January 9th, 2007
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I had an e-mail yesterday from someone looking for a list of user-generated content companies in Canada. Well, there’s b5media (that’s an easy one, eh!), Bubbleshare (photo-sharing), Blogware (blog publishing) Cambrian House (crowd-sourcing), Five Limes (green retailing), BlogTV.ca (video-sharing) iBegin (local listings), Kitchen Lackey (recipes, cooking) and….who else it out there? Do we have another potential Flickr in our midst? Why isn’t this list longer given we’re in the midst of a user-generated content revolution. After all, Time Magazine recently declared 2006 to be the year of “You” so shouldn’t “You” also include Canadians? If you’ve got more suggestions, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.
Update: A few more members to add: Nakama (wireless photo sharing), NowPublic (citizen journalism), ProductWiki (product reviews/e-commerce), Netus (business project network), Food Inc. (restaurant reviews), FrontRowCentre (movie reviews and listings), JobLoft (job classifieds) and Top10PressReleases.com (Digg-like voting on stock market press releases).
Written by Mark Evans on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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About a year ago, Yahoo!'s programmers rearchitected Messenger. They identified capabilities common to all platforms, and built a core body of code. This freed their designers to adapt Messenger's user interface to each operating system. So the Mac client is more Mac-like, and so on.
With WinVista coming out soon, their team is working to finish the native version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista (Mv). Yahoo! expects a release to market in Q2 this year. Here are some of the coming features (if the creeks don't rise):
Profile-generated buddy groups. Your Mv user profile link to your other Yahoo! profiles. 
Yahoo! knows you've signed up for their sports, checkers, job search, mailing lists, investment forums, dating services. Mv puts that connection to use: Mv dynamically creates lists of your buddies based on common attributes. So you can see that five of your friends are on the Burning Man mailing list, three play bridge, and seven are watching the Sopranos marathon on HBO at the same time you are. Powerful lock-in. Privacy issues need work before release: you may not want your boss to see you are both looking for the same job, or that you've joined a cancer support group or that you're also in a dating club for submissives.
Behavior-generated buddy groups. Bringing relevance to buddy lists. I'd find it useful to show people you talk to often, or just once, or for long talks, or on some regular schedule. Mv may use it's own logs to better bring buddies to your attention. It would be interesting to see this informed by your other Yahoo! contact vectors, like email and blog feeds.
Sidebar buddies. Since not all friends are equal, Mv comes with a gadget that lives in the sidebar. You can drag your frequently called buddies from your list to the gadget, and always see their presence or one-click-to-call/chat as part of your desktop.
VoIP. PhoneIn, PhoneOut, and PC to PC. Free voicemail. p2p where possible, else relay/server. Still no multiparty video soon. Nor conference calling.
Visualizations are new; something to look at (distract you?) while you talk to someone. The example above shows a rotating planet with pulsing "radio waves." In a video call, Mv replaces the visualization with the live vid feed. Note the mode ribbon (text, call, video, share) is multiple choice; and that the window contains all elements of the conversation.
When you make a Yahoo! PhoneOut call and it is connected to regular phones by a Yahoo! partner with retail telecom operations (like AT&T or BT), Mv may show the carrier's logo.
Flexible orientation and layout. Think wide. The average Vista sale will be for a wide screen aspect ratio, 16:10, suitable for playing hi-def movies. Messenger for Vista (Mv for short) lets you reshape your main window from the traditional skinny vertical column to a wide display. As you stretch it, its contents (buddy lists, groups, history, etc.) adapt to the new layout.
Text vs. Visual Buddy Displays. The version I saw had a slider that let you shift the presentation inside the window from a face-focused view to one with smaller persona icons, increased textual detail, and more people visible at the same time. 
A great distinction between normal social vs. workplace contexts.
