Murdoch get Wall Street Journal
After months of back-and-forth negotiations, the board of Dow Jones voted last night in favor of recommending a tentative deal to sell the publisher of The Wall Street Journal for $5 billion to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The final decision will be made by Dow Jones’s fractious controlling family, the Bancrofts, which could still seek to scuttle the sale, people who have spoken with family members said. That point was underscored by the fact that two of the four Bancroft family members on the board did not take part in the vote. Several of the Bancrofts have expressed their disapproval of selling to Mr. Murdoch, fearing that he would bend news coverage to further his political or business interests. And two family members on the board, Christopher Bancroft and Leslie Hill, have been actively seeking alternative bids. According to an adviser briefed on the meeting last night at which the offer was weighted, Mr. Bancroft left the meeting early, before the vote. Ms. Hill stayed but abstained from voting. Dow Jones released a statement late last night saying that its board had determined that it would be prepared to approve “and recommend to the Dow Jones stockholders, including the Bancroft family stockholders” an agreement to sell all outstanding shares of Dow Jones for $60 per share in cash. If the family ultimately decides to reject the offer, the Bancrofts could be facing a further erosion of revenue and, potentially, a sharp drop-off in the value of their shares. Executives at The Journal have acknowledged that advertising revenue at the paper is tens of millions of dollars behind projections. Dow Jones stock closed yesterday at $56.45.

Xbox chief defects to Electronics Arts
Peter Moore, corporate vice president for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, which includes overseeing the Xbox and Games for Windows businesses, has resigned. Moore is to join video games giant Electronic Arts as president of the EA Sports label. "Peter has contributed enormously to the games business since joining Microsoft in 2003 and we are sad to see him go," said Robbie Bach, president of entertainment and devices division at Microsoft. "Since that time, he presided over the global launch of the Xbox 360, spearheaded a revitalised and rebranded Games for Windows business, and helped steer the console's ascent." Ironically, Moore will be replaced by Don Mattrick, a former president at EA. Moore will remain at Microsoft to assist in the transition until August, and will return to the San Francisco Bay area to take up his new role at EA in September. According to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, EA is to pay Moore a $1.5m golden hello, along with an annual base salary of $550,000 with a discretionary target bonus%age of 75% of that salary.

Google Expands Print Ads Program
Google is expanding a test program that lets online advertisers buy ad space in newspapers, as the publishing industry struggles to offset business that has moved to the Internet. Google launched an initial test of Print Ads last November, connecting about 100 advertisers with 50 newspapers. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said late Tuesday it will open the program to the "hundreds of thousands'' of U.S. advertisers and agencies that use its online-ad platform, AdWords. Newspaper publishers including Hearst Corp., The New York Times Co. and E.W. Scripps Co., cautiously optimistic about early results, have increased the number of daily newspapers involved in the test to 225. "We did see some new advertisers come in through the original test,'' said Gannett Co. spokeswoman Tara Connell. "Now we really need to see whether there really, really are advertisers (who are) going to jump in here and bring us new business." The self-serve,Web-based program is designed to draw companies with little or no experience with print advertising. Like with search advertising, companies bid on available ad sizes, sections and dates; it's up to publications to accept or reject the bids. Google's technology automates the billing and payment cycles.

Sprint to offer `friend-finding' on phones
Building on the growing demand to use cell phones for more than talking, Sprint Nextel announced Tuesday that it will offer a "friend-finding" service that uses location-based technology. Sprint, one of the nation's largest cell phone service providers, inked a deal with Mountain View's loopt, which first introduced its service last fall on Boost Mobile, a mobile service owned by Sprint. Loopt - which is aimed at the 14- to 25-year-olds who most frequently use social-networking sites like MySpace - allows users to create groups of friends on their phone and keep track of them using a combination of text messaging, pictures and the GPS technology embedded in many new cell phones. The deal makes Sprint the first major carrier to launch a location-based service with social-networking elements - although there are a handful of other mapping and GPS services used by a variety of carriers. "This is a very interesting space to watch; we've seen with our research that these types of services are very popular among the younger demographic," Michael Gartenberg, wireless analyst with Jupiter Research. Sprint reported that its data revenues - those that don't depend on customers talking on the phone - increased 44% year-over-year to nearly $1.2 billion in the first quarter. Even more, the number of Sprint customers using text messaging increased 23% in the past year. Loopt signed up more than 100,000 users before beginning to charge a fee in January; since then, the company has declined to provide updated user numbers. The service will be available in the coming weeks on more than 25 Sprint and Nextel phones for $2.99 per month, plus standard data charges.

