It’s about time. Facebook stock is in free fall — more than halved from its initial listing price at $38 per share — and investors are freaking out. Wall Street responded accordingly with its share of finger-pointing, calling for the heads of executive management.

Questions of blame aside, this is Zuckerberg’s first chance to address some of the biggest questions hanging over his company’s head, with the potential to assuage at least some investor concern.

Here are a few topics I think he should speak to — after that, delivery is on him.

Strategy: Short Term vs. Long Term

Since Facebook first filed its S-1 to go public, Zuckerberg has made no bones about his lack of regard for the Street. “We don’t build services to make money,” Zuckerberg wrote in his founder’s letter last February. “We make money to build better services.” Essentially, it was a message saying that Zuckerberg wouldn’t put short-term fiscal gains ahead of the long-term well-being of the company.

The grim reality of being public, however, has set in. Investors have shown waning confidence in the company’s monetization prospects through the sinking share price. Despite the continued insistent focus on the long-term, Zuckerberg needs to address the here-and-now, what Facebook can do in the short-term.

Why? Because despite whatever grand plan Facebook management has for the company, the reality is that a tanking stock price affects a company in palpable ways, from internal struggle to strain on external partnerships. Shrugging off concerns can only work as a strategy for so long.

How, for instance, can Facebook use its newly gotten IPO gains to get ahead? What sort of immediate acquisitions will the company focus on? Is Facebook in the business of acquiring teams for talent, or for technology?

From there, Zuckerberg could then elaborate further on his vision for Facebook, and how the company’s biggest initiatives — especially Open Graph and working with third-party developers — will benefit Facebook in the long run. While this is obviously more comfortable territory for him, the public needs a better idea of how Facebook plans to get there.

Monetization, Mobile and Otherwise

Everyone already knows Facebook’s scale is massive — the company comes closer to the billion-user mark with each passing day. But despite the scale, there’s still that other lingering problem: Revenue.

Right now, Facebook’s ARPU (average revenue per user) isn’t as impressive as some of its peers (like, say, Google), hovering in the dollar to buck-and-a-quarter range. What’s more, user growth is slowing in North America and Europe, where the ARPU is highest, while the fastest-growing areas of user growth — places like Asia and what Facebook calls the “rest of the world” region — typically have some of the lowest ARPU numbers.

Add to that the growing trend of users flocking to mobile devices, a platform that Facebook readily admits it has not effectively monetized. That’s certainly a problem for Facebook when sources of user growth like developing nations rely primarily on low-cost mobile devices to access the company’s services.

And as my colleague Peter Kafka has stated so aptly before, Facebook is still figuring out its whole advertising game. It doesn’t have, for instance, a Google AdWords-like product, essentially a straightforward way of showing advertisers where their ad budgets are going.

But that’s a whole other rabbit hole. Can Zuckerberg plainly and clearly explain what’s in store for Facebook’s advertising strategy for monetizing mobile, or shed light on any potential ad products that we aren’t privy to? That’d be nice.

Supporting the Troops

If you’re an employee inside of Facebook, the last three months have sucked. I’ve heard tales from exasperated Facebook employees who go home from work only to hear from friends and family how awful they’ve heard the company is doing. It’s a wear on internal morale — something that could seriously affect attrition rates.

That’s especially true considering the additional pressure over the next 18 months, as employee shares continue to come out of lockup. Those sitting on millions from when they first signed on could essentially cut and run to a new outfit, either joining a competitor or perhaps taking the money to float a new start-up of their own.

What Facebook needs is a public rallying cry, something beyond the internal all-hands meetings Facebook holds regularly, in which Zuckerberg has reportedly reassured his employees, while acknowledging that the stock slide was “painful” to witness.

A strong declaration of solidarity that, yes, things are tough, but the company has banded together to weather the storm, could help ease the scrutiny his employees face from everyone on the outside.

And it would also be a reminder to prospective Facebookers that the company is still hiring actively, and that it’s still a desirable place to work for a young, upstart engineer.

Admit It: You Blew the IPO

Lastly, there’s the botched IPO that will live in infamy. All we’ve heard is Wall Street and media chatter, with Facebook staying largely mum on the topic. No explanation on why it went down the way it did, no retrospective on what the company would have done differently. (The most we’ve heard was from CFO David Ebersman on Facebook’s first earnings call in July, parroting the “long-term” party line: “We’re disappointed in the way the stock has traded. But we’re focused on long-term.”)

Basically, the public wants to be leveled with. Insight as to why things went south the way they did could ease tensions with retail investors who feel scorned from the offering, particularly when buying into Facebook seemed like a sure bet from the start. It won’t necessarily yield any immediate returns, but it could stanch further bleeding, keeping some from cashing out sooner rather than later.

It’s the elephant that has been in the room for months. Talk about it.

Mark Zuckerberg: CEO

Ultimately, much of Zuckerberg’s appearance will boil down to something intangible: The way he carries himself.

Will his performance onstage carry with it the gravitas of a CEO in control of his company, a commanding presence who knows how to lead? Has the young tech prodigy moved past the days of sweaty public nervousness? It’s unclear what to expect, exactly: I haven’t seen him at an event in the flesh in more than a year.

But one thing’s for sure: He needs to nail it.

Over the past year, Amazon has slowly been entering that space, aiming to go up against industry-leading Groupon.

So far, it has done fairly well. For example, Amazon is the fourth-largest daily deal provider in the U.S., following Groupon, LivingSocial and Travelzoo, according to Yipit, a deal aggregator that closely tracks the major players.

Starting early tomorrow, the company is planning a publicity stunt to raise its awareness even further, by posting $10 Amazon.com gift cards for five bucks.

The offer will be distributed on the AmazonLocal site, via email and on some Kindle devices, and has the potential to sell out, since limited quantities will be available. (Don’t get too excited, it’s limited to one per customer.)

As part of the promotion, Mark Eamer, a director of product at AmazonLocal, provided a glimpse into the company’s plans in the crowded local deals space (but that’s pretty good, considering the company’s corporate culture to not disclose much of anything).

Offering gift cards is a common way for companies in the space to drum up new subscribers, even though the companies often lose money. For example, last year, LivingSocial sold 1.3 million $20 Amazon gift cards for $10 apiece, Groupon pawned discounts for Barnes & Noble, and more recently, Google offered up gift cards from REI.

Eamer said this represents the first time it has sold gift cards for Amazon.com, but in the past, it has sold deals for other Amazon-owned properties, such as Diapers.com and Soap.com.

Up until now, most of AmazonLocal’s growth has been supported by the $175 million strategic investment it made two years ago in LivingSocial. Nine months ago, Amazon launched its first local deals site in Boise, Idaho, with the help of LivingSocial, and today it operates in 90 markets across 26 states and the District of Columbia.

Eamer said that even now most of the deals listed on the site come from LivingSocial, although AmazonLocal is hiring its own sales team in Seattle and in other locations to help source deals. He declined to say how many people work in the division.

