Hello Martin

Investor Relations News

I’ve been complaining about the lack of M&A Activity in europe, lack of specialized M&A companies specializing in media/internet (like Montgomery & Co in the US) - But i have to say Axel Springer certainly seem to be on the hunt here, and they are starting to build up quite a wide portfolio of internet companies. I guess you can almost say there is similarities between Axel Springer and IAC as a holding company for a wide variation of companies (even though Axel Springer has long content background with newspapers).

Anyways i think it’s great that there is some M&A activity in europe and i hope they continue to buy companies, since it’s a great driver for more entrepreneurs to setup companies (not saying you should start a company with a exit in mind!).

So Usatoday (frontpage) and Wall street journal (Frontpage Personal journal) on thursday and then Good Morning America today, i guess we have had a good week

Video:
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3310633

Accompanying article: ABC: Find summer flight deals

Anybody who has ever met me and ventured in to the subject of cars will know i am a complete car nut, so i have watched an endless amount of video clips of car tests and reviews. Lately i have taken a bit further interest in these videos than just the cars in the video. Any video search on youtube for any sports car will generate a wide selection of videos which in most cases will keep you glued to the screen for quite a while.
So when i had dinner with a friend the other week who is an engineer at heart and we discussed the subject of car reviews in the media and i explained to him that throughout my viewings i have come to the conclusion that Jeremy Clarkson stands out above everything else he crinched since he believes that he doesn’t always know how to make the most out of the cars, and sometimes just talk plain gibberish.
Anyways i know this post is a bit off, but with HD Cameras coming in at 1000$ or so high quality video will become much more of a commodity but in the end it will always come down to the presenter in the end too (unless it’s a silent production). And as more and more content moves to video format it becomes more clear and clear how unique of a talent there is to presenting something, And once you start moving content from the “written” to the “spoken” you are taking a chance in the sense that it’s no longer “content is king” but there is more factors that gets added weather your content will be successful or not.
Who knows if Jeremy is just this way naturally or he does an “act”  - But if he ever wants to leave BBC he can shoot me an email
Oh yeah since i know it’s mostly web people reading here… Top Gear is supposedly viewed by around 350 million people, does your website get that many visitors?

During my research in to this subject a bit further i also read about windingroad.com - Which i had visited many times but had no idea it was a digital magazine only, i think it’s a very interesting project, i think they have missed A LOT of things that they could/can do and it will be interesting to see where they head to next, and i can only applaud them for taking the risk.

Been playing around with spotify for a while now, really like it, i know there is other services like it out there that’s been available for a long time, but this is the first music service i hooked up too, they don’t have all the songs, but it feels like they have a broader availability of regional music compared to something like itunes where they do “regional” selling.

And the streaming is lightning fast. Anyways i think it can be a great service for those who haven’t tried other platforms before and go straight to spotify since interface is very easy to use too.

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Hey if you know anybody who’s really good at doing Online Ad Sales, please drop me a line, need to be US based, but doesn’t matter where.
email is: firstname@thisdomain.com

Just noticed what must be one of the most watched websites in terms of webdesign, now have a new look, not sure if it’s temporary or will stay that way…

KRAMER: Jerry, don’t you see? This world here, this is George’s
sanctuary. If Susan comes into contact with this world, his world’s
collide. You know what happens then?

Have been getting a lot of facebook invitations lately.
I find Facebook quite interesting and think it’s more professional than MySpace. But i have some troubles signing up to Facebook mostly because for really the first time friends and acquaintances have asked me to sign up as have business contacts, and i am really having trouble mixing them i’ve found, for business i use LinkedIn quite a lot and like how the service works. However for friends the only social network i use for them is simply my cellphone, up until the beginning of this year i only had friends numbers on my cellphone to avoid the world’s colliding but i had to sync it because in the end i just couldn’t do business the way i was supposed to without business contacts on my phone. Maybe just i have this problem, not sure if it’s because normally my business world is just so far apart from my friends world???
Am i crazy or is this a good boundary to have?

Dell is to start selling computers through walmart

I think anybody who’s ever done retail have always looked upon Dell as the dream model to have where you controlled the entire flow from production to customer, i think it’s an end of an era to say the least, and obviously if Dell was a private company i don’t think this would ever have happened. I have always  been impressed by Dell as a company, and wish them all the best, what some people often been passed by is that Dell used to be (and could still be, not sure) the biggest $ generator on the internet, since they used to sell 40% of all their products online, which meant a staggering amount of revenues flowing through 1 single website.

The swedish forest stores 1/3 of all carbon dioxide let out in a year by swedes in the ground, and that the forest far outgrows the capitation of forest per year.  Pretty cool

Can’t say anything in my defense, i will try and improve soon.

