Acer uses operating software from both Microsoft and Google in its smartphones and tablets.

Google unveiled last month a $12.5 billion offer for Motorola Mobility, its biggest deal ever launching it into a lower-margin manufacturing business which pits it against many of the other handset companies that now use Google’s Android software.

“They work against some of their clients,” said Walter Deppeler, president of Acer’s operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa. “It was a good gift to Microsoft,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin.

Other cellphone vendors at IFA — Sony Ericsson, HTC and ZTE — have said they see the Motorola deal as focused on acquiring Motorola’s patents library to help protect its Android software, but the Motorola phone business also places Google in direct competition with other phonemakers using Android.

Deppeler said Acer would consider the implications of the deal before deciding on future platform choices.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; Editing by Greg Mahlich)

Facebook users can tune into the hour-long live video chat on the site at 1:30 pm EDT, and can leave questions for Winfrey on the page wall created for the event.

The 57 year-old Winfrey has embraced social media. She has almost 6.3 million fans on Facebook and more than 7.2 million followers on Twitter.

Winfrey hosted the final season of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in May this year. She continues to host a prime-time show on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) television channel, which launched at the beginning of this year.

(Reporting and Writing by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

The Guardian of London, the New York Times, Der Spiegel magazine, Spain’s El Pais and France’s Le Monde issued a joint statement on Friday deploring WikiLeaks’ decision to publish “unredacted State Department cables, which may put sources at risk.”

In a message posted on its Twitter feed, which Assange is believed personally to control, WikiLeaks confirmed on Friday it had released “251,287 US embassy cables in searchable format.”

Earlier this week, WikiLeaks issued a lengthy statement accusing a Guardian journalist and a former WikiLeaks spokesman of having “negligently” disclosed top secret passwords to a copy of the cable database which had been floating, unnoticed, around the Internet for months.

For its part, the Guardian said that it “utterly rejects any suggestion that it is responsible for the release of the unedited cables.”

New York Times editor Bill Keller told Reuters: “We’ve never kidded ourselves that we had any control over the behavior of WikiLeaks, and we have taken pains to keep the relationship arm’s-length. … It’s sad that — whether out of a craving for attention, or an absolutist doctrine of ‘transparency,’ or some more malign motive, I can’t judge — WikiLeaks has decided on this irresponsible course.”

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Vicki Allen)

Netflix shares fall after stumble with Starz

(Muchfinance) – High-flying Netflix Inc saw its shares fall 8.6 percent on Friday after failing to secure a chunk of movie content for the online service it touts as the future of its popular video rental business.

The collapse of talks, announced Thursday, with cable channel operator Starz Entertainment underscored investor concerns that Netflix may lose its edge in online rentals.

Under the leadership of well-regarded Chief Executive Reed Hastings, Netflix shares have tripled since January 2010. But the rocketing price and recent stumbles, including a July decision to raise some prices, have drawn short sellers betting the momentum cannot continue.

Hastings decided to raise prices for subscribers who still want DVDs-by-mail, a move seen as emphasizing higher-margin streaming plans. The price hike angered so many customers that the company warned it would see a pause in its normally explosive subscriber growth.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter, who has rated Netflix “underperform” for more than a year, said the failure to make a deal with Starz was evidence of higher content costs the company must grapple with as providers recognize their leverage.

“Starz is the perfect example. Content owners have to play hardball with Netflix,” said Pachter, who has a $110 price target on Netflix shares.

Starz, controlled by John Malone’s Liberty Media, ended talks with Netflix to renew a streaming deal. After February, Starz will stop providing its content, which includes exclusive rights to first-run Sony Corp and Walt Disney Co movies, for streaming on Netflix.

Netflix said Starz movies and shows account for just 8 percent of U.S. subscribers’ viewing, but some analysts said lack of new content may lead to higher customer attrition.

Netflix has long enjoyed a near-monopoly in the online streaming space but the recent entry of Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc’s YouTube could potentially lead to subscribers switching to alternative services.

The field could get even more crowded. Dish Networks, which won Blockbuster Inc in a bankruptcy auction for $320 million, is expected to expand its business beyond satellite TV and eventually into online video streaming.

“Rising content costs and increasing competition from incumbent and new players alike remain our top concerns,” UBS analyst Brian Fitzgerald said of Netflix.

SHORT SELLERS’ PICK

Yoni Jacobs. portfolio manager for Chart Prophet Capital, said he previously shorted Netflix in the face of growing competition in the online market and a “weak” streaming library. Jacobs covered his short position when Netflix shares hit $200 but remains negative on the company’s outlook.

