A fund is being put together by AT&T, Hollywood talent agency William Morris and venture capital firms Accel Partners and Venrock to offer seed finance to companies working on online content, social networking, mobile games and advertising services. The funding amounts will be anywhere between $250,000 up to several million.
Ultra WideBand wanabee Tzero Technologies has raised $18 million in its third round of funding, led by Asian Private Equity firm, the CID Group plus current investors August Capital, Lightspeed, OVP, US Venture Partners, and VentureTech Alliance. Tzero is continuing to try to claim the high ground in wireless high definition video, using WiMEDIA Alliance UWB. Pulse~link, the originator of the pure pulse based UWB concept has proven its technologies, operating them at close to 1 Gbps, whereas no company using WiMEDIA technology has so far got close, including Tzero as far as we know.
Turn has raised $15 million for the second round of its VC funding, to provide online targeted advertising services. The money came from Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures. The company also launched its Turn Smart Network this week, which was beta tested last year and launches with 500 advertisers and agencies, and 3,000 websites. It uses a machine learning platform to blend contextual, audience, behavioral, and additional custom targeting methods to achieve advertisers’ performance goals, the company claims.
Viacom may seem a shadow of its former self these days, having tired of Blockbuster and been scared out of CBS ownership, and reduced itself largely to the safety of content. But it is still growing and revenues increased 18% to $13.4 billion, with Media Networks contributing $8 billion of that and filmed entertainment around $5.4 billion. Paramount’s Transformers film led the way, with Shrek the Third and royalties from the Guitar Hero game also contributing strongly.
We always thought that Microsoft dragging its heels over the European Commission anti-trust case would cause problems and now it has imposed a $1.3 billion for failing to fully comply with its original anti-trust order made way back in 2004. Microsoft continually failed to offer interoperability information to rivals, about how its Windows operating system talked to the rest of the Microsoft world, giving it an advantage in connecting to its servers.
Online DVD rental leader Netflix raised its first quarter guidance this week saying that things were going better than expected, and it will have between 8.16 million and 8.26 million subscribers by the end of the quarter, up around 300,000 over previous estimates. This will bring it revenues around $324 million and $10 million net income. By the end of the year it expects anywhere up to 9.5 million customers and revenues of over $1.3 billion. Something tells us this cannot be good for Blockbuster, which trails it in this market.
The deal for Liberty Media to buy a controlling interest in DirecTV from News Corp has been given the green light by US regulator the FCC. The deal still has to clear hurdles at the Justice Department.