"TheStreet is a leader in high-quality, professionally-produced financial content, and their coverage in the technology, communications, and cleantech sectors and the attractive audience that content attracts makes them an ideal partner for GigaOM," said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. 

"We look forward to working hand-in-hand with the editorial, analyst, and business teams at TheStreet to share content across our joint network of sites, to co-author research reports that deliver critical insights into the technology-driven industries we jointly cover and to introduce our respective audiences to each other’s brands and service offerings," added Walborsky.

"Our partnership with GigaOM builds on TheStreet’s recent content and audience-sharing arrangements with other best-in-class partners from Newsweek to Nightly Business Report to the personal finance site Bundle – all organizations that understand the distinct value of TheStreet’s quality, action-oriented content in the financial vertical," said Daryl Otte, CEO of TheStreet. 

"As a well-followed brand in the leading areas of technology with a highly-engaged audience and deep roots into the vibrant West Coast technology community, GigaOM delivers to TheStreet great incremental distribution while lending significant new resources and insight to our already strong offerings in the technology sector. We are pleased to be teaming with such an influential partner," said Otte.

GigaOm and TheStreet have already released a co-branded report available through GigOm Pro, the publication’s paid service.

Om Malik has now raised $5.8 million since his firms inception. The latest funding round was led by  Alloy Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm.

Giga Omni Media is a blog network that owns seven websites including GigaOM, WebWorkerDaily, NewTeeVee, OStatic, Earth2Tech, jkOnTheRun and TheAppleBlog. The company has also entered the conference business with two successful conferences last year, Structure and Mobilize.

According to a blog post by founder Om Malik, Giga Omni Media plans to use this money to aggressively expand:

"We are going to use this new investment prudently, to enhance our technology platform and content offerings, add to our current portfolio of publications and expand our Events and Briefings businesses. We are in investing for the long-term — in ourselves."

Her article covers a number of different examples of search verticals and shows how they are succeeding in meeting the relevancy demands of their users in much more efficient way than Google may ever be able to do. However with that said, the end goals of vertical search and the end goals of Google seem to me to be divergent.

Vertical search has the ability to ask very specific questions that they know are relevant to the query. Google on the other hand cannot make assumptions as to the specific needs of the user. Given the strength of branding that Sramana imagines these vertical search tools to obtain, she believes circumventing the need for Google and going right to the vertical search could pose a long term business problem for Google that they might never be able to over come.

Still the following quote from Sramana got me really thinking:

“At the back of my mind is a vision that is much bigger than vertical search. It is Web 3.0, a summation of context, community, commerce, content, vertical search and personalization. In the end, new brands able to build deep, rich, highly personalized Web 3.0 user experiences would become Google’s real competition.”

How do you feel about this conclusion? Does it feel to you like vertical search from a strong brand could be the challenge that Google is unprepared to meet?

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As many in the blogosphere are just discovering, GigaOm founder Om Malik has a good reason for being absent from his namesake blog for the past few days. A coronary episode put him out of action, according to a post at GigaOm he penned today:

I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since. With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be OK.

That support included a purging of all kinds of indulgences from his home. Malik said his apartment is now free of “smokes, scotch and all my favorite fatty foods.”

Well-wishers have been invited to leave their best wishes in the comments of the blog post, and as of this writing 140 comments have been made there. We wish him a speedy and full recovery.

The American Heart Association website provides lots of information on and the prevention of cardiac problems. It’s well worth a read by everybody. Ladies should also check out the Association’s Go Red For Women movement, as a step toward thwarting the number one killer of American women.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/om-malik-on-the-mend-2008-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/reactions-to-amazon-mp3-store-2007-09 http://www.webpronews.com/reactions-to-amazon-mp3-store-2007-09#comments Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:22:43 +0000 Bruce Houghton http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40667 Our news story and analysis "What The Amazon Store Is...And Is Not" got so many links and hits that we thought we'd take a look across the web to see what other's thought of the opening of Amazon's MP3 Download Store.]]> Our news story and analysis "What The Amazon Store Is…And Is Not" got so many links and hits that we thought we’d take a look across the web to see what other’s thought of the opening of Amazon’s MP3 Download Store.

Engadet - "If you’re into DRM-free music, you have a reason to get pretty excited today."

Om Malik @ GigaOM – "Bottom line: 26 out of 50. I am not ready to write Amazon off just yet. We might have a worthy competitor…"

David Card of Jupiter Research - "Amazon’s 2.3 million song catalog is fairly crippled…But pretty soon, consumers will see the fruit of competition based on pricing, merchandising, packaging, user experience, editorial, knowledge of consumer habits, etc., etc., instead of on random acts of technology…The game just got a lot more interesting.

Hypebot Comment by Bruce Warila - "Is Amazon going to make the pie bigger or divide it? I am doubtful that the paid download market is going to keep growing…:  (more great comments from Hypebot readers here.)

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It’s probably best to focus on the business arrangement, however, and according to a press release, “Through this deal, TheFind gains a leading fashion destination site that identifies and delivers the hottest trends in women’s fashion, while Glimpse.com users gain access to TheFind’s unparalleled roster of online boutiques, specialty fashion retailers and leading brand stores.”

Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind, also stated, “This acquisition further proves our ongoing commitment to providing the most engaging, efficient and fun online shopping search experience for our fashion-savvy consumers.”

Of course, as exuberant and chatty as both corporations were about the takeover, neither disclosed the purchase price.  Yet “market share” and “people count” graphs at GigaOM and Frostfirebuzz.com both represent Glimpse as a virtual flatline, so it’s likely that not much cash passed hands.

For this reason, don’t be surprised if TheFind continues to buy up other sites.  The company could have just been keeping mum, but a month and a half ago, TheFind received $15 million in financing, and it had no clear plans for the funds at the time.

