Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) subsidiary and one of the biggest Digg copycats that I have seen thus far, Propeller has relaunched into a lamer version than it’s 1.0 version.  When the site relaunched this morning, Propeller got rid of the Digg-like voting scheme, but the site is now telling their users to “Prop It,” also known as voting for stories to make it to the homepage.  The site is now using a scale of 1-10 for their stories.

Members of the new Propeller can create groups too.  Some of the most recently created groups are Firefox, Offbeat, Britney Spears, StumbleUpon, Jovial’s Group, Make Money Online, google, Organization, 90210, and Autos. 

Propeller categories include Arts/Entertainment, Business/Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science/Technology, Sports, and Style.  When a story makes it to the homepage of Propeller, they appear on the homepages of AOL and AOL News too. 

The biggest flaw that the new Propeller has right now is that they are giving their community too much power.  Spammers will be having a party with that ability.  The new Propeller site is pretty ugly too.  Simpletons using the site will not be able to tell what part of the site is a text ad and what part is actually content.  I really think that this site needs a major design overhaul.

The concept of Propeller first started on Netscape.com.  The idea was led by Jason Calacanis.  Calacanis hired several top users on Digg, Reddit, Flickr, and Newsvine to drive the top stories on Netscape.com.  Kevin Rose, founder of Digg called out Calacanis for doing this, but later the two ended their feud.  The voting idea was killed off of Netscape.com and then later moved to Propeller.   

Any thoughts on the new Propeller?  Comment away.

Related Links:
Propeller
TechCrunch

Veoh is a video sharing website based in San Diego, Calif.  Michael Eisner, former Disney chairman is on the Board of Veoh.  Eisner was one of the investors in Veoh’s $12.5 million in second round funding in April 2006.  Eisner also participated in the $25 million Series C round of funding in August 2007 as well.  And today Veoh raised $30 million in funding from Intel Capital, Adobe Systems, Shelter Capital Partners, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs, The Tornate Company, Time Warner, and several other investors.

Veoh has two viewing options for their site.  The first option is to allow users to stream videos from the web, but they provide full episodes of television shows giving them the leg-up on YouTube.  The second option is to watch high quality videos using VeohTV through p2p technology.  Like YouTube, Veoh compresses video using Adobe Flash.

Veoh claims that they receive 28 million unique visitors who spend 100 minutes per month on their site on average.  Veoh isn’t that far behind DailyMotion and Metacafe in terms of traffic.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Veoh Raises Another $30 Million From Intel Capital, Adobe, and Gordon Crawford by Erick Schonfeld

Meebo, the online chat application that is powered by AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber has raised a Series C round of investment at $25 million. JAFCO Ventures was the lead investor. Other investors include Time Warner, KTB Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Meebo was started in September 2005 and is currently valuated at $200 million.

Meebo is a top 400 site within Alexa.  The online instant message company plans to utilize their partnership through Time Warner by working with its subsidiaries such as AOL, TMZ, New Line Cinema, People Magazine, and CNN.

Meebo will be expanding to Japan and Korea with this round of funding.  Meebo also has partnerships with VideoEgg, CBS, PUMA, and 4 record labels.  Meebo started in September 2005 and has over 29 million users sending over 150 million IMs daily.

The actual name of the company was written on a napkin by the three co-founders.   What is the deal with  coming up with business plans and Internet company names on napkins?

“We’re absolutely convinced at Cox that online revenue is continuing to grow,”stated John Dyer, EVP of Cox Enterprises. “If you look at Cox’s history, we’ve not necessarily been the first into a space… But we’ve prided ourselves in the course of history in being early investors.”

Cox Enterprises, the communications company that owns a large number of TV, radio, and newspaper companies is planning to acquire Adify Corporation. Adify is an advertising company that brokers ads for publishers and spreads advertisements for marketers. Cox plans on acquiring the digital advertising company for $300 million.

Adify’s clients include Martha Stewart Living Omimedia and several finance web sites created owned by Forbes Inc.

Early investors in Adify include NBC and Time Warner.  These companies will cash out and won’t have any further influence on Adify’s operations.  NBC will still be a customer.  Cox also owns Autotrader.com.

