Pity the poor lawmaker.

Lobbyists from America’s richest and most influential companies are walking the halls of Congress arguing for the need to preserve American innovation.

Lobbyists for high-tech firms like Intel and Cisco say the best way to do that would be for senators to pass a patent bill that will reduce the number of bad patents. But pharmaceutical companies and smaller tech firms say the bill itself weakens patent protection and poses a major threat to American competitiveness.

The debate quickly deteriorates into arcane talk of offshore patent trolls, inequitable conduct, prior art and obviousness.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of the patent reform on Sept. 7, and the Senate is supposed to take it up “in the next few weeks,” according to Cisco’s General Counsel Mark Chandler.

The push for reform aims to address high tech’s irritation at patent trolls — a reference to lawyers who buy patents and file infringement lawsuits, often against high tech companies whose products can use hundreds of patented gadgets.

Cisco’s Chandler says his company has even seen patent trolls move offshore, a sort of outsourcing of patent trolling.

How will the Senate vote? Your best bet is look at which companies are in a senator’s home state for a clue.
—by Diane Bartz

(Photo: Reuters)

Britain’s Guardian Media Group, which owns the Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK, is launching a U.S.-focused news and commentary Web site in the coming weeks called Guardian America.

The site will be run by former American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky, who was appointed in May. GMG has targeted the U.S. because six million of the 16 million unique users on the Guardian’s UK Web site are based in the United States and it wants to take advantage of American’s hunger for news about their country with a different perspective. The new site will be underpinned by the Guardian’s UK-generated content, bolstered by its own U.S.-based correspondents and columnists and carry links to the Guardian’s collective group blog, comment is free.

Reuters correspondent Gavin Haycock speaks with GMG Chief Executive Carolyn McCall, who discusses strategy, rivals and liberalism with a small ‘l’. She expects the new site will compete for readers of the New York Times and Washington Post.
 
On why now:
This is a content-led strategy. It did surprise us in the past the amount of traction we have in America where we have done no promotion, no roadshows … what has really appealed to the American audience, the six million uniques out there is our content and the distinctiveness of our UK-driven content.
 
On differentiation:
I have always said the strongest thing about the Guardian is that it has this content which is quite hard to replicate. It is independent journalism, it is very well resourced, it has got resources all over the world but it has a liberal with a small ‘l’ outlook on the world. So it is a different outlook to the norm or to the mainstream and that has had a huge resonance.

I think it is important to define what liberal with a small ‘l’ is, especially when you are going into America with that positioning. It means something very significant in America. It is not something we would be talking about in our marketing strategy for instance. Liberal to us means fairness, openness, transparency, plurality, it is a range of views … We would always have this plurarity, this range of views and depth. I think that is quite unusual. I think it is particularly unusual in America.

I think the brilliant thing about (the new U.S. Web site) is that we have more users than the LA Times and the Houston Chronicle online in America. That is quite good, it gives us something to sell.
 
On the rollout plan:
I am a great believer in really firming up your content strategy, going for reach and then going for revenue. I think that is really the only way to do it. It has stood us in very good stead on GuardianUnlimited.”
 
We will start with news and comment and then we will go from there into looking at areas that we can develop that play to our strengths. What we need to do first and foremost is monetise the traffic that we have got through our core.
 
On why Americans will care:
What really fascinated me when I was in the States is how many people want to know in America what the rest of the world thinks about them. They are interested in what Europeans are saying about America, about Bush, about policy, about Iraq, about Iran. They are fascinated because some of them are not comfortable with how they are portrayed in the world. That is I think where we will do well because we have a very opinionated view of the world, a lot of resources to cover the world well and we also spend a lot of time talking about America for obvious reasons.

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Readers eagerly awaiting the arrival of what may be the most anticipated book release in history are expected to show remarkable self-restraint.
The latest and last instalment of the Harry Potter series arrives in stores at 12:01 am July 21, but research by Wal-Mart shows that despite suspense over the ending, most readers are planning on keeping their curiosity in check.
Nearly 9 out of 10 intended purchasers say they’ll read straight through to the end rather than skip to the final pages to find out what happens, according to a telephone survey of Americans age 16 and older conducted on July 17 by Wal-Mart.
Nearly 17,000 people have already vowed to keep the ending a secret at www.makethepledge.net
About 28 million people say they plan to buy the book this weekend, according to the survey. That’s equivalent to the number of people in the states of New York and Michigan combined.
And, the research suggests that America is truly a nation of optimists. 58 percent of those planning to buy the book believe Harry lives at the end.
Wal-Mart is doing its part to keep the secret safe - over 50,000 ear plugs will be distributed Friday at Wal-Mart stores where the retailer predicts the largest sales will happen. The secret of who dies will not be discussed at the registers, the company said.

–Written by Regan E. Doherty

Boardroom politics may have been her nemesis at Hewlett-Packard, but that hasn’t stopped former HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina from appreciating the role boards play in bringing about change. That’s why she’s serving on a number of them, Fiorina said at the Wall Street Journal Deals and Deal Makers Conference on Wednesday.

Fiorina is using them to push causes close to her heart, including eliminating poverty and increasing the number of women in boardrooms, she said. “If you don’t get women involved, solutions don’t happen as fast,” she said. Although women have made some progress, she added, it’s still “clearly not a meritocracy.”

Some of these ideas have made their way into her memoir, Tough Choices, in which she also talks about steering HP through the tech slump and the merger with Compaq. Fiorina was fired from HP in 2005.