Theme tweaking exposed. They are building affordances (the parts of the UI you can touch and manipulate) that let you change Mv's skin color and texture by picking from a wheel type of style palette launched from a button on the front. Like the resizing, this enables direct manipulation, making tweaking more immediate, less abstract, and fun.
Animated emoticons. Emoticons are the little pictures you can include in a chat message, like a happy face. They are visual shorthand for feelings and ideas. Mv's "super emoticons" are little bundles of animation that jump out of the IM context to make a point. A little over the top for my taste, they are sure to be a hit among anyone using emoticons now. Frankly, I'd love to see an emoticon plug-in creation and sharing framework, so designers can create and spread their own unique aesthetics and notions.
Windowing. We saw a user combine open Mv windows by dragging them on top of one another, leaving you with one window with tabs (see picture below). Again, letting people manage their cognitive burdens.
The rearchitecture is as much an innovation management decision as a technical one. With three teams bouncing designs off of three different user communities, Yahoo! multiplies their opportunities for deep learning and to discover compelling experiences.
On a side note, their Realtime Communications organization is now part of the Audiences Group.
Technorati tags: skype, skypejournal, yahoo!, yahoo, realtimecommunications, voip, messenger, yahoomessenger, design, ui, ue, ux
Written by Skype Journal on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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If you are a Sprint Nextel customer, at some point you have suffered from dropped calls. It seems that malaise is spreading to the service provider itself, which has hit a massive air pocket. The company today gave a guidance that could make anyone cringe. The news was so bad, that the company had to cut 5,000 jobs. Quick recap of the bad news:
- In the fourth quarter ending December 31,2006, Sprint Nextel lost post-paid 306,000 subscribers, the only metric that counts amongst the Wall Street types. Analysts had estimated a loss of about 250,000 subscribers to defect to other carriers. UBS estimates another 330,000 will be gone in the first quarter of 2007 and expect these losses to continue.
- The capital expenditures are going to be up in 2007 to $8.5 billion versus a shade over $7 billion in 2007.
- The company will spend $300 million on WiMAX in 2007, and more in 2008. No idea, how much, though they did promise coverage for 100 million possible customers by then. Chicago and Washington DC will be their first two trial markets for WiMAX.
- 2007 revenues are going to be flat when compared to 2006, remaining in the $41-t0-$42 billion range.
- The good news is that a lot of that money is going to be spent on 4,800 new cell sites, which will raise the total number of Sprint cell sites to 67,000, which compares favorably to 45,000 for Cingular and 26,000 for Verizon.
- The company is planning a new CDMA based product for Boost customers that uses CDMA network and offers unlimited calling.
The company lost more than expected post-paid customers in the fourth quarter of 2006; will spend more money and will have a flat 2007 in terms of revenues - that’s a left-right-left combination that could leave any investor KO’d. Sprint should count its blessings that all busy bodies, aka bloggers and reporters, are in Las Vegas attending the CES.
In many ways you could predict that this was coming. In Septmeber 2006, Sprint COO Len Lauer quit the company. A month later Tim Donahue left the building. While trying to predict the future because of these developments was akin to reading tea leaves, still two senior executives leaving in quick succession is always a red flag.
Beyond the numbers, Sprint-Nextel’s problems stem from their dual network strategy - CDMA and iDEN. CDMA is doing fine, iDEN is a mess and causing customers to cancel and switch to other carriers. And Sprint-Nextel will remain a mess up until a point when its one network. And if that was not enough, Sprint-Nextel’s decision to add yet another networking protocol, WiMAX, to the mix is only going to create bigger headaches for the company. In a note to his clients, UBS analyst John Hodulik writes, “We believe the company remains committed to WiMAX but is re-evaluating its projections on the project.” Re-evaluating to slowdown, would be a good move at this time.
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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A friend of ours who slaves for a big hedge fund called and point out the really low volume of trading (lower than Friday) on both NYSE and NASDAQ.
