Vonage may be going public, but it's receiving a considerable amount of public scrutiny surrounding the stability of its Internet telephony business. Even though Vonage is able to sell phone service on the Web at affordable prices, competition from cable, telecom and other voice over Internet Protocol providers like Skype leave it exposed, say skeptics. For one thing, the triple-play deal of phone, high-speed Internet and digital TV offered by the likes of Time Warner and Comcast is hard to pass up for many consumers. Then there's Skype, which offers free PC to PC phones calls as well as free …

A beleaguered stock for years, The Walt Disney Company is showing some bounce again on Wall Street thanks to aggressive efforts to move into new media like free Web programming and mobile phone content. According to The Hollywood Reporter, since Bob Iger took the helm, investors have rewarded the company for its bold new strategies, which have included selling hit ABC shows at Apple's iTunes Music Store as well as offering streaming ad-supported versions on the Web for free. Three million people streamed a quartet of hit ABC shows like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" during the company's two-week trial run …

Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the movie moguls formerly in charge of Miramax, have taken a stake in a social networking Web site called ASmallWorld, according to the Los Angeles Times. The exclusive site is an invitation-only social network; founded in 2004, the company describes itself as "an exclusive global online community" comprised of 130,000 members in more than 100 countries. The Miramax founders, along with a group of investors including Bob Pittman, the former chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner Inc., are said to have made a "significant" though undisclosed investment in the start-up. Invitation-only social networks are …

Is it time for Web video ratings? Currently, advertisers buying video are doing so against numbers publishers report, which might or might not be audited by a third party. It's interesting to think that the same companies that buy and use the complicated "scientific" procedure for buying television are now buying online video, but the process for buying the latter isn't nearly as refined, writes Ian Schafer of ClickZ. How do you compare performance and impact when the processes are so different? Without neutral, third-party reporting you don't, really. While comScore offers a product, Schafer says it isn't widely used. …

Online virtual worlds are small places made up of concentrated, captive groups of people; many of them tend to spend most of their free time there. That's enough for certain advertisers to take a keen interest in being seen there, as Reuters.com reports. Interscope, a record label, noticed a cheap but effective marketing opportunity in the form of a nightclub appearing in the virtual community Doppelganger. It recently opened the Pussycat Dolls Lounge, named after one of its principal acts. Doppelganger's users bring their digital personalities, called avatars, to the nightclub as a place "to go out" at night …

The whole world loves Google, with its cute brand and free and useful services. Advertisers (generally) love the returns, shareholders and analysts love its performance on Wall Street (+53 percent in the last year) and the media loves all of these things, which is why we have hundreds of stories about the search giant everyday. But what nobody knows, and everyone seems to forget that they don't know, is how exactly the world's most popular company works. To investors and analysts, Google only discloses the basics: profit, expenses and balance sheet. "Google's whole purpose is to make information easier to …

A Silicon Valley start-up plans to launch an online commerce system that aims to give consumers more power over digital media downloads. What does that mean? The company, Navio Systems, sells software to content providers that lets them sell the rights to pieces of content to consumers rather than downloads or individual files themselves. The product also lets companies use a variety of different online distribution methods--from blogs to fan sites--and gives consumers access to the content from PCs, phones or nearly any other Web-enabled media device. As it is, consumers have less rights and lots of restrictions when it …

The online advertising job market is hot again. It takes a while for the job market to pick up following a big bust like the dot-com recession, but Business Week points out that Web companies are now hiring ad-related positions at a rapid pace. The online ad business was up 30 percent last year, according to the IAC, and now "job candidates are feasting on a seller's market." Avenue A/Razorfish, the Web's top ad agency with a staff of 1,500, needs to fill 200 positions after already filling 200 so far this year. Digitas, of Boston, needs to add 74 …

At the tail end of E3 last week, the Entertainment Software Association released its latest fact sheet for video game usage. Every year, the ESA releases a detailed demographic and trend report for the video game industry, and every year, the average video gamer's age seems to go up. This year, the ESA claims the average age of gamers (both online and console) is 33, and that 38 percent gamers are female (a number that hasn't changed for ESA in the last few years). Is the average gamer really 33? What gives? Wasn't it 28 not too long ago? Does …

Poor AOL. We're in the midst of the Internet's second coming, and the beleaguered Time Warner unit was never invited to the party. The Economist says the specter of the worst merger in history has cast a perennial pall over the one-time Web giant, leaving few people at Time Warner with anything nice to say about it at all. In fact, analysts on Wall Street regularly cite AOL as the reason they don't advise clients to buy Time Warner. Because of this, the paper predicts Dick Parsons will soon have to cut the Web portal lose, as it now looks …