As Guardian.co.uk and Times Online report, fund manager Fidelity International and Gore’s Generation Investment Management backed the deal, alongside existing shareholders, and now become shareholders themselves.

Separately, £20 million in new bank financing has also been secured, taking Ocado’s overall debt to around £100 million. Ocado generates annual revenue of about £450 million but is yet to return an annual net profit since its launch in 2000.

Co-founder Jason Gissing says: “There is lots of stuff we want to do on the consumer side whereas before we have been focused on the website and delivering on time.” Ocado claims it is a greener grocery option for consumers, as it discourages people from driving to the shops—fitting in well with the environmental values of Gore and his investment firm.

Ocado has yet to rule out an IPO in future, but according to Telegraph.co.uk, Gissing is happy to wait before cashing in. “We think this market will be worth £40 billion so we are delaying profits to ensure we keep growing and gain market share with our eyes firmly fixed on the big prize,” he says.

Gore’s main media investment is the independent TV network Current TV, which also runs Current.com.

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—World Federation of Advertisers The head of digital strategy at Dutch brewer Heineken Marco van Veen has been appointed the first chairman of the World Federation of Advertisers Digital Network. The WFA launched the digital committee in January 2008 and it counts Proctor & Gamble, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Orange among its members. From Revolution.

—Starcom Media Group: The Publicis Groupe-owned agency has lost executive director Jim Marshall, who stands down from the firm after 20 years to launch his own media consultancy. He will consult Starcom on a part-time basis for six months. Via Media Week.

—Future publisher: The special interest mag publisher has appointed former Emap exec Pat Eggington as group publisher of its consumer electronics titles, including What Video and Hi-fi Choice. From Media Week.

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—Virgin Music: Remember Virgin Media’s unlimited music service with Universal? Vapourware so far. Now unnamed EMI and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment execs express concern to NMA over the detail. Virgin says a pre-Christmas launch is on-track.

—Wii iPlayer: Nintendo has upgraded the console’s internet channel to support Flash 8 – with the side-effect that the BBC’s cut-down, web-based iPlayer has stopped working on the machine. Via Reg.

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The pair announced that, from this autumn, Tesco will be giving access to full-length films in Microsoft’s Silverlight format (with quality claimed to be “similar to” DVD and Blu-ray) plus non-DVD bonus content like games, ringtones and MP3s.

But viewers must buy DVD titles from Tesco shops or its online store to unlock the titles.

Tesco’s entertainment director Rob Salter, in the release., says a “broad range” of movie studios are taking part and promises the downloads will “far exceed the DVD experience and deliver exclusive content, web events and services.” Microsoft says that, while this is UK-only, more countries will be added “eventually”.

It’s hard to see this as separate to entertainment content makers’ constant battle against piracy. Like the music industry, Hollywood has been vigourous in stopping people downloading the latest cinema or DVD release illegally through lawsuits and take-down notices to torrent-trackers and lone pirates. But this shows it’s also moving to convince the P2P generation that its legitimate content offer is worth paying for.

So just as the studios are investing in 3D movie releases—try recreating that in your bedroom—this is an attempt to provide a unique home-based experience that pirates cannot match .

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After occasional recent criticisms that the National Union of Journalists is more concerned with being King Canute to the rising media tide than in equipping members to stay afloat, Jon Slattery reports the union’s magazine magazine branch has now tabled a motion to be presented to its upcoming annual delegate meeting at Southport in November…

The motion reads: “This ADM notes that:

This ADM instructs the NEC (national executive council) to address this problem by working with the blogging community and Twitteratti to bridge this gap and create a framework that embraces the NUJ’s journalistic principles while maintaining the press freedom enjoyed by bloggers and twitterers.”

The union has certainty taken a lot of time lately fighting regional and other journalism cutbacks made during a decline brought about by structural change and the advertising downturn (see its current list of causes). In some cases, it argues newspaper proprietors are still making profits healthy enough to obviate the need to redundancies.

But is the union really failing its members when it comes to online training, or is this just a renegade bunch of twitter addicts who think 140 characters is the future… ?

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iPod and its siblings revolutionised the music business and gave labels a lifeline just when they needed one. On Apple’s own stats, shown Wednesday, it still has 73.8 percent of the mobile music player market, with “other” manufacturers languishing on 18 percent, SanDisk (NSDQ: SNDK) 7.2 percent and Microsoft’s Zune 1.1 percent.

So the number of people who own at least one iPod is smaller than Apple’s headline stats because some people own more than one? Big deal. A company that successfully forces customers to shell out again after 18 to 24 months is a company that’s doing well; a tactic seen in other sectors like white goods.

But Mulligan, whom we followed up with, has a darker warning for the companies that rely on iPod: “I don’t think there is anything that reflects particularly badly on Apple; this is what device sales are all about,” he says.

“But it is a big big deal for digital music sales. It means that the key dynamic in digital music sales is changing direction. The number of new potential customers arriving in to the marketplace is slowing.”

Mulligan’s thesis, which cuts through the larger numbers being bandied about, would suggest that digital music sales, which still aren’t offsetting record label revenue decline, are set to plateau as does the number of people who own players.

