The International Trade Commission determined the technology Microsoft uses for wireless communication with the Xbox doesn’t infringed on a Motorola patent for wireless connectivity.

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Dish received signed commitment letters from five banks, including Barclays Bank and Jefferies & Co., the people said. Including about $2.6 billion it raised in bonds last week, Dish has now raised close to $12 billion for the deal.

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The latest example involves cable ties, AC-DC adapters, radiation detectors and the like. In April of last year, Amazon rolled out AmazonSupply, an e-commerce site featuring such industrial goods. Google followed suit this January, testing Google Shopping for Suppliers, which also helps shoppers find items tailored for businesses.

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Other carriers also have so-called “below-the-line” fees, named that because they frequently appear at the bottom of the phone bill after the service charges. Such fees help boost revenue growth in a massive organization, but consumer groups criticize them because they are less likely to be noticed by users and allow carriers to advertise lower prices than they actually charge.

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Lenovo’s solid results stand out in the global PC industry, which is struggling with weak demand as more consumers turn to tablet computers and smartphones. Global PC shipments in the first quarter fell 14 percent from a year earlier, according to research group IDC.

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Analytics involves the tools of data gathering, data management, statistical analysis, data visualization and information systems to deliver better information, more efficiently, to decision makers within an organization. Clearly the technology behind these tools has advanced rapidly in the last ten years with tools such as Hadoop, R, Qlikview and the like all making the utilization of the mass amounts of data that are now available to organizations possible.

In sports, the most significant leap forward in technology is in data gathering, where companies such as Stats llc and Catapult Sports have utilized advances in technology to fundamentally change the size and scope of data available from practice and competitions. Stats llc utilizes cameras and optical tracking technology to capture the position of everything that moves on a basketball court 25 times a second, while Catapult Sports utilizes GPS, accelerometers and other wearable technology to track player movements and physical characteristics such as heart rate. Both technologies have shifted the type of data available in sports from the count of specific on court actions (attempted shots, for example) to the continuous movements of every element on the field of play.

Despite this massive increase in the availability of data, Moneyball remains unchanged, because Moneyball is a strategy for utilizing analytics. Moneyball is the value investing of building a successful sports franchise. The concept is to utilize data to identify undervalued players so that teams with lower payrolls can still compete at a high level. The Oakland As — and, to some extent, the Tampa Bay Rays — have followed this strategy successfully for 10+ years. But, just as there are a multitude of investment strategies, there are countless strategies for building successful sports teams. Moneyball can be effective, but that does not make it the best use of analytics for every franchise. Analytic systems can require a significant investment in tools and personnel, so it is the strategy for employing those systems within the organization that determine how successful the organization with their analytics.

The key to successfully employing analytics is not to simply invest in analytic systems and blindly apply the strategies that have been made famous through popular books and movies. The key instead is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your organization and seek to find the areas that can best utilize analytics as you build them. The Dallas Mavericks and the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association, for example are both highly analytic teams, but they also have approached analytics differently, applying their analytic resources strategically to areas that make the most sense for the team.

The San Antonio Spurs were one of the first NBA teams to hire a statistical analyst and an applications developer. They employed these personnel assets along with any technological investments, at least initially, on assisting with player acquisitions. The general philosophy of the organization from a personnel side has been to buy low and sell high — acquiring players who fit the style of play of the organization well — typically through the draft — and then trading them for other assets once the rest of the league has seen the value that the Spurs did. This is similar to the Moneyball strategy employed by the As, and has produced a team that is currently in the Western Conference Finals, with only one player picked in the top 10 of the draft.

The Dallas Mavericks were pioneers in analytics in the NBA as well, but employed a very different strategy for maximizing their investment in analytics. The Mavericks hired the first statistician in the NBA to function as part of the coaching staff. Instead of focusing primarily on player acquisitions like the Spurs, the Mavericks focused first on in game decisions, believing that is where analytics would be most impactful in their organization. The guiding philosophy for the Mavericks was that since there are a lot more in game decisions made during an NBA season than personnel decisions, the benefit to them would be best realized focusing on that part of winning games. The Mavericks won the NBA title with statistician on the coaching staff and were in the playoffs for two of the three seasons since the hiring.