“Their library is even weaker now” after the breakdown with Starz, Jacobs said.

Gareth Feighery, a founder of Philadelphia-based options education firm MarketTamer.com, said the inability to renew the Starz contract could just be the trigger for short sellers. “The failure to strike a deal with Starz might be just the fundamental event the short sellers have been waiting to pounce upon.”

Netflix is one of the heaviest shorted blue-chip technology stocks. Its shares have a short interest of 15.5 percent as of August, implying that more than 1 in 6 Netflix shares is shorted. Blue-chip technology stocks like Google and Apple have short interest positions below 2 percent.

Content owners and short-sellers have questioned how Netflix can charge customers so little.

ALTERNATE DEALS

Netflix was offering to pay somewhere in the $200 million to $300 million range annually for rights to stream Starz content, a source familiar with the negotiations said.

Some analysts remain positive on Netflix’s prospects to secure alternative deals.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst George Askew, who has a “hold” rating on the company’s stock, said the loss of the Starz contract could help Netflix in the long term, as it could use the money for replacement content.

Netflix shares closed Friday on Nasdaq down $20.16 at $213.11.

(Reporting by Himank Sharma and Lisa Richwine; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier, Maju Samuel and Tim Dobbyn)

AT&T prepares two-track plan to save T-Mobile deal

(Muchfinance) – AT&T Inc is expected to soon present a proposed solution to U.S. antitrust regulators to salvage its planned $39 billion acquisition of smaller rival T-Mobile USA, according to people close to the matter.

Even as the No. 2 U.S. wireless service provider gears up for a lengthy court battle against the Justice Department, AT&T is prepared to make concessions to address concerns that the T-Mobile deal is anti-competitive and could cause wireless prices to rise.

This two-track plan will allow AT&T to try to find a settlement before the lawsuit reaches the court.

“AT&T is pretty determined that they can find a solution, and they are pretty confident,” one of the sources said, requesting anonymity as the talks are private.

The U.S. government on Wednesday sued to block AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile USA, a deal that would vault the combined company above Verizon Wireless as the No. 1 player in the United States.

If AT&T fails to defeat the lawsuit, it would have to pay T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom an estimated $6 billion in cash and other assets as part of the original deal.

Details of AT&T’s proposed settlement were not available, but it is expected to include pledges to maintain T-Mobile’s relatively cheap mobile subscription plans, and asset sales.

AT&T may have to sell up to 25 percent of T-Mobile’s business, including airwaves and customers, two sources said, to address the government’s concern that just three companies would control 90 percent of the U.S. wireless market if the merger goes through.

Bob Doyle, a former antitrust enforcer now in private practice, said it would be difficult for AT&T to reach a settlement with the Justice Department as there would have to be divestitures on both the national and regional level.

While there might be several buyers for regional assets, the only possible buyers for national assets are Verizon Wireless and No. 3-ranked Sprint Nextel Corp — which could cause another round of antitrust scrutiny.

“Verizon’s a no go. Sprint may be a no go also,” said Doyle.

AT&T, led Chief Executive Randall Stephenson, declined to comment, referring questions to its previous statement that it believed in the merits of its deal and planned to fight the government’s suit.

JUDGE LIKES TO ACT QUICKLY

U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in Washington, D.C., was selected at random to preside over the case, one of the biggest antitrust court battles in years.

She has a reputation for speedy rulings, which would be welcome to AT&T compared with months or even years of uncertainty. For Deutsche Telekom, it has tried for years to find a way out of its T-Mobile business, and has no Plan B.

AT&T has asked for an expedited hearing, and one source expects the case could go to court in two months.

The carrier and regulators had been in preliminary discussions over divestures before the Justice Department filed its 22-page lawsuit on Wednesday. In those talks, AT&T had offered to divest up to 10 percent of T-Mobile assets.

“That was part of the frustration in that AT&T expected that they would have had much more meaningful discussions and figure out where everyone was, and whether they could close the gap,” the source said.

AT&T wants another meeting with the Justice Department as soon as possible, but “I don’t know if and when a new meeting is scheduled, given yesterday’s news,” said a person familiar with the discussions.

Still, the Justice Department could prefer a settlement to avoid the risk of losing the case in court.

“It is always scary to go off to litigation. I suppose there’s a chance that the government could get cold feet,” said Stephen Calkins, who teaches law at Wayne State University.

