Monday, October 20, 2014

10.20.14

Entertainment:
·         AirMedia aims to be the syndication platform for premium video, and has recently raised $2MM in funding
·         Movie Nights is a service that lets two parties enter their movie preferences and it presents a selection of films that coincide with your interests
·         Pitbull to host the American Music Awards
·         Lionsgate and Tribeca to form a SVOD company
·         Vice News to expand operations in France today, with expansion to Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Brazil and Mexico planned
·         Lionsgate pacted with Google for a weeklong video series in which top YouTube creators including iJustine and Veritasium imagine the dystopian world of “The Hunger Games.”
·         Pandora beta tests its sponsored listening ad format on Fox programming
·         Spotify has announced a family pricing plan
·         FremantleMedia Latin America has announced a new strategic partnership with media and entertainment company 360Powwow to develop original Spanish-language content
·         Please see below for a breakdown of CBS’s financials and why the stock is down 23% since its all-time high in March
Tech:
·         Chicago is installing nodes on light poles around the city to gather ambient data to help government officials and residents understand how they can make the city a happier, healthier, and smarter place to live
·         Snapchat began rolling out ads over the weekend
·         Please see below for the 14 companies that are participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield
·         Brazilian internet conglomerate Movile is pushing deeper into consumer investments in Latin America through a $2MM investment in mobile movie ticketing company, CinePapaya
·         Crunchbase has launched a ‘New Events’ section
·         Google is integrating Songza’s technology into its Google Play Music service
·         The iPhone 6 is allegedly outselling the 6 Plus by a 6-to-1 margin
·         Marvell, a chip manufacturer, is expanding into the market for network search engine chips with a product that can juggle 8 million simultaneous streams that will enable next-generation mobile networks and Internet-of-things processing
·         Apple Pay to rollout today, but ubiquitous use isn’t expected
Deals:
·         Facebook acquired CinemaWell.com, a social network of cinemas which connects movie authors with the audience, for $95MM
·         Tim Armstrong says AOL and Yahoo! will not merge
·         A consortium of investors from Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi is said to be planning to offer about $2.2B to buy Reebok from Adidas
Business:
·         IBM is paying Globalfoundries $1.5B as part of a deal to offload IBM’s chip-making unit
·         Microsoft is readying the launch of a smartwatch, which will hit stores before the holiday season
·         IBM’s stock plunged the most in more than four years after abandoning an earnings forecast for 2015, as the company struggles to transform fast enough to handle the shift to cloud computing
Exec Moves:
·         Marc Andreessen steps down from eBay’s board ahead of the PayPal spinoff
Retail:
Startups:
Government:
·         Chinese government accused of staging a ‘malicious attack’ on iCloud

Other:

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