AOL formally acknowledged that it plans on a round of very large cuts: In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Time Warner unit said it plans on taking up to $200 million in restructuring charges through the first half of 2010. Earlier this week, Kara Swisher reported that AOL’s coming spinoff would be followed by layoffs of up to 1,000 employees.
Why did Google start labeling blogs as “blogs” in its search results? Eric Schmidt thinks it may have to do with your mother.
Plastic Logic, which has been talking up its coming e-reader for some time now but hasn’t actually started selling it, has a little more to say: It will have more to say about its coming e-reader in a few months.
Oh, and its coming device has a name–the Que.
Spotify, the streaming music service Americans love talking about but can’t actually use, has given us even more to chat about: The company now promises to roll out some sort of TV service…some day.
Where? In Sweden, of course, which is where Spotify started, and which acts as a sort of test lab/best-case-scenario provider for the service.
Is Twitter a billion-dollar company? It is now, according to its investors. People familiar with the company tell me it has raised around $50 million in a funding round that values the start-up, which has no real revenue to speak of, at about $1 billion.
As Kara Swisher just reported, News Corp.’s MySpace has hired media consulting firm Media Link, along with Media Link President Wenda Harris Millard, to overhaul the social network’s sales group.
Here’s the complete internal memo from CEO Owen Van Natta, which describes Millard’s position as head of the ad sales group as an “interim” one, and announces that former sales boss Jeff Berman is out.
Google says its oft-maligned video site is going to start making lots of money soon. But it still has some work ahead of it. Right now, for instance, just four in 10 of YouTube’s most popular clips carry advertising.
So now that the RealNetworks attempt to get into the movie-copying business has been rebuffed by a federal court once again, I’ve got a question: Why, exactly does RealNetworks want to be in the movie-copying business?
Novelist Nicholson Baker loves books, but not Jeff Bezos’s device: “Amazon is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things…fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch.”
A federal judge has dismissed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider-trading case against Mark Cuban, the AP reports. Astonishingly, Cuban has yet to say anything about this on his blog or his Twitter account. But I assume that will be rectified shortly.
One downside of being the world’s most talked-about start-up: You become an irresistible target for hackers. And now someone’s made off with a pile of Twitter’s corporate documents, apparently with Google’s unwitting assistance. Time to for a realistic solution to the cloud computing security problem.
The blog network owner says he’ll open his checkbook for readers who have amazing tales and pictures he can publish. He’s not talking TMZ money, yet. But “I’d love to have their reputation–as the place you go if you want to make a buck.”
You say you’re not convinced by the first TV spot for Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine? Then feast your eyes on these puppies, which AdAge says were supposed to run later this summer but have been moved up because Team Redmond “”realized that the market would be receptive to our product messages sooner than expected.”
Want to watch the season finale of “30 Rock” for free, whenever you want, on a big screen? Go for it, says Hulu–just don’t watch it on a TV.
Confused? Of course. So was I when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.
Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.
Here’s the newest twist in the Facebook valuation/funding saga: Russian investors have reportedly offered to sink up to $350 million in Mark Zuckerberg’s social network–at two different valuations. The Wall Street Journal says investment group Digital Sky Technologies has offered to spend $200 million on a chunk of the company’s preferred stock at a $10 billion valuation, and is also offering to buy up to $150 million worth of the company’s common stock at a $6.5 billion valuation.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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