Dailymotion.com is a user-generated content video website that competes directly with YouTube. Dailymotion is a top 100 global website on Alexa. The company was started in France and raised $34 million in funding two years ago from Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity of Paris. This is on top of the $9.5 million in funding that was provided by Atlas Ventures and Partech International.
The company has also hired Ian Brotherston, a former AOL executive as their CEO. Ian will be taking the place of Mark Zaleski, who is expected to take a non-executive chairman position.
DailyMotion’s revenue is around $16.2 million, but it is not enough to cover bandwidth costs. YouTube on the other hand consumes close to $2 million per day in bandwidth costs and makes about $513-$663 million per year.
Pizza Hut is adding a new position for their company and it revolves around social media. The official title is “Summer Twintern” and the position requires the intern to tweet about Pizza Hut. “They’ll be our social media journalist, chronicling in 140 characters or less what’s going on at Pizza Hut,” stated Bob Kraut, the VP of marketing communications at Pizza Hut.
The salary is competitive and the intern must attend ad shoots, product meetings, and various corporate events. The Twintern is also required to regularly search for Pizza Hut on Twitter search to respond to any negative mentions.
In the job posting, it was also mentioned that applicants should study the video that was made by the former Domino’s Pizza employees in which they defaced the food. The intern must be willing to relocate to Dallas for the summer and the applications begin today.
Conservative news reporting agency FOX news and social network MySpace have launched a citizen journalism website called uReport. On uReport, MySpace users can contribute videos, pictures, stories and add their favorite FOX News personalities such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. So far I think the website design itself looks poorly designed and executed.
There is literally nothing under the World, Entertainment, and Politics section as of right now (screenshot below). Based on first impression, I would have no reason to come back to the website. uReport is very similar to the citizen journalism service put together by CNN called iReport.
Using Facebook, CNN iReport contributors can send footage, photos, etc. Initially iReport had some flaws because someone had posted a story about Steve Jobs having a heart attack. This caused Apple’s stock to plummet temporarily. Since that event iReport has been monitored closely.
Both citizen journalism services have their own advantages and disadvantages. MySpace has over 150 million users and CNN airs in over 100 million households on TV. Both services are also competing against Twitter users where people are quickly reporting the news and uploading pictures as it happens.
After IBM recently backed out of making a deal with Sun, Oracle stepped up to the plate and bought out the Java-making company for an astonishing $7.4 billion. IBM’s offer was about $6.5 billion.
This will give Oracle the opportunity to become even more competitive against IT firms such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SAP, etc. Sun also holds the assets to two of the most impressive pieces of software Java and MySQL.
“To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry,” wrote Sun President and CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz in an e-mail to Sun employees. “Let me assure you [Oracle is] single minded in [its] focus on the one asset that doesn’t appear in our financial statements: our people.”
Oracle will be paying $9.50 per share for common stock in Sun, but the agreement is subject to the Justice Department’s approval. Sun was founded by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy. Oracle was co-founded by Lawrence (Larry) Ellison.
“Java is the single most important software we’ve ever acquired,” stated Ellison in a conference call. “With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle is now able to make all of the pieces of the technology stack fit together and work well.”
Yesterday I wrote about the video in which two former Domino’s Pizza employees made a disgusting video of them making food. One of the employees put some of the ingredients up his nose and placed it back in the food. The Internet was furious about the video and it spread like wildfire.
Domino’s made the right PR move by personally responding to the video. Patrick Doyle, President of Domino’s gave a message about the video above and mentioned that there are felony warrants out for the arrest of the two employees and that individual store in Conover, North Carolina was shut down and sanitized. The company will also be re-examining their hiring practices.
Ning, the social network platform created by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini has hit the 1 million milestone. Over 1 million social networks have been created using their platform. The company was started in October 2004 and launched officially in October 2005. The company raised over $100 million in funding.
About 22 million users have registered for the service and they lost about 20% of traffic this past December because of the decision to shut down adult content and porn social networks. Last February the traffic has been able to catch up. Ning’s traffic comes mostly from social networks that have a strong following. For example, thetwilightsaga.com is a fan website built on Ning that had 94,000 people join within two months.
Verizon has announced that they are planning to build an app store for their Hub phone. The Verizon Hub will already have some web add-ons built-in such as weather and traffic. Third party developers will be invited in the near future.
The Hub has been selling since February 1 as a home phone and Verizon is looking for ways to keep growing the landline business since many people are starting to disconnect to save money due to the weak economy. The Hub is targeted towards families that are looking for a phone with limited Internet services to place on kitchen counters. To access the applications, Verizon will not require consumers to be Verizon customers.
“We’re in the process of getting rid of that restriction,” stated Verizon product manager John Gravel. “Why would you limit anyone from using this?”
The Hub store will be launched later this year. Verizon believes that Internet radio would be very useful for a phone like this. On future Hub devices, Verizon is planning to make it multi-touch.
Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, and CNNbrk are all competing with hitting one million followers on Twitter first. Now discussion board website 4chan wants to get it on the action by creating a script that allows users to create thousands of fake Twitter accounts and make them follow a specific user.
“Honestly, if either of them win, the entire internet f**king loses,” stated a user on the 4chan. “What say we miraculously beat them to the punch with an all-new account?” The Twitter account being used is called basementdad which is named after Josef Fritzl in Austria. Fritzl is the man who was charged for sexually abusing his own daughter in his basement for over 24 years. So far the basementdad account has over 30,000 users.
“We’re aware of it and we’re monitoring the situation,” stated Del Harvey, who oversees abuse on Twitter. “It’s not just one person.” This is the first time that adding a million users to a specific Twitter account using scripts has been attempted.
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