The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

Remember when Fortune magazine wrote in September that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had reportedly bagged a bison as part of a “personal challenge” to eat only what he had killed?

Well, proof of that is hard to miss, now that the ginormous mounted head of said dead bison has been hung on the wall of a Facebook conference room used by the social networking site’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Zuckerberg placed it there recently as a prank, to surprise his top exec with the installation of the very hairy bison when she was away from Facebook’s Silicon Valley HQ.

And surprised she was when she got back and was faced with the creature, which pretty much takes up the whole room, as you can see above and below.

(And, let me just say on a personal level, like a digital version of the “Murder She Wrote” lady, solving the mystery of this geek-on-bison killing is a whole lot more satisfying than getting a pile of internal Yahoo memos.)

The bison has now been nicknamed Billy and also sports a Facebook-branded baseball cap and occasional hoodie — natch! (My suggestion if you want to use a dead beast metaphor most effectively here would be to clad it all in Google swag.)

While he never confirmed it, Zuckerberg had teased the crowd about the possibility of his hunting prowess at the f8 developers conference this fall in his keynote speech, displaying his Facebook page that had a picture of what he had tagged “Bison Burgers.”

In fact, it’s been quite a lot of bison for the famous entrepreneur since he felled the majestic beast. According to Wikipedia, bison usually weigh 700 to 2,200 pounds, but can be as much as 3,800 pounds. That’s a lot of burgers!

To get them, Zuckerberg learned the most humane approach and then shot the beast in California, after obtaining a hunting license and, presumably, a very big gun.

Clearly, he was serious when he told Fortune in May that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Among the early victims, which grew in size, were a lobster, a chicken, a pig and a goat.

At this time, the Winklevii are still roaming the plains — and it would be illegal and just plain mean on Zuckerberg’s part to frag them any more than he already has.

So, he went for the bison, the next biggest beast in his cross-hairs.

Its head will be moved to Facebook’s new headquarters today along with the rest of the company, who will now work in spacious new digs.

Which, I am told, could easily fit a herd of elephants — but let’s not go there.

But since Steve Jobs has already declared that his new building will be “like a spaceship,” now might be a good time to see how the proposed, but presumably real, building stacks up to some of Hollywood’s actual, but fictional, spaceships. Enjoy:

A story in the Seattle Times this weekend detailed the company’s growing pains as it nears an end to a years-long process to relocate from a number of buildings around town to a centralized campus in downtown Seattle.

The e-commerce giant now occupies seven buildings covering 845,000 square feet, and has long-term leases to occupy more than 1.7 million square feet, including four buildings still to come.

On a worldwide basis, Amazon is gobbling up talent right and left.

In 2010, its ranks swelled by 9,400 positions to 33,700 employees.

It now lists openings for 1,900 jobs in Seattle, which is twice as many as a year ago, The Seattle Times reports. Of those, more than 900 are for technical positions.

Amazon has chosen to relocate in an area just outside of the downtown core that is being revitalized by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate venture. Called South Lake Union, Allen envisions the area being a magnet for biotech and other tech companies.

Since Allen started investing in the neighborhood, it’s become home to a ton of new lofts and townhomes, a mix of new restaurants, hotels, stores and an electric streetcar that connects the corridor to downtown.

Separately, Vulcan Real Estate announced today that it had completed the third phase of Amazon.com’s new headquarters, with two new office buildings now fully occupied. When completed, the project will have five phases, totaling 11 buildings, some new and some historic. Phase IV is currently under construction and includes three buildings set to open this spring. The final phase, which includes one new office building, has also broken ground and will open in 2013.

Today, he says it’s all “new eBay.”

At the company’s analyst meeting at its headquarters, the company demonstrated the major changes made over the past couple of years and laid out plans for how local, mobile and social will lead the next wave of commerce.

In the afternoon, Bob Swan, eBay’s CFO, took the stage to give the financial rundown that everyone had been waiting for since the morning.

Swan highlighted PayPal’s growth trajectory by saying that it expects to double revenues over the next three years to between $6 billion and $7 billion, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010.

He also talked up how mobile was gaining speed by saying that PayPal mobile transactions were estimated to double to $2 billion in total payment volume, and that mobile on marketplaces will double to $4 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Meanwhile, when looking at the company’s gross merchandise volume, he sees the business increasing from $60 billion in 2010 to $75 billion in 2013. And, to support the strength of the business, the company anticipates generating $7.5 to $8 billion in free cash flow by 2013.

