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09 Feb 2011 21:56

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Biz, Tech: Could Google or Facebook buy Twitter? It’s a definite possibility.

  • valuation A December financing round put Twitter’s valuation around $3.75 billion – not peanuts in any sense but not anywhere near Facebook’s valuation. Back in February 2009, they were worth just $250 million.
  • offers? The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google and Facebook have both eyed taking over Twitter – with offers ranging in the $8 billion to $10 billion range – but talks have gone nowhere so far. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Feb 2011 21:14

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Biz: Did the TV guys win? How fast-flying TBD got its wings clipped

  • Above is a quick Compete.com chart comparing DC media outlets Wjla.com to TBD.com through December. See something notable here? Yeah, we do too. WJLA.com has slightly lower traffic than it did six months ago. But TBD has come out of nowhere to effectively triple the amount of traffic WJLA was getting. Which is pretty amazing, if you think about it – an effective rebranding greatly expanded Allbritton’s reach. (Both are effectively dwarfed by The Washington Post, but the Post has a national reach whereas the Allbritton-owned sites skew local.) And TBD’s editor Erik Wemple says January was the site’s best month ever. Despite this, though, WJLA effectively won the battle for media presence in Allbritton’s corporate structure. How did this happen?
  • HoW TBD BECAME TBD Allbritton, which also owns Politico, said it planned to launch a local news site last year. They brought on Jim Brady, a former Washington Post and AOL guy, who crafted a vision of a local news brand that worked across the board – in broadcast, on cable TV and online. It launched six months ago to much industry attention for its HuffPo-like approach to local news.
  • The visionary, out Unfortunately, corporate culture hurt the site right off the bat. Only a year after Brady started with Allbritton, he was out, a victim of a debate over aggregation (which TBD is really good at) vs. original reporting. “As we talked about the next phase of our growth, it seemed clear to Jim and I both that we had some stylistic differences,” wrote publisher Robert Allbritton.
  • Did The TV Guys win? Now, just six months after TBD launched, it appears that the folks at WJLA control TBD’s destiny. The TBD TV component (on cable) is effectively going away. WJLA.com, the former site, is coming back alongside TBD. And WJLA’s general manager, Bill Lord, will be taking over as head of each of the local news entities. It appears the old-schoolers won. source
  • » Bloodletting on Twitter: Jim Brady, an active tweeter, has been ripping his old company over the last day or so over the decision to restructure. In his harshest tweet, he offered this sentiment: “At good companies, the people who resist necessary change are pushed aside. At bad companies, they are put in charge. RIP, the old TBD.” There is a degree of universal-ness to what he has to say, and many have been made their feelings known about the matter on Twitter today. While it’s certainly not the worst decision a company has made, TBD’s restructuring reflects a debate happening in newsrooms around the world: Is change needed? Or is the status quo more effective? Allbritton appears to have chosen the latter route, despite, you know, the chart above.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Feb 2011 11:31

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Biz: It’s official: Coca-Cola has broken through the Soviet wall

  • 3% the increase in sales volume the company has had in North America in its most recent quarter
  • 5% the sales volume increase the brand has had worldwide in its just-ended fourth quarter
  • 31% the increase in sales volume in Russia; insert hilarious communism joke here source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

09 Feb 2011 11:05

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Biz: Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke not happy about slow hiring pace

  • The job market has improved only slowly. … This gain was barely sufficient to accommodate the inflow of recent graduates and other new entrants into the labor force and, therefore, not enough to significantly erode the wide margin of slack that remains in our labor market.
  • Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke • Explaining, in front of the House Budget Committee, the issues he and others are having with the slow pace of the economic recovery. While things are recovering, job growth is way too slow for his comfort. In other news, Bernanke says that inflation is likely to stay low for the foreseeable future, and that the government needs to get the budget situation dealt with. “Creditors would never be willing to lend to a government with debt, relative to national income, that is rising without limit,” he says, suggesting that we could face an actual fiscal crisis if we don’t take heed. Great. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Feb 2011 22:36

