Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Barry Diller’

Movie review site Flixster buys rival Rotten Tomatoes from Murdoch

Movie review-and-view site Flixster has agreed to purchase popular review site Rotten Tomatoes from IGN, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Much like the recent sale of Photobucket, the move is part of News Corp’s plan to jettison properties that aren’t core to its business.

The reason for the merger is simple. The combined sites’ reach is estimated at 30 million unique visitors per month, accordding to a press release from Flixster. “To use movie terminology, we think this is a blockbuster double-bill,” Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein wisecracked in the release.

It’s hard to track who owns who: IGN acquired Rotten Tomatoes in 2004, and was then acquired itself by News Corp. Flixster fended off an acquisition bid from Barry Diller’s IAC last year. IGN will take a minority stake in Flixster. Got all that?

Flixster, founded in 2007 in San Francisco, has raised $7 million in funding, much of it from Lightspeed Ventures. The company has fewer than 20 employees. Rotten Tomatoes, founded in 1998 as a spare-time project by Senh Duong, has gotten by on an estimated $1 million in angel funding.

Read the whole story…

TC50 Backstage: Is Jim Lanzone a Jerk?

So former Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone just launched his new company, Clicker. It’s like a TV Guide for online video, and the experts named it as one of their favorite companies they saw today. I like Lanzone, but I had to ask: Does a company with a well-known CEO and $8 million already in the bank really need to win our $50,000 prize?

His answer and more about why he’s jumping back into the start-up fray and his “divorce” from Barry Diller on the video clip on the jump.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Read the whole story…

Barry Diller Still Doesn’t Like Twitter, Still Can’t Stop Talking About It

A couple of weeks ago IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller was telling the elite crowd at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference that he was “pessimistic about Twitter’s prospects for making money.” A couple of weeks later and he’s singing the same tune, this time to the elite crowd at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Pasadena.

In an interview with Andy Serwer, Diller admitted that he didn’t really understand the service and doesn’t use it himself. He said it was for people who want emote real time information like “I’m going to the doctor now,” “I’ve left the doctor now,” and “I have a cavity,” and that it doesn’t seem like a natural advertising platform. “It’s not exactly for me” he said, “I don’t go to the dentist.”

He does admit that it is a “very strong” real time communication device. But he just can’t get much more excited than that. Maybe he’ll take another look if Twitter ever hits those massive revenue projections.

Full video is below. Sorry for the low quality, Fortune will likely have a clean high definition version soon and I’ll swap it out.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Read the whole story…