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All posts tagged ‘mobile’

Monday, September 8, 2008

NBC Drops Silverlight, Runs Back to Adobe for Flash

Corvida

NBC seems to be having a change of heart this week. The network recently wrapped up its streaming of the Olympics using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. However, if you tuned in for this week’s NFL season opener, NBC was using Adobe’s Flash technology instead of Silverlight–a fact that made some do a double take. Here’s a look at why NBC left Silverlight in a flash (pun intended).

As we stated, NBC took a chance on Silverlight to stream the Olympic ceremonies for online and mobile viewers. While this was a great opportunity for Microsoft to promote its Silverlight platform, it wasn’t enough for NBC.

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

VoIP Goes Mobile

Olga Kharif

Scott Goldman uses his mobile phone to call friends and business contacts all over the world, from Britain to Australia. But the Southern California-based consultant doesn’t pay a dime in international tolls to his mobile-phone carrier, AT&T, the biggest in the U.S. Instead, Goldman places the international portion of the calls–roughly 100 minutes a month–through a service called Gorilla Mobile that relies on Internet-based technology to route wireless calls virtually toll-free. Goldman, a user of Apple’s iPhone, estimates that he saves hundreds of dollars a year with Gorilla’s service. He stands to cut wireless bills even more by signing up for another, iCall, that’s due for the iPhone in the coming weeks

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Atom Could Be Intel’s Little Engine That Could

Therese Poletti

At Intel Corp.’s big developer conference this week, the chip giant was extolling the virtues of its newest little chip, called the Atom. The Atom has surprised both company executives and analysts with its popularity among hardware makers. The chip was introduced in March and is aimed at an emerging market of very low-cost mobile devices, especially in developing countries.

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Apple: Pacific Crest Sees Rising Cash Flow From iPhone

Tiernan Ray

Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves released a note this morning with a bunch of data points showing the rising importance of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone in Internet usage. And he implies that the current value of the shares could be closer to $184 than the current $176.15 at which the stock trades.

Hargreaves writes that based on data from privately held Internet measurement firm Net Applications, of Viejo, Calif., the Safari Web browser shipped on the iPhone accounts for .3 percent of all world-wide Web surfing in August so far, double its share in June, prior to the introduction of the iPhone 3G. “iPhone’s rapid share gains in Internet usage suggest potential upside to current estimates,” writes Hargreaves, “and are a strong indicator of what we believe are lasting competitive advantages.” He goes on: “As Web-based software and services become more ingrained in our every-day working and personal lives, Apple’s emerging advantage in the mobile Internet will, in our view, become increasingly valuable.”

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Virgin Mobile Q2 Sub Losses Not as Bad as Forecast

Eric Savitz

Virgin Mobile (VM) posted Q2 revenue this afternoon of $317.4 million and profits of 7 cents a share, better than the Street consensus of $314 million and 2 cents. The company posted net service revenue of $291.4 million, in line with its forecast of $285 million to $295 million. Virgin had adjusted EBITDA of $32.3 million in the quarter, better than its forecast level of $19 million to $23 million. The company lost 111,000 net subscribers in the quarter, less than its forecast of 130,000 to 160,000.

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Thursday, May 15, 2008

At the Churchill Club: The Top 10 Tech Trends

Eric Savitz

I’m at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif., tonight, for the Churchill Club’s annual Top 10 Tech Trends Dinner. This is the club’s 10th annual tech trend panel. Making the picks:

  • Steve Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
  • Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures.
  • Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital.
  • Roger McNamee, Elevation Partners.
  • Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners.
  • Tony Perkins, of Always On, is the moderator.

Perkins, McNamee, Jurvetson and Schoendorf have done this before. Kopelman and Khosla are the panel newbies.

Lots of mobile phone predictions. Green energy. Water. And more phones.

Here’s the pundits’ list of trends, with some responses from their fellow panelists.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Pivot: RIP… What Can We Learn?

