Tech wrap: AT&T, Sprint admit using monitoring software
Phone makers RIM and Nokia denied installing on their mobile devices an app which can monitor what users are doing without their knowledge or consent while carriers AT&T and Sprint admitted to using it. The companies responded after a security researcher demonstrated in online videos how the “Carrier IQ” software worked on Google’s Android operating system and said that phones running RIM’s BlackBerry platform and Nokia’s Symbian OS also had the software installed. AT&T and Sprint said they use “Carrier IQ” to monitor network quality.
Blackstone Group and Bain Capital are preparing a bid for all of Yahoo with Asian partners in a deal that could value the Internet company at about $25 billion, a source familiar with the matter said. The potential bid by the consortium, which would include China’s Alibaba and Japan’s Softbank, has not yet been finalized, the source and two other people familiar with the matter said. E-commerce giant Alibaba, whose primary interest is in buying back a 40 percent stake owned by Yahoo, is keeping its options open and said it has not decided whether to participate in a bid for all of Yahoo.
Apple’s iPhone edged past major news events, celebrities and pop stars as the top searched term on the Web in 2011, according to Yahoo. The media company said the smartphone proved more popular than reality television celebrity Kim Kardashian, pop star Katy Perry and singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who placed in the top five. Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted of the murder of her young daughter after a highly publicized trial, was No. 2.
Best Buy is recalling about 32,000 Rocketfish battery cases for iPhones because of a fire hazard, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada said. The Richfield, Minnesota, company and the CPSC have received about 14 reports of the Rocketfish Model RF-KL12 Mobile Battery Case overheating while charging in the United States, the CPSC said.
The European Commission joined forces with major technology firms including Apple, Facebook and Google to improve the protection of children online. The coalition, which includes 28 companies, will develop an age-based online ratings system and aims to strengthen privacy settings. It also plans by the end of next year to make it easier to report inappropriate content. Other measures include improving parental controls and enhancing cooperation among law enforcement and hotline authorities to remove online material showing sexual abuse.
Financial Times finds new way to save newspapers
Maybe the real headline should be, “Financial Times finds old way to save newspapers.” It’s called the lawsuit. As reported by Cityfile:
You know we’re in a deep recession when even billionaire financiers can’t afford to pay for subscriptions to the Financial Times. In what will go down as one of the more bizarre (and unintentionally hilarious) lawsuits we’ve seen in quite some time, the newspaper filed a lawsuit against Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group on Wednesday for sharing an FT username and password instead of setting up separate accounts for its employees. Yes, an unknown “senior employee” at the colossal private equity firm “authorized the initiation and repeated renewal of an individual, personal subscription to FT.com” and then distributed the login details to company employees so they could all join in on the fun. (The court documents list the username as “theblackstonegroup” and the password as “blackstone,” although FT says it has since “disabled the credentials to mitigate damages.”)
The New York Post gives us the background on why the situation is absurd on its face:
Blackstone’s penny-pinching ways stand in stark contrast to the way Schwarzman lives. Two years ago, his wife threw a $3 million 60th-birthday party for the buyout king that featured 500 guests, and included a performance by Rod Stewart. A Wall Street Journal story chronicled Schwarzman’s fondness for $40 crab legs and for running up weekend food bills of $3,000.
For MediaFile’s part, we see another tool that U.S. newspapers can employ to enrich their depleted coffers. Newspaper publishers usually wait for one among them to step forward and take action before falling in en masse (cutting dividends, laying off workers, etc), and we wonder why the lawsuit route should be any different.
Yes, there are differences between the FT and most U.S. newspapers. The FT charges hefty subscriptions to read the paper in print and online. (Online subscriptions run $179 to $299 a year, as the FT’s complaint states). That means there is a monetary value to “sharing.” Most U.S. newspapers charge nothing, but require registration.
Think about it this way, newspaper websites depend upon the information they glean through registration — including how many people have registered — to set rates that they charge advertisers. If the entire municipal staff in Anytown, Kansas, is sharing access to the Kansas City Star, it’s presenting a distorted picture to the paper, which then presents a distorted picture to advertisers. With ad revenue in free fall and the possibility that some big-city papers might die within weeks, it seems fair to imagine that a trip to the courthouse could result.
Steve Schwarzman has a major management undertaking considering the diversity, size and complexity of his investments.
It is doubtfull that he was aware of the pirating of FT login or clonning.
What the press will do to create stories of the Rich and Famous goes beyond common sense. Wouldn’t a private & descrete settlement between FT and BS been more appropriate?
Next thing we’ll see is a news story comparison of Schwarzman to Madoff. Anyting to sell papers!
If Wasserstein could turn back Time (Warner)…
Bruce Wasserstein, chief executive of private equity firm Lazard, joined Blackstone co-founder Steve Schwarzman at a breakfast sponsored by Fortune magazine this morning to share their collective wisdom regarding the financial crisis. (For more on the breakfast, see our DealZone blog).
At the end of the Q&A session, he got one of those out-of-the-blue questions from editor and moderator Andy Serwer: If he could do it all over again, would he still have hooked up with Carl Icahn on the activist investor’s quest to shake up Time Warner Inc?
It sounded like he would. He told guests at the breakfast that he was proud of the report that he and Icahn prepared about the state of the media conglomerate, which contained a bunch of recommendations for how it could improve — including mounting a bigger push into the digital age.
Then there was the money. “Both Carl and we did well financially from this.” And the investors? “Our view was to be helpful to the shareholders of Time Warner.” (Icahn’s strategy to break up the company failed, but he did reach an agreement in early 2006 with former Chief Executive Richard Parsons to add independent directors to the board and to get the company to buy back more stock)
One problem: It was a pain to convince a company seemingly stuck to its accustomed ways, Wasserstein said: “You face such entrenched points of view that it’s difficult to be successful unless you have really long-term resolve.”
So, would he do it all over again? “Probably not is the honest answer.”
I asked him afterward what made him decide that. Explaining their plans was the hard part, he said. I said, “to whom? The company? Or reporters? People like me?”
Pearlstine to make the most of Bloomberg
It looks like Norman Pearlstine couldn’t resist the glamorous life of journalism. After two years in the private equity business at the Blackstone Group Carlyle Group (D’oh!), Pearlstine is joining Bloomberg LP as “chief content officer,” where, as Bloomberg said in a press release, he will work with “Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler to seek growth opportunities for its television, radio, magazine and online products and to make the most of the existing Bloomberg News operations.”
Pearlstine used to be the editor-in-chief of Time Inc for 11 years, and before that spent 23 years at The Wall Street Journal. More details on his CV, directly from the release :
He was the paper’s top news executive for nine years, serving as Managing Editor and then Executive Editor. He previously worked as the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe, the first Managing Editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Tokyo bureau chief.
Pearlstine was founder of Smart Money magazine and worked as an Executive Editor of Forbes. He is the author of OFF THE RECORD: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources , published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007.
We don’t know what to make of this. Our immediate questions:
- Will he succeed Winkler, with whom he worked at the Journal?
- Will he put Bloomberg into M&A mode?
