This is more of an enquiry than claim: is Soundbuzz the backbone of BigPond Music? I just read a post over at TechCrunch claiming that Motorola has acquired Soundbuzz. It mentions that Soundbuzz has partnerships with Hutchison 3, Motorola, Airtel, SingTel, M1, Optus Zoo, Telstra/ BigPond Music and Microsoft.

THE surfwear and streetwear company Billabong International has snapped up the Tigerlily swimwear and clothing business from Jodhi Meares, the former wife of James Packer.

Billabong, which has a market capitalisation of $3 billion, has not revealed how much it paid for the operation but it said the acquisition would be earnings per share positive in the first year.

However, market sources said Ms Meares would be paid between $3 million and $5 million for the company she built up over the past nine years.

Continue reading about Billabong’s take-over of Tigerlily

Online search leader Google said on Friday it purchased FeedBurner, which helps bloggers and podcasters syndicate and make money from their online content, for an undisclosed sum.

Chicago-based FeedBurner “delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content,” wrote Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management, in announcing the deal on Google’s official blog.

FeedBurner also offers a tool for pushing ads through feeds, generating advertising revenue.

According to some reports Google was to pay $US100 million for FeedBurner, which was launched in 2004.

Source: SMH

Wotif.com, an online accommodation booking site, has severed ties with Ninemsn Ltd.

This comes as Ninemsn and Sensis recently joined forces. Ninemsn is a portal that brings both Microsoft (MSN) and Channel 9/PBL content -particularly news- together through the one interface. Currently, Ninemsn attracts around 11-million visitors per month.

Wotif.com’s chief operations officer, Robbie Cooke said in a letter to shareholders that “The withdrawal of Wotif.com from the Ninemsn site will have no negative impact upon the Wotif.com’s financial performance.”

Without the partnership (with Ninemsn) Wotif.com is likely to see a decline in visitors. I feel we’ll see advertising attempts increased by Wotif.com in the coming months.

Microsoft’s latest purchase is NASDAQ listed ad company, AQuantive Inc. This news comes soon after Google acquired DoubleClick, also an ad firm.

According to analysts at Goldman Sachs, “[Microsoft buying AQuantive] increases the likelihood that the software maker will also buy Yahoo! Inc.”

Pajago

This week has brought big news from both US and Australian media companys. In the US, Yahoo and Microsoft are joining forces, and over here in Australia, Sensis and NineMSN.

This is going to be an interesting love triangle-or is it square- I feel. Sensis is teaming up with NineMSN which is 50/50 owned by PBL and Microsoft, and Microsoft is teaming with Yahoo which is the second most popular search engine. Sensis’ search engine, in my opinion, is a load of crap so it’ll be interesting to see whether these “mergers” lead to Sensis search being powered by Yahoo. This would be ideal, seeing No. 2 telco in Australia, Optus, is nice a cosy with Google.

Pajago