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Two big purchases overnight. Can’t keep up!

Late last night, it was confirmed that Vodafone (NZ) had purchased local ISP iHug for $41 million. iHug is the third largest, and provides telephone, satellite and broadband services. This is an interesting step for Vodafone, as the only way to enter the market with a bang is by buying one of the largest in that market. With the advent of local loop unbundling starting here early next year, I suppose that a co-operative wired and wireless world is brewing in Vodafone’s head.

• Juha has full details.

Well, one giant had been in a certain market for a while, but failed to catch up. It has been confirmed that Google purchased YouTube for US$1.65 billion. Now, we must remember that Google was perhaps one of the first companies to have shared video and searching, but it quickly got overtaken by the start up. Google Video has only recently put YouTube style features in.

It does seem to be that if you want to make a bang in a market, you just buy into the largest company of that market.

Google has come up with a novel way of labelling images - using the mind of the human!

In a quick, 90 second game, you are linked up to another player. The two of you then get shown the same image and have to label them. You score points based on how many labels you match.

• Google Image Labeler

There are flaws in the game though. The images are extraordinarily tiny. You can hardly make out what the image is in some cases, and it also makes it hard to flesh out any applicable labels. Hopefully they’ll fix that up, and quickly.