MediaFile

Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research and development, said on the network’s Olympics conference call Thursday that archery is the new curling.

As a former “vice skip”* on my high school’s curling team, I have a message for Mr. Wurtzel: archery is no curling, sir.

Of course I am being a bit tongue-in-cheek here and I’m not that offended. Plus, Wurtzel has some compelling numbers to back up his claim.

He said curling was the most-viewed Olympics sport on cable this year, even ranking ahead of basketball and its TV-ready athletes like LeBron James

“Archery is the new curling. The numbers for archery have been nothing less than huge,” said Wurtzel. “It delivered an average of 1.5 million cable viewers, the highest rated cable sport, beating out basketball. Now maybe it’s the Hunger Games phenomenon, or Brady Ellison orKhatuna Lorig who taught Jennifer Lawrence how to shoot for the film,  it really doesn’t matter but we’re going to keep an eye on that.”

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on PandoDaily.com. It is being republished with permission.

Well, this is a different side of Yuri Milner… The famed Russian tech investor and founder of Russian Web giant Mail.ru, has launched the Milner Foundation, with the aim of doing nothing more than advancing our knowledge of the universe.

The $27 million foundation will annually award $3 million to fundamental physicists doing great work. And just let them keep doing that work. There are no expectations to be met, no commercialization that has to come out of it. Milner simply thinks it’s important that we understand the universe better than we do now. ”My background is in theoretical physics, and it’s something very close to my heart,” he said in an interview from Moscow this morning. “We, as a mankind, are not rewarding the best fundamental scientists the way we should, and this is one way to do that.”

It’s a toss-up which of this summer’s Olympics controversies will be the one most remembered. Twitter’s censorship (er, enforcement of terms of service) of an NBC critic and Empty Seat-gate are strong contenders. But for me NBC’s decision to tape-delay and edit live events after bragging that it would provide unprecedented real-time online access takes the gold.

Somehow our emotional attachment to television — and not video — remains incredibly strong. How else to explain the torrent of hate begat by NBC’s online blackout and broadcast delay of the Olympics opening ceremony in a day and age when alternatives and workarounds abound and time-shifting itself is considered a basic human right?

No, this feels like an “Occupy TV” moment: We, the 99 percent are galled that NBC won’t give us what we want when we want it, and that NBC is doing it because of a profit motive that requires it to manufacture appointment TV.

Apple’s resounding patent victory over Samsung in a California courtroom last Friday is a blow to the competition, which now won’t be able copy Apple’s technology. But it is a win for competition. It will force everyone to think harder about turning the unimaginable into the normal.

And that’s what technology innovation is all about.

I am all for intellectual property (it’s how writers make a living) and no particular fan of software patents, which can be vague and overly broad. It’s a very tangled area of IP that in the modern-day tech industry has been a life-support system (think Kodak) and a means of protecting oneself against patent trolls (like that guy who tried to sue the World Wide Web). Patent troves, in the astute description of technologist Andy Baio, have also been weaponized in perverted campaigns to stifle innovation.

Apple and Samsung are duking it out all over the world — some 50 lawsuits in about 10 countries, by one reckoning — in a sort of forever war. Samsung got a favorable ruling just days before in a South Korean court. But the marquee case was the one in San Jose, California, where a jury found that Samsung had violated six of the seven patents Apple sought to defend – three software and three design – and awarded the company $1.05 billion.

The venture arm of the world-beating chipmaker Intel Capital is increasingly looking outside the U.S. for deals– and finding them in places ranging from Ghana to Turkey.

“We are seeing a lot more dealflow outside the U.S.” said Intel Capital President Arvind Sodhani, an Indian-born globetrotter who believes the trend will continue– if only because that’s where most of the world economy is.

The firm, which plans to invest $300-$500 million this year, is putting its money where Sodhani’s mouth is. Recent investments include Rancard, a Ghana-based company that provides cloud-based software for mobile services, and Kupivip, a Russian ecommerce business. That’s a far cry from most VCs, who if they invest outside the US at all, tend to stick to markets like westsern Europe– or for the more adventurous, Brazil and China.

Facebook has now gone through its first trial by fire as a public company, slightly exceeding revenue expectations (with $1.18 billion) but showing a big loss in its first reported quarter ($157 million). Facebook shares were pummeled in after-hours trading; the company’s market cap has been slashed in half in just 10 weeks.

This is a bad, bad situation for Facebook’s early shareholders, 97% of whom are individual, retail investors – unlike those at the other big tech titans, which are majority-held by institutions: Google (68%) and Apple (67%). That Facebook’s percentage is so high suggests that Facebook is a stock for the masses. The masses need a hero.

That hero is not Mark Zuckerberg. He needs to get out of the way – not because we can judge him a disaster based on a single’s earnings period, but because he isn’t playing to his strength. He’s letting down the average folks who saw something shiny and new, but are now seeing shades of overhyped tech redux.

Bluefin Labs– a company that tracks a brand’s perception on social media sites while a commercial airs on TV– has named a new CEO.  JP Maheu has signed on with the fledgling company as CEO while its co-founder Deb Roy will take up the role of chairman.

Maheu was most recently the global CEO of Publicis Modem, the digital marketing arm of Publicis Worldwide, and has also served stints as CEO of Razorfish and chief digital officer at Ogilvy & Mather.

Bluefin provides technology that allows network programmers as well as advertisers to track what people are saying about specific products or TV shows on social media such as Twitter or Facebook.

Dish customers: No 'Breaking Bad' for you! (Photo: Reuters)

Evercore analyst Bryan Kraft believes the prolonged blackout that has left DirecTV’s 20 million subscribers without MTV, Comedy Central or Nickelodeon for a week, could lead to some industry consolidation.

In a research note out late Wednesday night, the analyst said if content providers Viacom, as well as home of ‘Breaking Bad’,AMC, which was dropped from No. 2  satellite provider Dish Network in July, get the upper hand, it raises the chances of a merger between satellite companies and cable providers.

If DirecTV and Dish comes out the winners, he said, it encourages cable TV networks to merge, but only when their valuations fall. DirecTV has pushed backed against what it claims are exorbitant increases in Viacom’s programming fees that it says it does not want to pass on to customers.

The minds of Silicon Valley have yet to find the cure for tardiness, but they have figured out a way to make being late less rude.

A new app call Twist notifies friends and colleagues when you’re running late, calculating the estimated time of arrival to your destination on-the-fly and zipping off text messages to the people waiting for you.

The free app, available on Wednesday for iOS devices, can be used for trips by car, bike, foot and public transportation in most major U.S. cities. In development for the past year, the app’s algorithms crunch through various data streams, such as the average speed you travel and real-time traffic patterns, to calculate ETAs that co-founder Mike Belshe says are 98 percent accurate.

Yahoo eats CEOs. The perennially ailing company lures talented managers into the corner suite of its Silicon Valley headquarters, then it sucks their good reputations out of their veins and casts them aside. They inevitably pass through the revolving door an empty shell of their former selves.

Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Scott Thompson. All took the CEO helm with visions of invigorating Yahoo into an Internet leader for the 21st century. Most became mired in Yahoo’s stubbornly byzantine culture. And all probably collected their severance checks wishing to themselves they’d never heard of the company with its stupid hillbilly name and its superfluous punctuation mark.*

Now it’s Marissa Mayer’s turn. Mayer – an early Google hire who instrumentally forged its successes in search, maps and online email – has become such a positive, likable presence in Silicon Valley that I actually felt sorry for her when I heard it was her time to be Yahoo’s help. A failed tenure as Yahoo’s CEO couldn’t happen to a better-qualified candidate.