Imagine walking into an establishment and being recognized by a digital system the moment you walk in the store. It’s a scene taken directly from Minority Report, but such ideas are not that far fetched considering some of the latest tools. For example, Foursquare in introducing new tools today that enable businesses to keep track of the people who have visited their establishment.
The tool, which was first published by the New York Times Bits blog, provides store owners with access to information about the people who attended their store, when they checked in, the frequency of attendance, and the most popular times of day. Right now, Foursquare users optionally check in to every store they visit, however it’s not that detached from the Minority Report scene (embedded below) in which Tom Cruise walks into the gap and is immediately recognized by a digital concierge.
While eye scanning systems may not be what’s used to detect our presence, our phones most definitely serve as the key to our identity. Right now Foursquare and Gowalla are leading the location race, but when it comes to identity, Facebook is the leading identity provider on the web today, with over 60 million monthly active Facebook Connect users.
For now, location based services are still a new thing to consumers, however this could be the fastest growing area in the social media space for the next 24 months. Facebook is expected to release their own location-aware service in the coming months, bringing location-based services to the company’s more than 400 million users.
While this new product has massive implications for the merging of our online and offline worlds, this is still only the beginning. Do you think we are headed in the direction of Minority Report?
Foursquare Analytics Screenshot
The song by The 5th Dimension says it all: “Last night I didn’t get to sleep at all, no, no. I lay awake and watched until the mornin’ light washed away the darkness of the lonely night.” I know just how they feel, and recent research would indicate that a vast number of Americans do, too.
Sleepless nights, it seems, are becoming a regular gig. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, about 60 million Americans suffer from insomnia each year. And such sleeplessness can have a devastating impact on our productivity.
Brent Scott, who headed up a sleep research project at the University of Florida, found that a poor night of sleep can actually impact how satisfied workers are with their jobs. And a poll by the National Sleep Foundation concluded that 40 percent of Americans are sleeping fewer than seven hours a night during the workweek. In addition, 75 percent of those surveyed reported problems sleeping a few nights a week, often resulting in missed workdays and errors on the job, among other things.
All this lack of zzzzs will be on the minds of scientists, psychologists and sleep experts this week, as it’s National Sleep Awareness Week, an annual public education and awareness campaign from the National Sleep Foundation that runs through March 13th and coincides with the release of its yearly report on sleep. Last year’s poll results showed that 30 percent of Americans were losing sleep over the U.S. economy.
This year, the report focuses on sleep and ethnicity in America, exploring the significant differences among the sleep habits and attitudes of Asians, Blacks/African-Americans, Hispanics and Whites. It’s the organization’s first poll dedicated to exploring the sleep practices of different ethnic groups; to that end it aimed to answer the following questions:
“The Sleep in America™ poll is a springboard for research,” says Thomas Balkin, Ph.D., Chairman of the National Sleep Foundation. “This year’s poll, in particular, will provide compelling insights into our current beliefs and behaviors regarding sleep, health and well-being.”
As for what a sleep-deprived individual can do, many of the tried and true sleep solutions offered by such organizations as the National Sleep Foundation seem to be just what the doctor ordered for a good night’s rest.
According to the experts, here are five ways you can perk up your productivity by getting a good night’s sleep.
While the gremlins of your problems may have you tossing and turning from time to time, regular sound sleep can often be achieved by developing good habits both in and out of bed. Tonight, turn off the TV, grab yourself a glass of warm milk, listen to a soothing CD, close the curtains and get yourself a good night’s rest.
Share your tips for getting a better night’s sleep below.
Photo by Flickr user kaibara87, licensed under CC BY 2.0
AFP - Somali pirates raked in an estimated 60 million dollars in 2009 but the Indian Ocean's ransom hunters have also spurred a much larger industry of ship protection devices.
5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix http://j.mp/aDTSD1
From Facebook to Twitter to You Tube, there’s no limit to the number of social networking sites that can be leveraged to interact with customers and prospects, and build positive brand awareness.
LinkedIn, however, stands apart from the crowd. The roots of popular sites like YouTube and Facebook are founded on the entertainment side of things. But since its creation, LinkedIn has been geared toward the professional business crowd.