Swan wants to stress that these growth rates are being driven from the company’s core businesses, and not from the more innovative stuff eBay is working on in local, mobile and social. “We are in a  different state than we were in March 2009, where the crystal ball was murky and full of potholes. Now the crystal ball is full of opportunities. We have unmatched advantages that position us to win.”

That’s possible because of the improvements the company has been making over the past two years.

“We’ve made significant and necessary changes necessary for growth. Two years ago, search was optimized for auctions and suffered. Two years from now, search will be a competitive advantage for eBay,” said Mark Carges,” eBay’s CTO of marketplaces. “We’ve rolled out many tailored experiences and selling on eBay will be vastly simplified.”

To illustrate the change, Carges showed how there’s no more irreverent banner ads on the search results page, and instead of returning up to 19 paid results, it gives shoppers the “best matches” and cuts the time in half that it takes to return results.

The company also launched the buyer protection program, which will return the price of the item and the cost of shipping to customers unhappy with purchases.

Christopher Payne, VP of eBay marketplaces North America, said the company will start to increase marketing spend on these improvements to drive awareness: “We’ve been intentionally quiet as we fixed fundamentals, but starting in the second half, we’ll start marketing this new experience.”

At lunch, analysts were so eager to talk to Donahoe he wasn’t even able to get to his seat. They crowded around him in the lobby to grill him on what impact Facebook, Apple and Google were going to have on the company’s payments aspirations.

Donahoe wasn’t phased, saying that PayPal is technology agnostic. He will support BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone — and all of the iterations they produce from phones to tablets. What’s more, he says, the company is building the tools and technology for merchants to keep up in what can be a daunting world.

Analysts appear impressed with the improvements. Today, the company’s shares traded up nearly 8 percent, or $2.57, to $34.53, coming close to marking a 52-week high.

Whether he is walking the halls of Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, or even just buying groceries at the market, Nokia’s chief executive is constantly flooded with suggestions for how the company should regain lost ground.

Elop recalled being at dinner just over a week ago and being approached by three young people who wanted to share their suggestions.

“The three of them couldn’t quite agree on what the right strategy was, but they clearly each had an opinion,” Elop said.

For his part, Elop has deeply considered three possibilities for its high-end smartphone business–sticking with plans to develop around MeeGo (a mobile version of Linux), shifting to Android or adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

Without tipping his hand, Elop spoke with Mobilized last week about the pros and cons of the various options. The interview came before releasing his big “burning platform” memo and literally as the final decision was being made.

For Elop, it came down to which approach would offer enough differentiation and yet would also be part of an ecosystem that would be large enough to attract developers, advertisers, carriers and all the other partners.

“It’s not just differentiation but sustainable differentiation,” Elop said. He also said that as big as Nokia is, it can’t afford to go it alone.

It is also critically important to Elop that the company be more competitive in the United States. Although the company ships more phones worldwide than any other company, its presence in North America is basically nonexistent. And yet, he said, the U.S. is where the pace is set for the high end of the market.

“We need to be in the United States in one way, shape or form,” Elop said. “We have to have a viable way to reopen doors.”

So where did that leave the various options?

Although MeeGo left plenty of room for differentiation, that option would also mean trying to be unique at the same time, as the company would have to convince others to build on the platform.

“For it to be a valid ecosystem, that also implies other [phone makers]–our competitors–would be attracted to it as well,” Elop said. “That’s one of the things that give it critical mass and credibility.”

Although Elop didn’t say so in our interview, his comments in this week’s memo suggest that his confidence there was low.

“We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones,” Elop said in his memo to staff. “However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.”

As for Android and Windows Phone, Elop said Nokia could offer a significant boost to either ecosystem.

“Android is growing very nicely; it has significant market share,” he said. “The combination of Android’s existing market share plus the market share that Nokia could bring to the Android ecosystem is a very large number and would signal a very substantial shift in the dynamics of the mobile operating system market.”

As for Redmond’s operating system, Elop said it is early days.

“Windows Phone is in its early formative stages in terms of getting customer traction and so forth. It’s a beautiful product and I say that as someone who is competing with it.”

