Well JANA Partners may not have been happy with the direction being taken over at CNet Networks, but CBS has given the company its $1.8 billion stamp of approval. Taken at face value, it might seem like a crazy deal, but in fact it’s a calculated, smart and well thought-out move. Continue Reading
Don’t blame me for getting caught up in the whole hoopla around media-buying-media…we media types are known for being narcissists. Blame me for not being able to blog about the new beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, which has built-in P2P features and is able to save files to the local drives. I was reminded by Hank Williams about the new release, and its big impact on the world of video in particular and other web apps in general.As some of you might remember, I wrote about Adobe’s P2P ambitions that revolved around buying a company called Amicima.
We are inching close to Structure 08 and are trying hard to round out the speaker list and the agenda. Our friends at Techcrunch wrote nice things about the upcoming conference on their blog today. I have been spending a lot of time researching the topics so we can make the event more fun and informative. The conference will be held on June 25, 2008 at the Mission Bay Center in San Francisco. More details are here. For ticket sales, click here.
The New York Times had an article today about the loss of women in the science and technology fields as they hit their 30s and beyond. It cites a report that blames a macho culture intrinsic to those fields. But it’s possible that readers in the tech field missed it as it only ran in the Style section of the paper’s web site rather than the Technology section. Because apparently the loss of female programming and engineering talent has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the latest swimsuits. An article on the Wii Fit however, was deemed worthy of appearing in both sections. Continue Reading
There is a big brouhaha today over Cox Communications blocking BitTorrent traffic, leading to outrage over what amounts to interference with the open Internet. The brouhaha is the result of a research study by Max Planck Institute, which found Cox, Comcast and (Singapore’s) StarHub to be anti-BitTorrent. There are some issues with this study, however — I, for one, (unlike DSL Reports) find it hard to swallow that there are no infringing phone companies.
Why is everyone surprised? I’m sure not. Cox admitted shaping traffic when we asked them about it back in October 2007, though they didn’t single out BitTorrent.
The publicity-hungry not-for-profits organizations do, however, bring up the issue of an open Internet, which is worthy of our attention — and anger — as consumers. But we need to focus our ire on the people who have helped create this mess — not ask them to get us out of it, as the Free Press proposes by suggesting that the FCC should intervene. FreePress Policy Director Ben Scott said: Continue Reading
This is hilarious. Google ignores MySpace. Facebook blocks Google’s Friend Connect.
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.
They all think they are open. Google and Facebook trying to out anti-open each other.
MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam.
Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects that Americans will receive 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, double the number sent in 2006. And Nielsen calls mobile social networking the next big thing, estimating 2.8 million unique mobile MySpace users and 1.8 million mobile Facebook users in December 2007.
According to antispam firm Cloudmark, spammers are already embracing these new technologies: Between 15 percent and 30 percent of friend requests on some of the largest social networks lead to a spammy profile.
Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans to scale its new Jabber chat service to 70 million members using a hella lot of servers and Erlang. As Sandy Jen over at Meebo can tell you, chat is a challenge to scale because it requires a constantly open connection to the servers and low latency. That’s a recipe for a lot of hardware and some flexible architecture. Good thing Facebook has $100 million to spend, but bad news for the firm if the money spigot closes.
What’s that saying? One man’s meat is another man’s poison? JANA Partners didn’t think highly of CNet’s scattershot approach to diversifying into non-tech segments (amongst many other issues). CBS, on the other hand, found the very same TV.com, Chowhound, GameSpot, UrbanBaby, MP3.com and other properties valuable enough to pony up $1.8 billion, a 45 percent premium to CNet’s closing price yesterday. That works out to about $11.50 a share. As you might remember, JANA Partners had acquired enough shares to launch a campaign to replace the management and the board. Now it might finally get its wish. Continue Reading
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