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26 August 2006
Capital 2.0
The best intelligence sources for the digital content sector are Rafat Ali's Paidcontent and Moconews. So now and then some of the interesting information he aggregates is published in special reports.
The newest pearl in these series is The Social Media Deals Report, covering the venture capital and M&A deals in the social media sector (for the second half of 2005 and the first half of 2006) available at just $ 100. Some highlights:
VC INVESTMENTS PER CATEGORY:
Social Networking: 21 companies, total: $95.8 million, 8 undisclosed
Business Social Networking: 3 companies; total: $21 million, 1 undisclosed
Video Sharing: 14 companies; total: $60.2 million, 5 undisclosed
Photo Sharing: 8 companies; total: $68.26 million
Avatars: 6 companies; total: $52.73 million
Gaming/Role-Playing: 2 companies; total: $16 million
Personal Media/P2P Management and Sharing: 5 companies; total: $17.5 million, 2 undisclosed
Entertainment Content: 4 companies; total: $28.5 million; 1 undisclosed
Collaborative & Social Search: 4 companies; total: $7.3 million; two undisclosed
Listings/Review/Events/Recommendations: 7 companies; total: $20.7 million; 1 undisclosed
Music Related: 6 companies; total: $16.7 million; 2 undisclosed
P2P: 3; total: $11.75 million; 1 undisclosed
Citizen-Blog Journalism: 9 companies; total: $22.9 million; 5 undisclosed
RSS Tools and Services: 8 companies; total: $13.5 million; 5 undisclosed
News Personalization & Sharing: 4 companies; total: $43.3 million; 1 undisclosed
Podcasting: 4 companies; total: $14 million; 2 undisclosed
Blogs Tools & Services: 5 companies; total: $26.1 million; 1 undisclosed
Wikis: 3 companies; total: $10.15 million
China: 8 companies; total: $47.3 million; one undisclosed
Physical Media: 2 companies; total: $17 million
IM: 1 company; $3.5 million
Mobile Social Media: 13 companies; total: $67.35 million; 2 undisclosed
# OF M&A DEALS PER CATEGORY:
– Citizen-Blog Journalism: 5 deals
– Community Sites: 6 deals
– Social Networking/Dating: 15 deals
– Video Sharing: 4 deals– Music Related: 4 deals
– Gaming: 1 deal– Tagging/RSS: 3 deals
– Podcasting: 1 deal
– Listings/Review/Events/Recommendations: 4 deals
– Mobile Social Networks/Community: 3 deals
– Other Mobile Social Media Deals: 5 deals
BIGGEST M&A DEALS:
– Fox Interactive buys Intermix/MySpace: $580M
– ITV buys Friends Reunited: About $304M
– Viacom buys Xfire: $102M
ES3* - Social warfare
Few people realize that the most advanced online gaming concepts are way ahead of the most mind boggling Web 2.0 concepts. Since gaming is also developing as a perfect convergence ground for multimedia, it will no doubt dominate the media discussions during the coming 10 or 20 years. Therefore, in my mind, I tend to classify many mmorpgs as Web 3.0.
Some of the most interesting technologies and gameplays for mmporgs have originally been developed by or for the U.S. Army. And now it seems that the military are learning from the social aspects of some of these same gaming concepts in consumer environments, in applications they use to train soldiers in the field, blending the digital and the real world.
This article in Technology Review describes the genesis and future state of ES3 ("Every Soldier a Sensor Simulation"), a video game developed by the U.S. Army Research and Development Command's Simulation and Training Center, based on the military doctrine that every soldier is a "sensor", much more able to identify threats and targets amid the chaos of reality than any machine. ES3 is heavier on social skills than on combat:
"In our environment of asymmetric warfare, you're trying to win the hearts and minds of people," says Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Compton, director of military operations at the Orlando center. "The last thing you want to do is to pull your trigger." [...] Players are evaluated on how well they gather and report information. ES3 [...] allows soldiers to upload digital photos of real-life details - say, an undocumented style of Iraqi dress - to the army's online ES3 network. If administrators approve these additions, they are incorporated into future play.
In the coming months, ES3 will be modified to include a sort of built-in language trainer, which will familiarize soldiers with common Iraqi phrases and symbols. "These aren't games," says Compton. "They're a new type of digital training."
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