However, that may not be the case much longer. While Elop was still leaving all doors open when he spoke with Mobilized a week ago, the options appear to have narrowed significantly in recent days. His memo on Tuesday appeared to rule out MeeGo as the best option, while a tweet from Google’s Vic Gundotra suggests Android is out and a tie-up with WIndows Phone is Elop’s final choice.

But, no matter what decision gets made at the high end, Elop said that the company probably needs a separate strategy at the low end of the market, where there is intense competition from Chinese phone makers building phones around low-cost chips from MediaTek.

Friday’s investor meeting will also address other aspects of the company, including its services strategy, its plans for its Navteq navigation unit and its plans to leverage its huge patent portfolio. The announcement also comes just ahead of the cell phone industry’s big trade show, Mobile World Congress, which gets going on Sunday in Barcelona.

Mobilized is here in London and will have live coverage of the meeting, which kicks off at 11 am local time. That’s 3 am PT, so set those alarm clocks early.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says it is just recently that the site has gotten itself on sustainable financial footing, and has become widely accepted as a useful, quality resource.

We stopped by the nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters, which is located amidst a sea of tech companies in the city’s SOMA district, on the eve of the big anniversary, which Wikipedia is celebrating with a set of relatively mellow user meet-ups around the world.

Gardner spoke about the evolution of Wikimedia as an organization, and set out its goals for the coming years. We videoed the part of the interview where she sets the scene for the 10th anniversary.

Wikipedia is coming off a successful grassroots fundraiser, where it was able to raise $16 million from users, in part due to founder Jimmy Wales’s face greeting users every time they visited the site until the end of the campaign. That’s double the amount raised in a similar campaign the year before.

And over the last 18 months, Wikimedia orchestrated a wide-scale community discussion of its strategy, aided by collaboration expert Eugene Eric Kim, which resulted in a set of goals to take the organization and its many volunteers forward.

Wikipedia now has cumulative 380 million edits, resulting in 17.8 million articles in 250 languages by eight million user accounts, of which about 100,000 edit at least five times per month. It has 52 people in its San Francisco headquarters, which Gardner took over in 2007.

The nonprofit’s three-part mandate is to increase Wikipedia participation, quality and reach. Its big focus for the coming year will be reach, according to Gardner, specifically targeting poorer areas of the world where Wikipedia has so far proved to be less popular.

The idea, said Gardner, is that if people in these places have the tools and exposure to contribute to Wikipedia, the resulting content will be better representative of the world, as well as more comprehensive.

“You can’t blame editors for not being representative,” said Gardner. “The way to solve this is not to make them feel bad.”

A major implementation of the initiative will be opening a Wikimedia office in India in the next couple of months. Gardner had just recently returned from a trip to India when we spoke.

Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s product team is also working to redo its registration and discussion tools, and future projects include a better system for understanding user reputations.

The company has also started a campus ambassador program at colleges, which Gardner said is promising in part due to the folks who have turned out so far. Unlike with Wikipedia, where 87 percent of contributors are men, the campus ambassador volunteers were 50 percent women.

Another college effort is a program with 25 public policy classes to improve the Wikipedia pages on a particular subject matter.

And on the infrastructure front, Wikimedia is finally moving its data center out of the hurricane zone in Florida to a dedicated space in Virginia. The nonprofit is also looking to cache the site from more locations (it currently does so in Amsterdam) so it can be more quickly accessible in more parts of the world.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/happy-10th-birthday-wikipedia-whats-next-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/yahoo-layoffs-of-650-to-700-employees-set-for-tomorrow/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/yahoo-layoffs-of-650-to-700-employees-set-for-tomorrow/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:49:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38492

It matters a great deal to the unfortunate employees at Yahoo who are being laid off this week for the reporting on the subject to be accurate and to entail some serious effort.

(It’s bad enough to lose a well-paying job in this still-tough economy, but to lose one over the holidays requires quite a lot more than incorrectly quoting a tweet off Twitter without checking first.)

And so here’s the deal, as BoomTown has previously reported, about what’s happening with Yahoo layoffs, set for tomorrow morning:

Yahoo will lay off about 650 to 700 employees.

Those layoffs will come largely from its product division, headed by Blake Irving, although there could be firings in other parts of Yahoo.

The layoffs are mostly in the U.S. units of Yahoo.

