The trend follows a more aggressive push by larger carriers, such as Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA, to capture users at the lowest end of the market, by such means as free phone offerings to those on government subsidies. Investors sent shares of MetroPCS and Leap sharply lower on Thursday.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Huawei phone is tokidoki inside and out, featuring a stylized case, on-screen wallpaper, a program for adding tokidoki embellishments to photos and four tokidoki ringtones.

There’s also a phone charm and two interchangeable battery covers. (That’s a lot of tokidoki.)

A video below hints at even more coming this summer.

Update: MetroPCS confirmed the phone retails for $69.99.

Update 2: The initial tokidoki phone is now on the market, not coming this summer, as initially reported. Though the companies say to expect more things this summer.

MetroPCS Sanctioned by tokidoki™ | Behind The Scenes Video from Sanctioned by tokidoki on Vimeo.

Splunk is not your traditional big-data company, in that it is not running some variant of Hadoop, like so many upstart companies in that space. Its specialty, as CEO Godfrey Sullivan told me last year, is harvesting data from machines; they can be Web servers or they can be air-conditioning units. Its cloud-based database grabs all the data generated by the machine in the course of its operation and generates alerts. Those alerts can tell a human operator things like “everything’s cool” or “ouch, things are not so cool. I need help.”

If a machine does something that repeats many times a day, hour or minute, then it is generating data that can be measured. And if it can be measured, there’s a pretty good chance that you can make that data useful, using Splunk.

Big customers include cloud concerns like Salesforce.com and the Web gaming outfit Zynga. Wireless companies like MetroPCS and T-Mobile use it to monitor their wireless networks. Several government agencies use it to help watch for attacks on their networks. In all, it has about 3,700 customers in 75 countries.

So, who stands to get rich today?

The two biggest shareholders are the Sevin Rosen Funds and August Capital, which each own 20.4 percent of the shares, worth just a whisker less than $280 million at the offering price. Behind them is JK&B Capital, which owns a 17.6 percent stake worth $240 million. Ignition Partners has a 12.1 percent stake worth $165 million. Sullivan, the CEO, has an 8.2 percent share worth $118 million. Another name that jumped out at me: Patrick McGovern, head of the tech research and publishing house IDG, has 240,666 shares worth more than $4 million. (Update: I’ve since learned it’s a different Patrick McGovern. Sorry about that.)

Clearwire has been hunting wholesale customers since at least September, when Chief Executive, Erik Prusch, said he was in discussions with AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and MetroPCS Communications Inc. Leap, which operates the Cricket brand, is the smallest U.S. carrier with a national reach, with roughly half the customers of MetroPCS, its nearest competitor.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

MetroPCS, which provides cellular service to 9.3 million customers, had a market value of about $4.3 billion as of Friday’s closing price. Its shares gained 6.4% to $12.78 in after-hours trading on news of the talks.

Read the rest of this story on the original site »

T-Mobile — which just months ago was pushing antitrust authorities to approve its failed deal to sell itself to AT&T Inc. — argued in an FCC filing that Verizon Wireless’s deal poses “a clear threat to competition” and would allow the nation’s largest cellphone carrier “to accumulate even more spectrum on top of an already dominant position, while checkmating crucial avenues for growth of its smaller competitors.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Accessory maker Belkin said on Sunday that it plans to make add-ons for a variety of smartphones that will allow your existing device to get the service. The real question is whether the market really cares.

Though watching TV on cellphones is wildly popular in Korea, attempts at mobile TV in the U.S. have either been met with lukewarm success (think MobiTV) or have flopped completely (think Qualcomm’s now-shuttered FLO service).

Having a way to get support on existing devices rather than having support designed into new devices will clearly be important for MCV, the coalition of broadcasters and networks behind Dyle.

Belkin isn’t saying just when the devices will be out or which smartphones will be supported, but a close look at the prototype it is showing off at CES this week will show a very iOS-like 30-pin connector, making Apple’s iPhone a very logical bet.

