EQAL, the new name of the production company behind the pioneering online video series Lonelygirl15, has received $5 million in funding from various investors to develop more shows beyond its first franchise and KateModern in UK. The round was led by Spark Capital, and includes some Silicon Valley heavyweights including Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen, and Georges Harik, a former Google executive. Also investing, Conrad Riggs, a Hollywood producer involved with TV shows such as “Survivor” and “The Apprentice”. All this for a Santa...
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TechCrunch says Digg is now finally serious about selling itself and is gathering bids via Allen & Co. Microsoft, Google, and two media companies (CBS, News Corp.?) are said to be at the table.
The real news, though, is that Digg has apparently cut its price from the $300 million the company originally wanted. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington says Google will bid $200-$225 million and that Digg will likely accept this. Microsoft is expected to bid even less. 100M?
In an interview several weeks ago, Digg founder Kevin Rose told CNET...
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Late last night, Amazon issued a statement explaining the cause of the problem that hobbled its S3 storage system yesterday morning. It was not a hardware failure. Rather, the service's authentication system, which verifies the identity of a user, became overloaded with user requests. As one person explained to me, it amounted to a kind of accidental DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, and Amazon didn't have enough capacity in place in one of its data centers to handle the surge.
Here's Amazon's explanation:
Early this morning,...
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The Times is reporting that Yahoo wants to restart merger talks with AOL as a way of avoiding the clutches of Microsoft, a move that — if true — is roughly equivalent to screaming “we’re totally desperate” from the rooftops of Yahoo headquarters. In this case, of course, it’s difficult to know who is the more desperate of the two, Yahoo or AOL. Neither has what amounts to a viable strategy, and neither has managed to capitalize on any of their vaunted media assets, despite years of trying...
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Yahoo Inc would consider a business alliance with Google Inc as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo's strategy said on Sunday.
Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft's bid, that source said. At $31 a share, Yahoo believes the bid undervalues the company, two sources said.
A second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology,...
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Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a trade conference.
All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. Donahue did not specify what countries were affected, when the outages occurred or how long the outages lasted. He said they happened...
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It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database 
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