AllThingsD » products

A Transformed Fairchild Returns to Silicon Valley

Don Clark — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 18:41:52 +0000

Fairchild Semiconductor, a major force in giving Silicon Valley its name, has endured an exile of sorts in Maine since 1997. Now the chip maker has returned to its home turf, with a product line that has changed dramatically.

“We’ve probably exited 90 percent of our businesses,” says Mark Thompson, Fairchild’s chief executive, who recently shifted the company’s headquarters to San Jose, CA.

Not that the remaining products are exactly household words, except in households of electrical engineers. They still have esoteric names like MOSFETs, flip flops, latches, solid-state relays and interleaved PFC controllers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Google's Eric Schmidt Shows Off Movie Studio, a Tablet Video-Editing App

Ina Fried — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:58:56 +0000

Google’s Eric Schmidt said that while computers are being criticized for driving humans apart, the opposite is actually taking place as devices are doing work that humans don’t want to.

“Computers are really here to make us happier,” Schmidt said, promising these devices will give people more time with friends and family, not less.

Schmidt, who gave up the CEO role last month, said that nearly all devices will get more interesting when they connect to the Internet. A music player that doesn’t connect to the network isn’t very interesting, he said, perhaps opening the door to the announcement of a long-talked-about, cloud-based Google music service.

The talk is just geting started. Mobilized got a really good seat in the front row, just two seats over from Andy Rubin, and has live updates below.

5:59 pm: Schmidt talking about things phones should be able to do, such as figure out better traffic routes and bridge language barriers. “You really can do magic,” he says, pointing to Google Translate, which lets you speak one language and have a language you don’t speak returned. “That’s done in a twentieth of a second or what have you,” he says.

6:01 pm: Brings out colleague to show an application on “an interesting new device.”

6:03 pm: The device is the Motorola Xoom tablet and the program is “Movie Studio,” an app built from the ground up for creating and editing movies on tablets.

He has a few images and videos from around Barcelona.

He creates a movie onstage and shows how it can easily be shared on YouTube. (This looks like iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker so far–both of which also let you edit movies and share directly to YouTube.)

6:07 pm: Upload goes slowly, though, as Schmidt notes it is the problem of doing a demo at a mobile network convention where everyone is hammering the networks.

6:09 pm: The goal of many of Google’s products, Schmidt says, is to do tasks quickly so that people can get back to being human. “We ultimately believe that speed matters,” Schmidt says. Google Instant, he says, can save two to five seconds per search.

Search is also becoming more personal. With permission, users can get more information. Next up, he says, is autonomous search as information comes up as one walks or drives, and is driven by location.

“That’s just the beginning of a large number of new apps that use that infrastructure to make a big difference,” Schmidt says.

Schmidt says how much info to share will be up to the user, but those that opt in can get much richer results.

There’s also a trend, he says, to returning more structured data, such as travel.

6:12 pm: Stat time: 120 million people using Chrome, up three times from a year ago.

YouTube revenue doubled in 2010. Now just being able to monetize professional content at a rate that starts to make sense for content partners.

6:18 pm: Computer science can help all kinds of things, Schmidt says. With phones and tablets, “You never forget everything” which is precisely what phones are good at.

If you choose, you can remember the hotels you stayed in and the people you met, etc., “Humans forget,” he says.

Computers are also preventing people from ever getting lost. When I was a boy growing up in Europe “I was always lost,” Schmidt says.

Translation may not prevent war, but should at a minimum increase dialogue, Schmidt says.

6:18 pm: “Even better you are never lonely,” he sats, because computers can point you to nearby friends or connect you to distant ones.

You are never bored, Schmidt says. You are never out of ideas because we can always suggest what you can do next.

Other changes, include the self-driving cars that Google has been working on.

“It’s obvious that cars should drive (themselves),” he says, adding that there will be a “kill switch” in case there are bugs. And it will take time, he says.

“This is coming. It will be decades, I suspect–not a year.”

He also says these innovations will scale to the masses.

“It’s a future for the masses, not the elites,” he says.

6:21 pm: With that, on to Q&A.

6:23 pm: Talking about targeted broadcast quality ads as next frontier.

“Who wants to see an ad that is not relavent to them,” Schmidt says. And that leads to revenue, which Schmidt points out is the whole point of advertising in the first place.

6:24 pm: Question on Android fragmentation saying there is frustration among phone makers and developers.

“We hear some of this,” Schmidt says. “You’ve stated the problem more strongly than I would have, but I will take that as feedback.”

6:26 pm: Question about role of Google in financial services.

Schmidt quips that Larry Page and Sergey Brin periodically suggest that Google issue Google Bucks as its own currency, but Schmidt says he always points out the regulatory issues.

On a serious front, he talks about the power of near-field communications as a means to turn real-world transactions into electronic ones.

“In that are very large businesses,” he says.

(Google built NFC into its Nexus S device.)

6:29 pm: Are you interested in Twitter?

“We love Twitter and I like to tweet,” Schmidt says, eliciting laughter from the crowd.

6:31 pm: Why so many operating systems?

Sometimes these things occur because the teams move so quickly, Schmidt says.

People have been asking when Gingerbread and Honeycomb will come together. Schmidt: You can imagine the follow-on release will start with an “I” and be named after a desert and will combine the best of both, Schmidt says.

