On the website of China’s State Radio Regulatory Commission, there is a listing that appears to be a regulatory approval for the iPhone. The approval date appears to be May 7th, 2009 and the certificate is expiring in 5 years. This will give China Unicom an ample amount of time to capitalize on a rumored three year deal that they have with Apple.
News Corporation is highly interested in building a LinkedIn competitor. That specific task has been delegated to The Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal is now requesting the services of Slingshot Labs. Slingshot Labs is another News Corporation subsidiary. Slingshot is part of News Corp’s web research and development arm. The about page of Slingshot’s website says “Our mission at Slingshot Labs is to be a fast-mover in the quickly evolving Web2.0 landscape.”
In 2008, The Wall Street Journal launched a professional social network called the WSJ Community. But that social network was hardly noticed so now its back to the drawing board.
Slingshot built a service for News Corporation called the Daily Fill and also launched MySpace events for the large social network. There are about 40-50 people on the Slingshot staff and the subsidiary has their own funding and operations. WSJ Connect seems to be still in the planning stages but there is a “strong interest” in moving the project ahead.
Amit Chowdhry | July 31, 2009 | 421 views | Comments Categorized under Toyota
In the video demo above, Toyota showcases one of their latest robots. The robot is in the form of a human and has the ability to run at 7km/hr (4.35MPH). This is even faster than Honda’s ASIMO humanoid robot, which can run at 6km/hr (3.72MPH).
Toyota’s robot prototype is 130cm tall and weighs 110 lbs. The Toyota robot’s legs have 7 degrees of freedom and uses real-time methods for balance control. The robot takes a step every 340 milliseconds. If you’re not a fan of watching robots getting pushed around, don’t watch the video.
NewsGator used to have an online RSS reader service, but their market share started slipping away from competitors such as Netvibes, PageFlakes, and Google Reader. Personally I never really used NewsGator, but I noticed Pulse2.com get a good amount of hits from their RSS reader about one or two years ago. The company has decided to focus more on desktop applications and enterprise social tools.
On the NewsGator blog, they wrote that users are recommended to migrate to Google Reader by August 31, 2009. Google employee Brian Shih wrote a welcoming blog post to users migrating from NewsGator to Google Reader yesterday.
As another alternative NewsGator’s desktop applications is one of the most used on the market. Their RSS reader for the Windows operating system is called FeedDemon. And NewsGator’s desktop RSS reader for the Mac is called NetNewsWire.
Thus far NewsGator raised about $39 million in funding from Mobius Venture Capital and Masthead Venture Partners.
The world has become a complicated place. It was to my understanding that if a bigger company made you a millionaire a few years ago and you did not have to work for them anymore, you’d just take your money and be happy on some island. Apparently the founders of Skype have decided to give eBay a hard time even though the company bought them out for $2.6 billion in September 2005. What more could the two founders want?
eBay wrote in their quarterly filing that there is pending litigation over the technology that Skype uses to operate. Skype uses a technology licensed from Joltid Ltd. Joltid is a company run by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Aside from starting Skype together, Friis and Zennstrom have also built P2P software KaZaa and P2P video streaming service Joost.
Joltid was seeking to have a licensing agreement terminated on Skype. Skype filed a claim in the U.K. against Joltid’s push for licensing termination. But Joltid filed a counterclaim reiterating that they hold the rights to the P2P technology used by Skype. The trial will be taking place in early 2010. To mitigate the risk of Joltid having too much software power over Skype, eBay has started developing their own P2P VoIP technology.
“Skype has begun to develop alternative software to that licensed through Joltid. However, such software development may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive,” stated eBay.
In April, eBay announced that they are planning to have Skype spin off as its own independent company and have an IPO of their own. Last year, Skype made $551 million in revenues alone. Skype’s expected revenue for 2011 is about $1 billion. eBay said that this setback will not hinder their future plans for Skype.
Yesterday after the Microsoft and Yahoo! deal was announced, Yahoo!’s market cap dropped about $2.9 billion and Microsoft’s market cap jumped about $2.9 billion. The coincidence of this occurence taking place was uncanny. Even Ballmer was shocked that Yahoo!’s stock took a hit. ”Nobody gets it,” stated Ballmer when talking to financial analysts at Microsoft headquarters yesterday.
Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a pact on Wednesday that would last 10 years. This deal is considered to be a blow to Google because Yahoo! will be focusing less on search technology. Instead Microsoft will handle the advertising revenue and search technology on behalf of themselves and Yahoo! Google on the other hand will have less competition to worry about.
Yahoo!’s homepage and their various other properties will be powered by Microsoft search engine Bing.com. Yahoo! will be keeping the majority of the revenue earned by ads on the Yahoo! websites. “I was myself kind of surprised by the market reaction,” stated Ballmer. “It’s a win-win deal.”
MySpace, the social network owned by News Corporation has launched a new service in the form of an e-mail provider. MySpace Mail has evolved out of a messaging system MySpace used in the past. Users will be able to send and receive e-mails with the MySpace.com domain through the social network going forward.
