Skype Up in The Sky For e-Bay In 2005, e-Bay Inc. spent $2.6 billion to purchase Skype, a software application that allows consumers to make domestic and international phone calls and conduct teleconferences over the Internet. The thinking at the time was that an Internet calling and video service would help buyers and sellers work out details of an auction, particularly in international sectors like India and China where e-Bay was expanding. Overall, the partnership has been deemed a bit of a failure. Apparently, eBay buyers and sellers prefer to communicate via email, and the merger proved to be a strain on company management’s time. Further complicating matters, e-Bay has been struggling to maintain its own footing in the ecommerce marketplace as rival Amazon Inc. gained market share. As a result, eBay has now decided to spin Skype off as an initial public offering (IPO) in 2010. eBay spokesman Alan Marks said the company chose to go the IPO route because “we think that’s what is going to maximize value for Skype and for e-Bay.” It has been reported that Skype’s founders, Scandinavian entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, expressed interest in buying the company back. TiVo’s DVR to Rewind Nielsen TiVo, a firm that made it easy for viewers to fast-forward through commercials, has now revealed a plan to help stations sell them. he company will directly challenge Nielsen, whose ratings data provides the basis for most ad sales, with Stop/Watch Local Markets. The plan calls to supplement TiVo’s measurements of national TV audiences with data from all but the smallest of the 210 local television markets that cover the U.S. TiVo will offer TV stations, advertisers and producers year-round, second-bysecond information about the shows and commercials watched by viewers who have one of the company’s DVRs. The anonymous data will come directly from the boxes, which are connected to one’s telephone line. TiVo execs are hoping that advertisers will be most interested in this data since Nielsen only measures local program viewing four months a year in all but the 21 largest TV markets (i.e., sweeps). By selling this info, TiVo hopes to supplement revenue from its oncebooming DVR business. The company currently has 3.3 million subscriptions, down 25 percent from its peak in 2007. But don’t count Nielsen out just yet. TiVo’s privacy-protection policies prevent it from collecting some important data that Nielsen can provide, including demographic breakdowns and the number of viewers watching a particular program at a given time. Piracy Ruling Does Not Scare Pirates In late April, a Swedish court gave four men behind the Pirate Bay torrenttracking website a one-year prison sentence and awarded $3.6 million in damages to major U.S. studios and record labels, including Fox and Warner Bros. Although Pirate Bay is just one of the many websites that index millions of music and video files, rendering them searchable and distributable on the Web via BitTorrent file transfer technology, this ruling is being viewed as a landmark that may finally start deterring other pirates from this sort of blatant online theft. The four men — Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom — were convicted of facilitating copyright violations for their role in setting up the internationally popular Pirate Bay site. According to Internet traffic monitor Alexa.com, it’s the 76th most visited website in the U.S. A major reason that Pirate Bay became a test case for studios is because its operators have been vocal critics of copyright laws, repeatedly mocking big media companies and converting many an active downloader over to their cause. Yet it remains to be seen what sort of effect their conviction will have on the global piracy problem. In fact, most experts still believe that new alternatives for downloading music, films and TV shows via BitTorrent and other, similar technologies will be found every day. Plus, the four people indicted have shown no remorse, vowing to keep fighting the studios over Internet rights. Famous Quotes A study published in 2006 indicated that “56 percent of all MBA students cheated regularly — more than in any other discipline.” -Academy of Management Learning & Education MAY 2 0 0 9 (Continued from Page 6)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTI4OTA5