Logic Wireless (who?) is showing off what it’s claiming to be the world’s first projector-packing mobile phone – the Logic Bolt – at CES 2009. This quad-band GSM, 3mp shootin’ candybar handset is supposedly able to project an image up to 64″ and is expected to do so for up to 2 hours thanks to its 1800mAh battery. It also appears to have an external speaker to help make your impromptu mobile projector sessions fun for the whole family. More pics after the jump. → Read More
Video sharing site Bolt has filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations. The site has been on borrowed time since an acquisition by GoFish failed August 1. Bolt.com was sued by Universal Music in October 2006 and owes Universal $10 million from that suit; the funds from the GoFish acquisition were to have been used to settle the $10 million with Universal. Bolt joins the TechCrunch Deadpool. → Read More
Amidst a falling share price GoFish has dropped its $30 million stock trade for Bolt.com. The deal was also meant to help Bolt pay its settlement with several music labels, including Universal Music. GoFish had initially celebrated the acquisition in their April 10KSB report as increasing distribution for their “made for internet” (MFI) video shows. The combined sites were expected to draw 7 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. and roughly 14 million globally (according to Comscore Media Metrix). The deal was expected to close in May 2007. The stalling deal was most likely responsible for the precipitous drop in their share price in June. The drop saw the company’s market cap shrink from $134 million to about $15 million. The acquisition eventually fell through due to alleged licensing concerns. GoFish has also experienced other problems. Sources close to the company have reported a major ad network stopped serving ads on the site last month due to the low volume of monetizeable traffic. Over two months, the network saw their total ad spending drop to $20 a day at a $1 cpm. This infers 20,000 unique visitors per day seeing advertisements on GoFish.com. The lack of advertising inventory on the front page was cited as a possible reason for the low numbers. → Read More
Video sharing site Bolt.com is being acquired by GoFish – a smaller but richer rival, in order to pay the settlement the company has agreed to with Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. The New York Times broke the story tonight. Bolt will go for an estimated $30 million in GoFish stock (update: forms filed Monday indicate that the acquisition was for about half this amount) ; the three year old GoFish was the first video sharing site to go public last October. Though it has just begun to bring in revenue from licensing deals, GoFish stock closed Friday just under $6 per share with a market value of $134 million. The settlement was for “several millions of dollars” in cash, stock and advertising credits – presumably much less than the original demand from Universal of $150,000 per infraction. The acquiring company GoFish, not to be confused with the wildly successful singles’ site PlentyofFish, has recently seen a huge spike in traffic. It was at 1.4 million monthly unique visitors as of December but reports more than 6 million uniques last month. Bolt sees more than 5 million unique visitors monthly (according to Comscore) and turned that traffic into $7 million in revenue last year. GoFish has reported no revenue but has deeper pockets. It was given birth to by Palo Alto investment firm Global Asset Capital. → Read More
On the day of the Google/YouTube acquisition, YouTube announced a licensing deal with Universal Music. Apparently, Grouper and Bolt.com didn’t get the memo. Universal Music has come out swinging in their first online video-related lawsuit against two of the lesser-known online video sharing websites, Bolt.com and Sony’s recent acquisition, Grouper. The lawsuit takes aim at the websites’ ability for users to swap pirated versions of its’ musicians videos and seeks as much as $150,000 for each incident of copyright infringement. Bolt.com operates much like YouTube, allowing users to only view Flash versions of the videos in their web browser without any ability to copy the video to their physical computer. Shutdown Bolt.com or remove any materials from the website, and they are no longer accessible by anyone. Alternatively, Grouper users can download the videos to their computer, iPod, or PSP. Thus, similar to how the old Napster operated with music, if a user downloaded a physical copy of a Grouper video to their computer, then the user will be able to view it indefinitely, even if Grouper were to shut down or remove the videos from Grouper.com. Surprisingly, other websites weren’t mentioned in this lawsuit. Metacafe is larger than both Grouper and Bolt.com (according to Alexa data) and a search for Universal Music artist Mariah Carey resulted in several music videos of her, along with a pre-roll video advertisement for CareerBuilder. Another that wasn’t named in the lawsuit is Guba, which has blatant copyright infringement occurring on their website as a result of their indexing pirated videos from Usenet. Despite teaming with the MPAA and supposedly cracking down on piracy with software called “Johnny,” users can easily view tons of music videos on Guba’s website or download them to their computer, iPod, or PSP. A search on Guba for Universal Music artist Mary J. Blige, returned several of her music videos. According to comScore, Bolt.com had 8.1 million unique visitors in August and Grouper had 1.8 million — whereas YouTube had 72.1 million. → Read More