MySpace’s 125 million monthly active users will be able to benefit from the new e-mail service within the next couple of weeks when the service is released. The mail service will have the same look and feel as Microsoft Outlook. Your MySpace username will be the same immediate username that you can use for your MySpace e-mail. For example, if your username is Tom, then your e-mail address will be Tom@MySpace.com. If your username is JohnDoe, then your e-mail address will be JohnDoe@MySpace.com.
It is a nice additional feature to have, but I think that most people are already comfortable by the e-mail address that they already have. Personally I do not care much for this feature, but I’m sure that there are people out there that do care. But to be fair I did not care much about getting my own Facebook username either.
Amit Chowdhry | July 30, 2009 | 444 views | Comments Categorized under YouTube
A couple of days ago I wrote about how Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz had a wedding video on YouTube that virally accumulated over 12 million views in less than a week. The video features the bridesmaids, groomsmen, bridge, and groom dancing to Chris Brown’s Forever down the aisle.
Given the number of views that took place in a short span of time, the rights holders of the song benefitted from the tools available for having a viral hit on their hands. The rights holders had Click-To-Buy links over the YouTube video which gave users the chance to buy the song through Amazon.com or Apple iTunes.
The click-through rate of the advertisement on the JK Wedding Entrace video was two times the average of other Click-to-Buy ads on other videos. Even one year after the song was released, the Chris Brown song reached as high as the #4 most purchased song on iTunes and #3 on Amazon.com’s best selling MP3s again.
Since YouTube shares the revenue on advertising with the right owners, they made a good chunk of change too.
The Samsung Solstice mobile phone will soon be arriving in stores. Samsung will be selling the phone through AT&T at a price of $99.99 with a two year contract. Some of the features of the phone include a 3″ touchscreen, TouchWiz, and social networking capabilities. Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo have applications built in. The phone has a 3G connection and a 2 megapixel camera. There is a microSD slot that can store up to 16GB.
LG Electronics has officially confirmed the BL40 Chocolate phone for their Black Label series. The black phone with the red trim has a 4″ wide screen and a 800×345 pixel display with 21:9 aspect ratio. The built in camera is 5 megapixel and uses a Schneider-Kreuznach lens. The connectivity of the phone is 7.2 Mbps UMTS/HSDPA. The new Chocolate has WiFi, aGPS, and will be available in the third quarter of this year across 54 countries.
Telecommunications company Motorola Inc. has released the financial figures for their second quarter. The company reported net income of $26 million. This is higher than a year ago in the same quarter when the company reported a $4 million net income. The reason why the company saw a profit increase was because of their aggressive cost cutting initiatives.
The revenue for the quarter was $5.5 billion which has dropped substantially compared to last year. Motorola reported $8.1 billion in revenues last year. Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha said that he believes the company will see a turnaround by this fall as the company launches several new products.
Motorola’s wireless device business saw revenue fall 45% to $1.8 billion. The operating loss this quarter was $253 million. Last year’s operating loss was $346 million.
Jem Stansfield, a presenter on the BBC series “Bang Goes the Theory” has created vacuum gloves. In this video, Jem used the gloves to climb the London White City BBC building. The gloves were made using a simple vacuum cleaner and he was able to climb the full 120 feet. All Jem needs is the ability to shoot spider-webs out of his arms and we have ourselves a real-life Marvel character. Do not try this at home warned the BBC.
Sony announced today that they have lost $390.5 million (¥37.1 billion) this quarter. The losses are blamed on consumers cutting back spending on TV and technology. Sony has also blamed currency rates, specifically a stronger Yen that is causing inflation in Japan and cuts away from revenue overseas.
Sony sales dropped 19.2% from a year earlier. This quarter’s sales were $16.8 billion (¥1.60 trillion). Operating loss was $267.77 million (¥25.7 billion). Demand for products such as Bravia TVs, Handycam video camcorders, and cyber-shot digital cameras, and Walkman music players have dropped. There has not been much demand for Sony’s consoles compared to their competitors either.
Sony sold about 1.1 million PlayStation 3 consoles and 1.3 million PlayStation Portables in the quarter. During the same quarter last year, Sony sold 1.6 million PS3 consoles and 3.7 million PSPs.
From a positive standpoint, Sony motion pictures saw a 6.5% increase in quarterly sales. The movie Angels & Demons helped trigger the sales increase.
Sony CEO Howard Stringer said that he expects the company to eliminate 16,000 jobs and cut costs in their 57 factories.
On the Sony Electronics Blog, the company announced that they have surpassed one million books available for download on the Sony Reader Digital Book. ”Our free public domain content offering from Google has now surpassed the 1 million title mark. This, in addition to the thousands and thousands of premium titles, best-sellers and new releases in our store, provides you with the largest, most comprehensive selection of eBooks available.” The books available by Google public domain in EPUB format are optimized for current models of the Sony Reader Digital Book.
Nokia has announced the D300s. The price of the camera is $1,799.95. Features include 24fps 720p with contrast-detect autofocus. For better audio quality there is external mic input. There is also a 12.3 megapixel DX sensor. The autofocus is 51-point. Burst shooting works at 7fps. To store the video and pictures, the camera has a CF and SD slot. The screen of the camera is 920k pixel.
