Microsoft Lands EPA As Virtual Earth Partner

On the same day that Google offered street view for Google Moon and $30 million for the Lunar X Prize, Microsoft has announced the signing of the US Environmental Protection Agency as a Microsoft Virtual Earth Partner.

The EPA has licensed the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform to develop mission-critical geospatial and mapping applications and will also integrate Virtual Earth into existing line-of-business applications, including Web-based mapping applications and environmental monitoring systems.

The deal will see Virtual Earth benefit via data sharing and analysis and insight for partner agencies, citizens and nongovernmental NGOs “on topics ranging from superfund sites and oil spills to waterways and the quality of beach water.”

Although Google remains the dominate player in the space, the deal continues Microsoft’s efforts to drive awareness and business through its competitor product. Having said all of that though, Google now offers neighborhood shots from the moon, pretty cool if perhaps without any serious business use; Microsoft might have gotten the contract but Google continues to win the hearts and minds of tech users.

$15 Million For VideoEgg As They Redefine Their Business

VideoEgg has just closed a $15 million series D round of funding led by Focus Ventures with WPP, Maveron, and August participating. VideoEgg cites plans to accelerate the development of their ad products and international sales network as the reasons behind the investment.

VideoEgg started off as a white-label video host, powering some notable web properties such as AOL sites, Bebo, hi5, Piczo, myYearbook, Dogster, Tagged and others. They then quickly incorporated an ad network. Like many other video startups, they did it through overlay advertisements (Yes, before YouTube). Startups are experimenting with other video ad formats “>as well. VideoEgg has been driving “significant” revenue through their overlay advertising.

Recently they applied that overlay model to Facebook as a new ad network, helping users monetize videos and applications. They reportedly pay a healthy CPM (developers have reported ~$8-10 CPM). Other Facebook ad networks include Lookery, RockYou, SocialMedia, and FB Exchange.

VideoEgg wants to continue developing their ad platform, moving from an impression model to an engagement model, while making ads more social. Although they remain tight lipped on the plans, ad networks on Facebook aim to make ads more engaging by tying virtual rewards to user’s contributions.

People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts.

Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings.

As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines - Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services.

To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts

Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
FEC Determines That Blogs Count As Media

Google Lands CNN As Exclusive Adsense User

CNN.com and Google have announced an agreement that will see Google’s AdSense become the exclusive text link advertising provider on CNN.com.

The deal will also open up the extensive inventory on CNN.com to Adwords’ advertisers.

Senior VP and GM of CNN.com David Payne said the deal would help deliver relevant ads to CNN users, “enhancing their overall experience on CNN.com.”

Although the deal might not initially sound all that exciting, CNN.com is a top 100 site online according to Alexa, making it one of the most popular media destinations online. That’s a lot of pages and ad inventory for Google to sell ads on, inventory that should pay handsomely for all involved.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, including the length of the agreement, which was described only as “multi-year.”