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) subsidiary, AOL LLC is announcing that they are acquiring Sphere tomorrow. Sphere is a service that is best known for finding related content and blog posts to specific articles and placing links to them in a widget form. You can find Sphere’s widgets on Pulse 2.0, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GigaOM and TechCrunch.

The rumor is that Sphere will be selling for $25 million. Tony Conrad, the CEO of Sphere is serious and professional about his San Francisco, Calif.-based company. How do I know this? Because he personally e-mailed me to make sure that it was working perfectly on Pulse 2.0.

“Hi Amit - my apologies for the long wait to get the contextual widget code snippet. We got a bit slammed following Web 2.0 but have finally built a plug-in that works in WordPress Self Hosted blogs. Since you’re running WordPress (a great choice!) we wanted to put you in front of the queue to try out our new SphereIt Contextual Widget Plug-in for WordPress,” wrote Tony in the e-mail he sent me around January 2007.

Best customer service I’ve seen yet in the world of Web 2.0. Congratulations Tony, the Sphere team, and AOL!

Bill Wilson, an EVP of AOL Programming will be overseeing Sphere’s integration into AOL content properties. AOL content properities include Weblogs Inc., Finance, and Entertainment. Sphere will not be changing its brand. Sphere took in $3.5 million in funding across two rounds of funding.

I’m wondering if there’s a way to integrate Sphere with AOL Instant Messenger. I’m guessing that Sphere will be plugged into Weblogs Inc. blog network following the acquisition.

Disclaimer: Sphere is one of my most favorite startups of it’s time.

Information Sources:
[1] GigaOM:  Personal Note: Conrad Got Mailed by Om Malik
[2] TechCrunch:  AOL Buys Sphere’s Blog Content Engine by Michael Arrington
[3] Sphere blog: Our New Address @ AOL.COM by Tony Conrad

Hulu is proving more and more everyday that they are not Clown Co. Hulu has just made a solid move for catering to those that prefer having RSS aggregation websites as their browser homepage.

Now Hulu has a way to add RSS feeds for several categories of videos on their site including: Recently Added Videos, Recently Added Shows, Highest Rated Videos, Most Popular Videos, Most Popular Videos This Week, Most Popular Videos This Month, Most Popular Videos All Time, Soon-To-Expire Videos.  Personally I’m going to take every one of these RSS feeds and add them to a separate tab on my current homepage, Netvibes.

There is also an Add Video check box that allows Hulu to embed the video within the RSS feed aggregation box.  This feature is not quite supported yet, but I’m sure it’s a work-in-progress.

What makes these RSS feeds interesting is that Feedburner powers them.  Feedburner is owned by Google and Google owns YouTube, a Hulu competitor. Oh, the irony.  No matter what you do on the web, it somehow connects to Google in some sort of degree.  Just like all of us are six degrees from Kevin Bacon, every Google competitor is 2 degrees away from Google.

Another interesting feature of Hulu is the ability to embed videos into social networks.  This will surely drive additional hits to Hulu.  Hulu is currently ranked 3,000 or so on Alexa and growing.  Below is a screen shot of Hulu in my Netvibes.

Great feature, keep it up Hulu team.

Hulu’s content is provided by Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) through NBC and warner Bros., General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) through NBC, MGM Mirage (NYSE:MGM), Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE), and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. (NYSE:LGF),

Frank P. Quattron has had somewhat of a tumultuous history. While the former Credit Suisse First Boston executive has earned over $200 million, he sent an e-mail to employees recommending to delete e-mails related to the buying of promising IPO stocks.

Despite wrongdoings, Quattron is back and advising the fastest growing search engine company through his company, Qatalyst. As Microsoft and Yahoo! are disagreeing over an acquisition price, Google has been brought into the mix to help Yahoo! out with advertisement outsourcing.

Quattron has been with Google since the beginning. In the late 90’s when Google was developing, Quattron was one of the first investment bankers to meet with them. Quattron was even hired to advise the company when it filed for it’s IPO in 2004 around the same time he was convicted.

