The UK’s troubled number-two local news publisher has vowed to launch national websites for pet shows, bonny baby contests, football fans and more, as part of new CEO Ashley Highfield’s big digital and transformation strategy.
Johnston Press, which operates sites for each of its 238 local newspapers, has fallen in to a mess. Trying to chip away at £352 million in debt, on Wednesday it swung to a £143.8 million annual loss, as it wrote £163.7 million off its newspapers’ value and nearly a tenth of its advertising dried up.
Business Insider reports that Apple has won a round against Samsung in court. A California court ruled Monday that Samsung failed to produce documents referencing Apple’s designs and features. U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal said Samsung violated multiple court orders by not doing this. This particular suit challenges Samsung 4G smartphones and the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Apple and Samsung have filed at least 30 suits against each other spanning four continents since April 2011, Business Insider states. The most recent of those suits was filed on April 19, when Samsung accused Apple of infringing on eight patents. At least 14 of those lawsuits were filed in Germany.
The latest hires in the tech and media industry…
Gannett: Gannett has named Saira Stahl the new vice president of strategy. Stahl currently is the vice president of operations and communications at Gannett Digital. In her new role, she will report to Gracia Martore, president and CEO at Gannett. Prior to joining the company, Stahl was the director of business development at AOL.
You know every once in a while you come across news about your company and it turns out your boss is no longer your boss anymore. If you’re me this probably happens to you every three months.
Anyways this morning I read in the media that Arianna Huffington (who I think used to be my boss) gained more control within Aol and then subsequently read that actually she had been “demoted.” Okay truth please guys?!
You don’t need a webcam-charted mood-graph to tell you that gaming can be a frustrating, enraging experience. Unbridled rage only begets revenge — lucky for you, then, that Corsair is beefing up its Vengeance gaming line-up. Its $149 Vengeance 2000 2.4GHz wireless 7.1 headset, for instance, hopes to help you suss out the location your foe with its optimized HRTF (head-related transfer function) positional audio chops. Failing that, you could always wrap your hardware in the outfit’s new C70 PC gaming case, a rugged rack designed to look like an ammo-box. This $139 steeled exterior case has room for eight PCI-E slots, 10 fan mounts, dual USB 3.0 ports and six SSD-ready hard drive bays — in arctic white, gunmetal black and the traditional military green. You can mosey on past the break for a peek at Corsair’s official press release, but folks in Boston will be able to able to check out the new digs in person at PAX East this weekend. If, you know, Vengeance is your thing.
[Thanks, Justin]
It’s painstakingly show to gestate a single motion picture, even for companies not rooted in Hollywood. Amazon proved that Thursday, with the unveiling of a slate of 15 prospective film projects currently under development at the Sherman Oaks, Calif. movie studio it launched back in November 2010.
It’s still not clear when Amazon will finally start shooting its first movie. Since launching its “People’s Production Company,” Amazon has solicited more than 7,000 scripts and 700 mock-up movies over the internet. And last year, according to GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler, it paid $580,000 to writers and another $2.1 million to create test movies.
The iPad’s journey to becoming more of a content-producing and creative tool took another step forward recently with the release of a new app called Pholium (US$9.99). The app is centered around the creation, viewing, and sharing of iPad photo ebooks.
All of the creation of the photo ebooks is done on the iPad. Whether you’re taking images from a camera through the Apple Camera Connection Kit or using photos you took with the iPad’s camera, all of your camera roll images are available in the Pholium Gallery. The Gallery lets you bring in Photo Stream images as well, and you can store the pictures that you want to use in your ebook.
Barry Diller’s latest investment in media disruption hasn’t even launched yet and it’s already in court. That’s part of the appeal of Aereo for Diller, chairman of IAC (NSDQ: IACI), who gleefully admits: “One of the reasons I love it is it’s going to be a great fight.” In a shades-of-Slingbox moment, he also demonstrated for the South by Southwest crowd exactly why broadcasters and multichannel distributors don’t like the latest broadband broadcasting concept, showing a few seconds of live TV and the “DVR in the sky” service that comes with it.
For $12 a month, Aereo is promising New Yorkers access to a remote dime-sized antenna that will stream broadcast networks live over broadband across devices, along with storage space on a cloud-based DVR. The company is housing thousands of the HD-quality antennas in data centers. The company has raised $20.5 million and is slated to launch as an invitation-only service in New York March 14. Fox (NSDQ: NWS), Univision and PBS are already suing to stop it.
Verizon’s continuing struggle to keep its LTE network running consistently has landed it in the news again. Wednesday morning, Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) reported on its Twitter feed that it is looking into customer complaints about its 4G service going down, and Engadget and Phandroid are reporting network outages in several markets ranging from Phoenix, Ariz., to Indianapolis, Ind.
Read the full post on GigaOm…
Buzz Contacts from Savvy Apps (US$0.99) is a fast way to reach contacts from your iPhone. Organize them into groups for one-tap access to phone calls, text messages, email or FaceTime sessions. The UI is about as clean and tidy as one can get and conveniences like pre-written text messages are quite helpful. Here’s my look at Buzz Contacts for iPhone.
UI