Still, it’s clear that one of Amazon’s advantages in getting merchants to work with them over a competitor is its scale, he said.

Eamer would not disclose how many subscribers have signed up for AmazonLocal, but overall, the company has 164 million active customer accounts worldwide, defined as people who have made a purchase on the site in the past 12 months.

“There’s lots of competitors in this space, and we all want attention from the merchants. By far and away, they [merchants] answer the phone and want to hear what we have to say. We have relationships with millions of merchants around the world, and 164 million customers worldwide. We know how to work with merchants and connect with customers — it’s unique to Amazon.com.”

In the future, Eamer said, AmazonLocal would be open to talking to other providers beyond LivingSocial to bring more offers to the platform. “We would consider it and evaluate that as time goes on, or as another relationship presents itself,” he said.

Amazon’s success in the space is important not just because it is interested in going up against Groupon, but because it uses offers to discount the price of its hardware, including the Kindle e-readers. For instance, a Kindle Touch “with special offers” costs only $99, but one without offers — a.k.a. ads — is $139. In other words, if it can subsidize the cost of its hardware through the use of these offers, it can compete more deftly against Apple and others in the tablet space.

Another goal for the year is to continue to refine its targeting abilities. Currently, offers are only delivered to people based on geography only.

“One of our key tenets is delivering the right deal to the right person at the right time … Our targeting is limited by geography, but we’ll be working on some things in 2012.”

Of course, in the case of tomorrow’s Amazon.com gift card, it will be sent out to everyone.

As we reported Wednesday, Oracle decided to slap Lynch silly with a public rebuke concerning his comments to The Wall Street Journal that his company had never been shopped to Oracle.

Always eager to clear up the record — just, well, you know, because — Oracle went on to publish the PowerPoint slides sent by investment banker Frank Quattrone of Qatalyst Partners to Mark Hurd in January. The slides may or may not have had anything to do with a meeting held by Lynch, Quattrone, Oracle President Mark Hurd and its head of M&A, Douglas Kehring, in April. Or not! You see, the stories vary.

(Oracle, by the way, has since taken down the slides, but you can still read them here. Update: And we’re now told the slides are back up. Interesting!)

But what about the email those slides arrived with originally? Well, a kindly source has sent it to us. Dated Jan. 26 — you can read it below — it was sent to Hurd by Quattrone (whose address I’ve deleted as a courtesy). Judge for yourself, but to me it sure reads like the windup to a sales pitch.

From: Frank Quattrone
Date: January 26, 2011 7:48:37 AM PST
To: “‘mark.hurd@oracle.com’”
Subject: Fw: Autonomy slides

Hi Mark,
It was great to catch up earlier this month. I wanted to follow up by sending the slides I promised on Autonomy. Given its strong position in managing unstructured data (such as video, voice and photos), “meaning based” contextual enterprise search, data protection, compliance, archiving and content/web management, I beleive it’s a very strategic asset that could alter the balance of power in the industry for whoever might acquire it. And despite its strong track record of growth and very high profitability (50 pct margins), it trades at less than 20x earnings and around 11x Ebitda, huge discounts to the other strategic software assets of scale. Please let me know if you would like me to follow up with you, Doug K or otherwise.
Thanks
Frank

And it was! At least the email part. Quattrone weighed in on the whole kerfuffle via an email to Lynch, which Lynch then shared with the Financial Times Alphaville blog:

“The slides Oracle posted publicly were sent by me to Mark Hurd in January, were prepared by Qatalyst and were for the purpose of our independently pitching Autonomy as an idea to Oracle. These slides were not used in our April meeting with Mark and Doug.”

So what of the meeting in April? Well, apparently it wasn’t a sales pitch at all. No, really. As Autonomy said in a statement also sent to the FT:

“In April 2011, there was a meeting for approximately thirty or forty minutes between Autonomy and Mark Hurd, which was set up by Frank Quattrone as an introduction to Mark Hurd. Oracle is an Autonomy customer. It was made clear that Autonomy was not for sale and no sale process was under way. Mr. Quattrone’s company was not engaged by Autonomy at that time. There has been no other contact with Oracle since then. …

“Qatalyst have informed us that the slides Oracle has recently posted on its website were prepared and sent independently by Qatalyst to Oracle on 26 January (the content is clearly from January). This is the first time we have seen them. Autonomy was not involved in this nor was Qatalyst engaged by Autonomy until mid-year. Autonomy did not present these slides in the meeting.

“Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help.”

Oh, snap! At least Lynch is learning the art of the snarky retort. So the slides were the work of eager bankers trying to get a deal cooking. And the meeting was just a friendly call by Autonomy’s CEO on a customer? With an investment banker and another company’s head of M&A — two people who have collectively done more Silicon Valley deals than any other people in the world — joining in just for kicks? Okay then.

While this tit-for-tat seems like a mildly entertaining tempest in a teapot, it’s a $12 billion teapot! One about which HP shareholders still seem to have a lot of questions, especially in light of the management change that has gone on there since the deal was announced. Time, however, is short: HP is said to be about ready to close on the deal Monday.

Why is it so important to Lynch that the world believe that Autonomy was not shopping itself, and not engaging in any discussions about selling itself? Because laws in the U.K. about corporate acquisitions are very strict, for one thing. And companies engaging in discussions about being acquired without disclosing that fact to shareholders quickly find themselves in hot water with regulators! That means CEOs in the U.K. get ticklish on this subject very easily.

Of course, the first official public disclosure about Autonomy being in discussions to sell itself to anyone crossed the wires at 1:32 pm New York time on Aug. 18, which, by my watch, is about two minutes after markets had closed in London. The disclosure, however, came about an hour and change after Bloomberg News reported that a deal was near. About 90 minutes after Autonomy’s disclosure in London — and with 52 minutes left before the close of markets in New York — came HP’s confirming statement that it was “in discussions.” Then, just after markets closed in New York, the deal was done. That leaves plenty of room for people on both sides of the Atlantic to ask all kinds of fun questions. Anyway.

And as we all know, Oracle — whether in January or April — passed on the opportunity to bid on Autonomy, primarily because the price was, as CEO Larry Ellison put it on a conference call last week, “shockingly high” at about $6 billion. And four months later — or eight, depending on when you start counting — on Aug. 18, Hewlett-Packard announced its plans to acquire Autonomy at nearly twice that price.

So what was the purpose of the April meeting in Oracle’s board room in Redwood Shores? Was it really a “lively discussion about databases,” as Lynch has previously claimed? Or an innocent customer call during which two masters of tech M&A just happened to be in the room? We don’t know exactly.

But we do know one thing: Having first characterized Ellison’s description of the matter as “just inaccurate,” then copping to a previously undisclosed meeting of some kind, Lynch does know how to change his story.

The company raised about $234 million in the offering yesterday and the results left it with a market capitalization of about $1.3 billion. About 13.9 million shares changed hands. Steve Wozniak, the Apple founder who is now a Fusion-io director and its chief scientist, bought the first 100 shares.