If you haven’t already incorporated LinkedIn into your online marketing mix, consider the latest statistics:
Get started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy today with these five tips:
1. Build a Network, Then Start a Group
Getting started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy involves two important steps, the second of which is dependent on the first:
2. Make the Most of Your Profile
For the LinkedIn community, your profile will be this first item they see, so treat it as you would any landing page. To make the most of your profile:
Include links in your LinkedIn profile using anchor text.
3. Leverage Third-Party Applications
Today, there are a host of third-party applications available to help you make the most of your LinkedIn activity. For example:
For an upcoming trip to Dallas, my contacts that will also be there are identified.
4. Update and Engage Frequently
Think of LinkedIn marketing efforts as you would blog, Twitter or Facebook marketing efforts: The more activity and interaction, the better the results. To consistently engage with your network:
5. Promote Your Profile
In order to expand your network, LinkedIn marketing efforts – like anything else – must be promoted in other channels. Include a link to your profile on your website and blog, in individual blog posts, in email signatures and even on business cards. Be sure to optimize your profile for important and relevant keywords. Allow enough of your profile to be public so search engines can rank that content accordingly.
These tips, of course, are just the tips of the iceberg when it comes to LinkedIn marketing tactics. What specific tactics have you found successful for marketing on LinkedIn?
© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com
When GGF announced that it would take over The Pirate Bay, the company bombarded the press with optimistic plans which indicated the site would become the largest online media store. The attention later shifted to the troublesome financial position of its CEO, but all along the company had confidence in its plans for the new and ‘legal’ Pirate Bay.
This fall, however, it all turned out too good to be true. After GGF’s shareholders agreed to acquire the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, the company had a month to come up with the proposed $7.8m (SEK 60 million). What followed was mostly silence and the deadline passed without an official response from the company.
From the moment it was announced the planned Pirate Bay acquisition had been surrounded by controversy. However, behind the scenes GGF CEO Hans Pandeya was drafting an even bigger deal with BitTorrent’s number one indexer at the time – Mininova.
“We will try to buy as many torrent sites as possible,” Pandeya told TorrentFreak back in August. In common with their plans for The Pirate Bay, GGF hoped to turn these sites into large media stores where users could download content with the full permission of copyright holders.
Little information has been made public about the “other” sites Pandeya was aiming at and how serious this interest was. Unlike all the other plans and deals that leaked out previously, no other torrent site has been publicly connected to GGF, until today where Pandeya’s connection to Mininova was exposed.
TorrentFreak has learned that GGF and Mininova already finalized a contract last summer to sell the torrent index for no less than 20 million Euros. This deal and the amount have been confirmed by several independent sources close to Mininova and GGF. One of the sources who confirmed the Mininova buyout plans was Hans Pandeya himself.
One of our sources further said that the deal had already been signed off by Mininova, and that GGF would wait for the verdict in Mininova’s appeal with the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This verdict was due one day before the GGF shareholders were set to give the green light on the Pirate Bay deal.
A positive outcome for Mininova in that case would have certainly made the site a valuable asset, but as we now know Mininova lost in court and was forced to proactively filter titles and remove a great number of infringing, and indeed non-infringing torrents to ensure absolute compliance.
Sources from within Mininova have confirmed the existence of the 20 million euro acquisition offer but denied that the contract was already signed. Instead, Mininova would have liked to see some proof that GGF could pay the proposed sum before signing.
Although there seems to be some disagreement on the details, there is no doubt that GGF had set course to get the two major BitTorrent sites in possession. In fact, Mininova was brought in during licensing negotiations with several senior executives at one of the major record labels.
During a meeting with the label in London, Pandeya was assisted by his short-lived business partner Wayne Rosso. In the meeting the executives were asking for some traffic metrics and out of the blue and to the surprise of Rosso, Pandeya picked up his mobile phone and rang a Dutch number, claiming that it was a “company of his” close to Amsterdam that could provide some insight into the traffic question.
