Marketing Pilgrim

Google has wasted no time in acquiring Omnisio an online video tools company that only launched publicly in March of this year.

TechCrunch explains what might soon come to YouTube via this acquisition:

The service lets users annotate videos, mash various clips up, and synchronize Slideshare presentations to videos (great for conference presentations). Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations.

Want to see Ominisio in action? Check out the embeded video below.

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Yahoo’s letter to shareholders yesterday was just the first step in their latest defense against Carl Icahn’s attempts to elect a proxy board at the shareholder meeting in two weeks. Today, Yahoo and its allies strike two more blows.

First, Yahoo has begun leveraging one of its biggest assests—one of (if not the) most popular home pages on the Internet. Yahoo has put a notice about the pending board election below the fold. TechCrunch spotted this earlier today, with a box on the Yahoo home page below-the-fold reading “Your Yahoo!. Your Vote.” An alternate form of the box, as seen by CNET, reads “We have a couple of exclamation points to make.” Finally, a third iteration quotes Carl Icahn:

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According to Mashable, Google just acquired Russian contextual ad company Begun for $140 million and grabbed a monopoly in Russia’s contextual advertising market in the process.

Begun is currently owned by two companies, leading to an interesting double-deal:

[Rambler Media Ltd] currently holds 50.1% of Begun. The transaction will consist of Rambler buying the remaining 49.9% stake in Begun from Bannatyne Limited, affiliated with the Finam group of companies, immediately after which Rambler will sell 100% of Begun to Google subject to certain approvals and conditions precedent for a total cash consideration of US$140 million, of which US$69.9 million is attributable to Bannatyne, with customary closing adjustments.

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I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. Somehow, by using every cliché in the book, I think I just guaranteed that I’ll always have get to be the one covering Microsoft/Yahoo/Google deal news. Well, today we’ll go with mixed sport metaphors. Mixing metaphors is even more fun than just using them!

Okay, so let’s hit one out of the park, shall we? There’s a new letter to Yahoo shareholders today—from Yahoo itself. It’s quite long, and since I’ve been working on synopses today, I’ll go ahead and boil this one down give you just the box score on this one, too. But just because I like you.

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Yahoo is in the midst of a three-front war—and yet not one of these fights is for dominance in any field of operations business.

The Eastern Front
Dateline Washington, DC. Yahoo is facing a Senate hearing on the Yahoo/Google search ads deal today. paidContent reports:

Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will point out . . . that the agreement does not expand Google’s share of the search market, and that the alternative outcome, Yahoo selling to Microsoft, would be much worse for competition.

Aside from facing the Senate now and other regulatory committees later, Yahoo and Google will face individual states, which are also subpoenaing them.

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I knew you were wondering, since none of us are sure these days, but Yahoo is still giving it the old college try. Here’s the latest from the Yahoo battlefront.

Although a few of our commentators insist that the Yahoo/Microsoft deal is all but inevitable, Rupert Murdoch disagrees. And I think he might know—after all, his properties, especially News Corp, have been courted by both sides almost since the beginning for support in brokering and/or funding a deal.

Murdoch said at the Allen & Co conference:

There won’t be a deal. There’s bad personal feelings. In six months, (Microsoft) will walk away.

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Suddenly, I feel like I work for Soap Digest. But with the latest don’t-miss developments in The Young and the Profitless, we had to get a jump start on Season Two!

Last time, on The Young and the Profitless:

Despite Stacey’s (YHOO) recent marriage to Grant (GOOG; last season), Brad (MSFT) has decided he’s going to win her back, with or without her consent.

Meanwhile, Grant’s and Stacey’s marriage is really one of convenience to provide financial support for Stacey When faced with Brad’s emotional assault, Stacey turns to Tim (Time Warner) for help—but Brad has been trying to get Tim on his side to help woo Stacey once and for all. Who will win Stacey’s heart and search business?

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You’ve heard said "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," now Yahoo wants to test the boundaries of that maxim to the full.

The Times Online is reporting Yahoo’s efforts to partner-up with Time Warner and possibly merge with the media company’s AOL unit–a deal worth as much as $10 billion! However, the clock is ticking…

Jerry Yang, co-founder and chief executive of Yahoo! is threatened on two fronts in the short term.

The first is a hostile break-up approach from Microsoft and the second is a boardroom coup by Carl Icahn, Yahoo!’s major shareholder.

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Sometimes we just can’t let dead horses lie. That’s okay, neither can Microsoft. After months of more drama than a daytime soap (ahem) with the attempted merger/acquisition of Yahoo, Microsoft pulled their offer back in May.

And now they’re saying, “Whoopsiedoodle. On second thought . . . we will be coming back fighting.” The Wall Street Journal reports today that Microsoft is planning another run at Yahoo—and this time they won’t be going it alone. They’re actively looking for partners to dismantle Yahoo. Current candidates include News Corp. (aka Nick on Y&P) and Time Warner (we may call him . . . Tim. He’s Alan (AOL)’s dad).

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Breaking news from Microsoft…

We’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

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Just six weeks after its coming out parade, natural language search engine Powerset is the subject of two rumors about its acquisition by Microsoft.

VentureBeat kicks things off, by telling us the deal has been done, and the purchase price $100 million.

Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.

The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month.

As if annoyed that VentureBeat might have gotten the scoop, TechCrunch reports the deal is not actually final.

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Yesterday’s news that Nokia acquired location based social network Plazes, was worthy only of making our Pilgrim’s Picks. Today’s news that Nokia has acquired mobile platform Symbian–and plans to make it open source–is definitely worthy of its own post.

Nokia already owned 48% of Symbian, but is willing to pay around $410 million in cash to acquire the remaining 52%.

So, what’s Nokia’s plan for Symbian?

Nokia on Tuesday also said it and other mobile phone makers such as Motorola, Inc , LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson along with operators AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone Group  and chipmakers Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics have formed the non-profit Symbian foundation to drive innovation in mobile services.

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