His agent is calling it “the best rock’n'roll book of all time” and publishers obviously agree, as bids for Keith Richards’ autobiography reached a whopping $7.3m (3.6m) at an auction in New York this week. Anticipation for the as-yet-unwritten memoirs has been building since May, when the Rolling Stone guitarist announced he was ready to put the story of his life down on paper. Fears that Richards may “do a Jagger” and renege on the deal because he can’t...
BOOKING FACE TIME
July 26th, 2007
July 15, 2007 — CBS digital guru Quincy Smith only arrived in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Thursday, but he wasted little time in getting down to business.
The former Allen & Co. banker, who’s hyper-connected to not only the established Silicon Valley players but also to the nascent ones, arrived at the Lounge bar around 10 p.m. Thursday night and quickly huddled with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Owen Van Natta around a patio table overlooking the resort’s ice rink.
The pair, who talked over drinks for more than an hour, made for one of the most intriguing sightings at the conference and sparked the most intense deal chatter of the four-day confab.
Desperate to shed its image of being an old media company, CBS hired Smith to aggressively move the company into the digital age, which he has indeed done through deals with YouTube, Last.fm and others. With Facebook now the social networking site that everyone lusts after, many wondered if Smith and Van Natta’s conversation signaled a possible CBS-Facebook tie-up.
Facebook’s youthful audience provides the exact digital demographic that CBS is looking for to counterbalance its aging television network audience. Moreover, there are a number of synergies between Facebook’s college-heavy contingent and the music-loving audience of Last.fm, which CBS acquired in May.
Of course, the meeting could have been nothing more than two old buddies catching up. Smith has been tight with Van Natta since the latter worked at Amazon.com.
The two could have also been simply discussing various licensing and partnership deals instead of an outright acquisition since Facebook’s new platform opens up a lot of opportunities for CBS content such as Sportsline, CBS News and Last.fm, which CBS officials have described as the company’s social networking play.
But when On the Money cornered Van Natta earlier in the day before his sit-down with Smith and asked if, given the deal speculation surrounding Facebook, he had spoken with Yahoo!, Microsoft or Time Warner’s AOL about an acquisition, he declined to reply.
Perhaps that was only because we didn’t mention the right company.
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin was in a particularly jocular mood at Sun Valley last week. >PAGE 1>
« ‘Innocent’ Rasmussen rails at team
Michael Rasmussen today denied reports that he lied about his whereabouts in the run-up to this year’s Tour de France, as his Rabobank team resumed the race - albeit without their sacked team leader. The Danish rider, kicked out of the race he was leading after yesterday’s 16th stage, declared that team manager Theo de Rooy’s decision was the work ‘of a desperate man’. Rabobank claimed that Rasmussen told them he was training in Mexico in June while he was actually...