John McDuling

Ian Wright was one of the five original founders of Tesla Motors, so he knows a thing or two about electric vehicles.

This post has been corrected. 

MLB Advanced Media (or BAM as its known) is the digital offshoot of professional baseball that  was set up in the 1990s to manage pro baseball team websites. Since then it has become a genuine force in streaming video, and also one of the most compelling stories in media and technology.

Last night, while most of the US (particularly its media reporters) were fixated on the annual Hollywood extravaganza known as the Oscars, an intriguing story broke on the other side of the planet, about two of the country’s major television companies.

Few products have had as big an impact on society over the past century as the car. Now, just when the automobile seems to finally be approaching its decline, America’s most fêted corporate visionaries seem determined once again to reinvent it, or at least how it’s used.

“We’re going to spend staggering amounts of money,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk declared last week on an earnings call. Not many CEOs would speak with as much candor about how they plan to use their shareholders’ capital. But then again not many CEOs are as bold as Elon Musk.

In all the excitement over the looming battle for supremacy in electric cars between Tesla and Apple, some pretty important comments last week from Elon Musk were largely overlooked.

Electric cars and smart watches may be getting all the attention right now, but don’t forget there’s another ancillary business Apple is involved in—one that it has already revolutionized once, and stands a good chance of revolutionizing again. It’s called music.

Driverless cars have been thrust back into the news because, well, Apple. Reuters reported on Saturday (Feb. 14) that the iconic device giant is trying to “learn how to make a self-driving electric car”. This contradicts a report the day before (paywall) from the Wall Street Journal which said that Apple has hundreds of employees working on an electric minivan, but a “self-driving car is not part of Apple’s current plan.”

Apple’s apparent interest in making an electric car is getting people pretty excited.

Today marks a full year since America’s two biggest cable companies, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, agreed to unite.

Elon Musk claims that in a decade’s time, Tesla could be worth as much as Apple is now. Given that Apple just this week became the first company with a $700 billion market value, it seems pretty optimistic, absurd even.

ESPN has launched a new mobile app, and it is called…ESPN.

The numbers: Tesla reported a fourth-quarter loss of $108 million on revenue of $957 million, and delivered 9,834 vehicles during the quarter. (Stifel Nicholas analyst James Albertine was looking for deliveries of 9,929 vehicles.)  The electric car maker said it expects to deliver 55,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs this year, an increase of about 70%.  Shares are whipsawing around in after-hours trading, but are down by about 3% at the time of writing.

Napster was the original online music startup.

The English Premier League has struck a new £5.14 billion ($7.84 billion), three-year deal for broadcast rights in the UK. That’s a 71% increase on what the last rights deal in the UK achieved in 2011. Ahead of the announcement, media reports suggested a figure closer to £4.4 billion was more likely. So it’s a pretty stunning result.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, one of the world’s most prominent investors in early-stage tech startups, does not think that internet companies are in bubble territory right now. Then again, he doesn’t think the tech euphoria of the late ’90s was a bubble either!

The Grammy awards last night were for the most part underwhelming, except for a brief interruption from the hip hop star once famously described by US President Barack Obama as a “jackass.”

Back at the start of the current American football season, the US’s favorite game was on its knees, mired in a series of unprecedented scandals.

Spotify could be putting off an IPO for another year.

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Marissa Mayer’s decision to spin off Yahoo’s remaining 15% stake in Alibaba is probably not the end of her dealmaking at the fallen 90s era internet giant. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s not even the beginning of the end. It’s more likely the end of the beginning.

If you spent any time on the internet last year you would know that there’s an enormous  (and quite strange) subculture that exists around video games. And like other corners of the entertainment world, the gaming business, estimated to be worth more than $15 billion a year in the US alone, is undergoing a dramatic, internet-led transformation.

It’s official: Yahoo is spinning off its lucrative stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba into a new listed entity. Here’s how the company illustrates the change (pdf):