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Biz: How to (reportedly) destroy evidence, according to an insider trader

  • Oh it’s easy. You take two pairs of pliers, and then you rip it open. Put ’em into four separate little baggies, and then at 2 a.m…. 2 a.m. on a Friday night, I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket, … and leave the apartment and I go on like a 20-block walk around the city … and try to find a, a garbage truck. And threw the @*^! in the back of like random garbage trucks, different garbage trucks … four different garbage trucks.
  • Hedge fund manager Donald Longueuil (reportedly) • In a series of messages explaining how he got rid of key evidence in an insider trading case. The details, from a government complaint, were unsealed today. He reportedly trolled the streets of Manhattan looking for a way to throw away a bunch of documents, including a flash drive and two external hard drives. So he chose to destroy them and throw them away in separate garbage trucks in the middle of the night. Sounds like our kind of party. Too bad the guy who he reportedly explained this to was cooperating with authorities. Oops. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Feb 2011 14:40

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Biz: Toyota’s cars don’t have computers with minds of their own

  • yes Mechanical defects in the Toyota vehicles, which have already been addressed by the company, were behind the sudden acceleration problem their cars had.
  • no After a long check, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that the electronics were OK and the computer wasn’t at fault. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

08 Feb 2011 10:08

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Biz, Culture: Groupon CEO Andrew Mason tries to explain awful ad campaign

  • Not a single person watched our ad and concluded that it’s cool to kill whales. In fact – and this is part of the reason we ran them – they have the opposite effect.
  • Groupon CEO Andrew Mason • Attempting to explain that his company’s controversial Super Bowl ads were in fact – IN FACT – meant to be respectful to other cultures and environmental causes. “The last thing we wanted was to offend our customers – it’s bad business and it’s not where our hearts are,” Mason concluded. Too bad nobody took the ads that way. Commenters on the blog post are savaging him and the company for trying to be a little too clever with its commercial approach without explaining its reasoning. They could’ve saved themselves a lot of trouble had they actually put a domain name on the ad somewhere. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

07 Feb 2011 00:23

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Biz, Tech: Three things to know about AOL’s Huffington Post merger

  • one The buyout fits perfectly in with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s content strategy. It’s a strategy that led him to buy TechCrunch last year.
  • two The merger of the two companies has the potential to draw in 100 million viewers to a single Web conglomerate with many tentacles.
  • three Arianna Huffington will now be in charge of all of AOL’s editorial content – including such notable things as Moviefone and Mapquest.  source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

07 Feb 2011 00:10

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Biz, Tech: Huffington Post, AOL getting married, having lots of little articles

  • By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform.
  • Arianna Huffington • Revealing to her readers that, holy crap, AOL JUST BOUGHT THE HUFFINGTON POST FOR $315 MILLION! THIS IS HUGE. LIKE BIG HUGE. This would be the largest deal AOL’s ever been involved in if not for that pesky Time Warner thing that ended up in tears for all involved – especially stockholders. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

04 Feb 2011 17:34

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Biz: Bernie Madoff trustee: The NY Mets knowingly took ill-gotten cash

  • $300
    million     the estimated amount in profits the New York Mets allegedly earned from Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme
  • $90
    million     the estimated amount that the team reportedly took from Bernie Madoff-related bank accounts source
  • » And now they’re being pressured to give it up: Irving Picard, the trustee in charge of the insanely massive Bernie Madoff account, claims in a lawsuit that the Mets organization, represented by Sterling Equities, turned a blind eye to Madoff’s scheme and had plenty of opportunities to see red flags pop up. “The Sterling partners were simply in too deep – having substantially supported their businesses with Madoff money – to do anything but ignore the gathering clouds,” says the complaint first made public on Friday. Officials for the team call the claims “an outrageous strong-arm effort” at getting money out of them, and deny any wrongdoing.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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