Energy storage system producer 24M Technologies spun out of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems today to become a separate venture.

The company raised a $10 million Series A funding round from Charles River Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners.

The company raised an additional $6 million in a grant from the Department of Energy‘s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). The funding will help 24M develop batteries that can store more energy for a lower price.

24M’s technology, created in collaboration with A123 and MIT, combines the best of rechargeable batteries, fuel cells and flow batteries to create new energy storage systems. Specifically, the company wants to create batteries that improve on the energy storage capabilities of lithium ion batteries. 24M especially wants to target the transportation and electric grid industries, with the hope of creating more affordable and effective electric car batteries, some of which currently cost upwards of $10,000.

A123 will continue its involvement in the venture by helping with product development and commercialization. A123 will also receive a seat on 24M’s board of directors and an equity stake in the company.

The $6 million grant 24M received comes from the Department of Energy and its APRA-E program. It is intended to help 24M commercialize its products in collaboration with Rutgers and MIT.

SlideShare,the "YouTube for presentations," has been focusing its efforts on becoming the premier platform for professional and business content. Today, SlideShare is going freemium with the announcement of tiered, paid plans for businesses.

SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. SlideShare has previously offered two premium services for businesses, LeadShare and AdShare, which let users collect money from leads and ads on the platform. SlideShare’s CEO Rashmi Sinha says that these features will be folded into the tiered pro plans.

While SlideShare will still offer a basic account for free, the startup will offer subscription-based pro plans starting at $19 per month. The silver plan, which is $19 per month, includes analytics and social media monitoring, SlideShare’s lead-gen feature, and the ability to turn off ads. The gold selection, which is focused towards small businesses at $49 per month, adds the ability to create a branded channel on the platform. And the platinum level, which is aimed towards enterprises at $249 per month, gives users the control to turn of comments and more. Brands such as Dell, Microsoft and Pfizer are already using SlideShare’s pro offerings.

Sinha says that the startup aimed to provide a paid model similar to what professional social network LinkedIn uses for its account options. Keeping the core functionality of SlideShare was key, says Sinha, who adds that the platform is seeing 30 million uniques per month.

SlideShare is steadily gaining traction as a hub for professional content, and a subscription model makes sense. Plus, the pricing structure could appeal to a broad spectrum of professional users, from freelancers to large companies. And Sinha is confident that the new model is not only going to bring in revenue but also going to resonate amongst business users. As Sinha told me, “Subscriptions are sexy.”

SlideShare faces competition from Scribd, Docstoc and AuthorStream.

As students head back to school, eBay is getting into mobile textbook sales with the launch of a a new iPhone app from Half.com, which eBay bought in 2000 for $350 million.

The Half.com iPhone app is also the first eBay buying application to integrate barcode scanning technology, which was implemented through the acquisition of RedLaser in June. The app allows users to scan the barcodes on items to find the best deals on textbooks, DVDs, books, video games and more, with discounts of up to 50 percent or more off the normal retail price. However, eBay says the majority of items sold on Half.com are textbooks.

The Half.com app includes access to 80 million active listings from more than 700,000 sellers. And you can also share deals via Facebook and Twitter. The app also includes a Buying Wizard feature that shows users results based on the criteria for item condition and seller feedback.

It’s no secret that eBay is making a big push into mobile e-commerce. eBay is on pace to reach a whopping $1.5 billion worth of goods sold via mobile phones in 2010. eBay’s primary iPhone app has seen 11 million downloads and the company also launched iPad and Android apps this year.

Best Buy is rolling out an in-store mobile couponing system in conjunction with a startup called shopkick. The system will be in place in 187 stores by tomorrow and 257 stores by October 1.

Earlier this month, we got a preview of how the system works (see video below). Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare or Gowalla, shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the shopkick app on their phone walks into a store. As MG wrote at the time:

The minute you enter a Best Buy location, your phone recognizes it and you get points and a message that there are deals available at this location. You can also use it to scan items and get more points and other potential deals.

Unlike other location-based apps, this doesn't use GPS (or even WiFi triangulation), instead this is a custom hardware plus app system shopkick created and installs in partner stores. This means no more fake check-ins and it allows the app to do some other potentially interesting things

The shopkick app also lets you scan items with your phone to get deals, and as you earn points, or “kickbucks,” you can redeem them in a variety of ways, including discounts at the store, Facebook credits, or song downloads from Napster.