Most businesses, like most teams, have limited financial resources to spend on analytics. This constraint makes it vital for organizations to not just invest and “do analytics,” but to create a strategy for maximizing the return on their analytic investments. While there is no one strategy that works best for all organizations, any organization can be helped to make better decisions by having better information.

Benjamin Alamar is a researcher, consultant, and author in the field of sports analytics. His book “Sports Analytics: A Guide for Coaches, Managers, and Other Decision Makers” will be published in August, 2013.

It is the headquarters for PokerStars, the largest online poker company in the world by a wide margin. And it is from this unusual perch the company is playing a difficult hand: just two years after being shut down in the U.S., and with its founder living here with a warrant out for his arrest, it wants to return to the U.S.

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Tokyo-based SoftBank has agreed to give the federal government the right to approve one of the directors it names to Sprint’s board. That director will be responsible for overseeing national security issues. People familiar with the matter said the government is also seeking the right to approve some of Sprint’s equipment purchases and wants the removal of Chinese gear from a Sprint affiliate’s network.

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Journalistic integrity boils down to the individual, and if someone’s willing to be corrupted, it’s probably not just the possibility of a job in the industry that’s a problem.

– Elizabeth Spiers, talking to the Content Strategist about tech reporters who go on to work in tech, sometimes for the companies they cover

Last July Microsoft paid $1.2 billion in cash for the business social networking company, which was then about four years old. It was a deal that raised the valuations of enterprise startups throughout Silicon Valley, according to venture capitalists, but Microsoft executives considered it a coup.

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In a brief statement Wednesday, Pearson said that Penguin has reached a “comprehensive agreement with the U.S. State Attorneys General and private class plaintiffs to pay $75 million in consumer damages plus costs and fees to resolve all antitrust claims relating to e-book pricing.”

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The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

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“The proposal from Third Point, Dan Loeb is something that we should discuss thoroughly at a board meeting and then we’ll decide Sony’s stance,” Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai said in a briefing Wednesday to lay out his strategic vision for the company. “Therefore, we are now going to start the discussion and we are still at the starting stage.”

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The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.

– Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF, on its pronunciation. Mr Wilhite was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award at the Webbys.

Among the findings of an investigation by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations are figures that show Apple’s reported taxes substantially exceed the sum it actually pays the U.S. Treasury.

One factor: Apple uses a conservative approach to accounting for taxes on its overseas earnings. It has been setting aside billions of dollars a year in provisions against possible taxes on income that it earned abroad. But those taxes wouldn’t be due until Apple brought the funds home to the U.S., something Chief Executive Tim Cook said he has no intention of doing.

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For the current quarter, the company expects adjusted per-share earnings of three cents to seven cents on revenue of $702 million to $727 million. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters were expecting per-share earnings of 11 cents on $727 million in revenue.

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The “hands-off” promise is both necessary to make and impossible to keep.

I remember hearing the promise from Jim Bankoff, who engineered AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. in the fall of 2005, at a Weblogs retreat in New York. (Bankoff is currently CEO of Vox Media.) He meant it, and Weblogs was indeed given a long leash. Jason Calacanis, Brian Alvey and Judith Meskill operated the blog network as before the acquisition, with better technology infrastructure and a better hiring budget.

I was editorial director of Weblogs, and eventually took over business ownership of the unit after the founders left the company. For four post-honeymoon years in that position I had a close-up view of how multiple stakeholders in a large parent company systematically and necessarily break the well-intended “hands-off” promise. Even on a long leash, the startup plays a sometimes ferocious defensive game to maintain cultural and brand integrity.

David Karp will continue to own Tumblr within Yahoo, but he will not be the only owner. Marissa Mayer will be co-owner. Mayer was already — in the same hour as the obligatory “hands-off” covenant — outlining possible changes. Other departmental executives will surface in Tumblr stakeholder roles, especially sales, business development, legal and the editorial team of Yahoo’s main portal. Putting Tumblr into Yahoo is like throwing a boulder into a lake, and many executives will be accountable for maximizing the ripples. They are all co-owners.

Mayer specifically addressed the branding concern, promising that Yahoo would not slap its mark on Tumblr pages. That’s a no-brainer, although Yahoo has fallen into the trap of over-valuing its brand in past acquisitions, notably Flickr. But some degree of co-branding is inevitable, probably immediately, if Yahoo wants to capture comScore recognition of Tumblr’s traffic.