The person on the other end of the line provided some information to the label execs and plans were made to head over to The Netherlands to do some due diligence. When Rosso later asked Pandeya about this mysterious Dutch company Pandeya revealed that it was in fact Mininova.
“It’s Mininova. I’m going to buy Mininova too and eliminate all the competition,” Pandeya told Rosso explaining the Dutch connection.
At the time of this meeting the contract was already drafted but not signed by both parties. If it would have gone through GGF would have had the option to buy out the two largest BitTorrent sites online. Of course we now know that the deal didn’t go though. GGF didn’t have the money and Mininova might not have been worth it after the negative verdict in their case against BREIN.
In the months that followed Mininova removed over a million torrent files making it a less lucrative asset for Pandeya. On the other hand it also shows that a torrent site with only “authorized” content will quickly lose most of its regular visitors. Despite this knowledge and all the failed attempts to pull investors in, Pandeya said a few days ago that we haven’t seen the last of him yet.
“I have a lot of secret plans I’m working on,” he warned.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts on how web sites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality using the LinkedIn API. Thanks to Marc Gingras, CEO and Founder at Tungle Corporation for his thoughts on the added value this integration brings to both Tungle and LinkedIn users.Wouldn’t you love to know, each time you are invited to a meeting, the title, role and background of the people attending the meeting? Imagine if you had access to the power of a network of over 60 million business professionals – like LinkedIn – inside a calendaring application like Tungle.me.
Think about it… one-click access to a network of business professionals from across the globe, directly from a Tungle.me meeting invitation. Here’s a quick demo. More details after the jump.
How cool is that?
Now, when you access a meeting invitation that you’ve organized or been invited to through Tungle.me, you’ll see LinkedIn icons next to each attendee with a LinkedIn profile.
These icons give you one-click access to all the pertinent business information you want prior to the meeting (in this case the participants’ LinkedIn profile).
That’s pretty powerful, and that’s what comes when you combine the scheduling power of an application like Tungle.me with the world’s largest business professional network – LinkedIn.
This integration was really straight forward thanks to the thoughtful engineering of the LinkedIn team and their API. The amount of time it took to add this capability to our services, is dwarfed by the benefit it will bring to busy professionals using Tungle.me’s easy scheduling service.
Sign up for Tungle.me here. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
Tungle.me integrates with LinkedIn to make scheduling meetings even easier
- Sarah PerezF
orce10, the networking gear maker founded in 1999, filed for an initial public offering today, as part of a rush of companies seeking to hit the public markets while the window seems open. IPO filings are up more than 900 percent in 2010 according to Renaissance Capital, which tracks the IPO market. Despite its relative youth for an IPO filer this year, Force10 represents not a hot new startup seeking access to the public markets, but a grizzled 11-year-old veteran trudging toward an IPO because it simply has to exit, and no buyers have emerged,
At least 13 venture firms firms have invested more than $205 million in Force10 within the last five years alone. The company seeks to raise $143.75 million through its offering. But given the amount of time its investors have waited, a history of losses, a complicated balance sheet thanks to a series of transactions, and a slew of larger competitors, Force10’s IPO looks a bit like a shotgun wedding.
Force10 sells telecommunications networking gear as well as 10 gigabit Ethernet gear for the data center. It’s the data center market that’s growing most for Force10, although the opportunity to provide aspects of the core network and backhaul components for telecommunications providers as they switch to all-IP architectures is another mid-term opportunity.
Three years ago, after a $60 million Series F round of funding, Om wondered when Force10 would IPO. But any company that didn’t make it before the fall of 2008, and was stuck staying private thanks to the economic freeze and the credit crunch. In 2009 it purchased Turin, a maker of wireless backhaul gear. It reported pro forma sales (which combined Force10 and its Turin acquisition) of $199.2 million in 2009 and a loss of $76.3 million.
Force10’s IPO may not reflect the return of the big ticket technology IPO as much as it reflects a lack of buyers for the business and the chance to get an exit while IPOs are possible. Instead of comparing it to Tesla, the electric vehicle maker that recently filed to go public, or Silver Spring, a smart grid startup that is expected to file soon, a better comparison would be Calix, the telecommunications gear maker that has raised a similar amount of money in its long history, and filed late last year. Given that too many hot IPOs can overshadow older candidates, perhaps it’s better for Force10 that popular online businesses such as Yelp or Facebook are holding off on IPOs this year.