Cardlytics, which provides solutions for transaction marketing within banking, this morning announced that it has raised $18 million in financing. New investors ITC Holdings and Kinetic Ventures led the round.

According to the press release, all of Cardlytics’ previous investors participated, including Canaan Partners, Polaris Venture Partners and Total Technology Ventures.

It’s unclear how much capital the company has raised to date.

National and regional retailers and service providers use Cardlytics’ transactional marketing platform to connect with consumers via online banking channels. This allows advertisers to use certain consumer transaction data such as purchasing history to accurately target people with offers that are highly relevant to them.

Its multi-channel approach includes online banking, SMS, email, mobile and social networks.

According to Cardlytics, financial institutions will be providing retail offers as rewards to over 10 million consumers based on their individual purchase behavior by next fall.

Intel has just announced that it will acquire Texas Instruments' cable modem product line. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2010, were not disclosed. Unsurprisingly, Intel says the acquisition will help further its foray into providing chips to the cable and consumer electronics industries. Intel wants to be able to provide products that provide on foundation for consumer elextronics devices such as set top boxes, digital TVs, and blu-ray disc players. The unit's advanced system-on-chip (SoC) products will be based on Intel's Atom processors.

Dell has agreed to acquire 3PAR, a competitor to the likes of IBM, HP, EMC and Hitachi in the data storage and management space. The transaction is valued at $18 per share in cash - marking a 86.5% premium to company's Friday closing price of $9.65 - or approximately $1.15 billion.

Spotify's SVP of strategic partnerships Paul Brown is to leave the music streaming service this week for a new startup outside of the digital music space. Brown tells Music Week it was an opportunity he "had to take", after being with Spotify for 18 months where he first joined as MD of the UK office, having previously worked at Pandora. However, he was quickly promoted to the role of strategic partnerships so it's potentially a major loss for Spotify.

Lycos, the ill-fated operator of a search engine, Web portal and whatnot originally established in 1994 (!) has a new owner – once again.

India-based digital marketing solutions company Ybrant Digital has purchased Lycos from Korean Internet company Daum for a reported $36 million in a stock purchase agreement.

Daum bought Lycos for $95.4 million in cash in August 2004, a fraction of what its then-owner had paid for the site four years earlier (Lycos was acquired by Terra Networks, the internet arm of Spanish telecom giant Telefónica, for $5.4 billion in May 2000).

Lycos claims its network, which includes the eponymous search engine but also products and services with familiar names such as Tripod, Angelfire, Gamesville and WhoWhere for social networking, ecommerce, video viewing and sharing, gaming, blogging and website hosting, consistently attracts 12 to 15 million monthly unique visitors in the United States, on average.

The company boasts that the network is also a top 25 Internet destination worldwide, reaching nearly 60 million unique visitors globally.

(Via @ScepticGeek)

On Friday Twitter started a mass roll out of its “Followed By” and “You Both Follow” features, which we covered in more detail in June (It seems as though Tlists, a feature which allows users to see what Twitter lists you are on, have yet to launch full force).

While Facebook and Foursquare have had “friends in common” social graph features for awhile, it’s been more difficult to directly convert these concepts to Twitter because the concept of “friend” v.s. “follower”/”followed” is hard to parse.

But, after playing with the features for a couple of days, they have proven to be incredibly useful, as or if not more useful and definitely more grammatically correct than "Who To Follow, and especially more useful than Facebook's “Mutual Friends,” despite the fact that Twitter  allows for one-way relationships whereas Facebook is by design two-way, where both parties have to agree on the relationship to connect.

Mapped out on the above chart, the "Followed By" feature shows you which of your friends (labeled as “Connected”) is following a user. Implicit in this feature is the fact that following someone is the equivalent to an endorsement, which makes it valuable to see which other people you follow have "endorsed" the person you are currently examining. In the case of @meowmeowbeat (the user I’m considering following or “Examined” in this exercise) it's @parislemon, who I know to be a stand up guy.  Maybe he's onto something?

Thus is also the case with the  "You Both Follow' feature. If you’ve landed on the Twitter profile of someone whom you’re evaluating whether to give credence, a delineation of their taste in people, or who they have endorsed that you have also endorsed might be the tipping point as to whether or not you should follow. @meowmeowbeat seems to be well connected in the tech reporting community, so the account is probably worth a follow in my case.

