Fairfax getting patriotic ; BlueFreeway for sale

Two different bits of news today for the Australians:

• BlueFreeway announced a $4million loss in its half year results. More unexpected though is it has been approached by a number of buyers, and is entertaining one of them - ASX announcements page here.
• Fairfax Digital apparently has an idea for some/all of the big 4 (excl Sensis) Australian publishers to come together to pool remnant inventory. The goal is to prevent international networks lowering effective CPMs when they are using their smarter adserving technologies to offer advertisers performance or action-oriented buys. The Australian article here.

S&M in M&As & public digital companies

As a break from  some small M&A news you may have heard last Friday, I spent a rare few minutes looking through my blog stats Monday night, and noticed a lot of traffic coming from Google searches for 'Hyro' &  'Blue Freeway', and various combinations involving 'CEO'.

Not that surprising given what's been going on of late, but I had a pang of guilt, because all the pages on my blog that Google directed searchers to were old news. So, here's a post so there's at least a bit more recent content for those future searchers:

• Amid the continual fall in BlueFreeway's share price on the ASX, CEO Richard Webb resigned last Wednesday (Jan 30). CFO Ken McDonnell also resigned (the announcement to the ASX cite's Ken resignation as "due to personal reasons"). Shane Murray & Steve Fanale, from portfolio companies Viva9 and MassMedia, will take on joint COO duties, while a new CEO is found. ASX announcement (PDF) here.

• A spectacular share price fall & v ordinary interim results has also claimed another CEO - Joe Calavassy of Hyro resigned last Friday (Feb 01). ASX announcement (PDF) here.
  

My blog stats turned me on to something entirely different though. There were a lot of search terms such as "Naked Photon". One or two would have been nothing, but there were quite a few. So I did a search myself, and found Paul McIntyre's (Fairfax marketing/media journo) article here about the speculation.

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The above  was going to be my post on Monday night London time.

But then Photon made the announcement and lifted the trading halt. This will teach me for procrastinating on a post.

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(Disclaimer: As always mentioned in the sidebar to the right, I have a small parcel of Hyro shares, a small parcel of eMitch shares, and a small parcel of Photon Group shares.)

last.fm introduces on-demand capabilities

Adding even more to last.fm’s existing greatness as a social & music discovery platform, is the introduction of on-demand ability.

They’re keeping all the recommendation engine stuff that’s made up the core of the radio product to date, but now you can also choose any track from any of the artists/labels they have signed up to play them as and whenever you like, on demand.

They announced this from CBS headquarters today:

•  The company has signed deals with all four major record labels and 150,000 independents to offer free streaming of full length music.
•  The platform will be ad-supported.

See more here:

Paid Content early snippet

Wired blog - more detail

The official last.fm blog

I'll post more once I've played, and read all the details, later tonight.

(I might try to do my well-overdue Best of 2007 compilation CD up as a last.fm playlist now - test it out that way.)

Unrelated, but kitschy, here some screenshots of the last.fm site c 2002 & 2003 that the team recently put up on flickr.  October 2002 & November 2003.

ad:tech Sydney programme

For those readers in Oz, I imagine the conference organisers are saturating DM lists and the trade press with FPC ads as they did last year, but just in case you're not aware, ad:tech Sydney is on again and the schedule has been released.

Find it here:  http://www.ad-tech.com/sydney/adtech_sydney_schedule.asp

What do you think of the line-up?  One of the Bens from GroupM Interaction - on their new blog here - and I have been speaking about WHO the intended audience is for ad:tech in Australia, and whether the lineup/keynotes etc are appropriate or not.

Of 2008, silence, and link disparity

So, Happy New Year to y'all. And Merry Christmas. And Happy Hannukah.

Yes, it's been that long since the last post here on Rotunda. (Almost long enough to add Happy Thanksgiving to the list above.)

I am still alive, and I am still neglecting this blog far too much. I could swear it will be different this year, but the proof is in the pudding.

One contributing reason to this of course (apart from that whole moving to the other side of the world, and getting stuck into sunny London) is I'm twittering stuff I might have previously blogged. And I've always had my delicious account that I use to keep track of stuff - news especially. 

But the love is getting diluted - especially since I started using Google Reader a while back because I now actively mark things as shared over there instead of linking to them from here. 

And the fourth and final cause, the latest one, is a bit back I started using tumblr - http://pascoe.tumblr.com/ - to capture other things.

So between all of those, you can get a good idea of what i'm tracking - but this year will definitely see more return to writing here more of the qualitative pieces.

...

