Author: Brad Reed

We may now have a clue about how Time Warner Cable plans to implement its own Aereo-like service. Unnamed sources have told Bloomberg that Time Warner Cable is considering buying an equity stake in Hulu and “could offer Hulu to its customers as a bundled service inside and outside of the home with its current products,” meaning customers could access their favorite shows on Hulu without paying a monthly subscription fee for Hulu Plus. Under the plan being discussed, Time Warner Cable would take a 33% stake in Hulu with the rest held by co-owners Disney, Comcast and News Corp. Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt recently said that the cable industry’s “structure needs more flexibility” and that he wants to offer customers “smaller, more affordable packages” that don’t cost them upward of $100 a month.

Things have been very up-and-down for Bitcoin lately and the virtual currency’s road coud be getting even rockier now that the United States federal government is getting involved. IDG News reports that the U.S. District Court in Maryland this week order the seizure of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox’s funds because it allegedly “failed to register as a ‘money transmitting business’ in accordance with 18 U.S. Code 1960.” The court-issued warrant alleges that Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles denied that his firm exchanged currency or “transmitted funds based on instructions to customers” in a questionnaire supplied by Wells Fargo back in 2011. Wells Fargo issues such questionnaires to determine whether clients it works with need to register as currency traders with the U.S. Treasury Department.

Samsung’s marketing Death Star isn’t just hovering over the United States — it has designs on conquering the entire world. Per Barron’s, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry thinks that Apple may have a tougher time in India than other markets because BlackBerry and especially Samsung have already blanketed the country with ads touting their smartphones as elite products that consumers simply see as less expensive versions of the iPhone. Because of this, he says that the companies have created “an environment where they tend to mentally enslave the consumer to buy their products.” Chowdhry says this is particularly true of Samsung, which he says airs TV ads once every 15 minutes in India.

Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde is apparently tired of being accused of breaking the law, so now he wants to start making the law instead. TorrentFreak reports that Sunde is planning to run for the European Parliament next year as a candidate for Finland’s Pirate Party. Sunde is hoping to follow in the footsteps of the Swedish Pirate Party that now has two members as elected European members of Parliament.

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Given the potential safety and privacy concerns surrounding Google Glass, Google has put some very tight restrictions on what kinds of applications developers can build for the headset. Or has it? Technology Review reports that Google will hold a session at its Google I/O conference this week dedicated specifically to giving developers root access to Glass and teaching them how to create experimental applications. Developers who hack into Glass will render their warranties null and void, of course, but Google still wants them to take that risk and test the limits of what Glass can do. Technology Review says that such hacks into Glass may be crucial to shaping the platform since Google still hasn’t finalized what features the headset will have when it’s released to consumers next year.

Google’s shares continued to rise on Wednesday in the wake of the Google I/O conference, closing at over $900 for the first time and giving the company a market cap of over $300 billion for the first time in its history. The company’s stock value has been increasing at a rapid pace all year, growing from the low $700 range at the start of 2013 to the low $900 range by the end of trading on Wednesday. The continued rise in shares Wednesday was somewhat curious given that Google didn’t unveil a new Nexus tablet or a new version of Android at I/O this year as many had been expecting. Some analysts have slapped the company with a $1,000 price target in recent months and it appears that it has a legitimate shot of hitting that target now that its shares have surged past the $900 mark.

Google CEO isn’t very happy that Microsoft decided to integrate its Google Talk messaging service into its Outlook webmail platform without extending a similar offer to Google for the Gmail platform. Page, speaking during the Google I/O developers conference Wednesday, said that Google always pushes to have open-source platforms that other companies can use but lamented the fact that much of the tech industry doesn’t extend the same courtesies for many of its own innovations. Page went onto say that he was “sad” that companies such as Microsoft were “milking off” Google’s innovations by not being as open with their own software.

Want to know why Google is nervous about Samsung’s dominance of the Android ecosystem? Look no further than new research from Strategy Analytics showing that the company accounted for 95% of all Android operating profits in the first quarter of 2013. The research firm says that this is a record high for Samsung and shows that rival Android manufacturers are increasingly finding it difficult to make any money off the platform. Although Strategy Analytics’ new research is certainly striking, it isn’t all that surprising given that other data has shown that Apple and Samsung together account for all the smartphone industry’s profits while all other smartphone vendors find themselves lucky to simply escape the red in any given quarter.

ABC isn’t taking kindly to Hulu subscribers who are watching its shows online instead of paying for monthly cable services. The New York Times reports that ABC, which is owned by Walt Disney, has decided to yank newer episodes of its shows off both the free version of Hulu and its own homepage and will instead put them on its mobile app that is only accessible to cable subscribers. The network says that it’s created its own in-house streaming app to better adapt to customer preferences by giving users access to its content on all their portable devices. ABC plans to roll out the app in six different cities over the summer.

Are you fed up with paying an $80 cable bill every month for dozens of channels that you never even watch? Not to worry, says National Cable and Telecommunications Association chief Michael Powell: You’re actually being given “unparalleled choice” in your programming. Variety reports that Powell, speaking on Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee meeting to discuss the benefits of “a la carte” cable programming, said that it’s a “very serious question mark whether consumers would have lower bills or cheaper service as a result of a la carte” because consumers may end up having to pay the same amount for fewer channels. Powell also said that it would be a mistake to make significant revisions to the 1992 Cable Act because it “could even be counterproductive by introducing uncertainty and displacing or skewing the marketplace rivalries” that offer “unparalleled choice” to cable subscribers.

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