Quick News

Just hitting the wires -- CBS to acquire CNET for $1.8 billion. Here's the release:

CBS to Become a Top Ten U.S. Internet Company with Unparalleled Content and Reach, Boasting Approximately 200 Million Monthly Unique Users Worldwide CNET Networks' CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, CNET News, UrbanBaby, BNET, CHOW and Search.com, Among Others, To Be Combined with CBS Corporation's National and Local Interactive Businesses

NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, May 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS) has entered into an agreement to acquire CNET Networks, Inc., it was announced today by Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBS Corporation. Under the terms of the agreement, CBS will make a cash tender offer for all issued and outstanding shares of CNET Networks for $11.50 per share, representing an equity value of approximately $1.8 billion. The acquisition will make CBS one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States, with a combined 54 million unique users per month, and approximately 200 million users worldwide.

"There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks," said Moonves. "CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNET Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience. Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest- growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives. We could not be more pleased with the prospect of adding CNET Networks and its tremendous team of people to the CBS family. I look forward to working with Quincy Smith, Neil Ashe and the considerable combined talent at both companies, as we build upon our success."

Based in San Francisco, CNET Networks owns many of the Internet's leading entertainment, news and information sites including CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, mp3.com, CNET news.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon and TechRepublic. The company, which reported significant profits in 2007 on revenues of $406 million, has a large international footprint, particularly in China.

Upon closing, CNET Networks' sites will be combined with CBS's stable of dynamic and growing interactive businesses. These include CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSCollegeSports.com, MaxPreps.com, CBSNews.com, last.fm, Wallstrip, MobLogic, CBS Radio and CBS Television Stations digital media platforms, and the distribution network of the CBS Audience Network, which is made up of more than 300 partner Web sites and reaches 82% of all online users in the United States.

"The core businesses of CNET Networks and CBS Interactive represent near perfect category symmetry in premium online content," said Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive. "Together we will have a terrific opportunity to not only grow our established businesses, but to build new attractive verticals of content as well. This is the beginning of an era for both CBS and CNET Networks; plus, it's going to be great to work with Neil and his team, many of whom I have known for many years."

"We're thrilled to join CBS and combine our interactive media experience with CBS's world-class content," said Neil Ashe, Chief Executive Officer, CNET Networks, Inc. "CNET Networks operates some of the most important premium online brands, serving the most sought after online audiences. Today's announcement brings together two organizations that complement each other and working with Leslie, Quincy and the talented people at CBS, we look forward to taking our business and our brands to the next level."

"We look forward to completing the acquisition of CNET Networks and the terrific benefits it brings to CBS as Quincy, Neil and their combined teams build upon our success," Moonves concluded. "At the same time our strong cash flow allows us to pay among the highest dividends in the industry, and we are committed to continue to pay our attractive dividend to return value to shareholders."

The Board of Directors of CNET Networks has unanimously approved the merger agreement and unanimously recommends that CNET Networks stockholders accept the tender offer and tender their shares.

The transaction is subject to customary conditions and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of this year.

Last month we interviewed Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria from Strands about their business and their acquisition of Expensr. Today Strands is announcing another acquisition -- this time it's NetworthIQ. NetworthIQ will become part of the moneyStrands application which is currently in private beta. No financial details were provided regarding the acquisition.

Gabriel defines moneyStrands as, "moneyStrands is an online money management solution that allows users to aggregate their online financial information in one place, providing them with an instant snapshot of all their finances. It provides users with the best personalized recommendations possible, helping them find new ways to save money and invest."

Mark Hendrickson believes that the acquisitions were made more for the human capital than the actual technology.

The personal online money management category is heating up with a variety of startups playing in the space including: Wesabe, Geezeo (a CN sponsor), Mint, and now moneyStrands coming soon.

