17
January
2006
|
08:28 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Business Wire: Is this Warren Buffett's "senior moment?"

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher


OMAHA, Neb. & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2006--Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A and BRK.B) announced today a definitive agreement to acquire Business Wire, a privately held company that is a leading global distributor of corporate news, multimedia and regulatory filings. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.


I guess you have to hit a dud occasionally, otherwise you wouldn't be mortal. I think Business Wire had about 30 seconds to live.


Maybe Mr Buffett's advisors hadn't heard of RSS and the fact that Business Wire has a customer (pissed-off) list--and that is all. A pissed-off customer list is not a defensible business model, (maybe he needed a fast depreciating asset for tax reasons?)


Anybody could disrupt Business Wire. I'll do it today, I'll call up Fergus Burns at Nooked, and some other contacts in the RSS sector.


We'll get every Silicon Valley corporate news room RSS enabled, and feed those feeds directly to the media news desks, investors, and any shareholder or anybody with an RSS news reader, in fact, we'll give you a news reader for free, already set up with the feeds you need.


And yes, this does satisfy Full Disclosure regs--much more so than Business Wire I would argue. Because FD calls for the broadest dissemination of news that is material to a company's business activities. RSS gets you into more places much faster and for far less money.


So give me a call if you want to skip Business Wire, I'll send out your releases for $50 a piece rather than $600 plus. . .


Hey Fergus, (and others...) let's create a media business on-the-fly and in real-time. Call my cell 4one5 threethree6 seven54seven. Now.