2013-05-25
Google Inc intends to finance, build and help operate wireless networks from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia,
Google Inc intends to finance, build and help operate wireless networks from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, hoping to connect a billion or so people in emerging countries to the Internet, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The Internet search giant - which has for years espoused universal Web access - is employing a patchwork quilt of technologies and holding discussions with regulators from South Africa to Kenya, the WSJ cited people familiar with the strategy as saying.
Access to the vast trove of information on the Internet, and the tools to make use of it, is considered key to lifting economies up the value chain. But countries are often hampered by the vast sums needed to build infrastructure, thorny regulations or geographical terrain.
To reach its goal, Google, which benefits the more people have access to its search and other Internet services, is lobbying regulators to use airwaves reserved for television broadcasts, which at lower frequencies can pass through buildings and over longer distances, the WSJ reported.
It is also working on providing low-cost cellphones and employing balloons or blimps to transmit signals over hundreds of square miles from high altitudes.
The company has already begun several small-scale trials, including in Cape Town, South Africa, where it is using a base station in conjunction with wireless access boxes to broadcast signals over several miles, the newspaper reported.
Chief Executive Larry Page has made no secret of his plans to use his company to work toward broader, non-profit goals. Google on Friday declined to comment on its plans.
Yahoo Inc has submitted a formal proposal to buy Hulu
LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc has submitted a formal proposal to buy Hulu, joining a growing list of bidders for the video service owned by News Corp and Walt Disney Co, two sources with knowledge of the bid told Reuters on Friday.
Yahoo just this week announced a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging service Tumblr. It now joins rival bidders for Hulu, including Time Warner Cable Inc, DirecTV, former News Corp president Peter Chernin and Guggenheim Digital Media, sources have said.
It is unclear how much the Internet company bid.
Sources have said Chernin is bidding $500 million, excluding an additional sum to cover Hulu's debt and programming commitments. But a source close to the bidding told Reuters his offer was too low, that Hulu could be worth as much as $1 billion to $2 billion.
Time Warner Cable's bid was fashioned as an equity investment, another person said, as the cable operator hopes to set up a joint venture with other cable companies to operate Hulu.
Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment. Its shares closed up 1.2 percent at $26.33.
At least five bidders have emerged for the five-year-old video service with 4 million users, potentially setting up a bidding competition. A second source close to the bidding said the offers submitted so far were non-binding and dependent on Hulu amending content licensing agreements the bidders found too restrictive.
Silver Lake, a minority owner of influential Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor, has also submitted an indicative letter of interest, the source familiar with the Hulu bidding said, confirming an earlier Bloomberg report. The private equity firm teamed up with William Morris Endeavor, which it invested in a year ago, for the bid, according to the source.
Hulu, which generated revenues of around $700 million last year, streams TV shows online in similar fashion to Netflix Inc. It is being advised in the sale by Guggenheim Partners, a separately funded group from the digital media unit that placed the bid.
Yahoo has gone on an acquisition spree to bring in talent as well as beef up its mobile and online products and content, as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to revive a once-dominant Internet icon that has for years bled users.
Yahoo remains one of the Web's most popular destinations, but has seen its revenue shrink, as consumers
2013-05-22
Google Get unlimited music for just $7.99/month
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Google Play" <noreply-googleplay@google.com>
Date: May 22, 2013 5:19 PM
Subject: Get unlimited music for just $7.99/month
To: <louis.h.peng@gmail.com>
From: "Google Play" <noreply-googleplay@google.com>
Date: May 22, 2013 5:19 PM
Subject: Get unlimited music for just $7.99/month
To: <louis.h.peng@gmail.com>
|
2013-05-08
$0.99 facebook phone
It's never a good sign when a cellphone company lowers the price of a cellphone so soon after its release, which makes the new, very low $0.99 price of HTC's so-called Facebook phone so very foreboding. It's only been a little over the month since the HTC One's debut at $99 — with a two-year AT&T contract. The new 99-percent discount suggests (or perhaps even confirms) that the social-media centric gadget, hyped by Mark Zuckerberg himself as an exclusive partnership in a rollout of his Facebook-first operating system, isn't selling too well. After all, Nokia slashed its Lumia 900 in half after a little over three months of struggling sales , and it looks like a similar thing may be happening to HTC, despite the Facebook marketing surge — overcrowded airplanes and all. One analyst said his local AT&T store had sold zero Facebook phones. And an Examiner survey of 20 stores found that the HTC One was selling "well," but not as well as the Samsung Galaxy S IV.
