iPad 5 Will Launch In October

iPad 5 Will Launch In October - Business Insider

Pebble Smartwatch Begins Shipping Today

Pebble Smartwatch Begins Shipping Today

Best Gadgets Of 2013

Best Gadgets Of 2013

Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal a mix of promise, pain | Ars Technica

Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal a mix of promise, pain | Ars Technica

AT&T reportedly unlocking iPhones for deployed servicemen as well

The nation’s second-largest carrier, AT&T, is beginning to unlock in-contract iPhones for the United States military personnel deployed abroad, a new report claimed Monday. As you know, AT&T is now unlocking out-of-contract iPhones for its regular subscribers.

The unexpected policy change has been instituted following unconfirmed reports last week that some disgruntled customers who had complained about the situation to Apple CEO Tim Cook via email saw their handsets unlocked.

As a result, AT&T subscribers can now slip in a SIM card from another wireless operator and use their 3G GSM iPhones with compatible cellular networks overseas and in the United States, such as T-Mobile USA (which welcomed the change)…

According to unnamed sources who spoke with MacRumors:

In addition to unlocking phones for off-contract customers, AT&T is also quietly unlocking iPhones for U.S. service members still under contract with the carrier.

The publication stressed that federal law mandates that carriers suspend service without penalty for deployed military personnel “upon presentation of their military orders”.

Though AT&T is not required to unlock the handsets, they are nonetheless choosing to do so on their own, the report has it.

If you are considering unlocking your AT&T iPhone, we have a handy survival guide to help find your way around AT&T’s online technical support chat system.

Tanking margins reportedly forcing US carriers to drop iPhone subsidies

Apple may be poised to become the world’s first trillion dollar company thanks to the iPhone, but sustainability of the pricey handset is now being put into question. One prominent analysts warns that United States carriers such as AT&T – faced with plummeting margins at a six-year low – are now considering reducing iPhone subsidies and adopting stricter upgrade policies.

If instituted, these changes could result in a more expensive iPhone and an estimated worldwide drop in sales of 27.5 million units in the June quarter, with a revenue estimate $1 billion below consensus.

Blame it on “aggressive” upgrade policies instituted by the world’s carriers. That’s the crux BITG Research analyst Walter Piecyk wrote in a Monday note to clients (via AppleInsider):

Operators, unwilling to stall the pace of ARPU growth, offered generous upgrade policies including some that enabled a fully subsidized phone upgrade only one year in to a two year contract. We expect those policies to change as the faster upgrade rate of smartphones compared to legacy feature phones has been a costly surprise to post-paid and pre-paid operators, alike.

As a result, Piecyk expects that iPhone sales in the United States will decline four million sequentially to nine million units, resulting in a worldwide drop in sales of 27.5 million units in the June quarter.

Apple retook the title of the world’s leading smartphone maker from Samsung by selling an astounding 37 million iPhones during the holiday quarter.

Interesting enough, the analyst warns carriers are banding together on this initiative. This indicates to me that carriers are growing wary and jealous because profit from the iPhone business is not being split fairly.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing for Fortune, gave this quote from Piecyk’s note to clients:

The commentary by wireless operators is likely to be decidedly more firm in how they plan to continue to hold back the rising phone upgrade rates that are hurting their margins. Even weak operators like Sprint, which has a large contractual commitment with Apple, will likely experience a decline in iPhone sales based in part on changes to its upgrade policies last year.

They will not be alone as we expect a similar trend at Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, America Movil and Telefonica, to name a few. In the United States, we expect iPhone sales to decline 4 million sequentially to 9 million with the largest impact coming from AT&T, Apple’s largest customer.

He wrote that carriers will “stunt the pace of phone upgrades” in 2012, beginning this quarter, dismisses the rumors of an Apple HD TV set launch in 2012 and downplayed the Chinese market.

The analyst also did what analysts rarely do, downgrading AAPL from “neutral” to “buy”. The company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings in two weeks.

The iPhone is one expensive device to sell even if its users are more valuable to wireless companies than a typical smartphone owner. Wireless operators in the United States spend billions in upfront payments to Apple.

For example, fourth-largest Sprint Nextel had to cough up a whopping $15.5 billion to get an estimated 24 million iPhones. For each iPhone, carriers pay an estimated $600-plus, selling it to consumers for $199 or less with a two-year contract.

The service contract gradually covers cost of subsidy, allowing your carrier to eventually recoup their investment and profit. iPhone subsidies are the highest in the industry because it’s such an iconic device that attracts people.

But with four major carriers now selling the iPhone in the United States and a bunch of local ones either offering or about to offer it, customers are less inclined to switch their network just to get an iPhone. As a result, churn rate is dropping and so are the carriers’ margins.

At the same time, Apple’s margin on the iPhone business remains the envy of the industry as the company continues to gulp up well over half the mobile phone industry’s profits.

We’re only speculating here, but if carriers are really banding together to drop iPhone subsidies, Apple may be forced to make its phone more affordable to everyone.

