Rupert to the rescue
Intellectual Ventures
Founder Nathan Myhrvold, formerly CTO at Microsoft, rejected the accusation that he is a “patent troll” – one who patents a process and then gets a healthy slice of the action when someone else makes it work. Yet his rebuttal seemed to confirm that is exactly what he is doing.
“We think there is a model called invention capitalism,” said Myhrvoid. The company files 500 patents and buys a few thousand more every year via acquisition. “If you’re not doing something that people find threatening,” he said, “you’re not really doing anything interesting.”
IAC/Interactive
CEO Barry Diller confirmed his plan to break web giant IACI up into five public companies: HSN, Interval, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree and new, pure internet IAC. He was “really excited” about doing a new news product venture with socialite-journalist Tina Brown, but did not say what it was.
On Hollywood, Diller said it was “a community that’s so in-bred it’s a wonder their children actually have any teeth.” That attitude will do wonders for the new venture.
Sony
CEO Howard Stringer said the price of LCD TVs had whistled down and hammered profits. OLED, currently prohibitively expensive, is the next big thing. Its million-to-one contrast ratio makes it a hundred times brighter than an LCD screen. Sony is working hard to find a way to mass produce it.
Stringer demonstrated the next generation screen, which is thinner than a credit card and can be made in a flexible plastic version. He promised a 27-inch version “fairly soon.” The interviewer said Vaio is loaded with half-baked programmes he called “craplets.” Stringer promised a “craplets review.”
Thomson Reuters
“Most of the folks here are struggling with issue of monetizing content and services in an essentially free world,” said CEO Thomas Glocer. His solution is specialized news feeds for financial services, law, health care, science, tax and accounting, and so on.
In five years time news delivery will be more of a mix, with an inner core of high-talent staff journalists on staff, thousands of stringers, and a circle of citizen journalists. Price discovery in emerging markets is still low tech. “You can’t wheel out the Amazon cloud into rural India.”
News Corp.
Rupert Murdoch is mystified the Microhoo deal fell through. “I can’t understand the whole thing,” he said. “Jerry Yang is a friend who we all love and admire and he’s emotional about it.” But MS should have persisted. “They're not used to big deals, to buying big things,” he concluded.
Murdoch said it would be “very sad” if the Google-Yahoo deals were held up by regulators. The crocodile tears dripped. What he did not say was that the regulators could put the joint venture to combine Microsoft, Yahoo, and Fox’s MySpace back on the table with a vengeance.
“We love them [Google],” he said. “I think they’re the greatest company in America.” But, he added, the public does want choice. “You don't want anybody to be a monopoly and own everything.”
Taken all in all, Murdoch’s performance was by far the subtlest and most interesting performance in what was otherwise a disappointingly fission-less result from assembling such a critical mass of ITC uranium. But then, he does own the company that was running it.
