Barnes & Noble’s Award-Winning $199 NOOK Color Now Even Better with Streaming Entertainment and More Breathtaking Content in VividView

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, continues to enhance its critically acclaimed NOOK Color with the largest-ever software update to the device now available at no cost (www.nookcolor.com/update), adding over 100 feature enhancements, access to top video and music services, popular apps, comics and more. With new tablet features and access to the best names in entertainment, the first-ever Reader’s Tablet™ is now even better at the incredibly low price of $199. Customers can enjoy popular movies and TV shows through leading services like Netflix and Flixster, with others coming soon. The update also brings faster, easier access to the world’s largest digital catalog of color and interactive books, magazines, children’s books, high-quality apps, and now comics and graphic novels.

The perfect holiday gift for those who love to experience all types of content in rich, beautiful color on the world’s most advanced VividView™ display, NOOK Color is available for new customers to purchase immediately in NOOK Digital Shops™ at their neighborhood Barnes & Noble stores, www.nookcolor.com and other leading retailers. Today only, customers who purchase any new $199 NOOK Color online with a MasterCard will receive a free $25 Barnes & Noble Gift Card, along with free shipping. This offer also applies to the #1-rated $99 NOOK Simple Touch™, and the all-new $249 NOOK Tablet™, the company’s fastest, lightest tablet with the best entertainment displayed in stunning VividView. Additional details are available at www.nook.com.

“Building upon our award-winning reading experience and vast digital content catalog, we are excited to offer our largest NOOK Color software update ever that will bring access to movies, TV shows, hundreds of new apps, comics, graphic novels and more to our time-tested, critically acclaimed Reader’s Tablet,” said William Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble. “This innovative product continues to receive high acclaim as an Editor’s Choice and is ranked among the most highly rated eReaders by many leading technology reviewers. At the incredibly low price of $199, customers can discover all types of interactive content specifically designed for the stunning, 7-inch display, in addition to staying connected through email and the web. We encourage customers to stop by their local Barnes & Noble this holiday season to learn about the whole portfolio of NOOK devices and receive free support from one of our highly-trained NOOKsellers.”

More High-Quality NOOK Apps™, Including Top Entertainment Services

Adding to the growing collection of high-quality NOOK Apps, children’s apps, games and more, NOOK Color customers can download Netflix to watch movies and TV shows, and Flixster which, through the UltraViolet™ standard, will allow consumers to access their digital movies and TV shows on the go. Coming soon, more leading services will be available. NOOK Color owners can also listen to millions of songs using the hottest music services, including Pandora, Rhapsody®, Grooveshark and MOG, all available with a free 14-day trial. In addition, NOOK Color owners can listen to their own songs wherever they go with the built-in music player. From music to movies and more, all NOOK Apps are the highest-quality versions available, optimized for NOOK Color’s beautiful and ultra-responsive 7-inch VividView display to ensure a stunning and seamless user experience.

The NOOK App library continues to grow with hundreds of new titles added each week to bring all the top requested and most popular apps to both NOOK Color and NOOK Tablet. Exciting new NOOK App additions include games published by Chillingo such as Roll in the Hole and Spider Jack, I Can Read, Cozi Family Organizer, Audobon Insects, Pat the Bunny, and more. Enjoy fun new holiday-themed apps including How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, The Berenstain Bears’ Christmas Tree, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and Tacky’s Christmas – all with a special reduced pricing promotion for the holidays. Also, find All I Want from Santa, Emma In: A Sweet Christmas plus an extensive lineup of holiday-centric live wallpapers, themes and much more.

Barnes & Noble’s Vast Collection of Interactive Content at Your Fingertips

NOOK Color customers can shop the world’s largest bookstore, featuring more than 2.5 million books, enhanced books, interactive magazines, newspapers, children’s books, and now comics and graphic novels. Highlights include:

NOOK Newsstand™: Choose from more than 300 newspapers and full-color, interactive magazines, delivered instantly to the device. Barnes & Noble offers the largest digital collection of top 100 magazines for subscription or single issue purchase – all available for a risk-free, 14-day free trial – including bestsellers PEOPLE, Food Network Magazine, Us Weekly, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, TIME, National Geographic and many others. Most interactive magazines offer Barnes & Noble’s ArticleView™, new animated and lightning fast page turns, smooth pinch, zoom and panning. Many special edition NOOK Magazines™ feature videos, animation, image galleries and more. Newly added publications include People StyleWatch, Southern Living, SmartMoney, Official Xbox Magazine, WIRED, SELF and TransWorld Skateboarding with more titles being added each week.
New NOOK Comics™: NOOK Color customers can now access a large collection of full-color comics, graphic novels and kids’ comics in high resolution that allow readers to pinch, zoom and discover this content like never before. NOOK Comics features the largest digital collection of Marvel’s graphic novels available through a third party – including Halo Uprising and other Marvel greats like Ultimate Spider-Man, The Astonishing X-Men, and Hulk: Planet Hulk, among others. NOOK Color customers can also enjoy titles from other leading publishers, including Archie – with series starring the redheaded star, plus pals Jughead and Betty & Veronica– IDW and Dynamite.
NOOK Kids™: With an incredible collection of more than 1,000 interactive children’s picture books and more than 12,000 chapter books, NOOK Color offers the world’s largest digital selection with hundreds of titles offering enhanced Read to Me and Read to Play functionality, so children and parents can interact with built-in narration and engaging in-page animation and activities. Newly added popular titles for the holidays include A Charlie Brown Christmas and Elf on the Shelf, both only on NOOK with engaging narrations and entertaining activities built right in to the stories, plus an exclusive edition of Sandra Boynton’s Christmas Parade, narrated by the author. Beginning readers can also enjoy new I Can Read series titles, plus Judy Blume’s popular Fudge series including Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and many more through the expanded chapter book collection.
NOOK Books™: Barnes & Noble continues to expand its NOOK Bookstore™ with the vast majority of books available for $9.99 or less. New PagePerfect™ NOOK Books™ feature cookbooks, craft and art books rendered with rich precision to retain all the beauty of their stunning print versions. Customers can also enjoy new titles including 11/22/63 from Stephen King and Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch, or bestsellers including Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich, Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible, Inheritance by Christopher Paolini, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and many more.

Enhanced Reading Experience Makes it Easier than Ever to Find New Great Content

NOOK Color customers can now explore new reading experiences and Shop enhancements that make it easier than ever to find great books, children’s content, magazines, newspapers and apps. Simply tap to open the redesigned NOOK Store to find a clean, customized interface and great social features that showcase the vast amount of content available. Explore customized reading features to enjoy all your favorite content like never before.

Customized reading: In response to customer feedback, NOOK Color now offers the flexibility to read books in portrait or landscape mode and to adjust the text with even more font sizes to choose from. And now reading is even more interactive with PDF thumbnail page views, and image pinch, zoom and pan in books and PDFs.
Unparalleled reviews and recommendations: Learn what to read next from Barnes & Noble’s knowledgeable booksellers, from new releases to up-and-coming authors. Barnes & Noble’s personalized NOOK Recommendations™ suggest titles by customer’s favorite authors in many different categories – helping them find selections in all subjects, from the most popular to hidden gems. In any book a customer is reading, a simple tap on the new NOOK Discover™ icon offers instant recommendations. Customers can also find new content through:
NOOK Daily Find – Discover a new read every day at an amazing price.
NOOK First – Exclusive content for NOOK owners from leading authors.
NOOK Snaps – Bite-size reads for “snackable” content on the go.
NOOK Spotlight – Twice a month, Barnes & Noble features great books at a great price.
New Release Tuesday – The weekly scoop on the bestsellers and the newest releases.

Get more social: With NOOK Color, customers can connect with Facebook friends and others through NOOK Friends™, and find out what they have to say about their books, magazines and newspapers. Customers can also share their thoughts about the books they’re reading via email, Facebook and Twitter. Owners can share books, as well as browse and borrow books, from NOOK Friends using Barnes & Noble’s exclusive LendMe® technology.
Continuous reading: Read what you love, anywhere you like™ on NOOK devices and with free NOOK Reading Apps. NOOK Cloud™ automatically syncs a customer’s library, last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across all of their devices, so a customer can start a book on NOOK Color, and pick right back up where they left off on their computer or smartphone.’

Flixster has a cross-platform movie discovery application and a mobile platform. They saw about 35 million downloads thus far. Rotten Tomatoes receives about 12 million unique visitors per month. Rotten Tomatoes is also heavily integrated into iTunes.

Below is an excerpt from Warner Brothers’ press release:

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group will utilize the powerful Flixster brand and technical expertise to launch a number of initiatives designed to grow digital content ownership, including the recently announced consumer application “Digital Everywhere.” This studio-agnostic application will be the ultimate destination for consumers to organize and access their entire digital library from anywhere on the device of their choice, as well as to share recommendations and discover new content. The Flixster acquisition and “Digital Everywhere,” combined with the Studio’s support of the UltraViolet format are all part of an overall strategy to give consumers even more freedom, utility and value for their digital purchases.