Antitrust regulators have a mixed record in court. The Justice Department lost in 2004 when it tried to stop Oracle Corp’s purchase of PeopleSoft Inc. It also failed to prevent SunGard Data System Inc’s buy of Comdisco Inc in 2001 — a case also presided over by Judge Huvelle.

AT&T’s lead antitrust attorney shepherding this deal is Richard Rosen of Arnold & Porter LLP, a former head of the communications section of the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

“He was the chief over there for many years and socializes with a lot of the staff over there. He’s well known and respected,” said a source close to the AT&T talks with Justice.

Rosen was lead counsel in Cingular Wireless’s $41 billion buy of AT&T Wireless, as well as AT&T’s buys of Dobson Communications, Centennial Communications, and wireless properties divested by Verizon and Alltel.

Deutsche Telekom also has antitrust star George Cary of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, who argued for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in its successful fight against the Staples merger with Office Depot in 1997.

Since so few antitrust cases are litigated, Cary’s success is unusual.

“He’s one of the best. He’s exceptional. George Cary is the Lou Gehrig of antitrust,” said David Balto, a former FTC policy director now in private practice.

(Reporting by Nadia Damouni in New York and Diane Bartz in Washington, additional reporting by Carlyn Kolker, Peter Lauria and Nicola Leske, editing by Tiffany Wu, Gary Hill)

United States loses video game jobs to Quebec

(Muchfinance) – Outside, the sun is shining, but it is dark in the production room where more than 150 Ubisoft artists, animators and engineers are racing to finish the latest edition of “Assassin’s Creed,” one of this holiday’s hotly anticipated games.

They are working not from Ubisoft’s headquarters in Paris or California, but in Montreal, Quebec. And they aren’t alone. Quebec has become the preferred place for some of the biggest names in video games to set up shop.

According to the economic development agency Invest Quebec, 86 companies and 8,236 jobs have migrated to Quebec as a result of a government program under which 37.5 percent of a video game company’s payroll is subsidized by the majority French-speaking province in the form of a refundable tax credit.

Put another way, for every dollar a video game company spends on paying its development staff, it receives 37.5 cents from the Quebec government.

The incentives, which include extra credits for companies that make French versions of their games, have enticed heavyweights such as Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard to open major operations in Quebec.

“There’s a buzz right now, just like how Hollywood was the place to make movies in the 1920s,” said Charles Jolicoeur, a coordinator at Invest Quebec.

Last year, Quebec spent $100 million on the program, up from $83 million in 2009 and significantly more than some U.S. states with similar programs such as Texas and Louisiana.

The province first set aside money for video games in 1996 after starting a program to jumpstart the film industry a year earlier. According to Jolicoeur, the aim was to move Quebec from a manufacturing economy to a “new economy” by creating artistic jobs for young people.

Fifteen years later, the bet appears to have paid off.

“The incentives the government provided helped plant the seed, and now it’s big and everyone is hiring,” said Yanick Roy, studio director of Bioware, an Electronic Arts outfit.

THQ, the Southern-California based company that makes the popular “WWE Smackdown vs. Raw” video game, recently made Montreal its adopted home. After putting up disappointing results the last few quarters, CEO Brian Farrell told investors in July that THQ was moving most its resources to lower-cost areas, including Montreal, as part of its restructuring. Studios in New York and Phoenix shut down over the summer.

Since relocating, THQ has hired 145 employees for its new studio, housed in a converted newspaper printing press near the cobblestone streets of Old Montreal. The next step is for the company to hire 100 employees every year for the next five years until it reaches a staff of 500.

“When you look at our plan, it would be very difficult to do it in a lot of markets. But the right ingredients are in Montreal, with the tax incentives and the quantity and level of talent,” said Dave Gatchel, general manager of THQ Montreal.

This week, the Montreal newspaper La Presse reported that the Tokyo-based video game company, Square Enix, was going to double its staff and hire 350 developers to become the third-largest studio behind Ubisoft and EA.

COMPETING FOR THE FUTURE

Ubisoft, the leading video game employer in Montreal, plies its 2,100 game developers in Montreal with a full-time doctor on staff, an in-house gym with personal trainers and a rooftop bar area overlooking the city.

The company, which came to Montreal from France in 1997, helped put the city on the map as a video game center. It released top selling games such as “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell” and “Assassin’s Creed,” trained hundreds of developers and invested in programs at nearby universities.

