Time Warner

Squawk Box June 6

by alec on June 6, 2008

For the Friday SquawkBox we did a roundup of a few of the stories from this past week.

AT&T’s release yesterday of their NetReach bundle. Starting at $79.95 per month it gives you residential DSL, WiFi access at 17,000 US hotspots, and 3G data access. Competitively priced, apparently, but a game changer? Maybe not.
Paul McGuiness, manager of U2, blames ISPs, handset manufacturers, and pretty much the whole world for the destruction of the music industry… this in a year when U2 made $355 million touring. We agree that he lives in an irony free zone.
Verizons acquisition of Alltel for $27 billion!
Jerry Yang and Carl ICahn? ICahn has been railing against Yahoo’s board, and publicly said that Yang is done if ICahn gets his way. We’re not very sympathetic to Yang’s plight.
Windows XP gets rescued again… for some classes of device. Is the mantle of “cockroach OS” passing from DOS finally? Most on the call are still running XP, and many see themselves switching to a Mac when it comes time to upgrade. Ouch!
Time Warner’s metered internet use trial. Om Malik says it’s the thin edge of the wedge. Calculations showed that the metered bandwidth was just enough to provide a non-compelling video experience. The call was full of Canadians who observed that we already have metered bandwidth usage in this country.
And for grins, we did a roundup of the latest iPhone rumours including the infamous box shot from Australia…

On the call: Don Eidse, Jim Courtney, Misha Nossik, Adam Somer, Brian Sharwood, Bill Volk, Jonathan Jensen, and Todd Spraggins

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Squawk Box May 21

by alec on May 22, 2008

Apologies for not getting this posted until today. At the Mesh conference, while WiFi is free, most ports are blocked. Uploading audio with FTP is problematic as a result.

On the call, we talked about Microsoft’s new “pay the user” search model. Consensus? A desparate bid. None of us felt that we would change our behaviour as a result of micro-payments.

And what about the rash of lawsuits being launched in the US by consumers against wireless providers? Finally fed up with byzantine contracts, billing plans, and high handed behaviour by the carriers, consumers are fighting back. No surprise to any of us. We’ve all experienced a carrier “sting” after tripping some unknown carve-out in the terms of service.

And finally we talked about Warner Records VP Technology Ethan Kaplan’s comments at Mesh. Unfortunately, a glitch in the conference recording meant that I lost most of the tail end of that conversation.

On the call: Dan York, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Jeanette Fisher, Dave Brown, Adam Somer, Jeb Brilliant, Ian Hood, and Neal Saferstein

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Squawk Box Jan 18: Sun, Hasbro and more

January 18, 2008

This morning we recorded another SquawkBox with Randall Howard, Howard Thaw, Jim Courtney and myself. We talked about Sun's acquisition of MySQL this week for a cool $1 billion. What's Sun's game here? Speculation runs the gamut from building enterprise applications to compete with Oracle all the way to cloud computing a la Amazon EC3. [...]

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AOL & MSN in Talks

September 15, 2005

The New York Post reported this morning that Time Warner and Microsoft are in talks to sell a stake in AOL to Microsoft. Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft’s Web unit MSN. Microsoft would pay some [...]

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