Maybe its because Wall Street doesn’t give a damn about CES? Motorola and Nokia outlined their grand visions, and the stocks ended the day in red.
Microsoft managed less than one percent gain, and Qualcomm’s MediaFLO didn’t impress anyone. And to make matters worse, Samsung came out with a grim outlook. Even Apple didn’t go anywhere! Okay, its time to hit the sack - more from the Main Event in San Francisco tomorrow morning!
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Updated: 8.58 pm: A few minutes after we had ordered our dinner at Mehfil Restaurant in San Francisco’s SOMA district, Scott Rafer, chairman of Orlando, Florida-based MyBlogLog, checked his Blackberry Pearl, and broke into a smile.
An unusually intense man, it was an unusual sight to see him smile. He typed out his response, and asked his lady friend to press the little Pearl to send the email. “It’s done,” he said, referring to the sale of MyBlogLog to Yahoo.
Though we have reported on the deal in the past, including this morning, when Marketing Shift reported that the deal was done, only to pull out the story a few hours later. I refrained from asking Rafer, who is a close friend. We normally don’t discuss business, the only reason our friendship has survived the trials of time. But this was special, and he shared his big news, though we had planned to have dinner almost a month ago.
Rafer declined to comment on the rumors about the price, and I didn’t press him for the details. Whatever the amount might be, it is clear that five-employee company (including Rafer) have done well, primarily because the company was completely boot strapped and raised zero dollars in angel or venture capital investment.
The team is going to join Yahoo and will be based in Berkeley and San Francisco and will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network. Most will report to Chad Dickerson, Sr. Director, Yahoo! Developer Network. This is part of Yahoo’s efforts to become increasingly social. Given how much effort Yahoo is putting on their Panama advertising platform, there must be some publisher-advertising angle to this deal, something we will discuss with Yahoo executives at the next opportunity.
More than the actual deal, it is the company’s past that makes it an interesting story. It was nearly eight months ago when I met Eric Marcoullier at yet another dinner with Rafer.
Marcoullier, who is based in Orlando, Florida had started the company with Todd Sampson in 2005. The two are fifth grade buddies. Eric had been trying to get bloggers to use his traffic measurement tool, though for some odd reason I did not bite. Rafer had contacted him via LinkedIn, and convinced them that they were sitting on a bigger opportunity than plain traffic measurement business.
Rafer suggested the company become a distributed social network, an idea that has been championed by Josh “Da Konnector” Kopelman of First Round Capital. Kopelman was one of the investors in Feedster, Rafer’s previous start-up, that is apparently limping along despite numerous setbacks. Soon there after, the MyBlogLog widgets started to show up on blogs, and a certain buzz started to form around the company. Since then 45,000 folks have signed up for the service, which is described as a blog-based social network.
In Fall 2006, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Josh Kopelman hosted many start-ups in his private suite, and it was here he introduced MyBlogLog to some of the Yahoo folks, and soon the rumors of a pending deal started to fly. However, it was only this evening that the deal closed.
Footnote: This just might be one of the first few virtual company acquisition. One of the founders lived in Massachusetts, while another called Orlando his home, along with two other developers. Rafer lives in San Francisco. And they met on LinkedIn. Yup, something for our friends on Web Worker Daily to chew on!
Photo by Chasse Carroll
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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The madhouse that is the opening day of CES is over and one thing is clear – CES has become more and more about mobile devices. Yeah, it’s always been a well tread topic at the show, but as faster and bigger wireless networks come online and the always-on mobile broadband connection becomes a reality, the main events and gadgets across the CES show floor are following suit.
Gates pushed the point last night, and the two morning keynotes on the first day were from the chiefs of the world’s largest mobile phone makers, Nokia’s Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and Motorola’s Ed Zander (check out our latest Flickr photos).
Zander and Kallasvuo both dished a flow of new devices and services from the companies. The ra-ra fest is just what the companies need to help them forget about some of the clouds that have appeared in the mobile phone market — slower than desired growth in matured markets where sales are replacement phones, while emerging markets are growing well but buying up cheap phones.