And it surely does. Major Internet properties, and their advertisers, are acutely aware of comScore positioning. At AOL, within minutes of comScore’s release of its monthly traffic report, I watched that thing rip through the company like a viral meme. In March of this year, Yahoo’s total U.S. traffic (that’s the filter most companies and their advertisers look at) put the company in the No. 2 spot, trailing Google by a mere one million unique visitors. That same month, Tumblr was credited with 29 million uniques. A certain post-acquisition bet is that Yahoo will do what it takes to vault over Google into the top slot.

And it takes co-branding. ComScore requires some mark of affiliation to acknowledge and report the traffic roll-up from an independently branded property to its parent entity. That’s why you see AOL’s logo in the footers of Engadget and TechCrunch, two sites where AOL’s mark hardly contributes brand charisma.

ComScore roll-up branding doesn’t really damage a professionally-produced editorial site. But there is greater sensitivity in a UGC (User Generated Content) destination where there is huge overlap of those who consume the content and those who produce it. The uproar among Tumblr bloggers over the acquisition is the first sign that the engine of Tumblr’s success does not want any affiliation with corporate overlords.

Speaking of UGC, it represents all sorts of trouble that will bring new influences to bear within Yahoo. Advertisers do not like appearing next to UGC. They don’t even like comments on pro sites, never mind the roiling swirl of unregulated blogs. Yahoo will create a monetization plan (Mayer is already leaking ideas and aspirations), and the company’s board and executive committee will synchronize Tumblr’s revenue potential with the drumbeat of quarterly reporting. Forecasts, operating budgets, timetables and deliverables will seep into the sales organization like wine into carpet. In meeting after meeting between sales and content, sanctity around Tumblr’s exemption from business as usual will be chipped away. To a category sales director, “hands-off” means not meeting a revenue deliverable, and getting a reduced annual bonus.

Advertising on Tumblr blogs is easy to predict, although who knows when. Run-of-service campaigns are clearly impossible for brand advertisers, and would be even without the heavy load of Tumblr porn blogs. The ability to produce specially-carved campaigns will have to be built into the publishing system, if it isn’t already. That slippery slope leads to possible special arrangements with highly-trafficked blogs, and a possibility of editorial management to some degree.

Enter the lawyer stakeholders. Yahoo’s legal stance for Tumblr will be based on “safe harbor,” a protection in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that applies to UGC platforms whose owners do not exercise control of the content. Safe harbor is punctured like a balloon with the first bit of content oversight. If that happens, every legal complaint brought over publication of copyrighted media becomes Yahoo’s liability for damages, even if the infringing media is removed. (With safe harbor protection, Yahoo only needs to remove the source of a legal complaint.)

Online advertising is a buyer’s market in which advertisers often dictate terms and conditions. Tumblr will be caught in the tectonic grinding of conflicting interests. Tumblr’s founding principles demand freedom. Yahoo’s business requires revenue from the hordes of Tumblr users. The legal wing values safety above everything. The next quarterly always looms, and the questioning for years will be about Tumblr’s income, just as with AOL’s Patch and other daunting monetization projects.

Let’s not forget about synergy, the great M&A buzzword that informs all discussions leading up to the big purchase. Any company with many moving parts must consider how a major acquisition is going to play nicely with its other brands, technologies and cultures. An acquisition that brings a substantial audience with it is eventually going to be asked (which is to say, required) to share that traffic. If synergy is a dominant pre-acquisition buzzword in large content companies, recirculation is the post-acquisition mandate.

From this essential business goal comes a creeping incremental destruction of purity. The first sign might be a modest, inconspicuous footer on Tumblr blogs with softly-hued links to other Yahoo properties. Giving away that inch could result, a year later, in dreaded “related links” modules in the sidebar. From there it is a bold and victorious leap to universal headers with full co-branding and drop-down promos for Yahoo’s Mail and News enterprises.

I’m being cynical, and these are not explicit predictions. The honeymoon period is characterized by respect and caution. Weblogs brought completely new DNA into the AOL organism. Tumblr is likewise fresh air — loaded with a young demographic — for Yahoo. But Yahoo also has experience with social content (Delicious and Flickr), and Mayer is certainly determined to chart a better roadmap for Tumblr on her watch.

