Archive for February 15th, 2008

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb 13, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — HP (NYSE:HPQ) and Unilever today announced an extension of their relationship with the signing of a seven-year outsourcing contract for the management of Unilever’s technology infrastructure in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Turkey and Middle East.

HP will provide an infrastructure designed to quickly adapt to the changing needs of Unilever’s business by standardizing, virtualizing and optimizing Unilever’s enterprise computing environment in the regions above as well as its client services environment in Asia Pacific, Africa, Turkey and the Middle East.

Operating as a single point of contact for Unilever’s enterprise computing environment, HP will work with Unilever’s strategic partners, including SAP, Microsoft and BT, to help reduce costs and ease the integration of new applications. HP also will manage the third-party contracts within Unilever’s technology environment in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Africa, Turkey and Middle East.

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MADRID — Disney has dipped its toe into the Spanish digital terrestrial television market, taking a 20% stake in nationwide free-to-air channel Net TV from media conglom Vocento.Deal has been valued at Euro 27 million ($39.4 million).

Via its Walt Disney Company Iberia subsidiary, the U.S. studio will bring to Net TV its expertise in developing TV channels and programming and tapping its huge film and TV library.

“We believe that DTT offers an excellent business opportunity for the future and we are delighted to cement our presence with this deal,” John Hardie, Walt Disney TV Europe, Middle East and Africa exec VP and managing director, said in a statement.

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TOTAL U.S. INTERNET AD SPENDING in the fourth quarter of 2007 grew nearly 28% over the same quarter in 2006 to $7.3 billion. For the full year 2007, online ad revenue grew 27% year-over-year to $25.5 billion, according to Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.

IDC research also found that Google’s net U.S. market share declined for the first time in two years due to slower growth in domestic fourth-quarter sales. The market leader’s net U.S. Internet advertising market share was down 0.5 percentage points to 23.7% last quarter compared to third quarter 2007. Google’s estimated net U.S. Internet advertising sales (excluding the traffic acquisition costs they pay out to the partners in their networks) grew by a little more than 40% in fourth quarter 2007, but its year-on-year growth rate in the quarter before had been 50%.

“If a merger between Microsoft’s new media business and Yahoo would come to pass, the combined entity would have a net U.S. advertising market share of about 17% based on our 4Q07 data,” said Karsten Weide, program director for IDC’s Digital Marketplace: Media and Entertainment service. “It would not quite bring Microsoft-Yahoo to where Google is in online advertising in the U.S., but it would give them a much better fighting chance than if they went it alone.”

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Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin warned mobile carriers to make their services easier and cheaper to use or they risk handing over their a lucrative portion of their business to companies like Google. He said mobile carriers have done a particularly poor job of making their services attractive to users; failing to fix that would be the industry’s biggest mistake…

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Cinema attendance in the European Union dipped 2.2% last year, with 910 million tickets sold, compared with 931 million in 2006.Admissions were up on 2005’s 899 million, but down significantly on the bumper 2004 total of 1 billion, according to provisional figs released by the European Audiovisual Observatory.

Among the major territories with falling admissions last year were Germany (down 8.2%), Spain (down 7.7%) and France (down 5.6%). Steep dropoffs were seen in some new EU states, such as Hungary (down 13.8%) and Slovakia (down 19.9%).

However, there were some notable upticks in other territories.

In Italy, admissions grew 12.3%, and, in the U.K., admissions were up 3.7%. Some new EU countries also saw rising attendance, most notably in Lithuania, where admissions shot up 34% from 2.4 million to 3.2 million. Read the rest of this entry »

The two smartest cars in the universe get chained up and whipped, until they escape using their super lasers, in this scene from Power Rangers In Space. With Knight Rider zooming back onto our screens this weekend, everybody’s acting as though KITT invented the super-smart car. But cars with a mind of their own have a long and awesome history in science fiction. Click through for our roundup of sentient cars that aren’t called KITT or Bumblebee. Storm Blaster and Lightning Cruiser from Power Rangers In Space. These are the two smartest and fastest cars in the universe. Storm Blaster is the Jeep, Lightning Cruiser is the sports car. They were lost inside an asteroid for thousands of years, but then the villain Divatox (best name ever!) found them and tried to control them. Instead, they decided to team up with the Power Rangers. In the clip above, Divatox’s minions have the two cars chained up and are whipping them.

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VIDEO GAME PUBLISHERS HAVE A new full-service marketing agency to turn to, as Sweet Spot Productions has officially launched, with initial clients including SEGA and EIDOS.

Hollywood, Calif.-based Sweet Spot creates ad campaigns for both game and film studios, and produces Webisodes, film trailers, as well as TV and radio spots to aid in promoting their client’s products. Co-founders Don Scotti and Joe Takats are film industry vets who have worked with companies like Warner Bros., Paramount and Disney on previous projects.

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TOYOTA IS PITCHING ITS COMPACT Corolla sedan to younger consumers who fancy themselves young Jay Gatsbys. The effort actually began during last week’s Super Bowl XLII with a humorous spot set in the parking lot of a mansion and focusing on the car’s sound insulation. The humor continues with a raft of ads touting the car, which has gotten a stem-to-stern redesign for 2009.

The effort, via Saatchi & Saatchi, L.A., aims to appeal to “young achievers”–who might otherwise be lusting for a Bimmer or a Lexus, for that matter. The campaign posits the car as an affordable alternative to a luxury car. Tag: “Live the Dream for Less Coin.”

Comprising three TV ads, print, outdoor and assorted Web elements, the push offers campy humor in a setting that’s a parody of the high life. The ads are set at a baroque mansion–the “Corolla Dream Estate.”

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Google it seems has lost the battle for the coveted C block of wireless spectrum currently being auctioned out by the Federal Communications Commission. Either Verizon or AT&T will win the spectrum, but Google has already achieved its primary goal.

All the search giant really wanted was to open up competition in the wireless market, which thanks to the spectrum rules, would happen (to a certain extent) whether Google won the auction or not. Verizon or AT&T will be required to build a network that allows any kind of device or software to run on it. In the end, Peter Cramton, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, an important figure in designing the spectrum auctions in the 1990s, believes the auction “will not transform the industry in a fundamental way.” One or several auction winners will walk away with the C licenses spectrum, though it won’t be Google. The coveted C block will go for less than what many anticipated, while many of the A and B licenses are now “grossly overpriced.” The FCC’s total gross for the auction is now approaching $20 billion.
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