Zander used the morning to talk about how Motorola would help consumers take their music and media with them wherever they are through the company’s mobile phones and digital living room devices. “Content moves with you,” he said and tried to illustrate the point by riding around the stage on a yellow bike decked out with a mobile charger. Later he demoed the company’s place shifting FollowMeTV technology, which allows users to view video, pictures and music in the living room on devices like digital cable receivers and on mobile phones.
On the music front Zander announced a partnership with Warner Music for the company’s mobile service and showed off the MOTORIZR Z6, a Linux-based music phone. Like Nokia did earlier this year, Motorola is pushing a music platform with both services and devices, and betting music will help sell its gear.
Kallasuvuo’s keynote was up second and on a slightly smaller stage at the Hilton, but filled with some sweeter devices. The company has been focusing on converged devices and recasting its phones as multimedia mobile computers for awhile, and today showed more of this plan. Kallasuvuo displayed the N93i video phone, an upgrade to the N93 we’ve been playing with, but the new one has Six Apart’s blogging service Vox integrated. Kallasuvuo said on mobile blogging and Web 2.0, “It’s the mobile device that will become the main way for people to participate in those communities.”
Kallasuvuo also showed off the N76, an eye candy slim phone, which he called “truly beautiful,” and the next version of its Wi-Fi-based Internet tablet the N800, which we can’t wait to check out. He mentioned that Nokia and Skype will develop a mobile Skype experience over the N800. He also showed a near-field communication mobile payment phone, the 6131, which Nokia is using in trials in New York. Whew – that’s quite a line up.
The companies are both hoping that all the flashy new phones and services announced this morning will help bring them the pickup they’ve been needing. Last week Motorola said its fourth quarter sales and earnings would be lower than it had previously forecast after slower sales of phones. That sent Moto’s shares down the most in more than four years (according to Bloomberg) and took Nokia stock in its down draft. Nokia’s third quarter earnings fell a bit while its sales rose, partly due to a drop in average phones prices, from a growing demand for cheap phones in countries like India.
Don’t get me wrong, sales of mobile phones are growing every year, and totaled 251 million units sold in the third quarter of 2006, according to Gartner — that’s a 21.5 percent increase from the same period last year. But the companies are in a bit of a bind. Matured mobile markets like many European countries, Japan and Korea and the U.S. are mostly buying replacement phones — a harder place to get growth. Emerging mobile markets like India and China are buying up phones quickly but it’s largely low cost handsets.
It’s a squeeze that the companies hope can partly be overcome by fancy handsets with features for music, the web, and video, among other things, that will convince consumers who already own a phone to get a new one. That’s one of the reasons why we get all these nifty new phones and services at CES every year.
Photos via Flickr
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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After much speculation (including a blog post I wrote yesterday), Yahoo finally acquired MyblogLog for $12- $10-million, according to Om Malik. Obviously, Yahoo put MyBlogLog in play last month when the rumors of its interest started to percolate. Of course, it didn’t hurt MyBlogLog’s M&A prospects that its social networking/community tool started to gain a lot of momentum in recent weeks judging by the number of widgets that started to pop up on peoples’ blogs. To be clear, MyBlogLog has some interesting features but it’s not much of a business given its only source of revenue is a statistics package that costs $3 a month or $25 a year, which competes against free services such as Google Analytics, Performancing and Sitemeter.
Yahoo is proving be an even better dream-maker for Web 2.0 start-ups than Google given the number of small acquisitions (Flicker, Blo.gs, Bix, Jumpcut). The question is what is Yahoo going to do with all these different pieces other than try to drive these users to other Yahoo services? And whatever happened to the Peanut Butter Manifesto?