Those let go will be notified tomorrow and will likely have to leave Yahoo facilities immediately. Company sources said the action will be completed by early afternoon, Pacific time.

It’s definitely bad timing for Yahoo, given it is less than two weeks until Christmas, but cost-cutting at the company seems unavoidable as it seeks to improve revenue and spur growth.

Still, it is another sad day in Sunnyvale, Calif., where the iconic Internet giant is headquartered.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/yahoo-layoffs-of-650-to-700-employees-set-for-tomorrow/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101028/google-among-bidders-for-2-billion-building/ http://allthingsd.com/20101028/google-among-bidders-for-2-billion-building/#comments Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:00:09 +0000 Anton Troianovski http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31699 Google Inc. is a front runner to buy the massive building it occupies as its New York City headquarters in a deal that could be worth nearly $2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Other buyers from around the world are also chasing the block-long, 2.9-million-square-foot building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the person said. If the deal is done near $2 billion, the building’s sale would make it one of the largest acquisitions of a single property in New York.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101028/google-among-bidders-for-2-billion-building/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100921/ladylike-fun-and-games-boomtown-visits-sugar-hq-for-an-update/ http://allthingsd.com/20100921/ladylike-fun-and-games-boomtown-visits-sugar-hq-for-an-update/#comments Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:42:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=33974

It’s been a dog’s age since BoomTown revisited Sugar Inc., the scrappy women-focused content start-up run by Brian and Lisa Sugar.

I first paid a visit to the San Francisco headquarters of Sugar three years ago to check out the flagship PopSugar (celebs), GeekSugar (tech), CasaSugar (home) and YumSugar (food) sites.

Since then, it has moved into a range of other arenas, via acquisition, such as:

ShopStyle.com for Web commerce; FreshGuide, which makes women-aimed city guides that show off daily offers in a wide rage of arenas, such as beauty, health and fitness; and video shopping start-up Shopflick, which is now a Los Angeles-based branded entertainment unit called Sugar Digital Entertainment.

And, most recently, in mid-July, it launched a fashion game on Facebook called Retail Therapy. where you run your own fashion boutique.

While mine would be all jeans, T-shirts and Puma Mostros, it is an interesting idea from a content company, injecting into the content model doses of virality, commerce and user passion.

And, of course, Sugar has launched the requisite Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPad apps.

Last summer, Sugar also cut its ties with NBC Universal by buying back its shares and got a Series C funding of $16 million from Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia has been an existing venture investor, having put $5 million into Sugar in late 2006. NBC invested $10 million in 2007.

And while Sugar has had serious acquisition flirtations with Yahoo (YHOO), it currently remains on the road to building a new media content company of the future from scratch.

Here’s a talk I had with Brian Sugar last week about that and more, as well as a tour of Sugar’s office.

Also below, a very funny video called “The Zoeinator,” which Sugar did for Rachel Zoe’s Zoe Report, as an example of its branded content efforts:

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100921/ladylike-fun-and-games-boomtown-visits-sugar-hq-for-an-update/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090421/more-pulitzers-less-money-new-york-times-ad-sales-down-27/ http://allthingsd.com/20090421/more-pulitzers-less-money-new-york-times-ad-sales-down-27/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:51:16 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6464 Yesterday the New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes, and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears.

But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.

In the first three months of this year, the New York Times Company (NYT) lost $74.5 million, or 34 cents a share once you factor out one-time charges, on revenue of $609 million. That’s worse than Wall Street’s low expectations of a five-cent loss on revenue of $630.8 million.

The reason, of course, is that the ad market is miserable in general, and even more so for newspapers. The company’s ad revenue was down 27 percent, notably worse than the awful 17.6 percent decline the Times recorded in the last quarter of 2008.

And as in the last quarter, former bright spots like the Internet business have now gone dark as well: Internet revenue was down 5.6 percent, Internet ad sales declined 6.1 percent, and revenue at the Times’s About.com unit dropped 4.7 percent.

Expect more of the same for the second quarter of this year, warns CEO Janet Robinson: “At this time, and it is early in the quarter, we believe the rate of decline in ad revenues in the second quarter will be similar to that of the first.”

