Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length
URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT
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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: BANKING & FINANCE (77%); NOBEL PRIZES (71%); POPULATION SIZE (71%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (71%); AWARDS & PRIZES (71%); CHECK CASHING SERVICES (69%); CITY LIFE (60%); CITIES (60%) COMPANY: GRAMEEN BANK (55%) PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (52%) GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (91%) NEW YORK, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (95%); BANGLADESH (93%) LOAD-DATE: April 1, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Alethia Mendez works for Grameen America, whose parent organization's founder started a group-lending plan for poor Bangladeshi women. The plan won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Grameen America, in Queens, is the international organization's first foray in the United States. Since January, its loans have exceeded $250,000, in amounts ranging from $500 to $3,000. Nicole Brown, 30, worked in Manhattan recently for her sister's house cleaning company, which was expanded with a Grameen loan. Ms. Brown got a loan, too, for her day care business. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 916 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
The New York Times on the Web Jana Offers Its Plan to Help Revive CNET BYLINE: By REUTERS SECTION: Section ; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. LENGTH: 359 words DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO A group of activist investors led by Jana Partners released a detailed plan Tuesday to bolster the earnings of CNET Networks, and rejected the online media company's offer of one board seat to settle their dispute. The group, which has been fighting to win control of CNET's board, said in a 38-page proposal that the investment banking backgrounds of the CNET ehief executive, Neil M. Ashe, and the chief financial officer Zander Lurie make them ill-suited to spearhead the company's turnaround. The Jana group said that CNET's management and board lacked the urgency and expertise required to turn CNET from a ''Web 1.0'' company into one that can keep abreast of peers like Yahoo , which are increasingly making money from online advertising and sophisticated search. The group's proposal calls for a range of measures, including tying up with a popular online advertising platform like Google's Doubleclick, revamping search and building social networking features for CNET's various Web sites. The group said these measures would bring more visitors and help CNET sell targeted and contextual advertisements. CNET, best known for its technology news Web site News.com, faces stiff competition from tech blogs. Analysts have also questioned its ability to generate new cash, as its share price nosedived from a dotcom-era peak of nearly $80 to $7.10 as of Monday's close. Jana and its partners -- the investment funds Sandell Asset Management and Velocity Interactive Management, the technology entrepreneur Paul Gardi of Alex Interactive Media and the venture capital firm Spark Capital -- are seeking to replace two of CNET's eight directors who are up for election, expand the board by five members and fill those five seats with its nominees. CNET has been battling the dissidents since January. The company suffered a setback in March when the Delaware Supreme Court ruled the Jana group could nominate directors without violating company bylaws. CNET has said it will appeal the decision. The company said last week it would cut 120 jobs, or 10 percent of its work force, in a restructuring to help it focus on long-term growth.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 917 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Citizen Huff BYLINE: By BRIAN STELTER SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1426 words ''Ari Emanuel called me last night with an idea for a blog,'' Arianna Huffington said last week as she sipped an iced coffee in the New York offices of The Huffington Post last week. In several ways, it was a classic Huffington statement, combining Hollywood celebrity (Mr. Emanuel, the famous movie agent), national politics (his idea was an essay on how Hillary Rodham Clinton learned, in his words, ''how to manipulate words to cover up her lies''), with an imperfect grasp of new media terminology (she meant ''post,'' not ''blog''). And of course, Ms. Huffington herself was at the center of the whole episode. When Ms. Huffington, the 57-year-old author and former conservative pundit, announced her plans for The Huffington Post three years ago, many critics dismissed the idea as a digital dinner party for her new liberal friends. But it has grown in ways that few, except perhaps Ms. Huffington herself, expected. In February, The Huffington Post drew 3.7 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online, for the first time beating out The Drudge Report, the conservative tip sheet with which The Post is often compared. On Technorati, a blog search tool, The Huffington Post is the second-most-linked-to blog, behind only the technology site TechCrunch. As Roy Sekoff, the site's editor, said, ''We've always wanted to be part of the national conversation.'' When Barack Obama made his first public remarks about his controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., he did so in a post on the site. ''It was immediately picked up everywhere,'' Ms. Huffington recalled. ''It helps to be bookmarked by the mainstream media.'' And The HuffPost, as it's known, has come to symbolize a certain combination of entrepreneur and online commentator, creating a brand and a business around Ms. Huffington. But she and her co-founder, Kenneth Lerer, have broader aspirations. In the last 12 months, they have introduced new content areas devoted to subjects like entertainment and business, and they have three more -- international news, sports and books -- coming soon. Ms. Huffington herself now spends less time on blog posts condemning the Bush administration (although there's