Friday’s Media and Technology Roundup
Fans scramble for Apple’s iPhone upgrade-Reuters
“Apple fans lined up overnight by the hundreds outside stores in the United States, Europe and Japan to snap up the latest iPhone, setting a new benchmark in the fast-growing smartphone market,” writes Franklin Paul, Marie Mawad and Sachi Izumi.
Twitter settles privacy charges with U.S.-Reuters
“Microblogging service Twitter has agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over charges it put its customers privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information,” reports Sinead Carew.
Broadband spurs new businesses and ideas in Kenya-Reuters
“When Kenyan graduate Roy Wachira, 25, set out to start his first business, he turned to the Internet, whose growth in the east African nation is spawning opportunities unthinkable even a year ago,” writes Duncan Miriri.
Google and YouTube defeat Viacom in copyright lawsuit-Reuters
Web 2.0: Ning does Virtual Gifts and Demand Media does healthcare
With the Web 2.0 conference about to kick off in San Francisco, Internet start-ups are unveiling new products and tossing out crumbs of data about their businesses intended to illustrate how fast they’re growing.
Social-networking firm Ning led the charge on Tuesday with the news that it has grown 300 percent year-over-year to 36 million registered users and that it is jumping on the virtual goods bandwagon.
The company said it will begin selling virtual goods across the 1.6 million specialized social networks that exist on Ning for $1.50 per gift. The company said it will split 50 percent of the revenue with the Ning network creators who offer the goods on their respective networks.
Virtual goods are increasingly catching on as an attractive revenue stream for Internet companies.
Zynga, the hot videogame maker for social media services like Facebook, said it raised $427,000 from three weeks worth of virtual goods sales on its FarmVille game, according to the Silicon Alley Insider.
Still unknown is Zynga’s annual revenue, which has been estimated to be between $100 million and $200 million in some media reports, but as SAI notes:
By telling us that some of its 59 million monthly FarmVille users spent $427,000 on just one product of the many available in just three weeks (annualized, the number is $7.4 million), Zynga is sending a very clear message: Yo! People really are spending lots of money in our games.
Sun Valley: Reuters returns to Idaho
Nearly every powerful media and technology executive you can think of will be camping out in the idyllic and affluent ski resort town of Sun Valley this week. They have aimed their Gulfstreams squarely at Idaho so they can show up at the 27th edition of Allen & Co’s media and technology conference, which investment banker Herb Allen holds every summer here.
That means nearly every media reporter you can think of will be hovering among the hedgerows and parking lots (and in the bar, naturally), waiting to get a few precious seconds with super-wattage movie executives from DreamWorks’s Jeffrey Katzenberg to Paramount’s Brad Grey, technology heavyweights such as Michael Dell and Bill Gates, media kingpins Philippe Dauman and Rupert Murdoch and fresh-faced startup darlings like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Evan Williams and Ning’s Gina Bianchini.
Reuters, of course, will be among the press crew at the scene. Reporters Yinka Adegoke and Alexei Oreskovic will show up, as will I, and photographer Rick Wilking will be shooting the pictures that at Sun Valley often tell a more eloquent story than any text dispatch can.
We and a bunch of other journalists will be working around the clock (literally) to get these powerful, and often reclusive bigs to tell you what the next stunning media and technology deals will be. We’ll also be asking them how they are keeping their companies in business amid big changes in the ways people inhale their news and entertainment, as well as how they are dealing with the fallout of an economic crisis last year that nearly capsized the financial system.
Also, keep an eye out for the glamorous or the unusual. Sun Valley guests typically show up with their families, and the whole affair is supposed to be casual. That means there’s always the possibility that Murdoch could lose more than his wedding ring. And celebrities, such as investor Vivi Nevo’s wife, actress Zhang Ziyi, are often part of the program.
Check back with us at MediaFile, and remember to read Reuters’s dispatches from Sun Valley. Allen & Co might keep the press outside, but we’ll be working hard to bring you the inside story.
(Photo: Designer Diane von Furstenberg and her husband, IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller at last year’s conference. They are the kind of media star-power that cruises around Sun Valley, Idaho, for a few days every summer. Reuters/Rick Wilking)
