Last month I told you about Hot Potato, one of the buzziest start-ups in the very buzzy “real time” sector. Now you can check out the service yourself. Or at least you can get a glimpse of it in this video.
A year ago, when Time Warner Cable and Viacom sparred over renewal fees, Viacom took out ads asking consumers for sympathy. Today, faced with the prospect of similar fights with the likes of News Corp. and Scripps, Time Warner Cable is launching its own appeal. Good luck with that.
How do you get Web users to pay for content? Get an iPhone into their hands.
That’s one conclusion you can draw from a new survey showing that people who own Apple handsets are more willing to pay for stuff than the average Internet surfer.
I’d like to say this is a half-full, half-empty scenario. But the more I think about it, the more I’m thinking the latter. Web ads improved over the last three months, but compared to last year, we’re still behind. And last year was terrible.
What if somebody made a version of “Mad Men,” but replaced the nostalgia and sex appeal with timeliness and accuracy? It would be sort of amusing, in small doses. Like this clip Yahoo made with other pitchmen in mind.
The tale of Joost, the would-be online video heavyweight, is almost at an end. Most of the company’s remaining assets have been sold off to Adconion Media Group, the two companies announced today.
Warner Music Group has a mixed bag of results for Wall Street this morning: The music label’s revenue was a bit higher than analysts had expected. But even after factoring out one-time severance charges, the company lost three cents a share, and the Street was assuming it would earn four or five cents a share.
Google’s acquisition spree continues: The company has bought Teracent, a start-up that customizes online ads on the fly. BoomTown reported in September that Google was interested in the San Mateo, Calif.-based company, which is filled with veterans of…Yahoo. No purchase price disclosed, but I’m fairly confident this was in the sub-$50 million category.
German entertainment conglomerate Bertelsmann, which made a move into the online kids/education market earlier this year, appears to be having second thoughts.
Bertelsmann is looking for an investor to buy some or all of Scoyo, which it launched in Germany in January of this year and previewed in the U.S. in September.
The people who own EMI Music Group may regret the purchase, but here’s a tiny bit of good news: Sales crept up last year. And next year’s numbers, aided by the Beatles, may be better yet.
Another expansion for Spotify, the much hyped European streaming music service: It’s now going to be available on Nokia phones and other handsets that run the Symbian platform. That’s good, because the service is supposed to work best as a mobile play.
But Spotify has yet to make a key expansion: To the U.S., where the big music labels worry that consumers will love everything about the site except paying for it.
The new AOL will differ than the old one in several ways: New boss, smaller headcount, different owners. So, of course, it also gets a new–but awfully familiar–logo.
Police charge a record company executive who didn’t use the messaging service to break up a near-riot of teenage girls at a Long Island mall.
Want to see Condé Nast’s not-so-secret plans to produce tablet-friendly editions of its magazines? Get yourself to New York’s Meatpacking District. Or check out this grainy YouTube clip.
Want to watch YouTube on your TV? There are plenty of devices and services that let you do that, with more on the way. But starting next month, at least one gadget is getting its YouTube feed shut down: Syabas, which makes a line of set-top boxes called “Popcorn Hour,” says Google’s video site has told it to remove YouTube content from its offering beginning December 2.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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