It’s going to take a Herculean effort to depose Google as Brits’ search engine of choice. But, percentage point by percentage point, Bing is fronting up, knocking its rival’s share below the important 90 percent mark. Read more at paidContent »
Nordic newspapers will be the latest to offer unlimited streaming music through Aspiro’s WiMP service, after publisher Schibsted bought the firm. But latest funding for Aspiro’s growth comes from outside of publishing. Read more at paidContent »
Some of the key Pixar staff whose hands sculpted Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody tell GigaOM’s Roadmap conference entrepreneurs must base their ideas off design that stems from a coherent story. Read more »
Tomorrow’s pay-TV box could be a handheld device or an in-TV app, if Magine, a new Swedish service using existing consumer gadgets and cloud distribution, gets its way. Read more at paidContent »
Is this the great firewall of Russia? Free-speech campaigners oppose a new agency that is blocking objectionable content. But, so far, outlawed sites contain child porn and drugs, not political dissent. Read more at paidContent »
Indie travel publisher TRVL didn’t like the software it had to use to make its free, iPad-only magazine – so it built its own. Now TRVL is giving away PRSS, hoping to kickstart other would-be moguls, and make a buck of its own. Read more at paidContent »
Payment meters win another exponent with news The Telegraph will require subscriptions from non-UK readers for 20 monthly articles and app access. Can this strategy of charging its biggest online audience pay off? Read more at paidContent »
Numbers of people paying for digital content will take off thanks to new media devices, Forrester forecasts. If paid content becomes commonplace, will publishers turn their back on advertising, and what should marketers do instead? Read more at paidContent »
A magazine is making its 1,000-issue, 90-year archive available to digital subscribers. The model could light the way for expert content publishers, who may be sitting on an archive gold mine – if they can start producing future-proof digital content today. Read more at paidContent »
Central Europe’s Piano Media has tried to build nationwide shared “paywalls” for dozens of news sites. Now it is acquiring a technology startup to offer news meters that can’t be defeated by deleting cookies. Read more at paidContent »
Movies are now the content of pizza. At least, for Domino’s, which is trying to incentivise booming ecommerce orders with complementary digital films. But, compared with dedicated VOD services, this initiative is a sloppy giuseppe. Read more at paidContent »
What happens in Belgium doesn’t necessarily stay in Belgium. Now Google News is facing a Brazilian boycott and France is threatening to copy a German-style tax on excerpting its newspapers. What’s an aggregator to do? Read more at paidContent »
UK commercial broadcaster ITV has long funded its free shows with advertising. Three years after declaring its intention to charge online, it is now finally publicly testing a paid VOD service. Read more at paidContent »
From the death spiral of ad downturn, digital audience migration and a thousand cuts, one man emerges to try some long-expected consolidation in the local news market. But can the proposed Local World company get going? Read more at paidContent »
The Financial Times’ digital subscriber sign-up continues apace, as the paper finds more money and more readers in paid digital content whilst the advertising market looks weak. Read more at paidContent »
Last week’s report is now confirmed, after Pearson and Bertelsmann took the weekend to hammer out a merger of their book publishers. But what is the rationale behind the big deal? Read more at paidContent »
Scandinavian newspaper publisher Schibsted is keeping up its efforts to diversify and attract user payments by investing in a regional ebook service. Read more at paidContent »
Magazine publisher Burda wants to take complete ownership of LinkedIn rival Xing, while rival Axel Springer is selling a games site to focus on its growing online content and classifieds business. Read more at paidContent »
Magazine publisher Future is exploiting iPad by offering a tablet production service to rivals and by identifying a new weekly publishing schedule for its monthly print titles and rolling news sites. Read more at paidContent »
In Russia’s fast-growing internet scene, Mail.ru is successfully marshalling its diverse arsenal of social network and game services to attract paying users, while its social advertising prospects turn down. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon’s global content strategy is becoming a step broader and more integrated through greater distribution for its Kindle range and inclusion of its video service Lovefilm on UK devices. Read more at paidContent »
Going digital-only may not suit all publishers yet, but some organisations for which paper publishing has been a means to an end are now increasingly going digital. Latest is a title on which homeless people depend for an income. Read more at paidContent »
The exclusive provider of ad services to a host of Italian online publishers is taking on money to fund development of new ad formats. Read more at paidContent »
In the online local listings and reviews segment, US big boy Yelp is giving a five-star review to Hamburg-based peer Qype – and buying it to expand the breadth of its business overseas. Read more at paidContent »
One of the many digital content services going global is music video outfit Vevo. Certain new countries mean a mobile-first approach – but that puts services at the mercy of a mobile ad ecosystem they say is still playing catch-up to desktop. Read more at paidContent »
4G mobile networks promise fast content access out of the home. The UK’s first such network is bundling movies and free WiFi access – but will consumers pay the 4G premium? Read more at paidContent »
Mobile networks like Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica are urgently investing in over-the-top internet services to guard against becoming dumb pipes. But what is the real value in telcos trying to mimic WhatsApp? Read more »
Music service Rara has spent the last 10 months quietly tweaking its offering following a quiet launch. Now it will start going live properly. The catch? Every user is going to have to pay to play. Read more at paidContent »
While Yahoo pulls out of South Korea citing “challenging” conditions, Google is seeing strong mobile revenue growth. What is the difference leading to contrasting fortunes? Read more at paidContent »
Download and streaming services are playing British musicians’ work to digital audiences around the world. But songwriters’ royalties from the overseas exposure are tiny – and they are going to stay that way. Read more at paidContent »
A skirmish between Google and newspapers over crawling of news headlines suggests Latin America’s digital publishing sector is maturing. But can Google keep publishers sweet enough to exploit opportunities in the fast-growing Brazilian market? Read more at paidContent »
The digital vendor that powers music services for Samsung, HTC, RIM and others is taking on investment to expand its offering from downloads to streaming, radio and more. Read more at paidContent »
Nokia sold a quarter fewer of its flagship smartphones last quarter, as retailers and carriers shied away from Lumia’s current generation, leaving Nokia with €120 million in spare parts. Shifting to new Lumias with the Windows Phone 8 software has hurt any momentum Nokia had. Read more »
‘Dead trees’ aren’t dead – they’re just dying. As news publishing’s funding dilemma grows more acute, everyone seems to know what The Guardian should do. Plenty of opinions were floated this week, as the paper denied it will stop printing. Read more at paidContent »
Managing cloud app-hosting services when many different locations and installations are involved can be a tricky exercise. Julian Coulon of Cedexis has some tips and tricks. Read more »
A new service, Eurex, promises to let broker any company’s cloud computing services to a new marketplace of consumers. GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference heard about the opportunities and challenges from company CEOs. Read more »
Talk about an overreaction. When education publisher Pearson spotted some infringing material on one weblog, its takedown by a host company felled a million more. Pearson apologises, but pokes the host for over-zealousness. Read more at paidContent »
Facebook users love sharing photos, and the demands of that appetite are gargantuan. Infrastructure engineering VP Jay Parikh lifted the lid on Facebook’s seven-petabytes-per-month photo upload task, during GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference. Read more »
Where’s the best place for cloud investment in Europe? Day One of Structure Europe concluded with an interesting discussion on cloud opportunities for startup companies. Read more »
TechCrunch’s CrunchBase has become a repository of information about tech startups. Now a Russian outfit wants to replicate the model, connecting investors with Russia’s fast-growing scene for a monthly subscription. Read more at paidContent »
