by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar this morning upped his rating on Apple to Buy from Hold, setting a $170 price target.
Kumar contends that Apple will gain share in the smart phone segment from both Research In Motion and Microsof Windows Mobile. He also writes that Google Android is “positioned to be a winner” in the sector.
Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple iPhone, a Research in Motion BlackBerry and phones running on Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian operating systems. The contest, sponsored by 3Com’s TippingPoint computer security division, will award $10,000 prizes to anyone who can break into one of the phones.
Why should location-based social networks be worried about Google? Because its new Latitude product was able to gain over a million users in just a week, Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told an audience at the Mobile World Congress today.
If you’ve been wondering what Microsoft’s Software+Services strategy is for its Windows Mobile platform, the answer should become a lot clearer in another couple weeks. Microsoft is set to take the wraps off these three services at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona in mid-February.
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
MediaMaster, a free Web-based application that allowed users to upload music from their hard drives and listen to it online or on their mobile devices, made the decision to shutter its doors, and explained on its Web site that “it is not possible to keep a service like this up for free without some sort of large scale userbase to get ads to pay for it.”
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.
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