Writers Strike Eisner - Media US News Story - CNBC.com
“Its over,” Eisner said. “They made the deal, they shook hands on the deal. Its going on Saturday to the writers in general.”
We should see the earliest affects on the late night shows, as well as “the Daily Show” and “Colbert Report.” And with any luck We’ll see a summer season of scripted TV.
dap: /.
This was on Apple insider yesterday
AppleInsider | Amazon to acquire Audible for $300 million
In a bid to bolster its status as a premier distributor of digital content, online mega-retailer Amazon.com said Thursday it has reached an agreement to acquire spoken content provider and Apple iTunes partner Audible.com.Related AppleInsider articles:
* High-quality unboxing photos of Amazon’s…
* Amazon’s new Kindle dubbed the ‘iPod of reading’
* Amazon rallies associates to battle Apple’s…
* Acer to acquire Gateway for $710 million
* iTunes passes Amazon to become third largest…Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon.com will commence a cash tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of Audible.com for $11.50 per share, or a 23 percent premium from their closing price of $9.33 on Wednesday.
Microsoft offers $44.6 bln for Yahoo; targets ‘dominant player’ - MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Microsoft Corp. on Friday offered to buy search-engine operator Yahoo Inc. for $31 a share, or $44.6 billion, in an effort to better compete with online-advertising juggernaut Google Inc.
The article goes on to say that the point of the offer is so the MSFT can compete with Google. Which makes sense, Yahoo! has been losing share price, just posted a quarterly loss, a announced layoffs, making it vulnerable to a take over bid.
Lots of times these deals are more trouble than they are worth, thins AOL(link) and Time Warner, HP and Compaq. Time will tell.
- Play: Work that you enjoy doing for nothing.
- The saying “Getting there is half the fun” became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.
- Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
BetaNews | HBO next to open its shows to the Web
Though it may be a bit late for it to enter the download market, Time Warners HBO will begin a controlled launch of HBO Broadband tomorrow, a free add-on to HBO on Demand.
Content will not be available through a browser, though, as HBO Broadband relies on its own application for Windows PCs running XP and Vista. Content is downloaded directly to the subscriber’s drive through the application and expires four weeks after the download date.
Maybe this is more about not giving Apple too much power but still acknowledging that the prevailing media business models are dinosaurs and the meteor is in the sky. It still a weak effort, I’m sure that TW will yield no fruit from sewing so sparingly, but we will see.
BetaNews | Yahoo to embrace OpenID standard for validating users
“All Yahoo IDs will be OpenIDs on January 30,” a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews late this morning, in a change-over that may elevate the whole issue of users’ online identities to a new level.Yahoo is calling its embrace of OpenID this morning a breakthrough in the field of Web user identity. Over the next few months, other Web sites that employ OpenID 2.0 validation, including all those not necessarily hosted by Yahoo, will be able to look to Yahoo as a validator of usernames.
Glad to see OpenId is really gaining traction. Its an open standard that ANY one can implement for FREE. Its a standard that is built on existing technologies, so any one who has a website already has the pieces they need to use this. And with Yahoo backing it looks like it will have the traction to be THE way authentication will be done on the Internet.
update:
I realize that I sometimes don’t explain things well, so I dug up this talk by Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain , a player and developer of openid. He does a better job than me.
Leaked memo: Time Warner Cable to trial hard bandwidth caps
Metered Internet access is a fact of life for many broadband users around the world, but has been largely a nonfactor when it comes to wired broadband in the US. That may change, according to a memo leaked to the Broadband Reports forums. If the memo is to be believed, Time Warner Cable will be rolling out what it calls “Consumption Based Billing” on a trial basis in the Beaumont, Texas area.
I’v got no problem with as long as two condtions are met:
BetaNews | Sun to spend $1B to acquire MySQL, will compete with Oracle, Microsoft
One of the principal products in the LAMP open source arsenal will become a Sun Microsystems product, possibly by the end of this quarter.When discussing enterprise database installations worldwide, as of today, it will be impossible not to consider Sun Microsystems along with Microsoft and Oracle. This morning, Sun announced it has reached an agreement with MySQL — which by some accounts may have become the producer of the most widely installed database, under everyone’s noses — in a deal expected to be closed as soon as this March.
This can be either very good or very bad. Anytime a major firm like Sun, is willing to invest in an OSS project its great for the project, but now they will be able to run it as well. That could be disastrous. From reading the article, Sun has big plans to use MySQL to shake up their product line. There also seems to be a disconnect between MySQL and Sun over what changes will take place for MySQL after the acquisition. It is never good when the acquired seems to be in the dark about the nature there organization after the acquisition is done. That smells like a lot of people leaving to me. I’ve been wrong before, and I hope I am again about this.
Unpaid bills lead phone companies to hang up on FBI wiretaps
A report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reveals extreme deficiencies in FBI budget and expense management procedures for surveillance. According to the OIG, phone companies have terminated FBI wiretaps and FBI surveillance phone lines as a result of unpaid bills.
Wow the FBI isn’t doing any better than some days.