Firefly founder (?) Billy Chasen presented his application last night at the NY Tech Meetup. Firefly is part of Betaworks which looks like half-startup incubator, half-vc. Firefly is a real-time online chat application that doesn't require an installation. It's a "cute" application in its design and innovative. It actually reminds me of those applications that popup when you are on a commerce site where a customer service rep asks if you'd like some help.

What I don't get is why this is better than hooking up a Meebo Room or any of the other embeddable online chat applications. Sure, Firefly is cute, but outside of that, what is it really? It's an online chat app that's limited to one page chatting. I'd much rather chat with users across a site. Also, for the majority of sites online, there will never be more than one person inside of the Firefly application - remember not only do you have to be on the same page as everyone else, you have to "install" the application. The Firefly site seems to indicate you will chat with everyone currently on the site not the individual story but that might actually make the conversation even more confusing.

What I heard after the demo was over was two main things. First, the name is close to firefox and the URL is actually "firef.ly" - this means for all time they will have to tell new users that it's "firefly - that's firef.ly" - you can see in the demo that Billy struggled telling the viewers the link. I'd suggest a name change now in case the tool gets popular. The other main feedback was that the tool seems more of an annoyance when one is trying to read a story. The way the tool is setup is that you can turn it on and off whenever you'd like so I would see a user reading the story then turning it on. This tool is more of an anonymous chat than a friend chat like Twitter/IM is.

Peter Kafka calls it a "feature not a business" and suggests that Firefly could charge Web sites to install the functionality. I disagree. Peter goes on to call it a "ADD Twitter" and again I disagree. While it's smart to try to leverage Twitter as part of the explanation, it's nowhere near the realm of Twitterville. If we put both companies on a map, Twitter would be the U.S. and Firefly would be Poland - that's how close the services are to each other.

view the video demo »

Yes folks, Twitter is down. Take this opportunity to clean out your email, clean your hard drive, take a walk or check out one of our great sponsors. From what we can tell, Twitter has been down for approximately thirty minutes as of the time of this post. We've received a variety of emails also noting the same. Our man in Switzerland says he is also unable to access the site.

Earlier this year we highlighted 10 excellent ideas on how to use the time when Twitter is down.

The question no one seems to be addressing is what happens to the apps that are built on top of Twitter? This morning we profiled Summize and their conversational search that uses Twitter. So for now, people can search but that's about it - the "real-time" index won't be updated until the service returns. How does this affect their income potential? What about all of the hundreds of other Twitter apps?

Is Twitter down where you are? If so, how are you using the time?

Update 7:34 PM Eastern: Twitter was partially up for a moment.

Update: 8:19PM Eastern: Twitter remains out of service - no update has been provided on the Twitter blog.

Update 8:48PM Eastern: From Chris Anthony: We have an update from Alex Payne via the Twitter Development group on Google:

"I can confirm that we have been down for some time due to a massive unexpected cache invalidation. We're working to bring the site back up, although some features will be limited until caches have repopulated."

Update: 9:15pm Eastern: Twitter is back with limited functionality

NY-based ZocDoc presented at last night's NY Tech Meetup. ZocDoc is a tool to help you find doctors and dentists and instantly make appointments with them. The ZocDoc founders showed up wearing scrubs though Cyrus looked more like a criminal in jail with his bright orange outfit. You can think of ZocDoc as OpenTable combined with Yelp but on the medical side.

Each listed provider displays their current open appointments along with their education and experience. After you visit with the provider, ZocDoc sends you a survey and the results are displayed on the provider's page. Currently ZocDoc is available in NYC and offers both dentists and primary care doctor information. Cyrus explained that the real power of the ZocDoc system is in the ability to find a practitioner who serves your insurance provider.

There is no charge to book an appointment using ZocDoc and ZocDoc currently does not charge any fees to the primary care doctors in their system. They noted that PCPs generate less revenue than specialists.

Yesterday they announced the launch of their new API which allows developers to build upon their technology. To kick off the development, they are offering a Macbook Air to the best implementation.

