Music royalties and Pandora’s box

By James Ledbetter – You might think in the nearly two decades since music first began streaming over the Internet that some kind of consensus about paying artists would have emerged. But about the only thing most Internet radio stakeholders can agree on is that the current system makes no sense.

The business stakes of this battle flared up again this week, when the New York-based indie musician Blake Morgan picked a public fight with Internet radio giant Pandora. more> http://tinyurl.com/ca7h9go

Six “Megatrends” That Will Shape the Future of Digital Media

By: John Villasenor – The World Economic Forum also works year-round through its network of over eighty global agenda councils, which address a diverse range of topics including biotechnology, climate change, energy security, and youth unemployment.

I’ve been a member of the Forum’s global agenda council on the intellectual property system. We’ve taken a careful look at the forces shaping how people are creating and sharing digital media today:

• Content distribution models are shifting
• New technologies are reshaping the creative economy landscape
• Traditional lines between content creators and content consumers are blurring
• Business models for digital content distribution are changing
• Commerce in creative works is increasingly global
• Technology is making it easier to modify and redistribute content

more> http://tinyurl.com/chy3yn6

How Hardware/Software Co-Development Fuels “Product Creation”

By Richard Goering – At CDNLive,  Frank Schirrmeister,  group director of product marketing for the System and Software Group at Cadence, talked about how Verizon came up with a new app to get National Football League (NFL) video on cell phones. This created requirements that rippled through the network and the design value “stack.” The network needed more bandwidth and the devices needed more capabilities. One result of such developments: “anybody in the supply stack needs to supply more.”

As a result of the demand to “supply more,” IP developers are now building integrated subsystems. This is, in part, what the recent Cadence agreement to acquire Tensilica is about. And chipmakers have become responsible for providing much of the software stack, including drivers, OS, and middleware. As Schirrmeister noted, no longer is it enough to just partner with a provider like Symbian or Palm for an operating system, as it was back in the 1990s. Now, semiconductor companies must provide the chip with the OS up and running, and the trend towards open source operating systems like Android and Linux is amplifying this trend even further. more> http://tinyurl.com/c468w2f

Cadence To Buy Tensilica

By Ed Sperling – Cadence has agreed to buy Tensilica for roughly $350 million in cash—$380 million minus $30 million that Tensilica had on its books at the end of last year—setting the battle over IP into high gear among EDA vendors.

EDA vendors are in a unique position to leverage their own tools in expanding their portfolios, raising big questions about how the competition will unfold in the IP market over the next few years. The Tensilica deal moves Cadence firmly into the dataplane processor and subsystem world, where integration capabilities are a big plus.

It’s clear that what started as a gingerly toe-dipping in the IP market has transformed rapidly into a feeding frenzy. more> http://tinyurl.com/cguvn2l

Related>

• Cadence buys chip design firm Tensilica for $380M, Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat
• Tensilica acquisition to accelerate Cadence core strategy, Rick Merritt, EE Times
• Cadence to Acquire Tensilica, Cadence

How Cloud Computing Is Redefining the M&A Landscape

By Louis Columbus – The US Technology M&A insights: Analysis and Trends in US Technology M&A Activity 2013 provides an excellent overview of merger, acquisitions, private equity, divestures, cross-border transactions across the five key industry sectors.  The report, free for download, covers the Internet, IT Services, hardware and networking, software, and semiconductor sectors.

Bottom line: The land grab is on for intellectual property in the fields of mobile application development, analytics and cloud computing as enterprise software vendors look to fill gaps in their product and service strategies. more> http://tinyurl.com/baarobu

Related>

• Does Cloud Computing Reduce IT Costs? Jeffrey Schwartz, Virtualization Review