VentureBeat

Rupert Murdoch holds forth on newspapers, Obama and Hollywood release dates: What if Rupert Murdoch were to wake up tomorrow and discover that he was the owner of a metropolitan newspaper? “I would run,” the News Corp. owner said today at the All Things D conference. Murdoch also admitted that he’d been involved in the editorial decision of the New York City-based newspaper The New York Post, a News Corp subsidiary, to endorse presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom he called a “rockstar.” Of interest to Hollywood, Murdoch said that he’d like to see the release date narrowed between when a movie comes out in theaters and on DVD and video on-demand. As the owner of social network MySpace and other popular social web properties, Murdoch’s Fox studios has especially strong internal set of formats for movie promotion and distribution. Finally, Murdoch pointed out that Obama’s campaign appears to be spending the most on Google ads, not so much social networking ads or other forms of advertising. You can watch the full video here.

Intelius, thinking about going public, accused of scam — Naveen Jain’s Intelius is scamming millions from users through a subscription-service-posing-as-a-survey scam, Michael Arrington charges, referencing extensive public documents about the company’s finances. Jain, notably, previously faced a number of charges over misleading investors about the value of Infospace, a dot-com era he headed that was briefly valued at $31 billion. Jain’s son defends him in a separate reply to Arrington’s piece, which you can read here.

How much will the housing crunch lead to unemployment? — Entrepreneur turned stock market bear Jon Fisher says unemployment will rise to nine percent in coming months. Fisher uses this Bloomberg chart to show a correlation between a fall in the rate of new U.S. housing creation (white line) and a rise in unemployement (red line) in the last fifty years. You can also read our previous coverage of Fisher’s views on the economy, and the future of tech startups.



More details on Chinese social network 51.com’s social network — 51.com, which competes against established social media services like giant instant messaging service QQ, Facebook clone Xiaonei and others, said last week that it was working on a platform for third party developers. Kaiser Kuo, who writes an excellent blog on the internet in China (in both English and Chinese ), has gotten more details from the company. It will launch a beta version sometime in June, with a set of APIs that will focus around “user information, friend list information, and other basic user activity on the network,” Kuo hears from company founder Andy Yao Yonghe. Top developers will be joining the company in the announcement, and launching applications.

Two more mobile platforms, one from Qualcomm, one from Microsoft — Qualcomm, the maker of mobile software including the BREW operating system, is introducing its own mobile widget platform today, called “Plaza.” Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on its own mobile platform, mysteriously code-named “Echoes.” It will be designed to let mobile operators run a set of Windows mobile applications and other services. Platform is certainly a buzzword now, but the iPhone SDK and Google’s Android both have the most momentum when it comes to offering meaningful ways for third party developers to build mobile applications. Taking into account their out-of-the-gate lead, the name of Microsoft’s offering already seems a little ironic.

1) Rumor: Google to buy Sprint?
2) The U.S. House of Representatives passes VC tax
3) Berkeley Bionics brings exoskeletons to market
4) Fox Interactive Media may start its own ad network
5) Railpower Technologies to steam on, for now
6) Zuckerberg, speaking grandly
7) Are Facebook’s ads illegal in New York?
8) Murdoch calls Facebook a phonebook
9) Sprint and WiMax startup Clearwire have ended plans to form a joint venture

Rumor: Google to buy Sprint? – The rumor surfaced yesterday, here, suggesting that despite a number of major issues, owning a carrier would give Google crucial control over developing and distributing its own mobile services. The issues, however, are numerous. Google would have to beef up its governmental lobby arm to compete against AT&T and other carriers for favorable regulations. It would also have to manage retail stores for mobile customers (expensive, although they’ve worked for Apple!). The move might also send the message to AT&T and the others considering the Open Handset Alliance that Google is actually going to compete directly against them, regardless of the Open Handset Alliance that Google is spearheading. Om has more about how this move could make sense for Google, Intel, Cisco and other leading Silicon Valley companies.

The U.S. House of Representatives passes VC tax — It will change the carried interest from a capital gains to ordinary income, thereby lifting tax to about 35 percent on VCs and other private equity professionals. It is not expected to pass the Senate, however, and President Bush has suggested he would veto it.

Fred Wilson’s series on the struggling VC industry – Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has a good series of posts about the rise and fall of the VC industry, and explains how the official data VCs report may look better than reality (because poorly performing firms have decided not to report their data, or are shutting down and so can’t report their data), and that even top performing firms in the industry aren’t doing that well. It suggests the VC industry is in for some serious pain.

Berkeley Bionics brings exoskeletons to market – It provides technology to give you extra muscles, and plans to augment human strength in places like the war zone (for military) or other emergency situations (firefighting, and so on). This system provides its pilot with the ability to carry loads up to 150 pounds on his back “with minimal effort” over any type of terrain for extended periods of time without reducing his agility. The company is a spinout from the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory and is raising funds. Via Alarm:clock.

Zuckerberg, speaking grandly – “There is no opting out of advertising,” Zuckerberg said of Facebook’s new platform last week, “Once every hundred years media changes. The last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise [then] was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years, information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have.” Via TechCrunch.

Fox Interactive Media may start its own ad network – FIM may be planning to begin providing advertisements, as well as living off of them. Company representatives have been making the rounds to gauge the interest of outside media sites in showing ads provided by Fox, according to the Silicon Alley Insider. Of course, FIM may be large enough to create its own ecosystem: The company runs AskMen, Fox.com, Dow Jones, Myspace and several other giant media properties. We’re not sure if it’s connected, but we also recently reported on FIM hiring a consulting company to streamline its ad operations. Maybe the advice was, “Go forth, and build your own.”