Update: Om Malik has more details here. For some insight into MyBlogLog’s revenue potential and traffic, Fred Wilson had some thoughts last month. Mathew Ingram wonders out loud what Yahoo intends to do with MyBlogLog, which he highlights raised zero venture capital.
Technorati Tags: M&A, Web 2.0
Written by Mark Evans on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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CNN Money reports that The Wall Street Journal says Apple has selected Cingular Wireless to provide wireless service for a new Apple-branded cellphone.
WSJ rarely gets it wrong. I tend to believe…
When Steve Jobs delivers his Macworld Expo keynote, we'll know more.
One question: will such a phone cannibalize iPod sales?
Written by Russell Shaw on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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At Skype's CES 2007 press conference this morning, there were three major announcements:
- Confirmation of the partnership with Nokia whereby the initial offering will result in Skype as the centerpiece for handling Internet-enabled conversations on the new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. While the N800 is available today, the Skype participation will be an upgrade expected in the early summer timeframe.
- Initial availability via retail channels of the first "PC-free" Skype Dual Mode Cordless Phones which require a direct broadband Internet connection (and the traditional PSTN connection) while handling both Skype and PSTN calls.
- A new line of Desktop Internet Phones with a larger LCD display that again can be directly connected to a broadband router to make calls.
The Skype Dual Mode Cordless phones comprise a base station that supports up to four remote handsets via DECT technology to avoid interference from WiFi networks while providing enhanced sound quality. Participating at this morning's press conference were representatives of both NetGear and Phillips but we can expect to see similar products from additional hardware partners over the next few months.
With these phones one can place handsets around the home, providing both presence information and Skype access from any location within the home. They have the potential to significantly change the calling dynamics within the family or a group of friends. One U.K.-based Skype employee had already provided these phones to his brother in the U.S. and his mother in Denmark such that mom could see the availability of either of her sons at any time and just pick up any handset in the house to make a call.
Since they operate independently of any PC, both the Dual Mode Cordless Phones and the Desktop Internet Phones eliminate any interference during Skype calls caused by using Skype on a Windows-based PC where other applications, such as Outlook, have the potential to disrupt a call while carrying some activity such as downloading email.
When asked how they would differentiate their products the NetGear representative referred to their user ergonomics and compatibility with other NetGear products to provide a positive customer experience while the Phillips representative talked about how they had incorporated Phillips' experience with voice quality enhancement using sealed acoustic chamber technology and unique DSP (digital signal processing) algorithms.
With suggested retail pricing of US$229 (NetGear) and US$169 (Phillips) these two products will soon be available at the Skype store as well as via their traditional retail channel partners.
(Once the Skype press releases are available on the Skype website, links to the various announcements will be added to this post.)
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Written by Skype Journal on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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My trip to CES in Las Vegas started last night in a most interesting way. At the gate, I noticed a fellow with a Dell, and a headset. I asked him if he was talking over Skype, and what I got was several stories about how wonderful Skype as a tool for family communication over [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Cable tv publication Multichannel News reports that gunshot damage to Comcast's fiber-optic main service line took down cable service for some 7,500 customers in Palm Beach county, Florida.
Service disruptions lasted from New Year's Eve until early on January 3. Some 20 separate nodes were affected.
It wasn't an overly ticked-off customer (as if) but drunken revelers. Reportedly, [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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There's a type of strange, counterintuitive faddishness at this year's Consumer Electronics Show that to me, defies all manner of logic.
Since few if any other bloggers will speak out about it, I view it as my role to do so.
I am referring to rampant, contagious "platformitis-" the mad rush to enable all types of video [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Reading the press release last night was a head-scratcher moment deluxe: Vonage is getting into the business of selling Wi-Fi? What, they don’t have enough scars from taking on incumbents in voice, now they’re going to butt heads over Internet access as well?
During a Monday morning phone call, we tried to talk some sense into Vonage chairman Jeffrey Citron, but he refused to be dissuaded. Bundling Wi-Fi will make it easier for customers to sign up for Vonage VoIP, he said. And if they are already Vonage customers? Lower acquisition costs, Citron replied.