These releases occur on roughly a six-month cycle, Schmidt says.

6:33 pm: On Chrome OS, Schmidt says there will be an opportunity to merge that with Android over time, but better to wait for the operating systems to mature and a natural time than to push them together too soon.

6:34 pm: On HTML5, Schmidt imagines that some number of years from now, most apps–mobile and desktop–will be running on HTML5.

6:39 pm: Question on Google’s role in health care.

Phone should be able to, at a minimum, carry medical info. Several percent of queries on Google are health-related.

6:42 pm: Is Facebook with its “Like” button a main competitor?

Today our main competitor is Microsoft. Microsoft has a good product in Bing, he says.

“There’s a couple cases where it might be too good. We discussed that in a blog post.”

They have the cash, the scale and the reach to do good and amazing things.

6:44 pm: On Nokia-Microsoft partnership:

“We would have loved it had they chosen Android,” Schmidt says. “That offer remains open.”

Android would have been a good choice for Nokia, he says.

‘We certainly tried” to get them, he says.

6:46 pm: How do you approach the fact that Android going higher and lower in the market?

Schmidt says that the company tries to show the best in its Nexus line, while putting minimum specifications out there to set the bar for what developers can expect.

6:47 pm: Question on why Google is not more broadly used in the education market?

Schmidt says the company has funded a number of YouTube professors. “We’ve not yet come up with the killer [education] app,” he says.

6:49 pm: Asked about Google’s interest in the PC operating system market, Schmidt says that Google’s answer is Chrome OS. Sometime in the spring you will see a series of PC makers come out with Chrome OS devices. However, he adds they won’t run current PC apps, such as Windows apps.

“It does not run any of your current PC applications so you might think about it,” Schmidt said. That said, he adds there are, in most cases, cloud-based options that are roughly equivalent.

6:52 pm: With that, Schmidt wraps up.

New App Helps You Decide Whether to Buy or Walk Out Empty-Handed

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:00:41 +0000

Say goodbye to impulse buys.

Smartphone applications are quickly becoming an easy way to judge a product on the spot, and figure out when to walk away if it’s not exactly what you are looking for.

SearchReviews is launching an application today that provides input on the go, by aggregating more than 36 million customer reviews from more than 1,000 sites around the Web.

Reviews come from sites like TripAdvisor, eBay, Sephora, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Zappos and QVC.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based SearchReviews was founded in September by Ankesh Kumar, who has funded the start-up with $350,000 of his own money.

SearchReviews’ applications for the iPhone and Android are launching today.

Both of them work a lot like others in the market.

A consumer scans a product’s barcode, and then receives a list of results. Other apps in the market today from Amazon, Google and eBay are similar, but SearchReviews is hoping to stand out by having the most reviews. The other apps also tend to focus on price comparison.

SearchReviews may be one way to avoid buyer’s remorse, but to be sure, mobile applications like these are disrupting the way traditional retailers have done business for years. As we’ve written in the past, retailers used to be confident that they could close a sale as long as they could get shoppers into the store, and that’s where they focused all of their attention–on customer acquisition. Now consumers have the tools to decide to leave empty-handed.

Was TweetDeck's Sale a Good Deal? That Depends on Bill Gross.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 22:04:22 +0000

On paper, Twitter is worth $4 billion. Its investors, at least, believe it will be worth $10 billion sooner than later.

So why is the leading Twitter application–the one that many of Twitter’s most ardent users rely on–selling itself for $30 million?

That’s the question lots of people are mulling over since Friday’s news about the UberMedia/TweetDeck deal.

The tech investors and observers I’ve chatted with in the last couple of days generally land in one of two camps. Either:

TweetDeck is the biggest Twitter client not owned by Twitter, and they sold too early.
TweetDeck is the biggest Twitter client not owned by Twitter and, given the circumstances, they did okay.

This is basically a more muted replay of last year’s Twittersphere freakout, when it became clear that Twitter wanted to own much more of the Twitter ecosystem itself, and would place more limits on everyone else.

One important variable here is the way you view Bill Gross and UberMedia. A big chunk of the TweetDeck payout–the majority, according to multiple sources–will be in UberMedia stock. So if you think that company–which just raised another $17.5 million itself–has an upside, then the deal looks that much better.

That’s hard to figure, though, because Gross seems to be doing two things: Buying Twitter apps that compete with Twitter’s own products, and building a Twitter advertising system that will compete with the one Twitter is trying to build itself.

And Twitter doesn’t seem any more receptive to any of that now than it did 10 months ago. But Gross and his backers argue that they’re going to pull it off in a way that makes Uber become the Zynga to Twitter’s Facebook–a smaller company built on another bigger company’s platform, that makes both of them more valuable. So if they’re right…

Meantime, this seems like a good time to revisit Twitter investor Fred Wilson’s “inflection point” essay from last April.

That’s the one that precipitated much quaking among third-party Twitter developers and investors, with good reason: In part, it explained that Twitter would be buying or building “hole-filling” services, which meant there wouldn’t be much reason for many of the Twittersphere’s existing apps to exist.

A year later, though, it’s the second part of Wilson’s essay, where he calls on developers to build new apps and services that “create something entirely new on top of Twitter,” that seems more striking.

