Intel Corporation has exceeded the Wall Street forecasts for the third quarter.  The reason why is because of strong demand for their chips.  This is good news for the economy considering Intel is the biggest chip company in the world.  This indicates the economy as a whole is strengthening in the tech sector.

Intel expects sales for the quarter to be roughly $8.8 billion to $9.2 billion.  Thomson Reuters analysts expected Intel’s Q3 revenues to be about $8.55 billion.  Intel themselves were surprised by their revenues because they expected the economic downtown to drastically affect business.

Dell, the second largest PC manufacturing company also expects to have a solid year.  “There are a lot of moving pieces in the PC industry as we prepare for a new operating system from Microsoft,” stated Doug Freedman, an analyst at Broadpoint AmTech in an interview with The New York Times.

The Chairman of The Associated Press said that he is “mad as hell” about those who “walk off with our work.”  Unlike The Associated Press, rival Thomson Reuters embraces blogs.  At least according Thomson Reuters’ President of the Media Group Chris Ahearn.

In a Reuters guest column written by Ahearn, the executive wrote: “To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting ‘resources’ (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.”

I applaud Ahearn for embracing blogs.  The barriers to entry for online journalism are decreasing.  And the First Amendment backs them up.  Threatening to sue those that use the words of an Associated Press article may not be the best business strategy according to the Reuters exec.

“Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.”

Ahearn said that a better approach to handling borrowing one another’s content is by giving credit where it is deserved.  When I quote from the Associated Press, I personally link to their articles and report that the AP deserves credit.  Does the AP always give credit back?  No.

Here is a news story about former Facebook application Scrabulous being renamed Wordscraper by the Associated Press.  Who broke the story?  Pulse2.  Who are the ones that gave us credit? Mashable and Ars Technica.  Who didn’t give us credit?  The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.  Treat those how you would like to be treated, Associated Press.

Last year Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit against Virginia’s George Mason University.  George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media had created a bibliography software called Zotero and Thomson Reuters believed that they violated copyright as a result.  George Mason had supposedly reverse engineered Thomson Reuters’ bibliography software called EndNote.

Zotero has the ability to open files using EndNote and save them as open formats.  Thomson Reuters’ license agreement prohibits software from having that sort of functionality.  Thomson Reuters was asking for $10 million in damages as a result.  A few days ago the lawsuit was dismissed by a Virginia Circuit Court judge.

Zotero works as a Mozilla Firefox plug-in that enabled people to store and organize research.  It has been downloaded over one million times since last September.  George Mason University said that they had no renewed a license for EndNote and will not make any changes to the software.

[via TechDirt]

Thomson Reuters is announcing tomorrow that they are launching a video-on-demand (VOD) service for financial service clients.  Clients will be able to search for thousands of videos and transcripts from Thomson Reuters’ archives.

“We’ve created something completely new here,” stated Devin Wenig of Thomson Reuters. “This is meant for the 550,000 financial professionals who have a Thomson Reuters screen on their desks.”

Thomson Reuters is not creating the service to compete head-on with CNBC or Bloomberg TV, but rather to make their financial services more attractive.  Each video will have a transcript and clicking on a portion of the transcript will automatically fast-forward to that portion of the video.  A number of clients have already signed on for the video service including Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Argus Research.

[via NYT]

Yesterday Google announced that they will be placing ads on Google News’ search results in the U.S.  This means if you search for keywords such as the iPhone or the Kindle, you will notice results for sponsored links from websites such as BlackBerry.com, att.com, Amazon.com, and SonyStyle.com.

“We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too,” stated Josh Cohen on the Google News Blog.

Google was debating whether to put ads on news.google.com for about 6 years.  They were skeptical before because of criticism from newspaper publishers.  Content from Google News is aggregated from various blogs and online newspapers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has reiterated that the search engine company is a friend of newspaper publishers.  Google’s own Adwords and AdSense business depends on newspaper publishers and other content publishers.

“When Eric Schmidt says he worries about the newspaper industry, it’s crocodile tears,” stated Brian Tierney CEO of the parent company for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News.

William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group has a difference of opinion with Tierney.  MediaNews is the parent company of about 54 daily newspapers including the San Jose Mercury NEws and The Denver Post.  He says that newspaper companies don’t have to let Google take content, but opt to do so because it drives traffic.

Reuters says that they will be watching Google News closely as they don’t have any licensing agreement with them.  “We are certainly not surprised by the move, which places Google News in a position to compete with news publishers — giving us cause for concern,” stated Alisa Bowen, SVP for Reuters.

[via New York Times]