The announcement of the purchase said Yahoo has picked up about 2 million visitors who hit the Rivals network of sites each month. It also gives Yahoo another social network, this time one comprised of die-hard sports fans who participate in Rivals.com communities.

“For those of you wondering how our recent management changes will impact our media operations here in Santa Monica, this deal should give you an indication that we

Here in Lexington, Rivals is a very popular site for fans of Kentucky basketball. Its forums have been ablaze ever since the abrupt departure of former head coach Tubby Smith and stayed hot throughout the entire search process which eventually landed Billy Gillispie at the helm of the program.

That community is just a small sampling of the large audience that comprises Rivals, which no doubt got the attention of Yahoo and prompted these acquisition talks. Rafat Ali at Paid Content first broke the story:

The price could reach around $100 million, which some we’ve spoken to say is overpriced, and that’s why the traditional sports media buyers are sitting out on this one. One exec involved in online sports acquisitions told us $50-75 million would be more realistic given a model that can—and has been—replicated and described the reaction to what Rivals was asking—$100 million—as “sticker shock.”

Their expose of well known MarketWatch journalist, Bambi Francisco, reads as more of an attempt to undermine a rival publication, than a serious look at whether traditional journalists should avoid getting involved with companies they write about.

Here’s the summary CNET uses to describe their story…

What’s new:

MarketWatch reporter Bambi Francisco was allowed by her bosses to take a stake in a matchmaker for start-ups and venture capitalists, an industry she has covered for more than a decade.

Bottom line:

The arrangement is rare among journalists who usually follow strict rules to prevent even the perception of a conflict of interest.

If you read the story, I’d like to know if you think I’m completely imagining this or not.

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Google Has Resources, Rivals, And Risks

Google made a lot of money, and spent quite a bit of it in 2006. Their annual report showed $10.6 billion in revenues, earned with $7 billion in costs and expenses. That left over $3 billion in Google net income for the year.

They also built their war chest up to $11.2 billion in cash and equivalent, and marketable securities. This gives Google the capacity to challenge their chief rivals in the marketplace for companies those rivals might want to acquire.

Yahoo and Microsoft rank as the companies Google fears the most. From the report (emphasis and spacing added):

Currently, we consider our primary competitors to be Microsoft Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft has developed features that make web search a more integrated part of its Windows operating system and other desktop software products.

We expect that Microsoft will increasingly use its financial and engineering resources to compete with us and Microsoft has more employees and cash resources than we do. Also, both Microsoft and Yahoo have longer operating histories and more established relationships with customers and end users.

They can use their experience and resources against us in a variety of competitive ways, including by making acquisitions, investing more aggressively in research and development and competing more aggressively for advertisers and web sites.

Microsoft and Yahoo also may have a greater ability to attract and retain users than we do because they operate internet portals with a broad range of content products and services.

If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results, more relevant advertisements or in leveraging their platforms or products to make their web search or advertiser services easier to access, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic or in the size of the Google Network.

The problem for Microsoft and Yahoo is that they haven’t challenged Google significantly yet on search results. Advertising concerns keep them from being as devoted to the purity of highly relevant search as Google is today.

Increasing competition from those two companies, and a host of smaller upstarts, should start pushing Google’s revenue growth down, along with its operating margins. If revenue should start coming more from Google Network members using AdSense, and less from Google Partners that the company controls, it will cost Google more for its revenue.

Advertising itself poses the greatest concern going forward. “We generated approximately 99% of our revenues in 2006 from our advertisers,” they noted in the report. “If we are unable to remain competitive and provide value to our advertisers, they may stop placing ads with us, which would negatively harm our revenues and business.”

John Battelle unearthed an interesting piece of information about Google’s YouTube purchase:

The YouTube acquisition is detailed, technology from that was valued at just $24mm. Goodwill (if ever there was an irony…) is the majority of the price. There’s $45mm in liabilities assumed.

That transaction had been valued at $1.65 billion at the time, thanks to the price of Google stock.

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I’m guessing losing big deals to your rivals and watching others being proactive on copyright protection, finally got Google’s attention, but apparently only just recently.

“We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago,” Schmidt told Reuters when asked what Google was doing to make anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners. “It is going to roll out very soon … It is not far away.”

No timeframe for rollout was given by Schmidt – shocker! – but whatever they introduce will be available to all copyright holders, not just the big guys who make licensing deals with Google.

Via Mashable.

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That’s how it looked a few weeks ago. Facebook was climbing, MySpace had outstripped even Yahoo for raw pageviews, and even Tribe could claim victory if it sold to NBC. But Friendster, with under a million visitors a month, was dead. It had shuffled off this mortal coil, it was an ex-company.

Until it won a long-sought patent on online social networking.

