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IAC Announces Plan to Spin Off HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval and LendingTree as Four Publicly Traded Companies — NEW YORK, Nov. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — IAC (Nasdaq: IACI - News) announced today that its Board of Directors has approved a plan to separate IAC into five publicly traded companies:
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IACI To Break Into 5 Companies (Thank Heavens) — The break-up can't come quickly enough for this hodge-podge, dead-in-the-water conglomerate. Release after jump. — IAC Announces Plan to Spin Off HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval and LendingTree as Four Publicly Traded Companies

UPDATED:Web 2.0 Is On The Ropes. . . Kleiner Perkins Has Halted Investments — [UPDATED: With a reply from Tim O'Reilly, one of the persons mentioned in this article.] — Whenever I meet with VCs lately I've noticed they have a growing distaste for Web 2.0 startups.


Hollywood Writers Strike: A Chance For Millions Online To Bloom — Hollywood film and television writers go on strike today in a move that will slowly cripple the big media production machine. — The strike relates to demands by writers for higher residual payments for DVD sales and internet downloads …
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Google enlists help for Google Phone — NEW YORK — Google (GOOG) today plans to announce the formation of an "open phone" coalition, with the goal of developing an operating system for the so-called Google Phone. — The new operating system, geared specifically for cellphones …
Discussion:
CrunchGear, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, TechBlog, mocoNews.net, A Media Circus, Gadget Lab, Gizmodo, ParisLemon and Between the Lines


Socialtext gets new CEO and $9.5 million in funding — Socialtext co-founder Ross Mayfield has stepped down as CEO of the enterprise wiki company and is handing the reins to Eugene Lee, a well-seasoned tech executive who has spend time at Adobe, Cisco, Banyan Systems and was a co-founder of Beyond Inc. (acquired by Banyan).
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Socialtext Reloaded — Enterprise 2.0 software maker Socialtext …
Discussion:
Socialtext Enterprise …

Publishers See a Way to Track Their Content Across the Net — Copyrighted work like a news article or a picture can hop between Web sites as easily as a cut-and-paste command. But more than ever, as that material finds new audiences, the original sources might not get the direct financial benefit …

Mark Cuban, Facebook, and OpenSocial — Mark Cuban is, as usual, insightful when he describes the potential of Facebook profiles to be used as the basis for smarter social applications outside of Facebook. His call for a truly open Facebook API is a must-read for anyone thinking about open social networks.

Windows Home Server Available Now to Help Families Protect, Connect and Share Their Digital Experiences — The HP MediaSmart Server is now available for pre-order and will be shipped to customers this month; new hardware and software partners announce Windows Home Server products and solutions.
Discussion:
All about Microsoft, Gearlog, Digital Trends, InfoWorld and Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check
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Things Turn Ugly in the 'Hacks vs. Flacks' War — Journalists often call publicists "flacks" and publicists call journalists "hacks," though rarely in earshot of one another. But the gloves came off last week after Chris Anderson, the executive editor of Wired magazine, chided "lazy flacks" …
Discussion:
Beet.TV


Ad:Tech: BuzzLogic Launches Conversation Ad Targeting — It seems that BuzzLogic has found another use for all of the conversation mining and sentiment analysis it conducts in the blogosphere. The company will today announce the launch of its Conversation Targeting™ ad system.
Discussion:
Search Engine Land


MySpace To Announce Self-Serve Hyper Targeted Advertising Network — MySpace will announce plans to introduce a new advertising platform, "SelfServe by MySpace," at Ad:Tech Monday. The service itself will launch to a limited set of advertisers in the next sixty days.

HiveLive Takes Web 2.0 Upscale — Social information sharing startup HiveLive launches their LiveConnect Community Platform today at the Defrag conference in Denver, but it's not HiveLive's first appearance on the web scene. In 2006, they opened a private beta that looked to some like just another Web 2.0 social sharing site.


Visual Studio 2008 to RTM in November — A few months ago, Microsoft was hedging as to whether it would deliver the final "Orcas" Visual Studio 2008 code in 2007 or 2008. But as of November 5, it's official: VS 2008 is going to be released to manufacturing later in November 2007.