ZocDoc is another one of those unsexy apps -- there's no facebook poke functionality -- but it's a very useful service and could change the way appointments are booked with medical care nationwide. Currently they are looking to expand in 2009 either in Washington or San Francisco - number of votes will determine where they expand next.

Blog commenting replacement system Disqus is announcing a partnership today with Seesmic today. Not sure exactly what to call Seesmic these days - it's partially a video message board and partially a video blog commenting system. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Adam Ostrow first reported on Disqus adding video comments last week.

This deal helps Seesmic more than Disqus. Both companies are currently valley darlings but Disqus seems to have started the slow crawl to mainstream adoption. Seesmic is still in the "figuring out who I am" stage -- which is ok for a new company like Seesmic is. I would have held off on this partnership a few months until Seesmic gains a bit more traction and user adoption. Also, video blog commenting seems about 18 months ahead of its time.

Disqus currently self-reports 13,000 sites actively using their blog comment replacement and Seesmic reports over 300 sites using the video commenting plugin. Check out my commentary on Disqus where I do a deep dive into the pros and cons of using their blog commenting replacement service.

What's interesting is that Seesmic investor Techcrunch launched the video commenting system a couple of weeks ago and so far it's been barely used. And when users have posted videos, most nearly all of them have me wanting my time back. A video comment must have emotion and offer something text can't. Otherwise just post the text and let me read and/or scan and move on. Just because you have a webcam, doesn't mean you should create video comments instead of text comments.

NY-based Magnify.net is launching a new tool today named Magnify Publisher. It's an add-on for blogging platforms -- the first installations are available for Wordpress and Movable Type.

Magnify Publisher offers a variety of video hosts to search from and you can filter to specific providers. Image search currently works with Flickr and more image providers are coming soon. There's also the ability to upload a video (it's stored on Magnify's servers) or record a video directly using a webcam.

I spoke with Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum who suggested that Magnify Publisher will allow bloggers to add more multimedia content to their posts. As we walked through the demo, it's clear that if you are looking for images or videos to add to a post, Magnify Publisher makes it very easy -- much easier than searching on a service, copying the embed or saving out the image and uploading or embedding. Rosenbaum also notes that by using the tool, it can help to add more video content to a site on a regular basis.

On a side note, Rosenbaum is very passionate about the NY tech community and believes we will see big growth this year.

Summize presented a demo of their conversational search engine last night at the NY Tech Meetup. They also announced the launch of local search. The local search allows you to select a location (i.e. New York, Berlin, etc.) and a distance (i.e. 10 miles) and Summize will present only the conversations related to your search in that location.

The conversational search works with Twitter and can also provide an on-the-fly translation service so you can check out the latest conversations in other countries (like the China earthquake).

One note, the majority of conversations between friends still occurs on private services including AIM, Google Chat, Skype, etc. These services are not indexed by Summize.

Lastly, Summize offers an API which many of the most popular Twitter applications are using. view the demo »

White label multimedia search provider Pixsy will announce a partnership with visual search engine Ditto on Thursday. Ditto enables people to navigate the Web through pictures. Under the terms of the agreement, Ditto will utilize Pixsy’s advanced media search platform to power consumer image search on destination search property Ditto.com and across its network of partners and affiliates.

Pixsy explains that their white label search service offers sites the ability to run branded video and image search which can drive additional pageviews and potential advertising inventory to create a higher ROI. Last week Pixsy announced a partnership with National Lampoon.

We've also learned that Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin will present at the Goldman Sachs Global Internet Conference next week in Las Vegas.

Content marketplace Mochila presented their application at tonight's NY Tech Meetup. We've written about Mochila a number of times before including our interview with the CEO and CMO. Mochila is a media marketplace that brings together publishers and content buyers. Their tagline is: "Buy. Sell. Earn." They offer a variety of top grade content publishers with all types of media including video, audio, image and text.

Mochila also announced a new video player this morning. view the video demo »