Despite its defiant tones, Yahoo’s response to Microsoft Monday morning looks like the letter of a defeated company. Yes, the letter asserts Yahoo stands by its financial projections for the year, despite the wavering economy. And it challenges various bits of Microsoft’s letter sent Friday night.
There is a shortage of iPhones in Apple’s (AAPL) stores in the United States. And there is a surplus of frenzied speculation about what this means. Many wonder whether Apple is closing out of its existing stock in order to clear the way for new models, possibly with the ability to connect to faster 3G networks.
Before Google gets too excited about open wireless access, it should look a little more closely at what did in AOL. The analogy is hardly perfect, but the new rules, promoted by Google, that will force Verizon to allow competitors to use its wireless network are in some way similar to those that forced phone companies to let rival Internet providers use their high-speed data services.
Here’s the telecom geek quiz of the day: What’s a megahertz pop?
A) What a Federal Communications Commission lawyer eats to cool off on a hot day
B) An ultrasonic explosive device used for pranks at MIT
C) A shiny prize horded by large phone companies
There are a couple of announcements Tuesday that point to a major technological battle: the race to become the platform for mobile applications. This is happening at two levels. There are mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Apple’s mobile version of OS X and Google’s forthcoming Android. And there are environments that live above the operating system that are meant to allow applications to run on multiple operating systems. Sun’s Java is the leader in this area now. Adobe’s Flash Lite is a contender. Microsoft said Tuesday that it was developing a mobile version of Silverlight (its answer to Flash). And Google is creating a mobile version of Google Gears, its software that lets online applications work when they are not connected to the Internet. For these companies, there is potentially real money at stake. With 1 billion phones made each year, even a tiny licensing fee for software on each one can add up. And there is also money to be made selling development software as well.
There is no better sign that we have entered an era of total media convergence than the decision by the Washington Post and Newsweek to host live video broadcasts on the Web of the presidential primary results.
A common theme in the hallways and receptions of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual conference in Phoenix, which ended Tuesday, was how little Jerry Yang did to make the case that Yahoo deserves to be independent. It wasn’t the sort of catty cynicism you so often hear, making fun of someone’s mediocre presentation. It was heartfelt disappointment.
Google has always had a love-hate relationship with advertising. Its power and wealth come from the $16 billion a year of advertising that it sells. Yet on its most important pages, the results from its Web search engine, it has limited ads to nothing more garish than a dozen words of text. That is about to change. On Thursday, Google started testing video ads on some pages of search results. And it is developing ad formats with images, interactive maps and other more elaborate features.
Yahoo is buying Maven Networks, a company that helps outfits like CBS and Sony put their video online. Its press release is full of all sorts of ways this will help Yahoo: It gets video technology. Yahoo will be able to use its sales force to sell video ads on partner sites. And it will be able to syndicate its content to other sites and bring other video content onto Yahoo.
Here’s advance word of another bit of Rorschach technology: Some people will look at it as a great innovation; others as a solution to a problem they don’t have.
Soon you will be able to deposit checks by scanning them at home and sending them electronically to your bank. No need to visit a branch or even an ATM.
Bidding slowed in the government’s auction of wireless spectrum Tuesday. By the fifth bidding round of the day, there were only 87 new bids, adding $6 million to the total. The total bid now totals $18.9 billion, up from $18.8 billion yesterday.
The calm was in contrast to the auction Monday when a second bidder emerged for the C block, the block of licenses that would allow nationwide wireless service. No new bids in the C block were placed Tuesday.
How will eBay fend off the growing challenge from Google? On its rival’s own turf: search. That was the most interesting thing I learned from a quick conversation Thursday morning with John Donahoe, eBay’s incoming chief executive.
The economy may be teetering, but the personal computer business is still nimbly running at full speed, according to the tally of sales in the fourth quarter of 2007 from International Data Corp. Worldwide, 77.3 million PCs were sold in the quarter, up 15.5% from the fourth quarter of 2006. That represents almost double the growth rate of 2005 to 2006.
It’s easy to see the imminent shutdown of Think Secret, the Apple rumor site, as a victory in Apple’s war against leaks and a deterrent for others who want to report aggressively about a company. But that’s not how Nick Ciarelli, the Harvard senior who founded the blog when he was 13, sees it.
With Ask.com introducing the AskEraser–a switch that will stop the site from collecting information about a user–it’s worth checking in on the real state of play with the accumulation of data online.
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