Parody: Why Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger would be a good thing (Funny or Die)

From the website Funny or Die , comes this parody of a Comcast spokesperson telling you about the benefits that viewers would see from the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger.

DirecTV posted a link to the piece on twitter yesterday (without comment).

Comcast Doesn't Give a F*CK from Tarik Ellinger

Philly Tech People News 3/2/2014

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Melissa Easy, Founder of DrugDev Selected as a Finalist for IIR Partnerships Woman of the Year (Business Wire)

Former CIA CTO Gus Hunt Joins Venture Capital Firm Artis Ventures' Board of Advisors (Globe Newswire)
Hunt remains an Operating Partner with LLR Partners.


Unirisx Expands to Serve Insurance Organizations in Asia-Pacific Region (Marketwire)

John Wookey Joins the Kenandy Board of Directors (Marketwire)

Enterprise Sales Veteran Doug Grigg Joins Plex as Chief Sales Officer (PR Newswire)


PBJ's new tech reporter: I'm back and ready to hit the ground running (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Comcast To Acquire Video Ad Platform FreeWheel (Re/code)
Price may be in excess of $300 million.

Sports programmers, teams could benefit from cable merger (Sports Business Daily)

Liberty Media says not finished looking at Time Warner Cable, other possibilities

Tom Paine

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Despite Comcast's agreement to acquire Time Warner Cable, Liberty Media President & CEO
Greg Maffei says Liberty, which owns 27% of Charter Communications, is still looking at
opportunities to increase its subscriber base, trade pub Variety reported.

“We will certainly not take anything off the table in terms of what we think are in the best interests of Liberty Media shareholders,” Maffei said, speaking at Liberty's 4th quarter 2013 earnings conference call today.

Charter had bid $37 billion for TWC before Comcast swooped in with a $45 billion bid earlier this month.

Maffei indicated that Liberty could be interested in systems that Comcast might divest,
or would be prepared to act if the Comcast/TWC deal breaks up for any reason, though he
doesn't expect it to. Comcast had said it would probably divest three million subscribers
if it completed the deal. Maffei did suggest that the conditions for approving the merger
could be so burdensome to Comcast that it might consider other options.

Maffei indicated that Liberty had received plenty of interest from potential co-investors interested in participating in Liberty's consolidation strategy. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said last week that "we are still interested in wisely acquiring subscribers."

Links 2/28/2014: Square postpones IPO; may seek buyer

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Liberty Interactive Corporation Reports Fourth Quarter and Year End 2013 Financial Results (Business Wire)
QVC.com represents 45% of US orders; mobile accounts for 32% of US QVC.com orders.

Comcast Said to Weigh Subscriber Spin With Time Warner Deal (Bloomberg)


EPAM Reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2013 (EPAM Press Release)


AT&T is testing its next-gen phone network on rural areas and retirees (Washington Post)

Square IPO Postponed Indefinitely (Fox Business)
Reports: May seek buyer instead.

Online Retailers Are Devoting Hundreds Of Millions To A Google Product That Hurts Amazon (Business Insider)

Franken Takes Aim at Comcast-NBCU and Comcast-TWC (Multichannel News)
Franken has never forgiven NBC for canceling his sitcom.

Xfinity On Demand Coming To All Modern Comcast TiVos (ZatzNotFunny)


More than shiny: Apple is an enterprise firm (Computerworld Blogs)

Links 2/27/2014: How The Comcast & Netflix Deal Is Structured

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White House Aide at Soiree Shows Comcast Reach for Deals (Bloomberg)

Consumers Union asks regulators to scrutinize Comcast-Netflix deal (LA Times)

Here’s How The Comcast & Netflix Deal Is Structured, With Data & Numbers (Dan Rayburn/Streaming Media)


Comcast-Time Warner merger: What it means for Lehigh Valley cable subscribers (The Express-Times)

Salesforce Q4 Beats Street, as CFO Smith Plans Exit (Re/code)

Salesforce.com CEO Benioff says company landing more big deals (PC World)



Workday's master plan: Grow financials, layer analytics (ZDNet)

Workday 2013/14 revs up 71 percent, forecast $710-740 for fiscal 2015 (Den Howlett/Diginomica)

DataStax Brings In-Memory To NoSQL (Information Week)



B.Riley Initiations: Buy Oracle, SAP & Microsoft Are Holds (Barron's: Tech Trader Daily)

Huawei settles InterDigital 3G patent dispute out of court (ITProPortal)

Universal Display Rising: Q4 Revenue Beats, Year Rev View Light (Barron's: Tech Trader Daily)

University of Pennsylvania plans new campus in South Philly (Philly Deals)

Links 2/26/2014: SAP, BMW research project will connect drivers with real-time offers and services

More Comcast Xfinity stores for Phila suburbs (Philly.com: Philly Deals)