still plenty of that) and more time reimagining The Huffington Post as what she calls an ''Internet newspaper.'' In October, the site hired a new chief executive, Betsy Morgan, from CBS Interactive, and this summer the site will take an ambitious step by introducing its version of a metropolitan section: local versions for major cities. Whether readers will follow the site into new areas, however, is an open -- and expensive -- question. The plan will put The Huffington Post into competition with existing newspapers and, arguably, with companies like Yahoo, AOL and CNN.com. ''Success on the Web is defined by spotting niches and serving them well,'' said Micah L. Sifry, the editor of the blog TechPresident.com. ''Will people go to The Huffington Post for great sports blogging? They're certainly not going to go see what Arianna says about opening day,'' he added. The sheer audacity of the plan should not surprise anyone who has followed Ms. Huffington's career. A native of Greece, she has been the president of the Cambridge University debating society; an author of books about feminism, Picasso and government waste; a panelist on radio and television shows; and a candidate in the 2003 California gubernatorial election. ''She's had at least nine lives,'' said Michael Kinsley, a co-founder of Slate and a columnist for The Washington Post. ''Someone will turn it into an opera. Probably her.'' She usually works in Los Angeles by the fireplace of her mansion in the affluent Brentwood neighborhood (the site's West Coast staff of six also works out of her home). Last week, she was in New York, meeting with staff members, sitting for an interview with the ABC newsmagazine ''20/20'' and speaking about online politics at New York University. When she introduced The Huffington Post in May 2005, she combined her posts with those of celebrities. Ms. Huffington prefers to say it has ''as many interesting voices as possible.'' But blogs often fade away as their creators tire of them, and many of the boldface names Ms. Huffington signed up and publicized in 2005 did not follow through. The retired anchorman Walter Cronkite and the former Bush speechwriter David Frum have each written three posts since the site started. The actress Diane Keaton and the lawyer Vernon E. Jordan Jr. have each written only two. Others, like former Senator Gary Hart, the screenwriter and producer Nora Ephron and the television host Bill Maher, continue to contribute regularly. Those who do contribute are met with varying degrees of fame online; many of the posts receive less than 10,000 views. But, especially when the posts are linked on the front page, the site provides a megaphone and gives authors some prominence. ''We've been very successful in selling people's books,'' Ms. Huffington remarked. Ms. Huffington, whose title is editor in chief, said she did not have a particular traffic goal in mind but sought to ''not just speak to the choir'' of progressive political addicts. When Ms. Morgan, the site's chief executive, arrived last fall, she immediately drew attention to metrics by requesting daily traffic statistics, weekly revenue estimates and monthly goals for both figures. The topical focuses seem to be helping. The site had 1.8 million unique visitors in December, 2.9 million in January and 3.7 million in February, according to Nielsen Online. (The Post's internal numbers are much larger; many online publishers contend the Nielsen figures are underestimates.) Staff members also credit much of the growth to moves that have made the site's commentary more prominent on search engines like Google and Yahoo. More than half of traffic now comes from nonpolitical pages. ''At first, we were very narrow,'' said Mr. Lerer, the co-founder. Comparing the expansion to the widening of a highway, he said the political front page was first complemented by media coverage, then by sections for living and entertainment. Mr. Lerer said he looked at the sections of a printed newspaper as a model. This year the site quietly changed its slogan to ''the Internet newspaper.'' The venture was profitable in some of its early months, executives say, but most of the revenue has been reinvested to hire editors, reporters and advertising representatives. Mr. Lerer estimated that it would raise $6 million to $10 million this year, twice the amount of last year. Advertisers have included Starbucks, the Discovery Channel and Volkswagen, Mr. Lerer said. The expansion of content areas and the hiring of a chief executive have prompted speculation that Ms. Huffington could sell the Web site after the election. In an interview, she shied away from the possibility, saying ''it's not something that we've discussed.'' According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution, the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used. That would put the price at more than $50 for each visitor, a high valuation. Using the site's internal figures, 14 million unique visitors for the most recent month, the price would be closer to $15 for each user. In the meantime, The Post is suffering some growing pains. A number of people have ungracefully departed in the past year, a situation Mr. Lerer attributed to the difficulty in transforming ''old media'' employees. The site has other challenges. Despite its number of visitors, it still has a high ''bounce rate,'' referring to users who visit one page and then leave the site. Drudge still records seven times the monthly page views of The Huffington Post, meaning that readers are frequently refreshing for the latest headlines. Ms. Huffington and her colleagues reject the comparisons, saying The Post seeks to be a community, not merely a collection of links. As new topical subsites come online, especially the one for local news, the site will increasingly try to act as an Internet curator with a distinct attitude, mixing blog posts, original news and links to other sources. ''Look at Yahoo or Google or CNN. Take away the branding and just look at the headlines, and they're very similar,'' said Mr. Sekoff. ''But if you take away the branding of The Huffington Post and the signage, you'd probably still recognize us.''
