sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged with access + Technology-News
Open Sugar & Microsoft: End of OLPC As We Know It?
However great an idea it might have seemed when it was first conceived, the One Laptop Per Child project has never been something I’ve been able to wrap my head around. I’ve always felt, despite the backers’ good intentions, that it was being shoved down the throats of emerging economies with more dire needs, such as food, clean water and schools. I was dismissed as a naysayer by many, mostly for not grokking how computing can revolutionize nations. But I haven’t changed my mind. This project comes off like a vanity play for the elite, who perhaps can’t grok the meaning of living within minimal means.
That personal opinion aside, OLPC has also had its share of teething problems, as we have chronicled time and again. First it was met with strong opposition from folks like Intel, who went on to create their own rival platforms, mostly to disrupt the whole OLPC movement. At the same time, Moore’s Law brought about the rise of low-cost Internet devices like the ASUS EEE PC, which I think are only going to get cheaper as time goes by.
The biggest blows, however, are proving to be self-inflicted. Today OStatic notes that OLPC’s Open Sugar platform is going to be adopted for new hardware platforms by Sugar Labs, the new effort of OLPC former president Walter Bender and one where he is joined by many of the core Sugar developers.
I can’t help but wonder if there’s a link between Bender’s efforts at Sugar Labs and yesterday’s announcement that Windows XP is going to be available on OLPC machines and that Sugar will be ported over to Windows. (Yeah, right…not with most of the people off doing Sugar Labs.) The availability of Windows XP is different from what the people behind OLPC had set out to do — build a truly open, low-cost connected computing device for kids around the world. The press materials don’t make it clear how much Microsoft is going to pocket.
There are some who might point to the low-cost hardware — $180 a pop — as reason for people to buy OLPCs for kids in emerging economies, but how will these machines compete with low-end computers and Internet devices that will run using Intel’s Atom devices?
I think this is the end of OLPC as we know it, even though I’m sure that almost all of you would disagree with me.
Bonus Reading:
* What you can learn from the sad state of OLPC.
* The unintended consequences of OLPC
Buffalo Can’t Roam But Still Charges Ahead
Patent lawsuits always seem to be one of two things: Little more than a slight annoyance, or a business-ending death blow. Rarely does the tech world see companies who resemble Timex watches in their ability to take a patent lickin’ and keep on tickin’. But the U.S. headquarters of Buffalo Inc. is one such entity.
In Japan, the company reports sales of about $1.3 billion a year. Yet it generates a mere $100 million of revenue out of the U.S., where it offers four types of products, two of which (Wi-Fi routers and flash memory devices) it currently can’t sell because of court injunctions. Another line — multimedia — is new, with the first product due to hit the shelves in June. Its best-performing line is storage, which is profitable despite the fact that the company buys the basic drives from its competitors. All in all, it reads like a prime candidate for business failure. But so far, Buffalo is making it work.
Let’s start with wireless, since the story there is pretty simple. Four years ago, Buffalo started selling 802.11n routers in the U.S., going up against Linksys, D-Link and Netgear. As the smallest player in the market it was first hit with a patent infringement lawsuit from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Last year, a court sided with the Australian firm and ordered an injunction against Buffalo’s routers, despite protest (and amicus briefs) from Netgear, 3Com, Atheros, Dell, Intel and others. The case is being appealed, but in the meantime Buffalo can’t sell Wi-Fi devices in the U.S. and the 802.11n IP is still up in the air.
Patent cases have stymied Buffalo in its flash memory business as well. Last month Buffalo stopped selling USB drives and memory cards (its first line of business in the U.S., which it acquired over a decade ago), due to a patent infringement lawsuit filed by SanDisk against it and several other industry players.
Legal fun aside, Buffalo has established itself as a well-regarded provider of storage for the small- to medium-sized business market and, to a lesser extent, consumers. Buffalo has a pretty loyal following for its network-attached storage products, but the company has to purchase the hard drives from rival firms Seagate and Western Digital since, like other smaller storage vendors, Buffalo doesn’t manufacture its own. Making hard drives is a competitive business where economies of scale are important.