But the pressure will be on, sooner or later. Many jobs are a little more at risk when a company has spent over a billion dollars, and Tumblr will start showing the smudges of many fingerprints. It might all work out well. Nearly all of AOL’s most successful content destinations were acquired. (Others, like Bebo, were catastrophic, and the high burn rate to maintain Patch is controversial.) Tumblr could be Yahoo’s most successful bet, despite the many hands that will inevitably be laid upon it.

Brad Hill is the former VP of Audience Development at AOL, and former General Manager of Weblogs, Inc.

ESPN said some of the job cuts are coming through attrition, or unfilled open positions, and didn’t disclose the precise number or types of workers who are being let go. ESPN, which operates several cable channels in addition to its flagship, has about 7,000 employees.

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The Richfield, Minn., company reported another quarterly loss driven by weaker sales in its European business, which it recently shed. The company last month sold the rest of its stake in Best Buy Europe back to Carphone Warehouse Group PLC for about $775 million to help shore up its profitability.

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With its vast operations in troubled Europe under siege from intense competition and regulatory changes, Vodafone is in desperate need of a reboot to keep pace with competitors whose popular bundled offers of mobile, fixed-line, television and Internet services are leaving the U.K. company isolated as a mobile-only player.

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Online design retailer Fab Inc. is in advanced talks to raise $250 million to $300 million in venture capital in a deal that would value the fast-growing but unprofitable company at $1 billion not including the new capital, people familiar with the matter said.

The deal and its list of final participants hasn’t closed, but it is expected to wrap up in mid-June, with existing investor Atomico is leading the round, the people said. Atomico did not respond to requests for comment.

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Mr. Ergen, the chairman of satellite-TV operator Dish Network Corp., made the offer to LightSquared on Wednesday, one of the people said. Mr. Ergen’s offer is for LightSquared’s so-called L-band spectrum, this person said. Spectrum is the limited pockets of airwaves that telecommunications firms need to operate wireless networks.

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The unusual result is possible because the iPhone maker’s key foreign subsidiaries argue they are residents of nowhere, according to the investigators’ report, which will be discussed at a hearing on Tuesday where Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook will testify.

The finding comes from a lengthy investigation into the technology giant’s tax practices by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.).

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The New York Times named 2012 the crossover year for Big Data: As a term and as a concept, Big Data broke through from the tech circle and into mainstream consciousness. (So much so that even Dilbert’s boss was talking about it.)

We’ve seen huge advances in our ability to generate, collect and store an explosion of data points: 90 percent of the world’s data has been accumulated in the last two years alone. We’re generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, and every serious company is dutifully logging and contextualizing every impression, every click and every purchase with excruciating detail.

That said, shockingly little happens to the information once it has been stowed in the database. A good friend gave voice to this dirty little industry secret the other day:

“Nobody wants to use the data.”

He’s remarkably spot-on. Even though almost every CEO says their companies are becoming data-driven, the fact is that most high-level decisions are still being made from bullet points, not data points.

What the data revolution brought us was systems for collecting data — but collecting is the easy part. And even more importantly, it’s the safe part.

The Real Problem: Data Phobia

The trouble with data is that it asks as many questions as it answers. Your engagement is down, bounce rate is up, search traffic is up — why is that, and what can we do to make it higher, lower and higher? Data almost never hands you the answers or insights directly; it just illuminates the issue. And it illuminates a whole bunch of them at once, so it’s up to you to figure out what the priorities are.

If this problem is an “opportunity in disguise,” most executives seem quickly scared off by the masquerade. In truth, Big Data raises the bar for how smart you have to be as an executive.

The easy answer — leaving the analytics to the analytics department — relieves you of the responsibility of figuring it all out, as though it’s unknowable to anyone without a degree in data science. But it also relieves you of the answers.

What is the executive’s greatest fear? That exposing the trove of data without knowing what to do with it makes them look worse, not better. In media, many have hidden that fear behind the veneer of idealistic purism. I remember talking with Martin Nisenholtz several years ago when he was at the New York Times about how data is used in a newsroom; I asked what would happen if he shared performance metrics with reporters in real time (obviously this was before Chartbeat) to see what their audience cares about. He said, “They would throw me out.”

Our strong institutions and professional commitment to standards have ensured the journalistic values of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability. None of those values are furthered by closing our eyes and ears to our own audiences. The result is a paradoxical culture that boldly states “content is king” and yet refuses to quantify its value for fear of tainting the purity of the product.

