AllThingsD » 2007

Skype Is Working, No Explanation Yet for What Happened

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 17:22:30 +0000

After two days of struggling with an embarrassing pre-holiday system failure, Skype appears to be running again today. CEO Tony Bates appeared in a video message overnight announcing that customers would be compensated for the loss of service. Free and pay-as-you-go customers will get credit for a free 30-minute SkypeOut call to any landline phone in the world. Paid subscribers will get credit for a week’s worth of service.

Offline instant messages and group video chat services remain offline, he said.

Bates said Skype now knows what caused the crash, but he didn’t disclose it. He ruled out the possibility of some kind of malicious attack, and said it’s conducting a detailed postmortem.

This would probably be the worst time for Skype to experience a high-profile outage. Though the Skype service is working today, lots of people who might have used it to call family members heading into Christmas may have made alternate plans.

However, the failure, whatever its cause, is also a reminder that Skype isn’t always in charge of its own ability to stay online. In 2007 an otherwise routine Windows security update issued by Microsoft forced an abnormally high number of PCs running Skype around the world to restart at roughly the same time. A software flaw prevented the Skype peer-to-peer network from compensating properly and the service crashed for two days.

This incident will also hurt its reputation with two key constituencies: Prospective business customers and potential investors. Business customers will rethink plans to deploy Skype. And potential investors will question whether this company has its act together, hurting the potential benefit from its forthcoming IPO.

To its credit, Skype did manage to restore service much faster than it did in 2007, as SkypeJournal notes here.

System failure is one of the risks that Skype admits to in its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Of the 2007 failure, Skype says in its filing:

“We experienced significant adverse publicity and lost net revenues as a result of this outage, and any similar outage in the future would likely harm our business. As we increasingly introduce products particularly targeted at business customers, any system failures could have a significant impact on our ability to attract or maintain our relationships with business customers.”

Bates’s video message to customers is below.

EMI Gets a New Boss. When Does It Get a New Owner?

Peter Kafka — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:53:12 +0000

Terra Firma, the private equity fund that owns EMI Music Group, has brought in a new CEO for the music label. Elio Leoni-Sceti is out; Charles Allen, the former CEO of British broadcaster ITV replaces him.

Leoni-Sceti came to the company in July 2008, a move that raised plenty of eyebrows as he had zero experience in the music business. His background was marketing packaged goods like Woolite and French’s Mustard.

But in retrospect it doesn’t really matter who Terra Firma brought in to run the company; the investment group’s big mistake was paying too much for EMI, using too much debt, in 2007.

At this point, the real question for EMI isn’t who runs it, but who owns it. There’s a decent chance that Terra Firma will breach a banking covenant in coming months and that control of EMI will go to Citigroup (C), which owns most of the label’s debt.

The conventional wisdom is that part or all of EMI will end up in the hands of longtime rival Warner Music Group (WMG) sooner or later.

Release:

CHARLES ALLEN BECOMES EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF EMI MUSIC LONDON, 10 MARCH 2010 — EMI Music announces the appointment of Charles Allen as its Executive Chairman.

Charles has been non-executive Chairman of EMI Music since January 2009, chairing its Board and supporting the transformation of the business. Elio Leoni-Sceti, EMI Music’s Chief Executive, who has successfully led EMI Music through the first phase of its operational turnaround, will be leaving the company on March 31st 2010.

Over the past two and a half years, EMI Music has become a stronger and growing company, with a talented senior team, significant creative success and a more rigorous approach to marketing and operations. This has resulted in increased sales, improved market share and industry-leading EBITDA margins.

Charles said: “Elio has done a great job. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with him; he is a very talented executive and we all wish him well in the future. Our goals for EMI Music remain the same. I will support and guide the group’s strong team, keep EMI’s focus on creativity and superb A&R, and deliver a digital platform. This is a great business – our task is to ensure it has a great future.”

Elio added: “EMI is a wonderful business with a great team and new creative and operational momentum. My job here is now done and it is time for me to move on. It has been a pleasure to work with Charles and so many other talented and committed people. I look forward to seeing the company go on to further success in the future.”

Mac Quicken Gets Deductions for Iffy Upgrade

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:04:27 +0000

Despite all of the success Apple (AAPL) has had with its Macintosh computers, the Mac has lagged behind Windows in personal-finance software.

The most popular program in the category, Intuit’s Quicken, comes in a Mac version. But it isn’t as good as the Windows version, dates from 2006, and requires an often tedious and flawed process for converting your data from the Windows version.