Because if Twitter really does end up being worth $10 billion or more, it seems like someone ought to be trying to do that. I’m not sure I’ve seen any, though.

Am I missing something? Feel free to weigh in below.

HP Oldsmobiles the Palm Brand

John Paczkowski — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:30:29 +0000

Hewlett-Packard bought Palm for its technology and talent, not for its brand. So it’s hardly surprising that the Palm logo and name were nowhere to be found at HP’s big webOS event Wednesday. Not in the signage. Not in the videos or slides included in the onstage presentation and not on any of the new hardware on display. The TouchPad, Veer and Pre3 all sport silver HP logos and “HP” as a prefix, not Palm.

In fact, the only place to really find the Palm brand these days is at the Palm.com domain, which, while festooned with HP branding, still includes “Palm USA” in its page titles. Evidently this is what HP meant when it said the Palm brand would “move into the background.”

Judging from Wednesday’s event, the storied Palm brand isn’t even a sub-brand of HP. It’s just a handle for a particular division of the company, though HP insists it’s keeping it around.

“Our future strategy is to continue to build the HP brand in the marketplace,” a company spokesman told me. “Palm is a great brand that is synonymous with mobile innovation and we are delighted to have it in our portfolio of brands allowing us future options.”

That’s a nice enough thought, though it’s hard to see HP ever reviving the Palm brand in the future–not after it’s rebranded the company’s products as its own and announced plans to use them to build “the largest installed base of connected users in the world.” If it succeeds at that, will Palm really be a future branding option? Doubtful.

In that sense, Wednesday’s event wasn’t just a showcase for some slick new webOS hardware, but a eulogy to the pioneering company that made it possible, the company that created the market for handheld devices and shaped that first early vision of mobile computing….

Eh, Oldsmobile was a great brand too, I suppose.

Quick Takes on webOS

Walt Mossberg — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:51:49 +0000

Following HP’s Think Big, Think Small, Think Beyond event held in San Francisco today, Walt and Katie share their quick thoughts on the new Veer and Pre 3 smartphones and the TouchPad tablet. Walt also talks about the company’s strategy for deploying webOS across its entire product line, from smartphones to tablets to printers and to the desktop.

[ See post to watch video ]

'With This App, I Thee Wed…'

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:57:08 +0000

Brides- and grooms-to-be take comfort in the tangible, whether its bridal magazines that seem to weigh five pounds each, reception venue floor plans or photos of dream cakes. But keeping these tangibles handy at all times means lugging around a thick binder stuffed with paper. No thanks.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I tested several wedding-planning applications for mobile devices that may get couples reaching for an iPhone instead of a binder. As a recently engaged person, I tested them for realistic usability, time-saving techniques and friendly user interfaces.

The Strength of The Knot

It’s nearly impossible to get engaged without quickly growing addicted to TheKnot.com, a one-stop shop for brides and grooms alike. Here, couples can create budgets using a template that estimates cost per item, and they can import guest lists in Excel spreadsheet format. They can also page through photos of other weddings held in their area, or obsessively chat online with other engaged people whose friends are tired of listening to them.

Unfortunately, The Knot Inc. doesn’t have one mobile app that replicates all of the rich features on its website, though typing http://mobile.theknot.com into the mobile browser on a device like the BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phones opens a condensed version of some features, including the ever-ticking countdown (201 days to go!) and checklists sorted into Category, Date or Reminders.

The Knot Wedding Dress Look Book encourages brides to enter personal details to find the best gown.

The company does offer two free iPhone apps (Android apps are in development) that focus on certain features of the website: The Knot Wedding Dress Look Book and The Knot Wedding 911. The Look Book encourages brides to find just the right wedding gown by entering details about themselves like body type, personality, type of wedding and best physical feature. Wedding 911 includes hundreds of wedding questions that are collected, sorted into eight categories and answered by the site’s editor in chief.

IPad owners can get their Knot fix by reading a digital magazine with features like videos demonstrating do-it-yourself save-the-date cards. The iPad app itself is free, but the magazine costs $4.99 per issue. Subscriptions aren’t available.

Get Yourself Registered

Thanks to the iPhone’s built-in camera, couples don’t need a store’s barcode scanner gun to add items to their registries; instead, they can take photos of products’ barcodes with their phone to automatically add items to registries. The MyRegistry.com Universal Wishlist With Barcode Scanner ($0.99), WeddingScan ($0.99), Registry Stop (free) and Gift Registry 360 Scan and Add (free) are four such iPhone apps that perform this function. If the barcode photo doesn’t work, users can manually type in the product name and take their own photo of it to illustrate.

Gift Registry 360′s free iPhone app is a personal bridal registry. Users photograph barcodes with their phone cameras to automatically add products to the list.

Wedding Planner-Approved

A friend of mine who’s a successful wedding planner in North Carolina recommended two apps for the iPhone and iPad: Brides Wedding Genius and My Wedding Concierge. Both are available in free versions, though a $4.99 version of My Wedding Concierge is also available for the iPad.