The Times has been trimming costs (via salary cuts and layoffs) and has bought itself a bit of breathing room by getting rid of its dividend, taking on a very expensive loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and selling off assets like its Manhattan headquarters. It still has some moves it can make–it is trying to unload its stake in the Boston Red Sox and to find a buyer for the Boston Globe.

But at some point it’s going to have find a way to start selling more ads again. Because awards alone won’t save the paper–Pulitzers can’t even guarantee their winners’ continued employment.

The Times has stopped providing monthly revenue updates, but it has been pretty good about providing detail via its earnings calls. I’ll be on the road during today’s 11 a.m. call, but will check the transcript and get back to you later with the most interesting nuggets.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090421/more-pulitzers-less-money-new-york-times-ad-sales-down-27/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081013/apple-rd-the-r-stands-for-rumor/ http://allthingsd.com/20081013/apple-rd-the-r-stands-for-rumor/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:17:57 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6649

One of the investments we make is to introduce new products that initially cost more because they deliver an entirely new level of value to the customer. Then we ride the cost curves down with value engineering and volume manufacturing, leaving us far head of our competitors. We have some of these types of investments in front of us that I can’t discuss.”

– Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, July 21, 2008

The media will gather tomorrow at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for an invitation-only event–presumably about updates to its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. And as with every Apple (AAPL) product launch, tomorrow’s has been preceded by feverish speculation about what form, exactly, those updates will take. Among the rumors currently making the rounds:

• Apple will uncrate a new line of MacBooks whose cases are carved from a single brick of aircraft-grade aluminum.
• Apple’s refreshed MacBook line will include a machine priced at below $1000, perhaps even as low as $800.
• The new MacBooks will feature glass, multi-touch trackpads and LED-backlit displays.
• They’ll swap out Intel’s chipset–not the central processor–for Nvidia’s MCP7A, which reportedly blows the doors off Intel’s G45 in the graphics department.
• Blu-ray will be offered as an option on high-end models.
• Finally, Apple’s new line of portables will include the unmatchable “state-of-the-art new product” to which Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook referred earlier this year, and that product will be a tablet. Something along the lines of the “MacBook Touch” described by MacDailyNews back in July.
  

  Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like but fuller-featured multi-touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion’s haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. … App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too.”

An interesting spread of rumors, some quite likely, others improbable … and yet entirely plausible because, after all, it’s Apple we’re talking about. We’ll find out which of these proves true tomorrow at 10 a.m. PDT. I’ll be covering the event live, so be sure pay us a visit tomorrow.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081013/apple-rd-the-r-stands-for-rumor/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20081013/apple-rd-the-r-stands-for-rumor-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081013/apple-rd-the-r-stands-for-rumor-2/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:17:57 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6649

One of the investments we make is to introduce new products that initially cost more because they deliver an entirely new level of value to the customer. Then we ride the cost curves down with value engineering and volume manufacturing, leaving us far head of our competitors. We have some of these types of investments in front of us that I can’t discuss.”

– Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, July 21, 2008

The media will gather tomorrow at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for an invitation-only event–presumably about updates to its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. And as with every Apple (AAPL) product launch, tomorrow’s has been preceded by feverish speculation about what form, exactly, those updates will take. Among the rumors currently making the rounds:

• Apple will uncrate a new line of MacBooks whose cases are carved from a single brick of aircraft-grade aluminum.
• Apple’s refreshed MacBook line will include a machine priced at below $1000, perhaps even as low as $800.
• The new MacBooks will feature glass, multi-touch trackpads and LED-backlit displays.
• They’ll swap out Intel’s chipset–not the central processor–for Nvidia’s MCP7A, which reportedly blows the doors off Intel’s G45 in the graphics department.
• Blu-ray will be offered as an option on high-end models.
• Finally, Apple’s new line of portables will include the unmatchable “state-of-the-art new product” to which Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook referred earlier this year, and that product will be a tablet. Something along the lines of the “MacBook Touch” described by MacDailyNews back in July.
  

  Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like but fuller-featured multi-touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion’s haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. … App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too.”

An interesting spread of rumors, some quite likely, others improbable … and yet entirely plausible because, after all, it’s Apple we’re talking about. We’ll find out which of these proves true tomorrow at 10 a.m. PDT. I’ll be covering the event live, so be sure pay us a visit tomorrow.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081013/apple-rd-the-r-stands-for-rumor-2/feed/ 0