Fusion-io had better luck than Taomee Holdings, a Chinese children’s media company whose shares also debuted today. Having opened at $9 a share, it finished the day at $8.23, down more than 8 percent. It had anticipated trading in a range between $9 and $11 a share.

At Fusion-io’s closing price, the shares of CEO David Flynn, who owns about 9 percent of the company, are worth about $156 million. New Enterprise Ventures, which holds 26 million shares, cleared $585 million. Lightspeed Ventures, which has 8.8 million shares, has a stake worth almost $200 million.

A few minutes after he talked with me this morning, Flynn, pictured above with Woz, appeared on CNBC, and I snagged the video for you below. In it he answers questions about the concentration of his customer base — Facebook, Apple and eight other companies account for more than 90 percent of revenue — and uses the word “transformative” about 18 times. At least he’s on message!

A 16-year Microsoft veteran, Weber held a variety of senior executive positions in sales, marketing and professional services before leaving to start his own consulting business.

His new gig as Nokia president and head of Markets, North America begins today as does Louison’s pursuit of “new career opportunities.”

COMPLETE COVERAGE:

• Nokia’s Stephen Elop Talks to Mobilized About the Big Microsoft Deal (Video)
• Massive Layoffs Expected at Nokia
• Nokia’s Microsoft Partnership: Does the New Strategy Add Up?
• Live From the Nokia-Microsoft Press Conference: It’s a Windows Phone World After All
• More From Nokia: Forecast Gets Cloudy, Plus Expected Executive Changes
• Nokia-Microsoft: What Steve Ballmer and Stephen Elop Have to Say in Their Joint Letter
• Nokia Confirms Microsoft Partnership With YouTube Video
• R&D Spending: Nokia Vs. Apple Shows Size Doesn’t Matter
• Not Seeing Much Return on That Massive R&D Spend, Are You, Nokia?
• Nokia: Big and Slow

Andreessen Horowitz has invested more than $80 million in Twitter via purchasing stock in private secondary markets.

When called about it by BoomTown, a spokeswoman at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm confirmed the purchase.

To be clear, Twitter does not get this money–early investors and employees able to sell their privately held Twitter shares do.

Buying into the secondary markets–which have recently attracted some controversy and regulatory scruntiny–has become a common way for VCs to invest in a hot start-up without a complex and competitive funding bake-off.

The move is an interesting one, since Andreessen Horowitz was not part of the recent $200 million round of venture funding at the San Francisco microblogging company, led by Kleiner Perkins at a $3.75 billion valuation.

Sources said that the firm made the move because it is already deeply invested in other key companies in the social space, including gaming giant Zynga, location-focused Foursquare, local discounting phenom Groupon and general social networking behemoth Facebook.

Apparently, Twitter makes it a full basketball team.

The investment by the firm gives more perceptual boost to Twitter, which is still trying to create a lucrative business model for itself, focused on advertising.

It needs to, if it want to stay independent for the long haul.

While an IPO is a possibility, so is an acquisition. Several months ago, while it was doing its funding round, Twitter had incoming interest from Facebook, which lobbed in a $5 billion soft offer, as well from Google.

Today’s the day we find out whether Cisco has successfully navigated the turbulence, and how bad the air pockets truly were. So far, the indications suggest that Cisco is starting to fly clear of the trouble. The consensus of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial calls for Cisco to report per-share earnings of 35 cents on sales of $10.24 billion.

Barclays Capital analyst Jeff Kvaal wrote in a research note issued Monday that Cisco’s end markets look healthy. Telecom carriers and Internet service providers are spending, and you see that reflected in reports from Juniper, which show sales to service providers up 24 percent, and in AT&T’s optimistic capital spending outlook. Meanwhile, growth in enterprise spending is holding steady as companies improve their networks. And in the end, Cisco’s guidance for sales to grow 3 to 5 percent may prove a tad conservative, meaning those air pockets may not have been as entirely bad as originally thought.

BroadVision today announced Clearvale Express, which it describes as a free and streamlined version of Clearvale Enterprise, its cloud-based business collaboration platform. It was created in part at the suggestion of Softbank, the Japanese telecom concern that is a partner on the product and will resell it in Asian markets.

Above, that’s an ad for Clearvale Express evoking the old “Pepsi challenge” ads from the early 1980s. In this case, Chatter is being portrayed as “Coke,” the established player being challenged by the upstart, which is silly because Chatter is a relatively new player in an increasingly crowded social enterprise market, though Salesforce is clearly the biggest among the new entrants.

Bashing Salesforce is suddenly trendy. On Sunday, Yammer and Socialcast were spotted buying text ads on Google using the word “chatter” in hopes of catching the odd Google user responding to the pair of TV ads for Chatter.com that aired during the Super Bowl.

And that followed an attack video put out by Yammer highlighting how Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loved Yammer at a 2008 TechCrunch event and accusing him of basically copying it. You can see that video below. Then there’s Jive, which used an industry survey to try to make a case that it’s a worthier player in the space than Chatter or anyone else, for that matter.

I’m betting there’s more of this public pile-on ahead, though with luck it will be followed by a round of deal-making. Last year, Gartner estimated the 2011 market opportunity for all these apps at less than $800 million and said that it’s tracking at least 80 vendors, at least 50 of which are based in the cloud. That makes the social enterprise market seem like small potatoes at first until you see Gartner’s prediction that these apps will replace email–Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes–as the primary tool for collaboration in businesses for 20 percent of companies within three years.

Combine that with a longer-term shift away from email–by teens, college-age people and younger people entering the workforce–and toward communication via Facebook and things like it, and you’ve got the makings of a fundamental shift in what’s considered normal as workplace technology. No wonder they’re taking swipes at each other. It is, however, already getting old .

Oh, to be misquoted!

Last week, a lot of folks on Twitter and elsewhere thought I had called Groupon co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason a “corporate douche bag” onstage in an interview gone badly awry.

While such a comment is not beyond me, the fact of the matter is that he called himself that.

At the DLD conference put on by Burda Media in Munich, Germany, I interviewed Mason, along with Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, about local online markets that they both now dominate online.

During the session, I pressed Mason about his aborted acquisition negotiations with Google, as well as future IPO plans for the Chicago-based social buying service.

When he demurred, I let it go, but then the ever-voluable Mason decided to explain himself.

“I used to watch people doing like what I just did on TV and be like, ‘What a corporate douche bag, I’m never going to be like that.’ And here I’m doing it. You made me do it!”

I didn’t, but thanks for the credit, Andrew!

After I pressed him on the Google talks, he tried the kiss-and-not-tell excuse.

“It’s very personal between the companies. You’re exploring each other and then everybody wants us to do that out in the open. We don’t have all the answers yet. We’re figuring things out. “

Thus, putting words in his mouth, I concluded:

“Sorry to put words in your mouth, but you’re basically saying ‘We’re a fucked-up group of people behind the scenes, but please invest in our IPO.’”

