Mobilog

Monday, December 12, 2005

Virgin + NTL: The Weekend Papers. : The weekend edition of UK papers had various points of view on the Virgin-NTL proposed deal (or the non-deal for now)
-- Branson V Murdoch: Why Britain's hippest billionaire is aiming is planning to take on Sky in a battle for global domination.
-- Branson's bride will be wearing red: But Virgin's boss may live to regret the day NTL and Telewest took his name
-- Virgin merger will smash 'old media' barriers [PaidContent.org]
12:02:36 AM

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Harper Collins Throws Its Hat In Digitizing Book Cauldron. : Yeah, it is all confusing, but this will all take a couple of years to at least start making some sense. News Corp.'s HarperCollins, one of the biggest book publishers, has decided to kickstart its own digital book strategy. It will digitize its active backlist of an estimated 20,000 titles and as many as 3,500 new books each year, and store them on its own servers, and then let the search engine spider them.
This is the opposite of what it does now: send copies of its books to various Internet companies for digitizing. The company figures that the present way lets the search companies own the customer, but by hosting and letting search sites end over customers to its own site would help them define the business model. [PaidContent.org]
12:02:08 AM

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Vodafone Should Exit Japan/US. The Telegraph, 12 December 2005
Sir John Bond, who becomes Vodafone's chairman in July, should review its global strategy. The mobile operator is in investors' bad books, with its shares trading at a steep discount to the sum of its parts. But a change of strategy -- if cleverly executed -- could replace the discount with a premium. The solution is to sell Vodafone's Japanese and US businesses. Not that it will be easy to exit them well. [Wireless Watch Japan]
12:01:22 AM

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