Lotsa “news” coming out of Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit happening in NYC and London this week (Do they ever invite other press to this?). A roundup:
— French media group Lagardere is banking on the Internet and sport to drive its growth in coming years, CFO Dominique d’Hinnin said. Lagardere plans small and mid-sized Internet acquisitions, targeting content-based Websites with high margin potential in countries where it already has strong positions, and can achieve the same kind of profitability as the radio business — 40-50 percent, he said. This ruled out trying to buy big search engines which the group “cannot afford” and community websites such as MySpace, DailyMotion, YouTube or Skyblog that have a huge audience but no clear business model.
— WPP is eyeing small- to medium-sized acquisitions of digital advertising companies…it aims to boost the revenue it generates from digital assets to about one-third of total revenue from about 20 percent, or $2.3 billion, in 2006, Sorrell said.
— AT&T expects targeted advertising related to its video (IPTV and broadband) and mobile services to become a billion dollar business in three years, said John Stankey, AT&T’s president for operations support. AT&T said its advertising revenue from U-verse and wireless today is very small. The company last year created a team to put the infrastructure in place to take advantage of the advertising revenue opportunity.
— Sling Media plans to resell fast Internet service and may start showing ads later this year, said CEO Blake Krikorian…later this year Sling Media will add a virtual button to its PC and cell phone software that will boost home broadband service speed. A deal with GetConnected Inc. will let Sling users upgrade their broadband services some time later this year, Krikorian said. GetConnected has relationships with a number of Internet providers, including Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Sling Media also may start showing ads on its service as early as this summer, when its new Clip and Sling service launches.
— Cisco is developing offerings to help create social networking Web sites that let groups communicate, Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo said.
— Europe’s leading blog company Skyblog is in tie-up talks with Google and others to accelerate its growth beyond Europe, putting on ice plans for a flotation later this year…With 8.5 million active blogs, Skyblog draws the biggest audience of all blog platforms in both Europe and France and generates revenue from advertising.
More coverage form Reuters summit is here.
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