Carl Icahn praises Yahoo (Really)
OK, so it’s an old story – around two years old, to be precise.
Still, you have to admit it’s interesting that Icahn wasn’t always as down on Yahoo’s management as he has been this week. At the time, he was putting pressure on Time Warner over its failure to do more with AOL, and pointing to Yahoo as a model of internet success. This is what he told the FT: Read more
Strands now calling the personal finance tune
It may seem a stretch from music to personal finance, but the team behind the MyStrands music recommendation service is now advising on the best way to spend or invest your money.
Strands, which has Spanish roots but has rebased itself in Oregon, has plenty of cash on hand to plan its own investments, having raised $29m last year, $24m coming from Spanish bank BBVA, and $65m in funding overall since it was founded in 2003. Read more
Taking a stake in Web 1.0
Quincy Smith has carved out a reputation as one of the leading digital visionaries among old media execs. Since joining CBS 18 months ago as head of digital efforts he has made a show of disdaining tired old Web 1.0 ideas in favour of Web 2.0 thinking (In a comment to the Wall Street Journal, he recently accused the video site Hulu of “arguing to be a premium destination in a time when nobody wants a destination.”)
This has not always made him popular in media circles. A senior figure at a big CBS rival I spoke to recently bristled at Smith’s apparent rejection of the traditional model that has typified the mass media business from the beginning: create your own destination (be it a TV network, newspaper or website) and attract as big an audience to it as you can. Read more
Jawbone makes noise with quieter Bluetooth headset
While Silicon Valley’s Apple and its iPhone may reign supreme in technology design, the Bay Area is home to several other stylish gadgets.
Oqo, set up by Apple renegades in San Francisco, invented the ultra mobile PC category in 2004 with its O1, which was succeeded by the O2 last year. Tivo, based in Alviso, and Sling Media, the Foster City developer of the Slingbox, have changed the way many people view television. Read more
Wall Street’s big Yahoo hope: If anyone can, Icahn can
Carl Icahn might well have a better chance of bringing Yahoo and Microsoft together than Steve Ballmer ever had of doing it on his own.
That’s the message the Yahoo stock price has been screaming. With the activist investor mounting a proxy fight, Yahoo’s shares now actually stand higher than they did on several days when Microsoft was still pursuing its unsolicited bid. Read more
Fire Eagle swoops on location services
Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s effort to broker location data for users and sites wanting to add where-in-the-world features, appears to be gaining traction, judging by a presentation at the Where 2.0 conference.
Tom Coates, leader of the project that launched the Fire Eagle beta two months ago at Yahoo’s experimental Brickhouse offices in San Francisco, gave a long list of sites now using or about to use the software Read more
Xbox 360 tops 10m US sales, 12m Xbox Live members
Microsoft has just announced a couple of Xbox milestones – 10m of its Xbox 360 game consoles sold in the US now and 12m members globally of its Xbox Live online service.
The company says the 360 is the first next-generation system to pass the 10m mark in the US. Read more
When community values aren’t enough
Anyone looking for juicy new details today about the in-fighting between craigslist and eBay would have been sorely disappointed.
As expected, craigslist countersued eBay after itself being sued for allegedly trying to reduce the influence that the internet giant has as a large shareholder of the classified advertising concern (we wrote about it earlier this week, here.) Read more
Finding the Where-withal to open up the Geoweb
I’m blogging live from latitude 37.6 degrees North, longitude 122.4 degrees West, or roughly a mile south of San Francisco airport, location of the fourth annual Where 2.0 conference on the geospatial web. Read more
Silicon Valley VC: the cash keeps rolling in
The venture capital industry may be stuffed with cash right now but that hasn’t stopped Lightspeed Venture Partners raising the biggest new fund of the year so far, at $800m.
When you ask where all this new money keeps coming from, Silicon Valley veterans have taken up a common refrain: the typical answer is “from overseas,” or “from Europe.” This is usually accompanied by a small involuntary smile that is meant to make you think: “Dumb Money” (at least, that is how it seemed at the National Venture Capital Association’s annual meeting in the Valley last week.) Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
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