Personally, whenever I hear Dyle, I can’t help thinking about those old Dial soap commercials from the 1980s:

The carrier is partnering with a consortium of TV stations and broadcasters to be the first to offer Dyle — their live TV application. The initial phone running Dyle will be an Android device from Samsung, MetroPCS said.

Of course, this is hardly the first stab at mobile TV. Although very popular in Korea, such service has not really taken hold. Some of the major carriers offer a limited lineup from MobiTV. Qualcomm had bigger visions with its FLO service, but shuttered the mobile TV offering and sold the spectrum to AT&T.

“We’re excited to be the first mobile service provider to deliver a unique entertainment offering like Dyle, but more important than being first is our belief that this service will meet the needs of our customers and deliver an exceptional mobile experience,” MetroPCS President Tom Keys said in a statement.

Dyle Mobile TV is the brand chosen by a consortium of content providers and broadcasters including NBC, Fox, ION Television, Univision, Hearst, Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps and Gannett. At launch, the group plans to offer more than 72 stations in 32 TV markets.

For its part, MetroPCS plans to offer Dyle in Atlanta; Boston; Dallas-Fort Worth; Detroit; Jacksonville, Fla.; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Orlando; Philadelphia; Sacramento, Calif.; San Francisco; and Tampa, Fla.

Usually the phrase refers to the kind of heavy-lifting computing that involves big databases and specialized software to sort it all out — usually sold by the likes of large, serious software or hardware companies like Oracle or IBM.

But there’s another kind of data worth sifting and sorting, and while strictly speaking it may not seem as big at first, it’s turning out to be equally sizeable. It turns out there’s a lot of useful data being generated by machines of every kind. When I say machines, I mean it in a fairly broad definition: Web servers, cellphone towers, air conditioners. If a machine does something that repeats many times a day, hour or minute, then it is generating data that can be measured. And if it can be measured, there’s a pretty good chance you can do so using Splunk, software put out by the privately held company of the same name. It’s aimed at keeping minute-by-minute track of almost any kind of machine and turning that information into useful data that might help solve a problem before it starts, or yield useful information that improves a business.

Backed by venture capital investments from August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, JK&B Capital and Ignition Partners, Splunk is rare among private start-ups in that it discloses its annual financials: In 2010 it reported $66 million in sales, which amounted to 96 percent growth over the prior year. And this year it has grown about 70 percent again, which would put it on track to break the $100 million mark. Chatter about a possible Splunk IPO is already starting to bubble. CEO Godfrey Sullivan is a veteran of running public software companies, having helmed Hyperion Solutions from 2001 until its $3 billion acquisition by Oracle in 2007. I asked Sullivan about Splunk’s IPO intentions and many other things in a conversation earlier this month.

AllThingsD: At a high level, what is Splunk and what does it do?

Godfrey Sullivan: We have a proprietary database. Our core intellectual property is the ability to harvest all that data that gets generated by a machine. Splunk sucks it all in at a very high speed. We also have a user interface on top of it that looks a lot like Google. You can do command-line scripting and search for a particular combination of events, or you can build your own dashboards and say anytime some set of conditions reach a certain point, you can generate an alert.

Who uses Splunk and what do they do with it?

Our biggest user is probably Salesforce.com, but we’re also seeing a lot of use from Zynga, MetroPCS, T-Mobile. They index more than a terabyte a day. Zynga uses Splunk to monitor the performance of all its games — FarmVille, Mafia Wars and the like — all in real time. At first they started using it to identify problems, but now they use it for quality assurance in their development and test environment. All the developers at Salesforce use it for quality assurance, and to monitor performance and user behavior on Chatter.

We’re also in 150 government agencies, mostly for security. Agencies use Splunk to watch for attacks coming from bad IP addresses, and then watching to see if any employees have a history of touching those IP addresses.

You’ve also seen your use cases grow outside of Web servers recently, correct?

We’ve seen an explosion of use cases, and we’re trying to respond to that. Our user interface is one that IT administrators really love, because you can search on it or create reports very easily. But this explosion of use cases is people who don’t want to do that. They want it to manage windmills or smart buildings. We’re starting to get a lot more brand awareness of Splunk as the way to manage machine data. It could be knowing where a box of wine is somewhere out on a UPS truck, or it could be pulling call-history data off a cellphone, and so we’re really trying to respond to this big explosion in new use cases.

