via HuffPost Game Changers: Who Is The Ultimate Game Changer In Philanthropy: The Extraordinaries

Making it effortless to add brief volunteer activities to your busy day. The Extraordinaries delivers information via mobile phone about micro-volunteer opportunities that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot. Standing in line at the DMV? Sure you can listen to music on your iPhone, but won’t you feel better about yourself if you use that iPhone to spend those stray minutes adding identifying tags to museum photos, or translating a Spanish document into English? With over 700 million smartphones expected to be in use by 2012, these innovators see billions of hours of spare time ready to be tapped into for the greater good.

Killer Quote: “We hope people might look differently at that ride on the bus and not just play video games. Micro-volunteerism is perfectly suited for the Millennial Generation. They are used to text messaging, MySpace, Facebook, get-in, get-out, instant gratification.” Must Click Link: BeExtra.org

via Sony Posts Fourth Consecutive Quarterly Loss SNE | SAI

Sony SNE lost $292 million in the quarter ending in September, the company announced this morning. This marks the fourth consecutive loss for Sony. It is now predicting that losses for the year will total ¥95 billion ($1 billion).

via The New York Times’ Coming Jihad Against The Huffington Post | 24/7 Wall St

There has been a great deal of speculation about what the basis of a suit of The Huffington Post by The New York Times would look like in legal terms. First Amendment attorney David Marburger has said in widely circulated comments that the best legal leverage that the old media has is to get Congress to amend the Copyright Act to restore the common law as a way to fight unfair enrichment that aggregators get by utilizing content created by other media.

The Huffington Post recently passed The Washington Post and LA Times in terms of the visitors each has to its website each month. Huffington’s revenue is rumored to be small, perhaps as little as $8 million this year. As that number grows, it will take more advertising share from its old media rivals.

Update: Several sources have told 24/7 that a suit by old media may be brought under the Interstate Commerce Act.

via Can Nintendo Rebuild? - BusinessWeek

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told financial analysts and journalists that the company had been unprepared for the sudden drop in sales of its Wii living-room game console. “We sensed that the market mood was cooling off in the spring,” he said. “But frankly, we hadn’t expected to get as bad as it did by summer.” In the past six months the stock has slid 22%.

In the July-September quarter, Nintendo’s operating profit dropped 52%, while sales slid 28%. Nintendo now expects full-year profits of $4 billion on $10.9 billion in sales, instead of $5.4 billion in profits and $19.7 billion in revenues. Last fiscal year, the company had its best year ever, raking in profits of $6.1 billion on revenues of $20.1 billion.

via Offers for Travel Channel Could Near $1 Billion | NYT

Cox Communications is expected to command close to a billion dollars for the Travel Channel, people close to the bidding war for the channel said on Thursday. The company is entertaining bids from a number of media companies, including the News Corporation and Scripps Networks [...]

The News Corporation already owns the National Geographic Channel and plans to convert its low-rated Fox Reality Channel into a spinoff wildlife destination called National Geographic Wild. Mr. Greenfield said the News Corporation could package the three channels into a “rapidly growing nonfiction domestic platform.”

via Why Nikki Finke Never Makes a Mistake | Gawker.

Part of Deadline Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke’s pose as the only real journalist in Hollywood is her claim that everyone else just conveys spin, while she offers the truth. But her “truth” has a habit of changing. Interestingly, Finke posted the first one at 10:30 a.m., and then got a call or e-mail from some sniping exec telling her how “Hollywood considered” the numbers disappointing, and then traveled back in time and posted the second one at “10:30 a.m.”. This woman’s powers transcend temporal instantiation. No wonder no one can take a picture of her.

We called Finke to get her reaction and had a delightful conversation. Here’s what she said on the record: “You’re full of shit. Gawker doesn’t practice journalism and lives to impugn those who do.”

via BBC to Cut Pay, Jobs | WSJ

Under pressure over its pay practices, British Broadcasting Corp. plans to cut the salaries of top managers and axe more than 100 senior posts as part of a broader overhaul to cut costs.

The BBC, which is funded by a license fee paid by the public, plans to cut the amount it spends on the salaries of its top bosses by about 25%, according to the BBC Trust. The BBC Trust oversees the use of the license fee and had asked management to cut salaries as part of a review into ways to save money. The BBC currently spends about £79 million ($129.4 million) on pay for its 634 senior managers and nine most senior executives.

via Don’t Forget To Use the Phone | HarvardBusiness.org

Email’s benefits are hard to resist. It’s asynchronous, so you’re not interrupting someone or putting them on the spot. It’s an efficient way to get information across without all the overhead of a meeting. It’s the corporate CYA mechanism, creating a digital he-said, she-said trail that you can refer back to later. So, email must also make us more productive …right?

Wrong — well, sometimes. In an age of email overload, there are situations when a phone call can get things done faster and better than an email.

via WPP: The Ad Market Recovery Isn’t Here Yet | SAI

“Confidence, however, remains fragile amongst consumers, because of the shadow of high unemployment levels and amongst corporates, because Armageddon and Apocalypse now were barely avoided in September 2008.”"

WPP shares were up 3.2 percent at 562.5 pence on the London Stock Exchange. Shares fell as low as 344.9 pence in February, and recently peaked at 596.5 pence on Oct. 15.

WPP said like-for-like revenue in the United States was down 6.1 percent, Britain was down 9 percent, western continental Europe was down 12.5 percent and Asia-Pacific was down 10.7 percent.

via Yahoo! Movies: Avatar Second Trailer