What do you think, is a $600-plus iPhone really sustainable for carriers? Perhaps that’s just a lame excuse the carriers need to conspire and break Apple’s tight grip on the wireless industry?

Facebook friends Nasdaq

Facebook has tapped Nasdaq to list its shares ahead of its much anticipated market debut expected in May, delivering a blow to Nasdaq’s arch-rival, the New York Stock Exchange.

The social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg is said to have picked the tech-heavy Nasdaq over the Big Board because it delivered a more attractive marketing and branding pitch, said sources close to the process.

Facebook will file revised initial public offering documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission later today to announce its decision, a source said.

Facebook, whose expected IPO next month could raise as much as $10 billion, will trade under the ticker symbol “FB,” as first reported by The Post.

Part of Nasdaq’s appeal is that it offered Facebook top billing in co-branded ads on TV and billboards, the source said.

Nasdaq, run by CEO Robert Greifeld, and NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer have been locked in a pitched battle to woo the tech giant in a high-stakes competition to nab the biggest tech IPO listing since Google went public in 2004.

Both CEOs courted Zuckerberg’s company by personally flying to Facebook’s home turf in the Silicon Valley to deliver their pitches to Facebook executives.

Sources say that Zuckerberg wasn’t intimately involved in the selection process, leaving the decision to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

While there was little difference between the two Wall Street exchange platforms, sources said, marketing prowess tipped the scales in favor of Nasdaq, which is already home to tech giants such as Apple and Amazon.

Nasdaq’s win is a huge victory for Greifeld and solidifies the exchange’s position as the go-to platform for the biggest tech companies.

The decision is about more than bragging rights. Bagging Facebook further bolsters Nasdaq’s ability to lure tech darlings like micro-blogging outfit Twitter that have yet to go public, observers say.

Sources say that the loss marks a setback for Niederauer’s NYSE, which had been making inroads into tech IPOs with big listings such as Pandora and LinkedIn.

Last year, the NYSE listed 44 percent of the technology IPOs in the US, bringing 19 new tech companies public. But the exchange has been pushing to take a bigger bite out of Nasdaq’s tech dominance.

One source notes that the NYSE had been hoping to build up enough cachet with a Facebook listing to try and lure away more established companies like Apple from Nasdaq.

An NYSE spokesman declined to comment on the exchange’s plans or the Facebook listing.

A Nasdaq spokesman did not return a call for comment, while a message for comment to Facebook was not immediately returned.

Microsoft testing prototype of Facebook-like social network

Office Labs testing TownSquare network sought by Office, SharePoint developers - By Heather Havenstein

June 10, 2008 (Computerworld) BOSTON -- At the request of its SharePoint and Office product development teams, Microsoft Corp.'s Office Labs operation has created and is testing a prototype of an internal social network that can provide employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues.

Chris Pratley, general manager of Office Labs, is slated to disclose details of the prototype - called TownSquare - Thursday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. He spoke to Computerworld today about the project, which was launched in January and has already been used by about 8,000 Microsoft employees.

With a layout that is strikingly similar to Facebook.com's (in which Microsoft invested $240 million in October 2007), TownSquare is fueled by enterprise news feeds that use Web services to query SharePoint for public information, such as promotions and company anniversaries, about an employee.

TownSquare also notifies users when a document or file is modified. Users can customize their feeds and monitor who is receiving information about them.

In early January, Pratley's group told 100 Microsoft employees about the network. Since then, 8,000 employees who learned of TownSquare by word of mouth have visited the network at least once, Pratley noted. About 700 use it daily.

Some Microsoft customers, which he declined to name, are testing the TownSquare network for use in their companies.

Office Labs works as a sort of advance development team that tests technology concepts suggested by employees and, as in this case, development teams. Pratley stressed that TownSquare is not a product, but a platform to test the technology concepts. By hammering out the various likes and dislikes of its users before releasing a product, "We're trying to get version three goodness into a first release," he added.

"We have instrumentation …so we know which things people use," Pratley noted. "We share that with the client teams we work with. They take the knowledge about usage so they don't make so many mistakes in product design."

Many third party vendors have targeted SharePoint as the core data source for information to feed their enterprise social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 applications. Several have announced upgrades to their products or new integration with SharePoint this week at the conference.

Anecdotal evidence has shown that employees like the TownSquare tool, Pratley noted. Employees especially appreciate being able to monitor the creation and editing of documents by colleagues, he added. One employee used the network to find a sponsor within Microsoft to fund her trip to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

"That is the kind of information that spreads through an enterprise social network," he said. "By posting it out there, the people interested can pick up on it, and other people can ignore it. It's a way to keep in touch in a social way with people you work with."

Like Facebook, TownSquare also includes a photos of users and allows them to note when they are away from their workstations, such as at a meeting or in the cafeteria for coffee.