Google also has an interest in Yahoo!’s discussion to merge with AOL since Google controls $1 billion worth of the Internet pioneer company. If the Google and Yahoo! ad outsourcing deal works out, Yahoo! may not agree to Microsoft’s offer.

Information Source:
[1] The New York Times Dealbook: Google C.E.O. Taps Quattrone as Adviser in Yahoo Battle by Andrew Ross Sorkin
[2] New York Magazine: Stock-Market Clash by Henry Blodget

Yahoo! Inc. has become the apple of every company’s eye. Microsoft, News Corp., AOL, Google, and Legg Mason are all interested in a deal with Yahoo!

AOL, subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX)
Time Warner’s AOL LLC is looking to repurchase some of Yahoo!’s shares above Microsoft’s offer of $31 per share and essentially AOL would be folded into Yahoo! The deal would make AOL valued at $10 billion and the dial-up access business wouldn’t be included.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and News Corporation (NYSE:NWS.A)
Microsoft and News Corp. are planning to launch a joint bid together to buy Yahoo! While this partnership is not official yet, a Wall Street Journal source confirms that discussions are serious. If acquired, this would combine some of the Internet’s hottest properties such as Live.com, MSN.com, Yahoo.com, and MySpace.com. Yahoo! confirmed 3 days ago that they are interested in an acquisition if the deal is higher than what Microsoft had to offer.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Yahoo! is launching a new advertising platform called AMP! but wants Google to be part of the action. Yahoo! is talking to Google about outsourcing ad search sales to them. This deal was made official yesterday in the form of a short-term test. Google would handle a limited percentage of Yahoo!’s web search queries. This test will be used to determine the feasibility of a longer term search-ad outsourcing agreement. It is in Google’s interest to work out this deal in the longer run to make Yahoo! less susceptible for a Microsoft acquisition.

Legg Mason Inc. (NYSE:LM)
Asset Management company, Legg Mason owns a large percentage of Yahoo! As a shareholder, it is in Legg Mason’s interest to capitalize as much as possible from any potential deal. CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer wrote a letter telling Yahoo! that if they do not respond, then he’ll work directly with the shareholders. Legg Mason is only ready to support Yahoo!’s independence if the bid remains to be as low as it is now.

What happens to Yahoo! is anyone’s guess. Nobody said that running the #1 Internet property was easy.

Information Source:
[1] Wall Street Journal: News Corp., AOL Pursue Yahoo Deals by Matthew Karnitschnig, Kevin J. Delaney, and Merissa Marr

“Gizmoz has enjoyed widespread adoption by consumers, advertisers and media partners over the last year, and with a number of exciting new products, programs and partnerships underway, the company is poised for significant expansion in 2008,” stated Eyal Gever, CEO/Founder of Gizmoz. “As we move forward on a number of key initiatives, building cross platform synergies into our service is at the top of the list. To pursue our strategy, Asia will be key. This financing will play an important role in helping us develop unique offerings for this market.”

Today Gizmoz, a social network that allows users to make 3D faces sync with their voices has raised $6.5 million. This is Gizmoz second round of funding, led by DoCoMo Capital. Other investors of this round includes Benchmark Capital, ngi capital inc., and Columbia Capital.

Gizmoz plans on using this round of funding to introduce their services around Asia, starting in Japan.

“Japan represents a large and strategic market for the company. Gizmoz’s offerings come at an opportune time in the development of Japan’s extensive mobile ecosystem, and they should feed the strong desire of Japanese consumers to embrace innovative content enhanced by Gizmoz’s technology,” stated Nobuyuki Akimoto, President and CEO of DoCoMo Capital.

AIM users may have also noticed on the start page that Gizmoz has signed a deal with AOL. AOL Instant Messenger, the most used messaging system in the U.S. can now create AIM Gizmoz Expressions and connect it to their account. Gizmoz previously advertised for Taco Bell and has a Facebook Application called In Your Face. Gizmoz widgets can be embedded in Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, and MySpace pages as well.

Competitors include JibJab and Blabberize. Gizmoz was started in 2003 and has offices in Menlo Park, Calif. and Israel.