Mason’s answer: “Yes!”

I’m glad I cleared that up!

In any case, here’s the full video of one of the more enjoyable interviews I have done in awhile:

The news cycle about the deal spun out of Facebook’s control after leaks emerged around the new year, with the social networking company taking a beating for the tricky and elitist way it had raised funds in a seeming evasion of the public markets, and Goldman changing the rules of the deal after much interest and scrutiny.

Since then, the leaks have kept coming, with no official acknowledgement of the deal from Facebook, until now.

Facebook today shed light on some terms of the transaction: It had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from Goldman Sachs, and elected to choose $1 billion in an offering that was completed today.

The company distanced itself from the deal, effectively saying that it didn’t need the money and it expected to cross 500 shareholders this year anyway (something All Things D was first to report).

DST and Goldman Sachs approached Facebook to express their interest in making an investment, and Facebook decided it was an attractive opportunity to bolster its cash reserves and increase its financial flexibility with limited dilution to existing shareholders….

Even before the investment from Goldman Sachs, Facebook had expected to pass 500 shareholders at some point in 2011, and therefore expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

We’ll likely see a similar drop when it begins trading on the Nasdaq again tomorrow, though the company is expected to post another quarterly blowout when it reports earnings after market close. Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell suggests investors prepare themselves for a drop similar to the one Apple shares suffered after the announcement of Jobs’s first medical leave. “We’ve been here before at the start of 2009, so it’s probably going to be similar to that,” he told Reuters. “Operationally the company coped very well last time, but there’s a certain Jobs premium in the stock, and that will be the concern.”

And while that’s understandable, that concern is overblown. As I wrote back in January 2009, for investors to sell on news like this is just silly:

“Because if Jobs were to leave Apple–willingly or otherwise–people won’t suddenly stop buying Macs. The iPod won’t suddenly go the way of the Walkman and early adopters won’t suddenly lose interest in the next-gen iPhone. Nor will the Houdini-meets-Edison magic that Jobs has brought to Apple suddenly dissipate.

“Yes, Jobs’s sensibility pervades Apple’s culture and its products, but that culture and those products are not tethered to his health or day-to-day presence at the company. And Apple’s deep executive bench is more than capable of running it–and running it well–in his absence.

“iPhones worldwide will not stop working if something should happen to Steve–although apparently there are quite a few investors who believe this is indeed the case.

“Apple will endure–with or without Steve Jobs. There will be a post-Jobs era, and whether it begins this year or 20 years from now is of little consequence.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Steve Jobs Asked for Privacy–and He Deserves It This Time
• Apple Shares Down Nearly 8 Percent in Frankfurt on News of Jobs’s Medical Leave
• Citing Health, Steve Jobs Steps Away From Apple, Again
• Apple Opposes Proposal on CEO Succession Planning
• Deutsche Bank Joins the Running of the Apple Bulls
• Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Apple Investors Are Wusses
• When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish
• AAPL Sauce
• Apple’s Steve Jobs: “I Have Decided to Take a Medical Leave of Absence”
• The Entire Letter: Steve Jobs Explains His Health Problem: “Hormone Imbalance”–Predicts Recovery by Spring and Will Stay On as CEO
• Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

A year ago, when Wolf first made that statement, he was right. An iPhone on Verizon would have been a severe blow to Research In Motion. That it will only amount to a sting this year says a lot about how RIM’s business has improved and how its revenue base has become more diverse in the year or so since.

RIM doesn’t disclose the identities of its biggest carrier partners, but it does disclose how much the top three contribute to overall sales, though it’s not hard to figure out that Verizon has traditionally been its biggest customer. A year ago, Verizon’s sales of BlackBerry devices contributed 25 percent of RIM’s overall sales, while the next two largest customers contributed 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively. At least one of those was AT&T.

Today the picture’s different. RIM’s biggest customer–and it may still be Verizon–accounted for only 12 percent of sales in the quarter ended November, while number two and number three each accounted for 9 percent.

RIM’s growth outside its top three countries–the U.S., the U.K. and Canada–has also picked up. According to figures from IDC, in 2007 RIM relied on North America for more than three quarters of its sales. As of the third quarter of 2010, that figure was down to less than 48 percent. And in a lot of these markets carriers don’t subsidize the phone as aggressively as U.S. carriers do, and so RIM ends up having an advantage on price: $250 or so versus $500 or $600 for an iPhone. RIM is also seeing strong growth in its prepaid business outside North America. During its Dec. 16 earnings call, CEO Jim Balsillie said prepaid sales in the U.K. had grown by 245 percent year-over-year.

Then there’s Android. Verizon threw a lot of weight behind Google’s Android platform last year and has been marketing it heavily all year. The results have been mixed. A study by ITG Investment Research last year suggested that Android didn’t give Verizon the competitive bump it had hoped for versus AT&T. Meanwhile, RIM has in the last year moved closer to AT&T and in August launched the BlackBerry Torch with that carrier, though it didn’t go as well as had been hoped.

It’s not like RIM isn’t going to take some damage from the iPhone. RIM shares are down this morning more than 1 percent. But for RIM it could have been much worse. In June, when Bloomberg News reported that Verizon planned to bring the iPhone to its network, I covered the story of how investors freaked out and lopped more than 6 percent off RIM’s valuation. Now investors seem to understand that it’s likely to hurt RIM’s overall share of the smartphone market, but it won’t be the disaster that it would have been a year ago.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen it already, make sure you watch the interview Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher did with RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis at D: Dive Into Mobile in December.

PREVIOUSLY:

• How Might the Verizon iPhone Differ From the iPhone 4 (Besides Being Able to Make Calls)?
• Tired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone. Wired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone Sales.
• Verizon iPhone to Debut With Unlimited Data Plan
• Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event
• Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/why-verizon%e2%80%99s-iphone-won%e2%80%99t-be-so-bad-for-rim/feed/ 26 http://allthingsd.com/20110106/live-verizon-wireless-touts-4g-network-shows-off-devices/ http://allthingsd.com/20110106/live-verizon-wireless-touts-4g-network-shows-off-devices/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 21:03:21 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1957 Well, we didn’t learn much new about Verizon Wireless’s new network or devices at the Ivan Seidenberg keynote on Thursday, but he did say that the company would have a preview of its LTE device lineup at this afternoon’s press conference.

Here’s hoping there are a few surprises here beyond the previously announced Motorola Atrix and Xoom.

The event is set to kick off shortly and Mobilized will have live coverage here.

1:05 pm: Well, despite timely warnings to get in our seats beginning at 12:45, it’s now five minutes after and the techno is still pumping.

1:11 pm: Okay. Getting started. Loud music gets louder. Cue video.

Tony Melone and Marni Walden take the stage and CEO Daniel Mead (at least I think it is Mead) is doing an intro.

1:15 pm: Another video now playing with partners. Since HTC CEO Peter Chou is in there, I think it is probably safe to say their oft-rumored LTE smartphone will make an appearance.