Arianna Huffington in her company's New York offices. Left, Matt Drudge, the man seen as her conservative counterpart. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHESTER HIGGINS EVAN AGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES) (pg.C4)
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 918 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Online Chat, As Inspired By Real Chat BYLINE: By BRAD STONE SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 954 words DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social. People visit each other's MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It's like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator. Now a new wave of Silicon Valley companies is bringing live socializing back into a medium that has, in the parlance of the technologists, grown overly asynchronous. Vivaty, a start-up based in Menlo Park, Calif., is creating 3-D virtual chat rooms that people can add to the Web pages and social networking profiles on the sites where they spend most of their Internet time. The company has been quietly working on its technology for three years and will begin a private test period on Facebook this week in advance of a wider introduction this summer. It is backed by the blue-chip venture capital firms Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Vivaty turns a flat profile page into a three-dimensional live chat room. Users choose characters to represent themselves from a list of preternaturally handsome avatars -- a requirement for any such service -- and proceed to one of a dozen environments, like a gothic urban warehouse or seaside villa. With videogame-like precision, they can then navigate that virtual space, which may feature their Facebook photos hanging from the walls and a YouTube video playing on a widescreen TV. Up to 15 others can choose avatars and enter the same room at the same time for text-based live socializing. ''We want to take all your content on the Web and move it to a more visually immersive, immediate experience,'' said Keith McCurdy, chief executive at Vivaty and a former vice president at the big game maker Electronic Arts. Similar online services like Second Life and games like World of Warcraft have existed for years. But they are not accessible through a Web browser. Instead they require users to install large and cumbersome programs and have plenty of Internet bandwidth for a satisfyingly immediate experience. Vivaty chat rooms, on the other hand, will be scattered across the Web. A user can stick an existing Vivaty virtual environment, or create a unique one, wherever HTML code can be imbedded. The company plans to make money partly by allowing companies to start their own virtual rooms on their own Web sites, where they can control the decor and their marketing messages. Vivaty's technology and business plan may be unique, but its overall goal is not. The entrepreneurs and investors behind other ''live Web'' companies say that the intermittent socializing on most Web sites ignores the primal human instinct that once drove people to the town square and now brings them into real-world social groups to watch the Super Bowl or the latest episode of ''Battlestar Galactica.'' ''A lot of basic human communication needs have been lost in this age of siloed, one-to-one communications,'' said Roelof Botha, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. ''At the end of the day, we are a social species.'' Mr. Botha, one of the original backers of YouTube, is behind live Web companies like TokBox, a year-old start-up that lets people conduct face-to-face video chats on the Web, and Meebo, a two-year-old Web messaging company that introduced a new generation of networked chat rooms to the Web last year. Chat rooms were an integral part of the online experience for users of early services like CompuServe and America Online. Characterized by names like ''Single and Looking,'' they often devolved into noisy chaos. The first wave of Web technology helped drive these unruly conversations close to extinction. The Web's static pages made it poorly suited for rapid-fire, live communication. Live chat was relegated to separate software tools like instant messenger programs. Newer Web programming tools provide flexibility for updates inside Web pages. But now there is a new problem: Internet users are spread thinly across millions of Web sites and blogs and various social networks. Last year, Meebo's chief executive, Seth Sternberg -- who as a teenager was a chat-room moderator for America Online -- introduced Meebo Rooms, a kind of 2-D version of Vivaty's cartoonscape. Meebo Rooms can play host to the same crowd on more than one Web site. For instance, there are around 100 people at any given time talking in the Meebo Room for the Showtime program ''Big Brother After Dark.'' Half of those might enter on Showtime's site, while the other half might join from fan's pages on MySpace. But they all conduct one live conversation. Mr. Sternberg asserts that the dialogue is cleaner in his new live chats than on the old AOL chats he used to patrol. ''Whenever chat rooms are embedded on a site with context, and everyone is there because they are interested in the topic, the conversation is good,'' he said. Other new live services are popping up quickly. This month, Facebook said it would introduce a live chat feature. Live video streaming services, from Yahoo and start-ups like Kyte, Ustream.TV and Justin.TV, are also proliferating. Those companies include live chat features as well, so users can discuss what they are watching in real time. Mr. McCurdy from Vivaty said he did not expect these live services to travel far across the generational divide. The younger video-game generation ''has more craving for contact,'' he said. ''They are using their computers for emotional experiences, and a video-game experience is more emotional than looking at a blue and white Facebook page.''
