QOTD

“We intend to charge for our news Web sites. The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com is the world’s most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting unique skills throughout News Corp. to increase our revenues from all our content. Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. The increase we have seen in our Wall Street Journal subscriptions since we acquired the paper proves to me that the market is willing to pay for that quality without any special market.”

– News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch vows to charge for online content.

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Looks like News Corp. was a little too optimistic when the company told investors in May that it expected a decline of around 30 percent in fiscal-year-adjusted operating income. Reporting earnings this afternoon, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and this Web site instead posted a decline of 32.5 percent.

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In August 2008, Facebook claimed 100 million monthly active users worldwide. By April 2009, it doubled that number. Today, the social networking outfit tells us it has reached 250 million monthly active users. Fifty million new users in under four months: Impressive.

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QOTD

“I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral. We’re happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers paying for it.”

— Rupert Murdoch says News Corp. isn’t working on a Kindle of its own

It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players, but ended in a three-way tie.

According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft-Yahoo deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown also wondered whether Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz on his trip to the Bay Area this week, or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination.

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Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation. And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game, and Google and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.

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Much 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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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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QOTD

There won’t be a deal. There’s bad personal feelings. In six months, (Microsoft) will walk away.”

– News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch utters the words Jerry Yang’s been longing to hear.

This year’s D conference had its share of great lines–tired ones, too (we’re all clear on the subject of Facebook and information sharing, right?). Here’s a selection of the former…

I will probably never be a CEO again.”

–Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang states the obvious

It’s a company that creates technology.

– Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answers the question, “What is a technology company?”

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Asked during a February earnings call whether News Corp. might entertain the idea of a MySpace-Yahoo alliance, company Chairman Rupert Murdoch replied: “I think that day has passed, but you never know.”
Well, now that he’s had about a month to think about it, Murdoch seems more certain that day has passed. In remarks at [...]

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I think that day has passed, but you never know.”
–News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch comments on a possible MySpace-Yahoo alliance during last week’s earnings call.
Yeah, you never know.
You’d think that News Corp. (NWS) would be a little too busy with the integration of a certain other multibillion-dollar property to consider adding another [...]

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