Meanwhile, a couple of quick news links for those readers in sunny Australia:

- Nielsen Asia-Pac MD Allan Dib has quit.  The Oz article here.
- From the same article:  Sensis is stopping using Nielsen measurement (presumably they're talking about MarketIntell product?).  So 2008 isn't going to be any clearer a year for online measurement.
- IAB Awards for 2008 are now open. The Australian IAB still don't seem to think using RSS feeds are a good idea. And currently, their form to sign up to get the expenditure report isn't doing anything upon clicking 'submit' in either FF or IE. Nice.
- Whoops, one more: What IS going on over at Beyond? All the stakeholders clearly have a nice strong belief in the company - not sure if its in the potential/capability, or their current programs?

Seven bags Unwired ; Mitchells-STW rumours

Two quick acquistion-related extracts, both related to ASX-listed entities:

• Seven Network Ltd (ASX: SEV) has hit the 90% acceptance for its offer of Unwired (ASX:UNW) that it needed to buy the company outright. News Ltd article here.

• The SMH has another article today on talks between STW (ASX:SGN) and Mitchells (ASX:MCU) about a potential merger. This rumour has been doing the rounds for months now, so it's hard to say whethere there's any more chance of it happening now, or whether the SMH just needed a gap-filler for this week. SMH article here.

Dell & WPP setup stand-alone mega-agency

Worth checking out is the news from Sunday that Dell has appointed WPP to handle every single aspect of its marketing under a to-be-formed new agency.

This PR Week story has the lowdown. From said story:

"...will bring Dell's entire external  marketing communications function under one profit and loss statement. WPP and Dell will create one agency, comprising all marketing disciplines and staffed with professionals, at least initially, devoted full time to Dell. The agency and Dell will also co-invest in a significant analytics tool that will map the efficacy of all marketing disciplines against each other and provide measurement for marketing initiatives against business goals."

Fairfax goes Google on The Age

The Google/Fairfax deal was announced back in May of this year, and the publisher has been running AdSense ads throughout their site since.

Spotted on The Age homepage just now, Google Adsense ads running in the medium rectangle (MPU as they're called over in ol' blighty).

Looks ugly, but would probably be effective re response if only because it's abnormal so more noticeable.

(Click the pic below to get the full size.)

On-demand TV in the UK set to radically change?

One of the media differences I've noticed between the Australian and UK markets is that video on demannd (VoD) actually exists here.  Yes, it's still in its nascent stages but the main broadcasters are all well into their offerings, be it the BBC iPlayer, or Channel 4's 4oD.

Today saw an annoucement that sounds like it has great potential: BBC, Channel 4 and ITV are going to launch a single destination for VoD content next year, that will involved a mixture of free, paid, streaming, and downloaded programming from the 3 networks as well as other 3rd party content providers over time.

It means BBC and C4 will probably abandon their own solo VoD efforts to date, but gives ITV their first real VoD look-in. Not sure where Channel 5 is - as one of the articles below says, they are conspicuous by their absence.

TechCrunch UK post.
MediaGuardian article.

Return of the Rotunda

So, it's been two months (!!) since the last Rotunda post. I'm now living in London - huzzah! We'll just see how coverage of digital progresses here - I don't imagine I'll stop caring about the Australian market overnight though.

To ease me back into things, here's a couple of quick link-outs, followed by a clip of Steve Balmer from Microsoft being entertaining...

First up, Australian-specific stuff:

• Yet another marketing services holding company floats on the ASX. This time is CommQuest.  Ridiculously trite name, the same could be said for their philosophy and approach - buzzword bingo anyone? List of companies in the group is here. Today was their first trading day with shares closing at about 20% up over the offer price. Keep an eye on the price progress here, or chart here.
• Still on ASX listings - MCM announced this week it will float too to raise $3mill - The Oz article here. Good on Tony McGinn I say.
• Some privacy numbnuts are "concerned" Yahoo!7's implementation of Right Media et al technology is going to be too instrusive. £50 says said advocates don't even understand what the tracking does or doesn't really do. Article here.
• Smart Company has a subjective list of the top 10 Australian digital entrepenuers.
• News Digital Media purchased comparison site GetPrice.com.au - article here.
• The ACCC has given its approval for the Google-DoubleClick purchase - article here. The EU
• YouTube launched an Australian version towards the end of October.

Next, some less-covered international/misc links:

• RCRD-LBL ("record label") is an interesting acknowledged experiment that will see if ad revenue can cover the costs of supplying DRM-free, free music - site here.
• Miro has come out of beta. It's an open-source alternative to the well known video on demand provider Joost.
• iD - the gamemakers behind titles such as Doom & Quake launched an official mobile division, due to the popularity and profitability of flogging the games onto handsets - article here.
• IBM has put out a report that claims 30% of current ad spend will go through ad exchanges by 2011.

And finally, the biggest news stories, that by now have been covered to death:

• Screenwriters in America are still on strike - Marc Andreesen is one of the few places I've found specific info on what they are striking over - here.
• Facebook launched it's three-part Facebook Ads strategy - all the blog coverage you can eat is here.
• Google + MySpace jump into bed together on a new approach to social networks - OpenSocial. Again, blog coverage here. Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester has a good "what's this mean for execs" post here.