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 919 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final 2 Irish Billionaires Clash Over Publisher's Course BYLINE: By JULIA WERDIGIER SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 924 words DATELINE: LONDON Irish history is rich in epic feuds of kings and family clans. A modern version is now being played out, as two Irish billionaires spar over the future of the publisher of London's Independent, The Irish Independent and more than 100 newspapers. Over the last two years, Denis O'Brien, a telecommunications mogul, has been slowly buying shares in Independent News & Media, much to the discomfort of Anthony J. F. O'Reilly, its chief executive and biggest shareholder. With a 22.2 percent holding and as the publisher's second-largest shareholder after Mr. O'Reilly, Mr. O'Brien wants the company to sell its flagship London paper. Further, he has accused Mr. O'Reilly of running an ''old-style fiefdom'' -- his son Gavin is chief operating officer, and the other two sons are nonexecutive directors -- and has called on him to resign. In an interview on Friday, Gavin O'Reilly said that Mr. O'Brien's attacks were ''clearly personally motivated'' and that no other shareholder had ever raised any concerns about corporate governance. ''We will continue to run our business as we do,'' he said. ''Buying a lot of shares in a company at a time when he was talking down the business raises important ethical questions.'' On Thursday, the company said that Mr. O'Brien's requests to sell its flagship paper were merely ''designed to destabilize the company.'' Mr. O'Brien shot back, saying the publisher's remarks were ''a highly personal and unwarranted attack'' on him ''and appear to be designed to deflect attention away from the company's disappointing stock performance.'' (Neither Mr. O'Brien nor Mr. O'Reilly wanted to be interviewed for this article.) Public disputes like these are rare in Irish business circles, which tend to be very closed. But members of the Irish business elite are getting used to rubbing against one another, because the country's booming economy over the last decade has created many new millionaires but not enough investment opportunities. The Sunday Times recently ranked Mr. O'Brien the third richest mogul in Ireland and said that Mr. O'Reilly (together with his wife) was fifth. If the two men were not such bitter rivals, they might find many similarities. Both are self-made billionaires and active philanthropists who have built businesses from scratch, who enjoy sports, and who prefer to pay their taxes in countries with lower rates than Ireland. Before starting his business career, Mr. O'Reilly was a successful rugby player on his country's team (a meeting with Nelson Mandela while on tour proved useful later when he expanded his publishing empire to South Africa). He moved from rugby to dairy in the early 1960s when he became chief executive of the Irish Dairy Board, a co-operative of Irish farms, and then joined H.J. Heinz to become the first nonfamily member to run the business. In 1973, he bought Independent News & Media, and within a few years turned the small Irish publisher into a multinational media company with assets in publishing, radio, outdoor advertising and the Internet. Mr. O'Brien's career took off in 1996 when he won Ireland's second mobile-phone license and he made a fortune by selling his Irish phone company to the BT Group four years later. He then set up mobile phone company Digicel, with more than four million subscribers in the Caribbean, and Central and South America, and added hotels and golf courses to his investments. Mr. O'Brien ''is very well respected in financial circles,'' said Colm Murphy, a professor of journalism at the University of Ulster. ''He made an awful lot of money for an awful lot of people but both are very good businessmen and both are very competitive.'' The bad blood between the two began when Mr. O'Reilly, the former chief executive of Heinz, beat Mr. O'Brien in a battle for control of Irish telecommunications company Eircom Group in 2001. Mr. O'Brien did not take it lightly that someone who had joined the bidding contest after him and had less experience in telecommunications beat him to the punch. Without giving any specific examples, Mr. O'Brien repeatedly complained about the way that Independent News & Media wrote about his business interests. In a letter to the publisher in 2003, he wrote that its publications were ''trying to destroy my reputation'' and that he was ''waiting for the appropriate time to rectify the damage.'' Independent News & Media's shares have dropped 24 percent since January 2006, when Mr. O'Brien started to buy shares. People close to him estimate that he has lost as much as $:100 million (127 million euros) on his investment so far. Shares gained 6.4 percent to 1.84 euros in Dublin on Thursday after the company reported profit that beat analysts' forecasts and said advertising revenue and circulation in its publishing division increased. ''The company is positioned more strongly than its peers in the current market with the advertising still strong in Ireland and exposure to emerging markets, such as India, being a net positive,'' said Stuart Draper, an analyst at Dolmen Stockbrokers in Dublin. Some analysts said there was no end in sight to the dispute, since the O'Reilly family retains a 27.9 percent stake and can block any takeover. Should Mr. O'Brien increase his stake to 25 percent, he will be able to block major decisions; owning more than 30 percent would force him to make a bid for the remaining shares. Gavin O'Reilly did not rule out that his father, who is 71, would sell his shares when presented with an adequate offer. Download 5,58 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham:
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