MediaFile

RIM is close to a decision on stripping its co-chief executives of their other shared role as chairman of the board, The National Post newspaper said, a change that could meet a key demand from angry and disillusioned investors. The Post’s sources said Barbara Stymiest, currently an independent member of RIM’s board, is leading the race to replace Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie in the chairmanship. RIM shares jumped more than 7 percent on the news. But some analysts doubted Stymiest, if named to the chairmanship, would actually assume the transformational role that activist shareholders are calling for.

Groupon shares closed the day down 6.6 percent after a Susquehanna Financial Group – Yipit survey of almost 400 merchants found that while 8 out of 10 merchants enjoyed working with daily deal companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial, 52 percent were not planning to feature deals in the next six months and nearly 24 percent intended to feature only one deal during the same period.

Apple is planning an event to be held in New York later this month that will focus on publishing and eBooks, AllThingsD and Techcrunch reported. The event will unveil improvements to Apple’s iBooks platform, Techcrunch wrote.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch rung in the New Year with a new Twitter account, tweeting praise for Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, a socially conservative former senator who has risen sharply in the polls, describing him as the “only candidate with genuine big vision” for the country. Also via Twitter, Murdoch called President Obama’s decision on the detention of terrorism suspects “very courageous – and dead right!”. On Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Murdoch tweeted: “Interesting but unfair, family must hate.”

You can say what you like about Rupert Murdoch, and most people have, but he doesn’t do things halfway. His decision to join Twitter on New Year’s eve has set the Twitterati and blogosphere alight not just because the 80-year old media baron joined but because unlike every other CEO or executive who’s joined Twitter, he’s actually expressed some real opinions — some of which are controversial given who he is. When Reuters asked CEOs at its Global Media Summit last fall most felt tweeting wasn’t for them.

In Murdoch’s first 24 hours he started off relatively gently praising an op-ed on Ron Paul in his Wall Street Journal, extolled the benefits of vacation, praised the founder of original founder of his New York Post and championed two of his Fox studios’ movies ‘The Descendants’ and ‘We bought a Zoo’.

He seemed to stick to some sort of neutral script for his first 24 hours but by Monday (Jan 2nd) he had praised President Obama for being “very courageous – and dead right” for his decision on terrorist detention, taken a poke at Glenn Beck’s old Fox News show and effectively endorsed Republican presidential candidate hopeful Rick Santorum: “Only candidate with genuine big vision for the country”. He also called on the “courageous” Obama to address what Murdoch sees as the United States’ biggest crisis, its education policy.

Tom Cruise’s fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie held on to the top of box office charts over New Year’s weekend as Hollywood said goodbye to a sluggish year at domestic movie theaters.

As 2011 ended, U.S. and Canadian revenue fell from last year and attendance slumped to its lowest level since 1995.

The year’s final weekend saw top movies add to ticket sales from the Christmas holiday one week earlier but no change in the top three chart positions. The “Sherlock Holmes” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks” franchise films took the No. 2 and 3 positions behind Cruise’s film.

With no new movies coming to theaters nationwide, the New Year’s weekend box-office battle will be waged among the big crop of films released around Christmas.

Theaters are hoping to catch moviegoers over a long weekend starting Friday and ending on Monday’s U.S. government holiday, when many people will be home from work or school. Tom Cruise’s action movie “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” – the Christmas weekend winner – looks likely to lead the pack again, according to industry pundits. Distributor Paramount Pictures projects an estimated $40 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales over four days for the popular franchise’s fourth installment. Other films fighting for top spots include Warner Bros. detective sequel “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” 20th Century Fox’s family sequel “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked” and Sony’s book adaptation and thriller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Three other family-oriented films also are in the mix - Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse,” released by Disney, and Paramount-distributed “The Adventures of Tintin,” plus “We Bought a Zoo” from Fox.

The movies will close out a disappointing year in terms of dollars at the domestic box office. Ticket sales for the United States and Canada will end the year down an estimated 4 percent from 2010 at $10.2 billion while annual attendance will rank as the lowest since 1995, according to forecasts from the box office division of tracking firm Hollywood.com.

Verizon Wireless has reversed its decision to charge a $2 fee for one-time telephone and online bill payments after a storm of criticism from consumers and the U.S. communications regulator.

Occupy protesters say they are making their own Facebook, Wired.com reports.

If the last decade was all about open source, the next decade will be about open APIs. However, as with open source, APIs aren’t necessarily a guarantee of billions in the bank, Matt Asay writes in The Register.