The infinite chains of possible one way connections leaves Twitter with the leeway to launch many more features based on their complex directed social graph, hence the hypotheticals above. While someone who "Follows Both Of You" might just be a spammer, the "People They Follow Who Follow You" connections might be a lot more telling about a user’s social caché. In any case, a user which you have deigned worthy of polluting your Twitter stream (whether or not they follow you back) may say a lot more about you then the fact that you've accepted your junior high lab partner’s friend request on Facebook. Would you follow that same classmate on Twitter?

Because of an inordinate amount of friend requests accepted from old college roommates and (at least for me) social media consultant, people seem to care more about who follows them on Twitter than who they’re friends with on Facebook. And Twitter’s decision to roll out these displays of a more intricate Twitter social graph is leading to better connections. Facebook's "Mutual Friends" on the other hand now looks somewhat limited, in Twitter social graph terminology the degrees of separation of a mutual friend on Facebook would be, "Person who you follow, who follows you back, who also has this same follow/follow back relationship with the person you're currently looking at."

Now if only @meowmeowbeat would follow me back …

I’ve spent the past 11 days on the isle of Crete, so I had to make sure I wasn’t still in a vacation daze this morning when I noticed that France.fr was available online, after being down for an entire month or so.

After rubbing my eyes for 2 minutes and slamming my head against the wall a couple of times, I looked again, and sure enough there’s a live website when you visit that URL.

The static site boasts numerous features, like a menu at the top of the homepage you can use to navigate your way around, photographs and maps of France as well as weather reports.

On the very top of the page, there’s even a handy time stamp, so you’ll never forget what day it is. If the mouse-over menus in the top navigation confuse you in any way, there’s even a box you can type keywords in and search the site from there.

Soon, the site says, you’ll even be able to create your own personal space, sign up for newsletters, save your favorites and provide feedback. For now, what you – finally – see is what you get, in five different languages no less (including French).

The general response to the news of the reemergence of France.fr on Twitter was quite amusing, by the way. One user expressed it thusly: “France.fr is available again, one month after its initial launch. We preferred the version of the site we got when it was down.”

All kidding aside, we’re glad the website is up so we can finally leave the subject alone, albeit regretfully. Just do us one favor and don’t go visiting the site en masse straight away – give it at least a full day of uptime, s'il vous plaît.

It's been a year since charity:water launched its site that organizes "give-up-your-birthday" campaigns, where people ask for donations instead of presents and the money goes to build wells in Africa. It’s a win-win: You get less stuff, the world gets clean drinking water.

And that year has been good for the thirsty in the world: Nearly $3 million has been raised over the site, including notable campaigns by angel investor Chris Sacca, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, and Alyssa Milano who raised $96,000 on her 37th birthday. (Yeah, it's another Twitter-happy celebrity. Calm down, Paul Carr, it's for charity.)

The thing I love about charity:water is if you give $5,000, you see a well tapped. None of this money goes for administration—it goes for water, pure and simple. Here are videos of just three of the thousands of wells that Sacca, Dorsey and Milano's birthdays provided.

But of course we all know the true sign of success on the Web is competition– even for doing good. Cue Bill Clinton who just last week announced he was giving up his birthday for his charity via Facebook Causes’s give-up-your-birthday app, which has raised more than $6 million for various charities since its inception.

Call it an altruistic grudge-match, but charity:water is throwing down a save-the-world gauntlet today launching its annual September birthday campaign. The tradition started four years ago when charity:water's founder Scott Harrison first gave up his birthday, asking people to donate money instead of buying him gifts. It has swelled in size every year as more September babies gave up their birthdays. Now on the first anniversary of the site, Harrison hopes to raise $1.7 million—all online, all in individual, give-what-you-can chunks, all by September 30.

I'm guessing even our most player-hating commenters are rooting for them. For you Virgos and Libras, the promo video is here.

It’s a lot like the Cold War – most of the really interesting fights among startup investors – and there are lots of them – occur behind the scenes. Publicly everyone gets along just great. But declining returns, too much capital and the disruptive force of a new breed of angel investors has created enough tension in the system that some frustrations are beginning to boil over. And in some cases, the gloves are coming off.

And entrepreneurs can and do get caught in the cross fire. Pick the wrong investor and you’ve closed the door on others. You’ll never even know why it happened, but it will.

