$600 for a share of Google stock?

With Google’s earnings announcement, analysts scrambled to raise their targets on Google stock, which closed at $459.67 today. The most aggressive target? $600 a share. Google’s stock closed up 7 percent today, adding about $10 billion to the company’s market value in a single day.

4 comments October 20th, 2006

Fox News: Kicking ‘em when they’re down

Totally editorial here. I have to say, I have kind of enjoyed Fox News’s good-natured taunts at CNN. They’re kind of funny and clever some times, and it’s usually a fair fight. But there is absolutely no place for Shep Smith’s gloating over the troubles at 30 Rock. Pride goes before a fall, Shep. Here’s what he said about the NBC changes:

SHEP: Man alive, the craziness happening across the river! What in the world is going on at NBC? We’re expanding here, you may have noticed. Expansion here. But NBC says it plans to slash about 700 jobs, or 5% of its workforce. That includes cuts in the news division. So if you’re a terrific producer, or a great writer, and think you understand fair and balanced, would like to work over here where we’re expanding, send me an email…. The move follows three years of falling profits and problems at that MSNBC; they’re struggling over there. They will move some of their operations to NBC headquarters in New York’s Rockefeller Center, also another NBC facility in Northern New Jersey. Our friends over there, we wish them very much well.

Smug, sarcastic, insincere and smacking of the schoolyard bully. Viewers look at our business as a whole. This kind of gloating continues to tar everyone. We can’t very well take politicians to task for “hurting America” if we’re doing the same. Knock it off. (Transcript via Inside Cable News)

18 comments October 20th, 2006

NBC 2.0: Today’s articles

Here are some of the articles about Thursday’s announcement of the cutbacks and changes ahead at NBC:

YouTube deletes 30,000 Japanese copyright files

YouTube has honored the request from a group representing Japan’s entertainment industry to take down 30,000 clips that violate Japanese copyright laws. A sign of things to come from the U.S. studios?

3 comments October 20th, 2006

Catch up with LR on the road this month

Lost Remote takes to the road this month for a couple of panels and roadshows. Come find us at:

Wired finds 700 sex offenders on MySpace

Wired News is releasing the results of a nifty bit of software one of its reporters wrote - along with the software, too — that found some 700 registered sex offenders with MySpace accounts. Wired’s Kevin Poulsen wrote a Perl script that cross-checked sex offender registries with MySpace accounts. (Listen to NPR interview.) Not all 700 were misbehaving - but he did find one man with an especially disturbing space that appeared to solicit minors. He reported it to police who subsequently arrested the man. (Of note: Poulsen served five years back in the day for some notorious hacker exploits. He now uses his powers for good.)

8 comments October 20th, 2006

Hyping the stadium non-story

“I think we blew it,” wrote CBS News correspondent Bob Orr referring to the media circus over the NFL stadium threat, which turned out to be a hoax as expected. “We should stop the breathless, breaking and live coverage updates of a non-event…. Watching [CNN’s] coverage, you may have thought al Qaeda was massing at goal posts from The Meadowlands to the Oakland Coliseum ready to storm the fields and strike a blow at another sacred American institution.” Orr’s right, and while CNN wasn’t the only news organization to blame, it was the worst offender. (I saw its coverage from the beginning, for the record). It’s events like these that drive more disgusted TV news viewers to the internet. Case in point: CNN.com is much more levelheaded than its cable news counterpart. (Via Terry Heaton).

10 comments October 20th, 2006

Google profit skyrockets, again

Does this sound familiar? Google reported its third quarter profit jumped 92 percent, handily beating analyst expectations. “Business is very, very good here at Google and we had an excellent quarter in all respects,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive officer. He also responded to more questions about possible increased legal exposure due to the YouTube acquisition. “We’re relying on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as it is being imposed by law. There are not a lot of shades of gray in how it works,” he said. “If you operate under this, companies have safe harbor. We do our very best to implement it as it is prescribed…It’s the law of the land and we absolutely operate by it.” Here’s the Google press release with all the numbers.

12 comments October 20th, 2006