Courtesy of Jack Schofield of the Guardian Unlimited’s tech blog, The Sunday Telegraph is giving even greater heft to the rumors that the UK mega-corporation headed by Richard Branson will buy cable company NTL with an eye toward merging it with Virgin mobile voice businesses into a new media unit.
The new unit will account for 2.5 mil. broadband internet customers, 4.3 million fixed-line telephony accounts, more than 5 million mobile phone customers and revenues in excess of £4 billion (or $7.8 billion). But that’s not the interesting part.
The deal is likely to spark a competitive response by Murdoch-owned BSkyB, which views the cable company as its main competitor and is currently on the hunt for a landline-based revenue stream of its own. Once Murdoch’s News Corp. feels the sting of stiffened competition in the UK, it’s likely that News Corp.-controlled DirecTV in the U.S. will ramp up its efforts to compete with cable companies on interactive services such as high-speed Internet access.
Update: The New York Times also covers this transaction, but spins it as a deal for Virgin to sell its mobile voice services to NTL. Both papers are reporting that the tentative transaction calls for Branson to sell his 71% stake in Virgin Mobile and then hold a 14% stake in the new combined company, which will retain the Virgin name.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:25 PM | Print | Comments (0)It’s easy to be obsessed with Google. Not only am I thick in the middle of drafting a report on the search giant, but the media shares my obsession by pumping out article after article on the Mountain View world-changer.
The latest example: Reuters has this piece today on Madison Avenue’s fear of Google. Google’s almost-perfect business model of pay-per-click combined with its recent push into free web analytics and continued refinement in its AdSense program is sparking dissidence among ad agencies, who fear Google might swallow up their businesses.
In fact, resistance by that most powerful bastion of American capitalism, Madison Avenue, seemingly drove Google’s stock down last week.
“From a consumer perspective, Google is all good,” Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine said in a recent note to clients. “However, Google is starting to attract negative publicity (tied to) its foray into other mediums.” His argument that Google’s encroachment into other businesses, including the large advertising agencies, drove Google shares down 4.7 percent last Monday, its biggest percentage loss in a year. The stock has since recovered most of its losses, closing at $417.70 on Friday, but the debate over Google’s power to transform whole industries only continues to grow.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:44 PM | Print | Comments (0)
For some reason the fate of newspapers in the Web 2.0 era is getting a lot of mileage here this week. The latest item to attract my attention: The Boston Globe has a piece today regarding its efforts to use new technologies and Web 2.0 advancements to survive in a print-challenged world. The author of the piece is the Globe’s new ombudsman, Richard Chacón, who proclaims “Wi-Fi pulse points” are the future of the paper.
These pulse points are micro-web sites set up by the Globe at various locations around the city, sites that provide information of a highly localized nature — Chacón talks about Boston’s South Station and the pulse point, available only via Wi-Fi and only in areas around the station, and the page set up by the Globe describing the history of the station, the shops and restaurants at the stations, and comments made by visitors.
Another intriguing development: the Globe now has an ombudsman’s blog that allows rapid reader feedback and, presumably, more rapid response by Chacón
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:16 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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