After a multi-billion dollar failed experiment, Time Warner has made moves to rid itself of the still profitable, but quickly dying AOL dial-up internet division.
The company plans to keep AOL’s Web-portal and advertising sectors and only sell its dial up internet access division which has been losing subscribers at an exponential rate. Time Warner’s new CEO Jeff Bewkes had this to say at a recent conference call. “This should significantly increase AOL’s strategic options,” he said. It is notable to mention that at its peak in 2002 AOL had 30 million paying subscribers. It now has 10 million.
AOL has now been ramping up its advertising business but it still lagging behind the industry. For the Q4 2007, ad revenue for the company grew 18 percent while the industry averaged propelled ahead by 25 percent.
The separation of AOL from Time Warner’s growing content business should allow the company to focus on stronger, more profitable businesses. A rival executive noted that Time Warner has wasted billions of dollars trying to find the Right business model for AOL. “Follow the money. Platforms, not content businesses, are where the money has been made on the internet,” he added.
I’m sure Time Warner share holders can vouch for that last statement.
Result for: exponential rate
Just 4 months after reaching 3 billion downloads the popular torrent site Mininova has announced that they have hit another milestone; 4 billion torrent downloads by its users.
Niek van der Maas, the founder of MiniNova had this to say about the latest milestone. “When we launched back in January 2005, we were the first BitTorrent site to offer a sophisticated search engine, sorting of search results, categorization, etc..We try to keep our lead by innovating and extending our website with new features. Many things changed in the past years, but one thing will always be the same: we try to offer the #1 P2P directory and search engine.”
The milestones just keep racking up for Mininova, and at an exponential rate as well. In May 2006 the site reached 400 million torrent downloads, and only 8 months later they hit the 1 billion plateau. By November of 2007 it was 3 billion.
“This is very good news, it means our site is growing exponential: the amount of total torrent downloads roughly doubles every half year,” Niek added. “And more downloads means more exposure, so more content available on our website.”
Result for: exponential rate
NVIDIA has introduced the latest version of its Quadro GFX card for the business sector. The Quadro FX 5800 marks the first time that a GFX card has been loaded with 4GB of graphics memory. Even NVIDIA’s dual GPU enthusiast video cards like the 9800 GX2 only sport 2GB of memory. “The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for today’s professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze, and use to make impactful decisions,” NVIDIA’s Jeff Brown, GM of professional solutions said in a statement.
He continued: “At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people’s lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions.” The FX 5800 offers up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores and supports interactive 4D modeling with time-lapse capability.
The FX 5800 supports both Open GL and DirectX 10 applications. NVIDIA says the level of performance offered by the new powerful card is needed for demanding environments like oil/gas exploration and medical imaging. The technology comes with a sobering MSRP of $3,499.
