DirecTV Group Inc. (NASDAQ:DTV) has appointed Michael White as their new CEO. White previously worked at PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) as the Vice Chairman. Interestingly White does not have much experience in the food and beverage industry so that makes the decision quite interesting for DirecTV. There is speculation that he will act as a “baby-sitter” for DirecTV until a take-over happens. AT&T and Verizon are both potential candidates for buying out DirecTV since they both partner with the satellite TV company.
DirecTV has 18 million subscribers and the company launched in 1994. The company is currently owned by The DirecTV Group which is a division of Liberty Media.
White will be taking the CEO position on January 1 and will be replacing Chase Carey. Carey will be leaving to join News Corp. as the COO and President. Shareholders and the DirecTV management team are currently discussing whether to spin off Liberty Media’s entertainment assets into a separate company. DirecTV used to be owned by News Corporation, but Liberty Media exchanged 16.3% of their stake in News Corp. and $625 million in exchange for DirecTV and three sports networks.
iMeem is a music and video streaming service that also has very popular applications on Facebook and MySpace. iMeem has over 50 employees working in San Francisco, California and the company started around November 2003. iMeem has close to $50 million in total funding since they started. Over 100 million people have used their service at some point and they have over 30 million registered users. Last year the company hired Montgomery and Co. to help find a buyer.
The reason why the acquisition hasn’t take place as of yet is because there is stakeholder approval pending. The amount for buying out the company is not expected to be high considering the amount of venture capital that iMeem had to take in for survival.
Once getting bought out, iMeem will more than likely be rolled into MySpace Music.
When you do a Google search using keywords on business or web companies, it is likely that you will find articles by TechCrunch, Mashable, Pulse2, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal on the top pages. This is because Google favors these online publications for providing users with valuable content. We benefit from people doing these searches and finding our websites and so do all the other blogs out there. That means more ad revenue for us. The more hits you get on the web, the more money you make. Its a simple formula. If Rupert Murdoch wants to remove The Wall Street Journal from Google, so be it. Thats less competition for us.
Personally I think it is an idiotic move for the WSJ to cut themselves off from Google since they supposedly receive 25% of their traffic from the search engine. However Murdoch would rather have a smaller amount of paid traffic than a larger number of people looking at content for free according to the interview. How will people find it if they don’t know it exists? Will cutting yourself from the world make people just give in and pay? It is highly unlikely because more people are starting to get their content online than pay for it. If you don’t believe me, ask someone that works for your local newspaper. I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan and The Ann Arbor News basically went out of business. The Ann Arbor News cut off the circulation to only Thursday and Sunday and changed their name to AnnArbor.com. Some of the staff members at The Ann Arbor News were absorbed into AnnArbor.com and the rest were laid off.
People may argue that they are willing to pay for content online assuming it is credible journalism. The Wall Street Journal has been a household brand for well over a century now so that proves that they are credible. But they started in a time when the invention of a computer was just a dream. Welcome to 2009, Murdoch. Its going to be a bumpy ride for print companies.
In August 2008 Google filed a report with the SEC that their $900 million investment in MySpace “may be impaired.” MySpace made the Google search engine the default for the search engine. Last week, MySpace executives Rupert Murdoch, Chase Carey, and Dave Devoe reported that MySpace fell short of traffic targets.
This means that MySpace will not be paid the full amount by Google. It is likely that MySpace will lose $100 million of the deal, making it an $800 million deal. The loss might be even greater than $100 million. It could even be $300 million according to one of the executives.
MySpace isn’t the only deal to go slightly sour by Google in recent times. Google sold back 5% of their ownership in AOL back to Time Warner. Google bought the 5% of equity for $1 billion and sold it back for $283 million.
MySpace and Facebook are rumored to be working in conjunction with each other on a new project. The new project involves MySpace users having the ability to share content on Facebook using Facebook Connect. The rumor was started by The Telegraph UK.
This deal is probably being set up by current MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. Natta was the previous Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Operations at Facebook. This means that you may start seeing MySpace Videos and music being embedded on the Facebook News Feed. Last week Natta even said that he does not consider Facebook to be a competitor any more.
I think that this would be a good deal all around for both parties. Facebook users would see more artistic expression provided by MySpace users. Artists on MySpace would have a bigger audience.
News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA) has hired Mark Rosenbaum as the CFO of MySpace. Rosenbaum is a former executive at MGM. “Having led companies at every stage of their development, Mark understands both startup culture and mature businesses, and is well suited to guide MySpace’s financial organization through its next phase of growth,” stated MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. “We’re thrilled to add someone with his pedigree and experience to the team.”
According to paidContent, News Corporation reorganized Fox Interactive Media into News Corp Digital Media. This group will oversee Fox Audience Network, IGN Entertainment, MySpace, Photobucket, Beliefnet, and Fox Mobile Group.
Rosenbaum also previously worked for Gemstar-TV Guide, a former News Corporation property. He also worked at 20th Century FOX and The Walt Disney Company. Rosenbaum received his MBA from Duke University and has a Biology Bachelor’s degree from UC San Diego.
Sharon Nguyen, SVP over at MySpace made an announcement that MySpace can now sync with Twitter. Facebook had this feature available a long time ago through the use of an application, then TweetDeck came along and made that feature available months ago. The most recent update of TweetDeck made the MySpace-update feature possible too.
