Roundup: TV news still main source for some, HP has strong quarter, free subway tickets? and more

Venture Beat — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:43:06 -0700

Here’s the latest action:

Study: Educated older people still get most of their news from television — The “educated” demographic, 23 percent of the U.S. population, also gets news online, according to a buzzword-laden report by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. This demographic is called “Integrators,” according to the language of Pew, and is somewhat similar in behavior to the younger, smaller group of online-focused readers it calls “Net-Newsers.”

Hewlett-Packard had a strong second quarter, beating analysts’ estimates — HP reported its summer quarter ended July 31 hit $28 billion in revenues, up 10 percent from a year earlier and above analysts expectations of $27.4 billion. Profits were also better than expected. Strong segments included server blades, storage, software and notebooks.

Free rides for all on the Red Line? — Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students are now able to publish their findings on how to hack into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (Boston) subway card service. They’d received a 10-day gag order last week, preventing them from disclosing their newfound free-ride knowledge at the Defcon hacker conference (that didn’t stop the info from spreading over the Internet, anyway).

Social network application company RockYou is considering at running classified ads in its car-related applications — This is another way for it to make money. Silicon Alley Insider has a few more details.

News aggregator NewsCred launches new features — Those include more advanced search, and pages for particular topics and breaking news.

Game industry trade group hires recording industry anti-piracy lawyer — The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has hired Kenneth Doroshow, a former executive at the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA is notorious for its efforts to combat those who illegally copy music and just shut down the music sharing site Muxtape. This is not going to make the ESA better friends with, well, anyone in their 20s and below.

Study: Big-media video site Hulu still growing quickly, passes Turner and CNN online — Now, Hulu is number eight Nielsen’s ranking of the top 10 video sites. It generated more than 105 million streams in July, to more than 3.2 million unique viewers. NewTeeVee has more.

Another travel-planning site launches: TravelMob — Allen Stern at CenterNetworks has tried it out for himself and seems to like it.

YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim now an investor, in Minnesota — Karim, a computer science Ph.D student at Stanford, is spending his summer break scouting out the twin cities for early-stage investments, the Star-Tribune reports in an interview. Youniversity Ventures, the investing body he’s a part of, originally planned to focus on just students coming out of Stanford and the University of Illinois — apparently, the scope is broadening. From the article:

…Whereas here [in the twin cities], there is certainly less activity. But at the same time, you don’t have these bubbles of nonsense out here. Things here seem a little too formal. I think that it’s inhibiting productivity. People in Silicon Valley will just get together and shoot around some ideas or program something together. Here, we have to go to a specific conference to meet people.

[MBTA Red Line ticket machine photo via James X. Nguyen. And yes, the Red Line is the one that goes by MIT.]