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What the VC Industry Upheaval Means for Startups
A Silicon Valley chip startup has raised more than $100 million over the past seven years, and now it’s finally talking about a new design for chips that can change their functions on the fly.
Tabula has what it calls a “groundbreaking architecture” where its chips can dynamically reconfigure themselves. Many former rivals, such as QuickSilver Technology, tried and failed to do the same thing over the years.
But try the startups must, as there is a pot of gold for anyone who solves this problem. Programmable logic is a big part of the chip industry, with two huge rivals, Xilinx and Altera slugging it out year after year as the dominant market leaders. These chips are software-programmable, and so they are flexible. You can put them into an electronic product at the last minute before you have to ship it. But they are big and expensive because it requires a lot of redundant circuitry to make the chips so flexible.
On the other side are custom chips that are hard wired, or essentially set in stone. These chips like Sony’s Cell microprocessor are designed well ahead of time. They’re inflexible, but they’re also cheap because they need no redundancy in their designs. The design of these chips is the hard part and it takes big teams years to finish at a cost of maybe $60 million.
Dynamically reconfigurable chips could actually combine the best features of both of these categories of chips. One of the problems is that these chips are also hard to design and can be difficult for programmers to master. If the makers of dynamically reconfigurable chips succeed, they could be used in things like cell phone radios that adapt to the quality of radio signal at hand. Tabula, however, appears to be going after the high-end field programmable gate array market — the same one dominated by Xilinx and Altera. Those chips are used in a wide variety of complex electronic products. That’s why Tabula is worth watching.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s name is derived from the Latin “tabula rasa,” which means blank slate. Tabula was founded in 2003 by Steve Teig, the company’s chief technology officer. The chief executive is Dennis Segers. It has acquired more than 80 patents and has more than 100 employees, the Mercury News reported. The technology is called 3PLD, or Spacetime. It relies on extremely fast interconnection within a chip, and it achieves that interconnection by stacking circuits three dimensionally.
Tabula’s investors include New Enterprise Associates, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, Crosslink Capital, DAG Ventures, Balderton Capital, Integral Capital Partners and SVB Capital. Tabula first produced samples of its chips three years ago and it now has them in the hands of customers. (It takes a long time to test a new kind of chip, and that’s why the funding amount has to be huge for this kind of startup).
Tabula’s chip can reconfigure itself as needed, up to eight times per cycle, and it runs at 1.6 gigahertz. Certain sections of the chip can reconfigure themselves as needed, not the entire chip at the same time.
If you’re either American or Canadian (or just a hockey lover), chances are you were watching the gold medal hockey game yesterday. And with over 400 million users, there’s also a good chance you have a Facebook account. So what does it look like when those two worlds collide? Like the picture above.
As you can see, Facebook status updates per minute exploded at two times yesterday. The first peak, at 2:29 PM PST, is when Zack Parise of the U.S. tied the game with a goal in the third period. The second, much larger peak took place at 2:54 PM PST, when Sidney Crosby scored the game-winning goal for Canada in sudden-death overtime. All told, more than 3.5 million status updates were sent during those two times, according to Facebook. Perhaps even more remarkably, that was twice the pace of updates for the rest of the day.
While Twitter has yet to release similar stats, the service also undoubtedly saw an explosion of tweets during those two times. At one point after the U.S. scored, my entire tweet stream except for two tweets was some variation of “USA USA,” “OMFG!! USA,” “GOAL HOLY JESUS USA !!!1!!!,” or the like.
Data released a week or so ago had Twitter seeing 50 million tweets per day now. Meanwhile, recent Facebook data says that the networks sees over 60 million status updates posted each day (from 35 million active status updaters).
Babelgum founder Silvio Scaglia was taken into custody by Italian police last Friday. Law enforcement officials had issued a warrant for Scaglia’s arrest earlier last week as the result of a wide-scale money laundering investigation, and he is expected to be questioned as early as tomorrow, according to a BusinessWeek report.
