Don't stare so hard at Google you miss Yahoo!

Your Rights in the Mashosphere

Old Media Loves New Media

Twenty-one-year-old Alex Tew became a millionaire the new old-fashioned way—one pixel at a time

Entertainment Tonight, and Tomorrow: The Media Industry's New Channels, New Content, New CEOs

KNOWLEDGE@WHARTON: Media giants are diversifying their digital holdings. Last year, MTV, a division of Viacom, bought iFilm, an online video seller, and News Corp scooped up Intermix Media, owner of MySpace.com, a popular social-networking site, as well as about 30 other sites.

The increasing centrality of the web as a way to deliver entertainment leads Berg to predict that "the new major networks are going to be Google and Yahoo." Google already has shown its willingness to battle with traditional publishers in its decision to digitize library books and make them available for online searching. Publishers are calling that copyright infringement. Google claims its aim is educational and thus protected by the fair-use doctrine. Both sides seem willing to fight in court, although Berg predicts that they will resolve their differences short of that. "My hunch is that Google's brand is so powerful that the publishers and authors will have to get with them and figure it out."

Another challenge for the entertainment industry comes from online retailer Amazon, which plans to sell music downloads. At one level, music distributors might welcome Amazon because it may be the only retailer that can compete online with Apple, Fader says. "At the same time, people in the industry have to be thinking, 'Amazon's not one of us, either.'"

Business 2.0: The Next Net 25

UPDATE: Is NBC Stealing iVillage at $600 Million?

As NBC Universal unveils its $600 million deal for women’s Internet network iVillage, venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky crunches the numbers. His conclusion: “This is an unqualified good deal for NBC,” he writes, comparing the price tag to last year’s $580 million purchase of MySpace by News Corporation.

[General Electric’s] NBC unit isn’t paying anything like a MySpace-style premium for women’s destination site iVillage. Picking the company up for $600 million works out to 5 times annualized fourth-quarter sales, or 17 times annualized fourth-quarter income. Those multiples are the ones that most venture investors and entrepreneurs will want to watch, as they will become comparables for future deals.

Calling iVillage the “centerpiece” of its digital strategy, NBC Universal has offered $8.50 per share in cash for the company. That’s a premium of about 6.5 percent to its closing stock price on Friday.

There have been reports for months that iVillage was up for sale, but the company has declined to confirm them. Privately held media group Hearst is a major iVillage shareholder, owning a 25 percent stake as of Sept. 30, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Inventor of Hotmail turns his attention to weblogs

FT.COM: Sabeer Bhatia, the Bangalore student who with a colleague invented the iconic Hotmail e-mail service and went on to make a fortune by selling it to Microsoft, is returning to fix what he describes as a “neglected stepchild”.

Mr Bhatia, now a serial technology-entrepreneur, will on Monday unveil his first attempt to “enhance the Hotmail experience” since selling for $400m his stake in the company he founded in Silicon Valley a decade ago.

Mr Bhatia will be in India to announce the global launch of blogeverywhere.com. Users of the website will be able to download a toolbar that allows them to write and publish their own blogs, while also giving Hotmail users faster access to their messages.

Blogeverywhere’s toolbar will download unread e-mail messages and store them in a local cache while a first message is being read. Users will then be able to access unread messages from their computer’s own memory instead of having to retrieve them from the internet.

Mr Bhatia believes the technology will cut down the lag time internet-based e-mail users experience in developing markets such as India where high-speed internet access is not widely available for the country’s estimated 250m online users.

Mr Bhatia has invested $5m from his personal fortune to develop blogeverywhere over the past two years. The idea was initially conceived by Shiraz Kanga, an Indian former software developer with Cisco Systems.

Mr Bhatia’s new venture is his first since investing $8m of his own money – along with $7m raised from financial backers – in Arzoo, a virtual classroom of free-lance academics and computer specialists who answer questions on IT problems encountered at home, or in a large workplace. That venture, however, ultimately flopped as a business.

Mr Bhatia is not alone among US-based IT entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in turning his attention to India and bringing funds to develop ideas in a country seen as one of the largest potential online markets after the US and China.

Pramod Haque of US-based funds Norwest Venture Partners and Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are among the investors supporting Indian technology ventures.

Mr Bhatia will also on Monday launch an internet telephony service similar to Skype. He says he is in talks with four Indian telecoms companies that could enable PC users anywhere in the world to call a land line, or mobile number in India for Rs1 (US$0.02).