Buffalo adds applications and other features to its storage products to make them more compelling at what is generally a higher price point than those offered by Seagate and Western Digital, but storage is a commodity product, one in which cost-per-gigabyte is a customer’s primary consideration. Regardless, Buffalo makes money on each of its storage devices, so while the fact that its success in storage puts money into the pockets of its competitors pocket is galling, it doesn’t signal the end of that business for the firm.
Storage and its single product for multimedia streaming (wired, because it can’t sell wireless in the U.S. right now) are the cards Buffalo currently has to play, and the Austin, Texas-based Buffalo USA intends to play them for all it’s worth. Patent fights or no.
Bill Gates Dishes on Physics, Internet TV, Net Neutrality
Bill Gates spoke at Stanford today, gathering a crowd because a) he’s Bill Gates, and b) he’s about to retire. Microsoft had just announced it would be giving students developer and designer software for free. Gates said that besides his philanthropic commitments, he’ll continue to stay involved in Microsoft’s work on natural user interface (e.g. Wii, iPhone, and Microsoft Surface-like devices) and the structure of knowledge, “and really take on the big frontiers of software.” Some quotes that caught my ear:
- “How many universities should have to give lectures on subjects like physics? The answer is: very few.”
- “A form factor that I’m a big believer in, that I’m excited to keep investing in so we can bring it to the mainstream, is the tablet device.”
- “Today there’s a few million people who are getting their TV through Internet feeds. It’s just a spectrum of content. Many of the things that will be available in TV in terms of watching, talking with your friends…things we see more today in the video game world.”
- “Today we’re still very device-centric — as we get this unlimited power in the cloud, the ability to move that data automatically will become commonplace.”
- “I don’t see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet.”
Viruses Are Spreading — Is My Chumby Next?
Folks over at SANS have warned of a recent antivirus update that blocks access to servers and generates lots of false positives. One system administrator at a large financial services firm told us, on condition of anonymity, that the new Trend Micro pattern file took down 300 systems within his organization.
“A pattern file caused slower performance for users attempting to access large files,” was all Christina Sarracino, a media contact at Trend, would tell us. So it’s unclear why people are reporting that the patch affected Oracle and Domino servers. Trend also wouldn’t explain what kinds of testing their patches undergo before release (though as a security firm, that’s probably a good thing.) Trend fixed the problem, which existed in a patch released on Feb. 12, with two patch updates later that day.
In the face of computer security threats, the world has automated all its security, from antivirus checking to spyware scanning to OS updates. And each of us has dozens of computing devices around us every day, from iPhones to Internet Tablets to game consoles. The bad guys have a lot more connected devices in which to hide their code.
Back in January, Marcus Sachs of the Internet Storm Center told The Register that “trying to (infect a product) all the way back at the factory…would be pretty hard to do.” Well, it didn’t take long. Late last month, Insignia, a maker of digital picture frames, announced that some of its frames had been infected with a virus in the manufacturing process.
Today the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting on a particularly nasty piece of malware that runs on frames and is designed to harvest personal data. Many of the higher-end frames connect to the Internet to pull photos down from photo-sharing sites, so they’re a good target too.
Is my Chumby next?
Microsoft Reorg Memos; What is SPAG
Someone at Microsoft needs a lesson in acronym creativity. While sifting through all the memos that were sent out by Microsoft honchos outlining the executive reorg, I came across Search, Portals, and Advertising Group (SPAG), a division that is going to be led by Satya Nadella. This is the group which gets the beleaguered MSN, till recently led by Steve Berkowitz, formerly of Ask.com. That is one nasty sounding acronym if you ask me.
There have been lot of questions about what Brian McAndrews’ role going forward. According to a memo-sent by Kevin Johnson, former CEO of aQuantive will continue to lead “the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Group (APS). As we implement the next phase of our integration plan, Brian will pick up additional responsibilities for online advertising sales, marketing, support, and all publisher business development.”
The Microsoft Memos Sent Out Today By:
2500 Hulu Beta Invites up for Grabs
Hulu has come a long way from its genesis as a “YouTube killer” pie-in-the-sky idea earlier this year. It survived Om’s “NewCo Wreck Watch” to earn a mea culpa and a “brilliant” assessment from our acerbic founder. But the video site — which features mostly NBC and FOX TV shows in full-length streamable glory — is still only available to a limited group of U.S.-only testers (albeit with some back-door ways to experience its content).
