Yahoo has changed its Yahoo Music site to act as a window on other music sites, including YouTube, Last.fm, Flickr, Pandora as well as links to the Apple iTunes Store and Amazon downloads, while still retaining its partnership with RealNetwork’s Rhapsody. Not quite sure what Yahoo’s aim is in this, is in a music site or a retail affiliate for other music sites? It still has 500,000 artist pages which is quite something.
Telefonica cellular brand Movistar, has begun a mobile banking project in Columbia, working with the National Federation of Coffee Growers and the Bank of Bogota in Santander, Caldas and Risaralda. The idea like Nokia’s Life Tools project in India, lets growers check out coffee prices at remote markets from their rural locations which have cellular access. They can then use a Smart Card chip to bank with their mobile phones, deposit money, make payments and ask for cash at various shops. Around 80% of Latin Americans own a mobile phone, but just 30% have access to mobile banking.
The Australian government has given up on its plan to contract with private enterprise for a national broadband network and will do the job itself. Blaming the global financial crisis, it said that no-one was prepared to put enough resource into the project so the government will build it and then slowly sell off the shareholding. The plan is to build a fiber network offering 100 Mbps to 90% of Australian homes and then use slower technologies for the last 10%. The cost is expected to be $30 billion.
IBM’s bid to acquire Sun seems to be dead in the water, after the smaller firm tried to raise the offer price and IBM turned it down. Sun’s share price promptly slumped because there are few other potential buyers. IBM had worries about regulatory issues and only Hewlett-Packard can realistically mount another bid. Now Sun may sell the company in parts, including its Java business, which might be of key interest to one of the mobile or software giants looking to dominate the cross-platform applications market.
Netflix is now adding more and more content to its online movie streaming video service, this week adding previous TV seasons of South Park and Nickelodeon shows such as iCarly and SpongeBob SquarePants. It will start with the first nine seasons of South Park – 139 episodes in all.
The Associated Press says that it will start getting tough on news sources which copy its news. Its chairman said the news cooperative would work with portals and other partners to properly license content but sue anyone that didn’t play ball. ‘We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,’ Singleton said at the AP annual meeting, in San Diego. It plans to build software which tracks online content to see if it is being used legally. Does that mean we can’t use its press releases any more?
UK quad player Virgin Media has bought options for just under 10% of interactive gaming firm NetPlay TV. The company has signed production and gaming agreements with Virgin Media until June 30, 2013, and will take over its ‘Challenge Jackpot’ brand for just under $3 million. The company will expand the brand’s online and mobile games offering and develop its own SuperCasino.com, Bingos.com and Eurotelemillions brands.
The Wall Street Journal reckons that (unsurprisingly) Nokia Siemens Networks is bidding for part of Nortel, listing the profitable carrier networks unit and the R&D unit working on LTE, which Nortel said it would pull out of back in September. Already the Nortel enterprise unit has attracted bids from Avaya and Siemens.
Small French VoD and IPTV player Anevia, has landed $7 million in a second round of funding with Seventure Partners leading and CDC Innovation, a shareholder from the first round also putting in cash. Anevia says it has systems installed which reach 4 million end users in the Telecoms and Hospitality markets. That’s a big figure for such a small company and we suspect that this is by dint of it encoding some TV channels which are then widely distributed.
French car maker Renault has launched a dedicated TV service in the UK with five channels going over the internet. Renault TV will use content from partnerships with Fashion Week and Formula One, and its 110-year automotive history, to provide entertainment and information to potential customers.
At no stage has Carphone Warehouse ever said that it did not want to buy the UK end of Italian ISP Tiscali, despite the fact that it failed to get on its last shortlist, which resulted in a deal going exclusively with BSkyB. Tiscali and BSkyB are no longer talking to one another, and Carphone Warehouse is back in the picture says UK newspaper The Telegraph. Tiscali is under pressure because it has missed debt repayments, and thinks its UK 1.8 million internet subscribers are still worth around $720 million while the vultures circling realize that it is now a distressed sale, with its share price falling rapidly, so that the stock market only values the entire group at $130 million or so.
Pace the UK set top company, which recently absorbed Philips’ set top business, has issued an interim trading statement to significantly upgrade expectations for 2009. The company says that demand has picked up in many of the Group’s global markets and technologies and this will result in a significant improvement, which it didn’t ratify this by issuing actual numbers. It was profitable with over $1 billion of revenues last year, and in January raised expectations and issued a dividend, so this is the second upgrade.