Some of the key features about the MySpace announcement include:
- Status updates synced back and forth between MySpace and Twitter
- MySpace updates can update Twitter
- When updates are sent from MySpace to Twitter, your MySpace status update is linked so people on MySpace can leave comments
- MySpace/Twitter sync is mobile using MySpace Mobile and WAP
- Open authenthication technology used for making data secure
Ernie Anastos of FOX News meant to say “keep plucking that chicken,” but ended up saying something that he’ll regret later. Silly anchorman, haven’t you learned from Ron Burgundy that sometimes people tend to trick you with the teleprompter. The video of the slip up on YouTube has become a viral hit and is inching close to about one million views. The engagement curve monitor used by Visible Measures, a video analytics company shows that a lot of people keep rewinding to see if the anchor is saying plucking or not. I thought that this anchor slip up was funny, but the bird feces landing in the reporter’s mouth was the funniest of all time. What is your favorite anchor man slip up of all time? Bill O’Reilly’s “we’ll do it live?”
Jason Oberfest, the SVP of Business Development at MySpace has quit to join Ngmoco as the VP of social applications. Ngmoco is a company that makes iPhone games that hired the President of SEGA Simon Jeffery in June. Oberfest will be developing and discovering social games that can be adapted into mobile devices. No word yet over who will replace Oberfest at MySpace.
Oberfest joined MySpace in July 2008 and was the general manager of MySpace Open Platform. Before working at MySpace, he was the managing director of business development at LATimes.com.
Wenda Harris Millard used to be the Co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living. Before Martha Stewart, Millard worked for Yahoo! as the Chief Sales Officer.
Now Millard will be taking over advertising sales at MySpace. While working for the head of advertising sales at MySpace, she will also remain as the president of median consulting company Media Link. MySpace sales boss Jeff Berman will be leaving the company as Millard joins.
Some of MySpace’s new hires include:
- Jason Hirschhorn as chief product officer
- Mike Jones as COO
- iLike CEO Ali Partovi, President Hadi Partovi, and CTO Nat Brown through an acquisition
- Katie Geminder as SVP of user experience and design
- Mike Macaadan as VP of Product
Below is the full press release of the announcement:
Rumor has it that iLike is currently in talks with MySpace about an acquisition deal. MySpace is planning to acquire iLike at a price of $20 million. This would be MySpace’s first acquisition since Owen Van Natta joined as CEO.
iLike has a sidebar that can be added to iTunes in order to discover new music and artists. iLike also has an iPhone application that detects where you are located and tells you about upcoming concerts. And iLike has a very popular Facebook application. In total, the company has about 50 million registered users.
The company raised $16.5 million in funding from Ticketmaster, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, and Vinod Khosla. The company was valuated at $53.2 million based on the term sheets on their last round of funding.
Heidi Browning is the MySpace SVP of insights and planning. According to a source with BusinessInsider.com, Browning has stepped down from her position.
Before starting another job, Browning plans to take a break. Heidi Browning worked closely with Jeff Berman, the ad sales boss at MySpace. Browning worked closely with advertising companies and other agencies.
“You can do a focus group every day for every demographic across the country and not get a fraction of the insights that we get each day from our users,” stated Berman at the 2008 IAB conference.
Earlier this week News Corporation announced their annual net income. News Corporation owns The Wall Street Journal, FOX, and The New York Post, and MySpace. In 2008, the company reported a net income of $5.4 billion. This year the company announced adjusted operating income at $3.6 billion, or a $1.7 billion dollar decline from the year before.
Part of the reasons for the loss was because of $680 million in charges made at FOX Interactive Media (FIM). FIM is the News Corp. unit that runs MySpace, Photobucket, and other web services. MySpace itself had a net loss of $203 million.
“These declines were primarily due to lower contributions from Fox Interactive Media (FIM) and NDS. The decline in FIM operating results was driven by lower advertising revenues at MySpace and increased costs associated with the launch of MySpace Music,” wrote News Corporation in a press release.
News Corporation is highly interested in building a LinkedIn competitor. That specific task has been delegated to The Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal is now requesting the services of Slingshot Labs. Slingshot Labs is another News Corporation subsidiary. Slingshot is part of News Corp’s web research and development arm. The about page of Slingshot’s website says “Our mission at Slingshot Labs is to be a fast-mover in the quickly evolving Web2.0 landscape.”
In 2008, The Wall Street Journal launched a professional social network called the WSJ Community. But that social network was hardly noticed so now its back to the drawing board.
Slingshot built a service for News Corporation called the Daily Fill and also launched MySpace events for the large social network. There are about 40-50 people on the Slingshot staff and the subsidiary has their own funding and operations. WSJ Connect seems to be still in the planning stages but there is a “strong interest” in moving the project ahead.
MySpace, the social network owned by News Corporation has launched a new service in the form of an e-mail provider. MySpace Mail has evolved out of a messaging system MySpace used in the past. Users will be able to send and receive e-mails with the MySpace.com domain through the social network going forward.
MySpace’s 125 million monthly active users will be able to benefit from the new e-mail service within the next couple of weeks when the service is released. The mail service will have the same look and feel as Microsoft Outlook. Your MySpace username will be the same immediate username that you can use for your MySpace e-mail. For example, if your username is Tom, then your e-mail address will be Tom@MySpace.com. If your username is JohnDoe, then your e-mail address will be JohnDoe@MySpace.com.
It is a nice additional feature to have, but I think that most people are already comfortable by the e-mail address that they already have. Personally I do not care much for this feature, but I’m sure that there are people out there that do care. But to be fair I did not care much about getting my own Facebook username either.
