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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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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In February, Microsoft surprised industry watchers and embraced the idea of data portability, throwing its support behind OpenID, a decentralized digital-identity protocol. This morning came the inevitable extension of that idea, the announcement of a partnership with five social networks on a new data-portability strategy.
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Google won’t be acquiring Bebo any time soon. Unless it’s willing to buy Time Warner’s AOL first. This morning AOL announced plans to acquire the social-networking site. Price tag: $850 million–cash.
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Facebook threw a well-timed sucker punch at Google’s “Everybody-But-Facebook” OpenSocial initiative this week, extending Facebook Platform–a set of tools that allows developers to build applications for Facebook–to other social-networking sites and platforms.
“[We] want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model,” Facebook senior [...]
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Looks like Google’s “Everybody-But-Facebook Coalition” has some new members. News Corp.’s MySpace, Bebo and blogging outfit Six Apart have agreed to join OpenSocial, Google’s much-discussed social play.
Bebo and Six Apart are nice additions, but it’s MySpace that will bring quite a bit more heft to this effort–an addressable market of some 70 million active [...]
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Note: John Paczkowski is on vacation and won’t be writing or posting videos until he returns Monday. To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. We’re calling it the Tech 10 and it appears here.
- Retailing behemoth Wal-Mart will sell digital-music downloads on its Web site without copy protection, Reuters reports. The so-called digital-rights management software insisted on by some record labels can stymie where the average user plays the songs.
- Taking on the juggernaut of iTunes, MTV and RealNetworks are forming an online digital music venture. According to The Wall Street Journal, Verizon Wireless has signed on as mobile distributor of the joint content.
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