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Monday, April 6, 2009

Time Warner on AOL: We Ought to Have That Removed…

aol_killed_byHere’s further confirmation that Time Warner is looking to spin off AOL. In an SEC filing Monday, the company said it is seeking to amend debt agreements that restrict it from unloading the struggling business. Coming as it does after the hiring of Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, as AOL CEO and chairman, the move would seem to suggest that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has given up on the idea of an AOL merger with Yahoo and is pushing ahead full-bore with a spinoff.

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Saturday, March 21, 2009

Weekend Update, 3.21.09–March Madness Edition

tinawozTechnically, the term refers to the frenzied flow of games and the intensity of the contenders for the NCAA Championship crown. But the NCAA doesn’t have a corner on “March Madness”–those descriptors work well in other instances, too. To wit:

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Friday, March 13, 2009

Quite a Stretch, Armstrong…

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Saturday, February 28, 2009

Weekend Update, 2.28.09

amykindleMuch ado about the Amazon Kindle 2.0 this week:

After its official unveiling on Feb. 9, the e-book reader started shipping on Monday, and actually managed to grab much–but not all–of the hype that’s surrounded Twitter of late. The device has been met with much acclaim, though it’s by no means unanimous.

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Saturday, February 7, 2009

Weekend Update, 02.07.09

What spreads faster than economic gloom and doom, and is more infectious than professional anxiety? That phenomenon known as “25 Things.” Just in time for Facebook’s fifth birthday, the record-breaking waste of time may have reached critical mass this week. Elsewhere this week…

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Saturday, January 31, 2009

Weekend Update, 1.31.09

Rumor has it there are big games going on this weekend–at least one of which involves football players. The rest involve the usual players, though they might appear in different positions–and on different teams–from week to week. These games, most likely, will continue through Monday and beyond. Scores will be kept on an ongoing basis.

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Friday, December 12, 2008

Happy Holidays from Fairchild and Alcatel-Lucent

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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Weekend Update 11/14/08

Safe to say that the mood of last week, with its anticipation of change, is a distant memory. A different kind of anticipation permeated the tech and online media industries, one more reminiscent of April 2001. There was news all around of layoffs, pending layoffs, bankruptcies and stock dives.

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Saturday, November 8, 2008

Weekend Update, 11/8/08


It was an eventful week–a new President-elect, Yahoo still playing the field with no takers, and the hovering recession beginning to hit a little harder, a little closer to home. It was hard to keep the storylines straight, so let’s approach it thematically.

Election 2008
Whether or not those voting machines malfunctioned or miscounted votes, Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, much to the chagrin of comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who–since the beginning of the McCain/Palin partnership–were handed once-in-a-lifetime material. Between the brilliant Saturday Night Live parody sketches of (and by) both Palin and McCain, and Obama’s victory speech, the other big winner (by a mile) was YouTube.

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Friday, November 7, 2008

Verizon to Microsoft: Hey Big Spender

If Microsoft’s leadership were to author a 600-page guide to competitive strategy, it would consist of this sentence repeated over and over again, “The Shining” style for half of them: It’s always easier to buy your way into a profitable market, than earn it. So it is that, Microsoft–which has been paying people to use its Live Search engine to find and purchase products online–is now working to buy its way into the mobile search market by outbidding Google on the search giant’s deal with Verizon.

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Saturday, October 11, 2008

Weekend Update, 10/10/08

The best thing that can be said of the week ending Oct. 10, 2008, is this: It’s over.

Marked by panic selling and wet-your-pants fear, it was one of the worst weeks in the financial world’s history–a week that cut the legs out from under Google, beat Yahoo until its market cap bled purple and caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to swing more than one thousand points on an intra-day basis.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Yahoo and AOL: Like Two Louts Merging to Make One Cretin

Looks like Carl Icahn did show up to his first Yahoo board meeting, though it appears he wasn’t able to get much done. The new board, which also includes former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi and former CEO of Nextel Partners, John Chapple, reportedly met Tuesday and decided as a first course of business to talk to Time Warner about the future of its AOL division.

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Thursday, September 18, 2008

Bewkes on Bebo: Well, That Was $850 Million Well Spent … Maybe

Disciplined capital allocation is a key priority for Time Warner. That said, the company “may have overpaid” for Bebo, the social-networking site it acquired for $850 million cash back in March. So said Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes in an interview with Portfolio.

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

New Plan: “Reset Default Search” Roofie Cocktails …

In the past year, Microsoft has spent $1.2 billion to acquire enterprise search outfit Fast Search & Transfer. The company spent more than $100 million on Powerset and its natural language search. It spent untold millions on R&D. Microsoft has even taken the rather extraordinary step of paying people to use its MSN/ Windows Live search. None of this has done much to prop up its laggard search service, which continues to toddle along behind Google and Yahoo–a very distant third in the search market.

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Google Take All

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About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.

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Ethics Statement

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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