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Posts Tagged ‘Merger’

T-Mobile and Clearwire mulling 4G partnership
Looks like the kids at T-Mobile USA are well aware that their company’s future will depend on offering both compelling handsets and a competitive network for them to ride on. Reuters reports that the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary has been exploring all its options with regard to the provision of 4G services, including potential joint ventures with cable companies and even spectrum sharing with AT&T, though the likeliest candidate for the moment remains Clearwire’s WiMAX infrastructure. Asked about a potential merger with Sprint, who controls 51 percent of Clearwire, T-Mobile’s CEO Robert Dotson declined the idea, explaining that “what you never want to do is take one company that is going through challenges and take another company going through challenges.” Reports of ongoing discussions between Clearwire and T-Mo have been around since last September, and the latest from Dotson suggests that his company is keen to get a resolution either way as soon as possible.

T-Mobile and Clearwire mulling 4G partnership originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T activated 3.1 million iPhones last quarter, 1 million non-phones
While Verizon suffers a bit on paper, primarily thanks to a spendy Alltel merger, AT&T has some pretty good news to report on the “money” front. AT&T’s $3 billion in earnings are up 26% over the year ago quarter, and particularly hot on the wireless front with 3.1 million iPhone activations, 2.7 million new wireless customers, and 1 million non-phone devices like e-book readers. While the 2.7 million bests the 2.2 million newbies at Verizon Wireless, AT&T gained less customers on contract thanks to its any-device-goes ways, so it’s hard to say who’s really in the best position here. Still, with devices like the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader and now iPad in its fold, AT&T is clearly the go-to for getting your not-a-phone onto the internet. Now if only it could do it, um, well.

AT&T activated 3.1 million iPhones last quarter, 1 million non-phones originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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EU Approves $7.4 Billion Deal Between Oracle And Sun

It’s official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly.

Oracle will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27th, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific time at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California.

Just in case you weren’t planning on attending or following the major Apple event.

The approval comes after an in-depth antitrust investigation opened in September amid concerns that Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL would stifle competition in the database market. In August 2009, the Departement of Justice had already given the deal green light.

From the press release:

The Commission’s in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.

Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle’s ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market.

“I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,” said Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner.

The database market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database vendors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – accounting for approximately 85% of the market in terms of revenue, the commission added.

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Movie review site Flixster buys rival Rotten Tomatoes from Murdoch

Movie review-and-view site Flixster has agreed to purchase popular review site Rotten Tomatoes from IGN, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Much like the recent sale of Photobucket, the move is part of News Corp’s plan to jettison properties that aren’t core to its business.

The reason for the merger is simple. The combined sites’ reach is estimated at 30 million unique visitors per month, accordding to a press release from Flixster. “To use movie terminology, we think this is a blockbuster double-bill,” Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein wisecracked in the release.

It’s hard to track who owns who: IGN acquired Rotten Tomatoes in 2004, and was then acquired itself by News Corp. Flixster fended off an acquisition bid from Barry Diller’s IAC last year. IGN will take a minority stake in Flixster. Got all that?

Flixster, founded in 2007 in San Francisco, has raised $7 million in funding, much of it from Lightspeed Ventures. The company has fewer than 20 employees. Rotten Tomatoes, founded in 1998 as a spare-time project by Senh Duong, has gotten by on an estimated $1 million in angel funding.

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Michael Arrington says CrunchPad litigation is "imminent," provides more details — but where’s the contract?

The strange saga of the CrunchPad is getting even stranger: although Fusion Garage has a press conference scheduled for Monday, the company’s apparently been hinting to some members of the press that the split with Michael Arrington was no surprise, and that TechCrunch didn’t actually contribute anything of value to the CrunchPad. As you’d expect, that’s got Arrington on the warpath. In a post titled “CrunchPad Litigation Imminent,” he offers up an email from Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan and two letters dispatched from his lawyers to both Fusion Garage and would-be CrunchPad ODM Pegatron that paint a much different picture: Chandra calls the split “out of the blue,” Pegatron won’t produce anything without TechCrunch’s “explicit approval,” and there was apparently even talk of merger between Fusion Garage and Arrington’s CrunchPad, Inc. That certainly puts the timeline into dispute, but Mike’s various CrunchPad intellectual property claims are far less solid, and unexpectedly weak — even if you completely accept Arrington’s side of the story, his CrunchPad dealings simply don’t reflect his reputation as a bulldog Silicon Valley attorney. Let’s break ‘em down:

