GigaOM

Folks looks like blogging is going to be way slow this weekend. Maliks. aka parents are visiting for the first time in years and as a result I am going to be concentrating hard on mom’s cooking, getting pampered and of course hanging with Mr. M, talking about cricket, bollywood movies, old friends and perhaps if possible take in the sights. The rain is not making it easy… but still not a bad way to spend the day cooped up. See ya Monday! Continue »

Just when you thought it was over, well Qwest has come up with another big offer - $30 a share, or a total of $9.75 billion for MCI. That’s a 30% premium to Verizon’s $7.51 billion. I think with this offer. Q has matched the demands of MCI board, leaving them very few options. Q calls this offer its best and final offer. I thought that buying out Carlos Slim’s stake in MCI, Verizon had trumped Qwest at best and bought insurance at worst. MCI shareholders Legg Mason Capital, American Express and Omega Advisors are putting up $800 million in cash to help Qwest boost the offer to $9.75 billion, Bloomberg reports. Those three MCI shareholders have 13% of the company. I am looking forward to may 16th when MCI shareholder meeting is held in Ashburn, Virginia. It could be a shouting match not too miss, and I would love to see the board members explain why Michael Capellas got $6.5 million in salaries and bonus last year. His bonus was $5 million. Not bad for a company which is seeing is revenues shrink with every passing month. Look through their filings carefully, and they have been selling off assets like real estate to keep going. This morning, Indian outsourcing company vCustomer bought MCI’s seven call centers in US and Philippines. The Economic Times says there are five total call centers. So different data. Anyway the deal means that vCustomer is now going to be running MCI’s operator’s directory assistance service, operator service and relay service assets. Continue »

Update: Base hit for the om team! Ryan Nelson, the Unix Systems Group and am Director of Operations for Major League Baseball Advanced Media confirms the MLBlogs is live. “We just launched www.mlblogs.com today… it’s a partnership with SixApart (the MovableType people). Should be fun! Continue »

Buried in VeriSign’s earnings was this bit of news:

Domain name registrations were up 23% sequentially; .com registrations hit an all time record of 40 million plus, driven mainly by “pay for click” advertising. Continue »

I am shocked that when I hear people buy jeans that cost only $45 a pair. I am shocked when people buy an Mp3 player that is not iPod. I am shocked people still buy a $400 PC when they can buy a $500 Mac Mini. I am NOT shocked that some gals - an no they are not on the cover of InTouch and their initials are not BS - are paying upwards of $300 for a pair of jeans.

New York Times Styles: Far from being rarities, jeans with price tags of $200 are now everywhere, the retail equivalent of dandelions after spring rain. And it no exaggeration to say that a pair these days can easily cost as much as an iPod (Tsubi, $319), a Motorola Razr (Levi’s vintage, $325), or a desktop computer with the printer thrown in. (Nudie vegetable dye jeans, $428.) Continue »

Robert Pepper, acting chief of the FCC’s Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, in a speech professed his love for broadband, consumers and Sling Media. One of the few officials to understand the game changing impact of broadband, he pointed out that faster pipes and cheap storage are changing rules of the game for broadcasting business. Continue »

Million man march, million mom march…. and now million download swim. Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software, told employees that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother’s house in his home country, Iceland. Now however good a swimmer he might be, he seems to be full of you know what. I think the Opera team has cooked up a PR stunt, which hopefully results in Tetzchner spending a lot of time in cold salty Atlantic waters. In first 2 days of the release, the downloads are at 600,000. Speedos, Shrinkage, Spoke-to-soon-icity Continue »

• How about an Apple MVNO
• Media Think Damian Said It First, Apple + MVNO

One of my readers emailed and asked the question: will iTunes phone ever see the light of the day? Given that both Sprint and Verizon, following Gecko’s credo, have decided that they are going to pass on the iTunes, it is a good question. Those are two of the three largest wireless carriers and the trepidation of iTunes fans is understandable. Like everyone else, I am worried about the mlackmail carriers and record companies are going to force on us. Continue »