June 2012

Gunmen stormed a pro-government television station in a suburb near Damascus, killed seven employees and destroyed its studios with explosives, Syrian officials said, calling the assault a brazen example of atrocities committed by the armed opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. Rebels disputed the official account of the attack, saying the killers were defectors from Syria’s elite Republican Guard, considered the most loyal core of defenders of Assad’s inner circle. If the rebel version is confirmed, the attack would constitute a significant breach of security for those close to Mr. Assad, who said that Syria was now in “a state of war.”

Many forces have combined to bring Research In Motionto the point of reporting a quarterly operating loss, but one of them was a split personality in the executive suite, former executives say.

As investor pressure mounted at the company recently, one CEO, company founder Mike Lazaridis, was focused on a make-or-break push to launch a next-generation BlackBerry with a new operating system. His co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, started pursuing a separate strategy that envisioned licensing out some of the company's proprietary technologies. Both men are gone from the CEO suite now, replaced in January by former Lazaridis lieutenant Thorsten Heins. He is slashing costs. RIM says it is committed to seeing through the rollout later this year of its next BlackBerry. But Mr. Heins has hired investment bankers to explore options and hasn't ruled out a sale of a company, whose stock has tanked nearly 70% in 12 months and pushed its market value, at under $5 billion, to less than one-fifteenth of its peak.

Will a News Corp. split have a downside for its entertainment properties?

As the media giant mulls splitting off its print business, among the many implications are that its entertainment empire will be further detached from the papers that can bolster the blockbusters churned out by the same entertainment side. Lore has it that News Corp. papers are used to promote Murdoch’s sprawling media assets and even the parent company itself. In 2011, a UC Berkeley study purported to show a "statistically significant, if small, bias" in how News Corp. properties reviewed 20th Century Fox movies. In the U.S. alone, News Corp.'s high-end (and increasingly consumer-aimed) Wall Street Journal and downmarket New York Post have ample opportunity to promote News Corp.’s vast sports, movies and TV interests. But even with Murdoch still very much in the picture, operators at separately run companies will have less opportunity for the interaction that can fuel such cross-pollination.

For more than a decade, online search has long relied on the same paradigm: a blank search box, and a user's query. But with the massive amount of data we're now providing to search engines on PCs and mobile devices--everything from location to calendar to browsing history--companies ranging from Foursquare to Bing to Airbnb are not just personalizing our results, but automating the process.

Google unveiled its latest innovation in the search space: Google Now. Rather than having to manually enter a question, Android users will soon have the option to see widget-like suggested results without even having to type in the search box. "You used to have to enter a search query or type in a street address, but that changes with Google Now," said Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android. "Google gets you just the right amount of information at just the right of time, all automatically."