Google is reaching out to mobile companies for help in getting their proposed Admob acquisition cleared by the FTC. Specifically, they’re asking select companies to write letters in support of the deal, which Google will then forward to the FTC.

We spoke with one mobile advertising company this afternoon that received the request from Google. The company was asked to write their thoughts on “Do you think mobile advertising is going to keep growing, and that Google’s acquisition of Admob won’t hurt your business or decrease competition in the mobile market?”

Last week Bloomberg reported that the FTC had reached out to Admob competitors about the deal. Our source that was contacted by Google says they were also contacted by the FTC months ago about the deal. Since then, silence.

Oddly enough, we had also heard recently that Google was actually looking for ways to back out of the Admob deal, which clearly isn’t the case based on this new information today. But there is speculation that Apple will change their SDK to require application developers to use Quattro Wireless if they want to include ads in their iPhone/iPad apps. That change would likely be paired with an argument that consumer safety requires Apple to filter these ads.

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Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for MicrosoftÂ@ Exchange, which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud.

According to Google's Enterprise Blog, the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There's even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there's too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Google announced its acquisition of DocVerse, a company that allowed Microsoft Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web. Both companies said that they had a "shared vision" for enabling Office users to edit documents online, and Google is undoubtedly planning to integrate DocVerse's features into Google Docs. With its Exchange migration tool and the acquisition of DocVerse, Google is definitely treading on Microsoft's territory and trying to make it even harder for small businesses to resist "going Google."

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The Web has hit a point where tracking pageviews is useless for startups.

There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure.

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Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods - and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed.

Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications. He writes about analytics at the company blog.

For startups that sell something, metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are vastly more valuable than detailed pageview tracking. It doesn't make any sense to focus on pageviews (an approximation for value) when you can measure the real thing directly.

There's also a clear pattern in the direction the Web is heading - toward interaction and responsiveness, and away from separate pages. If you're going for incredible user experience, on-page interactions are your bread and butter. Can you imagine what a drag it would be if the page reloaded every time you commented or 'Liked' something on Facebook? It would be awful.

This trend further devalues the pageview as a valid metric. If you have a highly interactive Web application that spans only a few pages, there's not a whole lot of value in seeing how many times those pages were loaded. Much more valuable information can be found by tracking the parts of your application that your users are interacting with the most. The benefits here are twofold: You can directly measure the things that are important to you, and you gain unparalleled insight into how people actually use your application.

If Not Pageviews, Then What?

When you're deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action. If you're not going to use it to make a decision, it's a waste of time to even look at it.

With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior.

Just a few years back, your only options were to roll your own analytics or to pay tons of money to a giant company like Omniture. This left startups in a tough spot, one many startup founders still encounter today: it's difficult to justify putting a lot of development time into analytics when it's not your main product, and it's hard for a small company to work with a large sales organization.

Luckily, the analytics landscape is changing. Many new companies are sprouting up to handle every aspect of your analytics, freeing you from the need to develop your own internal tools.

Split testing

Split testing involves creating different versions of your site and measuring how the changes affect user behavior. Your changes can be as small as a different call to action or as large as a complete redesign. With this data in hand, you can make changes to your website to massively improve your conversion rates.

What companies do it?

• Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing solution. It makes it possible to change a number of different things and determine the optimal combination of changes.

Conversion funnel analysis

Funnel analysis is a way of measuring conversion rates across multiple steps of user acquisition. For example, you can measure the rate at which visitors from the front page go to the pricing page, and then how many continue on to actually create an account. This is an incredibly important concept to understand, and can be applied to many aspects of your application.

What companies do it?

• Mixpanel (my company) is a freemium service that provides funnel analysis and segmentation.
• Google Analytics has a feature called Funnel Visualization that provides basic pageview-based funnel tracking.
• KISSmetrics is a new company with a funnel analysis product in closed beta.

Click tracking

Click tracking is a great way to measure how effective your website is. Every click a visitor makes is recorded, so you know which links and buttons are receiving attention. There are a number of ways to report this data, but the most popular is to overlay an image of your website with a heatmap of all of the clicks. If your users aren't performing as you expect, you can try changing the page and continuing the test.

What products do it?

• ClickTale is a freemium service that can generate click heatmaps and movies of single visitor sessions.
• CrazyEgg is a paid service that can generate a few different reports for your visitor click activity, including heatmaps.

Event tracking

Event tracking is a way of measuring exactly what users are doing on your site. Things like invites sent, videos played, and user signups all count as events. This functionality will grow more and more important as the Web grows more interactive.

What companies do it?

• Kontagent is a freemium service that is focused on Facebook applications. It can track Facebook-specific events like invites and notifications, among other things.
• Google Analytics recently added basic event tracking to complement its pageview based service.

Measure Relevancy, Not Your Ego

Ultimately, analytics are crucial to online success. If you want to improve your startup, you've got to be measuring it. It's critical to measure the right things, though - the things that are actually important to your business, not things merely appeal to your ego. It can be mesmerizing to watch the unique visitor count go up day-over-day, but this is a dangerous diversion. The era of eyeballs equaling success is long past, so you should instead be measuring the things that are truly relevant to your business.