Shelly Palmer

Last week, three of the nation’s largest cable companies quietly pulled the plug on a joint cellphone venture with Sprint Nextel Corp. called Pivot. The goal of this service offering was to help the cablers compete with the Telco Triple Play (video, voice and data). In theory, a Quadruple Play (video, voice, data plus a mobile phone) would seal the deal and make the cable offer irresistible to consumers. In practice, it just didn’t work.

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

iPhone Users Are Having More Fun

Stacey Higginbotham

New data from M:Metrics for the month of January confirms that folks who own an iPhone tend to do more entertaining things on their devices–such as watch video and visit social networks–than those who own smartphones. However, February data from mobile ad network AdMob points out that iPhone users are still a relatively small part of the overall mobile phone market in the U.S. Good thing, otherwise we’d never get anything done.

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Thursday, August 23, 2007

An Elephant Not in the Room

Jim Balcom

Very often, in the excitement accompanying a new technology, there is some sort of “elephant in the room” that everyone convinces themselves is not really there. In the heady, early days of the World Wide Web, for example, investors in particular seemed to ignore the need for profit in the business models of so many of the Internet IPOs.

At the recent D5 conference, I could feel a familiar, collective excitement in the air as speaker after speaker described in glowing terms the opportunities for delivering more and more media content to our mobile devices. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, for example, told us that “mobile was one of their key platforms,” and that they were now specifically designing TV shows, such as “Lil’ Bush,” for the mobile platform.

During the conference, representatives of Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and Facebook, among others, indicated that they were specifically redesigning their services for user-friendliness on our handheld devices. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, dubbed the coming trend “SMS gone wild”–people sending and sharing all kinds of stuff from phone to phone. And the platform vendors–Apple, Samsung, Sony, Palm and others–described some of their plans for the next generation of devices on which we will consume this new content. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, even predicted that the mobile phone could perhaps become the home PC for lower-income households. Heady stuff, indeed.

So, as one of the few “energy” executives in the room, I kept waiting to hear how these new applications and devices would be impacted by–and planned to circumvent–what some insiders are calling the “run-time gap.” The run-time gap describes the difference in demand for power and energy in mobile devices, and the ability of battery technology to deliver it. The demands for “portable power” are skyrocketing–thanks to the technologies and markets we heard about at D–but battery improvements are comparatively flatline. The difference in the two growth curves, graphically, gives us an ever-widening gap. I wondered: Would “Lil’ Bush” have to be edited to 15-minute episodes so that the credits could roll before the battery rolled over?

At first, I thought it was just the old elephant in the room–the secret problem with mobile multimedia that nobody wanted to talk about. But then it became increasingly clear to me: The run-time gap was not an issue in that audience–and perhaps in most other audiences–because nobody even seemed to be aware of it. It was, instead, an elephant not in the room.

When the questions didn’t come, and I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, I finally raised a hand myself and posed the power question directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs: How are you going to deal with the power demands? With the iPod and video iPod behind him, and the multimedia iPhone then ahead, he, at least, should be concerned. And he was; he said, essentially, that “power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.” Think about that. From Steve Jobs’s mouth to your ears–at least metaphorically. “Power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.”

Now, I have a vested interest in the issue because my company builds a sophisticated plastic membrane that makes tiny, mobile-oriented fuel cells possible. We happen to believe that mobile devices should have continuous and uninterruptible power that can be replenished by inserting a small fuel cartridge, small enough to be carried in a pocket or purse–an ideal solution for power-hungry, multimedia portable devices and the flood of new content coming our way.

After many years of development, the technology is now on the verge of packing more energy than batteries, more safely, in less space and weight. But whether or not you share our vision, if you have a vested interest in mobile devices, mobile applications and mobile content delivery, you cannot ignore the power issues. It does nobody any good to be able to watch the latest episode of “CSI” on their favorite mobile device if the screen goes dark before we’ve found out whodunit.

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