The Opportunity: Using Big Data to Make Big Bets

Until recently, we have had startlingly few case studies of the transformative power of Big Data on which to model our own big changes in media. Instead we’ve had IT initiatives that promised big insights, but ended up delivering big databases and bigger IT bills. For once, it’s not the IT department’s fault — it’s those of us who are using the data (and, more often, aren’t using it) who are to blame.

That’s why I turn to those who have made the big bets to see what’s different. Netflix has long been the poster child for using data to drive results, and now they’ve proven in no uncertain terms that when you ask your data the right questions you can find hugely valuable insights — even in the sacred domain of content creation.

Before Netflix pursued the option to buy “House of Cards,” it looked to its massive data stash. Execs wanted to know: Do Netflix users enjoy political thrillers? Check. Of political thriller enthusiasts, how many also watch David Fincher films? A whole bunch. Oh, and one more thing: Is this crowd fond of Kevin Spacey? As it turned out, there was a very healthy crossover in that Venn diagram.

Not only did this insight give Reed Hastings the confidence to bid on “House of Cards” — it gave him the level of certainty necessary to outbid heavyweights like HBO and AMC for the series.

What I love most about this story is that the questions were so simple, so logical. Sometimes the sheer volume of data at our fingertips overwhelms us and makes us forget that the fundamental strategic questions haven’t changed. What has changed is that now we have far better access to the answers. And when you can give your users what they want based on the signals they themselves have been sending you, that’s when Big Data starts to earn its keep.

Five Questions You Should Be Asking Your Data

Forget about Omniture and Google Analytics and all of the data minutiae you’re already tracking. Forget about little personalization features. The most valuable data doesn’t fit on the dashboard. Think bigger and move upstream: What’s the most amazing new product or service you can create? Here are five places to start digging:

• What does my audience love? Cut the data every way you can to deeply understand this, with nuance — then reorient around that product. It might be parenting advice, or current memes, or breaking news. If you can find a common thematic thread in your most-consumed content, you have a great starting point for further segmentation. Lauren Zalaznick turned the Bravo network around by pinpointing the five key interests of the audience, cutting out the clutter, and giving them more and more and more of what they loved (hence the hugely popular “Top Chef” and “Real Housewives”).
• How do they want it? Netflix noticed that a significant number of users were watching marathon-style, and so they bucked TV tradition and released “House of Cards” all at once. How could you change your content packaging to better match the real habits of your users? Many have tried and failed with full-length video programming on the Web; that’s because (so far at least) most Internet audiences can’t sit still long enough to watch a 30- or 60-minute program. Adapt your delivery to what your audience wants.
• How can I best relate to them? Personality is critical — so which of your brands’ public talents and personalities relate to whom? It might be a popular columnist, Don Draper, or Boo the Pomeranian. Figure out which personalities your audience connect with the most, and leverage them into the other themes and packages.
• What secret signals is my audience sending? Target famously figured out how to identify pregnant shoppers and even estimate their due dates months before the woman ever purchased a stroller or a pack of diapers. Find out which clues in your data indicate that a customer may be on the path to a new phase of life, and start messaging them with your relevant content even before they get there.
• Where is my sweet spot? Once you discover the key themes, packages and personalities that resonate with your audience the most (and at which relevant life stages), you can cross the data sets and identify your best untapped opportunities. Don’t just tweak your existing products and advertising — create whole new products that are designed specifically to thrive at the intersection. Just as the strong affinity overlap for Spacey/Fincher/Cards gave Netflix the confidence to make a bold bet, your own Venn diagram will spotlight your best chances to create knockout content that is destined to succeed.

Rethinking Management: Ask, Understand, Execute

When it comes to dealing with Big Data, our skills haven’t evolved as fast as our capacity. We all have a functional specialty, whether it be content creation or distribution or sales or management — so whose job is it to ask the right questions of the data? Big insights and actions aren’t led by a data scientist; they are led by an executive who has an integrated view of customers, products, distribution and sales.

But asking Big Data the right questions isn’t just a new practice to add to the management to-do list. Pulling it off requires a rethinking of the manager’s role entirely. We’ve traditionally thought of management as the discipline of managing people and managing the business. Now it’s time to add “managing our understanding” to the job description.

The time of the executives who merely “execute” is past. The successful executives in this post-Big Data world first ask, understand, and then execute with the full support of the data behind them.