[ See post to watch video ]

As a result, many PC owners who consider buying a Mac but rely upon Quicken resist switching. Or, they resort to work-arounds, such as installing Windows on their new Macs or keeping around an old PC—solely to run the more robust Windows version of Quicken.

This week, Intuit (INTU) hopes to alleviate this situation with an all-new $60 version called Quicken Essentials for Mac, or QEM for short. The company describes QEM as the first version of Quicken developed specifically to run on a Mac, as opposed to being copied from a Windows product. It also says the product was influenced by a Mac-savvy team from Mint, a Web-based personal-finance service Intuit acquired late last year.

I’ve been testing Quicken Essentials for Mac, and have seriously mixed feelings about it. In general, it worked well and kept its promises, and it largely solves the crucial data-conversion problem. Unlike its predecessor, Quicken for Mac 2007, it looks and feels like a modern Mac program. It also can download transactions from over 12,000 banks, brokerages and other financial institutions—about triple the number supported by the prior Mac version and double the number supported by the base version of Quicken for Windows.

However, this program is still no match for the Windows version in the breadth and depth of its features, and is even a step backward in some features from the old 2007 Mac version. It is really a stripped-down version of Quicken, for basic tracking and managing of your finances. It isn’t likely to satisfy hard-core family financial planners, especially those who like to keep an eagle eye on investments or create detailed budgets and reports.

Most important, Quicken Essentials doesn’t display, or even allow you to enter or edit, individual transactions in investment accounts. It only shows a snapshot of the current status and value of the overall investment account and of the securities or funds it holds. It also lacks a bill-paying feature. And it can’t export your data to Intuit’s popular TurboTax program. Even the much-maligned older Mac version could do these three things.

While QEM is easy to use and has colorful, understandable charts and graphs that show your financial situation, its budget and reporting capabilities are rudimentary, and it has no planning features for helping you reduce debt or save for retirement.

The new team from Mint, now in charge of Intuit’s Personal Finance group, concedes that QEM lacks some important features, but says it hopes to add detailed investment-tracking and bill-paying to a future edition.

The company claims the new QEM will satisfy the needs of users who aren’t deeply into investment management or planning, or who are new to personal-finance software.

For my tests, I entered my own various bank, credit-card, retirement and brokerage accounts, and the program was able to automatically download transactions for my checking and credit-card accounts, and snapshot views of my investment accounts, in most cases. In a few instances, I had to go through an intermediary step of downloading a file from a bank or brokerage Web site, and then importing it into QEM.

Quicken Essentials can update each account separately, or all your accounts at once. But I couldn’t find any way to schedule automatic downloads of data.

The company boasts that one of its big advantages is that it automatically categorizes transactions you download. It knows a purchase at Safeway is probably “groceries.” It remembers these for the future, but won’t retroactively apply the categories to past transactions.

To me, the biggest plus in QEM is its greatly improved conversion ability. I was able to successfully convert files from Quicken for Windows, Microsoft Money and the older Mac version using sample data from those programs provided at my request by Intuit, since I don’t use these programs and lacked my own data.

Each conversion took 30 minutes or less. The process requires you to export your data from the other programs and then use a special conversion utility that comes on the QEM disk. You then import the files created by the converter into QEM. For conversions from Money, you need to have the program installed on your PC.

Some information, such as individual investment activity, and various reports and plans that QEM doesn’t support, won’t transfer. And, after the conversion, you have to reenter your log-in information for banks and brokerages.

Overall, I consider QEM just a start in bringing a better version of Quicken to the Mac. Devoted users of Quicken for Windows will likely still resist the Mac, or be forced to resort to work-arounds so they can keep using the Windows version.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Watch Hollywood Crater in a Single Sentence

Peter Kafka — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:57:03 +0000

DVD sales are collapsing, nearly as quickly as music sales did over the last decade.

It’s important to remember this whenever you see stories about Hollywood’s resurgence, measured by box office receipts. Because box office receipts don’t do that much for Hollywood’s bottom line–that’s the role of DVDs.

It’s also important to remember this when you see stories about Hollywood’s conniption fit over “windowing” and the lawsuit/hardball deal combo the studios have used with Redbox and Netflix (NFLX). Because the studios’ desire to wring every last penny from DVDs is what’s driving those moves.

Ditto for Hollywood’s desire for a 3-D boom: The studios are in desperate need of a new revenue stream to replace the disappearing discs.