Well, Hulu’s not opening up today, but they’re doing something nice. The company contacted us to give away some 2,500 beta invites to U.S.-based NewTeeVee and GigaOM readers. Apparently all you have to do is go to this site and enter your email address. So what are you waiting for? Go check it out.
(Cross-posted at NewTeeVee.)
The Sound of One Palm Flopping
The good news for Palm is that it met its second-quarter numbers Tuesday afternoon. OK, it met the estimates it made only a couple of weeks ago, which were substantially lower than its earlier guidance. That revision sent Palm’s stock tumbling 19 percent in less than a day. So the good news is really just that things didn’t get worse.
Except for one thing: According to Palm, things are getting worse.
In the current quarter, Palm is now expecting revenue of between $310 million and $320 million, below the $358 million analysts had been looking for. It sees a net loss between 14 cents and 16 cents a share, a good deal larger than analysts’ average forecast of a 4-cent loss.
But wait — maybe there’s good news in all this: Palm investors won’t have to suffer through any more depressing cycles of lower and lower financial guidance. That’s because, as Palm said in announcing its results for the quarter ended Nov. 20, “The company will suspend specific financial guidance in future quarters, but will continue to provide general business guidance and comments on industry trends.”
Forget about shooting the messenger, Palm has chosen instead to shoot the message. I suppose this can’t really be taken as good news either, unless you are a big believer that no news is good news.
How did investors react to all this news? They sent Palm’s stock down 73 cents in after-hours trading Tuesday evening. And again, this doesn’t sound too terribly bad, until you consider that Palm’s stock has traded in the single digits since paying a $9-a-share special dividend to shareholders in October. A 73-cent drop meant it Palm lost an eighth of its market value.
Palm, of course, is in the midst of a turnaround, and Wall Street is well-acquainted with its problems — the fizzle that was Foleo, the sore need for a revamped platform for its devices, the sale of a quarter of the company to Elevation Partners and the accompanying board and management overhauls.
Given all that, most investors were content to give the new Palm at least a few quarters to right itself. Even so, amid such diminished short-term expectations, the quarterly numbers it reported this week managed to disappoint. The damage was done, in part, by a delay in Palm’s Treo 755, a move which may have hurt its chances for strong holiday sales. One has to wonder if maybe this turnaround could end up taking longer than expected.
Then there’s the sustained attack from Research In Motion’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone. Much can be said about those formidable competitors, but I’ll let the two images below tell the story. The first is the Google Trends chart for the Palm, iPhone and Blackberry.
The second is a stock chart of their three respective manufacturers.
Turning a company around is one thing, but catching up to two of the hottest gadget makers in history is another. Palm can do it through innovation, as it has shown in the past. But going up against not just one, but two other innovation success stories will take some doing.
ComVentures, Velocity Play Let’s Make A Deal
Ross Levinsohn and Jon Miller’s investment vehicle, Velocity Investment Group, that launched with much fanfare earlier this year, with backing from General Atlantic, a big East Coast hedge fund, has been working hard to close some deals in Silicon Valley, but they had nothing to announce so far. So instead, they announced that Velocity is merging with Palo Alto-based venture firm, ComVentures, and the combined entity is going to be called Velocity Interactive Group. Venture Beat had first reported the likelihood of this development back in October 2007.
“We have been involved with ComVentures on deals informally and this makes it more formal, where we also administer the fund,” Levinsohn said. Levinsohn is the former President of Fox Interactive. Jon Miller ran AOL for Time Warner. As part of the deal — three ComVentures partners David Britts, Keyur Patel and Roland Van der Meer are going to join Miller and Levinsohn. The new fund will use $1.5 billion or so in capital and invest in digital media companies exclusively. Two ComVentures’ partners - Michael Rolnick and Jeb Miler - are “moving on.” This is a good deal for ComVentures, which has lost its halo after the telecom bust. The new name can paper over any lingering issues.
In a long chat earlier today, Levinsohn said that one of the main lessons of past one year has been that the private equity styled investments don’t exactly make sense in pre-revenue pre-profit start-ups, Velocity was trying to acquire. In other words, the deals were too complex for Silicon Valley.
