Atlanta startup Movl says it’s been acquired by Samsung Electronics for an undisclosed sum. Just two years old, Movl began by creating games that interacted with TV — like “We Draw,” which won Samsung’s top developer award in 2011. Then the startup created a platform for iOS and Android developers to seamlessly integrate their apps with smart TVs, starting with Samsung and Google TV — with more on the way.
The Huffington Post’s online video channel, HuffPost Live, will soon debut on cable TV: not as it’s own channel, but as a programming daypart on Mark Cuban’s AXS TV. Huffington Post has been trying to get its own cable TV channel for several months, according to a NY Times report, but in the meantime it’s inked a deal to air on AXS TV on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. “(It’s) a way to get on now,” explained HuffPost Live co-creator Roy Sekoff.
Lost Remote friend Mike Proulx and his Hill Holliday colleagues are throwing their third annual TVnext Summit on Monday, and you can watch a live stream of the event right here beginning at 9:30 a.m. ET. Mike tells us, “You don’t want to miss the intro.”
Check the schedule for the list of panel discussions. The event runs until 4 p.m. ET.
On the VC panel at the Lost Remote Show, Chris Fralic, partner at First Round Capital, praised Twitter’s approach to building a standalone music app that ties to external services like Spotify. He raised the idea that Twitter could do the same for TV, which certainly sounds plausible, especially as Twitter #Music continues to ride high on the App Store charts.
As Twitter’s inevitable IPO approaches, the company is beginning to put some dollar signs behind its social TV efforts. The Financial Times reports that Twitter has inked a deal with Publicis’s Starcom MediaVest Group to the tune of “hundreds of millions of dollars over several years.” The deal gives SMG’s clients (P&G, Walmart, Coca-Cola, etc.) access to preferred advertising, advertising products and research and data.
While the nation was riveted on the Boston bombings manhunt, BBC America announced in a tweet that it had inked a deal with Twitter to offer the “first in-tweet branded video synced to an entertainment TV series.” Twitter has yet to elaborate, but the announcement follows a report this week that the social network is courting major media companies for partnerships that would “let Twitter stream videos on its site and split the resulting ad revenue with the networks.”
We’ve made a great last-minute addition to next week’s Lost Remote Show, which already has a stellar lineup of social TV execs. New York startup Now This News is building the first mobile-social video news company from the ground up, and we’ll be dedicating 30 minutes to get an inside look (and see some of the best clips they’ve produced so far).
Apparently there are a lot of them for Conan O’Brien. The social-savvy kids at Team Coco have launched a Tumblr today featuring some of Conan’s biggest hissy fits, including this one when he was told Don Cheadle cancelled:
More drama on the “Reasons my talk show host is crying” Tumblr.
As a former Sacramento resident who lives in Seattle, naturally I’m interested in what happens with the struggle over the Sacramento Kings. Since I consume most of my news on mobile, I decided to download an iPhone app from the Sacramento Bee to complement the coverage on Twitter.
One of the most popular business books over the last couple decades is Geoffrey A. Moore’s work on “Crossing the Chasm,” which argues that there’s a challenging chasm between a product’s early adoption and mainstream use. Some companies burn out after they’re unable to bridge the gap, while others are able to scale their products beyond “visionaries” to “pragmatists” who represent your average consumers.
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