“As baffling as it may seem, HP was trying to rid itself of Palm without taking a loss on its purchase”, a source with knowledge of the negotiations told MobileBeat.

By John C Abell
The opinions expressed are his own.

Pick a year: It’s easy to look back and convince yourself That Was The Year That Was in tech, partly because the pace of change is so rapid and partly because we so readily embrace and then quickly depend on things that are completely different. Consider this: When the class of 2012 was applying to college, there was no iPhone. Until those students were just about at the end of their  junior years, there was no iPad. Both of these nascent devices now define the mobile Internet, which is where all the action is.

But 2011 had some pretty remarkable advances that seem to be the start of inexorable things to come, as well as some surprising and sad examples of demise, whose impact will surely be felt for years to come, in ways that are currently near-impossible to predict.

Some may argue that 2011 was the year of the tablet (redux), because of the spritely launch of Amazon’s Fire and Barnes & Noble’s reboot of the Nook color. I say, it was bound to happen, and that the only really interesting thing is that content companies are giving Apple a bit of competition, and not the hardware bigwigs.

Amazon.com shares fell to their lowest level since late March on Thursday on concern about sales growth during the online retailer’s crucial fourth quarter.

Free Wi-Fi is on its way to some Japanese vending machines, reports gizmag. Much like a mobile hotspot at a local coffee shop, people near the machines would be able to connect to the internet for 30 minutes at a time and surf the web.

Just when you thought you’d never hear the words HP TouchPad ever again, the miniature version of the tablet computer that caused a frenzy when it went on sale for $99 has emerged: the HP TouchPad Go, reports the International Business Times.

The iTV might be the most anticipated product Apple will ever launch, and it seems everyone has an opinion about it, writes Gigaom’s Ryan Lawler. Apple will win in TV the same way it won with the iPhone — by having a compelling platform for app developers, he says.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS “hasn’t made much of a splash in 2011″, says ex-Windows Phone evangelist Charlie Kindel. “Microsoft’s approach with WP7 has a impedance mismatch with the carriers and device manufacturers while Google’s approach reduces friction with carriers and device manufacturers at the expense of end users,” his blog says.

Netflix and the Gap were among the worst performers in customer satisfaction among the largest online retailers this holiday season, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

Just what the country needed: Another political Web site.

At the beginning of the week, ABC News launched OTUS, its political news supermarket with its top political reporters (Jake Tapper, Jonathan Karl, Amy Walter, and George Stephanopoulos) hunkering on the site's home page. OTUS threatens to dice, grind, sieve, and aerosol the complex business of campaigns and the affairs of the state into inhalable powder.

As Tapper says in this promo, OTUS (short for of the United States as in, POTUS, president of the United States, or SCOTUS, supreme court of the United States) is all about the "power moves, the mini-dramas, the scheming" in politics. Tapper promises that OTUS will flag both the "urgent and the ridiculous," offer games, display correspondents' Twitter feeds, and create a stock market-style ticker that assesses the rising and falling worth of candidates with social media.

ABC News has expanded its Web efforts at what is obviously a late date. Salon, Slate, Talking Points Memo, Yahoo Politics, Politico, RealClearPolitics, Red State, Huffington Post Politics, FiveThirtyEight, Mother Jones, National Review Online, Daily Beast, Daily Caller, Roll Call, The Hill, CNN Politics, NBC's First Read, Time 's Swampland, National Journal, specialty sections at the Washington Post, the New York Times, New York magazine, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and Reuters, as well as numerous other sites already cover the beat, and cover it well.

Research In Motion, still smarting over having to change the name of its yet-to-come operating system, faces a similar trademark challenge to its popular instant-messaging service BlackBerry Messenger. The service, which allows BlackBerry users to send each other text and multimedia files and see when they are delivered and read, is widely known and even promoted by RIM via the shorthand BBM. That has proven an encumbrance to BBM Canada, which measures radio and television audience data and expects its day in a Federal Court against RIM by February.

RIM seems determined to keep using the BBM name and not to pay BBM anything. “We believe that BBM Canada is attempting to obtain trademark protection for the BBM acronym that is well beyond the narrow range of the services it provides and well beyond the scope of rights afforded by Canadian trademark law,” it said in an emailed statement.

Facebook, Google and Yahoo, and other internet firms, have been ordered by two Indian courts to remove material considered religiously offensive, the latest skirmish in a growing battle over website content in the world’s largest democracy. One court in the capital Delhi on Friday issued summons to 19 companies to stand trial for offences relating to distributing obscene material to minors, after being shown images it said were offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians, the PTI news agency said.