RELATED: An Early Version of Facebook Home Is Out in the Wild
It's not too surprising the HTC One hasn't exactly flown off shelves, and not just because it's a mid-level phone in a Galaxy and iPhone universe. Reviewers found the first Facebook phone addictive but refused to recommend it to anyone who wasn't a Facebook "addict," whatever that means. I liked the phone itself after trying it for a week, just not the Facebook-as-a-home-screen part of it. Plus, the best part of Facebook's new mobile OS — Chat Heads — is available through the social network's Messenger app, on all Android phones, without having to buy a brand-new device. Perhaps there just aren't that many actual Facebook addicts out there? Or maybe they're all so cheap (read: young) that a price cut can lure them in.
U.S. court scrutinizes class suit against Google e-book project
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. federal appeals court on Wednesday questioned the reasoning behind a class-action lawsuit against Google Inc over its effort to digitize millions of books, suggesting that many authors could benefit from the project.
Billions of dollars are at stake in the long-running dispute, in which The Authors Guild as well as groups representing photographers and graphic artists argue that the Google Books project amounts to massive copyright infringement.
Google is appealing a lower court's ruling allowing the plaintiffs to pursue a class-action lawsuit rather than file claims individually.
If the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals bars the plaintiffs from suing collectively, it likely would be much harder for them to win a large damages award against Google.
Circuit Judge Pierre Leval, one of three judges hearing Google's appeal, said the company's project could benefit many authors. It could particularly help writers whose works are more obscure, by telling readers where they could buy their books, he said.
"A lot of authors would say, 'Hey, that's great for me,'" Leval said.
Robert LaRocca, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued that a survey of class members that Google conducted was flawed. That survey, plaintiffs said in court papers, showed that 500 authors, or 58 percent of those surveyed, approved of Google's project.
"We think the vast majority of the class support us," he said.
WHAT'S FAIR USE?
The case derives from the Mountain View, California-based company's 2004 agreement with several research libraries to digitize books with a goal of helping researchers and the general public find material.
Google has since scanned more than 20 million books and posted snippets of more than 4 million online.
The project could have "enormous value for our culture," said Circuit Judge Barrington Parker.
"This is something that has never happened in the history of mankind," he said.
Google argues the practice constituted "fair use," an exception under U.S. copyright law because it only provided portions of the works online. Plaintiffs disagree, saying the verbatim display of the copied work does not substantially differ from its original form.
Seth Waxman, a lawyer for Google, told the appeals court that based on the plaintiffs' argument that the company should pay $750 for each book it copied, that would amount to more than $3 billion in damages.
Leval and the third judge on the panel, Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes, suggested the case may have gotten ahead of itself.
Instead of reversing the lower court's ruling allowing the case to go forward as a class action, the two judges asked lawyers for both sides why they shouldn't send the case back to the district court to rule on Google's "fair use" defense first, then decide later on the class's validity.
"I wonder if you're out of sequence," Leval said to Waxman.
The Google lawyer countered that the class encompasses vastly different types of work, from poetry to mathematical books. Arguing its "fair use" defense against such variety would be like arguing "with one hand tied behind our back."
The judges reserved judgment on the matter.
"The investment we have made in Google Books benefits readers and writers alike, helping unlock the great pool of knowledge contained in millions of books," Maggie Shiels, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a statement.
The case is Google Inc v. Authors Guild Inc et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 12-3200.
(Reporting By Bernard Vaughan. Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel;
2013-05-07
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd posted a 171.1 percent jump in net profitin the fourth quarter as its revenue rose 84 percent, according to a regulatory filing by major shareholder Yahoo Inc.
For the quarter ending December 2012, net income attributable to Alibaba Group was $642.2 million while its revenue for the period was $1.84 billion, the filing said.
Yahoo, which owns about 24 percent of Alibaba, reported the privately held online shopping giant's results as part of a document filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Industry watchers widely expect Alibaba to seek an initial public offering as early as this year and some say the company could fetch a valuation as high as Facebook Inc's $100 billion.
