Voices

Home Automation Start-Up R2 Studios in Acquisition Talks

A secretive start-up founded by the man who popularized the Slingbox has been in talks with companies considering buying it, people close to the company say, with Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Apple Inc. cited as participants.

Voices

A New Era in TV

We are in the early stages of a video creation, distribution, consumption, content bundling and pricing paradigm shift that will lead to fundamental shifts in the pay-TV ecosystem.

SigFig Rolls Out a Smarter Piggy Bank to Help People Invest More Wisely

San Francisco-based SigFig is rolling out a new type of investment service that makes managing investment portfolios way easier.
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Dish Gets Ready to Serve Up Broadband and a Giant DVR

A pre-CES leak reveals some cool stuff, but not the Web-based cable killer some of you are rooting for.
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Exclusive: Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Blake Krikorian Joins Amazon Board

Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Blake Krikorian has joined the board of Amazon, according to several sources close to the situation. He is considered one of tech’s most savvy execs with regards to video and media distribution, an area the online retailer is aggressively entering.
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Mac Alternatives to Quicken

Walt answers a reader’s question on alternatives to Quicken for Macs, putting a computer to sleep and watching TV on the iPad.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse at Dive Into Mobile

When Sprint CEO Dan Hesse joined the company three years ago, the third-largest carrier was bleeding subscribers from having a poor reputation for customer service and facing stiff competition from the likes of AT&T, which held the exclusive on the iPhone. Since then, Sprint has stemmed the losses, mostly by beefing up its customer service and by investing in the prepaid sector to attract a wider audience during the economic downturn. Going forward, Sprint looks to its 4G strategy for growth through its ownership stake in WiMax-provider Clearwire.

Owen Van Natta Out at MySpace

Owen Van Natta, the prominent Internet executive brought in to overhaul MySpace, has left after less than a year. News Corp., which owns the social network, has replaced the CEO with his former lieutenants, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who have been named co-presidents.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson: “Wireless Is the Priority of This Business”

Randall Stephenson is just two years into his tenure as CEO of AT&T, but faces challenges that have been decades in the making. Among them: remaking AT&T amid the steady decline of its landline business, future-proofing its business as our appetites for bandwidth grow, competing with the likes of Comcast in the cable TV market and fending off the proponents of Net neutrality who don’t care much for the idea of a two-tiered Internet. Beyond this there is the issue of continuing to build out AT&T’s wireless business, which if not iPhone-dependent, is certainly nursing a hell of a habit.
Randall Stephenson at D7

Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference. We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.” Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.
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Slingbox, Sling.com Team Leaving Echostar