Week of April 9, 2007

Google Acquires Doubleclick For $3.1 Billion

Friday, April 13, 2007

Most of you are familiar with doubleclick as the online advertising company that serves up banner ads. Google is the dominant market leader in search and contextual advertising, and this purchase provides Google with an instant (and extremely strong) position in display advertising. It was rumored that Microsoft had bid $2 billion for the company, and the move by Google makes it clear they intend to dominate online advertising, even if there are conflicts-of-interest between the two formerly competing text and display ad companies.

MySpace Lays The Smack Down

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Users of Photobucket's popular slideshow widget on their MySpace pages were in for a rude surprise this week, as MySpace blocked the widget from showing up. The reason issued from Fox was that the new Photobucket video platform included advertisements, and MySpace does not allow third party content that includes advertisements. Since the Photobucket video widget shares code with the slideshow widget, they were both blocked.

This is not the first time that MySpace has blocked third party widgets, but it is one of the highest profile ones. The conflict is a preview of what will certainly be a battle that becomes more heated as time goes on: The walled garden of broad all-inclusive social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace versus the free wheeling trend of social web widgets.

Over 100,000,000 Served

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

This week Apple proudly announced the sale of their 100,000,000th iPod in a little over 5 years. This is an impressive feat by any measure, especially for a device with an average price of several hundred dollars. To put it in perspective, over the last 5 years, the value of all iPods purchased is more than a third of the total value of music sales in the US.

The music industry has sold about $55 billion dollars worth of music, while the value of the iPods sold in that time is roughly $20 billion. If you take the $2.5 billion in iTunes sales and add it to the iPod sales, Apple's numbers look even more impressive.

Virgin Radio To Stream Into Game Consoles

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Using an embedded flash widget that allows a clean MP3 stream from within web browsers, Virgin Radio has announced that its four London radio stations can now be streamed into Sony PS3 and the Nintendo Wii game consoles. While game consoles are clearly aggressively moving toward becoming media hubs (see the previous entry on IM capability added to the XBox), this move is an indication that content providers are being equally aggressive in moving their content onto gaming consoles, as well.

Microsoft Adds Instant Messaging To Xbox

Monday, April 9, 2007

Gaming consoles have been moving toward hardware convergence for some time, with the goal of owning the valuable entertainment center position on the top of the television. With gaming consoles able to play DVDs, digital music, and even download content, it was only a matter of time before they started to move into other consumer areas. Microsoft has done that today by announcing that Instant Messaging has been added to their Xbox console. Look for more Internet-specific integration announcements from all of the gaming console builders as we move into the future.