But as new entrants such as THQ move into Montreal, the competition for top video game talent has intensified. Last year, THQ poached Patrice Desilets, the designer of “Assassin’s Creed,” which spurred a lawsuit between the companies.

“The energy is the same here at THQ as when I started at Ubisoft in 1997,” he said. “It’s a smaller place with less people, and there’s the feeling that we’re the underdogs.”

EA, the second-largest U.S. videogame company, came to Montreal in 2004. It has 750 employees on three floors of a downtown high-rise next to top-tier law and accounting firms.

EA plans to hire more people in mobile and social games. Playfish, the social games company that EA bought in 2009 in a deal worth roughly $400 million, has 30 employees in Montreal and plans to nearly double its staff by the end of the year.

The Quebec government is also pursuing its next big growth area — online games. Though the local industry is still big-budget console games, sales of these games are declining. Quebec is courting online gaming companies to ensure that jobs and growth stay in the province. Government representatives will attend G-Star, the video game show in South Korea in November, to attract Asian games companies to set up outposts or build data centers in Montreal.

“We are going to convince them to have a look at what’s going on in Montreal and to join the parade,” Jolicoeur said.

THQ’s Desilets, a lifelong Montreal resident who rose to fame with “Assassin’s Creed,” said the notorious winter weather should not deter game developers, even ones from California, from considering a move. He said they should focus on what the city offers, like affordable housing, culture and cuisine.

“You have winter, but then you realize it’s not that bad,” Desilets said. “I love it here. One of my dreams is to be the mayor of the city.”

(Editing by Peter Lauria and Robert MacMillan)

(Clarifies reference to the province of Quebec, not Quebec City)

Amazon tablet coming November at $250: TechCrunch

(Muchfinance) – Amazon.com Inc plans to unveil a cheaper, smaller $250 rival to Apple Inc’s iPad tablet device in November, industry blog TechCrunch reported on Friday.

Sporting a back-lit 7-inch screen — smaller than the iPad’s and about the same as Research in Motion’s PlayBook — the device is geared toward playing music and movies off the Internet, the tech blog reported.

TechCrunch, which said it had played with a testing prototype, reported that the plan was for Amazon to offer Amazon Prime — its $79-a-year Internet streaming service — for free along with the gadget. It did not cite any sources.

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

The Internet retailer’s first entry in the tablet computing arena — its Kindle functions more like an electronic-book reader — has been touted as a strong contender to Apple, whose cheapest tablet goes for $499.

Motorola and Samsung have only chipped away at Apple’s commanding three-quarter share of the market, while Hewlett Packard threw in the towel by announcing it will kill off its TouchPad after a final production run. This week, Sony Corp leapt into the field with its own poorly reviewed device.

Analysts have been upbeat on Amazon’s gadget, particularly if it beats the iPad on price. It may sell as many as 5 million tablets in the fourth quarter, becoming the top rival to Apple, Forrester Research estimates.

Apple sells between 7 to 9 million tablets a quarter.

The upcoming tablet, running an operating system developed from an older version of Google Inc’s Android software, will be Wi-Fi only and come with a color touchscreen but a limited 6GB of memory, according to the blog.

TechCrunch said that was because the device is geared toward playing content off the cloud or Internet, rather than the gadget itself. The tablet’s main screen features a carousel that spins between a book-reader, a music player, movie player and other applications.

A 10-inch version may arrive 2012 if the 7-inch device sells well, the blog added without citing a source.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; editing by Carol Bishopric)

WikiLeaks Assange wanted U.S. cables released months ago

(Muchfinance) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange late last year told associates his website’s entire cache of U.S. diplomatic cables “must somehow” be released, according to a written record of the discussion.

The record — notes of a meeting — describes an intense conversation between Assange and other WikiLeaks activists in November at Ellingham Hall, a mansion in eastern England where he has resided since British courts released him on bail pending a decision on a Swedish extradition request for his questioning about sexual misconduct allegations.

According to the notes, examined by Reuters, the substance of the meeting was a “heated conversation about rough plans on releasing cables.” The debate’s details were first reported on Friday on the website of Britain’s Guardian newspaper by James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer who attended the meeting and who now works for the Guardian.

Evidence of the discussions surfaced as WikiLeaks announced that it was releasing its entire database of “251,287 US embassy cables in searchable format.” People who examined the database said its contents are unredacted.

The topic under discussion at Ellingham Hall was a plan under which WikiLeaks would give mainstream media organizations access to the cable cache in return for their agreement to redact sensitive information from the documents before publication. Last year, human rights groups criticized WikiLeaks for releasing raw U.S. military documents whose contents could have jeopardized the safety of civilians.

