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.
In late April, Owen Van Natta became the new CEO of MySpace. Since that time there has been a lot of shaking up of company executives. About 30% of MySpace employees were laid off last month too.
Now there is a list going around of all the MySpace executives that have either been laid off, stepped down, or shuffled around within News Corporation.
Below is the list:
Max Engel – Top Engineer at MySpace resigned
Tom Andrus – SVP Product Management resigned Travis Katz – MySpace Internetional head resigned Jamie Kantrowitz – MySpace Music SVP of Strategy and Global Marketing resigned Dan Fawcett – President of FOX Digital Media moving to News Corp. Ulf Waschbusch – Director of Mobile Product resigned Ming Chen – Produt Manager working on products for Tom Anderson resigned CJ Chaney – worked on MySpace Developer Platform in Seattle resigned Eric Novins – Engineer for MySpace photos resigned Allen Hurff – SVP of Engineering resigned
Chase Carey has been the President and CEO of DirecTV since December 2003. This past week Carey stepped down from DirecTV and joined News Corporation to replace Peter Chernin. At one point, News Corp. even owned 34% of DirecTV. When Carey joined DirecTV, he left News Corporation.
To find a replacement for Carey, DirecTV formed a director committee. As a temporary replacement EVP of Legal, HR, and Administration Larry Hunter has become the interim CEO of DirecTV.
“Chase has been an important advisor and a close friend to me for several decades,” stated Murdoch. “I know that his leadership, strategic capabilities and more than 15 years of experience at our company will prove invaluable as we face the challenges and opportunities before us.”
Disney has decided to jump on board with online video streaming by sending over content over to Hulu. That’s not all. Disney has acquired 27% of the company. Disney joins other Hulu owners NBC Universal, News Corporation, and Providence Equity Partners. Soon Disney will be sending over shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, and Grey’s Anatomy to start with.
“We are smiling big today because we are honored to be working with a company that quite frankly inspired us from the very start of Hulu. Walt Disney was a founder, an innovator, a person with an atypically high quality bar, and someone who was maniacal in his obsession to delight his customers. Hulu has always taken great inspiration in that example and the culture Walt Disney created (which Bob Iger and his team carry forward and push to new levels),” stated the Hulu blog regarding the partnership.
CBS and the CW are basically the only major TV networks left out of Hulu. CBS is hosting high quality episodes of their own TV shows on CBS.com and TV.com. The CW hosts full TV shows on their website too.
Last week I wrote about how former Facebook co-founder Owen Van Natta will become the new MySpace CEO. Now it appears that News Corporation will be hiring former AOL executive Mike Jones as the COO of the social networking company as well.
“Michael’s operational insight and knowledge of the social media market will prove to be a valuable asset as we set out to evolve the MySpace product offering,” stated Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer of News Corporation. “From a product perspective, there’s no better choice than Jason, who is highly regarded as an incredibly talented innovator, media executive and leader, all qualities I know will greatly benefit our team and our users.”
Miller is the former head of AOL which is where he most likely met Jones for the first time. I have a feeling that this won’t be the last time that News Corporation will poach executives from AOL. MySpace founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe are still negotiating other leadership roles within News Corporation.
News Corporation has also hired Jason Hirschhorn as the new Chief Product Officer of MySpace. Hirschhorn was President of Sling Media Group before attaining this position.