Levinsohn said that the media business including Hollywood is in a state of flux and this is an opportunity for a fund with both media and technology skills to build the next generation of digital media companies. He said he has been meeting a bunch of writers, talent agencies and even studios and they are all interested in digital media.
“It is safe to say everyone is freaked out,” he said. “The traditional media guys are trying to understand digital and at the same time you have venture guys who are trying to understand media.” Silicon Valley VC funds have been making frequent trips to Hollywood and trying to put the VC dollars to work. Only recently we heard of a new fund being cooked up by DFJ and talent agency, Creative Arts Agency.
The new Velocity Interactive Group is going to make some video content related investments, Levinsohn said. Mobile video, content delivery networks and even storage qualify as “digital media” in his books. VIG’s current portfolio includes NDTV Networks is India’s first and largest private producer of current affairs and entertainment content both online and on television and IndiaTV, another Indian media company headquartered just outside of Delhi, India. Their US portfolio includes Fabrik, a storage company, Doppelganger and Mixercast that is developing multimedia mash-up service.
Reader Question: 700 MHz & The Buildout
Earlier this morning I received an email from one of our readers who had some questions about the 700 MHz auction and the high cost of the infrastructure buildout that someone like Google might have to undertake in order to roll out their own network. His question:
TV broadcasters have been broadcasting 700 mhz signals from their local tv stations for decades. The buildings and towers to send the downstream signal. Which means the infrastructure is already in place to cover the country minus the backhaul/upstream gear? Couldn’t Google (and Apple together, perhaps) buy the backhaul gear and have it installed at these stations and create ad revenue sharing agreements with the owners of these stations?
Given that two networks — broadcast and broadband — will be used for very different purposes, there is a need for new gear. The only thing they share is the slice of the spectrum. Anyway, I decided to put his question out to you, hoping that you can give him more insight into this topic.
Optical Breakthrough Can Shrink SuperComputers
An IBM research team has developed a new kind of optical modulator that converts a digital electrical signal carried on a wire into a series of light pulses that can be carried on a silicon nanophotonic waveguide. Essentially what this means is that going forward, a series of multicore computer chips could be connected via these modulators.
The new technology aims to enable a power-efficient method to connect hundreds or thousands of cores together on a tiny chip by eliminating the wires required to connect them. Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores can be 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires.
To see how it works, check out the video:
Giant supercomputers of today will, in the future, shrink in size, thanks to this development. Or perhaps we have humongous computing power in our laptops. From a broadband perspective, we can think about putting optical routing on a chip, lowering costs and power requirements, and have a major impact in terms of boosting bandwidth.
The Portable Risk of High Capacity USB Drives
I was recently leading a session for the Panorama Capital CIO Council, a group of about 25 Fortune 500 CIOs with which we meet twice a year, when the topic of securing enterprise data arose. The CIOs were not, however, talking about data security that can be solved by using products like firewalls, spam filters, malware gateways or data loss prevention appliances.
Instead, the hot topic was the security risk of data leaving the enterprise via portable USB disk drives shoved into workers’ pants pockets. USB disk drives are a cheap and convenient way to move data off your computer — much easier than taking a laptop or hard disk drive. They are also the fastest and surest way to give a CIO a security headache.
Today, USB disk drives of up to 16 gigabytes in size are available. That size will undoubtedly grow over the next few years; some predict they’ll reach at least 128 gigabytes, larger than the hard disk size on many of today’s laptops. That’s a lot of documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other confidential data walking around on keychains and in backpacks and laptop cases.
The size of USB disk drives, however, is not what sends shivers down the spines of the CIOs on our council, but the fact that a vast majority of these drives will be totally unsecured, open and accessible to anyone who happens upon them. The number of potentially risky scenarios that come to mind are suddenly endless, among them employees that load their disk drive in order to take their work home, police officers that transfer files from a laptop in a patrol car to the station house, lawyers who transfer case documents, and so on. To make matters worse, some of the newer USB disk drives, such as the Sandisk Cruzer, can hold not just a user’s files but their entire workspace environment.
A number of remedies to this security concern are now entering the marketplace but none of them, according to our CIOs, are yet in widespread use. Devices such as SafeBoot PortControl (recently acquired by McAfee) and DeviceLock prevent access by disabling the physical USB ports altogether. Microsoft is apparently developing a similar technology, one that will allow for Active Directory entries to restrict USB devices on a per-user and group basis. These methods may prove an effective, albeit Draconian, way of solving the problem.