According to the notes, a Scandinavian activist said: “You do realize the idea of not putting ALL of these cables up is totally unacceptable to people around this table, don’t you?” This set off “another shouting match.” According to the notes, Assange was “insistent all cables must somehow be eventually released.”

Assange did not respond to an email requesting comment which was sent to him via the owner of the mansion.

The notes do not allege that Assange or others were insisting that the full document cache be released uncensored. In a book on WikiLeaks published earlier this year, two Guardian journalists, David Leigh and Luke Harding, wrote that when he started talking about releasing classified U.S. government documents, Assange expressed reluctance to redact the material, but was persuaded to do so by mainstream reporters.

DISCLOSING PASSWORDS

In a statement released earlier this week, WikiLeaks appeared to lay the groundwork for its release of the entire document cache by accusing one of the two Guardian journalists of having “negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords” in their book.

But WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed, which Assange is believed to control, also publicized German press articles describing how the passwords allegedly disclosed by the Guardian journalist could be used to decrypt one or more copies of the entire WikiLeaks cable cache. That cache apparently was mistakenly posted on the Internet months ago at an obscure address.

In reply, the Guardian insisted that Assange had told the paper’s reporters that the file which the passwords unlocked would only be posted for a few hours on a secure server. “WikiLeaks should take responsibility for its own pattern of actions and not seek to deflect it elsewhere,” the Guardian said in a statement.

A State Department spokesman confirmed that last month, Assange advised it “of the impending release of information and of its intention to continue to release classified documents.” The department said it declined to “cooperate” with WikiLeaks.

On Friday, five major media organizations which had collaborated with WikiLeaks and Assange over the release and redaction of items from the diplomatic cable cache denounced the website’s release of the whole uncensored database.

“Our previous dealings with WikiLeaks were on the clear basis that we would only publish cables which had been subjected to a thorough editing and clearance process … Today’s decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone,” the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde said in a joint statement.

In an email to Reuters, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said: “We’ve never kidded ourselves that we had any control over the behavior of WikiLeaks, and we have taken pains to keep the relationship arm’s-length.”

Keller added: “I think the news media organizations involved were heartened that WikiLeaks gradually, grudgingly seemed to take our example and acknowledge the value of holding back some information that could put innocent people at risk. It’s sad that — whether out of a craving for attention, or an absolutist doctrine of ‘transparency,’ or some more malign motive, I can’t judge — WikiLeaks has decided on this irresponsible course.”

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Mohammad Zargham)

Officers did not say exactly what Apple had lost, but they left a clue — the San Francisco Police Department’s Friday press release about the hunt was called “iphone5.doc,” an apparent reference to a new version of the mobile phone that tech industry watchers expect to be released soon.

Apple declined to comment on the matter.

Tech news service CNET this week said an iPhone 5, which has not been released, went missing in a San Francisco bar in July. SF Weekly, a local newspaper, on Friday quoted a San Francisco man as saying police had come to his house in July searching for a lost iPhone.

Although a prototype of the iPhone 4 went missing in 2010, police said this time Apple had tracked “the lost item” to a San Francisco house and four police accompanied two Apple employees to the house.

“The two Apple (security) employees met with the resident and then went into the house to look for the lost item. The Apple employees did not find the lost item and left the house,” the police statement said.

It did not say why police accompanied Apple security or the circumstances under which Apple employees “went into the house to look for the lost item”. Police did not respond to a request for further comment.

SF Weekly quoted a 22-year-old man who described himself as the resident of the searched house as saying the group identified themselves as police and that none had said they were working for Apple. They had traced the phone to the house using satellite positioning software on the device but did not find anything in the house, he said he was told.

The man, identified by SF Weekly as Sergio Calderon, could not be reached for comment by Reuters.

Police, meanwhile, gave different versions of events during the day on Friday, while Apple has declined to comment at all.

Hours before San Francisco police issued their statement about the search, SFPD spokesman Lieutenant Troy Dangerfield denied that police had been contacted by Apple in connection with any lost phone, or by the person visited by Apple security and the police.

“No one has reported anything,” Dangerfield told Reuters.

In general, Dangerfield said SFPD requires a supervisor’s approval for personnel who are not law enforcement officers to accompany police during investigations.

“It’s not routinely done at all,” Dangerfield said.

(Reporting by Peter Henderson and Dan Levine)

Apple hunted lost item - clue points to new iPhone