Is price right?Napster Inc. hired UBS UBS Union Bank of Switzerland UBS United Bible Societies UBS United Blood Services UBS United Buying Service UBS Used Bookstore UBS University Business Services UBS Universal Building Society (UK) UBS Ulaanbaatar Broadcasting System Investment Bank last week to scout out possible buyers, or at least potential interest, in the music-sharing site. To quote a line from a Chicago song one of Napster's older subscribers might download To receive a file transmitted over a network. In any communications session, "download" means receive, and "upload" means send. The download/upload often implies a big/little scenario, in which data is being downloaded from the "big" server into the "little" user's computer. , "Does anybody really care?" L.A.-based Napster has more than 500,000 subscribers and recently announced a shift to an ad-based business model. The company said third party interest sparked the move, but officials wouldn't divulge who or what they were actually interested in. If analyst reports are to be believed, a few potential buyers have surfaced, including Amazon.com Inc., Real Networks Inc., San Disc Corp. and the company mentioned in seemingly seem·ing adj. Apparent; ostensible. n. Outward appearance; semblance. seem  ing·ly adv. every Internet InternetPublicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the deal, Google (Google, Mountain View, CA, www.google.com) The largest search engine on the Web, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University students. In 1996, they developed their "BackRub" search engine, named after its unique page ranking method (explained below). Inc. There's a reason none of these potential suitors is likely to be particularly ardent (Ardent Software, Inc., Westboro, MA) A database vendor formed in 1998 as the merger of VMARK Software, Unidata and O2 Technology. Its products included the UniVerse and UniData databases and DataStage data warehouse utility. , however: the price. With the company's healthy cash position of $97 million at the end of the first quarter and annual revenues in excess of $100 million, Napster will easily be able to demand well into the hundreds of millions for the service. Chairman and Chief Executive Chris Gorog toes a party line when discussing options. "Our goal is to enhance shareholder value which could potentially lead to a new strategic partnership or the sale of the company," Gorog said in a statement. "But in any event our primary focus will remain on growing Napster." Napster, which has already survived a body blow from Apple Computers Inc. and its iPod, is preparing to do combat with Microsoft Inc. and its Zune portable media player launch. |
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