Maybe it was the fuzzy connection (Citron said he was calling from one of the noisy show-floor booths Vonage has at CES, left), but we still weren’t convinced that reselling EarthLink’s not-so-fast Wi-Fi would be such a big bonus for Vonage. Since Citron couldn’t give us any pricing for potential service bundles — or specs on a promised Wi-Fi phone — it was hard to judge how much Wi-Fi might be able to add to Vonage’s shaky bottom line.
In our haste, we forgot to ask Mr. Citron how the added costs for ISP service and support would impact any broadband profits — since Vonage has had trouble scaling support just for VoIP in the recent past. But I bet it’s one we hear asked at the next quarterly call.
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Written by Paul Kapustka on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Seldom has a company gotten more ink for delivering so little as OQO, a San Francisco start-up that is building an ultra-ultra portable PC that is increasingly becoming pointless. “Our main goal is to reinvent the PC in a pocketable form,” Jory Bell, Oqo co-founder tells the New York Times.
Oops, someone already did that! HTC and their Qwerty-keyboard capable Windows Mobile smart phone devices are cheaper and have longer battery life than OQO. Their future models are getting even more powerful. Windows Mobile is slowly overcoming most of its shortcomings and is becoming a stable-and-viable mobile OS option. OQO might have missed their window of utility.
“OQO Delivers World’s First Ultra Mobile PC With Integrated Mobile Broadband Service Powered by Sprint,” their press release screams. Scroll down and you find out a brand new meaning for delivers:
The soon [WHEN] to be released OQO model 02 will be available at http://www.oqo.com/store, through OQO’s enterprise sales team, and through channel partners. To be notified of product availability, please sign up at http://www.oqo.com/.
Between “delivers” and actual “delivery” lies the window of missed opportunity.
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Just out of Skype press conference at CES.
The most interesting product info stuff:
NETGEAR Dual-Mode Cordless Phone with Skype (SPH200D)- connects simultaneously to a home network router and a phone line jack. This enables users to place and receive PSTN and Skype calls from a single cordless handset without the need for a PC tether.
Philips VoIP841 [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Okay my VoIP start up friends! If you got something exciting and new - product, service or even a feature - you are eligible to enter the ETel Launch Pad, which is going to be held as part of ETel, the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. The event will be part of ETel’s opening ceremony on Tuesday evening, February 27, 2007.
ETel Launch Pad is co-organized with yours truly and co-produced by GigaOm. Entries will be accepted through Monday, January 22, 2007. You can submit your entry here. You want to get more details about the event, you can go here, or read all about it on the ETel Blog.
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Live from CES in Las Vegas, special correspondent Kevin Restivo (aka my Talking Tech podcasting partner) has some thoughts about Microsoft’s efforts to win over bloggers and podcasters. Take it away, Kevin.
Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to win over notoriously critical bloggers and podcasters this weekend in Las Vegas. The software giant, which is fighting to make gains in the Web 2.0 world, flew 60 bloggers and podcasters to a two-day conference called Featured Communities Vista Lab 2007. Microsoft also flew in renowned photographer Art Wolfe to give a lecture on digital photography, and gave attendees a signed copy of Wolfe’s latest book, which sells for a cool $125. Oh, and some guy named Bill Gates addressed the group on Sunday morning.
The conference comes on the heels of a controversial giveaway, which saw Microsoft give away Acer Ferrari notebook computers pre-loaded with the Vista to about 90 bloggers (including Mark) And ya, there was some actual talk about software and new Web 2.0 services.
Web surfers looking for directions will probably appreciate two new services, called Virtual Earth 3D and Local Live that were previewed for the group yesterday. At first glance, they don’t seem to be ‘me-too’ services. Virtual Earth, for example, lets you cruise through 15 U.S. cities in 3D fashion. Canadians can still use the service but only in 2D format. Microsoft hopes to include detailed 3D mapping for other Canadian and U.S. cities over the next year.