Have there been any examples that have surprised you?

There was a guy in London who said he was managing a greenhouse with it, taking temperature readings and driving levers to open and shut. There was another one in Japan, just after the tsunami. The local aid agency there was using Splunk to help distribute food. They were pulling weather data and information about which roads were open or impassable, to understand where to send food and in what direction on any given day, and to keep it from spoiling en route. There was another we heard about in China that was for tracking husbands and wives from cellphone data. We got called in to appear on a TV talk show about that once.

Do you have anything new teed up for the remainder of the year?

We just announced our first cloud service. We’ve always been run in the cloud, because our customers would install it to monitor an app, and their infrastructure was in the cloud. But for the first time we’ve started offering Splunk as a service. We call it Splunk Storm. The essence is that it’s aimed at developers in the cloud. If you’re a developer, you can go out and turn on a Splunk instance, and set the dials for how much indexing and data storage you want. And once you’ve done that, you can Splunk all of your development work as you do it in the cloud.

Splunk is unusual in that it is privately held and venture-backed, but you report some of your financials. Why is that?

We publish numbers once a year, and we did $66 million in revenue last year. And we just announced that in our second quarter we grew 70 percent over the year-ago quarter, and that comes on top of 68 percent growth in the first quarter. So life is good. We have 3,000 customers in 70 countries.

These days, hitting $100 million in sales is considered sort of a magic number for going public. If you do that — and it looks like you will — will you consider going public?

I am no longer allowed to answer that question. I will tell you we’ve recently hired a CFO, a general counsel and a CIO. Beyond that, I really can’t answer that question.

Verizon Wireless will begin offering the plan — which includes unlimited talk, text and Web use for $50 a month — on Thursday, said spokeswoman Brenda Raney. In addition to Verizon stores, it will be sold at Best Buy Co., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. locations.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Today there’s a lot of hope that Spotify’s buzz/marketing will help make subscriptions mainstream. But if these things are ever really going to work, subscription services are probably going to need help, by attaching themselves to services that consumers are already using/paying for.

That’s what Rhapsody is trying today, by bundling itself along with wireless carrier MetroPCS via a $60 package that gives you all-you-can eat data and music. As Billboard notes, Rhapsody also has deals with Verizon and AT&T, but this is a deep integration that puts the service offering front and center for MetroPCS’s 9 million customers.

That said, I’m still not sure how compelling the offer will be, since it doesn’t appear to offer any discount to Rhapsody’s standalone $10 a month service: Beyond the music service, the differences between a $50 a month MetroPCS plan and a $60 a month MetroPCS plan seem to be limited at best.

And if you pay for Rhapsody on your own, you won’t be limited to Android phones, as you are with the MetroPCS deal.

[UPDATE: Rhapsody takes issue with my assertion that the MetroPCS bundle doesn't amount to a discount on Rhapsody's $10 a month a la carte price. I spent some time going back and forth with a Rhapsody PR executive over the issue this afternoon, and in the end, we're going to end up agreeing to disagree.

They point out that MetroPCS 4G users who pay $60 for a bundle that includes Rhapsody also get goodies like unlimited multimedia streaming, while $50 4G users who don't get Rhapsody are capped at 1 gig per month. The distinctions between the $50 and $60 3G plans are slighter, as I noted above. Again, you can try to decipher it for yourself via MetroPCS' pricing grid. But in the end, as I argue below, I don't think the bundle represents a serious discount, and certainly not one that will register with most consumers.]

[UPDATE TWO: As CNET points out, Warner Music Group, one of the four major music labels, has not signed on for this version of Rhapsody, which means any notion of a discount is officially silly, since MetroPCS bundle-buyers will be getting a service with major holes.]

If you really want to move the needle, I think that carriers or cable companies or someone will have to be willing to absorb some of the costs and offer subscription music at a substantial discount to the now-standard $10 a month price point. Any takers?

