Apple has sold some 225 million iPods to date, making it one of the most popular electronic devices ever. And it’s sure to sell even more after the updates the company announced at this morning’s event in San Francisco. Among them: Larger, cheaper iPod touches and nanos with cameras and FM radios.
A quick update on the Samsung/SanDisk story I posted earlier this morning. Now that Samsung has officially called off its bid for Sandisk, shares of Rambus are trading higher on a rumor that it might soon be the target of Samsung’s attentions.
It was fun while it lasted, but Samsung has abandoned its bid to buy SanDisk. In a regulatory filing made nearly a year after its $5.85 billion offer for SanDisk was rejected as too low, Samsung officially called off the effort, which, had it been successful, would have combined two of the largest flash memory producers into a single NAND monstrosity.
SanDisk CEO Eli Harari says the company is “very disappointed” with its fourth-quarter bottom-line results, which doesn’t even begin to describe the way the company’s investors must be feeling right now. They had expected the flash memory card maker to report a fourth-quarter net loss of 60 cents a share on revenue of $766.7 million. Instead, it reported an adjusted net loss of $1.65 a share.
Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media, as SanDisk hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?
Is SanDisk out of its mind? On Tuesday the company rejected a $5.9 billion acquisition bid by Samsung Electronics. Apparently, it feels the $26-a-share cash offer–an 80 percent premium over its Monday close–undervalues the company.
Apparently, NBC Universal doesn’t know that jumping into rebound relationships after a particularly painful breakup is rarely a good idea. After Apple tossed its fall TV lineup off iTunes in August, saying the two companies couldn’t agree on pricing, the broadcast network has been spitefully seeking out distribution deals wherever it can find them: Hulu. [...]
Flash memory maker SanDisk has apparently devised a means of offsetting the legal bills that might arise from the price-fixing suit filed against it (and 23 other companies) earlier this year: suing the better part of the removable flash storage industry for patent infringement.
SanDisk filed three patent-infringement lawsuits against 25 companies that make, sell or [...]
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. Read more »
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.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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