[TechCrunch]

Google Buzz

Google is making GMail more interactive by integrating additional social media features into the service. Coined as Google Buzz, GMail will soon have the ability to share videos, photos, and websites with contacts within the e-mail service itself. Flickr and Twitter are both supported. [Google Blog]

Apple Aperture 3

Apple has upgraded Aperture to the 3rd version this morning. Aperture is a high-end photo editing software. New features include Faces, Places, and Brushes. [Apple.com]

LG GD800 Mini and GT350

LG has announced two new mobile devices: the LG GD880 Mini and the GT350. THe GD880 has a 3.2″ touchscreen, 5 megapixel cam, WiFi, AGPS, and 7.2Mbps HSDPA. The GT350 has a four line QWERTY sliding keyboard and a 3″ WQVA touchscreen. No details on pricing yet. The GD880 Mini will be available in Europe starting next month. [BGR]

Foursquare-Zagat Deal

Foursquare has announced a deal with Zagat. Foursquare will soon offer their users a “Foodie” badge that indicates how many times the user has rated restaurants on Zagat. [NYT]

Motorola Invests In TuneWiki

TuneWiki has raised $7 million in funding from several investors. This is TuneWiki’s second round of investment. Investors include Motorola Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital LLC, and Novel TMT. [Globes Israel]

Flixster Raises $12.5 Million

Flixster was recently acquired by Rotten Tomatoes, but that hasn’t stopped the company from raising additional funding. According to a filing with the SEC, Flixster has raised $12.5 million. The investors were undisclosed. Flixster currently receives 30 million unique visitors per month. [VentureBeat]

Yammer Raises $10 Million

Yammer, the micro-blogging enterprise service has raised $10 million in funding as part of a Series B. Yammer has about 60,000 companies registered as their clients. “We said that we would use our Series B financing to bolster engineering, sales, and marketing,” stated Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks in a press release. [PRWeb]

News Corporation will maintain a stake in the combined Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster company. Flixster has mobile applications on the iPhone, Palm Pre, BlackBerry, and Android. Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster will operate as separate entities.

This round of funding was provided by Pinnacle Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  In order to compete, Netflix introduced similar social networking and reviewing features within their DVD rental services.

Lightspeed Ventures previously invested around $2 million or less around January 2007.  Here are some of the statistics on the site as of January 2008 (via Wikipedia):

• User Homepages: 42,122,063
• Movie Ratings: 1,225,752,033
• Quiz Questions: 3,017,434
• Movies: 34,254
• Actors: 71,934
• Photos: 1,312,286
• Videos: 353,672

Information Source:
[1] PEHub: Flixster Raises Second Round

Yesterday, Liberty Media Holding Corp. International bought 14 million shares of IAC/InterActiveCorp from a single holder.  And then IAC bought 6 million shares of its own stock from that same single holder.  This brings Liberty Media’s ownership of IAC to 30%.

IAC gave their Internet property, Ask.com a major marketing overhaul.  Jakob Lodwick, co-founder of Vimeo, parted ways with IAC after a disagreement with the company’s management recently.  And today I read that IAC may be close to acquiring Flixster.

Flixster is a social network centered around movies.  According to TechCrunch, either the deal is done or is “very close.”  The deal is rumored to be potentially around $150-$200 million.  One of Flixster’s primary traffic drivers is its Facebook Application.  Flixster raised around $2 million from Lightspeed Ventures and other angel investors.  The social networking company is based in San Francisco, Calif.

San Francisco, Calif.-based movie and social network database, Flixster.com, has seen exponential growth since its January 2006 start. Flixster currently has 30 million-plus user homepages, has 870 million+ movie ratings, and 1.5 million+ quiz questions in user-generated content. The database currently also hosts over 30,000 movie profiles, 60,000 actor profiles, 1.1 million pictures, and 310,000 videos. Flixster’s Facebook Application is part of the reason why Flixster has seen enormouse growth as well.

Today TechCrunch reported that we may see a Flixster acquisition happen soon. TechCrunch sources have cited that a letter of intent was sent to Flixster from InterActivCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), parent company of Ask.com, LendingTree, Ticketmaster, HSN, and Match.com. The rumored valuation is worth $150 million.

Flixster is monitored by several administrators and the company has about 8 employees. Besides the Facebook Application, another reason for Flixster’s accelerated growth is because users are asked to provide GMail or Yahoo! Mail passwords and then the user is asked to invite friends and family from their contact lists.

Flixster is powered with $2 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Keep checking Pulse 2.0 to see whether the acquisition takes place.