It's not a small world after all for Disney. The family entertainment giant served up mixed financial results on Tuesday night, spearheaded by the most profitable quarter in the company's history.
Even as investors reel from the stock-market roller coaster this week, Wall Street is moving on, with plenty of news on the way. Next week will bring headlines about retail and gaming earnings, as well as quarterly reports from News Corp., SodaStream and some newly public Chinese firms.
Some influential tech voices deeply critical of today's search technology hailed the victory of IBM's Watson at Jeopardy! as a forerunner of a new type of more intelligent, useful and less spammy search. Here's why that's still an awfully long ways off.
In a blog post on Friday, Google made its most direct warning that it would be tweaking search algorithms to punish "content farms" -- cheap producers of Web content that either copied or scraped information from other publishers. Demand Media could suffer in particular.
Look out, Demand Media: Here comes another cheap content-creation competitor. Meet BlueGlass, the newest entrant in the rapidly expanding field of producing low-cost text and video articles designed specifically to snag search traffic.
How much quality content can a penny buy? I trolled Demand Media's eHow.com to answer that question. Here's my collection of the dumbest articles published by the company, which recently filed for an IPO.
In an IPO market as finicky as this one, the contemporary adage that any publicity is good publicity doesn't hold. Not when your Web traffic drops suddenly and you've been rated the worst Internet company, and especially not when the CEO may have been caught fudging the facts.
Investors eyeing the IPO of Demand Media, a much-discussed content startup, may be drawn by its big-name underwriters. But they should also scrutinize details such as the company's business vulnerabilities and lack of profits.
