Blockbuster v Netflix in box bout
A battle of the boxes began today between Blockbuster and Netflix, the principal online DVD rental services in the US.
Blockbuster announced its MediaPoint digital media player to serve movies to TVs over the internet. Its response to Netflix’s Roku box, launched six months ago, differs in some important respects. Read more
How much does spam cost? It’s hard to quantify in terms of bandwidth, time and effort blocking it, and general nuisance. But here’s a figure to mull over: $873m.
That’s how much Facebook has been awarded in damages against a spammer in a US court for sending unsolicited messages on the Facebook network. And if it sounds trivial in this era of multi-billion dollar bailouts, it’s a lot more than Facebook’s expected revenues for 2008 – more than double, in fact. Read more
Buying Twitter in $500m or less
Twitter’s $500m takeover talks with Facebook may baffle its non-users. While Twitter has a devoted community of millions, sceptics have dismissed its 140-character “micro-blog” posts as nothing more than Facebook’s existing status update feature. Both allow people to answer Twitter’s central question: What are you doing?
For Twitter’s co-founder, Biz Stone, the answer seems to be “quite a lot” towards making a greater distinction between a feature and a business. 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.
