Staples To Merge With Office Depot

Via the New York Times:

In planning a $6.3 billion merger, Staples and Office Depot are betting that 18 years was long enough for government regulators to change their minds about how consumers buy office supplies. The deal, announced on Wednesday, is expected to be closely evaluated by antitrust authorities, given that it will shrink the world of office supply retail specialists to a single chain. A previous attempt to unite the two in 1997 was blocked by the Federal Trade Commission. But the two retailers will argue that since then, the business of selling office supplies has become significantly more competitive. Customers can choose from a variety of sources, including giants like Walmart, Target and Amazon. It is this rise of alternatives that helped propel the latest merger talks in the first place.

Office Depot bought Office Max just two years ago. In a press release posted on their website, Staples headlines the deal as an acquisition, not a merger.

Argh II: The Suckening

Eighteen hours into the TWC outage and according to their perkily apologetic Twitter feed, service will be restored to the Upper East Side sometime between Friday and five minutes ago. Meanwhile 150,000 UES residents are overloading the TWC phone system and swarming the coffee shops and McDonald's that have other providers. At the moment I'm in a midtown Starbucks below the outage but there are no seats and no power outlets. Of course. I shall safari further...

Sam Seder On Net Neutrality

What do we have to fear from Google and Verizon?

Air Google

Google will buy travel software company ITA for $700M. While they claim to have no plan to establish themselves as resellers of airline tickets, the takeover is raising concerns of anti-trust violations.

"What we're going to do is build new flight search tools that focus on end-users," Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in a conference call with analysts and members of the press on Thursday. He said that Google had no plans to sell airline tickets to consumers and that Google planned to honor all existing agreements that ITA has with its partners. The deal should allow Google to match innovations made by Microsoft Corp, whose recently re-launched Bing search engine has gained share by focusing on a handful of specific search categories like travel and shopping.

The deal, which was reported to be in the works for weeks, has unnerved travel industry players worried that Google could end up wielding too much influence in the sector. ITA, which has roughly 500 employees, provides software that organizes flight information like fares and flight times. The company is a major source of information about airfares to the aviation industry, used by airlines, travel agents and other sites including AMR Corp's American Airlines, Continental Airlines , Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz and Microsoft's Bing.

Travel-related searches currently make up about 12% of Google's revenue.

Ticketmaster To Merge With Live Nation

The country's biggest ticket seller and biggest concert promoter have been granted permission to merge and create a single company that will run pretty much every bit of your concert experience.

Once the merged is officially closed, the combined company will be called Live Nation Entertainment -- a combination that would have control of nearly all aspects of the music industry pipeline: artist and venue management, ticket and merchandise sales and more. Live Nation operates 75 U.S. music venues. In 2008, Ticketmaster sold more than 141 million tickets -- $8.9 billion worth. Under the terms of the proposed judgment -- filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. -- the companies have agreed to sell Ticketmaster's self-ticketing subsidiary, Paciolan, to Comcast-Spectacor, and to license its hosting technology to AEG Live –- a pair of concessions designed to keep the ticketing and promotions landscape competitive. According to Reuters, the merged company would also be “barred from retaliating against any venue owner that uses another company's ticketing or promotional services.”

Is anybody holding their breath that ticket prices won't go up?

Please Pay Comcast Negative Five Cents

My loyal companion Aaron notes from his self-exile in Portland that Comcast wants the immediate payment of negative five cents for his many months-ago discontinued Jersey City account. If he doesn't negative pay them at once, they'll disconnect him even more and send him to negative collections. Or something.

Daily Grumble

Realizing that complaining about one's cable provider is as fruitless as complaining about the weather, I still must vent about Time-Warner's "paperless" billing system. In addition to providing your 87 digit account number, to pay online one must also enter a "customer code," which, hello, is only available on the paper bills. And of course, to get your customer code you have to call them and spend 20-30 minutes navigating useless menus before finally getting a real person in Bangalore to scream at. Aside from the idiocy of requiring two unique codes to pay one's bill, requiring a phone call to get one of those numbers defeats the point of "online" billing, dunnit? The icing on the cake was the below message I got when trying to send an annoyed email. When is our communist/socialist leader going to nationalize the cable industry? I'm standing by.
UPDATE: Almost forgot. To pay by phone, as I finally did, Time-Warner charges a $1.99 "transaction fee." Five minutes later, I got a robo-call survey asking what I thought of their "customer service."