Frankly, said people within, they hadn’t seen that coming. And everyone knows that a few small companies launched social networks before Friendster, and those companies could claim prior art and negate the patent.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, Friendster might make a go at using this patent. It could go the sweet way, licensing “its” technology to social networks like MySpace. Or it could go the bitter way by filing lawsuits.

Either way, Friendster should strike before everyone else figures out that it doesn’t deserve this patent.

Friendster Patent on Linking Web Friends Could Hurt Rivals [WSJ]

READ MORE: facebook, myspace, friendster

*Originally published at Valleywag.

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Nick Douglas writes the Silicon Valley gossip rag Valleywag. On the side, he writes Fibonacci poetry and short stories about net-saturated life.

"I'm in it to win it, and No Limit is my home."
-- American rapper and poet Snoop Dogg

Microsoft is in it to win it when it comes to the enterprise space. Just because a lot of journalists think Google and Linux will take a wrecking ball to Microsoft’s foundation of Windows and Office doesn’t mean Microsoft feels the same way.

COO Kevin Turner told the crowd during his closing keynote speech that “we’re not going to let Google win in the enterprise space. That’s our house, our market space,” a CRN report noted.

Turner continued in this vein, to the approval of the Microsoft faithful in attendance:

That does sum up how Microsoft has entered and ended up dominating a lot of markets. For example, Microsoft moved from a zero market share in the web browser market to a figure of about 83 percent usage of Internet Explorer in 2006. One-time browser leader Netscape is a shell of what it used to be.

All the ex-Wal-Mart CIO Turner was missing from his speech was a Howard Dean-style call to action from the executive. Though it is tempting to rule out Microsoft when so many alternatives exist for its products, the company does enjoy the business of numerous large and powerful corporations for its core revenue generating products.

They’re in it to win it.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Looks to me that the group, calling itself the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, has realized how much easier it is to beat Microsoft when Europe’s courts have your back than on store shelves.

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) said in a statement that Microsoft “threatens to deny enterprises and individual consumers real choice.”

The complaint asks the Commission to put an end to the practices that the group says have hemmed in its members.

“ECIS deeply regrets that strong antitrust law enforcement appears to be the only way to stop the sustained anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft,” Simon Awde, chairman of the group, said in a statement.

Microsoft said IBM and some other competitors were attempting to use the regulatory process to their business advantage.

“When faced with innovation, they choose litigation,” the statement said, adding it would respond quickly to any eventual request from the Commission relating to the complaint.

ECIS said that limits which were placed on Microsoft in the 2004 antitrust court ruling – now under appeal by the company – needed to be rapidly and fully enforced.

The group said Microsoft Office software was one example of a Microsoft product that did not permit rivals to interoperate properly with the Windows operating system, preventing them from competing.

“It prevents them from achieving full interoperability,” said Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for the group.

Give it up. You guys are all dinosaurs, and Microsoft beat you years ago. Try teaming up with some real competition, like Google or Yahoo.

Mary Jo Foley says:

It’s not clear yet what differentiates the latest suit from the most recent one

Exactly.

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.

Armonk-based IBM plans to follow through with its promise to talk candidly about its Cell processor. The technology firm will debut the chip in 2006.

The Cell, developed in conjunction with high definition DVD rivals Sony and Toshiba, has a 64-bit Power core, and eight separate co-processors. These allow the Cell to fulfill data-intensive processing functions for scientific, cryptographic, and media applications.

Oh, and it will have gaming applications as well, as future owners of the Playstation 3 will find.

By tapping the widespread open-source solutions community, IBM hopes to create a groundswell of support via new applications for the Cell. While IBM has shared technology with developers in the past, this circumstance will be different.

IBM does not plan to charge licensing fees to developers for access to the Cell technology, also known as Broadband Processor Architecture. Also, IBM will not require developers to be bound by non-disclosure agreements.

While developers will be able to write applications, IBM will retain the right to manufacture the chips. The company sees many uses for the Cell besides gaming; high-performance sectors like medical imaging and military applications could be markets for it.

To make the Cell a potent game chip, the designers have not incorporated full floating-point arithmetic compliance with IEEE standards. A subset of floating point arithmetic, single precision floating point computation allows for fast throughput of graphic objects. The real time nature of games and media helped Cell designers make this choice.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

I’ve always said that search gets you an audience larger than the Super Bowl, for the cost of a Yellow Pages ad.

Lot’s of basic information on how paid search works, the last paragraph has a testimonial the whole search industry can be proud of.

Ask Ray Allen, a former ad agency executive who is now the president of American Meadows, a wildflower seed supplier in Williston, Vt. “I used to spend millions of dollars of other people’s money on TV, radio and newspapers,” Mr. Allen said.

“Never in the history of media,” he said, “has a small business been able to have that much reach.”

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.