We hope you wear baggy pants, because you're going to want big pockets to carry Samsung's giant new jukebox. The Galaxy Player 5.8 is dominated by its namesake 5.8-inch, 960 x 540 LCD -- a screen that makes the 4.8-inch AMOLED on the closely related Galaxy S III look downright modest by comparison. Android 4.0 and the latest generation of TouchWiz
make their first appearances in a Samsung media player here, with the
spin naturally on books and movies instead of the tasks you'd associate
with a smartphone. You're otherwise looking at the kind of media player
you'd expect in 2012: there's either 16GB or 32GB of built-in storage, a
microSD slot, a front VGA camera for those face-to-face sessions and a
huge 2,500mAh battery to compensate for the display. We're still waiting
on a few details, such as the exact processor and the Galaxy Player
5.8's launch schedule, although the announcement's timing suggests we
may get a peek at this behemoth when IFA 2012 kicks off later this week. In the meantime, we'd advise against buying a pair of skinny jeans.
SAN
FRANCISCO, Aug 14 — Google Inc is buying the Frommer’s line of travel
guidebooks, the latest move to amass a trove of publishing content that
could strengthen the No. 1 Internet search company’s push to become a
major online travel broker.
The sale by John Wiley & Sons Inc comes nearly a year after
Google’s US$151 million (RM470.1 million) purchase of Zagat Survey,
which offers reviews of restaurants, hotels and nightclubs in cities
around the world.
Google and Wiley & Sons did not announce financial terms for the deal, which is expected to close shortly.
The
deal will meld the 55-year-old travel publisher’s deep database of
hotels and sights into a search giant that is seeking to position its
services across the entire trip-planning process, from searching for a
holiday destination and looking up hotel reviews to booking tours and
restaurants in far-flung cities.
As a result, analysts said, Google is increasingly threatening a
range of companies, like review site Yelp Inc and flight and hotel
booking service TripAdvisor , which are scrumming for a slice of the
growing online travel market.
US online travel sales are expected to reach US$119.2 billion this
year, up from US$107.4 billion in 2011, according to eMarketer.
“It’s been Google’s overarching strategy to dominate the travel
vertical,” said B. Riley & Co analyst Sameet Sinha. “They want to
dislodge these vertical search engines that may have gained over the
last few years.”
Shares of Yelp fell 7.7 per cent to US$23.87 yesterday after the deal
was announced. Online travel website Expedia Inc’s stock slipped 1.1
per cent to US$53.83. TripAdvisor fell 4.5 per cent to US$33.52.
Shares of Google, which yesterday announced plans to lay off 20 per
cent of its recently acquired Motorola Mobility business, rose 2.8 per
cent to US$660.01. Wiley & Sons shares were off 1 cent, or 0.02 per
cent, at US$47.58.
Going local
Last year, Google closed a US$700 million deal to acquire ITA
Software, which provides search technology to companies such as Kayak
Software Corp.
But Google’s aspirations in travel are just part of its broader
ambitions. For years, the company has tried to help broker commercial
transactions between its roughly one billion users and small, local
businesses.
Google’s local search efforts — headed by its high-profile executive
Marissa Mayer until she left to head Yahoo Inc last month as chief
executive — have been a priority for the search engine.
Since acquiring Zagat, Google has given more and more space on its
search results page to business listings from Zagat, a practice that has
drawn regulatory scrutiny and criticism from competitors such as Yelp.
By teaming up with Frommer’s, which publishes 350 titles and covers
over 4,000 destinations, Google could further expand its reach
internationally and beef up information on local hotels and tourist
activities across the globe.
“They want to marry content with commerce, and content is an
important part of that equation,” said Sinha, the B. Riley & Co
analyst.
In recent years, Google has not hesitated to offer top dollar for
other properties that it believed could strengthen its local commerce
offerings.
In December 2009, the company unsuccessfully offered more than US$500
million to acquire Yelp. One year later, in late 2010, Groupon Inc, the
daily deals company, turned down a US$600 million offer from Google.
Europe on US$5 a day
For an acquirer such as Google, the most valuable part of Frommer’s
is its extensive database of business listings and tourist hotspots that
have been maintained and curated for years and can be integrated into
Google’s deep pools of data, analysts said.
“When Google buys Frommer’s they’re not really buying a book
publisher or imprint, they’re buying a database with both content and
photography,” Lorraine Shanley, president at Market Partners
International, a publishing consulting firm in New York.
A Google spokeswoman said that over time, the company would integrate
the content acquired from Frommer’s with Zagat. But initially, Google
will continue to offer the reviews of hotels, restaurants and sights
across the world on the Web under the Frommer’s brand name.
The spokeswoman said there was nothing to announce regarding whether Google would continue to publish the print guidebooks.
Wiley, which also publishes the “For Dummies” series, acquired the Frommer’s line in 2001.
The publisher had been looking to offload Frommer’s in recent months
as it consolidates its business around its textbook offerings, said
Morningstar analyst Michael Corty.
The latest acquisition by the Internet giant caps a 55-year journey
for a series that first appeared in the early years of commercial air
travel. In 1957, Arthur Frommer, a former US soldier, released his
European sightseeing book, entitled “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day”, after
fellow GIs snatched up a similar guide that Frommer had distributed
while he was stationed in Germany.
Written in a breezy style and appealing to the budget-conscious, the
slim book encouraged Americans across a broader economic spectrum to
venture overseas in the flush postwar era.
His guide, Frommer wrote in the first edition, was meant for American
tourists who “own no oil wells in Texas” and have “never struck it rich
in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European
vacation”.
In the 1970s, tattered copies of Frommer’s book accompanied a new
generation of young American backpackers across Europe. And in the years
since, other publishers such as Lonely Planet have also found
considerable success printing thick bound guides for the independent
traveller. Lonely Planet is now owned by the British Broadcasting Corp.
But the golden days of travel-book publishing may be over, given the
rise of always-connected tablets and e-books that can be easily updated
with the most current maps and listings, said Shanley, the publishing
consultant.
“People still want to take a travel guide with them when they go on a
trip, but presumably that will erode over time,” Shanley said. “I’m not
going to sound the death knell of travel books, but the expense of
creating a new edition and then printing it and distributing it is
becoming prohibitive.” — Reuters