Brides Wedding Genius is a free iPhone app that focuses on dresses, jewelry and travel destinations for a wedding or a honeymoon. Users conduct searches for content by plugging in preferences such as price, style of ring or destination. Results can be starred and saved to a list of favorites. A helpful “Find Online” tab quickly opens each item’s website within the app. A $2.99 upgrade will add features and sync the app with BridesWeddingGenius.com.

My Wedding Concierge is a self-described inspiration engine, and I tested the full version of this app on my iPad. The home screen of this app offers a large search box and an “Inspire Me!” option below this box. Inspiration comes in the form of suggested wedding blogs, of which there are many, I’ve discovered since becoming engaged. I like that My Wedding Concierge tries to sort through these blogs to return relevant content, even though some blogs seemed a bit unrelated to my searches.

The Knot’s iPad app offers a digital magazine version of the popular website and costs $4.99 per issue.

Make Contact

The $9.99 iWedding Deluxe iPhone app works well if you have a lot of people already added as contacts in your iPhone; a shortcut lets you move those contacts over to the app in one step, thus keeping names of transportation companies, photographers, the ceremony officiant and rental companies in one central spot.

This app’s Home screen shows a countdown clock that measures time down to the second after users input the time of their wedding during setup. A section called The Guide helps locate nearby wedding vendors using GPS and Google Maps. It also lists useful blogs and tips for setting a budget, choosing a ceremony venue and proper etiquette.

BlackBerry and Android

I found a handful of wedding planning apps on the Android and BlackBerry platforms, including a $1.99 Android app called MyWeddingBudget and a $2.99 BlackBerry app called Wedding Organizer. But both of these felt rather bare bones and not as intuitive as the iPhone and iPad apps I used.

If all else fails, the $0.99 Bridezilla Tamer iPhone app will try to add humor to the situation with lines like, “You’re right, it’s perfectly reasonable that our cake costs three months’ rent because we’ll remember how it tasted forever!”

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com

Disney Steals Top Mobile Exec From Electronic Arts

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:24:00 +0000

Adam Sussman has left his job at Electronic Arts as the VP of worldwide publishing for mobile to join Disney, we have confirmed. BusinessInsider.com first reported his departure, saying he will be rejoining Disney, where he previously worked for six years. He will be Disney’s SVP of publishing for Disney Games. Sussman was responsible for making EA one of the largest game developers in mobile, and was a frequent guest at Apple iPhone events to help unveil new products.

A Big Quarter From Google, and Shake-Up at the Top–Larry Page to Become CEO

Peter Kafka — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:03:37 +0000

First look at Google earnings: Net revenue of $6.4 billion and $8.75 a share.

The Street was looking for $6.06 billion and $8.09 a share.

Also, importantly, a shake-up at the top. From the release:

* Starting from April 4, Larry Page, Google Co-Founder, will take charge of Google’s day-to-day operations as Chief Executive Officer.
* Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder, will devote his energy to strategic projects, in particular working on new products.
* Eric Schmidt will assume the role of Executive Chairman, focusing externally on deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership–all of which are increasingly important given Google’s global reach. Internally, he will continue to act as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.

Here’s the full text of Schmidt’s statement explaining the move:

When I joined Google in 2001 I never imagined—even in my wildest dreams—that we would get as far, as fast as we have today. Search has quite literally changed people’s lives—increasing the collective sum of the world’s knowledge and revolutionizing advertising in the process. And our emerging businesses—display, Android, YouTube and Chrome—are on fire. Of course, like any successful organization we’ve had our fair share of good luck, but the entire team—now over 24,000 Googlers globally—deserves most of the credit.

And as our results today show, the outlook is bright. But as Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So Larry, Sergey and I have been talking for a long time how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making—and over the holidays we decided now was the right moment to make some changes to the way we are structured.

For the last 10 years, we have all been equally involved in making decisions. This triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company.

Larry will now lead product development and technology strategy, his greatest strengths, and starting from April 4 he will take charge of our day-to-day operations as Google’s Chief Executive Officer. In this new role I know he will merge Google’s technology and business vision brilliantly. I am enormously proud of my last decade as CEO, and I am certain that the next 10 years under Larry will be even better! Larry, in my clear opinion, is ready to lead.

Sergey has decided to devote his time and energy to strategic projects, in particular working on new products. His title will be Co-Founder. He’s an innovator and entrepreneur to the core, and this role suits him perfectly.

As Executive Chairman, I will focus wherever I can add the greatest value: externally, on the deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership that are increasingly important given Google’s global reach; and internally as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.

We are confident that this focus will serve Google and our users well in the future. Larry, Sergey and I have worked exceptionally closely together for over a decade—and we anticipate working together for a long time to come. As friends, co-workers and computer scientists we have a lot in common, most important of all a profound belief in the potential for technology to make the world a better place. We love Google—our people, our products and most of all the opportunity we have to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.

His shorter comment, via Twitter:

Here, again, is a cheat sheet from Citi’s Mark Mahaney, so you can play along at home:

Plastic Logic Nabs New Funding, Plans Plant in Russia

Ina Fried — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 01:00:50 +0000

E-reader start-up Plastic Logic said it has finalized an investment deal with the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies. The Russian agency, known as RUSNANO, will provide $150 million in equity financing for Plastic Logic, which plans to build a $700 million factory in Zelenograd, Russia.

