Equity for tech licenses? No thanks
An interesting fact about personal finance startup Mint.com, which recently sold to Intuit for $170m: the account aggregation technology that powers Mint.com is licensed from a company called Yodlee.
Yodlee, which was founded in 1999, has raised over $100m in funding. While it operates its own consumer-facing personal finance website, its core business is in licensing its technology to others. Its licensees include startups similar in nature to Mint.com as well as major financial institutions like Bank of America.
Dumb move of the year: NLA to charge for newspaper web links
Newspapers are in trouble. Few dispute that. The question on the minds of industry participants and observers is simply: "How do we save them?"
In an effort to desperately find a new source of revenue for its members, the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) is making a bone-headed move: charging PR agencies for links to newspaper websites that they send to clients.
It is nothing short of preposterous.
Google may take BBC's iPlayer global
Google's bread and butter may be search and the recession may have led Google to cut back on projects that weren't bringing home the bacon but that doesn't mean that Google isn't looking to expand its already large footprint on the web.
It just announced that by the end of the year, it hopes to be offering its publishing partners the ability to sell ebooks through Google Book Search, putting it in competition with Amazon in the burgeoning ebook market.
YouTube goes silent in the UK as music videos blocked
Digital music is the future of the recording industry but sometimes you wonder if we'll make it to the future with all of the fighting that takes place over licensing.
The online music market is no stranger to disputes and the latest is resulting in premium music videos on YouTube being turned off for UK users.
Were reports of the entertainment industry's death greatly exaggerated?
There has been a lot of talk about the decline of the traditional entertainment industry the past several years.
As a growing and maturing Internet has become a much more powerful medium for the distribution of media, traditional entertainment enterprises, from television networks to record labels, have increasingly faced new challenges that many argued threaten their survival.
Holiday shopping forecast 2009: a lot like 2008, with more coupons
The NLA explains why it is going after the news aggregators
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