The news weighed on MetroPCS’s second-quarter results and erased as much as 35 percent of the company’s market value Tuesday. Rival Leap Wireless International Inc., which reports its results Wednesday, saw its shares fall up to 18 percent.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Monday dismissed lawsuits filed by Verizon Communications Inc. and MetroPCS Communications Inc., saying the companies had to wait to challenge the rules until they were published in the Federal Register.

In December the FCC adopted new rules prohibiting Internet providers from deliberately blocking or slowing Web traffic, but the agency hasn’t formally published them.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Dallas company is the first U.S. carrier to offer a 4G network that runs on Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, technology. It comes ahead of Verizon Wireless (VZ), which plans to turn on its own LTE network by the end of the year, and AT&T Inc. (T), which has set its own 4G ambitions for next year.

The aggressive push to 4G illustrates the importance of data services—even for a prepaid provider like MetroPCS that traditionally serves the low end of the wireless market with phone calls.

“More than half of our customers use their handset as their primary access to the Web,” MetroPCS Chief Executive Roger Linquist said in an interview. “What we needed is a better experience.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) is rolling out new brands and plans, including a partnership with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) announced Thursday that will charge seven cents per minute or text message–about half as much as TracFone Wireless, the largest U.S. prepaid provider.

Verizon Wireless, (VZ) which had largely avoided the prepaid market, has opened its nationwide network to prepaid resellers. In the first quarter, Verizon accounted for nearly half of the industry’s prepaid subscriber additions.

The entry of larger carriers into prepaid service has pressured smaller players like MetroPCS Communications Inc. (PCS) and Leap Wireless International Inc., (LEAP) which combined have 12.4 million customers, to slash prices and explore a merger.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

WMT is rolling out the plans nationwide after previously testing service via 234 stores, according to Reuters.

This is something of a nightmare for the pure-play pre-paid wireless companies, including MetroPCS (PCS) and Leap Wireless (LEAP), which just a few days ago found themselves facing the prospect of AT&T (T) jumping into the pre-paid market.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The story notes that both MetroPCS and Clearwire own spectrum suitable for 4G networks. T-Mobile has yet to announce a 4G expansion plan; both Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) have begun upgrading their networks and plan to use the LTE standard.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Now that most of the biggest ones in the U.S. have reported their first quarter results, how did they perform? We looked at six–Boost Mobile, Sprint’s (S) prepaid unit; Leap Wireless (LEAP); MetroPCS (PCS); T-Mobile; Tracfone, the U.S. prepaid unit of America Movil; and Virgin Mobile USA (VM), which posted earnings earlier today.

Of those, Tracfone remains the biggest in terms of subscribers, ending the first quarter with 11.8 million. MetroPCS and Boost added the most net new subscribers, gaining about 684,000 and 674,000, respectively.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In an interview with the Journal’s Amol Sharma, MetroPCS CEO Roger Linquist said the company will be building its New York City network–including the five boroughs as well as parts of New Jersey and upstate New York–throughout 2009. MetroPCS ultimately intends to connect that area with Boston and Philadelphia, where it has already begun offering cellphone coverage.

Read the rest of this post

“Never before has the divergence between the high end and low end of the wireless market been so stark,” writes Moffett.

Read the rest of this post

Among the more than 260 applicants included on the bidder list released last night by the FCC (accepted applications; incomplete applications) are AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Cox Communications, Google (bidding as Google Airwaves Inc.), MetroPCS, Qualcomm, National Datacast (the for-profit subsidiary of the Public Broadcasting Service), Alltel, Towerstream, Chevron and Frontier Wireless (EchoStar).

And then there’s zillionaire investor Paul Allen–Microsoft’s other founder (pictured above). Applications from Vulcan Spectrum LLC and Bend Cable Communications LLC, both Allen-backed ventures, have been accepted by the FCC. Seems Allen fancies himself the Pied Piper of the Wired World, and the Wireless World as well. Perhaps someday we’ll have the Paul Allen Brain Atlas, the Paul Allen Telescope Array and the Paul Allen Advanced Wireless Services Spectrum.