The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘digital-media’

Enterprise content management juggernaut Open Text has bought content analysis startup Nstein Technologies for $34 million. Nstein’s Text Mining Engine helps businesses centralize, understand and manage content through semantic and text analysis.

For example, Nstein powers the backend of The Financial Times’ semantic search engine, called Newssift, that indexes about 4,000 business news sources, from online newspapers and blogs to news portals and research sites.

Open Text’s digital media solution help its customers manage rich-media content, so Nstein’s technology should boost Open Text’s existing offerings. Last year, Open Text, which is a publicly traded company bought up 3-D interface innovator Vizible.

Local cost-per-click marketplace Reply.com wants to raise $60 million in an initial public offering. The company filed its offering statement with the SEC this morning.

Reply.com is a cost-per-click ad network which targets ads for local businesses. Its strategy is to gather more information from consumers who click on their ads by inserting a “middle page” between that pops to ask them where they live or what brands they like to improve targeting before showing them an ad.

Revenues rose 75 percent in 2009 to $32.6 million. The company operates with a 50 percent gross margin, and turned its first net profit in 2009 of $2.5 million. The business produced $4.7 million in cash flow in 2009, but it ended the year with only $1.3 million in cash. Reply.com acquires click traffic from search engines, display ad networks, and other sources. These traffic acquisition costs account for nearly all of its cost of revenue. In the fourth quarter alone, the generated 4.9 million “enhanced clicks” and 700,000 leads for 5,000 advertisers. The company employs 127 people—103 of them in sales and marketing.

Since 2005, the company has raised $27.5 million from Scale Venture Partners, Outlook Ventures, ATEL Ventures, and Debi Coleman, a former CFO of Apple. CEO Payam Zamani is the largest stockholder. He owns 43 percent of shares outstanding (before the offering). Scale is the second largest shareholder, with 21.5 percent.

Zamani was previously the co-founder of Autoweb, and he’s been bankrolling the Reply.com. Over the past two years, the company has been dipping into his personal lines of credit to improve its liquidity. According to the filing, the “aggregate principal amount that we repaid under these credit lines to Mr. Zamani through December 31, 2009 was $5.9 million.” All of this personal debt to the CEO was repaid as of December 31, 2009, but it does suggest one reason why the company may need more working capital. It also plans to use the proceeds to expand into new advertising categories and geographies (and, presumably, to hire more sales people—local ad plays are very sales intensive).

Click on the tables below to see its consolidated income statement.

Hold on to your hats, folks! It’s a doozy.

Excerpt from: 
Acer’s Aspire One officially gets a little spec bump

Standalone set-top boxes like the Boxee Box and the Roku Player are good because they add Internet content to heretofore unconnected TVs. That’s a good thing. However, analysts at the Diffusion Group believe that the devices will eventually peter out to be replaced by Blu-Ray devices

Here is the original post:
Analysts: Blah blah Internet TV boxes are blah blah a dead end

Listen, I know you did this fancy-pants study that concluded people vacuum more efficiently when they are listening to music.

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Electrolux, vacuums do not need iPod docks, m’kay?

Comcast and General Electric announced early this morning that they agreed to form a joint venture that will be 51 percent owned by Comcast and 49 percent by GE. The joint venture, which will consist of the NBC Universal businesses and Comcast’s cable networks, regional sports networks and more, will be managed by the newly formed Comcast Entertainment Group (CEG).

GE will contribute to the joint venture NBCU’s businesses valued at $30 billion, including its cable networks, filmed entertainment, televised entertainment, theme parks, and unconsolidated investments, subject to $9.1 billion in debt.

Comcast will put in its cable networks (including E!, Versus and the Golf Channel), its ten regional sports networks, and certain digital media properties, collectively valued at $7.25 billion. Comcast has also agreed to pay GE approximately $6.5 billion in cash. Former E! Networks President and CEO Ted Harbert will be heading the new entity, as he was recently promoted to President and CEO of Comcast Entertainment Group.