Another remedy is to require a password to access the USB disk drive. But passwords are a notoriously weak security mechanism that require user diligence and maintenance, something not commonly seen in the real world. Further, due to corporate governance and compliance issues, CIOs are looking to secure data using at least two-factor authentication. Even the Executive Office of the President wrote a memo last June requiring two-factor authentication for remote access of information, including data contained on portable storage devices.
The encryption of data on a USB disk drive appears to be the next wave of security coming to these devices; Kingstons DataTraveler Secure Privacy Edition and Ironkey seem to have good products in this area. But this mechanism alone does not satisfy the two-factor authentication requirement. Ironkey is also working to solve the two-factor authentication issue using their USB disk drives combined with their online services.
Are you involved with securing your corporate data and if so, are you worried about the insecurity of USB disk drives and how their use can bypass all of the corporate security that you have worked so diligently to put in place?
Allan Leinwand is a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.
Security
access
Enterprise
random
USB
drives
Technology-News
The Team Is People Too
Anne Zelenka, who writes about Web 2.0 topics for us, has a very thoughtful follow-up to
my post about teams and individual bloggers on on her personal blog. “It’s a natural tendency to limit exactly who we grant personhood and individuality too,” she writes, eloquently describing how people view the folks who make up a team.
In other words, the team is people too. Which is why group blogs as a business are still written by people — very passionate people. I am thankful for my team — each and everyone of them, and this Thanksgiving Day, in addition to my family, I’ll be thanking the good lord for bringing each one of them into my life.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
How Amazon Could Kindle Some Interest in E-books
Wouldn’t it have been cool if Amazon built an e-book reader so inexpensive they could almost give it away for free, then make money by selling e-books for people to read on it (or selling upscale versions of the reader later)? Instead, they stuffed it so full of technological wizardry that it costs $399.
Most people have no idea if they’d really like to use an e-book reader or not. It may be something you just have to experience to grasp. But who’s going to experiment with electronic book reading when the price of entry is so high?
Newsweek’s Steven Levy reports that the Kindle goes 30 hours on a single charge, stores 200 books, and uses wireless connectivity based on EVDO so it operates completely independently of a PC. All cool, but not as cool as an e-book reader that demands only a small commitment of cash. An inexpensive Amazon-branded e-book reader could have been the star of this holiday season.
Disclosure: Our RSS feed is part of the Kindle device, and we are under NDA to comment about its features. We are going to wait till that NDA comes off. Newsweek has pretty much all the feature details in case you are interested. - Om
Mr. Coder, VMWare Wants Ya
Google, which has been battling Facebook for talent recently, is facing an attack from another source. VMWare, the server and PC virtualization company that went public this summer, is hiring all the engineers it can find. Ann Winblad, a general partner at venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, recently quipped:
“As much as we all love [VMWare CEO] Dianne Green, we have to figure out a way of stopping VMWare from hiring all the engineers in the Valley.”
VMWare (VMW), despite a recent slide in its stock price, has a hefty market cap of over $31 billion. Too bad they can’t virtualize the engineers! Who would you rather work for: Google, VMWare, Facebook — or someone else? (Take our poll below the fold.)
access
virtualization
random
Facebook
goog
vmw
Technology-News
Weekend Fun: On Facebook, Time Isn’t Money
How much time and money do you spend on Facebook? That was the question we recently asked those who installed the GigaOm Question of the Day app, that we launched on October 17. Over 80 people piped in and offered up gems like these:
- “Since time is money, then I’m spending to much of both.” — Tomas Nihlén (If time = money, what happens now that Facebook = $14 billion?)
Of our admittedly non-scientific survey, most people spent 15 - 30 minutes a day on Facebook, and no money. But the answers got us thinking how some other tech luminaries who have yet to join our group would answer the question: * “While I used to think it was a fad, for the past few weeks I’ve been on it constantly, you should see the 40,000 Microsoft employees friends I’ve forced into joining signed up. Oh, and I spent roughly $240 million on it. BOO-YAH! Suck on that Google!” — Steve Ballmer
“Facebook is dead to me.” — Sergey Brin
“What he said.” — Larry Page
“Mwah-ah-ah-ah-ah! (curls mustache) AHHH-ah-ah-ah!” — Mark Zuckerberg
“Give me 100 days and I’ll give you an answer.” — Jerry Yang
And now for our new Question of the Day: Does the new Mac OS X really growl? Or is it a disappointment?