I have to admit I have fallen in love with new York… Posted via blackberry

Super well done boys! Zecco which i am very proud to have been part of, just had a very good article covering them in Business Week

Have noticed that on several news sites, that you can “double” click on a word and they will load a thesaurus and match it up, the feature doesn’t get promoted anywhere from what i can see, but it’s beeing used at New york Times, and i saw it on another newspaper site the other day.

Sorry, this might not be so good in terms of independent news, but i can’t help to love it it’s like taguchi testing - AP ignoring paris hilton

    Sam Seaborn: [while discussing the importance of funding the “Super-Conductor Super-Collider” - a controversial scientific project that would cost billions:]
    Sen. Jack Enlow, D-IL: If we can only say what benefit is in it. No-one has been able to do that.
    Dr. Dalton Millgate: That’s because great achievement has no road map; and the X-Ray is pretty good, and so is penicillin, and neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind; and when the electron was discovered in 1897, it was useless; and now was have an entire world run by electronics. Hayden and Mozart never studied the classics. They couldn’t. They invented them.
    Sam Seaborn: Discovery.
    Dr. Dalton Millgate: What?
    Sam Seaborn: That’s the thing that you were… Discovery is what. That’s what this is use for. It’s for discovery !

Maybe i should apply for this one

Was just reading a NYT piece on how Arthur Schlesinger died yesterday, and i found the newspiece to be a bit to steep since i didn’t know enough about Mr Schlesinger, so an idea poped up.

Someone (You maybe!?) Should build a plugin for all browsers, that analyzes each page you browse (Or a set series of domains of your choosing) and then picks up what say the main 3 keywords for that page is.
For the selection of keywords in most cases a simple Keyword Density checked with stop words etc removed would do just fine.

Data for this page is:
Word - Instances - % of total words on page

1. article 24 2.37%
   
2. click 21 2.07%
   
3. schlesinger 17 1.68%

And for multiple words:

1. more articles 12 1.99%
2. new york 11 1.83%
3. york times 8 1.33%
4. arthur m 6 1%
5. white house 4 0.66%
6. arthur schlesinger 3 0.5%

As you can see both Article and Click could be described as stop words, or “common” words and could easily be removed.

Next step would be to match it up with wikipedia, you could hit Wikipedia with a query straight off, but since the Wikipedia database is available for download i would suggest that someone downloaded it and had a set domain for querying to guarantee fast response.

After this was done a button would appear somewhere in your toolbar or down right hand corner.

Revenue possibilities… well if you wanted to make money you could do a banner layover once the user hit the button to wikipedia… not saying that’s what you should do though.

Read a Vanity Fair article about the guys behind the pirate bay today, somewhat well written.

It got me thinking about possible solutions for some of the users that today download movies and tv shows illegally. You have services like iTunes store, Amazon UnBox. I have used iTunes myself to download tv shows, but it simply sucks… for 4 reaons mostly.

1. Had to use my friends US account to get latest tv shows
- What are they thinking… you have been able to send files pretty quickly around the world now for the last 10 years or so… media companies, welcome to a global market PLEASE!

2. Download speed
I actually reckon this is the holy grail to convert the people who really don’t wish to download illegally but do it anyways. Services like Rapidshare, Megaupload have realized this, because that’s what people are paying for there when they download something copyrighted. They are paying to download a illegal file as fast as their connection allows them too because they don’t want to wait on seeds/peers. I guess it’s like being “horny” (there we go… now google will filter me for adult content) - You want to get laid then and there… not in 5 hours.
They are labeling the services as “on demand” - On demand is absolutely not waiting a longer time period to download something than the actual file is.

3. Quality of download
All notes kind of co-exists with each other, but honestly, i want to be able to chose which quality i want to download something in, because hey if i am downloading an episode of say Seinfeld i really don’t care ALL that much if it’s 640×480 or 1024×768 or something even higher. I would even be willing to go much lower, hey if it was good compression enough i could do 320×240 too.
However it should all be available for up to my choosing!

4. Instant availability of content
Hey i understand that tv channels sells advertising, but shows should be possible to be downloaded the second they stopped showing.
And for movies it should be a couple of days after opening, and here some people might think… but hey they make A LOT of their money off movie tickets, yeah it’s true but there is a huge difference between watching a movie at home and at a cinema, not only the quality, but the social aspect. People are starting to become more “un-social” overall, hence the explosion of cafe’s worldwide, nobody wants to take someone home, so they meet up at a neutral place. That’s what the cinema is too, it’s a neutral place to do something, so even if they release the movies for downloading it will not stop people going to the cinemas, because it coincides with a different and bigger thing than the actual movie.

So i am not supporting piracy, but hey media people it’s quite a bit your own fault!

it’s like the old saying, if you don’t vote you don’t have a saying about how the people in charge runs the government.

It’s a bit like that here too, it doesn’t really feel like the entertainment people are trying that hard… stop complaining and start doing instead!