Until very recently there was an established pecking order with venture capitalists. The top guys, most would include Benchmark, Kleiner and Sequoia on that list – would see every deal. They’d mostly compete amongst themselves for those deals. And if all of them passed, the other guys got to take a look. The system was so firmly established that some VCs gave up trying entirely. DAG, for example, built a fund based solely on the promise that they’d follow the big guys, in later venture rounds at much higher prices. For investors, it was a way to get in on the hottest deals, albeit at worse terms. And the top tier funds could show startups a way to raise more money over two rounds at a higher average price, helping to justify the premiums charged by these firms. Sometimes DAG would even be willing to step in and take the PR hit when things went wrong.

Today things are much more complicated. More funds are arguably in the top tier – guys like Accel, Andreessen and Greylock have risen. But more disruptive are the angel investors. It used to be that angels worked with venture funds, doing the very early rounds and then handing things off when a company did well.

But the last several years have seen the rise of the cheap startup. Internet startups can use open source software and new scripting languages to ship products fast and cheap. Often there’s no need to go past an angel round of funding until it’s time to decide between selling and doing a big marketing push. Either way the VCs lose, because even if they get in at that late stage the valuations are much higher and returns plummet.

An entire generation of entrepreneurs have stopped thinking about hitting up those top tier VCs as their first step in the startup process. Many now simply begin with Y Combinator, or take a small angel round. These angels are fast and nimble and they are hanging out with the entrepreneurs at events, incubators, etc. They are in the fray, while many of the old VCs remain above it all, waiting for the entrepreneurs to come to them, hat in hand.

And those angels aren’t shy about trashing the VCs. Angel investor Dave McClure goes on regular rants about venture capitalists, for example. As does Chris Dixon. And Jason Calacanis.

The VCs, for their part, fight back more quietly. They point out that very few angel funded startups end up very big or interesting. “An entire generation of entrepreneurs are building dipshit companies and hoping that they sell to Google for $25 million,” lamented a venture capitalist to me recently. He believes that angel investors are pushing entrepreneurs to think small, and avoid the home run swings. And you don’t get a home run unless you swing hard, he says. When you play it safe you nearly always lose.

I repeated this argument recently for the fun of it at a Y Combinator event for aspiring angel investors. You can imagine that it wasn’t much of a crowd pleaser. Y Combinator, which has spawned some 200 plus startups in just a few years, could be considered the king of this ecosystem, I said.

Whether there’s merit to the argument or not, it is relevant to the entire ecosystem. Some venture capitalists think that this “think small” attitude is driving entrepreneurs who may otherwise build the next Google or Microsoft to create something much less interesting instead, and then everyone loses. No IPO. No 20,000 tech jobs. No new buyer out there for the startups that don’t quite make it.

And without those occasional but huge exits, the entire ecosystem can fail. Venture firms need big returns to raise new funds. Without venture money a lot of the innovation in Silicon Valley would end.

So in effect, the argument goes, the angel investors are like a quickly growing cancer. Without radically invasive surgery, Silicon Valley will eventually flatline.

Dramatic? Yes. But now many of those angel investors are raising big funds and are starting to look like those old style venture capitalists. McClure has a $30 million fund. Dixon has a $50 million fund. Mike Maples and Chris Sacca as well. Aydin Senkut just raised a $40 million fund, notes the WSJ. And Jeff Clavier is raising a big fund of his own.

All of these guys previously invested their own money in small chunks that weren’t threatening to VCs. All are now investing much larger amounts of other people’s money in startups. They are most definitely putting pressure on the old guard.

What’s the cutoff? Around $500,000, says Ron Conway, probably the most successful angel investor in Silicon Valley history. Above that and the VCs see you as competition. Conway has stayed well below that threshold, and his companies regularly go on to raise traditional venture rounds from venture capitalists.

All of this competition is good for the individual entrepreneur looking for capital. Most of the bottlenecks have been removed, and it’s easier for a good idea to attract the cash it needs. But I think there is some merit to the idea that too many entrepreneurs are thinking small these days. Which is fine in a vacuum. But if big companies aren’t being built because of this small thinking, we’ll all suffer sooner or later.

So think big. And be mindful of the politics when you raise that angel round.

Last week, a firestorm erupted after Google and Verizon jointly proposed new rules to lawmakers for protecting the “open Internet” and net neutrality. When Google and Verizon professed their love for the open Internet (“Google cares a lot about the open Internet,” said CEO Eric Schmidt), they left out the future of the Internet, the wireless Internet. Instead, they would only apply to the wired Internet.

