Although I don’t have a position in Netflix (NFLX), I have been watching how the options have been trading in advance of the company’s next earnings announcement on April 25.
First, here’s a look at the implied volatility (IV) for options on NFLX just before previous earnings announcements based on data from ivolatility.com.
The pink lines show IV for the options closest to expiration with the other lines representing IV for longer-term options. The b
U.S. retail sales of video game hardware, software and accessories rose 1 percent to $1.08 billion in October, helped by sales of “Battlefield 3,” market researcher NPD Group said Friday.
Hardware sales, which include game consoles such as the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii, rose 6 percent from October 2010 to $295.6 million.
Sales of software, or the video games themselves, rose 3 percent to $621.3 million.
That’s well short of the 21 percent year-over-year increase that Cowen and Co. analyst Doug Creutz was expecting. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, meanwhile, was forecasting a 14 percent software sales growth.
When including PC games in addition to games for consoles and hand-held gaming devices such as the Nintendo DS, software sales rose 1 percent to $649.5 million.
“Battlefield 3,” a military shooter from Electronic Arts Inc.
Here’s your chance to catch up on a jam-packed paidContent Entertainment—or brush up on the details for all of you who spent Thursday at The London in West Hollywood and joined virtually by live stream. Find out what Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, thinks content companies can learn from drug dealers; what Dawn Ostroff, president of Conde Nast Entertainment has in mind at her new gig; what Mark Suster, partner of GRP Partners, thinks Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) needs; how Mario Queiroz, product development VP of Google (NSDQ: GOOG), explains Google TV isn’t a cord-cutting device; and much more. Plus, keep an eye out for the video coverage, coming soon.
Cooperation between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire on LTE should help to bring two versions of that technology together, leading to increased device choices and roaming opportunities for subscribers in developed markets.
Sprint disclosed Wednesday that it has agreed to work with Clearwire to make the two carriers’ LTE (Long-Term Evolution) networks work together. Sprint will turn to Clearwire for additional capacity to fill growing mobile data demand, probably beginning in 2013. Because the two carriers plan to use different types of LTE, they will need to make the two versions work together smoothly, a development that may have impact beyond the two U.S. partners.
Sprint and Clearwire currently share a WiMax network, with Clearwire as the operator and Sprint reselling services for its 4G phones and data devices.
The past couple of weeks has seen the web filled with tributes to Steve Jobs who passed away on October 5th. With those tributes has been a lot of imagery and video from Jobs’ history, some of which has rarely been viewed before.
There is one piece of footage that has never been seen before though, and was actually thought lost forever. It’s the full interview with Steve Jobs from 1995 when he was still running NeXT.
Around about 10 minutes of the interview was used for the show Triumph of the Nerds, but few people know that around 64 minutes of interview was given by Jobs that day at NeXT headquarters in Redwood City. Why have we never seen the rest? Bec
By David Zeiler
Cloud-based computing is shaping up to be a major battleground in the U.S. high-tech sector for the rest of this year, as companies compete to deliver such services as music streaming to consumer-based mobile devices.
And it figures to be a true clash of titans, with such high-tech heavyweights as Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL), Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) serving among the major combatants.
And music is just the beginning.
Video streaming will follow quickly, joining such already-common “cloud” applications as file storage and sharing and online photo albums.
For instance, Amazon made an aggressive move right near the end of the first quarter, when it launched its Cloud Drive service.
Google News, which has long relied on automation to deliver news content from countless providers, has announced a twist in its algorithm: It will now recognize “featured” content among the tens of thousands of stories it delivers every day.
Google announced Saturday that news organizations can now add “standout” metadata tags to stories they’re proudest of — like exclusives, scoops and investigative projects — and the U.S. edition of Google News will consider including a “featured” label with the story on its news homepage and in search results. There’s no guarantee a story tagged this way will be featured, but Google’s algorithm will factor the tag into its decisions, the company said.
“We can showcase that standout piece of journalism in Google News by putting a ‘featured’ label in front of it,” said Google News product specialist David Smydra, who announced the new option at the Online News Association conference in Boston. “An