Google has bought dMarc, an advertising technology provider to the radio industry.  The price tag is pretty large – a $100m deal that, with a mega earnout, can go up to $1.14 billion (according to the WSJ, via Jeff Jarvis).


To me, this shows that Google is staking out its position in all areas of media and entertainment.  I presume dMarc strengthens Google’s relationships on the ad sales side.  I look forward to seeing how the radio side of the media/entertainment explosion plays out. (I noticed that Fred Wilson reported the deal in his series he calls "Exploding Radio". As I think about how radio, or pure audio content, will be impacted by the [r]evolution in media, I keep getting this picture of an old radio set, getting blown to pieces, in my mind.- Thanks Fred)

Continuing two trends in one move, AOL has acquired the recently-launched video search company Truveo.  The continued trends are:

– Big web players buying very early startups
– Big web players scrambling to take positions in the upcoming video explosion

Marc Cenedella’s company TheLadders.com announced an exclusive partnership with the Journal.  First, congratulations!  I have blogged before that TheLadders is one of the smartest innovators in online recruiting.  It’s a good sign that WSJ is noticing.

In general, I believe that market forces bring the price down of access to information as processing power increases and transportation costs go down.  The  phrase, "Information wants to be free" is one expression of this thinking.  There is much thinking around this topic.

One  company frequently brought up on the topic of "free" is a personal favorite, Craigslist.  So, I was surprised when I read today that CL is beginning to block spiders and search engine bots. A few months ago, CL had asked Oodle to stop listing CL listings.

CL is well known to not be greedy.  So what is the reason for this?  I think it’s the issue of attention scarcity?  Umair agrees with me.

Frequently, I come across brilliant writing that makes me feel like a very weak communicator.  Umair Haque is a writer/thinker that is the author of many of these.  He has a brilliant recent post titled Strategy 2006, in which he discusses the upcoming revolution in the media industry, in a list format.  He concludes with:

    11) The world becomes a much more interesting place…

I agree with Umair, but think he’s underestimating the upcoming impact.  One of the reasons why I feel that he’s underestimating is the breakneck speed that the media companies are formulating their video strategies.  Proof?

Google’s Video Initiative
ABC & Apple
Fox & DirectTV
Yahoo!’s Video Moves
Mainstream News Online
Microsoft, Sony and Starz: Vongo

Notice these are all links to old media outlets.  Also notice that the oldest of these articles is 5 days old (OK, that’s a bit biased because of the CES).  So, this is not blogsphere jabber.   According to Marketwatch’s Bambi Francisco (free registration req’d):

"It took iTunes about a third of the time, or one week, to sell 1 million songs back in April 2003, when the iTunes Music Store launched
with just 200,000 titles. Now, less than three years later, iTunes has
more than 2 million titles from record labels and independent artists
and has already become the No. 7 music retailer, according to NPD."

So I am expecting the visual media industry (TV, film & video) to learn quickly what the music industry has painfully learn.

There’s some buzz that Larry Page will be announcing a new video distribution service by Google in his CES keynote.  It makes sense to me, since the constant increase in broadband penetration and improvement has brought the web to the last frontier, the home entertainment system.  The current Google Video search feels experimental, at best, so it’s natural for Google to fill it’s content bucket.

It continues to feel like 2006 will be when video explodes online.

TheStreet.com reports that Piper Jaffray internet analyst Safa Rashtchy has raised his price target for Google to $600.  Here’s the report in PDF, via John Battelle.

Auren Hoffman alerted me to Retrievr.  He comments:

we’re getting closer and closer to fast image recognition technology
which will totally change the way we process and search pictures,
photos, videos, etc.

I agree, and further think that innovation in this area will start effecting how search is viewed by the masses.  Today, search is typically pointed to the body of information outside of our domain.  Increasingly, as it goes beyond text, it can be pointed within our domain – approximating Vannevar Bush’s Memex.

I am happy we’re moving in this direction.

Information wants to be free.  The latest to see this are the guys at Business2.0, where all content is now available on the web for free.  Now I am waiting for NYTimes to do the same for TimesSelect.