BlackBerry gets Wi-Fi, VoIP
The rumours were true. Research In Motion (RIM) has officially confirmed its development of the BlackBerry 8820, the first handset in its history to feature built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. It also supports Micro SDHC memory cards. Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) capability is also built into the 8820, which allows the handset to hop between GSM cellular networks and VoIP when it's within range of a Wi-Fi network. That may well help users eke out their airtime packages, but it'll be interesting to see how many of RIM's carrier partners enable the feature. The 8820 has retained many features of its predecessor, the 8800, so a media player, GPS navigation and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity with A2DP wireless stereo are all included. However, the new handset adds a Micro SDHC slot for Flash cards of up to 32GB. Rumours of a Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry were given new life last last week when it emegred that the handset had gained the US Federal Communications Commission's approval to include the connectivity features. No formal release date has been given for the 8820, but RIM has said that it will be available from select wireless carriers around the world "in the coming weeks", with AT&T due to unveil it in the US later this summer.

German eDonkey servers shut down
File-Sharing service eDonkey suffered a body blow last Friday as German music industry lawyers won a fight in the battle to to shut down the 'Donkey servers. The District Court in Hamburg has made a temporary injunction to the operator of an eDonkey server. Heise reports that the computer must be taken offline for "as long as the range of music files offered for download via the server contains illegal files." While the server itself did not host any illegal files - being a P2P service after all - the server operator was snagged for having "willingly and in a causal fashion assisted in the illegal disturbance." "We shall in future take legal action against any operator of a P2P network srver who makes tracks available ilegally," warned International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) director Peter Zombik. He went on to say that it's "sad to see the inherently beneficial P2P network technology still being used to violate copyright on a massive scale." Stefan Michalk of the IFPI told Heise that, after the move, it's up to the ISPs to lend a helping hand.

Korean phone makers turn home advantage into global sales
South Korean handset giants LG and Samsung are using strengths in their home market to build a strong position in international markets, according to new research. Both companies have been more successful in the US than local competitors in selling phones with advanced entertainment features. Advanced phones, with features such as mobile TV, are already extremely popular in South Korea. A survey of 2,000 US residents found that 12% of LG phone owners, and a similar percentage of Samsung owners, said that their phones had mobile TV features, compared to only 8% of Motorola users and no Nokia users. Nokia also fell behind the Korean firms in other entertainment features. Parks Associates said that phones from the two Korean manufacturers were three times more likely than Nokia phones to allow users to buy music online.

EU officially endorses DVB-H
The European Commission (EC) has formally endorsed DVB-H as the preferred standard for digital TV signals to be broadcast to mobile phones, though the business model for broadcast TV is still open to debate. The Commission makes much of its decision to mandate GSM as a mobile phone technology back in the 1980s, and the resulting success of mobile telephony, drawing parallels with the broadcast TV business in cost-reduction of equipment and potential for roaming between countries. The problem with this argument is that the DVB-H specification covers only part of the interface - aspects such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) are likely to remain deployment-specific so switching between services, or countries, is unlikely to be possible. Language barriers will prevent much international roaming anyway. The other problem is frequencies. The EU would like to see a chunk of the UHF band (470-862MHz) allocated to DVB-H once it's freed up by the analogue TV switch-off. But UK regulator Ofcom is moving away from allocating frequencies to technologies, preferring to just license the band and allow the buyer to decide what to use it for. So even if DVB-H is used across Europe, you won't be able to receive a picture from different operators with one device - and even if you can you're unlikely to be able to decode it. The business model for broadcast mobile TV is also contentious.

Does Harry Live?
Frustrating perhaps the most elaborately orchestrated marketing machine ever mobilized for a book, photographs of what appeared to be every single page of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the series by J. K. Rowling, were circulating on the Web yesterday. On various file-sharing Web sites yesterday to look at amateur-seeming photographs of what appeared to be each pair of facing pages of a copy of the book. The pictures, which could be downloaded through sites like the Pirate Bay and MediaFire, showed the book laid out on a green-and-red-flecked beige looped carpet, with fingers holding the pages open. Some of the photos made the text difficult to read, but the fiercely protected ending was definitely legible. Tens of thousands of people downloaded the files yesterday, according to BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks file-sharing. By midday, many of the Web links were no longer working. On the link-sharing site Digg yesterday, a person using the name TocsinFilms appeared to take credit for uploading the images, then said he was simply “one of the first” to do so.

Harry Potter Spoilers
Ron dies.
Lupin dies.
Percy dies (this death occurs before the wedding, inevitably throwing events into chaos).
Snape dies.

Voldemort dies.
Voldemort is killed in the Department Of Mysteries. He baits Harry about his parents, Sirius, Dumbledore and Ron. which turns out to be the worst thing Voldemort could have done. As Voldemort steps out into the circular bit with many doors, Harry opens the locked door, and Voldemort is destroyed by the blinding light, which heals Harry, who seems close to death (he does not die).

Overview of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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