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Ross Fadner, Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 11:30 AM
News Corp. To Layoff 5% Of Fox Interactive Media
The Wall Street Journal
Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. division that houses MySpace, is laying off 5% of its workforce, or about 100 people, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to an unnamed source, the layoffs include all FIM units. The cuts began last month. "I can confirm that several of the groups within FIM are eliminating some jobs and repurposing others," a FIM spokesman said in a statement. "This is part of a larger effort we're making to put FIM in the best possible position to succeed now and, more importantly, to emerge even stronger once the markets recover. It's important to note that we continue to hire in many areas."
So much for the Web being above the broader economy. Indeed, the Journal points out that News Corp. will be under pressure to show strong earnings from FIM when it reports quarterly profits next week. The economic downturn has already put pressure on the division's advertising growth. In the third quarter, FIM reported a revenue increase of 17%, down from 23% in the second quarter.
In response to the rather bearish Journal report, MySpace issued the following statement: "We are constantly aligning our business and resources to focus on the core strategic initiatives of MySpace. We currently have open positions, are actively hiring in areas including but not limited to MySpace Music, Business Development, and other product initiatives. We expect to have more MySpace employees at the end of this fiscal year than we currently have."
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Should Twitter Sell To Facebook?
D: All Things Digital
According to various reports, Twitter, which has been featured prominently in the news for breaking stories like the plane crash in Manhattan's Hudson River, is raising another $20 million in a round of funding valuing the company at $250 million. Kara Swisher worries that the Web 2.0 startup, which has no revenue source, is getting a little cocky: "Twitter folks are always going on about how they don't need money since the burn rate is so low and because they could turn on the revenue spigot any old time they want to," she says. "Well, Twitter might want to ask Facebook about how burn rates can rise quicker than you think and how hard it is to get that pump of revenue truly going in a sustainable way."
As such, Swisher says the microblogging sensation might want to reconsider selling to Facebook, a deal that it abandoned late last year. For starters, Twitter and Facebook would "fit nicely together, creating the most powerful universal address book ever." Secondly, thanks to the economy, Facebook isn't going public anytime soon, and the idea of Twitter going public is absolutely "laughable." Thirdly, some larger company will probably buy Twitter soon, although it would probably be happiest and most autonomous as part of Facebook, Swisher says.
GigaOm's Om Malik disagrees. He thinks Twitter "needs to swing for the fences," which means competing with social networks like Facebook to create a new, more open, "more democratic." ecosystem of services built using Twitter. In other words, Twitter has the opportunity to become its own platform, one that could rival Facebook.
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MySpace Passed Over Facebook's $75 Million Offer
TechCrunch/Silicon Alley Insider
Julia Angwin, editor of The Wall Street Journal's technology section "Digits" has authored a "tell-all" book about News Corp. company MySpace. The book isn't set for publication until March 17, but TechCrunch has a copy of a draft. MySpace is quick to point out that it had no involvement in the book whatsoever. Michael Arrington adds that, "It's clear from the tone of the book that Angwin's sources are primarily or solely people who've left the company, many of whom have a bone to pick with MySpace or parent company News Corp."
In any event, the book's big revelation is that rival Facebook offered to sell to MySpace for a puny $75 million in February 2005. Co-founder Chris DeWolfe said no, but after News Corp. swooped in to buy Intermix, MySpace's parent, for $580 million that summer, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came back in the fall asking for $750 million. Once again, DeWolfe said no.
Well, that certainly turned out to be a big miss. Since then, Facebook has surpassed MySpace as the Web's No. 1 social network. In fact, just last week, comScore numbers showed that Facebook now draws nearly twice as much traffic as the former No. 1. Depending who you ask, Zuckerberg's firm is now valued somewhere between $2.5 and $4 billion. As Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson says, "Of course, given the slow pace of innovation at MySpace since its acquisition by News Corp, its entirely possible Facebook would never have become the cultural touchstone it is today under Chris and Tom's leadership instead of Mark's."
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Advertisers Search For Online Video Standards
BusinessWeek/Online Media Daily
Online video ads come in different shapes, sizes and formats; some can even be skipped. As BusinessWeek reports, the lack of uniformity is confusing enough for Web users, but it poses even bigger problems for advertisers, who need to worry about tailoring their ads to different standards as well as coming up with a way to measure effectiveness using a wide range of approaches.
"With so many different formats for video online, we incur incremental production costs every time we enter a new format," notes Nancy Ryan, media director for insurance company Allstate. As the report points out, these difficulties have resulted in many companies avoiding online video advertising altogether.
To deal with this issue, several publishers and advertisers are banding together to create a single standard format for online video ads, as reported by Joe Mandese in Online Media Daily. Called the Pool, the group aims to discover which video ads work best, and to develop a standard format. "In terms of advertising spending, television didn't take off until it got a 30-second unit," says Tracey Scheppach, senior vice-president of video innovations at Starcom MediaVest. Starcom, which is owned by ad holding giant Publicis Groupe, founded the Pool late last year when it asked Microsoft, Yahoo, Hulu, CBS Interactive, Discovery Communications, AOL, and online video ad network Broadband Enterprises to propose a total of 30 different types of ads. The group then invited large marketers to the table and took a group vote on which ads they believed would be most effective. As of Jan. 21, Starcom began testing the top five candidates, and plans to announce a winner next month.
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Microsoft Unveils Latest Internet Explorer
BBC News
Microsoft has unveiled Internet Explorer 8, which it says is faster, easier to use and more secure than Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. IE 8 offers performance upgrades to speed up page loading, new navigation features and tab isolation so that if you hit a bad site, only that tab closes and not the whole browser.
A feature called WebSlices updates users about particular items on another page like stock prices, the weather or an eBay auction. So-called accelerators allow users to access services like maps or language translations in a small window without leaving the page you're on. "We have made IE 8 the best browser for the way people really do use the web," said Microsoft's Amy Barzdukas.
"Microsoft needs to say these things because it continues to lose market share to Firefox, Chrome and Safari," said Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald. Indeed, recent figures show that Microsoft's dominance of the Web browser market is eroding. According to Net Applications, at the end of 2008, IE's market share fell below 70% for the first time in eight years, to 68%. Conversely, Mozilla's Firefox, the No. 2 Web browser, broke 20% for the first time, with a 21% share.
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Obama's 'Smart Grid'
GigaOm (via Fortune)
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Apple, Palm Play The Patent Game
VentureBeat
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Obama's Disappointing Broadband Stimulus Plan
Bloomberg News
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