So here’s the one-sentence story I promised, which illustrates the collapse. It comes via Edward Jay Epstein’s dissection of MGM’s blowup, published on Defamer (nice get!):

In the US alone, MGM’s net receipts from DVDs fell from $140 million in its 2007 fiscal year (which ended March 31, 2008) to just $30.4 million by 2010.

That clarifies things, no?

Yes, you can add plenty of caveats if you’d like. For instance, MGM has been more or less dormant except for its Bond films the last couple years, and studios rely on new releases to juice DVD sales. And the DVD slump hasn’t hit all studios equally–Disney (DIS) and DreamWorks Animation (DWA) have done less poorly, because parents still need to buy stuff to occupy their kids.

But that’s still a staggering 78 percent drop in a couple years. So even if you’re running a studio whose DVD sales don’t look that bad, you’re looking at plummeting sales. Scary stuff.

iPhone Slow to Catch On With Jiangxi Province Farmers

John Paczkowski — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:02:42 +0000

Sales of the iPhone in China appear to be picking up steam after a relatively underwhelming start. Though it took China Unicom, Apple’s (AAPL) carrier partner in the country, 40 days to sell its first 100,000 iPhones, the company managed to sell another 200,000 in the 20 days that followed.

So, 300,000 iPhones sold in China since the device arrived at market in early November. Clearly, that’s not the nearly the number Apple sold in the U.S. when the iPhone debuted in 2007. But it is an improvement over the paltry number sold at launch.

Google Announces Jan. 5 Android Event

John Paczkowski — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:38:43 +0000

This just in: Google will host an Android press gathering at its global HQ on Jan. 5 (click on image below to enlarge). Presumably, the event will have something to do with the company’s Nexus One, an Android phone that Google plans to sell on its own Web site and perhaps through T-Mobile as well.

Google’s (GOOG) choice of date here is an interesting one. By scheduling the event just before the official start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 7 (and hours before the first CES press briefings begin), the company would seem to be taking a page from the Steve Jobs’s playbook–sucking some air out of the annual event.

Remember, Apple (AAPL) upstaged CES in a very big way back in 2007 when it announced the iPhone. It appears that Google is attempting something similar here. Question is, does the Nexus One have the same sort of…gadget gravitas to pull focus from CES?

Was It All a Bad Dream? Ad Business Optimism at 2007 Levels.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:30:35 +0000

Your semidaily dose of advertiser pulse-taking: People who plan to spend money on ads seem more chipper than they have been in two years.

The summary, via MediaPost:

The optimism of ad executives to boost their advertising budgets has risen to its highest point in two years, and is now at pre-recessionary levels, according to the most recent in a series of periodic surveys gauging the long-term confidence of advertisers and agency media-buying executives. The study, which is based on an index of executives who plan to boost their ad spending over the next 12-months vs. those who plan to decrease it, currently stands at a positive difference of four percentage points, the highest level since the fall of 2007, when the index stood at positive eight percentage points.

And a chart! (Click to enlarge.)

That data point comes from Advertiser Perceptions Inc., which periodically polls ad buyers about their moods–and more practically, whether they intend to spend more or less in the future.

This tracks with the last report we saw from the firm back in May. And more generally, with anecdotal stuff publishers and ad types tell us.

The usual caveats: Things are getting better, but that doesn’t mean they’re good. And online growth is good, but it’s best if you’re Google (GOOG); everyone else is going to see much smaller gains. Or, at least as likely, smaller declines.

How to Tweak Outlook Email To Work for You

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:26:03 +0000

If you have a job, chances are you use Microsoft Outlook.

But are you using it to your best advantage?

Despite the popularity of Microsoft Outlook, several of its functions aren’t noticeable unless you dig around in menus or try out keystroke shortcuts. Many of these tricks can be found by reading a user manual, but users would rather be spending their time in Outlook responding to or writing emails.

[ See post to watch video ]

In last week’s column I reviewed a program called Postbox, which displays email and its contents in unique ways. In that review I mentioned that Outlook, too, has extra functions, but that these aren’t always as obvious as they should be. Below, I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be some of Outlook’s lesser-known talents. I focused on Outlook 2007, which many people currently use, and I also included a handful of notes about what Outlook 2010—due out late spring or early summer—will include. With any luck, you’ll find a few tips here that make your time in Outlook better spent.

Search Me

Rather than simply entering a word into the Outlook search box, you can help the search engine narrow its results by giving it specific parameters. For example, if I remember that my friend sent an email with “LSU tickets” in the subject line, I can type “subject: LSU” to pull out all emails about the Louisiana university. Or if I want to find all emails from Molly, I can write, “from: Molly.” This works with several other terms including “to,” “sent,” “cc” and “message size.”