• Arrington claims he’s the “outright owner of the CrunchPad trademark,” but that’s simply not true: the CrunchPad trademark was only applied for on November 17, the same day Arrington says Fusion Garage notified him of the split. Oops — and even stranger because Arrington’s said the CrunchPad was due to be launched on November 20. Why wasn’t this sewn up months ago?
• Assuming there isn’t some secret CrunchPad patent application we don’t know about, the only major rights we can see TechCrunch asserting to the CrunchPad device have to do with the copyright to the code , and that’s a total mess. Since Arrington apparently didn’t draw up a contract giving him sole copyright to the CrunchPad’s code, he and his lawyers are arguing that TechCrunch and Fusion Garage are “joint owners” to any rights, and that’s just about the weakest position Arrington can be in. Joint copyright owners are legally considered to have equal rights to the entire product, and unless there’s a written agreement (see how that keeps coming up?) saying they both have to sign off, each joint owner is allowed to non-exclusively sell the entire thing without the other’s approval. In our experience it’s pretty rare for joint copyright ownership to be an ideal business arrangement, and we can’t imagine how Arrington got to within three days of launching the CrunchPad without hammering out the details of who owned what.
• In fact, the most notable thing about the letter from Arrington’s lawyers to Fusion Garage is that it doesn’t contain any contractual language whatsoever — it only references emails and conversations between the two companies. That’s particularly odd because the letter to Pegatron says TechCrunch will be suing for breach of contract, so you’d think Arrington’s attorneys would be laser-focused on his contractual rights if he could assert them. Then again, you’d think Arrington would have known better than to start this project without doing the appropriate paperwork first, so really anything’s possible.

Now, we could be totally wrong about all of this: we haven’t heard anything directly from Fusion Garage, and there very well could be contracts we haven’t seen. But for right now, we’re absolutely mystified as to how Michael Arrington — who, again, is an attorney — found himself in this position, and we’re still mildly convinced this is all some kind of stunt. We’re sure there’s more drama to come, stay tuned.

Michael Arrington says CrunchPad litigation is “imminent,” provides more details — but where’s the contract? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When AOL Spins Off On December 9, It Will Be Worth About $3.4 Billion

It’s been a long decade, but AOL will once again be an independently traded company on December 9, when Time Warner will spin off shares. Every Time Warner shareholder (disclosure: including me, from when I was employed there) will receive shares in AOL using the following formula: one share of AOL will be distributed for every 11 shares held in Time Warner.

In other words, we finally have an approximate market capitalization for AOL. The business will be valued at 1/11th the value of Time Warner. At today’s market cap of $37.8 billion for Time Warner, based on a closing price of $32, that implies a $3.4 billion market cap for AOL. Unless Time Warner shares surge over the next few weeks, it will be in that ballpark.

So the AOL business which was valued at $5.7 billion just last July when Google sold back its 5 percent stake, is now worth even less—not to mention the initial $20 billion valuation when Google first invested in 2005 or, going back even further, the original $109 billion merger with Time Warner way back in 2000.

But let’s forget about all that. Onwards and upwards. With a little cost-cutting, those AOL shares will shine. Right?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Deutsche Telekom eyeing Sprint Nextel for acquisition?