Scaglia founded Babelgum in 2007 and has been single-handedly bankrolling the London-based video startup ever since. A Babegum spokesperson went to great lengths today to tell us that the investigation won’t have any negative impact on the company. “Babelgum’s business plan is fully funded for 2010 and beyond,” she said, without going into specifics. Still, the arrest isn’t exactly helping the startup that has been struggling to find its place in the online video world for some time.
Italian law enforcement officials allege that Scaglia was part of a 2 billion euro ($2.7 billion) tax fraud and money-laundering scheme during his time at Fastweb, the Italian ISP he founded in 1999. They issued a total of 56 arrest warrants last week, and the Financial Times is reporting that police confiscated a number of paintings and other works of art that were purchased with the fraudulent money. Scaglia was abroad when officials issued the warrant, but returned to Italy Friday and was taken into custody at the airport.
Babelgum’s spokesperson refused to provide details about the amount of money Scaglia has invested in the startup so far. The company announced in 2008 that Scaglia had invested 50 million euros and was planing on shelling out another 40-60 million euros annually throughout 2010. All in all, Scaglia committed to spend as much as 350 million euros on Babelgum.
The company has shifted focus multiple times in recent years. Babelgum originally emerged as a competitor of the P2P video service Joost, but shifted to web-based streaming early last year. It originally envisioned itself as a destination for full-length indie feature films and documentaries, but has recently been investing more money in original short-form web content like the viral video hit Little Jersey Shore. It’s also been securing deals for exclusive music video premieres from bands like Coldplay and Weezer, potentially competing with music video venture VEVO.
Babelgum significantly reduced its staff at the end of last year, shuttering its Dublin headquarter as well as its Nice, France-based R&D office. It also reduced staff at its New York office. The company called the cuts result of its growing focus on content, and its spokesperson went out of her way today to assure me that these efforts are not hampered by the investigation. “Mr. Scaglia’s assets have NOT been seized and the company’s functioning and effectiveness has not been impacted in any way,” she wrote in an email (emphasis in the original), adding that Babelgum’s operations are not part of the investigation.
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Babelgum founder Silvio Scaglia was taken into custody by Italian police on Friday, Feb. 26. Law enforcement officials had issued a warrant for Scaglia’s arrest earlier last week as the result of a wide-scale money laundering investigation, and he is expected to be questioned as early as tomorrow, according to a BusinessWeek report.
Scaglia founded Babelgum in 2007 and has been single-handedly bankrolling the London-based video start-up ever since. A Babegum spokesperson went at great lengths today to tell us that the investigation won’t have any negative impact on the company. “Babelgum’s business plan is fully funded for 2010 and beyond,” she said without going into specifics. Still, the arrest isn’t exactly helping the start-up that has been struggling to find its place in the online video world for some time.
Italian law enforcement officials allege that Scaglia was part of a two billion Euro ($2.7 billion) tax fraud and money laundering scheme during his time at Fastweb, the Italian ISP he founded in 1999. They issued a total of 56 arrest warrants last week, and the Financial Times is reporting that police confiscated a number of paintings and other works of art that were purchased with the fraudulent money. Scaglia was abroad when officials issued the warrant, but returned to Italy Friday and was taken into custody at the airport.
Babelgum’s spokesperson refused to provide details about the amount of money Scaglia has invested in the start-up so far. The company announced in 2008 that Scaglia had invested €50 million ($68 milllion) and was planing on shelling out another €40 million to €60 million annually throughout 2010. All in all, Scaglia committed to spend as much as €350 million ($477 million) on Babelgum.
The company has been shifting focus multiple times in recent years. Babelgum originally emerged as a competitor of the P2P video service Joost, but shifted to web-based streaming early last year. It originally envisioned itself as a destination for full-length indie feature films and documentaries, but it has recently been investing more money in original short-form web content like the viral video hit Little Jersey Shore. It also has been securing deals for exclusive music video premieres from bands like Coldplay and Weezer, potentially competing with music video venture VEVO.
