MOL acquires Friendster
Malaysian digital payment-development company MOL announced last Thursday its plans to fully acquire US social networking site (SNS) Friendster.
According to the companies, the merger will create “Asia’s largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network, pairing MOL’s offline retail channel partners and payment platform with Friendster’s large online footprint, social network and user community in Asia”.
Approximately 90% of Friendster’s user base is in Asia, and is particularly dominant in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Its target user is between the ages of 16 and 24.
The news came less than one week after Friendster unveiled its relaunched site and logo that included improved services for digital micropayments and games, for which MOL claims to be well-entrenched in Southeast Asia.
Among Friendster’s changes is the adoption of easier site navigation; entertainment and gaming features; services that allow users to better personalize their Friendster profiles, homepages and navigation; easier ways to share photos; and a new Friendster Gift Shop, which allows users to purchase gifts through micropayments via Friendster’s Virtual Wallet.
MOL has a network of more than 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels across 75 countries worldwide and like Friendster, has a strong market in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as Thailand and India. The company also partners with more than 70 online game publishers that have have 200 online game titles.
“This combination is a natural progression of our relationship and will be an industry-changing event,” said Friendster CEO Richard Kimber. “The new combined entity gives Friendster the kind of financial backing, retail distribution, and e-commerce infrastructure that will enable us to accelerate our strategy and create a locally relevant, fun experience for our users in Asia, both on and offline.”
News of Friendster’s intentions to find a buyer surfaced in July this year. At the time, a source at Friendster confirmed that TechCrunch, which first reported the story, had seen “a very fact-based document” issued by Friendster and Morgan Stanley, which was enlisted to help with the process. That article noted that Friendster sought a buyer looking to gain quick access to the Asian social networking scene.
Last week, news surfaced that Friendster had shortlisted a group of companies for the merger. Reuters cited sources that named Chinese digital powerhouse Tencent as among the contenders.
Friendster and MOL first began working together in October, when the digital payment company was enlisted to develop an integrated payment platform that would lay the foundation for The Friendster Wallet and The Friendster Gift Shop.
"Tiger" the most searched term on US news sites
After the mysterious car crash on Nov 27, which have sprouted rumours of numerous extra-marital affairs, Tiger Woods has become the top search team in US news sites at the beginning of this month.
According to New York-based research firm Experian Hitwise, “Tiger Woods” ranked first in those searches on Dec 1, Dec 2 and Dec 4. Total queries for Woods soared more than 40-fold in the week of the accident. It almost doubled the following week.
Woods crashed his car outside his home near Orlando, Florida and posted a statement on his website on Dec 2 saying that he had let his family down with "transgressions" but did not address reports of infidelity that appeared in the media such as US Weekly.
“There’s an almost unquenchable appetite for more content,” said Pete Blackshaw, an analyst with Nielsen Co in Cincinnati. “Traffic is taking a significant jump.”
On Google, terms related to Woods were among the top 20 fastest-growing queries for all but one day of this month. Bing, the no. 2 US search engine, said queries for Woods shot up almost 40-fold in the past 39 days while Nielsen said the percentage of blogs commenting on Woods surged more than 10-fold.
While TV ads featuring Woods have vanished from the airwaves, the scandal hasn’t had that same effect online, said Rajeev Goel, chief executive officer of California- based PubMatic Inc.
The bulk of advertising with Woods is probably traditional media, such as television and print, said Goel, whose company helps Web publishers sell space to advertisers.
On the contrary, he expects the scandal to help sites sell more advertising. Some of PubMatic’s news and entertainment customers have seen traffic double since the Woods story broke, he said.
Some of Woods's sponsors such as Proctor & Gamble, Gillette, Electronic Arts and Nike said they have not altered their marketing plans since the accident. Other sponsors include Accenture, Upper Deck, AT&T , TLC Vision Corp , Berkshire Hathaway's NetJets private jet unit and Tag Heuer watches.
Google teams up with newspapers for "Living Stories" feature
Rupert Murdoch may have turned away from Google when he threatened to remove his news organisations from being indexed by the search engine, but other newspapers are working together with the search engine.
The New York Times and Washington Post will be introducing an experimental way of presenting news online through Google's "Living Stories". The online publishing feature organises information according to how the news is developing.
"We're looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organisations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features," software engineer Neha Singh and senior business project manager Josh Cohen wrote on the Google blog.
"Living Stories" works in a similar fashion to topic pages – groups content around a keywords such as "climate change" or "the war in Afghanistan".
Binding it together using a story summary, the experiment prioritises content according to how important it is and displays it in different ways. Each topic comes with a visual timeline and a list of important events, and the option of filtering topics - in "the war in Afghanistan", for example, the reader can focus on "the troop debate" or "the Afghanistan elections".
One of the most interesting aspect of the feature is that it remembers what users have read and keeps track of what they clicked on. It then highlights the changes and updates since their last visit to get rid of redundant information.
"The page is personalised to user reading patterns. When users leave the Living Story and come back to it later, the newest updates and events are presented at the top. If a user read a particular update on a previous visit, it is collapsed the next time the user returns," explains Google's Oliver Rickman.
View the video below to get a better understanding of Living Stories:
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