A Head-Spinning Day for Tech Brands
By Guest Author
This is a guest post from RJ Bardsley, a Senior Vice at Racepoint Group. Follow him on Twitter @RJBardsley.
If you’re on the West Coast and just waking up, run, don’t walk to your nearest news source. What you’ll find is a blistering barrage of news from some of the biggest and coolest tech brands this morning. Here is a quick run down of what hit the Wall Street Journal today.
- Microsoft buys Skype for $8 billion. This is the biggest-ever acquisition for Microsoft. Can they make it work? It makes sense – Skype will add a lot to MSFT’s gaming and communications platforms.
- Google Unveils Web Music Service… uh, watch out Apple? I don’t know about that, but Amazon and Spotify may be shaking in their boots a little bit. Google still has to secure licenses from the four major record labels. Expect the system to operate like a remote hard drive.
- Apple and Google will both testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on mobile privacy. Yes, location-based information is really neat, but it turns out people don’t really like it when you know where they are all the time…
- LinkedIn set the terms for its IPO: how does $3 billion+ sound? This could be the first in a flood of US tech IPOs. Expect Groupon to follow suit later this year and Facebook maybe next year. Freescale, the chip company also set price terms for its IPO yesterday. Can you say 1998?
- Silicon Valley wild child, NVIDIA, also announced an acquisition this week. It bought Icera, a UK start up focused on baseband chips. The move will make NVIDIA more of a competitive force in the mobile phone market.
- Gilt, the online luxury retailer (and @rdeplazes’s frequent digital haunt) has raised $138 million form investors. Yeah, I guess you really can say 1998…
- Video game maker Activision announced a 32% jump in sales.
- Apple and Conde Nast announced that many of your favorite media outlets – including Wired, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Allure, Self, GQ, and my personal favorite, Golf Digest – will be available for subscription on the iTunes store. Yey.
3 comments May 10th, 2011
