POLITICO & Axel Springer Announce Joint Acquisition of European Voice – POLITICO Press Release:

POLITICO and Axel Springer, the owners of the POLITICO joint venture in Europe, announced today that they have acquired EUROPEAN VOICE and will rebrand the respected Brussels publication as POLITICO in the spring of 2015.

Bad news for Europe. Axel Springer, a big German publisher of among others the popular tabloid ‘Bild’, is the leading force behind the ‘Leistungsschutzrecht’. That is an ancillary copyright intended to make Google pay press publishers for showing snippets in search results and on Google News and got introduced last year.

Axel Springer is very aggressive in every imaginable way. (except for the innovative kind) Due to the popularity of Bild they have a lot of power in Germany. Expect them to try to influence the EU to very hardly regulate Google and other US tech giants.

It will be interesting to see wether Politico will allow that kind of instrumentalisation of the publication. The relationship could easily become contengious over this. Because while Politico does this to extend its business, Axel Springer does it to extend its power in the EU.

Ben Thompson articulates an opinion on the Apple Watch here that is very close to mine. Especially when it comes to the platform questions. Timing is important. Hence the watch comes next year not 2020.
Great listen. Recommended.

“I think this is a crucial point: Love owns his niche, and he is willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure that remains the case.”

neunetz:

“That gives us a guess of 2,564,103 Chromecast users using the device 3 times a week.”

Chromecast is not such a big deal after all.

““Makeupaddiction,” for example, is a section dedicated entirely to beauty products and tips. Users post hundreds of conversation threads daily, often recommending different types of products to one another.

This is exactly where a brand wants to be, Reddit says. If a company like Estée Lauder bought an ad unit — a so-called “native ad” that looks similar to other Reddit conversation threads — at the top of the Makeupaddiction sub-Reddit, users in the thread would treat it less like an ad and more like content.”

Using Subreddits for ads makes a lot of sense.

“This is how one can really understand why Ballmer – over the objection of Nadella, among others – made the disastrously stupid decision to buy Nokia. We now know for a fact that my speculation at the time that Nokia was about to introduce Android phones was spot-on, and the terms of the deal suggest that Nokia was having financial difficulties as well; if Microsoft would have lost Nokia, they would have lost Windows Phone, and Ballmer saw that as a mortal threat. Never mind that Windows Phone is for all-intents-and-purposes already dead; the thing about culture is that it not only eats strategy, it washes it down with a potent mixture of selective facts and undue optimism.”