iWON
[…]Source:GigaOM
With its old-line businesses losing steam, AT&T is looking at new revenue streams. It has already diversified into video through its U-verse and HomeZone services; now it’s looking to shore up its Yellow Pages business. It is buying click-to-call service provider Ingenio and plans to integrate it into the online version of its directory […]

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates that AT&T pays Apple $18 a month per iPhone. And, after some quick math to figure in research firm iSuppli’s July estimate that it costs $265 to build each device, which retails for $399, others are now estimating Apple profits $565 per iPhone over two years. No wonder Jobs felt so comfortable shafting the early adopters who paid $599 for their phones.

Source:Valleywag

AOL founder Steve Case’s Revolution Health will lay off 60 employees in the next 24 hours, according to an internal memo. The bloodletting comes a day earlier than Valleywag reported yesterday. Lowlights from the bloody memo after the jump.

Revolution Health president Tim Davenport butters them up …

As a newcomer, I’ve been impressed by the progress that you all have made. From the launch in April to now, the growth has been terrific. With the drugstore.com partnership, Revolution Health Networks will aggregate over 9 million unique visitors in October, and more than 100 million page views - the latter will make us the third most viewed health information network on the web, behind only WebMD and Weight Watchers.

… and then delivers the blow …

After studying all of this, I’ve decided that we need to do some restructuring at Revolution Health Networks, to position us for our next phase of expansion. As you might expect, these changes involve some people switching jobs, and others leaving the company. When all the shifting and changes are done, I expect that RHN - which has about 240 employees now - will have about 180 by January 1st

…and then tells laid-off workers where their salaries are going….

despite these changes at RHN, the overall number of employees in the Revolution Health Group companies (Revolution Health Networks, CarePages, Extend Health and RediClinic) will continue to grow this year: Revolution Health Group (and its affiliates) began the year with about 500 employees, and will end with about 700 employees, a sizable increase.

… then slaps the remaining employees on the ass and tells them to get in the game …

For those remaining at the company, we will then have an all-hands meeting after these individual and departmental discussions have been completed. There is much to be proud of at Revolution Health, and the overall growth of the company is impressive.

(Photo by mre770)

Source:Valleywag

The last we heard from Google on TV advertising, cofounder Sergey Brin gloated that “interest” and “bookings” were up. He told us that “the remarkable thing about television advertising, is that it is almost as accountable as online advertising.” I didn’t believe him then. The news that Nielsen has agreed to provide Google with demographic data on television audiences makes me even more skeptical. This just shows that Google had no idea what it was getting into when it decided to try to get into selling TV ads.

As long as viewers can’t click on a television commercial or otherwise alert an advertiser that their pitch succeeded or failed, TV commercials will remain undertargeted and obnoxious. Yes, that means Chevy will continue to tell you this is our country for quite some time.

Here’s what I think Brin meant to say, but couldn’t .

Google is currently testing TV advertising with satellite provider EchoStar, which just purchased Sling Media. Sling Media makes a device called the Slingbox. It relays television through the Internet for viewing on a PC.

If Google were to introduce an advertising unit similar to its YouTube InVideo ads for this subset of TV viewers, it could, perhaps, start to make TV advertising as accountable as Brin suggested it already was.

When a Google TV/EchoStar advertiser’s commercial shows up on a PC screen through a Slingbox, Google could make a link to the advertiser available. Then, Google would have click-through data and actual accountability. But not until then.

For now, all Google can determine is whether a given TV set is actually turned on and tuned to a specific channel at the time an ad runs; it also claims to detect when people change channel in the middle of an ad. But if you go to the toilet mid-ad? Google has no clue. The fact that it had to turn to Nielsen to supplement this with demographics about the people watching an ad just goes to show how weak Google’s TV-ad data really is. Funny how no one seems to be holding Google accountable for this.

(Photo by danagraves)

Porn industry insiders disagree on how they feel about The Pirate Bay. Some would like American authorities to go after the file-sharing site to protect their copyrights. Others are uneasy about the idea of one country’s laws reaching across borders, since many countries aren’t as permissive about adult entertainment as the U.S. [TorrentFreak]

Source:Valleywag

NEW YORK CITY — I’m at the Mixx 2007 online-advertising conference here, marveling at the brazenness of author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. “How do we use this medium in the way it wants to be used?” he asks, as he’s interviewed by Charlie Rose. He’s speaking, of course, about the Web, but he might as well be talking about the medium of the conference stage. And he’s using it to promote his new website, Squidoo. Squidoo, as best as I can tell, is sort of a blog-hosting service like Google’s blogger, sort of a social-bookmarking service like Yahoo’s Del.icio.us, and sort of a hand-compiled search-results aggregator like Mahalo. Godin, of course, doesn’t miss the opportunity to brag to Rose and the audience that Squidoo’s Web traffic is larger than the Wall Street Journal’s, without the benefit of any advertising. Except, of course, the kind of free advertising you get by being a best-selling author and getting invited to speak at conferences.

Source:Valleywag

What does EchoStar’s $380 million deal to buy Sling Media mean? In some ways, Sling’s decision to sell out seems odd. Satellite TV is on the downswing, most people believe. Rupert Murdoch, after all, sold News Corp.’s stake in DirecTV, in part to raise cash to buy Dow Jones — favoring content, in other words, over distribution. But Charlie Ergen, the obstreperous entrepreneur behind EchoStar, may have a larger plan for Sling’s Net-connected set-top boxes. “This is just the beginning,” says Sling founder Blake Krikorian in an interview with PaidContent. He’s not kidding. The rich EchoStar buy, I believe, is a move by Ergen to prepare his company for life after satellite TV.

Sling Media’s main product, the Slingbox, differs in a key way from popular digital video recorders like TiVo. Instead of recording programs for later display in the living room, the Slingbox rebroadcasts what’s on your TV, live, to your laptop, cell phone, or other Net-connected screens. While TiVo lets you shift TV shows in time, Slingbox lets you move TV programming to other places. (This is especially handy if, say, you want to follow your home team’s games, only available on your local cable system, while you’re on the road.)

Obviously, a Slingbox could be hooked up to EchoStar’s Dish Network boxes. But it could just as easily be connected to a DirecTV box, or a cable hookup. So why would EchoStar buy something that’s so hard to turn into a proprietary advantage?

Obviously, EchoStar could introduce set-top boxes that have Slingbox functions, saving space under the TV set. But I think there’s more to it than that. Internet bandwidth looks set to increase continuously, while capacity on EchoStar’s satellites appears increasingly constrained. If the Slingbox rebroadcasts any video signal over the Internet, couldn’t EchoStar, one day, skip the satellite altogether and pump television programming over the Internet — what’s known in the industry as IPTV?

Of course, in IPTV, EchoStar will face competition ranging from AT&T to Microsoft. No small challenge. But Krikorian, the Sling Media founder, has faced unlikely odds in introducing a new, difficult-to-explain piece of hardware, winning critical praise and blog buzz, and now selling his company at a more than healthy price. If he’s sincere in staying on at EchoStar, as he told PaidContent, Ergen’s company has a chance to transcend its satellite-TV heritage. That seems worth a few hundred million dollars.