The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Next New Networks Sees 300 Million Views In 2009; Approaches Profitability
- Google Plans To Deliver 1Gb/sec Fiber-Optic Broadband Network To More Than 50,000 Homes
- DailyMotion Secures EMI Video Content In Ad Deal
- AOL Shells Out $200K To Join MIT Media Lab Consortium
- New York Times Sees Rebound In Internet Advertising In Fourth Quarter
- AOL’s Surphace Goes Self Serve With Private Beta Of S4
- Encoding.com Raises $1.25 Million For SaaS Video Encoding Platform
- YouTube Introduces “Safety Mode” For That Grey Area Content
- ST-Ericsson Helps Handset Manufacturers Make Low-Cost Android Smartphones
- Is This @EricSchmidt’s Facebook Profile?
| Next New Networks Sees 300 Million Views In 2009; Approaches Profitability Posted: 10 Feb 2010 09:00 AM PST
Online television studio Next New Networks is reporting a few milestones today, releasing news that the network has seen over 300 million views across its networks in 2009. The company also claims it doubled revenue from 2008 to 2009 and saw a 70% increase in the number of sponsors. Next New Networks builds internet based "micro television networks" for targeted niche communities. Over the past few years, Next New Networks restructured and reshuffled its executive team and staff, bringing in Lance Podell as CEO in late 2008 and added a new chief of programming Kathleen Grace in 2009. The company says viewership grew thanks to programming and networks in 2009, which include Fast Lane Daily, Barely Political (aka Obama Girl),Beyond The Trailer and more. In 2009, NNN's networks grew to over one million subscribers on YouTube, podcasts and e-mail, a 300% increase from 2008. Although company, which earned a blog post on YouTube’s blog recently, claimed profitability by 2009, that expectation has been held off until this year. While the company as a whole isn’t profitable, we are told that several of its networks are. The company has raised $23 million in funding.      
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| Google Plans To Deliver 1Gb/sec Fiber-Optic Broadband Network To More Than 50,000 Homes Posted: 10 Feb 2010 08:05 AM PST
Google is getting into the broadband business. The company plans to deploy its own “experimental” fiber-optic network to at least 50,000 homes, perhaps as many as 500,000. The fiber-optic network will deliver speeds of 1 gigabit-per-second, which is more than 20 times faster than residential fiber optic services offered today in the U.S. The company writes on its blog:
The service will be competitive in price to today’s broadband services from cable and telephone companies, but it will be much faster. Verizon and Comcast must be thrilled. Google says it is doing this on an trial basis to promote new killer apps that will take advantage of the faster speeds, experiment with better ways to deploy fiber to the home, and create pressure for more open access to broadband in general. It sees its effort as complementary to the U.S. government’s national broadband deployment plans, which it also supports. Communities and municipalities who would like to be considered for Google’s service can apply here. Google owns its own vast network of dark fiber around the globe to connect its data centers, speed up search, and lower its cost of streaming billions of videos a month on YouTube. With this project, Google is taking its first step in connecting that fiber backbone to consumer’s homes. It is not clear what Google services will come with a broadband subscription, but it is a safe bet that Google will be the default search and Gmail will be the default email. Maybe they can throw in Google Voice service and an Android phone that lets you talk over WiFi.      
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| DailyMotion Secures EMI Video Content In Ad Deal Posted: 10 Feb 2010 07:56 AM PST
Content will go onto the main site, mobile, iPhone app and the DailyMotion channel on Internet-connected TVs. The deal covers all EMI’s labels, and the labels represented by EMI Label Services and EMI’s Caroline Distribution unit. Artists featured from April will include Coldplay, Katy Perry, Robbie Williams and David Guetta. Dailymotion will deliver ads against the videos to all three screens. Paris-based Dailymotion has over 65 million unique monthly visitors, according to comScore. It raised another €15 million in financing late last year. The venture recently turned profitable, but that additional investment was required to fund its steep growth. It expects a 50% increase in turnover in 2009 and 2010. DailyMotion says it currently serves 1 billion video views per month.      
