Tag: rupert murdoch

Peer-to-peer lending has already grown significantly in the UK and the US, but remains in its early stages in Australia. However, it's now set to take off

Click around the tube and it is apparent that big business and TV have become inseparable. The nightly news is no longer one anchorman in a suit looking down the camera, delivering the daily doom and gloom. Production value, scandal and celebrity are now the tools used to drive up ratings, strengthen shares, and make the news profitable. Such a world was first prophesied in the 1976 classic Network.

The brainchild of 27-year-old wunderkind Orson Welles who starred, wrote and directed, Citizen Kane tells the story of media tycoon Charles Foster Kane and how his relentless ascent to the top brings him unparalleled power but leaves him a lonely old man. What made Welles’ work that much more special was that he based Kane on the life of powerful, real-life business magnate William Randolph Hearst, who didn’t take too kind to the less than flattering depiction.

Does the iPad have what it takes to save the newspaper industry? That’s what Matthew da Silva asked a number of leading experts in the fields of digital media and mobile technology. As he reports, expert opinion is so far mixed – but one thing is certain: it’s up to news companies to capitalise on innovation by understanding their readers’ rapidly evolving lifestyles.

According to an article in The Australian: Fairfax Media should axe its Melbourne and Sydney daily print editions and focus on e-readers and online to boost earnings. Macquarie analyst Alex Pollak suggests Fairfax could get the ball rolling by spending about $50m to give away 100,000 e-readers to seed the migration of readers away from print.

Out of every one hundred new businesses founded today, in ten years time only three will still be open for business. So what do those three have in common? And is nature or nurture responsible for entrepreneurial success? Christopher Witt wonders.

Well whaddya know. Two weeks after we wrote about Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis's suggestion that Microsoft and News Corporation should do a search deal that freezes out Google (Murdoch and Calacanis hatch separate plans to shut out Google)... it's been revealed that Microsoft and Murdoch's News Corporation are in talks about just such a deal.

Here's an interesting idea from Mahalo founder and Silicon Valley insider, Jason Calacanis. A couple of weeks ago on This Week in Startups, he floated a strategy that would enable Microsoft to seize a chunk of search market share from Google and the big media companies to make more revenue from their digital content.

With a simple change in policy and little additional investment, MySpace would no longer be the place where people simply try and get famous enough to make it to TV or newspapers. It could become the destination. Mark Cameron thinks he knows how to save MySpace from terminal decline.

To open this year's D7 Conference, singer Jill Sobule was asked to cobble together some lyrics about meeting Rupert Murdoch at the 2008 D7 Conference, run by the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal. I opened it expecting a perfect storm of earnestness and sycophancy. But it's actually quite whimsical.

Sick of sitting through tedious events (oh, I don't know, say, ones where the speakers repeatedly define "innovation") and then wishing there was some...

The Packer deal took everybody by surprise. It coincided perfectly with the media reform announcements, but in fact had more to do with maximising shareholder value than with media reforms.