Ajax Girl

Not content to leave Tom Cruise alone in a self promotional Adwords Campaign, the American Government is buying Adwords units in defense of American Foreign Policy.

The ad (pictured right) reads “Peace & Security, Creating security through improved relations and cooperation” and links through to a page on America.gov with a motto of “Telling America’s Story.” The page includes stories on Syria and Nuclear Reactors, Terrorists and other Bush Administration foreign policy news.

It’s not clear whether this ad is being displayed within the United States itself, or simply to the rest of the world. Tax payer money well spent, or waste of money propaganda via Adsense units? You can be the judge.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/283689313/

Lycos might be one of the last names you’d expect to see associated with the online video darlings YouTube and Hulu. The search-engine-cum-internet-portal that rose to international popularity in the late 90s before crashing down to earth post-bubble-burst certainly hasn’t been on our radar more than a couple of times in the last three years.

But the South Korean-owned holdover is making strides to socialize the online TV show and movie viewing experience with several upgrades to its Lycos Cinema property.

Lycos Cinema launched over a year ago and gave visitors the opportunity to watch older content simultaneously with each other using patented “simulstream” technology. The idea is that half the fun of watching a movie at the theater, or a TV show on the couch, comes from the people around you, and it’s important to preserve that personal relationship element.

The new version of Lycos Cinema is intended to enhance that social experience of simultaneous video playback. Lycos has built out a new XMPP chat client that lets people talk about the shows they are watching. And a redesigned user interface highlights your friends’ media consumption preferences with member profiles that contain personal calendars, watchlists, and recently purchased movies. The site is reminiscent of Evite in that you can invite your friends to screenings and they RSVP appropriately. Friends can also be invited to shows on the fly with a simple URL.

Lycos Cinema is a hybrid video delivery site: much of the content is ad-supported and free, but much of it is also made available on a rental basis (a la iTunes or Amazon Unbox). Pricing is in line with the market at $4 for new releases, with 30 days to start watching and 24 hours to finish. Since this is a social service, however, you can also buy seats for your friends, or the general public, to watch shows with you. It costs $6 to rent for up to 5 people, and $8 for up to 10 people.

Lycos’s efforts are commendable but there’s one huge deficiency to the service: it hasn’t signed with any of the major studios yet so you won’t find all the good content already available on Hulu and its partner sites. Lycos says the new version of Cinema will provide it with a “seat at the table” for discussing these deals, but until they materialize, you’ll have to remain satisfied with content from National Lampoon and a number of small independents.

The video site does have the benefit of being incorporated into the larger Lycos network of properties. Lycos Cinema’s content is given top spots in Lycos search results, for example, and it can certainly be promoted to Lycos’s 20M monthly US uniques in a variety of other ways.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/283680005/

We’re a few weeks away from the Prague TC/CG Meet-up and things are heating up. We have four sponsors lined up for the show:

Nelso - Multi-language local search for Europe
GoodData - A data analysis suite by Roman Stanek, founder of NetBeans and Systinet,
Newstin - Global social news
Geewa Multi-player games for mobile and PC

We’re confirmed at Restaurace Zvonařka on Friday, May 23 from 7pm until 10pm. You can RSVP on Facebook or email me with the subject line “PRAHA I’M YOURS” to john @ crunchgear dot com.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the evening, drop me a line at john @ crunchgear.com. See you in Praha!

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/283621398/

The Pirate Bay may get all the headlines, but BitTorrent directory Mininova continues to grow. Stats from the site above (some are public, some via a non-published link) show the site is quickly racing towards 5 billion downloads after having only passed 4 billion February 18.

Comparing Mininova to The Pirate Bay isn’t easy. The Pirate Bay doesn’t offer a download figure, only concurrent users, with the site having passed the 10 million user mark in January. Both Alexa and comScore rank Mininova in front of The Pirate Bay, Alexa ranks The Pirate Bay at 101 to Minivova’s 52. comScore records over 30 million monthly page views for Mininova, but doesn’t track any traffic for The Pirate Bay at all (comScore isn’t strong on European stats where we’d presume a lot of The Pirate Bay’s traffic would come from).

The break down of what is being downloaded is interesting. Video (movies and TV) make up 60% of the downloads on Mininova vs 19.55% for music. TV Shows are the most popular category at 38.7%; if we presume the music industry is broken based on illegal downloading, wouldn’t the demand for TV shows also demonstrate that the TV business is in trouble as well, even as services like Hulu try to offer a legal alternative?

One thing that can be taken away from these stats: that BitTorrent isn’t going away, its general usage and acceptance in the community is accelerating despite attempts by the RIAA and others to harass users.

(thanks to Ashley Smith for the tip)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/283610217/

RSS Reader News Alloy is to shut due to a lack of funding. Michael first reviewed the site in January 2006 and it was mentioned again in a round up of RSS Readers later that year.

The following email was sent to News Alloy users:

You received this email because you are registered user of News Alloy Project - Web2.0 based Feed Reader. (http://www.newsalloy.com/)

Bad times finally came, my contract with our hosting provider is over so i will shut down the site in a couple of days, please grab your OPML for your convenience.

Future plans:

If you are interested for project to stay alive and get it under your wing please contact me, we need new dedicated hosting (quite powerful).
In case you want to get full ownership of the domain and grab all sources feel free to ask. It will cost not that much as fat cats are asking.

Also i’ve developed new version about 6 months ago which is half ready - News Alloy 2.0.
It looks much brighter, faster, pure Javascript UI, rich featured and impressive look and feel. But to make it complete i need funding. Thats for sure.
If You want to have look - please let me know to get an invitation.