Web 2.0 Summit: Zuckerberg Admits to Deal-Making
We’re at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, sitting on the floor in a room packed with people here to see Mark Zuckerberg kick off a strong first-day lineup. The Facebook CEO basically just admitted to the much-discussed Facebook $15 billion valuation financing, telling interviewer John Battelle: “It’s going well, we’ve almost wrapped things up.” Battelle was taken aback by the lack of “no comment,” and pressed his luck by noting that the meteoric valuation is “a lot.”
Zuckerberg’s coy, but informative response? “We’ll see.”
We’ll keep you posted.
A couple other quick bits, from responses to audience questions:
Question: Will you allow users to export their data?
Zuckerberg: We want to get there. We realize that this is a flaw within the system now and something we want to get out.
Question: What are the pros and cons of taking additional investment?
Zuckerberg: Taking money allows you to accelerate growth, it allows you to look at other opportunities that you wouldn’t have. Also, there are the standard cons as well.
10 New New Secret Questions
Have you ever wondered why the “secret questions” on everything from your bank account to email account all have a certain bland quality to them? Where were you born? What was your first school? Bo-ring.
We think it’s time for question writers to get a creative and come up with some more contemporary queries. We are seeding with 10 suggestions, but feel free to blog on your own site (TAG: Secret Questions) and link back here. Or just go nuts in our comments.
- How many stock options do you have? (How many are worth anything?)
- Who was your first online date? (Which service was it through?)
- What is your World of Warcraft name?
- What was the name of your first startup?
- What is your Facebook username?
- What was your first email address?
- What is your Google Page rank?
- When was the first time (year) you used Google?
- How many IM accounts do you have?
- When was the last time you went out on a date?
Bonus secret question (and answer):
- How many pounds have you lost since YouTube got acquired and you had to eat crow? 22 (18 to go.)
Update: Oracle Wants to Buy BEA Systems, BEA Wants More Money
Oracle (ORCL) continues on its enterprise software roll-up strategy. Having already gobbled up dozens of companies including PeopleSoft, it now has plans to buy BEA Systems (BEAS), offering $17 a share, or about $6.7 billion. Oracle offer is 25 percent higher than BEA’s recent closing price. Update: BEA, however, says that’s not good enough.
BEA has been under pressure lately from Carl Icahn, a corporate raider-turned-white knight. Icahn recently campaigned for management changes at Motorola (MOT) and Time Warner (TWX). He has 13% stake in BEA, which according to Dealbook cost him $663 million. That’s worth $871 million, if Oracle gets its way. Or a whopping $208 million in profit for Icahn in less than a month. Now that’s a good life!
Stuart Williams, Senior Analyst, with Technology Business Research gives a thumbs up to the deal:
BEA is a technology-focused firm that should find a good home inside Oracle. Oracle owns the software stack below the BEA middleware (OS and database), around BEA’s offerings (the complete Oracle Fusion Middleware suite), and above BEA’s offerings (applications). Oracle can integrate the BEA technology directly into the core of the Oracle stack, strengthening it, while at the same time removing a competitor and adding close to $1.4 billion in annual revenue to its coffers. TBR believes the potential acquisition is a strong win for Oracle. BEA will help Oracle as the company gears up to combat IBM for the leadership position in the middleware market.
Home Again, Naturally
After spending 11 hours in the plane (and another four hours in the airport and commuting to the Airports) I am finally home, completely wrecked and jet lagged. Nevertheless, the good news is that I have lots of good stuff to write about.
In case you were wondering why I was slacking off last week, I was actually reporting, and have to admit enjoying life in a real metro. Wow, London had this special buzz, which used to be sole purview of New York. Is London the new New York? (Travel tip: Virgin Atlantic is the only way to fly. The best flying experience thus far on transatlantic route.)
Among various articles planned, The State of The Euro Startup Scene, a video interview with Saul Klein, who is running Seedcamp, a European version of YCombinator, and an exclusive interview with Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom.
