10 posts and columns on April

IPad 2: Start the 100-Day Hype Countdown

in Mobile on December 8, 2010 at 9:54 am PT

Industry sources are telling the occasionally reliable DigiTimes that Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner, will begin shipping the next-generation tablet within the next 100 days in preparation for a spring debut that will follow the launch of the original iPad by about a year.

May Search Metrics: Google Losing Share or Gaining It? All Depends on How You Look at the Data

in News on June 11, 2010 at 5:30 am PT

Getting an accurate read on the tides of search market share these days is no easy feat given the interface changes being rolled out by the major players. Consider comScore’s May search market report, which shows Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing gaining share, ostensibly at Google’s expense.

It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll), Android

in Mobile on May 26, 2010 at 8:14 am PT

Android may be outselling Apple’s iPhone in the United States, but has a long way to go before it rivals the device in market penetration.

Videogame Industry Suffers Massively Multiplayer Sales Decline

in News on May 14, 2010 at 6:50 am PT

April was another lousy month for the videogame industry. With overall revenue down 26 percent and hardware down 37 percent, it was the worst monthly year-over-year sales decline since last July, according to research house The NPD Group. It was also the 10th time in the last 13 months that sales have fallen year-over-year.
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A BoomTown Bier-Trinken Visit to the Gourmet Haus Staudt, Home of iPhonegate! (Can You Say Oktoberfest in April?)

in News on April 27, 2010 at 5:33 am PT

When BoomTown was kibitzing with SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg about where to meet up this week for a chat to catch up, we decided to forgo the obvious and instead choose the complete Silicon Valley cliche of the moment. Destination: Redwood City and the now-infamous Gourmet Haus Staudt. As in, the the beer garden behind the German grocery store where the iPhone 4G prototype was snatched from a birthday-celebrating Apple engineer by person still unknown and sold to the now-police-shookdown Gizmodo gadget site. Here’s our Gemütlichkeit travelogue!

Hell of a Way to Get Out of Your AT&T Contract, Varney…

in News on July 6, 2009 at 12:15 pm PT

Earlier this year, Christine Varney, the new antitrust chief at the Department of Justice, said she planned to return the DOJ to a policy that led to landmark antitrust suits like the one against Microsoft in the ’90s. And she delivered on that promise in short order. Since her confirmation in late April, the DOJ has seen a sort of Trustbuster renaissance. It has begun inquiring into potentially anticompetitive recruiting practices in Silicon Valley. It’s opened an investigation into the Google Books settlement. And now it’s scrutinizing cellphone exclusivity deals, like the lucrative one between Apple and AT&T.
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Hell of a Way to Get Out of Your AT&T Contract, Varney…

in News on July 6, 2009 at 12:15 pm PT

Earlier this year, Christine Varney, the new antitrust chief at the Department of Justice, said she planned to return the DOJ to a policy that led to landmark antitrust suits like the one against Microsoft in the ’90s. And she delivered on that promise in short order. Since her confirmation in late April, the DOJ has seen a sort of Trustbuster renaissance. It has begun inquiring into potentially anticompetitive recruiting practices in Silicon Valley. It’s opened an investigation into the Google Books settlement. And now it’s scrutinizing cellphone exclusivity deals, like the lucrative one between Apple and AT&T.
iphone-att

Ad Market Looks Worse Than Expected, Which Is What We Expected

in Media on July 6, 2009 at 6:19 am PT

It has been three months since Zenith Optimedia revised its ad market forecast downward. Which means it’s time to knock it down once again. The ad buying firm now thinks the market will shrink by 8.5 percent this year, which is worse than the 6.9 percent decrease it predicted in April, which was worse than the 0.2 percent decrease it threw out in December. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, of course. But anyone want to bet on what happens in three months?
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Search Market: Same as It Ever Was

in News on June 16, 2009 at 4:34 pm PT

More sad data points in Microsoft’s Sisyphean battle for the search market. ComScore released May 2009 core search volume and market share metrics for the U.S. this afternoon and they show what search metrics always seem to show these days: Google’s share of the domestic market growing at the expense of its rivals.
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April’s Job Loss Report Less of a Train Wreck Than March’s

in News on May 6, 2009 at 7:11 am PT

The number of job cuts made during April was the lowest since October. That’s the latest from outplacement services provider Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which said today that “planned workforce reductions” in April were 132,590–12 percent fewer than the more than 150,000 recorded in March. Great news, right? Until you realize that the “planned reductions” to which the company refers were up 47 percent from a year earlier and are still at recession levels.
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