Digital Media: Austin

Simon & Schuster has inked a deal with LibreDigital (a division of NewsStand) to help digitally distribute its content. The LibreDigital solution is described here.

Business Wire

iCrossing, an integrated digital marketing company, has announced plans to utilize Pluck’s SiteLife platform to integrate social media into its client’s websites.

Business Wire

On Networks and blinkx announced a recent distribution partnership. blinkx plans to match contextual advertising with ON Networks high-def content and both will share in the revenue. The actual split was not mentioned.

Business Wire

The ABJ reported that Apogee is opening an office in Canada to help service existing clients. The article also mentioned that Apogee opened satellite offices in San Fran and Chicago earlier this year. At this point the company has roughly 60 employees, up from only 20 in 2006.

The SummerMash 2008 tour is making a stop in Austin on July 30th. Pluck is a local sponsor and the stop is in conjunction with an Austin Tech Happy Hour. I’m not exactly sure what the event will entail besides food and drinks but that’s usually enough to bring people out.

Who, when, and where.

Speaking of Austin Ventures and Bazaarvoice, the Austin Business Journal is reporting that the social commerce company has raised more money in a series C funding round. The money will be used to expand internationally as well as locally here in Austin.

The story states that the company will be “aggressively hiring sales people, Java developers, product managers and tech service and account managers.” The company will also begin looking for a larger space to accommodate it’s rapid growth here in Austin.

So I haven’t posted in forever but thought I’d get back in the game. This particular story struck me as post worthy. The New York Times’ DealBook is reporting that Austin Ventures is partnering with former Intermix CEO Sherman Atkinson to create a new media company called Atcor Holdings.

The venture capital firm is handing over $50 million to help Atcor pursue a rollup strategy for companies in the $25 to $75 million revenue range. This is on the heals of the announcement in April to hand over $50 million to Jeff Dachis of Razorfish fame to create a social networking rollup company.

One wonders if either of these new holding companies/funds will be used to rollup existing digital media companies currently in Austin Ventures portfolio. I’m looking at you Bazaarvoice, Powered, FameCast, On Networks, NetStreams, and Slacker.

So I haven’t posted in forever but I felt like this news was worthy.

Today DGFastchannel and Enliven Marketing Technologies (parent company of Springbox) announced plans to merge.  I’m listening to the conference call right now.

The deal is supposed to close by the end of Q3.  You can see the press release here.

Fresh off his 60 Minutes interview, SXSW has announced that Mark Zuckerberg will be the keynote speaker on Sunday, March 9 at 2:00pm.  I have a feeling that there will be more people there than for Dan Rather last year.

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Paidcontent.org announced last Tuesday that Austin based, Pluck, will be integrating their SiteLife social networking platform with Facebook and OpenSocial.  Currently media sites such as Reuters and the Washington post utilize the platform to add web 2.0/social media functionality such as comments, profiles, and blogs to their pages.  Mashable has a post about how they think this functionality might be utilized.