1:16 pm: Samsung and Ericsson execs also in the video.

1:17 pm: Verizon exec now touting the advantages of its 4G network including its spectrum, which it says will give it the best in-building coverage.

Also talking about how it is sharing its spectrum with rural service providers.

1:18 pm: Mead: “We’re very pleased to be part of bringing broadband to rural America.”

1:21 pm: Mead hands off to CTO Tony Melone to talk 4G and LTE.

Melone says that the company knows there is a lot of skepticism of the company’s move to go straight to LTE but that the bet is paying off with more networks and running faster than planned.

“The customer feedback we are getting is everything we had hoped for and then some,” Melone says.

Melone talks about 4G LTE plans.

Thirty-six months from now we will have the nation covered with LTE, Melone says. Two-thirds of the population will be covered in 2012. This year alone, he says, Verizon will add 140 new markets, including places like Little Rock, Detroit and Sioux Falls.

1:26 pm: On to devices.

Ten devices coming by mid-year being shown on stage: Four smartphones, two tablets, two notebooks and two mobile hotspots.

1:33 pm: LG CEO shows off the LG Revolution, what appears to be a slimmish smartphone.

Next up, Skype’s CEO talks about a new partnership that will allow for Skype to be always on and integrated into the address book of all of Verizon’s LTE smartphones,

1:34 pm: He’s followed by HTC CEO Peter Chou, who introduces the HTC Thunderbolt.

Chou says he’s been personally testing and using the Thunderbolt, which features the new Skype video chatting along with HTC’s Sense user interface.

“Let me tell you, it’s blazing fast,” Chou says.

Other features include a built-in 4G hotspot and a 4.3-inch Super LCD screen.

1:37 pm: He thanks Qualcomm and Google engineers that worked together to create the device, so guessing this one isn’t using Nvidia’s Tegra chip.

Next up is Electronic Arts VP Travis Boatman. EA’s mobile games lineup ranges from Monopoly and Tetris to Need for Speed and the FIFA 11 soccer game.

The new mobile version of Rock Band for Verizon’s LTE network lets people form a band and remotely jam over the network.

Samsung executive goes onstage to show off three devices for the LTE network, One is a mobile hotspot, one is a smartphone and the other is a 4G version of the Galaxy Tab.

Phone packs 4.3-inch Super Amoled Plus display, which is said to boost colors and offer improved display. It’s got an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with HD video and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat.

The tablet has a 1.2GHz processor developed by Samsung, while the hotspots provide connections to up to five users at a time.

Most impressive is the fact that the Samsung executive pulled all three devices out of various pockets.

Marni Walden shows off the remaining devices–a Novatel MiFi hotpot that works with both 3G and 4G networks.

There is also a Compaq Netbook, an HP notebook, as well as the previously announced Motorola Xoom and Motorola Droid Bionic.

1:47 pm: On to Q&A (hoping laptop No. 2 holds out through the end of question time.)

First question has to do with LTE speeds, which often exceed the 5- to 12-megabit speeds promised. Mead says that the company’s goal is to meet the promised speed range once the network is fully loaded, something that is not the case today.

Next question is on battery life. Melone says the company believes it will be able to meet customer expectations in that regard.

The company says it won’t announce pricing or rate plans for the 4G products, beyond noting its current prices for 4G laptop cards and service.

As for simultaneous voice and data, Walden says the company intends that at least some of its 4G launch devices will support talking and accessing data at the same time.

“It could be on some devices and not all,” Walden says.

Walden also confirms all the phones it showed Thursday are running Android.

1:55 pm: Asked about net neutrality, Mead says that what the industry needs is “unfettered development.”

“We think the free market system works very well, and we don’t need a lot of heavy intervention.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110106/live-verizon-wireless-touts-4g-network-shows-off-devices/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110105/yuri-milner-to-talk-about-facebook-deal-on-bloomberg-tv-tonight-streamed-live-online/ http://allthingsd.com/20110105/yuri-milner-to-talk-about-facebook-deal-on-bloomberg-tv-tonight-streamed-live-online/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:36:16 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1969 When companies file normal IPOs, they go into quiet periods. But there has been nothing quiet about the latest financing behind Facebook, which has evaded the public markets by rigging a way to privately sell $1.5 billion worth of shares through Goldman Sachs in a deal that values the company at $50 billion.

Tonight, an hour-long special on the topic will air at 9 pm ET on Bloomberg TV (and will be streamed live on Bloomberg’s Web site), featuring Yuri Milner, CEO of Digital Sky Technologies and one of the key investors who helped put together that deal. Unfortunately, while Bloomberg’s press release listed Milner as a “guest,” it neglected to mention that he won’t be an actual live guest (as initially reported here). Instead, clips from a Milner interview last year will be interspersed with current commentary from writers David Kirkpatrick, Paul Kedrosky and Bill Cohan, and marketing professor Scott Galloway.

Goldman has reportedly given its clients limited information and only until the end of the week to pony up a minimum of $2 million to invest in Facebook. One Goldman customer told Reuters he felt like he was being expected to invest on “blind faith.”

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher yesterday described the Goldman-Facebook deal as “sneaky,” “elite” and “opaque.”

Here’s the promo for the Bloomberg program:

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110105/yuri-milner-to-talk-about-facebook-deal-on-bloomberg-tv-tonight-streamed-live-online/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101229/mobile-security-firm-warns-of-new-android-trojan/ http://allthingsd.com/20101229/mobile-security-firm-warns-of-new-android-trojan/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 21:40:34 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1490 Lookout Mobile Security, which just raised fresh capital to boost its fight against mobile malware, said it has identified the peskiest cellphone threat to date.

The Android Trojan, dubbed Geinimi, has cropped up in China and is capable of taking a significant amount of personal data and sending it to remote servers.

Lookout said Geinimi displays botnet-like qualities and is the most sophisticated wireless malware it has seen. Thus far, infected programs have only been seen on various Chinese app stores.

“Geinimi is effectively being ‘grafted’ onto repackaged versions of legitimate applications, primarily games, and distributed in third-party Chinese Android app markets,” Lookout said in a blog post on Wednesday. “The affected applications request extensive permissions over and above the set that is requested by their legitimate original versions.”

The security firm said it has already updated both the paid and free versions of its software to protect against Geinimi.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101229/mobile-security-firm-warns-of-new-android-trojan/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/live-blog-rim-talks-to-the-street-but-plans-to-say-less/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/live-blog-rim-talks-to-the-street-but-plans-to-say-less/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:50:58 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1057 Investors are eagerly awaiting Research In Motion’s conference call, though the BlackBerry maker has already said it will share less detail this quarter and even less in the quarters to come.

Earlier on Thursday, RIM reported earnings that topped estimates along with sales that were just about what many analysts were expecting. The company said it expects revenue for the current quarter to be around $5.5 billion to $5.7 billion with per-share earnings in the range of $1.74 to $1.80.

