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Valleywag is reporting that MySpace has acquired Photobucket. Although no one has the financial details of the deal but the price tag is rumored to be between $250 - $300 million. The two companies had a thorny past with MySpace twice banning Photobucket videos and photos on MySpace. The latest ban led to a lot of PR for Photobucket and was later lifted. Apparently the acquisition talks were a reason behind the removal of the ban.

Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and rode the MySpace bandwagon as a backend photo-storage service for MySpace users. Photobucket generated $6.3 million in revenues last year and estimate to hit the $25 million revenue mark this year. The site has 40 million registered users.

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MySpace which recently blocked Photobucket from their site has now lifted the ban and MySpace users could see their Photobucket videos, photos and slideshows on their profile pages once again. The revelation has been made by Alex, CEO of Photobucket on the Photobucket blog.

Some funny points in the announcement are: Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon founder and CEO in his keynote at Web2.0 Expo has disclosed some astounding facts about the Amazon S3-web services storage platform. According to Bezos S3 now stores 5 billion objects, served 920 million S3 requests on its peak day with 16,607 requests in its peak second. Bezos termed this computing platform as “Web Scale Computing“.

This is astounding take up given the fact that the service was launched just thirteen months back and had just 800 million stored objects in July 2006. Clearly Amazon is trying to do with storage in general what Photobucket is doing with photos, and VideoEgg with Videos, i.e to become an infrastructure for existing destinations.

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Photobucket, which just launched new and enhanced video editing features, is reporting that the photos and videos hosted by Photobucket have been blocked by MySpace. This has now happened for the second time, with a similar incident taking place in January 2007. On that occasion MySpace`s response was that they were merely trying out a new filter to prevent security breaches on MySpace. The blockage was imposed at around 10:30 PM Pacific Time, and is really serious.

This sort of blocking has become a regular behavior at MySpace, and they usually lay the blame on security issues, terms of service violations or other such crap. MySpace has previously shut down all Flash widgets in January for a couple of hours, then blocked Imeem, and after that permanently blocked Vidilife, Stickam and Revver. No matter what the reason MySpace assigns, the blockage really hits the startups hard. Revver is struggling for its mere existence ever since the ban.

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Photobucket has launched a real time video uploader. The uploader allows Windows users to instantly upload clips using the drag and drop functionality and share the moment it is uploaded without any time lag. This is really a great achievement and will spur growth as there is nothing that users love more than “instant gratification”. Users could also trim and slice the beginning and end of videos before uploading and upload directly from the webcam using their new real-time encoding client.

Another new enhancement is Remixing. Users can now mashup any videos or photos from their album, add captions, bubbles and party favors like hats, noses and eyeballs. Photobucket initially has 500 songs in there collection and a selection of videos to remix from.

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