News Corp buys remaining 49% stake of Jamba from Verisign

Written on 7th October 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has taken full ownership of mobile content provider Jamba by buying VeriSign’s 49 percent stake for about $200 million. VeriSign has been trying to divest its slower-growing businesses to focus on its core website-naming and Internet security services.

Jamba was founded in Berlin in 2000 by the Samwer brothers (that’s right, those guys who invested in Facebook) and is still based in the German city next to having established its US headquarters in California. In late 2004, VeriSign bought Jamba for about $270 million. On 12 September 2006, News Corporation announced it paid approximately $188 million for 51% shares in Jamba and would combine it with Fox Mobile Entertainment assets.

The company makes content like wallpapers, ringtones and games for mobile phones. It also offers short episodes — called “mobisodes” — of some Fox TV series, including “24,” “Prison Break” and “Bones,” for phones. The company also sells insurance for mobile phones and home electronics and runs online gaming and online dating services.

(Hat tip to SAI)

Jamba, Jamster, News Corp, news corporation, Rupert Murdoch, verisign

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Registry fee for domain names will increase

Written on 28th March 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Yesterday, VeriSign announced that the prices for registering .com and .net domain names will increase. The Internet services company agreed with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that from October 1, the barrier for starting a dotcom site will be higher. This is odd news in an economy where things tend to get cheaper (or even Free) instead of more expensive.

Don’t panic though. The increase is minimal:

VeriSign said the registry fees for .com and .net domain names will increase to $6.86 and $4.23 from $6.42 and $3.85, respectively.

Individuals won’t have to worry about price increases but it might be another blow for domain tasting and kiting. Even a slight increase in costs might make their business-cases less attractive.

Source: Reuters.

dotcom, icann, money, verisign

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Internet greatest’s join up with OpenID

Written on 7th February 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur

Today Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, VeriSign, and Google have joined the OpenID Foundation as board members. The OpenID Foundation board is there to “to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community”. OpenID is really exploding in the last couple of months. With Google and Yahoo! becoming official OpenID providers, the OpenID movement has grown to billions of users. Now the Big Five have announced to not only support OpenID as a provider but also actively help to develop the standard furthermore.

Earlier this year OpenID 2.0 has been released. This is a serious landmark in removing the burdon for web users to store loads of password and username combinations. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.

In Europe the OpenID Europe Foundation is gathering more and more local OpenID providers to team up. Snorri Giorgetti, founder of the OpenID Europe Foundation, says Europe now contains 17 OpenID providers, varying from France to Estonia. The European Foundation is not directly connected to the OpenID foundation but is there to promote OpenID in the member countries and to support the OpenID consumer websites on a technical level.

Europe, google, ibm, Microsoft, openid, verisign, yahoo

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