At FOWA, I met with some really cool companies, including XCalibre. (Read my post about them.) And of course there are updates on some of the more well known companies, like Jaiku. This is clearly going to be busy weekend!
Okay I am off to make some real coffee now, and see if I can push falling asleep for another six hours or so. Yankees are playing Cleveland, and not doing so well. Bummer!
Midnight Madness: Benjamins for iPhones in Manhattan
In New York this week for the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings, I was stranded without a crucial piece of Apple (AAPL) equipment and had to make an emergency run to the store tonight. I decided that with the time difference in my favor I’d go out and see my cousin’s friend’s band first, since she had told me the Fifth Avenue Apple Store is open 24 hours.
After cabbing over, I descended from the street, through the glass cube, and into the store shortly before 1 a.m. I was shocked to see that it was totally packed. I grabbed what I needed, got in line, and asked the guy in front of me what was going on at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday.”Oh, I’ve seen it this bad at 3 a.m.,” he replied. An Apple Store employee later said that it never, ever slows down. It took 15 minutes of waiting in line just to get to the counter.
So what is every in such a rush to buy in the middle of the night? iPhones. Five at a time. I started looking around and realized everyone else in line was clutching stacks of twenties. The guy in front of me had hundreds. “Where do you sell these?” I wanted to know. “Europe,” he said.
“But isn’t it incredibly expensive to use them there?” I asked. “Yeah, the data fees are crazy. But people still want to buy them, so that’s not my problem,” he replied. I asked the clerk who helped me if he had any idea how much money the store pulls in each night. He said he had no idea.
Maybe buying a phone at midnight and carrying fistfuls of cash around is just something busy, crazy New Yorkers do — who am I to judge!? However the experience made it clear to me that three months after the iPhone went on sale, things like unlocking, slow data rates, and high-ticket prices have yet to knock sense into people’s heads. The iPhone phenomenon is far from losing steam.
Photo #1:The checkout line snakes around as we wait to give Apple money.
Photo #2: A security guard stands watch over the Apple Store Fifth Avenue entrance.
First Facebook App Up For Sale On Ebay
A few months ago, a rash of Web 2.0 start-ups had put their projects (and assets) up for sale on eBay (EBAY). Some of them actually sold - like Kiko (for $258,100). Now it is the turn of Facebook App developers to put their wares under the hammer. Michael Zhang is selling his Logbook Facebook App. So far he has 21 bids and the top bid being $172. Why do I get a feeling that this isn’t the last Facebook app to list on eBay. Is this a sign of a coming top in the Facebook market?
Viacom Attempt At Cool, FLUX
Viacom, which was rumored to havebought Tag World announced its own social network, FLUX, which is essentially Tag World. It turns out they partnered up with Tagworld and invested in them, instead of outright buying them. I could say so much - instead we are letting the photo do the talking. Viacom’s octogenarian owner Sumner Redstone meets Entourage’s Adrian Grenier.
Vanity Fair (Re) Discovers Tech
You know things are getting downright frothy when Vanity Fair rediscovers technology and starts giving way too much attention to technology titans by including them in its annual New Establishment list. The bible of frivolous has out done itself this time; it has also included a new micro-list, The Next Establishment. Perhaps it couldn’t fit in more tech types in the big list.
The New Establishment’s top three are: Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs and the The Google Boys, in that order. Bill and Melinda come at #10, which makes you wonder: How many billions does a guy have to make and how much does he has to give away before he can top the list? The King of Latin Telecom and Fortune Magazine’s richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, (worth about $59 billion) ranks a cool #11.
Other tech notables: Larry Ellison (20), Jeff Bezos (23) Peter Chernin (24), Michael Moritz (56) and Vinod Khosla (62). As an aside, the New Establishment non-Caucasian representation: less than 5 percent.
The Next Establishment, however, is chock full of techies. Chris & Tom (MySpace), Janus Friis and Noklas Zennstrom (Skype), Brad Greenspan (ex-MySpace), Joi Ito, Markos Moulitas, Elon Musck (Paypal, Tesla), Evan Williams (Blogger), Danny Rimer (Index Ventures) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook.)