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| AOL Shells Out $200K To Join MIT Media Lab Consortium Posted: 10 Feb 2010 07:25 AM PST
AOL has joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab as a sponsor, which according to the consortium’s site, costs around $200,000. The MIT Media Lab is a research community that focuses on the study, development and invention of digital technologies. The sponsorship, which lasts for 3 years, was spearheaded by AOL Ventures, an investment fund launched by AOL in 2009 to nurture early-stage external and employee-originated ideas. With the sponsorship, AOL have access to all of the research conducted at the Lab; Lab-wide visiting privileges; open invitations to Lab-wide lectures and special events; and most importantly, non-exclusive, license-fee-free, royalty-free licensing rights for IP that’s developed within the lab. Jeff Reynar, who was recently hired from Google to head up engineering for AOL, will be responsible for coordinating the collaboration with Media Lab research teams. According to the release Reynar will be exploring way to incorporate innovation in AOL’s content business so I’d expect for AOL to be looking at content-related technologies to license at the Lab. It’s not a bad deal for AOL, considering that the Media Lab has some fairly innovative projects coming out of its program. One project that caught our eye was Personas, which takes your name and searches the web for some context around it. The technology then takes the words and sites it finds to build a profile of your presence on the web. Other Media Lab sponsored technologies include EchoNest and MusicBox.      
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| New York Times Sees Rebound In Internet Advertising In Fourth Quarter Posted: 10 Feb 2010 06:28 AM PST
The online advertising recession might be over for the New York Times. The company announced fourth quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues for the quarter were down 11.5 percent to $681 million, but Internet revenues (including About.com) were up 10.3 percent to $102 million. The Internet advertising portion of that was also up 10.6 percent to $90.6 million. Earnings per share were 44 cents after special items, above consensus of 38 cents. This is the first quarter in more than a year that Internet advertising revenues did not decline. While one quarter of data is not enough to confirm a rebound, it is a hopeful sign. Annual Change In Internet Advertising Revenues 4Q08: -3.5% Internet advertising is making up an increasing portion of the company’s total advertising dollars, now making up 23 percent of the total in the quarter. For the year, total revenues were down 17 percent to $2.4 billion, total advertising revenues (mostly print) were down an even steeper 24.5 percent to $1.3 billion, with Internet advertising revenues down 4.6 percent to $294.5 million. Only $174 million of that Internet advertising was on its news sites. The real standout business the New York Times owns is information site About.com, which made up only 5 percent of the company’s revenues last year ($121 million out of $2.4 billion), but 69 percent of its operating profits ($51 million out of $74 million). About represented such an outsized portion of profits last year because the rest of the businesses were showing losses most quarters. If you look at only the fourth quarter, About still makes up 5 percent of revenues, but only 13 percent of operating profits, which is closer to what it should be going forward.
     
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| AOL’s Surphace Goes Self Serve With Private Beta Of S4 Posted: 10 Feb 2010 06:00 AM PST
Until now only the largest publishers were able to tailor the types of related content links, as well as the look and feel of the Surphace widget. Small sites had to make due with a standard pop up Surphace widget that had little flexibility in terms of content and design. Now, sites of any size can customize the size, interface and types and quantity of content that Surphace pulls into posts. The result, says Surphace, is higher reader engagement. Here’s an example of a site beta testing S4 (scroll down to the bottom of the post and look for the Surphace content. Here’s another one with different content and design. Setup is very straightforward. Most people will choose a narrow, standard or wide column widget, and publishers can decide to include content from their own site(s), mainstream media, blogs and/or video. Surphace decides what content is relevant to the post (they tend to do an excellent job). Publishers can also choose to completely customize the Surphace content with a bit more work:
In the future, says Guttman, Surphace will give S4 publishers the option to embed advertising from Aol with a revenue share. And they’ll add “real-time conversational buzz” from Twitter streams. S4 is currently in private beta. If you are a publisher and want to give S4 a try, sign up here and use the invite code s4tc. The first 250 publishers to use the code will get instant access.      