If none is interested i will put other project on the top of News Alloy domain.

Please keep in mind that News Alloy project was developed by one single person who was in charge of everything - coding, design, promo and PR.

Now I’m open for interesting contracts and custom jobs in the area of web development and system administration.

Thank you for staying with us,
Volodymyr Danylyuk,
Project Developer and Maintainer

I’ve never used News Alloy before so I’m not sure that it’s worth saving, but it might be a cheap entry into a ready made startup, or a decent value add for an existing company.

Until its saved, News Alloy joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/283605224/

As everyone digests yesterday’s extraordinary news around Microsoft’s withdrawal of their Yahoo bid, the big rumor around the valley is the Yahoo is frantically trying to negotiate a deal with Google to outsource search advertising and get it announced before the markets open tomorrow.

Yahoo-Google?

It’s not clear that Google still wants to do such a deal now that the immediate threat of a Microsoft/Yahoo deal is gone. The reason - the almost certain regulatory review (even Congress has taken note) And even if they are still willing to talk, Yahoo has lost the lions share of negotiating leverage. That means a lower revenue share, a shorter term deal, etc.

If Yahoo and Google reach a deal, it’s possible they could at least argue for a case that Yahoo’s value should increase to $37/share (but the markets won’t buy it): based on analyst projections, Yahoo could increase cash flow by $1 billion or more by outsourcing, and increase revenue per thousand search queries to as high as $90 from the current $40 or so. Combine that with massive headcount reductions (Yahoo won’t need their search marketing employees any more, possibly 2,000 employees), and Yahoo could have short term bottom line gains of well $1.2 billion or more/year.

With a trailing P/E of almost 40, That extra cash could, theoretically, boost their market cap by more than enough to reach their goal of $37/share.

That’s the theory anyway.

In reality, even if a deal is announced, the markets will factor in the risk of regulatory veto, as well as the long term negative effects of giving away the search marketing business to their biggest competitor.

And Yahoo’s true market value today remains in the $19/share range, or about $26 billion, now that the Microsoft crutch has ben removed. A good chunk of that - $10 billion or so - is actually from their Alibaba and Yahoo Japan holdings.

So Yahoo and Google may do a deal or they may not - but either way it isn’t going to help Yahoo’s share price as much as they hope.

Angry Shareholders

We also expect Yahoo to announce their delayed annual shareholder meeting early this week, and actually hold it as early as late June. When it’s announced, shareholders have ten days to propose an alternate slate of board members. Microsoft says they are sitting on the sidelines, but a group of angry stockholders may now emboldened enough to make their own effort to change company management.

To say that shareholders are angry is an understatement. They made it clear to anyone who’d talk to them that they would be more than happy with Microsoft’s $33/share final offer. Legg Mason, Capital Research, T. Rowe Price and others all reportedly strongly wanted the Microsoft deal to happen.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/283520539/

Microsoft’s dramatic decision this weekend to withdraw its offer for Yahoo and not pursue a hostile bid raises a whole host of questions. What happens to Yahoo now? What happens to Microsoft? Or is this just a tactic to drive down the price of Yahoo’s shares so that Microsoft can go hostile with a lower offer? And if the deal really is dead, does Steve Ballmer need to start looking for a new job?

This last question may not be so hypothetical. Ballmer has been the big driver behind this deal at Microsoft—some would say to the point of obsession. After the disaster that has been Windows Vista (Microsoft’s core product), Ballmer may have realized he needed to redeem himself in the eyes of Microsoft’s board. And the “transformative” deal with Yahoo was the way he was going to do it.

One reading of Ballmer’s obsession with the deal is that he felt his job was on the line if he didn’t get it done. According to one secondhand account that leaked to us yesterday before the deal was called off, over the past week Ballmer increasingly has been “yelling and screaming at employees for almost no reason” and is being “more of a tyrant than usual.” One executive on the Microsoft deal team supposedly made a comment about “not having to worry about Ballmer anymore” if the Yahoo deal fell through. What the exec didn’t know, though, was that Ballmer was in earshot, and he screamed back that the deal would go through and that he wouldn’t let the board “crucify” him.

As things stand, the fact that Ballmer was not able to close the deal could put his job in jeopardy. The big questions are: If he really does walk away, can he put this distraction behind the company? Or is it too late for Ballmer? If Microsoft’s board loses patience with him, it might have to ask Blll Gates to temporarily come back as CEO until it finds a replacement. After all, Ballmer has already made a strong and convincing case for why Microsoft needs Yahoo to make its online and advertising strategy work (it needs the scale of Yahoo’s display and search advertising inventory to compete with Google). It is not clear how it can achieve its objectives on its own or through other acquisitions.

Maybe Ballmer backed down because he realized the deal was becoming too big of a distraction and he didn’t want to drag it out further given Yahoo’s continued resistance. (And save his job in the process). Or perhaps he thinks he can still get it done by making Yahoo’s stock price collapse and come back with a hostile offer. (After all, if you are going to go hostile, you’d want to drive down the stock price of the target company to make your offer look even more attractive to shareholders). We’ll find out later this week.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/283361471/

I really enjoyed O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo this year, which took place in San Francisco on April 22-25. The Expo is a companion event to the Web 2.0 Summit, and “an expanded, inclusive gathering for the technology and business communities through a combined conference and tradeshow.”

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/web-20-expo-san-francisco-2008/