RUSNANO will also provide $100 million in debt guarantees, while Plastic Logic’s existing investor Oak Investment Partners will add another $50 million in equity investment.

“We evaluated multiple locations and potential partners across the globe for our second factory, Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta said in a statement. “We determined Russia with RUSNANO as an investment partner was the best fit for our business. RUSNANO has demonstrated it is fully invested in our goal to commercialize plastic electronics. We are gratified by the RUSNANO investment package and the continued commitment of Oak Investment Partners in bringing this disruptive technology to market.”

Plastic Logic has been showing off its plastic display technology for years (including a demo at D7), but scrapped its first product–the Que e-reader (see image), after several delays. The company said it still hopes to bring to market a business-oriented e-reader and is working to develop such a product. The company said that the Zelongrad factory, which should be ready for production by 2013 or 2014, will employ more than 300 people and have the capacity to crank out hundreds of thousands of displays per month.

“This investment signifies the potential that we see in the future of Plastic Electronics across a variety of commercial and consumer products,” RUSNANO Managing Director Georgy Kolpachev said in a statement. “Flexible plastic electronic displays will provide
another major milestone in how people process information. Entering this new disruptive segment at the stage of its inception gives Russia a chance to win a leading position in global market of future electronics.”

Despite its new Russian plans, Plastic Logic said it plans to continue investing in the Dresden, Germany, plant it opened in 2008, as well as its research and development center in Cambridge, England.

Still unclear is just how it will compete with the likes of the Kindle, iPad, Nook and the many, many other tablets and e-readers that will hit the market before anything ships from Dresden, Zelenograd or any other Plastic Logic facility.

Steve Jobs's Absence Won't Derail Apple, but His Presence Still Key Factor in the Company's Success

Ina Fried — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:21:10 +0000

Be prepared for a flurry of predictions on how Steve Jobs’s latest medical leave of absence will impact the company’s products.

There will be those who are inclined to try to equate Jobs’s health issues with all kinds of near-term product implications, but such speculation is likely off base. While Jobs’s health may have been a factor in the timing of a couple of announcements, don’t expect his medical issues to substantially impact things like the next iPhone or iPad.

The company overall tends to operate on long lead times, so much of this year’s product plans are likely in the works and probably won’t be deeply affected. Jobs practically said as much in his brief statement.

Also, Jobs leaves Apple in extremely capable hands. Tim Cook has ably led Apple during Jobs’s prior medical leaves, and there is every reason to believe that this time will be no different.

Longer-term, though, is another question. Here is where it is hard to overstate the importance of Steve Jobs at the helm.

While Apple has a company full of talented workers, Jobs tends to be involved in major (and plenty of not-so-major) decisions in almost every area. He is a well-known perfectionist with a strong, sometimes maddening focus on having products done just so.

Those who understand Apple know that Jobs is not just a chief executive–he is also the de facto head of every department. If there is a tough call to be made about a product or a decision on the next marketing pitch, Jobs is the ultimate authority. He’s known to weigh in on all manner of more minor issues too. This attention to making every detail just so can make Jobs a tough guy to deal with, but is also key to a good part of the company’s success.

And even in the short term–although the same products are likely to come from Cupertino, whether Steve Jobs is there to introduce them or not–no one can sell like Steve. There’s a reason that satellite trucks line up for blocks anytime he has something to say.

Update, 1:35 p.m.: Just got done going on MSNBC talking about the situation (video posted below).

Ina Fried talks to MSNBC Dayside about Steve Jobs health
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Myspace Plans to Lay Off 550 to 600 Employees Tomorrow

Liz Gannes — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:00:39 +0000

Myspace, which has been struggling to revitalize itself, is expected to lay off 550 to 600 of its staff of just over 1,000 tomorrow, according to several sources.

NetworkEffect first reported news of the large-scale cuts at the end of December.

But now, the social-network-turned-entertainment-hub has set a date–January 11–and is working on finalizing the people it will let go, which will likely include a significant number of international employees.

The Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company will be touting the changes as a restructuring to shed “legacy” businesses and products.

Unfortunately, the context for that rationale is that Myspace is shedding a full half of its staff.

After the layoffs, the News Corp.-owned Myspace will turn its sights to sale options, as I also reported.

The company is primarily being shopped to private-equity buyers, although one intriguing possibility currently being raised within News Corp. is to try to sell Myspace to Yahoo.

Internally, Myspace staffers have been expecting layoffs in early January for some time, with the numbers circulating being as high as 70 percent of the company’s staff.

(Disclosure: News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

Update: Myspace did make major layoffs on January 11, though it reduced the number to about 500 staff cut.

You Forgot "Think Different," HP

John Paczkowski — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:15:33 +0000

Now that Hewlett-Packard’s gotten its webOS printers out of the way, the company’s moving on to the much more exciting business of mobile devices. Moments ago, the company distributed invitations to a Feb. 9 event in San Francisco promising “an exciting webOS announcement.”

Presumably that means we’ll be seeing the company’s eagerly anticipated “PalmPad” webOS tablet, though the invitation leaves room for other devices as well. “Think big. Think small. Think beyond,” it reads.

You forgot “Think different,” guys. Or, better yet, “Think original.”

