Disney CEO Bob Iger told the audience at the Digital Hollywood Media Summit today that that Disney has sold 4 million movies and 40 to 50 million videos through iTunes since signing up in 2006. Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider estimates that this equates to $122.8 million for Disney from Apple, then writes: In other words, a little less than 10% of the $1 billion digital revenue goal Iger has laid out for his company this year — and a rounding error for a company that generated $35 billion in sales last year…The upside for Disney is that this is all incremental revenue, with zero marketing costs. So they’d rather have it than not. But another reminder that digital sales aren’t going to do much for Disney or any other the other large media congolomerates’ top and bottom lines for quite some time. Fair call in that it’s a drop in the Disney sales ocean, but in talking down the figure it ignores the alternative, which is no revenue and increased piracy in a marketplace that is switching to digital content in large numbers. 40-50 million videos and 4 million movies sold in a marketplace that is conditioned to free/ piracy after 2 years is positive for Disney and the industry going forward, because that’s 50 million times some hasn’t downloaded the video or movie for free. The movie market itself has been stifled by DRM and poor quality video, but Apple’s move into HD and rentals should drive further growth in the legitimate download marketplace, such that these figures could easily double or even triple over the next 12 months. Huge revenue figures no: but growth at a time where DVD sales are now declining and Bluray has yet to fully establish itself in the broader market. It should also be noted that Disney’s biggest shareholder is Steve Jobs; if they were making $1 in profit from iTunes they’d still likely be using the service. → Read More
San Francisco based WeGame, a “YouTube for gamers” (although it is much more than that) seems to be off to a solid start. Since launching last month, founder Jared Kim says 7,000 videos have been uploaded to the site, and 13% of users are uploading videos. The other 87% are there to watch game videos like this one from Guitar Hero: http://www.wegame.com/static/flash/player2.swf WeGame.com – Gaming Videos The company will announce they’ve closed a $3 million second round of financing, adding to the $500,000 they raised previously. True Ventures led the round, with participation from HitForge, SoftTechVC and a number of individuals. Kim, who’s 19, dropped out of Berkeley last year to launch WeGame. This is his third startup. CrunchBase Information WeGame Jared Kim Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Let the chiseling begin! I think we all saw this coming: now that Blu-Ray has no competition, the distributors can raise prices back to what they probably should have been in the first place. As you can see in the chart above (courtesy of/shamelessly stolen from Tom’s Hardware), every company but LG has raised the average price of their player by $75-100 from what it cost at or near the beginning of January. And even LG hasn’t kept its price near the low end of the range. It’s safe to say that now is not the time to buy Blu-Ray. Wait for the companies to make back the money from their loss leaders, then snatch ‘em up when they put them back on sale. Blu-Ray Player Prices Hit 2008 Highs As Competition Dwindles [Tom's Hardware] → Read More
[photopress:dhts.jpg,full,center] Normally, if I were to meet a girl with a tattoo from an NES game, I’d likely fall in love. But man, this is just mean: The Duck Hunt dog laughing. If you see this in real life, you can only assume you’re doing it wrong, because that’s what this snickering canine has come to symbolize. via Geek Stir → Read More
[photopress:depicollo.jpg,full,center] I love Rock Band. It’s one of the two reasons I finally broke down and got an Xbox 360 (the other being Halo 3), and my friends and I play it often, that’s why I found this interview with Harmonix’s Greg LoPiccolo to be so interesting. He sheds some light on a little bit of the development of the game, from bundle packages over individual instruments to sales figures to everything else. It’s not a read for everyone, but if you’re a Rock Band fan, it’s definitely worth a read. Leader of the Band [GameIndustry] → Read More
[photopress:umpcroadmaphg4.jpg,full,center] The future of portable computing is going to involve UMPCs, there’s no way of ignoring that, and Intel is working on a pretty impressive roadmap that will take it there. Intel is set to launch the Menlow processor, which is an ultra-low-power platform with support for hyperthreading up to 1.8GHz, WiFi H.264 and MPEG2 built-in, as well as Bluetooth and GPS support, but this is just a stepping stone to the awesome-sounding Moorestown platform. Moorestown is a tiny yet powerful processor family that will come in both single and dual-core configurations and has the lofty goal of being low-powered enough to last all day on a single battery charge, even when used continuously. Is it hot? Yes. Will we actually use it when it comes out in 2009? Oh, yes indeed, especially if it’s in an iPhone. UMPC: 2007 = Menlow, 2008 = Moorestown [Beyond 3-D's forums] → Read More
Now this is an odd idea, indeed. A guy with my dad’s name (Mike Hickey) at Janco Partners is speculating that the release of GTAIV, arguably the most anticipated game of the year, could perhaps sap ticket sales from Iron Man. Wait, what? The reasoning is that they come out the same week, and that geeks will be too busy trying to beat the game to go out and see a dope-looking superhero film. I guess it’s sort of like when everyone played Wookie-hooky when Episode I came out, except Iron Man isn’t going to blow Ewok. Analyst: Iron Man film could suffer from GTA IV release [Joystiq] → Read More