Fiorina said she often gets asked whether she will get into politics, but said she has no plans so far.

Her presidential candidate favorite? Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.
McCain strikes her as the kind of person who knows “the only way to solve problems is to find common ground with people” who don’t necessarily share the same point of view.

- Reporting by Anupreeta Das

IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller couldn’t wait to disclose the size of the company’s new marketing campaign to tout his Ask.com search engine and other new products at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York — despite the best efforts of his own lieutenant.

“We’ve got a number of different ways that we’re going to use to tell people about Ask, its tools, why it should be used, why you should be thinking about making a change from Google … We’ve started a major television campaign that has just begun in the last — “

” — week,” Ask CEO Jim Lanzone piped up.

That’s where it gets interesting. Listen to the interplay between the two as Diller insists on disclosing the size of Ask’s 2007 marketing budget.

As soon as Dow Jones confirmed an approach from News Corp., speculation sprang up in some corners that a takeover battle for the Wall Street Journal publisher was surely about to begin.

Paul Kedroksy, the Infectious Greed blogger who calls himself  “an occasional commentator on CNBC”, said GE/NBC should bid aggressively for Dow Jones. “A new Fox biz network with integrated WSJ/DJ/Marketwatch will be an instant major media presence.” 

“I would think that some senior people at CNBC … pleading with GE execs to make a run at Dow Jones,” The Big Picture speculates.

It’s about time, said Jim Cramer at thestreet.com, recalling how Murdoch asked him about the wisdom of a Dow Jones bid 10 years ago. “With Dow Jones, News Corp has a ready-made business team to give its business channel the talent and the data it needs.”

Media blogger Jim Romenesko carried the report from CNBC’s David Faber, posting that the surpise $60 a share offer could draw in newspaper groups Washington Post Co., the New York Times Co. as well as privately-held Bloomberg LP. 

If concluded, the deal would give News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch a lock on global financial news, Reuters Ken Li reports.

The offer fuelled some U.S. newspaper shares. The New York Times rose over 6 percent on the day. Murdoch’s offer means “New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, who has brushed aside shareholder critics, is probably on the phone with is bankers right now,” concludes Jonathan Barr in AOL’s bloggingstocks. 

What’s your view of the News Corp move?

Newspaper editors may be grumpy in general, but most are upbeat about the industry’s prospects, according to a new survey of newsroom trends.

Some 85 percent of editors are very or somewhat optimistic about the future of their papers, said the survey, which was commissioned by the Paris-based World Editors Forum and Reuters.

That may strike you as a surprise. After all, newspapers are everyone’s example No. 1 of old media trying to remain prosperous as its lunch gets eaten by free news on the Internet, mobile phones and blogs.

Other results:

- 35 percent of editors believe print will be the most common medium for news over the next decade

- Nearly 60 percent believe news will be produced via digital media such as online (40 percent), mobile telephones (11 percent) and e-papers (7 percent).
 
The survey, which was conducted by Zogby International, sampled a spread of regional and national editors, with around half from Europe and a smaller number from Asia and the United States.

(Reporting by Gavin Haycock in London; Editing by Robert MacMillan in New York)

(Updates with BusinessWeek comment) 

One place you wont find the story why Citigroup honcho Todd Thomson left the bank: CNBC.

Thats because CNBC news anchor Maria Bartiromo, known to tabloids as the Money Honey, is reported to be at the center of the story.

Bartiromo took a flight with Thomson on a Citigroup corporate jet from Beijing to New York, CNBC said. Several press outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, said that other Citigroup employees had been bumped from that flight so that Thomson and Bartiromo could ride back alone.

The network said Bartiromo sought permission to take the flight, had received it, and that CNBC had paid Citigroup for that flight.

Thomson was known as a big spender in the company, but the final straw, according to the Wall Street Journal, was when he used $5 million of Citigroups money to sponsor a Sundance Channel television program whose hosts included Bartiromo. (NBC is a co-owner of the channel.)

Citigroups expenses have risen much faster than its revenue, forcing the company to engage in extensive cost cutting.

CNBCs coverage has given no mention to Bartiromos involvement in the Thomson story. A search on CNBC.com for “Todd Thomson” only turned up an Oct. 26, 2006 video on “Asia’s Boom in New Wealth.”

In an emailed statement, a CNBC spokesman said that Bartiromo works tirelessly around the world in the service of business journalism, and added, Her record and reporting speak for themselves. The spokesman declined to comment beyond the statement.

Bartiromos role in Thomsons departure was also omitted from BusinessWeeks coverage of the story, which focused on the fact that Sallie Krawcheck, who had been Citigroups chief financial officer, is replacing Thomson. Bartiromo writes a column every other week for BusinessWeek.

Business Week spokeswoman Kimberley Quinn  responds, “We are covering, and will continue to cover, Citigroup and its management changes, including a story in the current issue titled ‘At Citi, More Heat on Chuck Prince.’”

Meanwhile, the Financial Times, which Bartiromo occasionally contributes to, has covered the Thomson/Bartiromo story.

Click here for Reuters coverage of the story.
                                                                                         –Reporting by Dan Wilchins

(Photo: Reuters / Bartiromo hosting Milken Institute 2006 Global Conference)

Getting ready for the show…

The WowWee Alive Elvis by WowWee Robotics sings during a media preview

A model pulls a EGO waterproof sound case for iPod out of a fish tank 
 

 The S-XGen ultra mobile PC 

Photos: Reuters