Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL [CNET]
- Unlike most people working at AOL’s Palo Alto, Calif., campus who were surely still hours from showing up at the sprawling complex, [Eric] Simons was already there. He’d been living there for two months, hiding out at night on couches, eating the company’s food, and exercising and showering in its gym. And now, with an angry security guard bellowing at him, it was all over.
In considerably less humorous AOL news…
The case against AOL, in numbers [FORBES]
- AOL is losing $500 million a year on its display advertising businesses, ie. Its premium content sites. Since 2009, those losses have totaled $1.3 billion. In the past three years, it has spent $668 million acquiring display-based business, including the Huffington Post, on which it spent $315 million. It has pumped another $235 million of investment into Patch. Its operating expenses on the display side run at $1.1 billion per year.
Mr. Cook goes to Washington [FORTUNE]
- For years, Apple has hewed to a studiously hands-off lobbying strategy, flowing from co-founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs’ aversion to tangling with the policymaking process. As his successor begins to put his own imprint on the company, however, Cook wants key players in Washington to know they now have an open line to the chief executive in Cupertino.
10 thoughts about how Apple gets to $1,000 [APPLE 2.0]
- Borrowing one of the oldest devices in print and online journalism, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster has boiled his thoughts about Apple into something like a top 10 list. Munster is on record predicting that the company’s share price — which closed at $565.32 Thursday — will hit $1,000 within two years. Here are his 10 ideas about how it gets there.
Google Project Glass spills more prototype secrets [SLASH GEAR]
- Another public outing for Google’s Project Glass has spilled even more details about the wearable augmented reality headset, including some of the first indications of just what’s visible through that single display. New glimpses of the prototypes have been shown courtesy of a Google Glass Walk that took place earlier this week in San Francisco, including what seems to be the first shot of the headset not actually being worn.
NBCU Exploring Buyback of MSNBC.com [ADWEEK]
- NBCUniversal is in serious negotiations with Microsoft to buy back MSNBC.com. Several sources with first-hand knowledge of the situation say that negotiations between the two companies have progressed to the stage where NBCU parent company Comcast is conducting its due diligence. They said that the partnership could be unwound by this summer.
HP’s core webOS Enyo team is going to Google [THE VERGE]
- The HP team responsible for Enyo — webOS’s HTML5-based application framework that debuted on the TouchPad — will be leaving the company and starting at Google shortly, The Verge has learned. What this means for the future of Open webOS is unclear; Enyo and the developers supporting it are central to HP’s open source strategy for the operating system going forward, and it’s hard to say whether this move will have any effect on the planned late 2012 release for version 1.0.
Introducing Facebook Camera [FACEBOOK NEWSROOM]
- Today, we’re introducing Camera, a new mobile app that makes using Facebook photos faster and easier. See friends’ photos all in one place. Share multiple photos fast.