Babelgum significantly reduced its staff at the end of last year, shuttering its Dublin headquarter as well as its Nice-based R&D office. It also reduced staff at its New York office. The company called the cuts result of its growing focus on content, and its spokesperson went out of her way today to assure me that these efforts are not hampered by the investigation. “Mr. Scaglia’s assets have NOT been seized and the company’s functioning and effectiveness has not been impacted in any way,” she wrote in an email (emphasis in the original), adding that Babelgum’s operations are not part of the investigation.
Related content on GigaOm Pro: Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud (subscription required)
Reply.com this week announced plans to raise $60 million in an IPO. ReachLocal had earlier announced similar plans to go public. The success of one or both companies’ efforts will have a major impact on other local-themed companies’ efforts to raise funds and/or go public.
Looking at Reply.com’s SV1, we see that the company has 127 full-time employees, including 103 in sales and marketing, 14 in technology and 10 in general and administrative. It has raised $27.5 million since its inception, and last year grossed $34.3 million in revenue from over 5,000 advertisers. It also delivered 700,000 leads.
The brainchild of AutoWeb Co-founder Payem Zamani, Reply.com was founded in 2001 primarily as a lead generation service for autos, with real estate added in 2003. In 2005, the company acquired Connecting Neighbors, which builds sponsored neighborhood websites for real estate professionals.
In 2006, Reply.com’s strategy made a sharp turn. It announced plans to sell Connecting Neighbors, which recently only contributed 5 percent of its revenue; and added “enhanced clicks” generated from auctioning inventory for a variety of local categories from the search engines and ad networks. The company reasoned that the search engines and ad networks had a massive amount of left-over local inventory that needed to be specially targeted. T
The online auction marketplace was introduced in 4Q 2008 with auto and real estate components. Since then, it has added home improvement and has just added insurance.
In the SVI, Reply.com noted that 65% of its income comes from locally-targeted national accounts, aggregators and channel partners. But an emerging sales focus is on channel partners offering white labeled versions of its system. Traditional media companies with a large installed base of advertisers are being specifically targeted.
Reply.com COO Sean Fox is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010, taking place in San Diego March 22-24.
The Associated Press is forming a new business unit called AP Gateway focused on creating products for new platforms—and more revenue for its members. More than that, to the folks inside AP it’s a move from preparing for the future to acknowledging it as the present. Or, as CEO Tom Curley is telling the Colorado Press Association today, according to a prepared text, “a new phase of digital publishing has arrived” that is “likely the defining moment” for publishers. The claim: “At last, we truly will be able to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time to the right device.” [The full text is here here.]
He might well have added “for the right price.” AP Gateway includes some existing businesses that already fit that description, among them AP Mobile and the Online Video Network. Part of the task is to figure out when and how to charge consumers. For instance, the AP Mobile app is a free download, but what would it take to make an iPad version worth a fee? That’s not a hypothetical; AP is already working on iPad apps.
For new Chief Revenue Officer Jane Seagrave, AP Gateway is “the capping event of a series of pieces we’ve been putting into place pretty methodically over the past four-five years. ... More to the point, we think this is where the future of revenue for the cooperative is.” Seagrave estimates the news co-op has invested roughly $60 million in the technology and building out the core infrastructure.
More than 1,500 members have signed on to the Digital Collaborative, which includes use of AP’s eAP database platform for multimedia content and its metadata system. The last piece of that puzzle was the News Registry to track and protect content, which drew controversy when it was announced last July. The News Registry, say Curley and Seagrave, is what will enable AP to create many of the products it has in mind. More to come
Small biz-focused online marketer ReachLocal has acquired corporate image manager SMB Live. The three capital letters in the Reston, VA.-based company’s name stands for the market it serves: small- and medium-sized businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The purchase is designed to help Woodland Hills, CA.-based ReachLocal create a set of tools aimed to help local businesses build up their online presence across social media and directory sites. Two months ago, ReachLocal announced its intention raise about $100 milllion in a stock offering. It has raised more than $60 million in funding, including $55.2 million in a round two years ago. Release
Related
Hulu investor Providence Equity Partners is pumping $50 million into a new online video company set up by Chinese Internet search giant Baidu.