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| Encoding.com Raises $1.25 Million For SaaS Video Encoding Platform Posted: 10 Feb 2010 05:58 AM PST
Encoding.com, a startup that provides online video encoding services, has raised $1.25 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Metamorphic Ventures and included angel investors Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan, and Allen Morgan. The funds will be used to further sales, marketing, and partnership programs. Launched in September 2008, Encoding.com provides a cloud-based, video encoding SaaS offering to let users host and encode user-generated and premium video. The company encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for a variety of well-known media and technology companies including MTV Networks, WebMD, Nokia, and MySpace. To date, Encoding.com has encoded more than four million videos since its launch.      
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| YouTube Introduces “Safety Mode” For That Grey Area Content Posted: 10 Feb 2010 05:45 AM PST
The new setting is browser-specific and opt-in, and helps users screen out potentially offensive content that they may prefer not to stumble upon (or have their family members see), even if the content is inherently not against YouTube’s Community Guidelines. As an example, YouTube cites news videos that contain graphic violence, such as war coverage. The company is careful enough to say the filter will not be 100% perfect. From the support page (where you can also find out how to turn on the setting, and even lock your choice on your browser with your YouTube password):
The ability to opt in to Safety Mode is available in all languages YouTube currently operates in, but does not extend to YouTube Mobile at this point.
     
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| ST-Ericsson Helps Handset Manufacturers Make Low-Cost Android Smartphones Posted: 10 Feb 2010 03:47 AM PST
ST-Ericsson says it anticipates manufacturers to launch the first commercial products based on its U6715 chip platform in the first half of 2010. The company claims the platform can support all the essentials of the smartphone experience, including navigation, web browsing, video streaming, email, WiFi, a five megapixel camera, a touch screen and more. A multimedia engine integrated into the hardware architecture of the U6715 frees most of the platform’s microprocessor subsystem to run applications. At the same time, ST-Ericsson says the U6715 platform allows manufacturers to significantly drive down the cost of device production and thus make highly capable smartphones less of a niche play and more of a mass-market product. The U6715 platform comes with an HSPA modem capable of delivering downlink speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps, and the company also boasts about its power efficiency. Equipped with a 1000mA battery, smartphones based on the platform are said to be capable of playing music for up to 40 hours and provide a talk time of up to 7 hours on a 3G network on a single battery charge. More details are available in this document (PDF).
     
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| Is This @EricSchmidt’s Facebook Profile? Posted: 10 Feb 2010 03:04 AM PST
Some people are suggesting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have just created a Facebook profile for himself, after signing up for Twitter in early December 2009 and right on the heels of Microsoft founder Bill Gates setting up an account on the wildly popular social networking service. Evidently, we can’t be 100% sure that this is his real account at this point – unlike Twitter, there’s no ‘verified account’ stamp for Facebook profiles and the man has yet to confirm our friendship (I forgive him, since it’s the middle of the night in the United States). The information that is viewable is mostly restricted to his Facebook friends, as it shows only a profile picture, his sex (Male!), a website (Google.com!) and his location (Mountain View, CA!). Nevertheless, my esteemed colleague MG Siegler says the mutual friends they have on the social network are all Googlers, so it is likely Schmidt (unless of course the Google employees were tricked into befriending a faker). Update: further proof that it is him – the person who created the profile linked the email address EricSchmidt1@yahoo.com to the account, and that happens to be Schmidt’s personal email address too. (thanks, Stephen!) Update 2: yes, that email address is publicized openly on Schmidt’s website, and no, I don’t know why he uses a Yahoo account (although I assume it’s an old account and I’m quite certain he also uses Gmail). One thing is for sure: unlike on Twitter, Schmidt did not obtain a nice vanity URL for himself (facebook.com/ericschmidt has already been taken by someone else) and his profile picture paints a picture of a soft-spoken man in casual clothing rather than that of a bad-ass. So do you think this is legit or not? And more importantly, are you going to try and befriend him so you can poke him all day? (Thanks to @RomilPatel for the tip)      
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Music giant EMI is to deliver its premium music videos onto the platforms run by 
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