It said that it shipped 14.2 million BlackBerrys, up 40 percent from a year earlier, and added 5.1 million new subscribers net in the quarter. However the company is expected not to forecast those figures for the coming quarter, nor does it plan to continue reporting those numbers in future quarters.

Among the things investors are likely to be interested in is what the company forecasts as far as shipments to Verizon in a quarter during which many expect the carrier to start selling the iPhone. Motorola has already warned that it expects its shipments to Verizon to take a hit.

Mobilized will have live coverage of the conference call starting at 2 pm PT.

1:55 pm: RIM shares, which had been trading lower in after-hours trading are now up around 3 percent.

2:02 pm: Call just getting underway with the usual warnings, caveats, etc.

2:06 pm: BlackBerry Torch now in 75 markets, just rolling out in Latin America.

2:06 pm: BlackBerry Style is one-third of BlackBerry sales at Sprint.

2:08 pm: Our relationship with Verizon remains strong, RIM says. A number of new products coming for Verizon including adding the BlackBerry 6 OS to the curve and Bold lines early in the new year.

2:08 pm: Recap of recent developer announcements, including payment service, launch of WebWorks, etc.

2:10 pm: Now more than 16,000 applications in BlackBerry App World, RIM’s App Store.

2:11 pm: PlayBook tablet expected to ship in first quarter in U.S. and will be Wi-Fi only. Other markets and models with cellphone radios will follow.

2:14 pm: Review of Q3 results. Average selling price for BlackBerry was approximately $315, with half of shipments coming in last month of the quarter as resellers prepared for the holidays.

2:16 pm: Company says it is comfortable with inventory levels.

2:19 pm: On to outlook. No plans for PlayBook revenues, with first revenues not expected until following quarter. Sounds like the availability of PlayBook won’t be until at least March. (RIM’s current quarter goes through Feb. 26)

2:24 pm: On to Q&A.

BB6 will eventually work on QNX operating system, but the company says it hasn’t given any sense of timing.

As for what QNX can deliver, co-CEO Jim Balsillie says “You’ll see more at CES.”

2:25 pm: Sorry, some technical problems here at Mobilized. We got disconnected a couple of times, but have switched to the Webcast and are back on.

Seems like the talk is on average selling prices.

2:32 pm: North America is still performing very, very well but dynamics here are different.

Balsillie says he expects stronger year here next year based on product plans in place.

“I feel very, very good,” he says.

“I feel great about where we are sitting in North America for 2011,” Balsillie says, and the company has “knocked the cover off the ball” in a lot of other markets.

2:37 pm: Question on China market. “I think you should have very positive expectations in China,” Balsillie says.

“China does well,” he says. “You’d always want them to do better….All you can do is keep doing the right things and investing in these places. The market is just so big.” Sometimes markets come faster than you expect, sometimes they come slower, he says. But, he says, “I’ve never seen a market not take off.”

Demand strong, he says, for PlayBook in China and Japan.

2:41 pm: Question on payments. Balsillie says one wouldn’t be going out on a limb to predict Near Field Communications integration.

2:44 pm: A lot of talk on why PlayBook is a good bet for businesses with Balsillie talking about its enterprise strength. Not much new information there.

2:46 pm: Will there be a media strategy to promote the tablet’s media abilities to consumers?

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Balsillie says–again, without giving any new details. Lots of game and media partnerships.

2:50 pm: Everything is fine. Things are great. (That pretty much sums up Balsillie’s statements the last few minutes–Just insert a different question or topic).

2:56 pm: “I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should be,” Balsillie says, adding that the fact one can create apps without needing to learn a new language are strengths that RIM’s approach s bringing to the table. “We’re way ahead on that and CIO friendliness, we’re way ahead on that too.”

3:02 pm: Call’s done.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101216/live-blog-rim-talks-to-the-street-but-plans-to-say-less/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101215/putting-social-to-work-sustainable-seafood-mapping/ http://allthingsd.com/20101215/putting-social-to-work-sustainable-seafood-mapping/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 03:00:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1328 For the last 10 years, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has distributed wallet cards that give an at-a-glance guide to which types of seafood are sustainably fished and which are not because of overly depleted populations, destroyed habitats or some other reason.

Last year the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program launched an iPhone app that does the same thing on a searchable and localized scale.

And it’s been downloaded 325,000 times. So, this week, the Seafood Watch app got a social upgrade, which lets users contribute information about where they have actually found sustainable seafood for sale.

Like mobile social health applications such as RunKeeper, this is one of the more interesting interpretations of making a function social.

In the new Seafood Watch app, a feature called “Project FishMap” allows users to tag restaurants and markets across the United States to note what specific sustainable seafood is offered, and earn (of course!) virtual badges for their contributions. And users can also load up the app when deciding where to eat, so they can make their decision based on where sustainable seafood is available.

Eventually, perhaps, this user-generated seafood map could be made available for incorporation into other local apps like Yelp. But for now, the aquarium is just promising that an Android app will be released next year.

The idea behind the Seafood Watch project has been to enable consumers to show their preference by asking for sustainable options and voting for them with their wallets. But sometimes trying to make a better choice can get awfully confusing, when, for instance, the waiter at a restaurant has no idea where the cod came from (Atlantic wild-caught cod=”avoid”; Alaska longline cod=”best choice”).

However, the aquarium says the program has been effective in lobbying larger businesses–food service companies Compass Group and Aramark have committed to purchasing sustainable seafood, and Whole Foods Market has begun labeling its seafood with the project’s recommendations.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101215/putting-social-to-work-sustainable-seafood-mapping/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101214/buywithme-likely-to-raise-more-cash-as-competitors-pull-ahead/ http://allthingsd.com/20101214/buywithme-likely-to-raise-more-cash-as-competitors-pull-ahead/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 01:57:10 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=620 BuyWithMe confirmed today that its CEO, Cheryl Rosner, has left the company after only eight months on the job.

To get the skinny, we caught up with the company’s Interim president, David Wolfe, who was promoted from chief product officer as the company seeks a new leader. Wolfe would not elaborate beyond echoing the company’s statement that the decision for Rosner to leave was mutual.

However, Rosner’s departure hints at how nascent the market for daily deals and social/group buying is, and how there’s still work to be done to figure out the economics.

The year-and-a-half old Groupon competitor is no exception. If you aren’t familiar, BuyWithMe is often considered the third- or fourth-largest outfit in the group-buying space. The company, which recently moved to New York City from Boston, operates in 12 markets, and has raised $21 million in venture capital. It has 93 employees.

Wolfe acknowledges that a hiring spree is necessary to catch up to its nearest rivals, Groupon and LivingSocial, and that it will likely need more capital to continue its aggressive expansion plans. “The intent will be to raise more money; it’s a probable event,” he said.

As it is, BuyWithMe will likely miss this year’s goal of being in 15 markets by at least one. But generally, Wolfe says, that’s not the problem: “We are taking a step back. What is most important is for our emerging markets to grow to maturity, and for us to push them over the hump and increase our market share.”

