gigaomnews Archive

Video search provider blinkx has publicly announced its proposal to (once again) acquire online advertising company Miva today. Back in August, blinkx offered $1.20 for each Miva share for the company but the deal never went through. Today’s proposed acquisition comes in at $0.55 per share, less than half of the August offer.

blinkx noted this morning, "blinkx believes the proposal is highly attractive for MIVA shareholders, particularly in light of issues in the MIVA business and current market conditions. blinkx’s proposal represents a 108% premium above the closing price of MIVA common stock of $0.2643 on November 18, 2008, and a 39% premium over the average closing price for the thirty days prior to November 18, 2008."

blinkx hits Miva hard with statements like, "MIVA has reported reduced revenues for the last eight consecutive quarters" but they believe that, "blinkx continues to believe that a combination of the two companies – fusing blinkx’s technology with MIVA’s distribution network – presents an exciting and compelling opportunity, and one that would prove mutually beneficial to both companies’ shareholders, employees, and customers."

Miva is located in Florida while blinkx has offices in London and in San Francisco.

Update: I spoke with founder and CEO Dominik Matyka who couldn’t share the amount of the new investment but did say that it’s a minority stake in the company. He also shared that the founders invested $500k previously.

Berlin-based social recommendations service Plista has announced a round of funding today from the Draper Investment Company. Swiss-based investor Peter Schüpbach also joined the round. The company is not disclosing the total amount raised.

Plista moves into private beta today and the company is planning for a full public release in January 2009. The system uses Collaborative Filtering and is available for Web, mobile and video-on-demand applications.

Rafe has a good review of the service where he notes, "Think of it as Aggregate Knowledge meets MyBlogLog meets Sphere, with a dash of Matchmine." Tom Foremski has a lengthy review of the product and says that he would have picked Plista to win over Yammer at the TC50 event. Tom notes, "Plista’s technology creates models of user behavior — it even has a mood filter. "We can tell if you are in a grumpy mood in the mornings and we can factor that into your ratings," says Mr Dominik Matyka, Plista CEO. Plista also has a social network component so that you can share your recommendations and find and follow people with similar tastes."

Search engine provider Viewzi has announced the public launch of their site search product today. Viewzi uses an interesting results page by providing the results in a layer on top of the current page.

Viewzi supports blog posts, videos via YouTube and Viddler and photos. They have different "views" based on the different content and the user’s selection. There’s a timeline view which is pretty neat and looks like the way Plurk works. I found that the views took a while to load – I’d suggest they work on reducing the load times.

Site search seems to be pretty hot these days with a variety of companies in the space including Quintura, Lijit and Google. We currently use Google on our sites and have found it to provide more traffic and better results than the internal Drupal search engine. Viewzi appears to be injecting Google ads into the results on the video view — I wonder if that’s their entire monetization strategy.

Ali has a good overview of the site search feature as well.

Conde Nast and Brightcove have announced a partnership which will bring the Brightcove video player and technology to several of the Conde Nast websites. The company says the first websites to launch with Brightcove are Wired.com, Portfolio.com, Glamour.com, Parade.com, and Self.com. In the next few months, Conde Nast plans to launch the Brightcove player on 16 more websites.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Last month AOL went with Brightcove for their online video. Here’s an example of the Brightcove integration on Portfolio:

AdKnowledge has announced the acquisition of Lookery today. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Only the Lookery ad network has been acquired by AdKnowledge, the data network portion will remain with Lookery.

From the AdKnowledge publisher blog, "Lookery has been seeking a company to acquire its ad serving business that is able to both provide you with the same or higher payouts that you are currently receiving and provide the same level of service that you have come to expect from Lookery." AdKnowledge acquired Facebook developer ad network Cubics last year.

The Lookery Guaranteed CPM program will continue within the Cubics network for those publishers who are enrolled. AdKnowledge self-reports over 10 billion social advertising impressions per month.

Found via the Facebook developer forum. There’s also more information about the acquisition on the Cubics/AdKnowledge Publisher blog.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira is reporting that Yahoo has announced the closure of Yahoo Live. Yahoo Live was part of the brickhouse program which was where Yahoo would try out a large number of different "quick apps" and see which ones stick. The Yahoo Live blog confirms the closure and notes that the service will shut down on December 3, 2008.

Another service I’ve wondered about is Yahoo Kickstart, a "connection" source for students and alumni looking for a job, hiring or just keeping in touch. When the service launched I wondered why they created it and gave it a "WTF alert". As of this afternoon, attempts to load the site are met with the error message below. Perhaps Yahoo is really starting to focus on the applications and services where they can drive usage, revenue, and value.

comScore has released its August mobile video usage statistics today. They report that 6.5 million Americans watched a mobile video in August. AT&T was the most popular mobile video carrier followed by Sprint.

In terms of type of mobile videos viewed, amateur videos was the most popular category followed by music videos comedy videos and movie trailers. The full list of categories is below.

comScore is also reporting that mobile social networking saw the biggest gain from August 2007 to August 2008 at 8.8%. This was followed by IM and news by download. I’d like to see a breakdown of which social networking services make up the increase. I have to imagine that the iPhone has a lot to do with the increase since many popular social networks now have native clients specifically for the iPhone.