Apple investors freaked out Monday, in part because two Wall Street analysts downgraded the stock. They are worried that margins will be compressed and sales of Macintosh computers and iPhones will be less than expected.
In honor of a redesign of AOL’s home page, we asked Bits readers earlier this week, “Who Uses AOL and Why?” So far, we’ve heard from more than 380 of you.
On Wednesday, Adam Sohn, the head of public relations for Microsoft’s Zune division, told me: “Babies are born every day without an iPod. We will get there.” That summarizes the challenge Zune faces from Apple–and Microsoft’s determination (at least for now) to meet it.
For those of us who follow such things, there’s always a bit of a disconnect when watching news reports that show domestic life in developing countries. Most of the time, the family in the living room or the men in the coffee house are huddled around picture-tube TVs.
Four years ago, Verizon Communications embarked on an ambitious and expensive plan to run fiber optic cables, which can deliver ultra-fast Internet service and dozens of high-definition video channels along with old-fashioned telephone service, past 19 million homes, roughly half its territory. When it was announced, Verizon’s $23 billion planned investment in the service, called FiOS, was met by a chorus of skeptics, both on Wall Street and among rivals.
AT&T is “carefully considering” monitoring the Web-surfing activities of customers who use its Internet service, the company said in a letter in response to an inquiry from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The iPhone and BlackBerry are the only devices consumers are using these days to access the mobile Web?
According to AdMob, mobile surfing is far more mainstream than what many people might think.
AdMob serves ads for more than 5,000 mobile Web sites and has been compiling data about which mobile phones and wireless carriers customers use to get ads when they access the mobile Web.
Viacom and Google have reached an agreement about how information about YouTube users can be used as potential evidence in the ongoing copyright dispute. Instead of giving Viacom the user names and Internet Protocol addresses for everyone who has uploaded or downloaded a video on YouTube, Google will provide an anonymous code number that represents those names and addresses.
The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The AP’s copyright.
AT&T restructured its deal with Apple, said Ralph de la Vega, the chief executive of AT&T Mobility, in order to overcome resistance from mass consumers to the high $399 price of the iPhone. Now, instead of paying Apple a portion of their monthly fees, carriers like AT&T will make a large payment to Apple every time an iPhone is sold and attached to their network.
How do you make money on television sets when your competitors keep cutting prices? Throw in a little Will Smith, of course.
Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, tossed out that idea at a lunch meeting Wednesday with people from the editorial and business sides of the New York Times. He noted his company’s recent agreement with cable companies to essentially build cable set-top boxes into its televisions.
If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on. A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it.
There was good news for Apple and Comcast, but bad news for Blockbuster woven into Time Warner’s conference call with investors today. Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, said that the company’s Warner Brothers studio will now release movies for video-on-demand systems on the same day they are released as DVDs.
If I see the balding guy in the Verizon commercial marching in front of the New Orleans Hard Hat Band one more time, I’m going to pull my FiOS TV cable out of the wall. But when it released financial results for the first quarter Monday, Verizon said this ad and the $99 unlimited talk plan it advertises were working well for the company. On a conference call with investors, the company said 13% of its new customers are signing up for the $99 plan, according to an account by the Associated Press. Previously, only 4% of its customers chose plans with bundles of minutes that cost $99 or more.
Can Yahoo win by building a coalition of losers?
BoomTown reports this morning that CNet is going to announce an expanded relationship with Yahoo this afternoon. In once sense that is a yawner. Those two have hooked up and broken up so many times over the last decade that they are some sort of dysfunctional couple who can neither commit nor leave each other.
But depending on the details, there may be a clue that Yahoo’s current strategy may be getting a tad bit of traction. As I wrote after Yahoo’s earnings call, the company seems to be trying to build its ad network among the mainstream publishers who feel most threatened by the rise of Google.
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