A quick description of the beta site from Kongregate‘s About page:

Kongregate seeks to create the leading online hub for players and game developers to meet up, play games, and operate together as a community.

By wrapping user-submitted Flash games with various community features, Kongregate’s site serves as a unique way for users to play great web-based games alongside friends. Anyone can add their own games to Kongregate’s library in a process that’s fast and simple.

But don’t expect to be able to embed the games on your site or blog, what plays at Kongregate stays at Kongregate.

"All this sounds promising," opines Blake Snow at GigaOm, "but unlike other proven online communities, making a enjoyable Flash game takes a lot more time and talent than, say, uploading a funny video, and that barrier limits Kongregate’s content stream."

If Kongregate takes off, the timing is right for them. In an increasingly attention-fueled online economy, online gaming is expected to grow 70 percent year-over-year, grabbing $1 billion a year in advertising by 2010.

It will be especially interesting to learn if the magic YouTube concept can be applied to games.

StumbleUpon Stumbles Into eBay For $75 Million

Both TechCrunch and GigaOM predicted yesterday the StumbleUpon purchase would be completed, and were proved correct.

eBay announced it would pick up StumbleUpon for about $75 million. StumbleUpon originated in Canada, and provided a browser toolbar that allows users to click a button and find sites within their selected areas of interest.

Those sites would be ones tagged by other StumbleUpon users, and each user can vote sites up or down when they appear in a Stumble. The simple yet effective concept caught on quickly, and the company moved to California to be closer to the action in Silicon Valley.

StumbleUpon claims a userbase of 2.3 million. They recently launched a video product called StumbleVideo, which focuses on video results.

Michael Buhr, a senior director at eBay, will become StumbleUpon’s general manager. As one of StumbleUpon’s happy users, I’m hoping eBay won’t turn the product into a non-stop lovefest of auctions appearing in the Stumbles.

Let’s zip into a simulation scenario drill in future;

A coveted and dedicated team of hackers hacks into some of these über famous blogs – TechCrunch, GigaOM, Engadget, Boing Boing, et al and took them for just 24 hours (may be even less should do). An organized blog article with striking difference but similar topic is posted across these blogs. Eventually, many diligent Digg, Netscape and Reddit users plasters them all over the heavily trafficked social sites. It then hits the front pages in record time (it will for such stories)! As soon as that happens, it is picked up across other blogs and is blazing hot across the blogosphere.

Even before it hits Digg’s Popular Upcoming Section, the news would have hit the Silicon Valley and other tech-sphere across the globe, it will hit thousands if not millions of blackberries, emails and IMs. Business institutes and other investors does a frantic sell-off, some will hesitate to buy and the price plummets to a formidable negative figure of the Company’s Stock in concern.

By the time, the hacked sites are taken controlled over from the hackers and normalcy restored, error, corrigendum issued; the damage is so well done that the Company’s Stock is in loss of billions of Market Dollar.

What if the hacking was organized by somebody or a team that just sold off millions worth of stock just few hours before the hack? Or what if the next rival Company’s people is involved? If may be remembered that the blog articles in the hack managed to mentioned something about the rival company that send their stock sky-rocking upwards! Alright, remember Le Chiffre’s plan to blow up that newly launched Sky Liner to make profits off the Stock Crash but he ends up loosing it himself – Casino Royale.

Back to Reality;

Early morning yesterday (US Time) around 11:49 AM EST Engadget posted an article claiming that the Apple’s iPhone and Leopard OS launches would be seriously delayed. They based the story on an internal Apple email that was forwarded to them.

Minutes after that article hits the Blogosphere, Apple’s stock started to see a massive selling, from $107.89 to $103.42 within 6 minutes. This knocks off a whooping $4 billion of Apple’s Market Cap. Of course, a lot of people lost a lot of money very quickly. Luckily, it turns out that the email was a hoax. Engadget updated their article to reflect the error. Again within hours, Apple stock recovered slowly but the damage was already done – it ended the day down just $1.40/share, or $1.25 billion in market cap.

Via:

• Engadget

• Techcrunch

Image courtesy: Counter Strike

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While many companies are looking to make a name for themselves with such aspirations, Atari just wants to reclaim its piece of the video gaming pie.

Just what sort of unmitigated chaos has been wrought in the wake of Second Life’s popularity?

GigaOM counts no less than eleven different start-ups that all reference Linden Lab’s online world as the fundamental concept for their vision.

Atari becomes the twelfth such company with its announced intentions to develop a 3D world consisting mostly of user-created content.

“Let’s just say it will be PC to start with,” says Atari Online Entertainment Senior VP Chris Bergstresser. “I can’t and I won’t speak for Europe but presumably if it is a success in the US then yes, it will be coming to Europe. We would quickly open it up to other territories."

Wagner James Au of GigaOM speculates as to why the phenomenon of user-generated virtual worlds seems to be catching on like wildfire:

What we’re seeing, I think, is game publishers slowly learning to apply the logic of Web 2.0 on their own medium. Creating content is expensive, and with the sole exception of World of Warcraft (8 million users and still growing), involves an increasingly futile struggle to retain subscribers.

Traditional online worlds require a large team of designers and artists constantly adding new content, for fear that players will quickly churn through the existing experiences, get bored, and leave. (Subsequently, most MMOs spike in growth, then quickly plateau and begin declining.) Going the user-created route means new content on a regular basis, produced by subscribers, with the company only spending money to foster and police it.

Atari certainly doesn’t need to make a name for itself in the world of gaming.

Most analysts would admit, however, that the company has been living off the merits of its past successes and has done very little in recent times that could be viewed as innovative.

If Atari can manage to catch this wave and ride it in to shore, then the company could find itself at the forefront of the gaming industry once again.