Amazon has now officially joined the Facebook craze. It has launched two of its own Facebook applications: Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine. Amazon Giver shows your Amazon wishlist on your Facebook page. Of course, there are more than a dozen apps on Facebook that already let you do that, but only Amazon Giver lets your friends actually buy those gifts for you without leaving Facebook. Ah, distributed commerce. Your friends can also click on a recommendations tab that creates Amazon product recommendations based on interests reflected in your Facebook profile. So if you are “fan” of The Killers, it might recommend one of the band’s CDs. If you are a “fan” of a soccer page, it might recommend a soccer ball. It also provides recommendations for your friends, conveniently listed by closest birthday. Amazon Grapevine creates an activity stream based on your actions on Amazon. Every time you update your wishlist, write a review, or rate a product on Amazon, it shows up in your friends’ Facebook news feed. Although this sounds almost exactly like Facebook’s Beacon program, Amazon is not part of Beacon (which went through a lot of privacy issues). Amazon Grapevine is completely opt-in. None of your activities are shown automatically just because you are a Facebook member. And none of your purchases are shown. In a way, it is too bad that is not an option. What a person buys says a lot about who they are. → Read More
Here’s a little more information about Acer’s new Gemstone Blue notebook series. First up, there are two models; the Aspire 8920G and the Aspire 6920G. Both feature an Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo processor and Vista Ultimate or Home Premium and up to 4GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, depending on your tastes. Both also have an integrated webcam, fingerprint reader, draft-N wireless, Bluetooth, CineDash media controller (see above photo) and Acer Arcade Deluxe software for all your media files. → Read More
Emphasis added The Inquirer is going a little loopy over this slide from an Intel showing the Menlow Moorestown road-map with a clever litttle sprat hidden in the corner. That’s right. The iPhone may get x86 processing power in gen two of Intel’s low-power chips. Will it happen? Meh. Who knows. This looks more like a lazy presentation maker than anything substantial, but let’s all go nuts and say it will happen. Iphone to go x86 [Inquirer] → Read More
You say tomay-toe, I say tomah-toe – let’s call the whole thing off! That’s the short version of what came out of a breakfast seminar for VCs and entrepreneurs in London this morning. (I took so many notes that I’m going to split this post into two parts. Part II is here). The slightly longer version of the above is that one side of the startup investment community thinks we are headed into a ‘market correction’ for the valuations of tech companies. The other side says we are heading off a cliff, and the market for exiting startups will be very bearish and hard for a long time to come. FirstCapital, which works with startups towards their desired exit, organised the breakfast seminar for entrepreneurs, senior executives from acquirers, and venture capitalists. The subject was M&A activity affecting internet entrepreneurs – an appropriate subject given that many seem to think that many web startups will have to merge or sell this year as funding becomes a tad harder to get for some companies (though not all – as always, the answer is along the lines of ‘how long is a piece of string’). The speakers were as follows: Sean Phelan, Founder, Multimap (recently acquired by Microsoft). Rob Feldmann, Head of M&A, News International. Sara Clemens, Director, Business Development and Strategy, Microsoft Online Services Group. In addition First Capital presented some interesting research which I will go into in the second part of this report, which indicated that last year was an unusual year for startup M&A, and largely focused not on web site deals but data deals. More on that later. On a side note, I need to point out that I was invited as a member of the press to the event a few weeks ago (I went last year in this capacity). But last night Microsoft asked that press not attend, for whatever reason. FirstCapital pointed this out to me but I decided to ignore this and gate-crashed the event anyway. If Microsoft wants to call me about this they can. Luckily, as it happened I arrived late for Clemens’s presentation, but what I did catch didn’t seem to be that interesting anyway. Most of it seemed to be “M&A 101″ – you know, if the company/people is good we buy it, if it’s crap we, er… don’t. Her contribution at Q&A was equally unenlightening, at least from → Read More
[photopress:firefox_3.jpg,full,center] I am really, really looking forward to Firefox 3. I love Firefox when it’s behaving, but mine has a tendency to suddenly lose interest in displaying a given page’s images, or finding its CSS. There are many memory leaks in Firefox 2 and 3 is said to plug most of them. Great! The beta for Firefox 3 just hit version 4, and it’s sounding like its shaping up to be a great browser. Page zooming, new download manager, and stability? Yes, please. Firefox 3 Reaches Beta 4 [Trusted Reviews] → Read More
Another Y Combinator startup launches today, this one with the intent of making online job listings more effective. Snaptalent is essentially an advertising network for jobs (currently, jobs for developers in particular). Employers add their job listings and the service displays them on the sites of participating publishers. Sixteen programming blogs have signed up so far, bringing their 4.5M+ monthly unique visitors with them. Here’s an example of what two Snaptalent job ads looks like: snaptalent_run(); The system was designed to make it easy both for publishers to load the ad widget (a simple JavaScript snippet) and for employers to set up attractive advertisements, ones that perform better than the typical Adsense unit. Snaptalent has provided point-and-click tools that not only help employers design their banner-sized ads; they also allow employers to upload photos and embed videos that complement the text descriptions shown when users click on the ads. But here’s the really interesting twist to Snaptalent’s strategy for getting job listings in front of the best candidates: in addition to placing ads on the blogs and websites trafficked by the target demographic, Snaptalent actively detects the IP addresses