Week that Was - 2007-03-23

By Dave Forde on March 26th, 2007 | All posts by Dave Forde

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There was a lot of debate at last week’s OMMA Hollywood and much of it was around an 800 lbs gorilla named “Google.” The company is continuing to be the “King of Media”with plays that extend into the online, print, TV and radio world. As powerful as they are to be truly dominant they need to be able to create content, and let’s face it, they are not a television producer and last week’s law suit by Viacom against Google is evidence of how they are still vulnerable. The other big news from Google last week was the introduction of their Pay-per-action advertising which ties online actions such as such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview to a publisher’s site and each users to a click through. The service which will be offered in beta will not be available for Canadians, what don’t we have big budgets too?

As Toronto is ramping up for Toronto Tech Week (TTW) which takes place May 28 - June 1st, we’re also going to help uncover the stories about some of the people and companies that make the city great. A separate RSS feed has been created and you can subscribe by clicking here, hope you enjoy the series.

Headlines

Online invoicing provider FreshBooks.com has changed the name of the companies corporate blog to “Fresh Thinking” which is a perfect name since they’ve been able to demonstrate that they bring a new way to look at business. I’m a big admirer of how their team is using blog technology to build a community around their solution as well as to help tell the evolving story of the impressive start-up.

Motorola to acquire Palm, will the rumours come true this week and the $2 billion PDA manufacture find their way once again? According to GigaOm, competitor mobile OS Symbian is expected to release an upgrade in hopes of re-capturing some of their lost market share, so maybe by next month we’ll have a new fight and landscape to watch for - Motorla/Palm, vs Nokia/Symbian vs RIM (Blackberry) vs. Microsoft.

Canadian agency Rare Method, continues to expand and looking to extend their market share on the west coast of the US with their latest acquisition, BOWG, so what is the secret to the Calgary agencies quarter after quarter growth?

At this past weekend’s Under The Radar event, Sudbury based Conceptshare.com took the winning award for “Web Sharing” application.

Deal Flow

Toronto based Side Effects Software Inc. which is a manufacture of 3D animation software for the visual effects industry recently secured $1.5 million US from MMV Financial Inc. The companies Houdini technology is used by numerous digital content creation leaders including C.O.R.E., Digital Domain, Disney Feature Animation, Double Negative, Framestore-CFC, The Orphanage, Rhythm and Hues, and Sony Pictures Imageworks among others.

Events