“They [Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari, founders of Flixster] have built an amazing user generated content site around movies, including ratings, reviews, actor pages, trivia quizes, movie compatability tests and tons of other stuff.”
-Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

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.

Vimeo, the video sharing site owned by InterActivCorp (IAC) and run by the same folks as College Humor have finally released HD support for movies. To get an idea of the quality that brings to the world of online video go here to see a clip of a pretty massive looking garden spider. You can switch HD on and off to see difference. I suggest viewing it in full-screen to really see the improvement.

To my knowledge, our site is the first place you can upload and watch video in true, honest-to-god high definition (1280×720). Right now basically every other video site (YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.) is doing video at 320×240. … Things are only going to get better, especially as Adobe releases H.264 support in Flash, which should be coming very soon. We’ll have a press release on Monday.
-Blake Whitman, Community Director of Vimeo

I’m not sure how Joost and other Internet Television like services are going to contend now with the availability of high quality video streaming directly in your browser. It’s interesting to note that Vimeo seems to have an advertising partnership with Canon as all their ads push canon products and HD Canon cameras. With the price of HD capable cameras eventually going lower and lower, HD video online will be ubiquitous. Also with Flash moving towards supporting higher quality video means that most current video sites will not have a large technology leap to implement HD Support. This is a the next generation of online video.

Microsoft just poached a Google client big time. InterActivCorp is the owner of Ask.com, Excite.com, Expedia.com, Hotwire.com, iWon.com, Live Daily, Match Ticketmaster, TicketWeb, Match.com, Citysearch, and Evite.com. And InterActivCorp just left Google’s DoubleClick and signed with Microsoft’s aQuantive. Both DoubleClick and Google are digital advertising companies. Google announced that they were buying DoubleClick for $3.1 billion on April 13, 2007 and Microsoft announced that they were buying aQuantive for $6 billion on May 18, 2007.

“The relationship with IAC is a fairly comprehensive partnership that is, in essence, designed to take advantage of the Atlas Ad Manager technology for IAC publisher sites and manage the full spectrum of their business online in terms of inventory forecasting, analytics, targeting, etc.,” stated Scott Ferris, a senior VP and GM of the publisher and emerging media divisions for aQuantive. “It’s designed to encompass all of the IAC publisher and media property over time^[1].”

Google’s DoubleClick acquisition is still being investigated for potential monopolistic practices. The acquisition is not quite finalized yet.

References:
[1] ClickZ: IAC Leaves DoubleClick for Atlas

Ask.com[1], formerly known as AskJeeves.com, changed around the look & feel of the search engine last night. The new look gives the website more of a three-dimensional look, hence the name Ask3D.

“It’s a pretty radical change,” stated John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media. “Most of the big players have a lot to lose, so they don’t want to shock the system. Ask has less to lose.”

Supporting Battelle’s statement, I believe that because Ask has less to lose, it can readily launch bizarre marketing campaigns such as the advertisement below:

[Source: Search Engine Roundtable[2]]

Below is a screen shot of the new look & feel of Ask.com:

I did a search on Detroit Pistons NBA basketball player, Rip Hamilton and noticed that Ask uses a three-panel system:

In the left panel is related news, search expansion suggestions, narrow search suggestions, and the search box itself. The middle panel has the actual search results. And the right panel has images, a biography clipping from Wikipedia, and blog search results. Each search result website can be saved to MyStuff, a bookmarking system through Ask.com.

“The way we will grow is by increasing the frequency of use of the 30 million monthly users we already have in the U.S.,” stated Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. By consolidating information on keywords from various sources, I think this new look for Ask.com will help the company remain competitive. Ask.com is the #4 search engine behind Yahoo!, MSN, and Google.

Jeeves, it’s been real. Jeeves is Ask.com’s former mascot, a butler that was axed shortly after IAC/InterActiveCorp acquired the company for $1.85 billion in March 2005.

[1] Ask.com
[2] Search Engine Roundtable: SEOs Critique Ask.com’s New “Algorithm Ads”

National Lampoon Inc. (AMEX:NLN), a humor media company has announced today that they have acquired DrunkUniversity.com. The amount involved is not disclosed.

National Lampoon is widely known for the movies that the company produces including Vegas Vacation starring Chevy Chase and Van Wilder starring Ryan Reynolds.

Drunk University is a site where users can submit photos, videos, read stories, and also search for drink recipes. Before the acquisition, Drunk University was a part of National Lampoon’s Humor Network.