Search Folders, shown in the folder list with a magnifying glass icon beside them, offer a way of saving the searches you perform most often. If, for example, you often search for flight confirmation emails, you could make a Search Folder called “Travel” that would contain a constantly updated list of emails containing the names of airlines.

New folders can be set up by right clicking on the Search Folders icon, selecting New Search Folder and following steps to select a type of folder from one of many pre-set types of folders—such as “mail sent directly to me,” “large mail” or “mail flagged for follow up.” Or you can create a custom Search Folder by telling it to search for certain words that appear within specific message fields.

Color Coding

To make certain emails stand out in a large list—like emails from your boss or messages addressed only to you—you can set up a rule that makes the email show up in a specific color. Or you can set certain emails to appear in bold font, or in a specific font type and size. Just think of all the emails from your mom that will never go unnoticed again thanks to red type, 14-point font and underlined text.

Setting up the way emails are displayed can be done by going to the Tools menu, selecting Organize, Using Colors and then choosing specific colors for emails from specific people. More advanced automatic settings for applying font type and size to emails can be added by selecting Automatic Formatting in the top right corner of the Using Colors screen. Click “Add” to create more rules.

Souped-Up Calendar

The Outlook Calendar can be organized to look the way you want it rather than the way it’s set up by default. For example, if you like looking at your day in hourly intervals rather than Outlook’s default 30-minute blocks, you can right click anywhere you see hours shown and select 60 minutes. Other increments are also available, like five, 10 and 15 minutes.

Outlook can also display other time zones right beside your own time zone by right clicking on the listed meeting hours, selecting Change Time Zone and checking the box labeled Show an Additional Time Zone. This is helpful for people who often work with distant colleagues, saving them from making a mistake and not factoring the right time zone for the other person. A Swap Time Zone button here quickly changes from one set zone to another, which could be a boon for people who regularly travel to different places and want their Outlook settings to reflect that they’re working from there.

Like color-coded emails, calendar events can be automatically sorted into pre-set categories like Personal, Travel and Family by setting formatting to look for certain words like Tennis (Personal), United (Travel) and Mom, Dad or Allison (Family). Added events that use these words automatically get labeled with a designated color to give your calendar a visual way of distinguishing different types of activities.

Another useful calendar tip: You can hold Control while selecting certain dates on the small view of the calendar and you’ll see only the schedules for those dates. So if I want to see Sept. 19, 22 and 24, I hold Control while selecting each date to see the three days’ activities displayed in the right viewing panel.

Visual Contacts

All Contacts in Outlook can be labeled with a photo of the person, which you add by double clicking on the small head icon in someone’s contact card and then choosing a photo from your collection. People who work in the same company and use Outlook can add their own photo to their contact and it will show up with their emails.

The top right corner of each contact card shows what a person’s digital business card would look like; this is an image that can be edited and copied using a right click, and then it can be copied and pasted to any email signature.

Looking Ahead

In Outlook 2010, due out next year, Microsoft (MSFT) says it hopes to streamline work in Outlook, creating smarter rules that do more with less manual work.

One example of this approach is that emails in the next version of Outlook will be, by default, sorted into conversations—a little like Gmail’s current system. An Ignore button will move all future emails related to the same conversation into the Deleted Items folder. That will include those with changed subject lines because Microsoft uses a special identifier to know which emails are associated with one another. A Clean Up button moves all redundant replies to the Deleted Items folder, leaving just the most recent message in the conversation.

Another feature is Reply with Meeting, a button in Outlook 2010 that will let users create a meeting out of an email. Selecting Reply with Meeting automatically invites those included in the email to attend a meeting.

The title of the meeting is the same as the subject of the email. If the users are in the same corporate network and they all use Outlook Calendar, this tool also looks for the next available time and date on everyone’s calendar.

Quick Steps, another streamlined feature of Outlook 2010, are one-click shortcuts that simultaneously perform several common actions that people take when handling email. If you select a Quick Step called Reply and Delete, it replies to an email and deletes the original. Users can create their own personalized Quick Steps like one labeled Social that, when selected, marks the email as read, moves it to a special folder and labels it under a certain category.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to
Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Intuit Acquires Mint for a Mint [CONFIRMED]

John Paczkowski — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:09:17 +0000

The TechCrunch 50 hasn’t even begun yet and already it’s making news. Online personal finance site Mint, which took top prize at the event in 2007, has evidently been acquired by Intuit. Price: A reported $170 million.