Seem to have forgotten the Palm name as well …

Quips aside, it’s going to be very interesting to see what Palm’s been able to accomplish with HP’s heft behind it. Certainly the company’s decision to showcase its new webOS products at a big solo event in San Francisco, rather than at CES this week, suggests it’s got some exciting new hardware to show off.

Hello MOTOS

John Paczkowski — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:20:32 +0000

Motorola’s days as lone entity on the New York Stock Exchange are over. This morning the company’s long-planned split became official when Motorola Mobility Holdings, which handles the company’s mobile and consumer products business, and Motorola Solutions, which oversees next-generation communications products for enterprise and government, began trading under the tickers MMI and MSI, respectively. As of this writing, both are doing relatively well, with Motorola Mobility up more than 7 percent at $32.39 and Motorola Solutions up .23 percent at $37.40.

Following Layoffs, Yahoo Cuts Products: MyBlogLog, Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz

Liz Gannes — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:58:59 +0000

At an all-hands meeting for the Yahoo product team following a round of layoffs yesterday that significantly impacted that group, Chief Product Officer Blake Irving showed off a slide of plans to “sunset” eight products and consolidate others.

Products on a list to be sunsetted–whatever that means–include MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious. Some of those properties came from acquisitions and others were internally generated.

The news of the Yahoo plans first came out via a screenshot of the Webcast posted on Twitter by Eric Marcoullier that included a slide with a list of impacted products next to an image of Irving, along with EVP of the Americas Ross Levinsohn, announcing the news.

Marcoullier was founder of MyBlogLog, which created one of the products being shut down. (MyBlogLog was bought by Yahoo in 2007 and has been pretty much neglected ever since.)

The slide also shows plans to merge additional products, including Fire Eagle and Yahoo People Search, and make features out of many others, including Yahoo! Alerts and Yahoo! Calendar. (If you have better eyes than I do, please help identify some of those logos in the comments.)

Marcoullier is no longer at Yahoo, although the validity of his Webcast screenshot was confirmed, after he was quickly criticized on Twitter by various current Yahoo employees who didn’t appreciate it getting out, including Irving himself, who insinuated he would fire whoever leaked the Webcast. (Click on image here to enlarge.)

While the layoffs and shutdowns obviously indicate a de-emphasis of technology products by Yahoo, they aren’t necessarily unwarranted. Some of these products were the same as those mentioned on then-SVP Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter Memo way back in 2006 as candidates for streamlining.

Update 12:21 p.m. PT: Yahoo’s statement on the matter just came through:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

In response to a follow-up question about Delicious, which seems to be the “sunsetted” product people are most upset about, the spokeswoman replied:

“We continue to operate Delicious today, and will communicate specific details when appropriate.”

Getting RIM's PlayBook From Mike Lazaridis (Video)

Ina Fried — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:00:29 +0000

One of the highlights of D: Dive Into Mobile was getting a few minutes to see RIM’s forthcoming PlayBook tablet in action. However, from there, things seemed to go downhill for CEO Mike Lazaridis.

According to the overwhelming consensus of both pundits and many of those in the room, Lazaridis’s talk left people even more skeptical that RIM truly is prepared to respond to the threat posed by Android and the iPhone.

Despite the rough going on stage, Lazaridis was kind enough to talk with Mobilized for a video interview, during which he both showed off the PlayBook and again made his case for why the BlackBerry is still competitive.

Asked about a rumor that the PlayBook might run Android applications, Lazaridis appeared to splash cold water, suggesting that the focus had been on making the device really support various Web standards, such as Java, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, HTML5 and Javascript.

“It’s foolish to fight the Web,” Lazaridis said, noting that Adobe has three million developers for its various products. “The Web has become the platform around the world….The whole point of PlayBook is to bring the power of tablets up to the Web platform.”

As for pricing, Lazaridis would only say that the PlayBook will be “competitive,” though at the very end of the video he seems to be making the case that it might be the same price or more expensive.

“I would argue this is a lot more powerful than the iPad,” he said.

[ See post to watch video ]

Google’s Andy Rubin on Apple: "Everybody Is Embracing the iPhone"

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 03:12:34 +0000

Google and Apple may be fierce rivals in the mobile space, and they may have different visions of the meaning of “open,” but there’s a mutual respect between the two companies that was in evidence tonight at D: Dive Into Mobile. Asked for his views on Apple in an interview with co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Andy Rubin, Google’s Android guru, had good things to say about the iPhone and the company that created it.

“I think everybody is embracing the iPhone,” he said. “I think that Apple makes good consumer products and focuses on a robust consumer experience and consistency across applications. More recently, I see them getting involved in the other end of the mobile spectrum, which is services–the App Store, iTunes, etc. I think that when you move into the services business, it creates a lot of new opportunities. If the operating system is the razor, then services are the blades.”

Does Apple have the DNA to make it in the services business?

Said Rubin, “My assumption is Apple is a company that learns from its mistakes.”

Analyst: RIM Vulnerable Ahead of OS Transition

John Paczkowski — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 11:04:33 +0000

The all-new QNX operating system that will debut on Research in Motion’s forthcoming PlayBook tablet may well rejuvinate the BlackBerry when it replaces the smartphone’s aging BlackBerry OS. And it may herald a promising new period for the company, but only after RIM has negotiated a potentially painful transition.