Sam Elhag and Gil Shafir are the founders of Drunk University. “We are excited to join National Lampoon and look forward to helping them continue to grow their brand in the college market,” stated the founders. Drunk University is roughly 5 years old. Content from Drunk University will be absorbed into National Lampoon’s College TV network.

DrunkUniversity.com is a competitor of CollegeHumor.com. CollegeHumor, a property of Connected Ventures LLC. Connected Ventures LLC had its controlling interest acquired by InterActiveCorp last year.

The return on investment made on YouTube’s funding through the acquisition definitely has whetted the appetite of investors. YouTube took in two rounds of funding from Sequoia Capital for a total of $11.5 million. So how come Brightcove, a lesser known Internet TV website is receiving such substantial funding? Brightcove started with $5.5 million and then received $16.2 million. Today, it was announced that Brightcove raised $59.5 million. This comes to a total of $81.2 million of total funding. The investors include Maverick Capital, The New York Times Company, Transcosmos Investments, Accel Partners, Allen & Company, America Online, General Catalyst Partners, The Hearst Corporation, IAC (InterActivCorp), and Brookside Capital.

“We think there’s a lot of opportunity outside the United States for Internet TV,” stated Adam Berrey, the VP President of Marketing of Brightcove. “We think this market will consolidate. It’s time for the leaders to emerge. This puts us in a good position.” Berrey didn’t mention what Brightcove is planning on doing for future plans, but according to TechCrunch, Brightcove did acquire metaStories on March 20, 2006. metaStories is a Seattle based company that has the tools that creates Flash content.

“Brightcove’s early success in partnering with media companies that are driving the transition of television and video distribution to the Internet puts the company in the right position as Internet TV takes off on a broader scale,” stated Jamie Kiggen, senior VP President of AllianceBernstein. “We’ve looked at many opportunities in this area and believe that Brightcove is well positioned for success in creating solutions that both media companies and consumers will embrace.”

With this new funding, Brightcove plans on growing the company and to provide Internet TV tools to media creators so that it would help them monetize as well as distribute their own videos. Brightcove is planning on launching ad revenue sharing soon.

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) owns search engine Ask.com (formerly known as AskJeeves.com). The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) announced today that Ask.com has launched a search service for mobile phone, Blackberry, and PDA users. The mobile service is called Ask.com Mobile.

One of the cool things that Ask.com did to provide swift information-collecting for users is minimizing keystrokes. An example mentioned in the WSJ article is that if people are looking for a weather report in a certain area, users just need to type in the area code and click on one the weather link that comes up. I have not heard of any other mobile search providers where you can find a weather report for a certain area in 1-2 clicks.

Ask.com’s VP of product management, Doug Leeds stated “We know that consumers are increasingly looking for search offerings while they are on the go. Ask.com wanted to develop an offering that would help to minimize thumb strokes so that consumers find what they are looking for faster.” Other Ask.com features on the mobile service include an image search, directions, yellow pages, currency conversion, and horoscopes.

As I mentioned in a previous [post], many companies have an increasing desire to profit from mobile advertisements. Microsoft signed a deal a couple of days ago with an advertisement provider and already have mobile phone ads whereas Yahoo! and Google are working on doing the same. Right now, it is unclear as to whether Ask.com Mobile will be pursuing mobile advertisements as well.

Ask.com was founded in 1996 and is now a part of IAC Search & Media. The founding architect of Ask.com, who now works at Symantec Corporation is Gary Chevsky .

Pronto Inc. is one of the newest businesses created by InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI). Pronto recently went into the Beta testing phase. The purpose of Pronto is to make life easier for the online consumer who may be distraught by the abundance of online merchants.

Pronto grabs product listings and prices from thousands of these online retailers including Newegg, Jr.com, and EWorldSale. Results can also be filtered by categories, merchants, and brands. Products can be sorted by highest-lowest prices and vice-versa. Oh! And one more thing! You can set Price Alerts (arrives via e-mail or Shopping Messenger) for certain products that is grabbed by Pronto. Here is an example of me setting a Price Alert for a $299 Black Sports Coat made for an iPod on Amazon. I’m willing to pay $1 and not a penny more!!

What I like about Pronto is the fact that there is a large database that surrounds the website. Users are able to browse through over 45 million products and select from thousands of merchants across the globe. This essentially expedites the online shopping experience as a whole and we all know that “Time is Money!”