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Posts Tagged ‘resources’

According to a release issued today, Fox, Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst Television, NBC, and eight other broadcast giants are launching a joint venture to develop a new national mobile content service.

The release says that the consortium will utilize existing “broadcast spectrum,” to enable member companies to provide content to mobile devices, including live and on-demand video, local and national news from print and electronic sources, as well as sports and entertainment programming.

Broadcast technology will come from to three station groups, Fox, NBC & Telemundo, and ION, and and the nine local broadcast groups, which are Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Media General, Meredith, Post Newsweek and Raycom. Separately, these nine local broadcast companies formed Pearl Mobile DTV Company LLC as a vehicle for their involvement in the venture.

The idea is to aggregate all of the broadcast technology from the 12 stations to offers mobile video and print content to nearly 150 million U.S. residents. In addition to broadcast spectrum, the partners will commit content, marketing resources and capital to the new venture. The service will employ ATSC-M/H, an open broadcast transmission system developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) specifically for mobile devices.

The venture is “designed to complement the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Initiative by giving consumers mobile access to video content while reducing congestion of the nation’s wireless broadband infrastructure. In addition, the service’s mobile content network will have the capacity to deliver local and national time-sensitive emergency information to citizens across the U.S.”

The FCC’s plan calls on broadcast companies to sell spectrum to provide mobile internet access for citizens in the U.S. It looks like the broadcast companies are pooling their resources together to provide local content for mobile device in the U.S.

It seems like the venture is early-stage at this point, with the networks still building out a management team and raising more funding.

Photo credit/Flickr/James Cridland

I’ve been wondering how, exactly, I’ll be able to do work on my iPad. With the assistance of programs like Dropbox and SugarSync, it is possible to cobble together a workflow that doesn’t drive me crazy.

When I last looked at SugarSync the service was in it’s infancy and I found it slightly lacking. All of my concerns, two years ago, have been address and now you have a fully versioned storage system that you can use to feasibly upload a plethora of files including, but not limited to, MP3s, videos, and documents.

Audio and video files, for the most part, played natively on the iPad. However, if you need to transfer odd formats or edit Office or iWork documents (you can view them just fine) you’ll need to email the files to yourself and them open them in Pages. This two step process, while upsetting to those afraid of more than one step, is frustrating at worst and a non-issue at best.

We called it. IAC’s Match.com is acquiring fellow dating site Singlesnet. We originally reported on the deal last week. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Match.com said the acquisition is more of a “value acquisition than a strategic one” and Singlesnet will continue to be run as an independent business. Singlesnet’s traffic, says Match,com, is declining but could present new monetization opportunities for “Match.com’s collective portfolio of domestic online dating brands.”

Adrian Ong, who joined Match.com from Soulmates Technology, will lead Singlesnet. The acquisition isn’t surprising. Match is in the habit of buying up potential competitors. The dating giant scooped up highly-targeted dating site network People Media last year for a whopping $80 million.

Although traffic is declining, Singlesnet’s traffic is fairly significant for a dating site that doesn’t have the resources of IAC-backed Match. According to comScore stats for January, Singlesnet saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide, which was half of Match.com’s 6.1 million unique visitors for the same period.

My buddy Rich tweeted a terse message yesterday afternoon: “Happy Birthday Apache Web Server, started 15 years ago today!” I had meant to write up the story then, but forgot it about it. Consider this my “Happy belated birthday” card. According to the official announcement , the Apache Software Foundation’s “first project became the world’s most popular Web server software within the first six months of its inception

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Apache httpd is fifteen years old

People in the online personals industry are buzzing. We’ve heard a rumor that online dating service and IAC property Match.com is acquiring fellow dating site Singlesnet. We’ve reached out to both companies for confirmation. Singleset’s representative wrote back to us to say: “I’m not in a position to discuss or consider this topic at the present time” Match.com has not yet responded.

If true, the acquisition wouldn’t be surprising. Match is in the habit of buying up potential competitors. The dating giant scooped up highly-targeted dating site network People Media last year for a whopping $80 million.

And Singlesnet’s traffic is fairly significant for a dating site that doesn’t have the resources of IAC-backed Match. According to comScore stats for January, Singlesnet saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide, which was half of Match.com’s 6.1 million unique visitors for the same period.

Here’s something that we don’t see very often; a chance at winning a $5000 photographer grant for people working on important humanitarian and environmental projects. This could be a great opportunity for the right person, and can definitely help draw attention to a project. Here’s the specifics from the Photocrati Fund’s website: What is the Photocrati Fund?

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Here’s your chance to get a $5000 photographer grant

Andover, MA-based SeeWhy has raised a second round of funding from most of its current shareholders, adding $2 million to the $4.5 million it secured earlier this year. The company plans to add additional investors alongside those investing in this round through 2010.

The startup markets tools that help ecommerce sites and online retailers up their conversion rates by giving them the opportunity to automatically or manually try to make people who were close to purchasing goods or services on their website but left the process before completion, for whatever reason, come back and finish the cycle.

SeeWhy refers to this concept as ‘re-marketing’ or ‘re-conversion’ and claims rapid follow-up of people who drop out of the buying process can increase conversation rates up to 50%. True or not, I think it’s an interesting idea, particularly for vendors who have the resources needed to follow up those guilty of ‘abandonment’ practically in real-time.

The company’s suite of products is named Abandonment Tracker, is entirely SaaS-based, and comes with a free version with a limited feature set so website owners can test the waters before going pro. Companies like Mastercard, Diageo, Radware and eCourier.co.uk are some of SeeWhy’s current customers.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

NPR has received $3 million in funding to launch a new journalism project that will focus on providing in-depth, hyper-local coverage on community-specific issues on an online platform. NPR received $2 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and $1 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The new funding will allow a pilot group of a dozen NPR stations with the resources to provide in-depth, hyper-local news on a topic that is most relevant to the community where the station is located. The grants also allow the stations to hire new “journalist bloggers,” who will focus exclusively on reporting and aggregating news about a topic relevant to that city. The pilot radio and TV stations have not been chosen yet.

In addition, PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer will share its embeddable video player with the pilot participants. The player makes it possible to access and present video content from NewsHour, Frontline, NOW, Washington Week, Bill Moyers Journal, Tavis Smiley and about a dozen local PBS stations. The NewsHour will also feature selected reporting from the participating stations on its Web site.

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