SAP, BMW research project will connect drivers with real-time offers and services (PC World)

Gartner BI Magic Quadrant: Winners & Losers
Tableau and QlikTech move up. (Information Week)

Workday Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year Fiscal 2014 Financial Results (Marketwire via Yahoo Finance)

Workday Slips: FYQ4 Revenue, EPS Beat; Q1, Year Views Higher (Barron's: Tech Trader Daily)




eBay Leads Giant $133.7 Million Investment in Indian Shopping Site Snapdeal (Re/code)

Square Acquires Online Scheduling Startup BookFresh (Re/code)

CenturyLink inflates its cloud & adds a way to serve up data fast (VentureBeat)

Cablevision beats Street on subscriber numbers, shares rise
(Reuters)

House Proposal Would Raise Taxes on Private Equity Income (New York Times: DealBook)


Having been burned before, Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco (PandoDaily)

Skyhook Acquired: Interview with CEO Jeff Glass (GPS Business News)

Links 2/25/2014: Boomi a key to new Dell/NetSuite Alliance

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Dell and NetSuite form alliance for mid-market SaaS (Computer Dealer News)
Dell exec calls Boomi “a secret weapon” for the company.

Dell Takes NetSuite Under Its Wing (Information Week)

Fiberlink Unveils MaaS360 for On-Premises Deployments (PR Newswire)

SAP and Xamarin work to simplify enterprise mobile app development (PC World)


Workday Losses, Big Sales Growth Seen Continuing (Investor's Business Daily)

How to tell the difference between Box and Dropbox (Fortune Tech)

Comcast/Netflix: Unwinding the Latest Traffic Jam, but at What Cost? (Knowledge@Wharton)


Rovi to Buy Veveo to Bolster Television Analytics (Bloomberg)
Rovi has a significant presence in Radnor.

Customer Supplied Images Drive Social ROI at Urban Outfitters (Retail Info Systems News)

Philly Tech People News 2/24/2014

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SAP Appoints Rick Costanzo as Executive Vice President and General Manager of Global Mobility Solutions (SAP Press Release)

IPO-Bound Box Hires Cloud Chief Graham Younger Away From SAP (Re/code)


SAP appoints Adaire Fox-Martin president of APJ region (CIOL)

Rajant Introduces Sagar Chandra as Vice President of Business Development, Latin America
(Business Wire)

DreamIt Ventures Brings Two Leading Talents to the Team and New York Community (Marketwire)


SureClinical Enhances Customer Experience with New VP Sales (PR Web)
Another ex-Dell Boomi executive.

Links 2/24/2014: Oracle buys Blue Kai; Pivotal spins off Cloud Foundry with SAP support

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WhatsApp Shows How Phone Carriers Lost Out on $33 Billion
(Bloomberg)

Can Google Eat All That Fiber? (Bloomberg/Business Week)

Verizon: Heavy Web users should pay more (PC World)

Why Netflix Is Actually the Big Winner in the Comcast Bandwidth Deal (Variety)



First Comcast-TW Cable Showdown with Feds Set for March 26
(Variety)



Supreme Court Declines Tennis Channel Review of Comcast Case (Variety)


Oracle buys Blue Kai, gains massive consumer data mart (PC World)

IBM Invests Another $1 Billion In its Cloud Business (Re/code)

Pivotal spins off Cloud Foundry, gains SAP and Rackspace support (Business Cloud News)


Vision - and money - for a start-up ecosystem in Philly
(Philadelphia Daily News)

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor (Fast Company)


LoudCrowd app eases classroom input (Penn Current)

Convergence, consolidation in US, Global broadband markets

Tom Paine

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Convergence. That's the word to describe today's broadband market, as distinctions between traditional telcos, cable systems, and to some extent wireless carriers (as mobile speeds increase) diminish. Cross-border and trans-oceanic barriers are becoming less important as well.

If the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is ultimately approved, the US broadband market will consist of three giants surrounded by minnows. But don't forget Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, which all have their own designs on slices of the market. And there may be other emerging competitors we can't even recognize today. Middlemen, including fiber networks and content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Akamai, are also important players.

Market value is not the sole indication of strength, although it does give one a general idea of who might have the upper hand in future consolidation. Of course, the figures in
the table below include only equity values, not debt loads, which can be very significant in the broadband industry.

Verizon just completed the acquisition of the rest of Verizon Wireless from Vodafone
this past week. And Vodafone will pay out $82.5 billion to its shareholders, cutting
its market value to about $100 billion. There has been speculation that AT&T might be
considering a bid for Vodafone.

The combined Comcast/TWC market value is shown as being the simple sum of the two's current market values, as it is a straight stock transaction. However, several factors could move the value up or down.




Link to chart

Source: Philly Tech News, based on closing prices as of 2/21/2014 (Price quotes from Google Finance)