Plenty of people called Google out for its hypocrisy. Either you are open or you are not. There is no such thing as being half-open (it’s like being half-pregnant).

Telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T want to treat the wireless Internet differently than the wired Internet. But it is not different. It is the same Internet, just accessed by different networks and different devices. It shouldn’t matter how you get there, the Internet should operate under one set of rules.

Google and Verizon argued that “wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world,” and that it is moving too fast to be bogged down by regulations. AT&T later chimed in supporting the carve-out with a post titled “Wireless Is Different.” It too warned against “onerous new net neutrality regulations” for wireless broadband, noting that wireless networks have orders of magnitude less capacity than wired networks at their disposal. Because of this limitation, AT&T argued, “wireless carriers must to be able to dynamically manage traffic” and operate their networks as they see fit. Cry me a river.

The issue here is not about managing traffic for often-valid technical reasons. It is also not about “burdensome” regulation. It is about setting the rules of the road for how the Internet will be delivered to consumers. The broad principles should be the same: whenever possible, all bits should be treated equally

If you read Google’s and Verizon’s proposed rules, they are actually a step forward in that for the first time they would prohibit broadband providers on the wired Internet (like DSL, cable, and fiber) from discriminating against any kind of “lawful” Internet content or application over another. They also would prohibit wired broadband providers from taking payments to deliver Internet traffic from one Website faster than anyone else’s.

These are sound proposals. Why wouldn’t you want to apply them to the wireless Internet as well? No bits should get any preference, and business deals that include “paid prioritization” of one Website’s content or applications would be illegal. In addition to not allowing wireless carriers to discriminate by content or application, they also shouldn’t be able to discriminate by device. Can you imagine a business deal between Google and Verizon where Android phones get faster download speeds than other phones on the network (including, soon, the iPhone)? Or YouTube videos get priority across all devices?

There are plenty of reasons to believe Google when it says it would never do such a thing, including its long advocacy of an open rules for the wireless Internet. But that was then, when Google was more idealistic and less willing to compromise its basic principles. Anyway, it is not Google we should be worried about, so much as Verizon or AT&T. Replace Google with Apple or Microsoft or News Corp. and it would still be just as wrong. Even without any explicit business agreements, you don’t want the wireless carriers deciding which apps or content should get priority delivery.

By taking the wireless Internet off the table in terms of abiding by any net neutrality rules, Google and Verizon invite such speculation. One man’s prioritization is another man’s discrimination.

Nobody wants burdensome regulation, but given that broadband access is a quasi-monopoly in most parts of this country with only one or two providers in any given town, and choice in wireless carriers is not much better, a few guidelines are in order. Fred Wilson suggests:

I would like to have one basic rule that is so simple that everyone understands what it means and we can simply follow it.

He points to the work of Stanford law professor Barbara Van Schewick, who proposes:

A non-discrimination rule that bans all application-specific discrimination, but allows all application-agnostic discrimination.

What this means is that a carrier couldn’t block Skype or Apple’s Facetime, but they could still discriminate against applications that take up more than a certain threshold of bandwidth. (Again, the rule might also include a ban on device-specific discrimination). A rule like Shewick’s would allow the carriers to manage the capacity constraints of their wireless networks while still upholding the principles of net neutrality.

Net neutrality does not mean that everybody gets to download an unlimited amount of BitTorrent movies onto their cell phones. It simply means that all bits are treated equally, even when they are blocked.

Photo credit: Flickr/ Jon-Eric Melsæter

In late 2005 Google was on the verge of acquiring a company called Riya – the first real attempt at image facial recognition and tagging for consumers. Google eventually walked away from Riya, and the company trudged on.

In 2009 the Riya product was shut down, but the company had already refocused its efforts on ecommerce – using the Riya core technology to let people search visually by seeing images that are similar to other images. Like.com was born. And they raised nearly $50 million in venture capital since 2006 and has revenue in the $50 million/year range.

Google is now in the final stages of acquiring Like.com, we’ve heard from multiple sources, for something north of $100 million.

What we can’t quite figure out is why Google is buying Like.com. It doesn’t fit neatly into mobile or their new social strategy like so many of their recent acquisitions. Like.com does have real visual search technology though. Perhaps Google, which has experimented with visual search, likes what it sees.

CEO Munjal Shah, a friend who I’ve known since 2005 (he launched Riya in my back yard) suddenly won’t take my calls or emails. So we’ll wait for confirmation until he’s ready to talk.

