SEE THE MARKETS: GOOGLE, APPLE, FACEBOOK, ANYONE

Rumors have been swirling so fiercely over a potential acquisition of Twitter that betting exchanges and prediction markets worldwide are opening odds on its future. (At press time, Media Predict forecasts a 25% chance of acquisition before Q3.)

As we saw recently, TechCrunch has openly argued that the company should stay independent and “spread its wings.” But those with a Hollywood point of view are asking a different question: “What would The Jonas Brothers do?”

After all, Twitter’s founders have more in common with the Jonas boys than you would think.

It’s easy to forget that Twitter is at the concluding phases of a phenomenal rise. Spinning off from the struggling Odeo and surviving countless outages, it grew and picked up an unofficial corporate sponsor in CNN – whose eager Rick Sanchez couldn’t do enough to plug it, so they called in Ted Turner and Ashton Kutcher to mop up.

Could the buzz be more intense than it is right now? Probably not. There’s no steady term yet for it (tech-sation?), but we all know that web destinations can suddenly emulate flavor-of-the month entertainment acts or consumer goods. In these moments their technical product is less like Apple’s (a good buy at any time), and more like the Tamagotchi (an item everyone wants right now). After all, the public always needs something to toy with in the internet. This was as true for the early web game “Gay or Eurotrash?” as it was for MySpace, YouTube, and then Facebook. Twitter is the latest to get the call.

Read The Rest Of This Entry »

Forget the warm weather, forget the beach. We know what you’re really looking forward to this May: blockbusters. We’ve just launched a summer-long contest we’re conducting with the best blog in entertainment, Cinema Blend. Make your trades, and then tune in every week to see how you stack up against the experts. And while the stock market may be in the dumps, the Summer Movie Challenge will deliver the goods: every dollar you make in these markets will be worth one lottery ticket for $500 in prizes from Fandango.com.

More details coming soon!

SEE THE MARKET

OUR FRIENDS AT Cinema Blend report that plans are already in motion to turn “Wolverine” into a franchise – with “Slumdog Millionaire” writer Simon Beaufoy in the lead to pen the sequel. As if that weren’t enough, Fox is already prepping a spin-off of the spin-off, “a new X-Men related movie franchise based on Mutant students and Professor Xavier’s school.” Now that’s confidence. Last year “Iron Man” bolted out of the gate to join the $100 million club in the first weekend in May – proving that early birds get all the worms in the summer movie biz. We expect similarly huge things from “Wolverine,” as recession-ridden movie-goers push it well over the century bar, if not higher.

Scenario: If you can find time away from other work – and if you can afford the meager development costs – then you can pursue your creative vision, with hopes of hitting it huge.

Question: are we talking web startups or garage bands?

With each passing day, Web 2.0 looks less like traditional industries that sell for profit services or widgets (the old kind). Rather, it resembles something vaguely like Hollywood.

• This industry features vast numbers of candidate projects, produced at a grass-roots level and initially financed by the original creators. Are we talking about indie films – or the latest Facebook App?
• This industry is characterized by fierce competition for recognition, in which middlemen select (from myriad prototypes) those lucky enough to receive funding and promotion. Are we talking about A&R Reps – or angels and VCs?
• In this industry, ideas are easily imitated, so that we often see three or four similarly themed projects in the pipeline at once. Are we talking about this year’s smackdown between “Cashmere Mafia” and “Lipstick Jungle” – or Twitter and Pownce?

The conclusion: if you’re curious about the future of Web 2.0, you’d do worse than look to the entertainment industry. Some lessons from the comparison:

Read The Rest Of This Entry »

As many of you have noticed, we’re in the current issue of The New Yorker. (See the full story here.)

What can we say? James Surowiecki knows his stuff.

The tenure of former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, who resigned yesterday, will certainly leave a lasting impression. Prominently, Semel – a former Hollywood executive – presided over efforts to bring Big Tech and Big Media together, in part by developing an entertainment division in Santa Monica. Semel is replaced by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, an all-around “tech guy” who will focus on reducing Google’s advantages in search and advertising.

So Yahoo may return to its roots, at least for now, leaving the classic Media-Tech divide unbridged. That’s fine with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. “The valley will take over Hollywood,” he concluded. “Not the other way around.”

On the other side, Sony’s Howard Stringer also chimed in on the topic last week in the Financial Times, with some pungent words describing how media executives often think about Silicon Valley.

“You’re using our content to drive your new global companies and getting rich in the process,” he said.
Read The Rest Of This Entry »

Interest in Media Predict remains high since our launch at the beginning of last week.

This week’s edition of the The Economist highlights the far-reaching potential of Media Predict, outlining our Project Publish contest with Touchstone Books and stating, “Show business may gain even more than publishing does.”

You can also hear an interview with founder Brent Stinski on “Future Tense” an American Public Media program carried on National Public Radio stations across the country. Play it now: RealAudio :: MP3 :: iTunes.

In media there’s always been a handy fallback. If a summer blockbuster flops or a hyped series fails, then there’s always the reassurance that, hell, media is crap shoot anyway. As the saying goes, “Nobody knows anything.” We see it regularly in the press – and so often in Variety that attribution isn’t even required.

“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman originally wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.”

Case in point: every studio turned down “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” “Why did Paramount say yes?” writes Goldman. “Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything . . . [N]obody, nobody – not now, not ever – knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”

Do you really buy it? Well, the media decision-makers have certainly made some monster mistakes:
Read The Rest Of This Entry »