A nice, easy exit for Mint, which might have been the next Intuit–had it stayed the course and remained independent. But above all, a savvy move for Intuit (INTU), which has neutralized a growing threat to its Quicken Online and absorbed Mint’s 1.4 million registered users and their $47 billion in assets. Seems that “doesn’t-make-me-scoff-out-loud business plan” that Kara Swisher once noted, worked out quite well for Mint.

Below, Swisher’s January 2008 interview with Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer.

UPDATE: Patzer has confirmed the acquisition from the TechCrunch 50 stage. The price is indeed $170 million.

[ See post to watch video ]

Upgrading to the iPhone 3G S

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:05:03 +0000

Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

In your review of the new iPhone 3GS, you said that AT&T had changed its upgrade policy so some buyers of the previous model could get the new-customer price earlier than planned. Can you explain this in more detail?

Almost all cellphones in the U.S. are subsidized by the carriers to bring down prices. Typically, existing customers—who have already benefited from a subsidy—can’t upgrade at the lower new-customer price (in this case $199) until they reach a point in their contracts where this subsidy has been recovered. These dates vary, based on a formula that takes into account things like the customer’s monthly spending rate.

When some early adopters of the 2008 iPhone model, the 3G, discovered they wouldn’t immediately qualify for this $199 “standard upgrade” price—the same as the new-customer price—they got angry. So AT&T made a concession, but only a partial one. It declared that any customer who had been told he or she couldn’t get the $199 price until sometime in July, August or September of 2009 would in fact now be able to qualify for that lower price starting on the first day of availability.

This concession doesn’t apply at all to owners of the original 2007 iPhone, or even every owner of the 2008 3G model. And it isn’t based on when you bought your 3G, but when the system told you that you could buy the new model at the “standard” upgrade price of $199. You can check the price AT&T or Apple will charge you for an upgrade by going to www.att.com/iPhone and clicking on “Check upgrade eligibility.”

I’ve recently heard that the new Palm Pre smart phone is unable to import data from the old Palm Desktop program. In other words, if you have Palm Desktop filled with data from a previous Palm model, you’ll be unable to get that data into your new Palm Pre. Is this true?

No. While the Pre isn’t designed to repeatedly sync with the old Palm Desktop software, Palm does offer a program, for Windows and Mac, that will perform a one-time import of your old data from Palm Desktop. It can also do a one-time import of data from certain other desktop programs as well, including Microsoft Outlook on Windows, and iCal and Address Book on the Mac. This program will help you move your data to one of the online services, such as Google, with which the Pre is designed to sync continuously. The software is called the Palm Data Transfer Assistant and is free at http://bit.ly/3lIaZ.

I am contemplating purchasing the 17” MacBook Pro rather than the 13” or 15” models because the antiglare matte screen is offered only with the 17”. How bad is the glare on the smaller screens and how cumbersome do you find the larger 17” MacBook Pro?

For a laptop of its size, the 17” MacBook Pro is remarkably thin and light. But I did find it cumbersome to use in coach seats on airplanes and to cram into small briefcases. As for the glossy screens, which are now the most common option on many laptops, they bothered me at first, but I don’t notice the glare now. However, both of these are personal issues. So my suggestion is to go to a store and see for yourself.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Microsoft Sweeps 2009 Patent Infringement Awards

John Paczkowski — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:22:32 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Latest Microsoft Patent Describes Method of Losing Patent Infringement Suits

John Paczkowski — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:29:17 +0000

2009 is proving to be a year of dubious distinction for Microsoft in patent litigation. On Wednesday the company was ordered to pay $290 million to Toronto-based i4i for willfully infringing its patents. Seems Microsoft used some of i4i’s XML technology in Word 2003 and, though it was apprised of its violation, used it in Word 2007 as well. Said i4i lawyer Douglas Cawley: “E-mails from Microsoft show they knew about the patent and infringed to make i4i products obsolete.”

The $290 million verdict is the second-largest patent jury award this year, the largest of all–coincidentally, I’m sure–being the $388 million verdict against Microsoft won by Singapore’s Uniloc in April over an infringement of its security technology. Then, as in the i4i case and most other patent rulings that haven’t gone its way, Redmond responded with incredulity, claiming it couldn’t have possibly infringed on the patent because the patent is invalid. “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid,” said David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman, in the company’s now boilerplate statement on such matters. “We believe this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict.”

Just Another Cyber Monday …

John Paczkowski — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:01:08 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Online Spending About as Lousy as Offline Spending

John Paczkowski — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:00:13 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]