All told, the company’s weekend efforts seem to have paid off with positive posts and lots of general gushing during the sessions.
Update: Microsoft unveiled the Home Server this morning. At first glance, it seems very cool, especially for people who have multiple computers that they access over a home network. The idea of a single repository for all things digital can only be a good thing. To be honest it’s something I expect from Google given all the talk about the company putting together a service that syncs your bookmarks, digital photos and music across the Web. For other views, check out 10 and Jeremy Wright, who sees a bright future for porn within Home Sever - Mark Evans
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Written by Mark Evans on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Like clockwork, every twelve months Bill Gates gets up on stage and delivers a keynote at the CES, outlining his vision of the future, demoing products and PowerPoint-ing his way through a wide array of products.
He takes a few well deserved swipes at His Jobsness. The undercurrent in his big speech - Microsoft will be everywhere in the future. To hammer in the point, he meets with bloggers who don’t exactly ask the tough business questions. Somehow the future doesn’t happen.
This year was no different, though I have to admit, Microsoft’s vision does look quite tasty. Tasty enough, that this time it might actually happen. I am not holding my breath, just like I am not holding my breath for an Apple Phone, or an iTV box as part of Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote. Nevertheless, my opinion doesn’t really count, given my Mac bias, what do you folks think? Take our poll, and rank the chances of Microsoft domination of the digital future.
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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In the wake of Motorola’s disappointing fourth-quarter guidance, there wasn’t a lot of talk about the Motorola Q, which was positioned as yet another Blackberry-killer earlier this year. When the Q was launched, Motorola was bullishly talking about selling three million or four million units in 2006. While I haven’t seen any specific Q numbers, NPD Group recently issued a report that the Q was the top-selling smartphone from August to October, and overall there were 715,000 units sold. According to Kenneth Leon, an analyst for Standard & Poor’s, Motorola’s wireless phone sales are flagging because the Razr is losing some of its buzz; while sales of the Q, may be slowing.
Technorati Tags: Blackberry, Wireless
Written by Mark Evans on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Earlier today Nokia, with over 850 million wireless handsets sold, announced a new partnership with Skype: From a Business Week report this morning:
Nokia said it will cooperate with eBay Inc.'s Skype telecommunications subsidiary to enable cell phone users to make calls over the Internet, particularly with its new N800 Internet Tablet, which allows wireless Skype connections.
The initial product resulting from this partnership is Skype integration into the new N800 which appears to be already available in the U.S. but will need an upgrade later this spring:
Skype said it will team up with Nokia with the N800, which is already commercially available in the U.S. and selected European countries. The updated version of the device with Skype features will be available by the end of first half of 2007, Nokia said.
It seems that pictures of the N800 have leaked out. We expect to hear more information about this device at the Skype press conference later this morning.
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Written by Skype Journal on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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This morning, Vonage announced a partnership with EarthLink that would involve resellng of EarthLink's municipal wireless services in several markets.
As one who has frequently maintained that Vonage needs to start offering bundled services to compete with its major broadband competitors, I recognize that this is a needed first step.
A first step, but barely a toe [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Ben Schachter, Internet Analyst at UBS Investment Research in a note to his clients outlined the prospects for Yahoo and Google in the coming year. The divergent fortunes of two web giants are aptly reflected in their hiring (and firing) forecasts.
- We believe there is a good chance of headcount reductions for Yahoo in 2007, or at least slowed hiring.
- While Google has more than doubled its headcount in the last year, we still expect very significant hiring in 2007. The company currently has almost 1,300 openings on its website for the U.S. alone.
Looks like Google is planning on making (and spending) a lot of money in 2007, though these kind of hiring numbers remind of another fast growing company…
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Written by Om Malik on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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