If you're not measuring your visitors yet, I urge you to get your toes wet - track something small. The conversion rates for the buttons on your front page would be a great place to start.

Is the pageview really dead? What other companies and services are available to help companies move beyond a pageview-centric mindset? Let us know in the comments

Photo by Iva Villi.

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SGI, the vendor that grew out of Rackable Systems' acquisition of Silicon Graphics, has hopped on the Xeon bandwagon with a new line of x86 servers based on Intel's new Westmere technology.

AOL (NYSE: AOL)—which is doubling down on its own local efforts—is now setting up a $10 million venture capital fund to invest in the local space. The company cites the “increasing number of startups” in the market as driving the creation of the fund, which will operate as part of AOL Ventures. Also likely not a coincidence: AOL Ventures head Jon Brod joined the company via its acquisition last summer of hyperlocal news startup Patch.

AOL is already spending $50 million this year alone to expand Patch; specifically, the company now says it will add 15 hyperlocal sites to its current 40 over the next three months. It’s also announcing it will relaunch its City’s Best entertainment guides in 25 cities in order to add “high-quality, city-specific content” and will add geo-targeted local content to AOL.com.

Late Beatle George Harrison may no longer be with us, but his film production work lives on thanks to indie home entertainment giant, Image. The company has announced the acquisition of Harrison's Handmade Films library, a collection of titles produced by the rock icon which showcases a wide range of movies covering multiple genres. The DVD/Blu-ray and electronic debuts are set for undisclosed times. The label's first theatrical release is the seminal Terry Gilliam flick, Time Bandits, which was one of several of Handmade's titles under threat of a remake several years ago, but nothing has come of it to date.

The fantasy adventure tale about a young boy who befriends a group of time-traveling dwarves isn't the only hit to Harrison's credit. "The Handmade library contains some of the greatest and most influential films of the past thirty years," said Ted Green, chairman and CEO of Image. "Their legendary expertise with home entertainment is the perfect match for our picture collection." That collection also includes movies like the British gangster drama The Long Good Friday starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren; Neil Jordan's 1986 noir Mona Lisa, which Kids' director Larry Clark is developing into a remake -- starring Eva Green; the black comedies and farces How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Withnail and I, A Private Function with Michael Pain (Monty Python) and Maggie Smith (Harry Potter), and the nutty Water starring Michael Caine and Valerie Perrine. [after the jump: what about that Harrison/Scorsese documentary?]

Filed under: Deals, Distribution, Home Entertainment

Continue reading Image Acquires Rights to George Harrison's Handmade Library Titles

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Computers are getting smaller and smaller. One need only look at the proliferation of smartphones for proof of this. The trend toward miniaturization is only going to continue. Pretty soon, we’ll have computers inside our bodies, rather than carrying them around with us! Scientists have recently successfully inserted silicon chips into living cells. The initial applications for this research seem focused on intracellular sensing and data acquisition, but that’s only just the beginning.

After inserting the chips into the live cells, the researchers made sure that the cells remained alive and healthy. They found that over 90% of the chip-containing containing HeLa cell population remained viable 7 days after lipofection.

Via Medgadget.

The cells used in this research were HeLa cells. There’s a very interesting history to the HeLa cells, and I never would have known about any of it had I not chanced to hear an NPR piece about a new book: ‘Henrietta Lacks’: A Donor’s Immortal Legacy.

Yahoo Inc. has announced at the 201 IMG World Congress of Sports that it will be acquiring Citizen Sports, a social and mobile application development firm focused on sports. Terms of the deal were not announced.

The acquisition, according to Yahoo, helps strengthen its “social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web.” Our guess is that Citizen Sports will provide Yahoo more distribution channels to promote its content and expand its reach, something we recently discussed at length.

Citizen Sports will be deeply integrated with the Yahoo Sports property, one of the most popular in terms of athletics. Citizen Sports provides Facebook, iPhone, and other apps for filling out brackets, checking scores, and participating in league partnerships. Having talented developers create the apps that will spread Yahoo Sports across the web seems like a sensible move.

When we learn more details, we will bring them to you.

Tags: citizen sports, Yahoo, Yahoo Citizen Sports

Yahoo has just confirmed that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports.

Press release below:

SUNNYVALE, Calif, March 17, 2010 — As part of its ongoing commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports (www.citizensports.com), a company that brings the world of sports to fans’ favorite social networking sites and mobile devices through innovative applications. This acquisition will strengthen Yahoo!’s social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web, and offering a highly customizable social experience.

“Yahoo! is in a unique position to combine our deep expertise in content and aggregation technology to offer a highly personalized social experience,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!. “Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally.”

Millions of people across the globe use Citizen Sports’ array of social and mobile products to play fantasy sports, fill out brackets, check live scores and read up-to-the minute news on sports including football, hockey, soccer, baseball, racing, rugby, hockey and cricket.  Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into these products, creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are.  On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications. This integration will further transform Yahoo! into a more personally relevant experience, drive deeper user engagement and create opportunities for advertisers to interact with audiences in new environments.