Right now, he claims, BuyWithMe’s best performing market is its first: Boston. Trailing close behind is New York City and Washington, D.C., but the other nine are struggling to have a deal every day. “They are performing as expected, given the focus level and resource level we’ve given them….It’s less that we stumbled strategically, but we really spread ourselves too thin to get into multiple markets, and now we are focusing on making sure we are providing great service.”

Wolfe acknowledges the competition by saying it’s a hard space to build brand loyalty. Consumers will gravitate to the best deal every time, so they are focusing on creating loyalty with merchants. “Our focus is on making sure we are delivering an amazing service to our merchants and consumers. A lot of people have jumped into the game, and it’s a challenging business. It’s not a small feat to deliver [deals] on a consistent basis.”

Does Wolfe believe there’s room for more growth in the market–beyond the successes of Groupon and LivingSocial?

His answer is yes. “I don’t think even with Groupon’s amazing execution that we are even close. We see a lot of blue ocean and a lot of untapped eyeballs on the consumer side across a lot of locations. The excitement over the past couple of months is not the end stage. We are seeing first innings, where a transformational shift is occurring on how retailers reach consumers. That’s fundamental.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101214/buywithme-likely-to-raise-more-cash-as-competitors-pull-ahead/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/multitouch-pioneer-jeff-han-starts-to-think-small-devices/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/multitouch-pioneer-jeff-han-starts-to-think-small-devices/#comments Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:00:35 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=823 For years now, Jeff Han has been working on large-screen multitouch displays.

Han and his company, Perceptive Pixel, are best known for creating the giant touch wall that John King and others at CNN use to break down elections.

While Apple, Microsoft and others have targeted consumers, Perceptive Pixel has focused on niche professional markets, especially the defense and government sector.

But, after years of watching the small touchscreen device market from the sidelines, Han said he thinks he is pretty close to creating his first products that will run on those devices.

“Mobile is interesting,” he said in an interview last month at his New York offices (in the Manhattan building that Google is buying, with the amazing roof view seen below). “How can you ignore a billion devices being sold every year?”

Han said there is a reason he has stayed focused on the high end of the market.

“I have a personal bias,” he told Mobilized. “I want computers to be functional, not just playful.”

The modern tablet, he said, is the first consumer device that has enough pixels and the precision sensors to potentially be of interest to Perceptive Pixel. In particular, Han said he is intrigued by the idea of using tablets to allow meeting participants to interact with a nearby larger touchscreen that might be in use by someone leading a meeting.

“We’re looking at mobile and slate devices as a way to tie into this family of collaboration [products],” he said, noting that’s where Perceptive Pixel is spending its energy when it comes to mobile, as opposed to coming up with some killer app that works only on smaller screens. “There are a lot of smart people creating mobile apps.”

Han said his first mobile efforts should come out early next year–in the first quarter or early in the second quarter, though he wouldn’t give more specifics.

Whatever Perceptive Pixel ends up doing in the tablet space, Han said his plan is to eventually have it support multiple operating systems, though Han said the company will probably only qualify certain devices. So far, he said, Apple’s iOS and the iPad seem best suited to the applications he has in mind, while the real-time touch performance on Android has certain issues.

“We’re not going to just let it run on anything out there,” he said. “Some of them just can’t guarantee a good user interface.”

Here is the video interview Mobilized did with Han:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/multitouch-pioneer-jeff-han-starts-to-think-small-devices/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/verizon-4g-network-to-launch-sunday/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/verizon-4g-network-to-launch-sunday/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:13:57 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=194 Verizon Wireless announced on Wednesday that it will launch its 4G network on Sunday in 38 markets across the United States.

The company had shared most of its plans ahead of time. One of the unknowns, though, was what Verizon would charge for the service. Verizon said on Wednesday that pricing will start at $50 a month for 5GB of data (that’s $10 a month cheaper than Verizon currently charges for its 3G data service). The company also announced two 4G USB modems (4G-ready phones won’t be coming until next year).

The event is just now kicking off, with Verizon Wireless CTO Tony Melone going through the details.

“This announcement has been a long time coming,” Melone said, noting that the company announced its plans to use LTE at Mobile World Congress in 2009. At the time, he said, the company didn’t necessarily know that it would be the first with a significant 4G network.

Melone also took shots at competitors, some of whom are already billing their existing networks as either 4G or delivering near-4G speeds.

“This is the real deal,” Melone said. “Not all 4G is the same.”

Update, 9:15 am PT: More on pricing. Two data plans: 5GB for $50 and 10GB for $80. Anything more than that will be charged at $10 per GB.

“There’s no limit,” Melone said. “We’re not going to slow customers down if they want to use more.”

As for speeds, Verizon said it expects customers will get 5 to 12 megabits per second when downloading and 2 to 5 Mbps when uploading once the network is fully loaded. (Speeds should be faster early on, Melone said.)

The two modems, which will sell for $99 after rebates, also support Verizon’s 3G network in areas where 4G is not available. They will be available online and at Verizon stores, but not immediately at retailers like Best Buy or Radio Shack.

More devices (i.e., phones) will be out by the middle of next year, Melone said. Verizon will talk more about smartphones at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, a spokesman said.

9:25 am: On to Q&A.

Asked about pricing, Melone said that they expect many customers will find their usage is above 5GB and will opt for the $80 a month plan, but still wanted to entice some customers with the lower price plan. “We believe the combination of the two will meet the needs of most customers,” he said.

Consumers will be able to get alerts letting them know when they are at 50 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent or 100 percent of their data plan and they can also query to see how much data they have used.

As for shifting from 4G to 3G, there won’t be a hiccup. However, the caveat is that going from 3G to 4G, you stay 3G until you finish an active session.

We’re likely to hear about some 4G-specific services around CES, Melone said, hinting at some sort of video service. “Obviously the capabilities of this network lend themselves to video-based applications,” he said.

9:38 am: I asked a couple of questions. First, how will Verizon handle voice and data simultaneously. (LTE supports it but 3G doesn’t.)

Melone said that was part of the thinking in launching data modems before 4G smartphones. “One of the reasons why we are not going out with voice out of the gate is it creates complexities that don’t serve anyone,” he said. That said, Verizon’s plan is that initially voice-only calls will be placed on the 3G network, while data sessions will be on 4G when both are available. Eventually, both will move to LTE, he said.

My second question was on whether the speeds Melone talked about on a fully loaded network take into account having a hit device, like the iPhone.

“We expect to be successful and have lots of devices on this network,” Melone said, adding that the company designed the network to be able to handle that kind of usage.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/verizon-4g-network-to-launch-sunday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101123/intel-offers-silicon-with-new-packages-deals/ http://allthingsd.com/20101123/intel-offers-silicon-with-new-packages-deals/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:00:02 +0000 Don Clark http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33006 Most personal computer makers buy chips the way Intel wants to offer them. But the technology giant has learned it needs to be more flexible in other markets, as an unusual arrangement with another Silicon Valley company shows.

