Australian miner Prospect Resources just wrapped up offloading its Step Aside Lithium Project in Zimbabwe for 2.2 million bucks to a private outfit called Fatima Resources. The deal gets them 850k upfront with another 150k coming in six months, plus potential bonus cash up to 1.2 million if the new owners hit certain targets within two years. Step Aside sits about 8 kilometers north of the Arcadia Lithium Mine that Prospect already sold off to Chinese battery giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt back in 2022.
This sale wraps up Prospect's exit from Zimbabwe after lithium prices tanked hard globally. Managing director Sam Hosack said the company is pumped to get some immediate cash return while keeping options open for future upside if...
Jersey-based Caledonia Mining just dropped a feasibility study showing their Bilboes Gold Project in Zimbabwe is sitting on 1.75 million ounces of proven and probable reserves, which translates to around 7 billion bucks at current gold rates. The project sits about 80 kilometers north of Bulawayo and needs 584 million in development cash to get rolling. They picked up full ownership back in January 2023 for 65 million. Stock jumped nearly 5 percent after the announcement.
The company plans to shift focus from its current Blanket Mine to make Bilboes the main operation within three years, targeting five tonnes of annual gold production starting in late 2028. They're looking at non-recourse senior debt for most of the financing while...
Zimbabwe School of Mines is working with the country's aviation authority to set up a program that teaches students how to fly drones for mineral surveys and then crunch the data for actual mining work. Training manager Martin January said the school is getting approved as an official training org and expects everything locked in by next year.
The curriculum expansion goes beyond just drone stuff. ZSM added courses covering mine safety, gem cutting and polishing, plus foundry tech for steel production. They partnered with Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe to grab equipment for gemstone training. January mentioned the school is also weaving in artificial intelligence and robotics coursework since automation keeps changing what...
Universal Music's German division might finally get answers from the EU's highest court about whether Cloudflare can be blamed when pirates use its infrastructure. A German federal court kicked the question upstairs after years of legal fighting over a dead piracy site called DDL-Music that used to link people to bootleg Sarah Connor tracks.
The case could reshape how internet backbone companies like Cloudflare and Akamai handle liability. Universal says Cloudflare's CDN service counts as hosting since it caches stuff for a year, which would make them responsible for infringement. Cloudflare claims the Digital Services Act protects CDN services as caching operations that get special treatment.
The EU court also needs to decide if...
Universal Music Group UK dropped Pause, which basically lets people grab single frames from music videos and turn them into prints. The platform scans through videos and locks each frame after someone buys it to keep things exclusive. Prices run anywhere from 65 quid for basic A3 size up to 495 for the fancy framed collector version.
Amy Winehouse kicked off the whole thing with You Know I'm No Good, and UMG will send money to her foundation for every sale. The project leader at UMG thinks fans will dig getting a unique piece from their favorite artist that nobody else can ever cop. Artists like Aurora, Keane and Jeff Goldblum are already working with the studio, and the company wants to branch out beyond music videos into film and...
ASCAP grabbed Marc Zelanko as their new Chief of Staff after the exec spent over 20 years grinding through senior positions at Paramount Global. Elizabeth Matthews brought him on to help squeeze more cash and better efficiency for the performance rights org that reps around 1.1 million music creators and publishers.
Zelanko ran massive projects at Paramount like the companywide COVID task force that kept operations running for thousands of employees plus revamped HR systems to cut down organizational risk. The appointment drops while ASCAP keeps posting fat revenue numbers with distributions hitting close to $1.7 billion and total revenues pushing past $1.8 billion after years of growth.
TikTok brought on Ziad Ojakli as its new head of public policy for the Americas after Michael Beckerman bounced from the position he had held for over five years. Ojakli has experience working at Ford, SoftBank and Boeing, plus time in the George W. Bush administration. ByteDance CEO Shou Zi Chew made the announcement through an internal memo.
The hire happens while ByteDance scrambles to offload about 80 percent of TikTok US to American investors before the late January cutoff that Donald Trump set. Oracle and Silver Lake would grab around 50 percent under the current plan, with existing ByteDance shareholders keeping 30 percent and ByteDance itself holding less than 20 percent.
Lawmakers from both parties are skeptical about the...
StubHub got slapped with a class action lawsuit after investor Daniel Salabaj accused the company of hiding cash flow problems before its IPO. The ticketing platform raised around $758 million when it went public but allegedly left out key details about operational changes that tanked its financial position.
The complaint says StubHub failed to warn shareholders about timing issues with vendor payments that would mess up cash flow numbers. Free cash flow went negative by about $4.6 million compared to the positive $10.6 million the year before. At least eight law firms jumped in to investigate after the stock crashed nearly 21 percent following the quarterly earnings drop. Shares bottomed out at $10.31 before bouncing back slightly but...
Amuse just hit 50,000 automated royalty advances through its Fast Forward platform and pushed out $10 million total to independent musicians since the service started. The Swedish company runs calculations across streaming data to figure out how much artists can grab upfront instead of waiting months for platforms like Spotify to actually pay out.
Over half the artists using Fast Forward apparently recoup their advances and come back for more, with the average user taking four separate advances. YouTube data just got added to the mix alongside Spotify and Apple Music, which the company claims makes it the only automated advanced system pulling from all three major streamers. Colombian hip hop artist UNIVERSE said the feature helped...