“And, of course,” Mulligan tells us, “if you get more sophisticated with the modeling, you can end up with even lower numbers (e.g. factoring in multiple device ownership etc).”

One possible route to continued growth, we reckon – unlimited-access music services like Spotify and Rhapsody that, unlike the a la carte track download option offered by iTunes and its ilk, offer up the entire “celestial jukebox”. We’ll see…

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Mercier will be responsible for developing partnerships across Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, including Xbox, Windows Media Centre and mobile.

BBCWW hired Mercier from MobiTV as head of mobile in 2007 before he got a wider digital role in ‘08. Ashley Highfield left as CEO of BBCWW’s Kangaroo JV last year. Microsoft’s UK online services group VP Chris Dobson went the other way to be BBCWW’s WVP and GM of global ad sales, leading BBC.com ad sales in particular; he later took two BBCWWers with him.

Via ATV.

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The NAA has posted the report and the responses to the Request for Information (some more informative than others.) I’ll have more after I get through it all but here’s a look at the answers from Google, the company that has become a symbol for everything publishers want and all that they fear. Left unwritten: this is really a Google-plus concept, as in “we’ll keep doing everything we already do in terms of aggregation but this is your chance to add possible money-making layers beyond all the great traffic we send you.”

—Google: (NeimanLabs has already published a detailed look).  As befits a company interested in rentals and selling download, Google assures the publishers “‘open’ need not mean free.” At the same time, premium doesn’t mean hidden, which is why Google says it’s “uniquely positioned to help publishers create a scalable e-commerce system via our Checkout product and also enable users to find this content via search—even if it’s behind a paywall.”

More important, Google promises that micropayments, long expected and delayed, will be available to Google and non-Google properties within the next year through Google Checkout in amounts from a penny to several dollars. The idea is to aggregate purchases “across merchants and over time.” But Google doesn’t believe micropayments “will be the norm for accessing content.” Google also plans to add a stored value option that would allow buyers to maintain a balance from which to draw. (Google issued a statement after the report was published that tries to play down its own promises: “As for Checkout, we don’t have any specific new services to announce but we’re always looking for ways to make payments online more efficient and user-friendly.”)

But, wait, there’s more—Google contends that “increased advertising opportunities will likely exceed total revenue from subscriptions.” Its “best thinking about a model that works for both users and publishers” includes single sign-on, content packaging, discoverability with all content indexed and accessible via search engines, increased advertising revenues using existing Google resources, broad distribution of through publisher-controlled syndication. The costs: support, software, hosting and bandwidth would start at no charge but that could change based on need. Google would share revenue to cover those costs, processing, profit margin, offering the Android Marketplace as the most “prominent” example. Google’s full response to the NAA (pdf).

For more from Google’s perspective, my colleague Joseph Tartakoff just posted an interview with Josh Cohen, the point man for Google News with publishers.

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The pair have engaged lawyers to threaten the US internet company with action over the use of images and names alongside material they consider to be defamatory and racist.

Stephen Taylor Heath, head of sports and media at Lupton Fawcett, said that a cursory search of Facebook quickly led to “bogus” pages that used the images and names of the pair to link to material that would be “highly defamatory” if published in a newspaper or magazine.

Warren, who has fought several high-profile legal battles, is understood to be determined to force Facebook to change its policy and take responsibility for the more unsavoury opinions of its registered users. Taylor Heath has called on other sports stars and celebrities to come forward. There is a legal grey area about the extent to which the operator of a website, or the provider of community tools, can be held liable for comments posted.

“The problem is when you search for a celebrity on the site you also come across pages using the celebrity’s name and image that have no official link but in some instances are full of defamatory and illegal content,” Taylor Heath said.

“At the moment the owners of Facebook do not seem to be taking this problem seriously. We have written to them outlining our concerns but all we received was a standard acknowledgement. We are still awaiting a response from their legal department.”

The row goes to the heart of a debate about the extent to which internet service providers, search engines, message boards and social networking sites should be responsible for material posted by users. Warren and Khan want Facebook to remove defamatory and racist material, as well as responding more promptly when it is flagged up.

Under its terms and conditions, Facebook promises to remove posts that are “abusive, vulgar, hateful or racially and ethnically objectionable”. However, the sheer volume of material posted is difficult to moderate and Facebook relies on users to notify it of serious breaches.

“We want Facebook to be a place where people can discuss issues and current affairs while respecting the rights and feelings of others,” the company said this year, in response to complaints from anti-racism campaigners. “However, there is no place for content that is threatening, abusive, hateful, or racially or ethnically objectionable on the site and Facebook will remove any such content that violates our terms of use when it is reported.”

Following similar complaints, the Google-owned video sharing website YouTube promises to act promptly when it receives complaints about copyrighted material or videos that are offensive or glamorise violence. But it has resisted policing the site itself.

Taylor Heath stressed that his clients did not have a problem with fan sites or fair comment around the sport, but want to clamp down on comments that were seriously racist or defamatory.

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