Update On Netscape.com: It’s Done, Possibly Moving To WOW.com. Big AOL Layoffs Coming.
We hear that wow.com, a domain previously owned by Compuserve and acquired by AOL, is a potential landing place for the Netscape service. AOL may have different plans for wow.com, however, and the Netscape portal may land somewhere else. Either way, look for a link or module from the old service to remain on the netscape.com domain after the changeover.
We also expect to hear about material layoffs at AOL in the next six weeks, possibly as much as 15% of the 16,000 strong workforce. Next week the senior execs are supposed to be notified of the exact size of the cuts and whether they are targeted to specific business groups or across the board cuts.
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Wrestling for the 401(k) Purse
It's the battle royal of retirement: Funds and insurers are vying over $90 billion that a new law may funnel to investment plans
Housing: Bush to the Rescue, Sort Of
The President's plan to allow distressed homeowners to switch into FHA guaranteed loans stops well short of a full-scale bailout
Former AOL, Fox execs start Internet firm: Report
Former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller and former Fox Interactive Media President Ross Levinsohn have started an Internet company aimed at buying, packaging and re-selling Internet startups as a combined entity, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Ross Levinsohn And Jonathan Miller To Announce New Buyout Fund Next Week
This news has been simmering for a while. When Ross Levinsohn (pictured left) resigned as the President of Fox Interactive Media late last year it was rumored that he intended to raise a large fund to acquire Internet startups. He soon partnered with Jonathan Miller, the former Chairman and CEO of America Online and the two have been out raising capital for the last few months. Their new entitiy is called Velocity Investment Group.
They’ve found their partner - $15 billion hedge fund General Atlantic. Details on the amount of capital committed to the new fund are scarce, but General Atlantic issued a press release today announcing that Levinsohn and Miller have become advisors to the fund. The timing is interesting - 5:14 pm EST on the Friday before the long weekend. The press was circling on this story, and the release was obviously made to preempt the news from breaking.
More news should be coming next week as details leak - size of the fund, etc. The new venture will compete with Demand Media and others for acquisitions. Demand Media, which has raised $220 million in capital, was founded by former Intermix Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Ironically, Intermix Media, the parent company to MySpace, was acquired by Fox during Levinsohn’s tenure there.
Update: We beat the WSJ by 16 minutes on this one. Their story is here.
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1.9 Billion Words; Scribd Users Have A Lot To Say
Wikipedia attracted a lot of attention earlier this week when Nikola Smolenski calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia. Smolenski calculated that as of last September, Wikipedia’s English index of informative/controversial articles would fill about 750 400 page volumes. Under the assumption of a 6MB volume, the total site would take up about 2,500 volumes (~15GB).
Today Scribd has released some numbers talking about just how big they’ve gotten as well. Since launching 6 months ago, the site has collected over 178,798 documents. That may not seem like much compared to Wikipedia’s over 5.3 million articles (source) across all languages (as of last September), but Scribd users seem more verbose. Scribd users have uploaded over 1.9 billion words, which would take up over 2,287 of Smolenski’s volumes (13.4 GB). No word on how many of those words are copyrighted.
However, Wikipedia is still obviously the pageview king, drawing over 7 billion pageviews (June) and 42.9 million (Feb) visitors per month, to Scribd’s 3.8 million uniques. Google was responsible for 24% of the traffic, and I imagine the same is true for Scribd. Wikipedia also features highly targeted and edited content to Scribd’s library of reports and rants. Although, unlike Wikipedia, Scribd is helping a lot of people catch up on Harry Potter.
Scribd has had quite a ride since launching over 6 months ago. They sustained a considerable amount of traffic after launch, and eventually went on to raise $3.5 million from Redpoint Ventures. Apparently, easily publishing documents online was not a solved problem.
Here’s a chart of the word growth of both Wikipedia and Scribd:
Note: According to statistics listed on Wikipedia, the site (all languages) has grown from 49,000 words in January 2001 to 1.7 billion words last September (the last reported point). Since the data only goes to September 2006, I extrapolated the growth (yellow) assuming the previous year’s monthly growth rate of 7.7%.
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Is Europe’s House Party Ending, Too?
After nearly a decade of exuberant growth, residential real estate prices are clearly starting to cool
Housing: Bush Rides to the Rescue, Sort Of
The President's plan to allow distressed homeowners to switch into FHA guaranteed loans stops well short of a full-scale bailout
The Sweet Business of Gourmet Chocolate
Sales and profits are up in the high-end chocolate segment as consumers continue to splurge on these affordable indulgences
The confounding complexities of building green
A survey released last week by the World Business Council on Sustainable Development found that key players in real estate and construction overstate the extra costs of green buildings by some 300 percent, "creating a major barrier to more energy efficiency in the building sector."