Mobile News Asia

Arrested Development co-stars Jason Bateman and Will Arnett are following Will Ferrell, Ashton Kutcher and other Hollywood types into the internet video biz but with a very different bent. DumbDumb, the new venture announced at CES, isn’t a creative venture that hopes to get advertisers; it’s a “sponsor-driven advertising and production company” funded by ad-focused Electus. CEO Ben Silverman and Bateman are friends from childhood; Silverman told me he suggested the venture to Bateman and Arnett. Through Electus, DumbDumb will work with College Humor and production company Notional, headed by Ricky Van Veen.

Bateman drove to Las Vegas from LA last night to have dinner with advertisers appear with Electus CEO Ben Silverman early this morning. (In a surreal note that could be part of a DumbDumb bit, Richard Dreyfuss got a little confused about which panel he was on and walked on stage during the session.) After the session, he and Van Veen, along with Electus COO Drew Buckley, talked about the new venture with paidContent. Here’s the video:

If I were a gamer, I’d probably be a lot more excited by being one of the very first to play the highly anticipated BioShock 2, set for sale next month, and I was most honored to be shown my way around the game by developer Jesse Attard. (Not so honored to be killed in seconds, but, hey.) I’m a tech geek, though, and what really grabbed me was how the high-bandwidth game is being delivered at CES: on Sprint’s just-announced 4G Overdrive and without any latency issues. The tiny drive is serving up the game on eight large screens in a parking lot at CES, courtesy of a partnership between Fox Digital’s IGN and Sprint (NYSE: S).

Just as one of his last moves at NBC—moving Jay Leno to prime time—starts to publicly unravel, Ben Silverman has the first deal for his new venture with IAC (NSDQ: IACI), Electus: a strategic partnership with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) to develop and produce exclusive original content. So far, sounds like some other high-profile ex-network content deals but the Yahoo deal highlights providing that content for the media company’s advertising partners.

Plastic Logic unveiled its Que e-reader at CES today; later, during an extensive interview, CEO Richard Archuleta spoke with paidContent about the way the company is working with publishers, particular newspapers and magazines. In this video, Archuleta demonstrates the technology that lets publishers create and keep their own format. I’ll have more about the business model and partnerships in another post.

—Lots of news from Yahoo’s Connected TV Group, which continues to be very active on the partnership front despite the recent departure of VP Patrick Barry. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) says that its TV widgets, which let users interact with internet content, like photos from Flickr or news from the NYT, on their TVs, will now be distributed by some additional firms, including Hisense International, which sells some internet-connected TVs, and media player maker ViewSonic. Last year at CES, Yahoo announced distribution partnerships for its TV widgets with Samsung, Sony (NYSE: SNE), and LG Electronics. Yahoo also says that TV Widget users will be able to soon access video content from Brightcove’s many customers, including Cars.com and Wine Spectator. Even more announcements in the release.