Depending on how long it takes, the switch to QNX could cause RIM to suffer some share loss in the smartphone market, particularly its high end. That’s the theory put forth by Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley, who believes RIM’s going to have a tough time maintaining market share in higher-end smartphones given the execution risks involved in rolling out a new OS and related portfolio of products.

Says Walkley, “We believe RIM will likely lose high-end smartphone market share and higher-end North American subscribers over the next several quarters due to limited new high-end product launches ahead of new QNX smartphones combined with improving competitive smartphone offerings such as the Samsung and HTC Android based smartphones at most carriers.”

And the iPhone, likely launching at Verizon early next year, won’t make things any easier. The PlayBook, of course, has and will continue to drive upside in the months ahead–assuming its launch goes smoothly and it is as well-received as investors seem to hope. But it too faces rivals formidable enough that Walkley doesn’t see it selling much more than 1.75 million units in C2011.

“We believe the PlayBook will struggle to compete against the iPad given the large ecosystem of applications for the iPad and the form factor and GUI of the iPad versus the PlayBook,” he concludes. “Further, we anticipate several Android-based tablets launching in 2011 at very aggressive price points and potentially running the Android 3.0 (Gingerbread version) and we anticipate an increasingly competitive environment.”

Palm Chief: By Birthright, Palm Should Have Owned the Smartphone Market

John Paczkowski — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:40:51 +0000

What Palm chief Jon Rubinstein’s appearance at Web 2.0 Summit today lacked in news, it made up for somewhat in perspective–on the mobile space, Palm’s smartphone birthright, its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard and its future under HP.

“Palm created the PDA (personal digital assistant) space with the Pilot and the smartphone space after it with the Treo,” Rubinstein said this morning, reflecting on the company’s state when he first came to it. “So by birthright, Palm should have owned the smartphone market, but it just lost its way. It’s a very similar story to what happened with Apple.”

Except, of course, Apple never forfeited its independence to another company in the hopes of reclaiming its birthright, or to execute the broader vision of connected devices that arose from it. But in Palm’s case, its acquisition by HP made perfect sense. “We needed more resources,” Rubinstein said. “We could not compete in a fashion that would allow us to be one of the premier companies in the marketplace. And HP needed a strong mobile strategy around which they could innovate–one that would allow them to control their own furture and not rely on the kindness of strangers.”

In other words, to differentiate and succeed in the mobile device space, you need to own a veritically integrated stack strategy–software, hardware and services–like the one Palm is now building out with the help of HP’s not inconsiderable resources. “We’ve actually pulled a couple hundred people out of HP and made them part of Palm,” Rubinstein explained. “We’re using them to broaden our scope and we’re just cranking away. Our view is we’re going to see people with more and more devices in the future and HP is in the middle of all this. So our focus is to deliver a unified experience for that around webOS.”

So what’s Palm got in the pipeline for next year?

“We’ve got some great products in the works,” Rubinstein said. “Some smartphones, a great tablet coming. I think we have several products that will be hits when they come out….Everyone forgets, we just closed this acquisition in July….This time next year, you’ll see us in a very different position.”

Microsoft's Kinect Is Under Pressure to Connect

Nick Wingfield — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 12:00:39 +0000

Microsoft Corp. is betting a new product called Kinect will deliver a bigger audience for its Xbox 360 videogame console by letting people play games without a traditional controller.

But Kinect, when it goes on sale Thursday, will also be the most visible test in years of whether Microsoft can churn out breakout consumer products from its huge investment in research and development.

Microsoft faces increasing pressure from investors to show a payoff from those investments, which amounted to $8.7 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30–bigger than the R&D budget for any other tech company. Microsoft has poured a chunk of that money into improving existing products and services like its Bing search engine, as well as more traditional franchises like Windows and Office.

Kinect will be especially visible: an entirely new $150 device sold at retail outlets and aimed squarely at the consumer market, a field in which Microsoft has been more sluggish to respond to trends than Apple Inc. and other competitors.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Japan No Longer Home For Panasonic?

Juro Osawa — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:09:39 +0000

In Japan, if you buy a map of the world, it will probably have Japan right at the center–-with the Eurasia continent to the left, and the Americas to the right.

That’s what the world used to look like to the country’s electronics makers. But now, Panasonic Corp., like many of its Japanese peers, is drawing a new map.

“We now view Japan as just one of the regions of the world,” said President Fumio Ohtsubo at a press briefing in Tokyo last week. “We need to get rid of the notion of a ‘domestic’ market.”

As part of its new business plans announced last week, the company said it will do away with the current distinction between “domestic” and “global” segments of its consumer products marketing operations.

Even after a number of Japanese consumer electronics brands, like Sony and Panasonic, expanded globally and became household names around the world in the 1980s, Japan was always very much home turf, where they developed and manufactured most of their gadgets and appliances before shipping them overseas. And the country’s fairly large population of more than 120 million, its robust economy and the wealth of its consumers meant the domestic market was too important to ignore.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

LinkedIn to Add Recommendation Service

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:42:33 +0000

LinkedIn Corp. plans to launch a new recommendations service, which will allow the social network’s more than 80 million members to post reviews of products and services linked to their professional profiles.