With T-Mobile UK and Orange now having to (potentially) learn to play nice, Deutsche Telekom is already looking ahead to its next big target: Sprint Nextel. According to a Telegraph report, the telecom giant, with an estimated value of $60.45 billion, has called in advisers from Deutsche Bank as it reportedly prepares to submit an offer to the $10.6 billion-valued Now Network within the next three weeks. The assimilation of Sprint and Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile US under the same umbrella could give second-place AT&T a fight with a 78.2 million-strong customer base… but that said, we wouldn’t anticipate any quick or smooth merger given the US carriers rely on substantially different bands (CDMA vs. GSM) for service. Hey, there’s always WiMAX might come into play. Obviously there’s a lot of unanswered questions here, but at this point it’s all speculation given no actual offer has been thrown on the table — and we bet Hesse will have some choice words on the matter. Keep an eye out on this one, things could very quickly get very, very interesting here.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Filed under: Cellphones

Deutsche Telekom eyeing Sprint Nextel for acquisition? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sprint’s Dan Hesse talks Android, Pre, iPhone, 4G on Charlie Rose

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse recently sat down for an interview with the master of one-on-ones and black backdrops, Charlie Rose, and while much of the talk was spent traveling down memory lane and revisiting Hesse’s two-decade rise through the ranks at AT&T before fleeing in 2000, there were some great quotes that came out of it:

• “We’re getting ready to launch a couple of new Android devices.” We know one’s the Hero, and the other — if we were the betting types — is the Samsung InstinctQ.
• Rose: “The merger with Nextel was a bad idea?” Hesse: “In 20 / 20 hindsight, it was, yes… the premium that Sprint paid for Nextel was too much.” Sprint’s gone back and forth on the idea of spinning off Nextel over the past couple years, so it’s not a surprising thing for him to think — but to hear Sprint’s CEO actually say out loud that he thinks a very active part of its network shouldn’t have become part of the company is a little bombastic.
• “Our prepaid brand is Boost.” Nothing wild and crazy about that statement, though it does reaffirm that Virgin Mobile is destined for assimilation. The whole thing’s kinda funny considering that Boost dabbled in CDMA before reversing course, and once again, Sprint will be dealing with large installed bases of both iDEN and CDMA prepaid customers.
• On touchscreen smartphones: “Those are the most expensive phones for us to sell, and those are the ones where we need to make sure that the customer stays with us [and] doesn’t churn, because we’re out a lot of money… those are expensive devices.” Theoretically, an aggressively-priced subsidized smartphone could still end up leaving a carrier in the red if you broke your contract early on and paid the ETF, but we doubt that’s a huge problem — especially for a CDMA carrier like Sprint. He goes on to say “I’m already looking at 4G versions of smartphones,” so that’s really encouraging to hear, particularly if you’re into WiMAX.
• “Customer will pay premium for simplicity. Simplicity is everything… Digital One Rate which we launched back at AT&T, that was all about simplicity… people paid more. It wasn’t a price cut.” Translation: “Unlimited makes you feel like you’re getting a deal, but rest assured, we’re banking.”
• In response to Rose asking how Sprint uses the Palm Pre to take on Apple and RIM: “It was really kind of Palm’s decision to take on Apple. And Palm has had [a] long standing relationship with Sprint.” It’s interesting to hear Hesse seemingly back away from a fight with Apple and chalk up the situation to happenstance — RIM not as much, considering that Sprint carries a number of BlackBerrys in its lineup and will certainly continue to do so. Talking more about pitting the Pre against the iPhone, he goes on to say that Palm’s handset is “doing well. But you’ve got to almost put the iPhone, to be fair, in a separate category. The Apple brand and that device has done so well. It’s like comparing someone to Michael Jordan.” If that’s not a tactful acknowledgment that the iPhone is a bona fide wireless superstar, we don’t know what is. Hesse’s giving the iPhone the respect it’s rightfully earned — as any strategically-minded executive would.
• “The biggest impediment to mobile growth is you got processors are getting a lot faster, screens are getting sharper, they use more and more power, and battery technology is not moving very fast… That’s the one breakthrough that the industry needs. It needs battery breakthroughs.” It’s good to hear that Hesse understands as well as everyone else that the wireless industry needs to be focused on making power draw a non-issue, but he sounds less convinced of the solution: “I don’t know. Solar we hope, and renewable energy sources.” When Sprint gets some cash socked away, it might consider throwing some R&D money at the problem — it’ll be first to market with something resembling a “national” 4G network, after all, and the situation’s only going to get worse.

Who knew you’d find out so much about the inner workings of the States’ third-largest carrier from watching PBS?

[Via Gizmodo]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Sprint’s Dan Hesse talks Android, Pre, iPhone, 4G on Charlie Rose originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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