As the #1 destination for online Sports with more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.*, Yahoo! Sports provides people with the most timely, relevant and comprehensive sports news, information and programming.  Citizen Sports’ network of popular applications for Facebook, MySpace, hi5, iPhone and Android span professional, college and high school sports.

“Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice,” said Mike Kerns, founder and CEO of Citizen Sports. “We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”

Citizen Sports was founded by Mike Kerns and Jeff Ma in 2004.  Since then the company has brought together millions of sports fans from around the world to enjoy sports and connect with their friends. Citizen Sports is based in San Francisco.

Yahoo! expects to complete this acquisition in the second quarter of 2010. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Column about why Oracle's earnings growth will continue with the acquisition of Sun, based on financial analysis from investment manager Chuck Carnevale.

The NBA Board of Governors has unanimously approved the acquisition by Michael Jordan of a controlling interest in the Charlotte Bobcats.

INFO FIGARO - Thierry Breton, le PDG d'Atos Origin, convoite un géant des paiements électroniques mis en vente par Royal Bank of Scotland.

INFO FIGARO - Thierry Breton, le PDG d'Atos Origin, convoite un géant des paiements électroniques mis en vente par Royal Bank of Scotland.

INFO FIGARO - Thierry Breton, le PDG d'Atos Origin, convoite un géant des paiements électroniques mis en vente par Royal Bank of Scotland.

INFO FIGARO - Thierry Breton, le PDG d'Atos Origin, convoite un géant des paiements électroniques mis en vente par Royal Bank of Scotland.

INFO FIGARO - Thierry Breton, le PDG d'Atos Origin, convoite un géant des paiements électroniques mis en vente par Royal Bank of Scotland.

Le holding de la SSII ACTI, Damilo, procède à une nouvelle acquisition, cette fois dans la production informatique. Il s'agit d'Architech IS, basée à la (...)

Chicago-based interactive marketing services agency, Straight North, announces the completion of their acquisition of Word Sell, Inc., a content creation, optimization and social media marketing company. (PRWeb Mar 17, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3740074.htm

Tout le monde connaît les .Com, les .Net, .Org et ainsi de suite, ces trucs que tout utilisateur internet verra en surfant sur son Browser préféré.... Mais bientôt c’est un autre genre de nom de domaine auquel il faudra peut-être s’habituer... Le “.canon”, un nom de domaine ‘Top Level’ !
Oui, oui, vous ne rêvez pas... Une surprenante, mais jolie décision de la part du fabricant Japonais ! Canon Japon a annoncé ce mardi soir qu’il avait commencé la procédure d’acquisition de ce nom de domaine... Du coup, vous devriez très rapidement voir naître des adresses URL du genre “5dmkii.canon” ou “rebel.canon” sur la toile Internet.

Et juste au cas où vous seriez intéressés pour avoir votre propre nom de domaine ‘Top Level’, sachez qu’il vous faudra tout de même sortir la modique somme de 185 000 USD par application afin de démarrer la procédure... Et bien entendu, quelques frais supplémentaires forts sympathiques devraient gentiment et furtivement venir s’ajouter au montant total !

Communiqué de Presse

TOKYO, March 16, 2010—Canon Inc. announced today that it will begin the acquisition process for the top-level domain name “.canon,” based on the new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) registration system.

The non-profit organization ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which maintains and regulates the Internet’s addressing system, has rigorously evaluated the current gTLD string of characters’ societal value, utilization purpose, and use in an organization’s operations. At its International Public Meeting held in June 2008, however, ICANN approved the relaxation and liberalization of the new gTLD system adoption rules. Following this meeting, a number of disputes arose surrounding whether the entry procedures were fair and adequate, and it was expected that the new gTLD system would commence registration application within 2010 at the earliest. The new gTLD system is expected to allow a company name, brand name, geographic region, or service type to be used as a gTLD within website and e-mail addresses.

Along with its expanding global business activities, Canon will continue to provide online information and services to its users, consumers, and other stakeholders, across the world’s countries and regions. With the adoption of the new gTLD system, which enables the direct utilization of the Canon brand, Canon hopes to globally integrate open communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with existing domain names such as “canon.com.” Canon has made the official decision to begin necessary procedures to acquire “.canon” upon the introduction of the new system. Following approval for the new gTLD system, which is expected to take place after the latter half of 2011, Canon will make full use of the new domain name to increase the convenience and effectiveness of its online communications.

When Disney purchased Pixar Animation Studios in 2006, one of the most influential factors behind the acquisition, besides acquiring the top computer animation studios in the world, was that John Lasseter, one of the powerhouses behind the rise of Pixar, would be put in charge of Disney's downtrodden animation studio. A fan of hand-drawn animation, Lasseter's return was sign of Disney's willingness to reinvigorate the dying art that the studio had all but destroyed only a few years earlier. His first project as Chief Creative Officer (CCO) was The Princess and the Frog - which is out today on Blu-ray - a film which sees the return of the studio to its animation and storytelling roots....

Read full article at Blu-ray.com