GE expects to realize $9.8 billion pre-tax in cash before debt reduction and transaction fees and after buyout of the Vivendi stake. GE expects to realize approximately $8 billion in cash after paying down the existing NBCU debt and transaction fees.

Headquarters for the business will remain in New York. The joint venture board will have three directors nominated by Comcast and two nominated by GE.

The transaction is subject to receipt of various regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, which is expected to be a very rocky road.

(Image source)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

A list of rumored items for the Sam’s Club Black Friday ad has been percolating around the web lately. There’s no ad scan to confirm any of this yet, but I’ll update this post once more information becomes available. For now, though, here’s a list of the rumored electronics items: Blank Media Blu-ray 2-Packs – $17.00 Computers Acer Aspire One 10.1″ Netbook – $197.00 HP G71 17″ LED Notebook w/Blu-ray – $499.00 Digital Cameras Olympus FE-4000 12 MegaPixel Camera – $98.00 Digital Media Cards Toshiba 16GB SDHC Digital Media Card – $24.00 DVD Players JVC 1080p Blu-ray Player – $129.00 Phillips Dual Screen Portable DVD Player – $99.00 Electronics Samsung Compact SD Camcorder w/Bag – $149.00 GPS Systems Garmin Nuvi 255w GPS Navigation System – $119.00 Home Theater Samsung 5.1 Blu-ray Home Theater – $398.00 Printers HP AIO Printer Bundle – $69.00 Televisions Hitachi 42″ 1080p LCD HDTV – $598.00 Phillips 52″ 1080p LCD HDTV – $1198.00 Vizio 47″ 1080p 240Hz LCD HDTV – $997.00 Video Games PS3 120GB Bundle – $399.00 Wii Active Life Bundle w/Mat – $69.00 Wii Family Bundle – $349.00 No word on possible doorbuster items or when the store will open on Black Friday

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Sam’s Club (rumored) Black Friday ad

You most certainly already know this by now, but Modern Warfare 2 is probably already available at your local GameStop .

More here: 
GameStop given permission to break Modern Warfare 2 street date (Update: Actually, no permission has been given at all. Fancy that.)

This past June I had the privilege of traveling to East Asia with a group of techies on a trip dubbed GeeksOnAPlane. The experience was a quick-and-dirty way to familiarize myself with the tech industries of Japan and China, since we were herded through back-to-back conferences and networking events meant to give us primers on a number of sectors such as web, mobile, and gaming (you can read about what I learned in each of those countries here and here).

I’m happy to say that the second GeeksOnAPlane trip will take me the other way around the world starting today. Our first stop will be in DC where we plan to meet with representatives from the White House Digital Media Group and the State Department Technology Innovation Team followed by an afternoon Startup2Startup lunch at the Washington Post. After that short layover on the east coast, we’ll jump the pond to attend Seedcamp in London and then the Picnic tech festival in Amsterdam. While I’ll be flying back home after Amsterdam, the rest of the group will continue to Berlin, Prague, Paris, and back to London for a series of other tech events such as Future of Web Apps and Ignite.

As during my trip to Asia, I’ll report back here on what I discover about tech and entrepreneurship in the nation’s capitol and abroad. For more information about the trip, visit the official GeeksOnAPlane website. And a special thanks to Founders Fund, AIM, PayPal, O’Reilly and Ignite – the trip’s main sponsors – for making this all possible.

Follow us on Twitter at @GeeksOnAPlane. We’ll be using the hashtag #goap.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Starting today, Jajah is rolling out a brand spankin’ new service - Jajah@call, a Twitter user-to-user phone call solution. That’s right, ladies and gents. Jajah, the self-proclaimed “world’s most innovative IP communications company,” is bringing this new feature to the wildly popular microblogging service.

This is not too much of a surprise, really, in light of Facebook’s recent voice feature announcement - these are all communication tools, after all, and what is the pinnacle of communication if not voice? It will provide Jajah with increased exposure, while giving always connected Tweeters a new “built-in” VoIP tool. See kids, healthy competition is a good thing!