MediaFile

Many of you  might have forgotten IAC/InteractiveCorp’s Daily Beast and Newsweek agreed to merge operations last November to create a new entity called, well…  Newsweek. And that would be understandable as it’s been pretty quiet till this week’s interview scoop with the former IMF chief Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s accuser.

IAC Chairman Barry Diller (pictured, right) told Wall Street analysts today that Newsweek has a promising future very different from the floundering Newsweek of recent years. He said under the leadership of Daily Beast founder Tina Brown the weekly magazine is starting to win back advertisers and subscribers.

“The losses are not really high. In a year, year-and-a-half or so, I think it’s probably a year-and-a- half, I think we’ll have no losses and be on the positive side. And I think for a pretty small investment we’re going to build a serious long-term asset in new publishing,” which he describes as the combination or offline and online.

Diller said the publication has some 10 million unique visitors on the Web and said the effort would  result in “reasonable losses”. He said total investment will probably come to a total of $50 million from “inception to conclusion of losses”.

This isn’t too dissimilar to Rupert Murdoch’s estimation for The Daily, the iPad-based daily magazine News Corp launched in February with much fanfare, a $30 million pre-launch  investment and a promise to spend around $500,000 a week running it. News Corp has not said much about The Daily since its launch and in recent weeks, well… they’ve had other distractions. Still New York Observer has a story here today saying the fledgling news service is suffering start-up growth pains.

Apple sued rival Samsung Electronics claiming that Samsung’s Galaxy line of mobile phones and tablet “slavishly” copies the iPhone and iPad, according to court papers. The lawsuit, filed on Friday, alleges Samsung copied the look, product design and product user interface of Apple’s products. Samsung violated Apple’s patents and trademarks, the suit alleges.

Twitter is in talks to buy TweetDeck for around $50 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. TweetDeck is an add-on program that helps Twitter users view and manage their tweets and messages on other services such as those offered by Facebook and Foursquare. Twitter has allowed advertisers’ “promoted tweets”, that show up when users perform searches on Twitter, to appear on TweetDeck as part of a revenue-sharing agreement, The WSJ wrote.

Texas Instruments’s quarterly earnings missed Wall Street expectations by a penny as expenses rose after two of its Japanese factories were damaged in the country’s largest-ever earthquake. The company, which plans to buy analog chip maker National Semiconductor Corp for $6.5 billion, said one of its factories will “soon” resume full production, and added that it expects a strong second half.

IAC chief Barry Diller has spent the last year building and then sitting on a pile of cash, which rose to $2 billion in the first quarter — only some $400 million less than its entire market cap of $2.4 billion. Journalists and Wall Street have asked Diller repeatedly how he intends to use the cash. A big M&A move perhaps? A generous one-time dividend maybe? Or share buybacks?******Diller is focused on adding to his empire of Internet units in small increments rather than making major acquisitions. That empire includes dating site Match.com, search engine Ask.com, event planning site evite and many others.******Here’s Diller back in April on the first quarter conference call with analysts: “While I can’t say what we’ll do, obviously, other than invest in the businesses we have, because we believe they’re worthy of investments, relatively small scale, we’re open but I am actually not optimistic about being able to extensively spend the enormously large amounts of cash that we have. It could change on a dime, but there it is at the moment.”******True to his word Match.com said on Tuesday it has signed an agreement to buy People Media, an operators of targeted dating sites for $80 million in cash from American Capital Ltd.******People Media owns 27 dating sites incluing BlackPeopleMeet.com, SingleParentMeet.com and SeniorPeopleMeet.com with a combined 255,000 paying subscribers.  IAC said People Media generated $11.6 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in 2008.