Here's Steve Balmer being interviewed by John Battelle - quite amusing. (Feed readers if you can't see the embed, click here.)

Google launches their Federal Election tools

I'm calling them "tools" not "coverage" as thats what they are.

Check it all out here:
http://www.google.com.au/election2007/

Three main parts:
a) a whole bunch of Gadgets including trends and customised news searches

b) a cool mapplet sitting in Google Maps (check under 'featured content' under 'My Maps')

c) a YouTube channel that includes the public contributions, as well as channels for each of the polticial parties

There's a 'how to use the products' video here.

Link roundup for 3 Sep

Now we're into September, its Spring a Leak time:

• In the midst of a Fin Review article today on Clemenger Communications Ltd, it was snuck in that they are to buy the remaining 60% of NetX that they do not already own (the tense of the deal wasn't clear).
• Joost has quietly released an API for its platform - NewTeeVee article here
• Richard Watson, chief futurist at the Future Exploration Network, has released a new book that looks worth reading - site here.
• Last week Nokia announced it was getting into the music store service biz (along with other product announcements) - read Jupiter Research's MarkMulligan's take on it here.
• You have to check this out - "content aware" image resizing that lets you scale images but still keep the important parts (or remove designated parts altogether) YouTube video.
• From last Thurs - an article in the SMH reporting on potential unrest between eMitch and their adserver DoubleClick because of a potential conflict in DoubleClick launching their Performics unit in this market.
• Last.fm continues to do some sexy stuff - this time they're tackling the issue of cleaning metadata via fingerprinting and collective intelligence.

On an unrelated note, came across the trailer for the movie "Once" on the weekend - a quirky film made up on non-actors telling a semi-true story, that's partly about music, it looks great. Its out now apparently in Oz. Trailer below:

Link round-up - 27 August

Dilly dally not:

• 27 Aug - Google AU will replace Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) sponsored listings across News Digital Media Sites. Fairfax ditched Yahoo! in May for Google too. The News deal also includes Google search replacing the News search. I wouldn't really like to be the exec in charge of the Yahoo Publisher Network in AU, although you could always just blame it on News Corps existing relationship with Google through things like the TrueLocal listings syndication and the MySpace deal too. The Oz article from today. The FFX article from May.
• In Melbourne: Lab.3000 is holding a forum on digital content this Thursday - 30 Aug. It's free, but registration is necessary - more info here.
• 24 Aug - YouTube is starting to roll out, beyond testing, ads overlays on its videos. SMH article here.
• 24 Aug - US music subscription service Rhapsody is partnering up with MTV. A VC post here. I am hanging for a decent music subscription service to be available in Oz, along with devices like the Sonos.
• 22 Aug - ASX-listed Q Ltd, which owns 3DInteractive, Mosaic & Freestyle Media amongst other things, continues to buy agencies - this time shelling out for Market United (Perth) and Clear Blue Day (for the princely sum of $87k cash for the latter).  B&T article here.
• Podcast first-mover ABC continues to see growth in usage - July downloads of podcast and vodcasts hit 5 million. Article here.
• In the "nice little video wrap-up" bucket:  a "did you know" video documenting change etc etc ; an explanation of social bookmarking in plain English.

Link wrap-up - 15 August

Hey ho, let's go:

• The Melb Twitter Underground Brigade (MTUB) drinks is this Thursday night - info here.
• AIMIA is having a Digital Media Summit Sep 27-28 in Sydney. Details here.
• Google Maps will soon be embeddable (think YouTube videos) - that and more info here at the APC post of Google happenings - including that they are trying to find Oz traffic data to pair with maps.
• Forrester Research has put out a paper on Engagement as a metric - more info here.
• In the US, MySpace this month is getting serious about targeted ads - SAI article here.
• Apple launches an iTunes widget for blogs/social networks etc. Bah - give me last.fm widgets any day - they show all my listening habits for a start, not just itunes-purchased music.
• Back to Google, there's change a-foot. The way top ad placement is calculated is changing. Here's the official Google line here whilst a more cynical take is here.

Q2 AU online ad spend up 44% YoY

The latest PwC figures are in the press today. They show online advertising expenditure for the second quarter of calendar 2007 hit $325.5 million. This is a 44% increase on the same quarter last year.

SMH article here on the figures.

On a related note, why does the IAB Australia continue to be so bad at updating its site with info? I registered when the first PwC report came out earlier this year, but still no report. Why doesn't the registered list get sent notification about the report the very same morning it hits the press? That way we all get timely notification, and the press still get in first.

(I'd like to do a historical/trending comparison here of segments - eg classified, search, display - but can't because I dont have the full report...  It does look like search & directories category continues to grow very strongly compared to the other two segments.)