Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

1. Microsoft is poised to announce , maybe later this morning, that the rumored acquisition of Skype is actually true. New hints suggest the price may have pushed as high as $8.5 billion, and Microsoft is obviously imagining how Skype will plug into its enterprise offerings

The Russian-born industrialist billionaire, who made his fortune in chemical and natural resource companies after the fall of the Soviet Union, just bought Warner Music Group, the record label that manages Cher, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Waka Flocka Flame. Access Industries will acquire Warner Music Group , for $3.3 billion in cash, it was announced today.

01 / Univision > > For pleasing its Latino base, and threatening the TV network establishment. Univision reaches 95% of U.S. Hispanic households, making it one of the top five networks in any language.

Call it a comedy of laptop errors.

George Doriot, the father of venture capitalism, liked to quip "Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete." Doriot died in 1987, but his ideas about venture funding can be seen to this day; Intel, Apple, and Cisco (to name a few) are some of the first companies to be funded by venture capitalists. The VCs that followed in his footsteps—including Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine—have, through their work, trailblazed a path of American innovation.

Dough Boys: “I love OpenTable,” says David Steele (center) of the restaurant Flour + Water, flanked here by his partners David White and chef Thomas McNaughton. | Photograph by Toby Burditt The inevitable push-pull between a platform and its customers. Network Effect: OpenTable CEO Jeffrey Jordan says his service’s attrition rate is “tiny,” less than 1%.

It was barely a month ago that American Express launched its futuristic mobile payments system Serve , and it's already moving to reinforce it by investing in a small firm

1. As the military battle for Libya goes on, a different battle has been won behind the scenes: Rebel forces have successfully hacked Gadhafi's mobile network, and have used it to establish their own communications grid. Gadhafi shut the networks and Internet down weeks ago, to confound the rebels

Everyone in New Orleans has a Katrina story, and those tales are typically tinged with loss, frustration, and grief. Five years after the storm, you still hear them, of course, and you still see evidence of the devastation that killed over 1,800 people and left more than one million homeless.

Amateur chef and comedian Nadia Giosia broke into the competitive world of celebrity cooking with the power of her online community. Nadia Giosia, the saucy Italian comedian behind Cooking Channel's hit show, Bitchin' Kitchen , broke into the elite world of television chefs through the grassroots enthusiasm of her fierce online fans.

Aha! Google is caught with ink on its hands. Then Google *must* be a media company after all, right? The truth is not that simple

As the NCAA men’s basketball tournament brings our national productivity to a halt today, with 16 games between noon and midnight EST, there are plenty of intriguing storylines.

01 / YouTube For transforming itself from Google's folly into a global network.

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today. The tech response to Japan's earthquake.

The magnitude 8.9 earthquake that hit Japan just a few hours ago has elicited a fast response from Google , with a person finder app identical to the one used in New Zealand recently. Japan's technologically very well equipped to react to the disaster, including the tsunami that followed the quake, and the nation's bullet trains, metros and nuclear power stations automatically halted. One reactor had an issue, but there was no reported leak