Can Social Gaming Save The Media Industry?

Media companies are in for an expected bad run. Advertising spending is down as much as 11% in the US alone, and is not expected to recover to pre-recession levels when the economy improves. Additionally, the market for content services and DVDs continues to be depressed, with consumer spending falling 4% during the quarter. I

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Deal Radar 2008: GirlSense

Continuing our coverage of online gaming, today I discuss GirlSense, the online tween social network for girls. Part of the Israel-based tween community StarNet Interactive, GirlSense allows girls to play dress up games, create their own designs, and build and interact on their own networks.

Time Warner’s Restructuring

Time Warner’s (NYSE: TWX) shares have gone nowhere during the past five years and shareholders have been crying for radical action. The Company has appointed Jeff Bewkes as the new CEO. He is expected to turnaround the entertainment conglomerate by taking some tough decisions. Here’s what I think Time Warner should do.

Audience Fragmentation

Here are a couple of charts from Imran again, showing Audience trends for big portals: “While portals were once the dominant source of news and information, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft only accounted for ~29% of total minutes spent online in August 2007 vs. 42% in 2002. A similar trend can be seen in page views

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NYT: Try Web 3.0

The New York Times Company, under pressure from investors because of its stagnant stock performance, announced Thursday that it would raise its quarterly dividend by 31 percent. [The New York Times Wall Street Journal Gawker] All the young graduates at top journalism schools have stars in their eyes when they think about working for New

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Web 3.0 and AOL Money & Finance

We have reviewed Yahoo, MSN and Marketwatch’s Personal Finance offerings in the earlier posts and today we are going to take a look at AOL Personal Finance from the Web 3.0 perspective.

Yahoo, eBAY, Microsoft, AOL

Once again, the media is calling for big acquisitions. This time, Merrill Lynch Analyst Justin Post says that Microsoft should acquire Yahoo. On the other hand, there is also speculation about Yahoo buying AOL from Time Warner. John Battelle doesn’t like this option. I said, a year back, that Yahoo and eBAY should merge. Since

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As AOL Reinvents Itself

A smart little acquisition occured today. AOL bought an Instant Messaging service that powers, among others, MySpace. Userplane licenses its technology to more than 100,000 sites. I really like plays like this that power thousands of web sites. Photobucket is an example of a similar play, that acts as a repository for photos that can

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