of all those websites’ visitors. It then uses the IP information to determine whether particular visitors work for companies like Google – or are enrolled at universities like Carnegie Mellon – where the best talent can be found. When employers set up their job ads, they can indicate a preference for particular organizations and their ads will be shown to those organizations’ members. So how much does this cost advertisers? $250 for every 500 people who click on their ads, regardless of whether those people have been targeted by IP address or not. These pre-paid (and therefore guaranteed) clicks can be purchased in 500 unit increments up to 2,500 people per posting. Publishers who display the widget on their sites will get an undisclosed share of the revenue they generate. The founders of Snaptalent say there’s nothing else available that competes directly with their offering (although deadpooled Edgeio came the closest). Of course there’s a variety of companies approaching the online job listings market in their own way. Broadly speaking, Snaptalent should be grouped with the aggregators (Indeed, Simply Hired, ZamZim, etc.) rather than the destinations (Monster, HotJobs, Jobster, etc) because they most clearly recognize the importance of distributed listings. CrunchBase Information Snaptalent Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Canon’s HV20 HDV camcorder has been the de facto standard for quite a while ago for semi-pro and prosumer video. Fantastic picture, great lens, but to me the idea of recording to DV in the year 2008 is abhorrent. Fortunately, it seems the rough edges have been smoothed off AVCHD and this generation is the one to buy. You’ve got 17Mbps video bandwidth, 16GB of internal storage and room for SD, three real framerate options (24p, 30p, and 60i), recording at 1920×1080 resolution. There’s a lot of competition in that price and performance range, but Canon’s HF10 is apparently the best deal of the lot right now. I thought Panasonic’s HDC-SD9 was sexy (we used it at CES), but this thing is almost as small, has better ergonomics and far better performance, for about $200 more. Can’t wait to get my hands on one. Check out the full in-depth review at the link below. Canon Vixia HF10 Camcorder Review [Camcorderinfo.com] → Read More
[photopress:defib.jpg,full,center] Hackers, those pesky critters that little the Interwebs with malicious code that steals your credit card numbers and casserole recipies, have now turned their attention towards something a little scary: defibrillators. OK, not really, but it’s possible. Many Americans are outfitted with devices that send wireless data to their doctors, reducing the number of needed office visits. This data, though, is not encrypted. A mean person could sniff out the signal and send code to the devices, that include implanted defibrillators, that could cause them to not function when needed, basically stopping the devices from saving a patient’s life. Everybody panic. Researchers hack defibrillators [Wired] → Read More
Our intrepid editor in chief John D. Biggs is live at the Acer announcement. I’ll be updating the info in this post as we get it… → Read More
As we reported yesterday, Google has now successfully acquired DoubleClick after receiving EU approval for the deal. While the focus has been rightly on display advertising, many have missed one part of the deal that will raise eyebrows: Google now owns SEO service Performics. DoubleClick’s Performics offers search engine services that include “natural search solutions” such as “link building.” Some highlights from the Performics service Our experts methodically optimize copy and content for each page to boost page rankings… Addresses external ranking factors and new business opportunities Now there is nothing wrong with what Performics offers; SEO and SEM are legitimate businesses. The catch is that Google is now offering paid services that promise improved search engine listings in Google itself, a 100% conflict of interest. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land calls for Google to divest itself of Performics, and it’s a call that should be supported. → Read More
There are way, way easier ways to do this, but they do cost money up front and you don’t get that satisfaction of creating your own expensive and unwieldy franken-device that performs an obscure function. It has to be said that their little dual-camera rig looks pretty cool and is not limited by splitting the light as a simple mirror setup would do. The single-lens solution I linked above works up to f/11, which is really unbelievably slow. Anyway, DIY types and experimental photographers might want to give both a try. Dual-Camera Stereoscopy [Patenteux.com, via MAKE:blog] → Read More
I’m sure there’s an excellent reason why my great Dell monitor has a 16:10 aspect ratio, when so many things are actually 16:9. But while I kind of like the little black bars when I’m watching shows and movies on it, it just seems kind of odd that they would make it so close, and yet not that most common of aspect ratios. Well, AU Optronics is manufacturing some 16:9 monitors for people who really hate letterboxing, although the fact that they’re CCFL-lit and not LED will not appeal to the media freaks who are so exacting about their ratios. The contrast ratio is 1000:1, which isn’t stellar, but they’re also only half an inch thick, which is great. There’s a lot of pros and cons there, and they also come in a variety of sizes, which makes it that much more complicated. Fortunately, they’re not even available yet so don’t stress. Stop, stop stressing. AUO demos 16:9 ratio, 24-inch HD monitor [Electronista] → Read More
[photopress:iphonesdkroadmap.jpg,full,center] In the first four days of the iPhone SDK being available, over 100,000 copies have been downloaded. That’s one for every man, woman, and child on Earth. Ok, not really, but it’s still a respectable number. Now what remains to be seen is this: will there be 100,000 crappy developers making shoddy Tetris clones, or will we get actual good apps? My money’s on the latter. Press Release → Read More
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