Railpower Technologies to steam on, for now – The fires were flickering for Railpower, a maker of hybrid locomotives, but the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan decided to step in and keep the engines running. The fund put $35 million into the cleantech train company, noting that it expects that “increasingly stringent environmental regulations in North America and globally will open up new markets” for clean rail startups like Railpower.

Are Facebook’s ads illegal in New York? — That’s what the New York Times is saying, citing a 100-year-old New York State statute which says that “any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained” can sue for damages.

Murdoch calls Facebook a phonebook –”The two platforms are very different in the user experience,” said Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp. and owner of MySpace, the competitor to Facebook. “MySpace is a place for self-expression, where users’ MySpace pages become their home on the Internet. It is where they discover people, content, and culture — where they share information, communicate, and consume. Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be a web utility, similar to a phonebook.” Via ZDNet.

Sprint and WiMax startup Clearwire have ended plans to form a joint venture — WSJ has details.

It’s official: MySpace, seeking to defend its status as the leading social network, will open up its platform to third-party developers over the next couple of months.

The news was confirmed tonight at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, where News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch and MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe were featured guests.

Like rival Facebook’s move six months ago, MySpace’s move will let developers build applications within MySpace and make money from them.

The full significance of this move — and of social networking platforms in general — is hard to tell. Despite the hype generated lately about the Facebook platform, few of the 6,000 or so applications are remarkable or particularly innovative. On the other hand, the applications are drawing traffic: Facebook’s platform applications see 14 million unique visitors a month, with 88 million visits for an average visit time of 4:30 minutes, according to Compete. We’ve heard estimates that the applications account for anywhere between two and 20 percent of Facebook’s overall traffic, something we’ve been trying to confirm.

MySpace, which still leads Facebook in overall users by a wide margin, was expected to make the move to embrace developers — as a way to ensure its leadership position.

However, MySpace has already let users install widgets from third parties. The difference is, now these widget-makers have the opportunity to build more complete applications for their existing MySpace users. Successful Facebook application developers will also have the opportunity to push their wares to MySpace.

RockYou and Slide, the leading widget providers on MySpace and application leaders on Facebook, both said that they have been waiting hungrily to push applications across MySpace and all the other social networks that plan to offer developer platforms — such as Hi5, Bebo and Tagged.

Even though Facebook’s open-platform move instigated the development of these rival platforms, Facebook’s has been a technical work in progress, with glitches still being regularly reported by developers.

News Corp.’s MySpace is opting for a slower approach, hoping to avoid some of the same problems.

In the next couple of weeks, the company says, it will release a directory of widgets already on its site.

Then, within the next couple of months, it will launch a platform that gives developers deeper access to MySpace data. Like Facebook, MySpace will offer application programming interfaces to its user data, so developers can build applications that run within MySpace. It will offer its own markup language for designing application user interfaces, and will let developers include Flash, Javascript and iFrames elements — also similar to what Facebook already offers. MySpace users will be able to share their profile information, activity on the site, lists of friends, and other personal data with developers’ third-party applications.

Asked by an audience member if MySpace planned to be more open than Facebook, DeWolfe smiled and said, “yes.”

It will initially offer third-party applications to only a subset of around two million MySpace users.

Next up: Google, which on Nov. 5 is expected to do something similar, starting with its social network, Orkut.
Separately, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch confirmed that MySpace co-founders DeWolfe and Anderson have signed a contract to work for MySpace for two years. There’s been speculation the pair are making $30 million over that time.
Asked by interviewer John Battelle what he thought of Silicon Valley culture, Murdoch responded: “In many ways it’s the most exciting place on earth, the center of innovation.”
In response to the rumors that Facebook is possibly raising money at up to a $15 billion valuation from Microsoft, Murdoch said it would mean Newscorp is “totally underpriced.” Facebook is known to be making much money, with reports putting revenue at $150 million this year, mostly from a sweet revenue deal with Microsoft. Newscorp has a $70 billion market value and will make $5 billion if the economy holds up, Murdoch said. More coverage here.
[Mark Coker, who covered the Murdoch talk at the Web 2.0 Summit, contributed to this report.]

MySpace is negotiating its entry into China with a venture capital group and a former China Netcom Group exec, according to the WSJ (sub required), a sign that it is relying on local help to avoid the expensive mistakes made by other U.S. companies in China.

The report said the Rupert Murdoch, chairman of MySpace owner News Corp., is sending his wife Wendi Deng (pictured above) to plan MySpace’s entry into the world’s most populous nation, and that she’s in talks with IDG Ventures in China, and Edward Tian, the former China Netcom Group chief executive to help with the move.

MySpace’s move is significant because eBay and Yahoo, two other large U.S. Web companies that made earlier moves to China, have struggled against local competitors there. Yahoo, an early player in search, has invested $1 billion there, but has little to show for it. It has seen competitors spring up all around it. The controversy around Qihoo has been particularly bedeviling for Yahoo. Notable is that Qihoo’s investors include IDG, which is MySpace’s supposed ally. IDG also invested in Baidu, which has eaten Google’s lunch in China so far.

MySpace will compete against several other local Chinese social networking players, including 51.com. That company recently received $12 million (scroll down) from Sequoia Capital. Sequoia is also investor in Qihoo, and thus the Web of intrigue is spun.

Murdoch has made all the right moves. He has said MySpace’s local operations need to be very Chinese.

The WSJ reports:

IDG’s Chinese investment arm already has a joint venture with News Corp. operating a Chinese portal called Chinabytes.com. A person close to IDG’s Chinese venture confirmed it had held talks with MySpace. A Chinese news outlet reported earlier this week that Luo Chuan, the former general manager of MSN China, would become president of MySpace China on Dec. 8. Luo Chuan couldn’t be reached for comment.