Participation in the program is free and voluntary for companies, which would need to set up company profile pages and add products to be reviewed before users could leave a recommendation. The program has some 30 participating companies at launch, including JetBlue, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Microsoft Corp. and Harvard Business School Executive Education.

Participating companies will be able to review the recommendations, respond to them, and possibly delete frivolous ones, LinkedIn said.

The closely held company has in recent months been adding new functionality to its website to become a hub for the information that professionals need to do their jobs. “A big part of what we’re working to do is becoming the essential source of information for our membership,” said LinkedIn Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Dell: Boxy, but Good

John Paczkowski — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:16:09 +0000

Apple Chief Steve Jobs just loped around a corner at Apple’s campus after introducing Apple’s new MacBook Air, catching a group of reporters grinding out stories about his new machines.

“Look at all those fat notebooks,” Jobs quipped, glancing at my Dell M1210 with a predatory grin.

– Forbes reporter Brian Caulfield

Dell’s hardware is not a cheap alternative to that of its rivals–or rather not all of its hardware should be described that way. The company peddles some premium products as well. It’s just that “premium” isn’t a word that often springs to mind when one thinks of Dell’s utilitarian products, which so often seem to occupy the negative space left behind by Apple and other high-end style setters.

But Dell’s going to change that.

The company is spending “hundreds and hundreds of millions” on a new ad campaign for its consumer business that hopes to draw attention to its upscale hardware. “We’re going to stop mentioning price as the single important aspect,” Paul-Henri Ferrand, Dell’s chief marketing officer, told Reuters. “Apple is known for dictating what’s going to happen in the market place and what a consumer should buy. We’re at the opposite end of the spectrum, emphasizing customer choice.”

Conan O'Brien Really, Really Wants Some Twitter Followers

Peter Kafka — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:43:08 +0000

I follow Conan O’Brien on Twitter. So do 1,677,799 other people.

But that’s not enough for O’Brien. Or, more likely, it’s not enough for Time Warner’s (TWX) TBS channel, which is paying big money to bring O’Brien back to TV next month. In any case, someone is paying Twitter* to make @TeamCoco a “Promoted Account”–one of the first that Twitter has rolled out today.

Here’s what that looks like (via my “New Twitter” homepage):

A little redundant, and I’m probably not going to follow two different Conan accounts. But whatever. It doesn’t have any material impact on the way I use Twitter, which remains both free and useful to me. (Except when it breaks, as it seems to have done just now.)

My hunch is that I’m going to feel the same way as Twitter starts to carve out increasing amounts of real estate for ads and other revenue-generating products on its platform. That’s what media companies do, after all.

And in fact, here’s another small ad move coming out of Twitter at the same time. It has moved up its “Promoted Trends” product from the bottom of its topics list to the top, where I’m more likely to see it.

Or at least it says it has: My Twitter Trends feature, which is set to “New York,” doesn’t show me any Promoted Trends at all. If and when they do show up, the fact that they’re up higher won’t make much difference to me, because I almost always ignore Trends in general.

And that’s the real risk for Twitter here–not that users will be turned off by ads, but that they’ll ignore them, just as they do throughout most of the Web. When’s the last time you clicked on, or even looked at, a Gmail ad from Google (GOOG)?

*It is possible that no one is actually paying Twitter to promote TeamCoco, and that the company is throwing it in as a promotional freebie, as it did in some cases when it rolled out “Promoted Tweets.”

Exclusive: Want More Followers? Twitter May Help You Buy Some.

Peter Kafka — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:25:35 +0000

Want more people reading your tweets? Twitter may offer you a hand–for a price.

People familiar with the company’s plans say it has been discussing yet another revenue generator: Think of it as a “Promoted Tweeter” product, which highlights specific user accounts, designed to bump up follower counts.

My sources weren’t sure about the business model behind the product, which may be because Twitter itself doesn’t know yet. Some obvious possibilities: Twitter could charge users based on the number of followers they acquired, or simply based on the exposure their Twitter accounts received.

Twitter wouldn’t acknowledge plans for the product at all. Here’s spokesman Sean Garrett, via email: “We will eventually have full suites of both promoted and commercial products. All the components of these two buckets of product have yet to be determined. Some are currently being tested publicly now. Some will be tested soon. Some are just ideas that we are broaching externally for feedback.”

If Twitter does move forward with its plans, it would represent a change in philosophy for the company, which has generally frowned on third-party companies that promise to build up follower counts–even though Twitter itself promotes specific accounts for free, via a modified version of its “suggested user list.” But TweetUp, a prominent and well-funded new start-up, has its own follower-building offering, so perhaps that has caught Twitter’s eye.

My sources say Twitter has discussed using the yet-to-be-named product both on its own Web site as well as third party clients. That would track with other Twitter revenue projects, like “Promoted Tweets,” its play on Google’s (GOOG) AdWords, and “Promoted Trends,” which it just recently launched on its own site but plans on moving to third-party apps as well.

The biggest question: What, exactly, is the value of a Twitter follower?

Twitter’s original “suggested user list” effectively granted a select group of users with follower counts of a million or more. But it’s clear that the majority of those followers, who signed up when they opened accounts, tend not to pay much attention. A smaller, but much more engaged, audience of Twitter readers can be much more valuable. But figuring out how to price that will be a work in progress.