Late last month, Alibaba bought an 18 percent stake in Sina Corp's popular microblogging platform, Weibo, for $586 million.
For Alibaba's financial year ending September 30, the company reported a 78 percent rise in revenue to $4.1 billion while net profit attributable to the company rose 80.8 percent to $484.5 million. Alibaba's October-to-December period was previously the first quarter but that was recently changed.
Alibaba is China's largest e-commerce company offering platforms where millions of Chinese shop for everything from kitchen appliances to clothes.
2013-05-04
Buffett, 82, launched his "@WarrenBuffett" account with the tweet "Warren is in the house," and immediately started adding followers at the rate of 1,000 per minute.
OMAHA, Nebraska (Reuters) - So they are not completely in sync after all.
A day after Berkshire Hathaway Inc Chairman Warren Buffett set up his own account on Twitter, his second-in-command, Charlie Munger, said he has no plans to follow the legendary investor's lead.
Buffett, 82, launched his "@WarrenBuffett" account with the tweet "Warren is in the house," and immediately started adding followers at the rate of 1,000 per minute.
But the 89-year-old Munger - renowned for his forthright style of speaking -suggested fans should not look forward to seeing his trademark remarks in 140-character form any time soon.
"No, certainly not," Munger said in an interview, after being asked whether he planned to join the social media network. "That's not my milieu. I don't like too many things going on at once."
It marks a rare point of departure between Buffett and Munger, who have worked together at Berkshire for decades.
"We have practically no disagreements. That's just the way the chemistry has worked," Munger said, commenting on his working relationship with Buffett.
"People who think we're quite a diverse pair, and that one is helping the other - it's more like two twins, and one of them is a little more able than the other."
Berkshire Hathaway will hold its annual shareholder meeting on Saturday in Omaha. Buffett calls the meeting and the weekend's related events "Woodstock for Capitalists."
2013-05-01
DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc has agreed to buy teen- oriented YouTube network AwesomenessTV to secure an online platform to showcase family-focused movie franchises such as "Shrek" and "Kung Fu Panda."
(Reuters) - DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc has agreed to buy teen- oriented YouTube network AwesomenessTV to secure an online platform to showcase family-focused movie franchises such as "Shrek" and "Kung Fu Panda."
DreamWorks said on Wednesday it will pay about $33 million in cash to acquire AwesomenessTV, with additional payments of up to $117 million if earnings targets are met in 2014 and 2015. The transaction is expected to be completed this month, it said.
AwesomenessTV is a network of 55,000 YouTube channels, with 14 million subscribers, that feature online talk shows, sketch comedy and scripted and reality series aimed at teens. It is among the original channels that Google Inc-owned YouTube helped bankroll over the past year and a half.
YouTube has spent more than $100 million to help about 150 media partners create and promote specialized YouTube video channels dedicated to topics ranging from food to sports. The idea is to improve the quality of videos on YouTube and to attract a bigger share of television advertising dollars.
AwesomenessTV was founded by Brian Robbins, an executive producer of TV shows, including "One Tree Hill" and "Smallville." Hollywood talent firm United Talent Agency helped Robbins set up AwesomenessTV in 2010, negotiating its early venture capital funding, the deal with YouTube and the sale to DreamWorks.
Under the deal with DreamWorks, Robbins will take an executive role at the movie studio to develop a digital family channel. DreamWorks movie franchises include "Shrek," "Kung Fu Panda," "Madagascar" and current box office hit "The Croods.
DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has talked about creating a family-themed cable channel since last July, when the company acquired characters such as "Casper the Friendly Ghost" and "Lassie" through its purchase of Classic Media.
On Tuesday, Katzenberg said the company was still pursuing the idea.
"On the cable side of it, again we continue to explore that. We continue to have interest," Katzenberg told analysts on a conference call after the company released quarterly earnings.
Hollywood talent firm United Talent Agency helped Robbins set up AwesomenessTV in 2010, negotiating its early venture capital funding, the deal with YouTube and the sale to DreamWorks.
The shares of DreamWorks, which reported stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings on Tuesday, were up 7.5 percent at $20.73 in Wednesday afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.
(Reporting by
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