GigaOM

Covad to be acquired by Providence Equity Platinum Equity Partners for $1.02 a share in cash, a 59 percent premium to its closing price on Friday. Covad is one of the handful of independent broadband service providers to have survived the telecom bust. Providence, I suspect, will have Covad focusing on wholesale and wireless [...]

Under siege from Wall Street investors, and facing competition from other potential wireless networks (700 MHz), Sprint Nextel (S) has a new-found appreciation for the need for openness. And its executives are taking every opportunity to extoll the virtues of open networks, especially xOHM.
Rick Robinson, VP of products and services of xOhm, told attendees [...]

Some fun facts from CTIA’s mid-year 2007 survey results (Download PDF):
* At the end of first half of 2007, there were 243.4 million subscribers or about 10.4M net new additions. UBS Research estimates that number works out to about 80% penetration of the U.S. population, versus 77% at year-end 2006 and 73% at mid-year 2006.
* [...]

The long-awaited and much-derided NBC (GE) and News Corp (NWS) joint venture Hulu will make a somewhat public debut this week, opening up a private beta tonight of its web video service and initiating distribution of its movies, TV shows, and mashups on AOL (TWX), Comcast (CMCSA), MSN (MSFT), MySpace, and Yahoo (YHOO). Full [...]

Amanda Mooney has a great idea: Google (GOOG) should build “capability to import my Outlook, Ziggs, LinkedIn and Plaxo contacts into my Reader account and have Google instantly subscribe to news and blog feeds related to my people.” In other words, they can implement some sort of “auto discovery” and turn Google Reader into [...]

Concerns over the use of cell phones while driving used to be confined to talking on them, prompting numerous states and even countries around the world to ban the use of the device while driving unless used in conjunction with a hands-free accessory. From an occupied hands perspective, however, texting is clearly a bigger [...]