Comcast Announced A $65 Billion Bid For Twenty First Century Fox

Comcast announced a $65 billion bid for Twenty First Century Fox units that are currently in agreement to be acquired by Disney.

The bid announced Wednesday represents a 19 percent premium to Disney's offer. Comcast, the parent of CNBC offered $35 a share in cash.

Disney agreed in December to buy the majority of Fox for $52.4 billion in stock. The deal included Fox's movie studios, networks National Geographic and FX, Star TV, stakes in Sky, Endemol Shine Group and Hulu, as well as regional sports networks.

"These are highly strategic and complementary businesses, and we are in our minds the right buyer," Comcast's CEO Brian Roberts said on a call with investors.

In a letter to Fox's board and members of the Murdoch family released earlier, Roberts said, "We were disappointed when Fox decided to enter into a transaction with The Walt Disney Company even though we had offered a meaningfully higher price." He went on to say, "We are pleased to present a new, all cash proposal that fully addresses the Board's stated concerns with our prior proposal."

Comcast is planning for an increased bid from Disney that may include a cash component according to people familiar with the matter. Comcast believes it is better suited to offer cash because the market allows for a higher leverage ratio from a cable company with strong cash flows than a media company like Disney, which is accustomed to carrying lower leverage ratios the people said. A Disney bid with cash will also diminish the tax benefits for the Murdoch family, which controls Fox.


Source: The Verge

Apple Acquires Shazam For $400 Million

Apple has announced that it has acquired song recognition company Shazam. According to Recode the deal is valued at $400 million.

In a statement to The Verge, an Apple spokesperson said:

“We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users. We have exciting plans in store, and we look forward to combining with Shazam upon approval of today’s agreement."

Shazam currently has apps for iOS, Android, and macOS with the Windows apps being pulled earlier this year. It is one of the most highly rated and popular apps in the world on every platform. Even before the acquisition Shazam has been part of Apple software powering the song recognition feature in Siri. 

With the acquisition, Apple could build deeper integration within Apple Music software. The deal should close in the coming weeks pending regulatory approval.

Vine For Android Coming Soon

In an interview with The Verge, it was mentioned that Vine for Android is being actively worked on, and is coming “soon.” For those of who have been intrigued by the app, but not enough to dump Android for it, this is great news.

Large companies who choose Android over iOS has proven to be a relatively smart move. While some would argue the fact that half of Instagram’s users are now on Android means the company missed out in the beginning, some might argue the exact opposite. Launching on iOS only gave the team behind Instagram the option to support a small amount of handsets, and hone their product before expanding overnight to double the user base.

Source: The Verge

Google Keep Note Taking App Spotted

Google, as a service provider, tries to cover all aspects of an online life a person could have, providing all the services. If you think of it, the company has the best known search engine and the best known email service. There is also a very good social networking site, a very good operating system for computers and a very popular operating system for mobile device, a very powerful, secure, and stable internet browser, cloud apps, cloud services for business, solutions for almost every kind of need a business could have. When such is the situation, it will be hard at work to try its luck with other popular online services.

With the success of Evernote, it is pretty obvious that people are very serious about taking digital notes on their computers or mobile devices, and they are doing this very much using Evernote. So it is only very evident that Google would want to try this service as well, after its Notebook service failed. The service we are talking about is Google Keep.

If you have heard of this before, you are not alone. This is because we have heard the name and seen the logo before. But according to a post on Android Police, the service was briefly up on http://drive.google.com/keep and that just means that we have to keep an eye on it. Also, the web publication features the above screenshot of the service which was submitted by a Google+ user.

Last year, the search engine giant accidentally leaked a screenshot on its Google Plus page which had a link labelled, “save to Google Keep.” Now, even though we do have anything like that, we have this official image to hold on to. And until the company makes any official announcement this is all we have.



Source: The Verge