Late last summer, Huffington Post launched a streaming video news service , backed by 100 employees, lots of cash and a heap of hype. So how’s it going? Pretty good, says HuffPost Live boss Roy Sekoff. Especially if you choose to look at HuffPost Live as a video clip generator: Sekoff says his service is set to serve up 48 million streams this month, up from 17 million in November. The vast majority of those views don’t come from people who are watching HuffPost Live itself, but are finding embedded videos on AOL and HuffPo pages, like this story about Sasha and Malia Obama’s spring break plans . If you’re looking at HuffPost Live as a standalone news “channel” a la CNN or Fox News, it has a much more modest reach: A bit more than 2 million viewers a month, and a live audience that wouldn’t register by TV standards. Sekoff says its concurrent viewership tops out around 40,000 people. But those patterns are standard for the Web right now. Just about everyone who does live video, including AllThingsD ’s corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal, gets almost all of its viewership after the fact, on demand. It’s possible that all of that changes if and when we get True Convergence Of All Devices All The Time.
Read MoreBlackBerry’s fourth quarter was the first round of a fight the company can’t afford to lose. And as brutal as the battle might be, the struggling smartphone pioneer appears to holding its own. Posting Q4 financials before the bell Thursday, BlackBerry reported earnings of 22 cents per share on revenue of $2.7 billion. The first number was a surpassed Wall Street estimates, the second did not. Analysts had expected BlackBerry to post a loss of 29 cents per share on revenue of $2.8 billion, according to consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters. This is the second quarter in a row BlackBerry has posted a profit after a string of dismal losses. BlackBerry said it shipped 6 million smartphones during the quarter, including about 1 million BlackBerry 10 devices
Read MoreIt may be a while before Apple’s shares return to the all-time high of $705 they hit last September, but they should hit $600 or so by year’s end. This according to Channing Smith, director of equity strategies at Capital Advisors, who predicts that Apple’s stock will rally in the second half of this year, following a potentially tough March quarter and June guidance that might leave a little bit to be desired. Like a number of other analysts, Smith says Apple is at risk of a near-term earnings miss. But he also says the company’s big picture remains rock solid. “What we think is going to happen is Apple gets a pass on this quarter and investors are going to start looking towards the summer and the fall, when you start to see new product announcements,” Smith told CNBC . “We’re going to see some excitement over what Apple is going to do something with its cash, that’s our expectation. … We think the focus really goes into the second half of the year, new product announcements, potential announcements with China Mobile and a lower priced iPhone.” So: Apple’s shares will recover — assuming the company delivers 1) a capital allocation plan that returns a bunch of cash to investors and 2) another hit product — preferably the next new, new thing.
Read MoreLongtime Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Worthen is joining Sequoia Capital as head of content to work with its startups, including on improving its blogs, social media and video. The Silicon Valley venture firm confirmed the move by Worthen, who has covered tech for 13 years, most recently focused on enterprise software.
Read MoreGoogle has warned that it will shut down its Google Reader news aggregator July 1. Many people (myself very much included) are mourning a beloved and useful product, but the company cited declining usage. Shutterstock/ Yuri Arcurs Under CEO Larry Page, Google has made a practice of “spring cleaning” throughout all the seasons so it can narrow its focus. Reader was just a another bullet point on the latest closure list. But the shutdown wasn’t just a matter of company culture and bigger priorities, sources said. Google is also trying to better orient itself so that it stops getting into trouble with repeated missteps around compliance issues, particularly privacy. That means every team needs to have people dedicated to dealing with these compliance and privacy issues — lawyers, policy experts, etc. Google didn’t even have a product manager or full-time engineer responsible for Reader when it was killed, so the company didn’t want to add in the additional infrastructure and staff, the sources said. But at the same time, Google Reader was too deeply integrated into Google Apps to spin it off and sell it, like the company did last year with its SketchUp 3-D modeling software . The context for this concern about compliance is Google’s repeated public failures on privacy due to lack of oversight and coordination
Read MoreGoogle’s Motorola Mobility unit is in the process of cutting a further 1,200 jobs amid continued challenges in its core cell phone business. As reported earlier on Thursday evening by the Wall Street Journal , the cuts will eliminate more than 10 percent of the hardware maker’s workforce. A Motorola spokesman confirmed the company is making cuts, but declined to go into details. “These cuts are a continuation of the reductions we announced last summer,” Motorola said in a statement. “It’s obviously very hard for the employees concerned, and we are committed to helping them through this difficult transition.” Google announced in August it would cut some 4,000 jobs, or 20 percent of the Motorola workforce . In December, Motorola announced a significant cutback of its South Korean operations , a move that resulted in 500 job losses. The same month, Google said it was selling Motorola’s set-top box business to Arris for $2.35 billion .
Read MorePandora Media Inc. reported better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter on Thursday afternoon — giving its stock a sharp boost despite the surprise additional news that its CEO plans to step down. Pandora P also projected a revenue range for the current quarter that was above Wall Street’s estimates. The stock jumped more than 19% in after-hours trades. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreAndrew Mason says Groupon is “better positioned than any other company in the world to plug local commerce into the Web,” but you wouldn’t know it from the daily deals site’s latest earnings : A fourth-quarter GAAP loss of 12 cents per share — 10 cents more than Wall Street was looking for. As Groupon’s shares tanked in after-hours trading, Mason fielded questions from analysts on the company’s earnings call, but didn’t do much to explain how the company is going to scale its core online-coupon business. Instead, he did all that he could to paint a happy face on today’s sad results, tossing out sound bites that glossed over the issues troubling the company: “It’s hard to believe just a short time ago we were a deal-a-day business.” “Record billings growth this quarter is a clear signal that customers love Groupons!” “Our vision is to be the operating system for local commerce.” Sadly for Mason, that last statement may be even harder to believe than the first. Thanks to its Groupon Goods offering, the company — which is seeing slowing growth in its coupon business — is now competing with juggernauts like Amazon and eBay in a sector where margins are thin. That’s not going to be easy, though Mason — whose tenure as Groupon’s CEO remains iffy — did his damnedest to say otherwise.
Read MoreBarnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio, who still owns 30 percent of the company, has offered to buy the bookseller’s retail operations , but not its Nook e-reader business. The Wall Street Journal forecast Riggio’s offer last night.
Read MoreKeith Rabois, the former Square COO who left the company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct, is weighing an offer to join Silicon Valley venture firm Khosla Ventures, according to sources close to the situation, and is currently leaning toward accepting the job there. But, that could change. In an interesting twist, the longtime entrepreneur and investor has also been in discussions with Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky to become COO or president there. Both the VC and the startup have been doing reference checks on Rabois, news of which has gotten out in the ever-chatty Silicon Valley scene. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that Rabois had been in talks with the San Francisco-based online housing rentals company. But sources with knowledge of the situation said that Rabois — who has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square — seems “99 percent” ready to move into a more formal investing role. Of course, there is still that one percent chance he might not, underscored by the eternal lure of the hot startup for serial entrepreneurs like Rabois. That said, he has also been an active angel investors for many years, with a wide-ranging portfolio, and is on many boards, including Yelp’s. The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago , after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee. Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.” That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO. “At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois at the time in an interview with me. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”
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