Five Business Stories...
Here are my five business stories that merit a read today:
Samsung is adding to the growing LCD screen manufacturing capacity around the world to the tune of $16.7 billion. With 19- and 20-inch flat panels already selling as low as $695, based on my perusal over the weekend, we'll be seeing sub-$500 prices within 10 months. Samsung's latest quarterly earnings were off 10.1 percent compared to the previous quarter.
Microsoft is going to dole out $10 billion to shareholders -- about a buck apiece. I guess it's hard to make earnings appear at an acceptable percentage rate when you have $46 billion in the bank.
RealNetworks released its SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language) implementation as open source today -- this is good for developers of content, like myself, who want to start synching events in video to other media. So, for example, if one had a "happening" a la the Emergent Democracy happening and recorded the audio call, the happening could be played back in Real format while the chat scrolled out as it did during the call. And, if the programmer is clever, new participants could annotate the record with their own comments, agreeing or disagreeing with the speaker or the chatters for viewing by others, later.
Chinese graft is a $2.8 billion business in just one city. But the Chinese government, which controls the Bank of China, recently cleared several Bank of China officials of fraud and then sacked them.
That link may be sponsored. Like an actor drinking a Coke on screen, MSNBC will place advertising links contextually. Describing a deal with About.com's Sprinks unit that will place ads along side stories about related topics, MSNBC president Scott Moore said it is "a relevant extension of our editorial content."
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at July 7, 2003 09:18 AM | TrackBack