The news comes roughly 7 weeks after Baidu confirmed plans to established a new independent company to provide licensed, advertising-supported online video content to Chinese Internet users.
Although it isn’t yet explicitly confirming that the name of the new company will be Qiyi in the press release about the investment, Baidu says it has registered the domain name qiyi.com for the venture.
Reuters broke the news about a possible forthcoming investment by Providence Equity Partners in the new venture on January 5, citing local news sources who reported that the new joint venture company had received about $60 million in private equity funds, with Baidu investing about $10 million into the firm.
If those reports were accurate, that means Qiyi only has Baidu and Providence as its backers for now. Baidu has also said that it will continue to maintain majority ownership in Qiyi.
According to eMarketer, China will have 518 million Internet users in 2010. The size of the country’s online video market was approximately 162 million yuan ($23.73 million) in Q3 2009, according to data from research firm Analysys International, and analysts expect sales to triple in the coming years.
Baidu stresses that it will work with regulators to ensure the “lawful distribution” of professionally produced media and entertainment content on the Internet.
From the About page:
Qiyi (www.qiyi.com) is an independent operated video website created by the world’s largest Chinese search engine Baidu Inc(BIDU.O). Qiyi intends to be a high-definition online video platform, offering the latest, the most complete, and most professional high-quality licensed content to users for free.
Under the premise of orientating correct public opinions and strictly executing the government policy and regulation, Qiyi provides diversified licensed video content and launches various channels for hit TV shows, movies, documentaries, cartoons, music, variety shows, etc., to fulfill the increasing needs from the users and to enriches customers’ cultural life.
According to the customer-oriented principle of Baidu, Qiyi aspires to reach the highest satisfaction of customers, and strives for perfection of exclusive content, reasonable products and viewing experience.
Meanwhile, Qiyi will strictly abide by copyright laws and administrative regulations, to take copyright protection measures to protect the legitimate rights and interests of copyright holders. Qiyi copyright of all content through legitimate channels such as procurement obtained.
Qiyi adopts meanwhile a series of measures to protect the legal rights of content providers and follows strictly the copyright-related laws and regulations. All videos on Qiyi are from legal channels.
Qiyi makes profit from advertisers on the websites and will also committed to developing other profit models supported by both of the users and the advertisers. The licensed online videos are totally free for internet users.
Qiyi keeps making efforts in the future operations to be the favorite video viewing platform of Chinese internet users’, and meanwhile to spread the advanced socialism culture by undertaking its social responsibility as an outstanding corporate citizen. Qiyi is playing a positive role in developing a harmonious society.
It’s just like Hulu, only with governmental censorship!
(Via press release)
Rosetta Stone (RST) shares are trading sharply higher after hours on better-than-expected Q4 results.
The provider of language instruction software reported revenue of $78.3 million and non-GAAP profits of 61 cents a share; the Street has been forecasting $74.3 million and 38 cents.
For Q1, the company sees revenue of $58 million to $60 million, with non-GAAP profits of 7-9 cents a share; the Street has been expecting $56.2 million and 12 cents. The company said results will reflect about $4 million in litigation expense related to a previously disclosed lawsuit against Google (GOOG). The suit alleges that Google allowed other companies to use Rosetta trademarks without permission.
For all of 2010, the company sees revenue of $286 million to $299 million, with non-GAAP profits of 90 cents to $1 a share; the consensus forecast has been for $279.6 million and $1.16. Results are expected to include $7.5 million in non-recurring marketing expenses, and $6 million in litigation-related costs.
RST in late trading is up $2.26, or 13%, to $19.60.
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BOSTON (Reuters) - Fortress Investment Group LLC (FIG.N), one of the world’s largest publicly traded hedge fund and private equity fund firms, reported a smaller quarterly net loss and said assets climbed as it took in new money from investors.
Fortress, which went public three years ago, said its net loss attributable to Class A shareholders narrowed to $84 million, or 58 cents a share, from $140 million, or $1.50 a share, a year earlier.