Intel on Monday detailed plans to begin offering a version of its Atom microprocessor–best known as the calculating engine inside millions of low-end portables called netbooks–that the company is packaging along with a different sort of a chip supplied by Altera. The combination is designed for what industry executives call “embedded” applications, a loose term that refers to office equipment, cars, medical devices, industrial machines and just about anything that is not a computer.

Companies designing such products are a key focus for Intel as it tries to diversify beyond PCs. They often need special circuitry to handle chores that aren’t easily carried out by general-purpose microprocessors, like Atom.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101123/intel-offers-silicon-with-new-packages-deals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101122/att-races-to-tout-speed-test-results/ http://allthingsd.com/20101122/att-races-to-tout-speed-test-results/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:25:53 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32944 AT&T has some new ammunition to fire at anyone who casts aspersions on the speed and reliability of its wireless network. Nationwide testing by Global Wireless Solutions, covering more than 400 markets representing about 88 percent of the U.S. population, found AT&T’s average mobile broadband speeds to be tops–its unnamed “nearest competitor” averaging speeds that were 20 percent slower and its largest competitor (that would be Verizon) running 60 percent slower. The GWS tests also showed that 98.59 percent of voice calls connected over the AT&T network nationwide are completed without interruption–within one-tenth of one percentage point of the top score in that category.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101122/att-races-to-tout-speed-test-results/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101117/livingsocial-goes-down-under-for-its-deal-of-the-day/ http://allthingsd.com/20101117/livingsocial-goes-down-under-for-its-deal-of-the-day/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:33:40 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32698 Discount-deal-a-day outfit LivingSocial is extending its presence into Australia with a $5 million investment that gives it a controlling stake in Jump On It, the country’s leading social shopping site. LivingSocial currently has more than 10 million subscribers across more than 100 markets in North America, the U.K. and Ireland. With its growth, the company says it expects to book more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101117/livingsocial-goes-down-under-for-its-deal-of-the-day/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101112/dont-call-it-a-bubble-says-fred-wilson-but-things-are-troubling/ http://allthingsd.com/20101112/dont-call-it-a-bubble-says-fred-wilson-but-things-are-troubling/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:48:13 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25815 Fred Wilson is one of the most high-profile investors in tech. And his blog is certainly one of the best-read. So if the Union Square Ventures partner says we’re in a bubble, that would be a very big deal.

But Wilson doesn’t use the word “bubble” anywhere in the post he wrote this morning. Instead he refers to “storm clouds” in two markets: One for tech start-up financing, and one for tech workers themselves (courtesy Google, Facebook, et al).

These are ominous clouds! A few excerpts from his post:

• “The competition for “hot” deals is making people crazy and I am seeing many more unnatural acts from investors happening.”
• “We are also seeing large deals ($5mm to $15mm) getting done in a few days with little or no due diligence. Investors are showing up at the first meeting with term sheets. I have never seen phases like this end nicely.”
• “I think both of these situations are unsustainable. And anything that is unsustainable will eventually stop happening.”

On Twitter, I summarized Wilson’s post this way: “@fredwilson says yes, it’s bubbletime.” And then I heard immediately from Betaworks’ Andrew Weissman and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts, both of whom have invested with Wilson in the past: They don’t think Wilson means there’s a bubble.

And neither does Wilson himself:

Why does it matter if we describe something as a “bubble” instead of “troubling”? I’m not sure that it does for the layperson. But I think it’s very meaningful for professional investors like Wilson. For one thing, if they think it’s a bubble, then their own investors might wonder why they’re continuing to make bets.

It’s also worth noting that even if we are in a bubble, it’s nothing like the housing bubble, or the 2000-era Web bubble (when Wilson was making VC investments via Flatiron Partners): The scale isn’t remotely similar, and the general public has very little stake in the outcome.

But it’s Wilson’s post, so he gets the last word here. Here’s his response to an email I sent asking him for additional input (I’ve added a punctuation mark or two):

I don’t think it’s helpful to use the bubble framework. There is a supply demand imbalance in hot deals and sw engineers, particularly in Silicon Valley. That is driving up prices but also leading to some odd behavior. I just think it’s healthy to talk about it calmly and rationally.

[Image credit: Joi Ito]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101112/dont-call-it-a-bubble-says-fred-wilson-but-things-are-troubling/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101109/ceo-secondmarket-is-a-return-to-old-fashioned-investing/ http://allthingsd.com/20101109/ceo-secondmarket-is-a-return-to-old-fashioned-investing/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:01:58 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=94 Today’s stock markets have “a casino-type mentality” driven by factors like the rise of automated trading and shorter-term average holding periods. People don’t take the time to do research and really get to know a company before they invest in it, in the opinion of SecondMarket founder and CEO Barry Silbert.

He thinks SecondMarket–best known for its facilitation of trading of private tech company stock–is a way to bring back a human touch. SecondMarket doesn’t necessarily replace an IPO.

But for companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and eSolar, SecondMarket trading slots into a pre-IPO dead zone driven by the longer average time to a public offering–now something like 8.8 years.

“Private to public in the past was like a light switch,” Silbert said at a Startup2Startup dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., last night. “It should be more of a dial.”

So, SecondMarket has facilitated $261 million worth of shares exchanged this year for 40 companies, compared to $96 million for all of last year driven primarily by Facebook, Zynga and LinkedIn.

SecondMarket works directly with these companies to set the terms of their own market on its system: For example, who can buy shares and when, if and when they can resell them, and whether insider trading is prohibited.

While outside investors obviously don’t have the same level of financial insight into a company as they would in the public markets, SecondMarket’s inventory consists of closely watched companies. Plus, it’s set up to attract very interested and agreeable investors, Silbert claimed. SecondMarket’s fees are quite high: Two to four percent of a transaction, with an average of $1 million to $1.5 million spent per deal.

As SecondMarket is evolving alongside the companies in its marketplace, here are some trends Silbert said he is seeing:

• Some participating companies use SecondMarket to reduce their number of shareholders so they have the breathing room to award more common stock to new people without triggering the SEC’s reporting obligations for companies with 500 shareholders.
• Rather than adopting conventional trading hours, some companies are setting specific time periods when their shares can be sold. SecondMarket is encouraging companies to set up a Dutch auction, where everybody who participates clears the same price.
• Silbert said that as a rule of thumb, the 40 companies currently trading on SecondMarket have raised Series C funding, have a valuation of at least $150 million, have more than 50 shareholders and have high growth. He said he sees an opportunity for investors to create funds to invest across the board. “Of the 40 companies, every single one of them has gone up in a pretty significant way. There’s a lot of money to be made here. Right now it’s just for accredited investors, but this is where the returns are.”
• Some companies are offering employees “hypothecation” plans: Funding loans to exercise options so employees can set themselves up to pay long-term capital gains instead of regular income. Silbert jokingly described this as a way to “basically screw the IRS.”

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