VentureBeat

When I first saw that Yahoo and the advertising holding company WPP were set to announce a partnership, my immediate reaction was: Here’s the first of many Yahoo attempts to rebuff Carl Icahn’s (and to an extent, Microsoft’s) hostile takeover bid. However, it seems that WPP is actually upset that the Yahoo and Microsoft merger didn’t happen, according to The New York Times.

“Anybody who is a customer in the marketplace likes to see balance in it,” WPP chief executive Martin Sorrell told The Times. “No one likes oligopolies. Search in America is imbalanced. That’s what Yahoo and Microsoft offered, a bit more balance.”

Looks like even Yahoo’s partners are now kicking it when it’s down.

The WPP and Yahoo deal will grant WPP’s clients advertising access to publishers using Yahoo’s auction advertising service, Right Media. This new range of sites will add avenues from which WPP’s ad-targeting division, 24/7 Real Media, can pull data. When it comes to creating more relevant, highly-targeted ads, the more data, the better.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this and other Yahoo partnerships are going to ease the pressure put on the company to take another look at the Microsoft deal. Some of those partners are pushing for it as well.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Integrated Media Measurement, the Silicon Valley start-up company that wants to make advertising more efficient by following you around — tracking everything you listen to every day — has raised $25 million more from advertising giant WPP.

IMMI, as it is known, gives cellphones to volunteers, equipped with a recording device built inside to track what ads they are hearing and seeing wherever they go. It has already learned a few things, including that people who play Halo3 tend to go to movies more frequently than the general population. See chart below.

We wrote about the company last year, after the four-year-old San Mateo, Calif., company emerged with $14 million in backing from Silicon Valley venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and others.

However, WPP, the latest investor, is the world’s second largest advertising conglomerate, and has made several aggressive moves lately to embrace new technologies to improve measurement of advertising success — something that’s considered crucial for WPP to please its large advertising/marketing clients. (See our coverage of WPP’s recent investments and acquisitions).

The phone captures 10 seconds of audio from its surroundings every half-minute, detecting what people are listening too, whether it is a TV program, radio, digital video recorder or even a sporting event or concert. IMMI then uses acoustic matching technology to filter through these snippets comparing them with samples of the media being measured. IMMI also says it can track whether people make retail purchases after viewing or hearing an ad.

By the way, it has a bluetooth technology called Beacon  — remember that name from anywhere? :-) — which beams its findings to a device in a user’s home to maker sure it can track everything they hear in their home, distinguishing it from outside.

1. Invidi gets $25 million from WPP, the world’s second largest ad conglomerate
2. Amazon building out its webs services
3. Atheros Communications buys micro GPS company
4. Google may be looking at wireless spectrum in the UK
5. Tiny Pictures, a mobile photo-sharing company, adds international language support

Invidi gets $25 million from WPP, the world’s second largest ad conglomerate — Most people think of Google and Yahoo as the new online advertising giants. But WPP is moving aggressively to upgrade its ad technology. It’s most recent move is to invest in Invidi, a company that targets ads to TV set-top boxes of individuals depending on their age, gender, location, income and ethnicity. It gathers the data by analyzing remote control, ratings, and program guide information along with census data. The Princeton, NJ startup earlier got capital from EnerTech Capital, InterWest Partners and Menlo Ventures, all of which returned to invest in this latest round. More details here.

Amazon building out its webs services — It has released SimpleDB, which provides database functions for young companies, without the need for a database administrator.

Atheros Communications buys micro GPS company — Atheros, the Santa Clara, Calif., maker of wireless chips, said it will buy u-Nav Microelectronics, a company that boasts the smallest and lowest power Global Positioning System (GPS) chip, including the one used in the Casio wristwatch for runners. The price is $54 million. More details here.

Google may be looking at wireless spectrum in the UK — That’s the gist of this CNET article, at least. The British telecommunications regulator OfCom will auction off a wide range of wireless radio spectrum within the next couple years, including the 700MHz band. However, A federal law prohibits Google from commenting on its plans outside of the US, as the company has committed to bid on spectrum in the US. The US Federal Communications Commission will auction off the 700MHz spectrum in January, which Google could use to offer its own mobile phone and mobile internet services. The company says it may reveal more of its international plans after the US auction is complete.

Tiny Pictures, a mobile photo-sharing company adds international language support — The San Francisco company’s service, known as Radar, lets you share and comment on photos from a mobile device and from the web. It already has 70 percent of its 630,000 total users outside of the US (previous coverage). Now, it is adding French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese WAP versions of its site, hoping to encourage existing users in many countries to add their friends. Chinese and Japanese versions are soon to follow, the company says.

Updated

Forget the historical record, which says that the majority of mergers fail financially (pick your reading from any of these articles).

The Internet advertising sector is in all-out merger mode, with new online start-ups emerging daily causing angst among the big guys, pushing big players to gobble up other big guys or the best of the smaller ones. The WPP Group, the world’s second-largest advertising company focused mostly on traditional offline ads, just announced it plans to buy 24/7 Real Media, an online advertising company, for about $649 million.

Most Internet companies, from the smallest start-ups to the large ones are feeling pain, as the landscape changes and they try to keep up with this fast-moving world. New targeting technologies make it possible to reach consumers in a variety of ways, and the slow will die, the swift and the innovative will win. Other mega deals lately include Google’s $3.1 billion agreement to buy DoubleClick (WPP has called Google a “frienemy”), Yahoo’s $680 million deal to buy the rest of Right Media, and Publicis’ $1.3 billion purchase of Digitas. Yesterday AOL acquired a controlling interest in Adtech AG, a German online ad-serving company for a reported $100 million. Smaller deals are happening at a furious pace, too, for example in the mobile ad market. The stakes are huge, because it affects all sectors, including the $55 billion TV market, which is increasingly interactive, and moving online.

WPP said it had signed a deal to buy 24/7 Real Media’s shares for $11.75 each, a 30 percent premium over their average closing price for the last 60 trading days, according to Reuters.

WPP has made moves in the start-up world, too, having invested in smaller ad companies, including SpotRunner, which offers a Web-based dashboard for advertisers to place television commercials (and recently raised $40 million), and online video game network WildTangent, a Redmond, WA company that has raised more than $50 million from VCs.