According to the NYPost, Blockbuster is on its last legs, and is looking for an equity partner as it runs completely out of money.
Citing insider sources, Blockbuster needs $213.5 million in cash to pay off loans and interest for 2010, with a similar amount coming due in 2011. According to latest financials, the company only has about $211 million in cash, and is expected to lose as much as $120 million in 2010, leaving them with no ability to pay off the loans unless they sell more of their assets, or complete larger cost cutting measures.
After the report, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes disagreed with the assessment: “All your numbers are wrong. They bear no resemblance to any materials we have in the market.” Any talks with private equity firms are for “strategic alternatives,” not to add capital infusions.
In February, Blockbuster said they owed $105 million in interest payments for 2010, but did not add what they needed to pay in principal.
Result for: 5 million
Apple shipped 24.89 million iPhone units in 2009, making it the top shipped smartphone for the year.
The numbers come from industry group Gartner, which showed off smartphone market share.
Phones with the Symbian OS remained on top with 80.88 million units shipped, with RIM second at 34.35 million smartphones shipped for the year. Finishing off the list are Windows Mobile, Linux, Android, and WebOS.
Percentage-wise, Symbian controlled 46.9 percent, RIM followed at 19.9 percent, Apple with 14.4 percent, WinMo at 8.7 percent, Linux at 4.7 percent, Android at 3.9 percent and WebOS at 0.7 percent.
Overall, 1.211 billion phones were shipped in 2009, down from 1.222 billion in 2008.
Result for: 5 million
Twitter has boasted that its users now send out 50 million 140-character-or-less tweets per day, or about six hundred per second. The micro-blogging giant, which is usually mute about much of its statistics, revealed the milestone on Monday. The site had five thousand tweets every day back in 2007, which went up to 300,000 per day in 2008.
In 2009, tweets had grown to an impressive 2.5 million every day, according to Kevin Weil, a member of Twitter’s analytics team. “Tweets grew 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day,” Weil said. “Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day — that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”
The total number of Twitter users is unknown to the public, kept as an internal statistic at the company since it launched.
Considering that the 50,000,000 figure only represents the amount of tweets made by users, the actual number of tweets delivered by the service would be much higher, with tweets being shown for all followers of a user. Furthermore, Twitter omitted messages that were posted from accounts identified as spam from the total figures.