Assets under management, which are used to calculate how much a money management firm earns, climbed to $31.8 billion at the end of December from $29.5 billion a year earlier. The company said that it had raised $1.4 billion in new third-party capital.
Fortress said distributable earnings climbed to $60 million during the quarter from $7 million a year earlier.
Hedge fund companies often highlight distributable earnings — income from their funds segment minus adjustable income taxes — as the best measure of their performance. (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
"60 million Americans don't use the interwebs" - http://digg.com/d21Jk0V?t4 #lis48801 #lis48820 (via @digg_technews)
[Direct Link]Report: Time Spent On Social Media Sites Increased By 82% Year Over Year http://bit.ly/a4hP6U
Consumers spent more than five and a half hours on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in Dec, 2009, according to a report by Nielsen. The amount of time spent on social media sites has increased by 82% from the same time last year, when users only spent three hours on social media sites each day.
Facebook was the most popular social network (hardly any surprises there) with around 206.9 million unique visitors in Dec, 2009. In addition to this, 67% of the global social media users now visit Facebook at least once a month. Facebook has also become more addictive, with time spent on the site increasing to six hours per month on average.
Blogs and Social Networks were the most visited online category, followed by online games and instant messaging. The time spent by users on social networks and blogs increased by 210% year-over-year with the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year.
Facebook and Twitter once again managed to outpace the overall growth in the social networking category by posting year-over-year growth of 200% and 368%, respectively – yes Twitter’s growth rate is even better than that of Facebook. A look at the growth rate for the month of December alone shows an even rosy picture for Twitter, as it posted an increase of 579% in unique visitors from the same time last year – growing to 18.1 million unique visitors from 2.7 million uniques in Dec, 2008.
Twitter has also released some internal stats, which reveal that the social network now sends out 50 million status updates every day, and is fast approaching Facebook – which boasts 60 million status updates on a given day.
Ten 200 ton buoys—each measuring 150 feet by 40 feet—are being installed off the coast of Oregon to build America's first wave power farm. They'll power 400 homes by harnessing "the energy of wave motion." Worth $60 million?
Of course, of course. Clean, renewable energy is almost always worth it. The trouble with wave farms is that they haven't shown much success yet. They're currently about six times as costly as wind farms, are easily damaged by large waves, and the first ones didn't work out so well:
The world's first commercial wind farm opened in 2008 in Portugal, but power production was suspended due to financial difficulties. Moreover, two years ago, a Canadian-produced wave power device sank off Oregon's coast.
Yikes. I'm sure that in the long run we'll start seeing positive results, but it looks like the path there will be long and expensive. [USA Today via Good via Inhabitat]
Leap Wireless is teaming with Pocket Communications to expand its footprint in South Texas in an apparent effort to primp for potential dance partners as the move toward consolidation continues in mobile. The companies said today that Leap will control a new joint venture that will acquire both companies’ licenses and operating assets in markets including San Antonio, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. Leap will own a 76 percent stake in the venture and will buy some of Pocket’s South Texas assets for about $38 million in cash before the deal closes, then will contribute to the business with its own related assets.
Pocket, a regional flat-rate service provider that also operates a network in New England, claims 320,000 customers in South Texas while Leap’s Cricket provides prepaid service to about 400,000 users in the region and 5 million nationwide. The companies believe the move will result in additional contribution to Leap’s OIBDA (operating income before depreciation and amortization) in the range of $50-$60 million within two years.
Notably, the deal includes a provision that forces Pocket to sell its stake in the joint venture to Cricket should Leap change hands. That’s a scenario that’s increasingly likely given that Leap has hired advisers to explore a sale or merger in the face of an increasingly brutal prepaid market. A tie-up with MetroPCS has been rumored recently, and the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that Leap had reached out to both AT&T and Verizon Wireless. So like a lonely girl hoping someone will ask her to dance, Leap is doing everything it can to make itself a little prettier as the industry continues to move toward consolidation.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Sprint’s Boost a Model for Prepaid Success
Image courtesy Flickr user betsssssy.
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