 Yahoo CEO: No Pressure to Do Microsoft Search Deal
Reuters
Speaking at an investor conference, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz stressed that the Web giant isn't under any pressure to do a deal with Microsoft. "Yahoo doesn't have to do anything with Microsoft about anything," Bartz said, adding: "We are a damned big, important site."
However, despite these assertions, Bartz said that combining Yahoo's search technology with Microsoft could provide important benefits of scale, and in turn, improve the company's monetization of its search service. She said a partnership could save Yahoo up to $700 million in costs. Analysts had pegged the annual cost savings of a search partnership with Microsoft at between $1.1 billion and $1.6 billion.
Regarding Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, Bartz said it would give Microsoft some "uplift" in the search market, but would not fundamentally change the competitive landscape. "They're not going to get scale through Bing. They're going to get some temporary interest," she said. - Read the whole story... Tapping the Enormous Potential of Mobile Apps
BusinessWeek
Steve Sprang, a 32-year-old programmer, created Brushes, a painting simulator for the iPhone, that has been downloaded more than 50,000 times and was used to create last week's New Yorker cover. The $3.99 app, of which Sprang keeps 70% of the revenue (per Apple's agreement with developers), has netted approximately $140,000, proving that there is money to be made selling software applications for the iPhone and other wireless devices, says BusinessWeek.
Apple's App Store has paved the way for competitors like Google, Research in Motion, Nokia and Sony Ericsson to follow up with their own application stores. Many of these apps are games, like Tapulous's popular Tap Tap Revenge, which requires clicking on moving lights to the beat of a particular song. This particular game has been downloaded more than 10 million times. Tap Tap Revenge is a free app, although users can also download a paid version which comes preloaded with music. Tapulous' best selling app, Tap Tap Coldplay, has sold more than 150,000 copies. "That would be pretty decent success for an album these days," says Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem.
Other apps focus on productivity. Viigo, a free news and information app sold on BlackBerry's App World and Microsoft's Windows Mobile, has been downloaded more than 450,000 times since App World's launch a month and a half ago. It plans to make money in one of three ways: by selling highly targeted advertising, by causing users to make transactions inside the app itself, and by selling a corporate version to large companies. Says the company's CEO, "We really felt that the winning strategy has yet to be revealed and we weren't going to make a Hail Mary play against one particular approach."
But that's what makes the mobile software business interesting says BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl and Peter Burrows: "No one is quite sure exactly how much money can be made, but given the market, the potential is enormous." - Read the whole story... Hulu Faces Sharp Drop Off in Growth
TechCrunch
Hulu's incredible growth seems to be dropping off-quickly, TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid reports. Between January and February of this year, the online video giant, which is jointly owned by News Corp., NBC Universal and Disney, saw a 42% increase in unique visitors and a 33% increase in streams, according to comScore data. Between February and March, Hulu became the third most popular video site in the U.S., with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams. However, between March and April, the site recorded modest growth of 4.4% in streams, from 380 million to 397 million. Meanwhile, unique visitors actually dipped from 41.5 million in March to 40.1 million in April.
Kincaid notes that much of the site's growth between January and February comes down to Hulu's primetime Super Bowl commercial, which introduced the site for the first time to millions of users. Kincaid calls these users "the low hanging fruit" because these people most likely already wanted to watch TV content on the Web, but didn't even know that Hulu existed. Now comes the much harder part: convincing die-hard TV fans to switch their viewing habits. - Read the whole story... News Publishers Look to Music Royalty Model
The Wall Street Journal
Newspaper publishers are looking to band together to demand payment from Web sites that use their content, The Wall Street Journal reports, in the same way that music publishers collect a fraction of a cent when their songs are played in public. According to experts, the publishers might be able to achieve this, as long as they're careful about violating antitrust law, which forbids teaming up in ways that drive up prices and limit consumers' options.
The music industry has been able to sidestep antitrust claims by limiting any single entity's control over access to songs. Under that model, media outlets can purchase a yearly license from the organizations that control public performance rights. These are the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and Broadcast Music Incorporated, which together represent the writers of millions of songs. Using a complicated formula, these organizations make sure that a major TV network pays more to use songs than a local bar.
The Journal says that Web sites that rerun whole stories or large portions of them are similar to radio stations and nightclubs. According to a study by tracking service Attributor, for each person who reads a story on an authorized Web site, five people access the same story on an unauthorized Web site. To stop this and demand payment for unauthorized use, news organizations would need an intermediary similar to Ascap and BMI, The Journal says. - Read the whole story... Palm Pre: Not Enough to Beat the iPhone
Silicon Alley Insider
The Pre, Palm's much-hyped iPhone competitor, is now just a few days away from its official release, and for the most part, it's receiving strong reviews, although most critics are complaining that the device lacks a sufficient app store, which has decidedly light third-party support thus far. That said, the consensus is that the Pre looks cool, has a great user interface-including touch screen technology and a slide-out keyboard-, and in Sprint, a superior network to the iPhone's AT&T.
Henry Blodget, for one, thinks the Pre won't be enough to steal the iPhone's thunder. "The Pre may be a cool device, but it won't restore Palm to its former glory," he says, citing three main reasons why. For starters, gadget reviewers, while undoubtedly impressed by the new smartphone, still don't think the Pre is as good as the current iPhone, let alone the new one set to be unveiled next week. Much of this comes down to Palm's woefully inadequate app store, which at launch, is still in beta. The iPhone, meanwhile, has over 40,000 apps available through its App Store, a figure that grows by leaps and bounds with every passing week.
Apps are a big reason why the iPhone is so valuable to its owners, Blodget says: "This creates the network effect that Microsoft Windows users have long been familiar with. Apple is far from having a Windows-like position, but it's getting there rapidly. And the only companies in a position to derail it right now are RIM and Google." Indeed, because of their size, RIM and Google are the only real iPhone competitors. However, Blodget is quick to add that the Pre makes Palm a much more attractive acquisition target. Nokia, "which is nowhere in the smartphone market", is the odds-on favorite, he says. - Read the whole story... Debating Google's Wave
Cnet Hulu Preparing To Charge For Content
Daily Finance |
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