Vanity Fair’s list is an apt reflection on what is in vogue. Curmudgeons call it a market top, but I happen to be in good spirits these days.
PS: If there is a kind soul out there who has access to previous issues of Vanity Fair’s New Establishment, maybe they can give us a statistical breakdown of technology’s representation over the past seven years.
Review: Microsoft Mobile Memory Mouse 8000
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) today released the latest addition to its mouse lineup, the Mobile Memory Mouse 8000. Typically the release of a device is a non-event, but since I have been using this particular device for the past couple of days, I decided to share some thoughts about it before you spend your $99.
At first glance, the roundish shape of the mouse looks odd, but after you spend some time using it, you quickly come to appreciate the curves and how nicely they fit in your hand, as well as how seamlessly it allows you to use the extra buttons.
The aluminum-black look is pretty nice, and matches the Macbook (black) quite well. The higher profile of the mouse, however, is a bit of downer, especially if you have one of those slim-profile bags (like the one I carry.) It sticks out like a goitre.
The Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 works with a Mac right out of the box — in fact, it was easier to set up on a Macbook than on a Vista machine. And it bundles 1GB of memory with the transceiver, which plugs into the USB. That might be a nice add-on for some, but to me it doesn’t make much sense. I mean, who carries their mouse without a laptop?
The best feature of this mouse, from my perspective, is the recharging dongle, which attaches to the USB transceiver and charges the mouse. Just for those rare occasions when your mouse runs out of batteries.
Verdict: 6.5/10. Buy if you have $100 to spare. Otherwise, Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 7000 is a better bargain at $50. The extra $50 can buy you a 2-4 GB USB drive.
Jobs’ Mea Culpa is Apple’s Victory
Steve Jobs is sorry. He wants to give you $100 back for what you paid when you bought your iPhone too early. Provided, of course, you spend that $100 in one of his stores.
I disagree with Om on this. I get this feeling that this is exactly what Steve Jobs had planned all along? The chances are high that that extra $100 you would have saved, had the iPhone been appropriately priced to begin with, would have been spent outside an Apple (AAPL) store. Now it’s staying in Apple’s coffers. And Steve Jobs looks like a caring, responsive CEO who didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings.
So Apple wins again. Forget the news stories that say Apple cut its price because sales were sluggish. On Tuesday, iSuppli, a research firm, said nearly one in 50 mobile phones sold in the U.S. was an iPhone, and that Apple was on track to sell 4.5 million iPhones this year. Today, iSuppli reiterated that view:
The iPhone outsold all competing smart-phone and feature-phone models in the United States in July on an individual basis. iSuppli�s teardown research indicates that Apple was generating a robust hardware margin at its previous pricing, and will still be profitable at the new pricing.
I suspect the money Apple makes off the iPhone will be a wash: What it loses in the new discount it will easily make up in holiday-season volume. And it will end the year with an even higher market share in handsets.
But what about Apple’s stock? It fell to $132.93 this morning from a high of $145.73 Tuesday, a drop of nearly 9%. Again, the press has been quick to assert that Wall Street was disappointed with Jobs’ announcements yesterday, particularly the iPhone price cut. But look at the 5-day chart, and it’s clear that Apple is actually up. It was a classic case of buying the pre-announcement hype and selling on the news. It may even offer a last-chance to buy in at this level.
Over at Barron’s Tech Trader Daily, there is a nice summary of analyst’s preliminary reactions to the iPhone news. Bottom line, analysts were taken aback by the timing and the degree of the iPhone discount, but overall they remained “fairly enthusiastic” and few dared to lower their ratings or price targets.
Apple does not take pride in disappointing investors, and it may be that this iPhone discount, coming sooner rather than later, is a way of signaling that iPhone sales have been strong enough that it can lower prices without missing targets.
Seagate Sees Future in Application-Specific Drives
The hard disk drive is the Rodney Dangerfield of the technology industry: can’t get no respect. Despite being the key ingredient of everything from fat iPods to notebook computers and digital video recorders, the HDD business is treated with faint disdain.
Bill Watkins, the colorful and plain-talking chief executive office of Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate Technology (SEG) knows it all too well, and is doing his best to overcome the commodity challenge. As a guest of the debut episode of The GigaOM Show he lamented the kamikaze tactics of his overseas rivals and lack of profits