Facebook Activity Stream software architect and Open Standards advocate Monica Keller is joining the engineering team at enterprise software startup Socialcast.

Keller will be assuming the role of Director of Engineering at Socialcast, which provides software that combines activity streams and microblogging for larger organizations interested in collaborating around realtime data.

Keller was an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager at Facebook, where she was an activity stream pioneer. She will now be helming Socialcast’s support of the Open Graph Protocol, also developed at Facebook. Socialcast will be the first enterprise software provider to support the Open Graph Protocol.

The addition of Keller to the Socialcast team represents a further commitment to expanding intelligence surrounding the corporate social graph. This new focus is the basis of many of the product developments Socialcast expects to launch before the end of 2010.

Previously a MySpace Group Architect, Keller had been at Facebook for six months before making the move.

"Rupert Murdoch To Launch New National Newspaper".

As headlines go, that's up there with "DeLorean To Unveil New 'Gull-Wing' Car", "Freddy Laker Reveals Trans-Atlantic Airline Plans" and "Charge! says Light Brigade" – reading it, you assume either there's been some kind of historical glitch in your RSS reader or that someone is making a wry joke about extreme business hubris. Surely no-one, not even a dyed-in-the-wool newspaperman like Murdoch, would be stupid enough to launch a new national title in the current climate.

But no – the story's true, albeit with a technological twist that makes the move sound only 1% less suicidal: Murdoch's new paper (launching ‘by the end of the year’) will be available only on tablets like the iPad. And readers will have to pay to view it. Oh, Rupert, you crazy old lunatic.

Of course the idea is doomed – that much should go without saying. Like so many of Murdoch's recent forays into paid-for online news, it reflects less a bold strategy to convince a new generation of readers that good journalism is worth paying for and more the 79-year News Corp proprietor's desperation to keep the cash flow coming until the company's profitability becomes someone else's problem.

But what's remarkable about this current escapade is that Murdoch is actually proposing to sell a product that people have previously failed to even give away for free.

As the LA Times explains, Murdoch hopes that his new e-daily will 'reach readers who increasingly consume their news on the go… offering short, snappy stories that could be digested quickly.' Says the man himself: “We’ll have young people reading newspapers… It’s a real game changer in the presentation of news.”

Now where have I heard that before? Oh yeah. I heard it back in London, in 2006, when a company by the name of News International launched a new free daily newspaper called 'thelondonpaper' (punctuation theirs – the paper was aimed squarely at the 'web generation' who, like their 7th century counterparts, are too busy for spaces between their words). This paper too was "targeted towards young readers, with emphasis on celebrity and more light-hearted news [with] little analysis of news stories and… lots of images and colour." News International's ambition with thelondonpaper was clearly stated: it would win back young, urban readers who had turned their back on traditional newspapers in favour of the Internet.

Of course, they failed: despite a polished product – handed out for free each morning at every Tube station in London – the paper published its last issue in 2009, having cost News International's owner tens of millions of pounds in the process. Young people, meanwhile, carried on getting their "light heated news with little analysis and lots of colour" from the Internet.

And the name of News International’s owner – the man who lost all that money trying to launch a new newspaper to compete with the Internet? Rupert Murdoch. He'd have to be delusional to try again.

Murdoch, however, is nothing if not delusional. Rather than learning from thelondonpaper and accepting that young people don't want to read newspapers – not even on the London Underground, one of the few places in the world where they struggle to access the Internet – he's taking another shot. And this time he's bringing the war right to the Internet's home turf: erecting a paywall, piling up pithy analysis-free stories behind it and genuinely believing that these "young people" whose approbation – and Paypal dollars – he so desperately craves will choose to subscribe, paying to read the same content as they can currently enjoy for free on any of a billion blogs and rival free news sites. To say that's a bold move is like describing the Charge of the Light Brigade in similar terms. Except that 278 people paid for the Charge of the Light Brigade.

No, this is way more than bold: this is the last gasp effort of a man who knows the end is nigh. Murdoch's print publications are hemorrhaging readers to online,and yet  his grand experiment with getting people to pay for digital content – building a paywall around the Times in London; a newspaper traditionally read by an older, perhaps more willing to pay, audience – has yielded only "disappointing" results. It’s no use.

But then again, at 79 years old, the undisputed king of newspapers really has nothing to lose by taking one last roll of the digital dice before giving up the ghost for good. If nothing else, it makes for a great headline.