Yahoo's intensifying quest for more unique material is getting even more adventurous. The company has hired Richard Bangs, an author and film director, to create multimedia packages about exotic -- and sometimes dangerous -- expeditions on mountains, rivers and islands around the world.
Bangs' initial package will debut Monday and revolve around a climb up the Eiger, the Swiss peak featured in the Clint Eastwood movie, The Eiger Sanction. The five-part serial follows the journey of John Harlin III, whose father died on the Eiger 40 years ago. Bangs hopes to present other adventures at least once a month.
The foray builds upon Yahoo's (YHOO) recent effort to display material that can't be found anywhere else on the web.
The strategy is designed to set Yahoo apart from its biggest rivals -- Google (GOOG), Microsoft's (MSFT) MSN and Time Warner's (TWX) AOL -- and expand its audience, already the largest on the web.
In the United States, Yahoo attracted 99.3 million users during September, outdistancing MSN's 89.4 million users, Google's 79.4 million users and AOL's 72.5 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
Last month, Yahoo hired a veteran war correspondent, Kevin Sites, to provide dispatches from armed conflicts around the world. That move was closely followed by the addition of several financial columnists who will provide exclusive material to Yahoo.
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Semi power: There's a new player in the lucrative market of semiconductors that power everything from cars and game consoles to medical equipment and supercomputers.
P.A. Semi is emerging after working the last two years in stealth mode, growing from a tiny team of big-name chip designers working out of a 600 square-foot office in Palo Alto, California to a company whose 150 employees occupy two floors in a high-rise in nearby Santa Clara, the hometown of No. 1 chipmaker Intel.
At the Fall Processor Forum, P.A. Semi will announce how it has designed a high-performance chip it claims will consume as much as 10 times less power than today's comparable products. But because it takes an average of four years to design and produce a new chip, P.A. Semi said its processors won't hit the market until 2007.
The startup's chips are based on the PowerPC chip architecture, which is a platform found in many networking and data storage machines as well as cars, some home electronics and upcoming video game consoles.
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Get the message: KDDI, Japan's second-largest mobile operator, unveiled a lineup of new phones with the ability to watch short segments of digital television programs and communicate with a group via text or voice.
The latest lineup will include three new models with a service that would let users send text messages interlaced with photos to up to four others in a feature that would resemble instant messaging chats on personal computers.
The service, called Hello Messenger, also allows users to communicate with a group via voice, walkie-talkie-style, using the technology known as push-to-talk made popular by U.S. operator Nextel Communications.
KDDI also said one of the phones made by Sanyo would also allow users to watch short segments of digital television programs with a program guide, sub-titles and an ability to record. The company plans to offer additional integrated features such as navigation to stores mentioned in a program, links to related content or mobile commerce.
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For your eyes only: Walt Disney plans to become the first major Hollywood film distributor to back an anti-piracy DVD technology that stirred controversy last year in advance of the important Oscar race.
Disney (DIS) said it would release DVD "screeners" -- copies of movies sent to groups that vote on awards -- only for DVD players made exclusively by a Dolby Laboratories (DLB) unit, Cinea, and engineered to thwart illegal copying.
Two years ago, Hollywood studios tried to ban all screeners, but the ban was unsuccessful. Last year, the Cinea players were not sent out soon enough to make an impact, and several nonOscar groups complained that they were not being given the players.
Now Cinea plans to distribute 12,000 players to members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
The DVD players are encoded with recipients' names, and screeners sent to those people are specifically encrypted so they can be seen only on those particular DVD players.
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Compiled by Keith Axline. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