While some employees have expressed initial surprise at all the information that Microsoft has about them in its intranet, once people see the type of information that is included in the feeds about them, "they see it's pretty safe stuff and say okay," Pratley said.

Microsoft Buys Facebook Stake for $240million!!!

Rapidly rising Internet star Facebook Inc. has sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.

The deal announced Wednesday after several weeks of negotiation values Palo Alto-based Facebook at $15 billion — less than four years after Mark Zuckerberg started the online social networking site in his Harvard University dorm room.

Microsoft also will sell Internet ads for Facebook as the site expands outside the United States, broadening an existing marketing relationship that began last year.

Besides validating Zuckerberg’s decision to rebuff a $1 billion takeover offer from Yahoo Inc. last year, Microsoft’s money should be more than enough to pay for Facebook’s ambitious expansion plans until the privately held company goes public.

Zuckerberg, 23, has indicated he would like to hold off on an initial public offering for at least two more years. In the meantime, Facebook hopes to become an advertising magnet by substantially increasing its current audience of nearly 50 million active users, who connect with friends on the site through messaging, photo-sharing and other tools.

The Facebook investment represents a coup for Microsoft because it provides the world’s largest software maker with a toehold on one of the Internet’s hottest platforms and a potentially lucrative forum for selling online ads.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft has been trying to become a bigger force in Internet advertising for several years, only to watch Google deepen its dominance of the space.

In its fiscal year ending in June, Microsoft’s online ad revenue rose 21 percent to $1.84 billion. Over the same period, Google’s ad revenue totaled $13.3 billion.

With the Facebook investment, Microsoft dealt a rare setback to Google, which had previously trumped its bitter rival in earlier bidding battles involving AOL and Internet ad service DoubleClick Inc.

“Making this investment … is a great win for not only for our two companies, but also our collective users and advertisers,” Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, said in a statement.

The coup shows Microsoft is getting more savvy about the Internet, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst for the research group Directions on Microsoft. “I think they understand it now and they’re proceeding correctly. Two years ago, I would have said they don’t get it at all.”

Tim Armstrong, who oversees Google’s North American advertising, declined to comment on the Facebook negotiations during s meeting held with analysts Wednesday at the company’s Mountain View headquarters.

“We have tremendous respect for them,” Armstrong said of Facebook.

Although News Corp.’s MySpace.com remains the largest social network, Facebook has been growing at a far more rapid clip during the past year. Facebook attracted 30.6 million U.S. visitors during September compared with 68.4 million at MySpace. Microsoft’s social networking equivalent — called “Windows Live Spaces” — attracted an audience of 9.8 million, according to comScore Inc.

Facebook…Silicon Valley’s Favorite Darling…

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is only 23 yrs old and already owner and founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most sought after properties. Wall Street is completely infatuated and consumed with this man’s every move. Will he sell? Will he open the company up to major outside investors such as Microsoft who is rumored to want to lay $500million in Zuckerberg’s hands for a potential %5 stake in the company which would value Facebook at $15billion.

Zuckerberg has already raised $37.7million from venture capitalists. Yahoo was interested in buying Facebook for a reported $1billion and Zuckerberg verbally agreed to sell but then Yahoo’s stock price plunged 22 percent overnight and Yahoo’s then CEO Terry Semel lowered the offer to $800million, but Zuckerberg and his board walked away from the offer after that. Yahoo then returned with the original $1billion offer but it was too late.

Facebook is now the most buzzed about company in Silicon Valley and Zuckerberg is continuously compared to visionaries like Steve Jobs (Apple, ipod, iphone) and Bill Gates. Facebook has opened up a platform for independent developers to implement software for the 40million some registered users. Since then some 3,200 new applications have sprung up on the site, a number that is growing at about 180 a week.

Facebook is generating more than a billion page views a day. Half of it’s $150million revenue comes from an advertising deal with Microsoft. So much for thinking Zuckerberg was literally nuts for turning down the $1billion offer from Yahoo. Now everyone in the valley is looking at this kid with green dollar signs in their eyes!

Microsoft might invest in Facebook!

I know it's now old news, but will post it anyway as a lead up and I'll track it's progress from here.

The rumors are swirling on Wall Street about a possible investment of $300-$500 million investment from Microsoft, which would land Facebook’s current total value in between $10-$15billion! Wow and this whole time we thought Peter Thiel (one of Facebook’s investors) was smoking rocks when he said that $1billion offer for the company was laughable. Thiel said that he placed Facebook’s value somewhere around $7 or $8 billion up there with MTV.

Zuckerberg said last year that he felt that Myspace sold themselves short to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million. He was probably right because in the next few months video giant YouTube sold out to Google for $1.65billion in stock.

So whatever is going on in silicon valley it seems that Mark Zuckerberg has the right idea and knows how to play the game. (The longer you hold out and refuse to sell, the more value it places on your company and product! Wow its just like dating. The longer a female withholds her goodies the harder the guy tries, the more he likes her, and he ends up spending more money for that ass!) Don’t you just love our business acumen???