AllThingsD » rumors

WhatsApp: We're Not Selling to Google

Liz Gannes — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:03:11 +0000

Popular messaging app WhatsApp says it is not in discussions to sell the company to Google.

Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp’s business development head, told AllThingsD today that the company is not holding sales talks with Google.

Earlier this week, a single-source report from Digital Trends said that the company was contemplating a $1 billion sale to the search giant.

Arora declined to comment further.

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum speaks at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York next week (this is one of the sessions that’s being livestreamed; more details on that soon).

WhatsApp has been the subject of similar rumors before, but with Facebook as the rumored buyer in December. At the time, the company said the reports were “not factually accurate.”

WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world, with a very simple formula of cross-platform messaging (mostly text, but also photo, video, audio and location sharing). The app costs 99 cents on iOS and, in some countries, the service costs 99 cents per year on Android.

Mac Rumors

Voices — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:59:25 +0000

What really floats their bots, what hardens Apple’s resolve is designing, making, and selling large numbers of personal computers, from the traditional desktop/laptop Mac, to the genre-validating iPad, and on to the iPhone — the Very Personal Computer. Everything else is an ingredient, a booster, a means to the noblest end.

– From Jean-Louis Gassée, in a post entitled “The Next Apple TV: iWatch”

Apple's Cook: Supply Chain Rumors Amount to Squat

John Paczkowski — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:35:15 +0000

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

For the past few weeks, Apple has been dogged by rumors that waning demand for the iPhone and iPad has caused it to curtail component purchases for those devices. During an earnings call Wednesday afternoon, Apple didn’t comment on any particular rumor, but CEO Tim Cook did offer a few words of caution about paying them too much mind.

“I’d recommend questioning the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans,” Cook said. “I’d also stress that even if a particular data point were to be factual it would be impossible to interpret what it really means to our business. Our supply chain is very complex and we have multiple sources for our components. Yields can vary, supplier performance can vary. There’s just a long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what’s going on.”

Twitter Debunks Rumors of Security Vulnerability

Mike Isaac — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 13:00:56 +0000

Twitter engineering manager and security chief Moxie Marlinspike denied reports that U.S. Twitter account holders are susceptible to an SMS-reliant hack where outsiders could post tweets to user accounts. After stories of the hack surfaced early in the week, Marlinspike pointed out that the vulnerability is only relevant to non-U.S. Twitter users, and was addressed in 2007.

Here Come the RIM-Samsung Rumors Again

John Paczkowski — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 10:41:27 +0000

Research In Motion’s best hope for recovery isn’t BlackBerry 10. It’s Samsung.

That’s the word from Jefferies analyst Peter Misek, who believes that RIM’s strategic review will culminate in a decision to license its BB10 operating system, and that Samsung is the company most likely to be interested in licensing it.

“Given recent management comments in the press, it now appears that RIM is realizing what Wall Street has been saying for some time: they are a subscale manufacturer and desperately need a partner,” Misek wrote in a note to clients. “We believe RIM is attempting to revive discussions with Samsung regarding a BB10 licensing deal.”

That’s a bit of a leap, but not an entirely unreasonable one. Just last week, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins acknowledged that licensing BB10 was an option under serious consideration at the company.

“We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year,” Heins said. “To deliver BB10, we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than [we] can do it.”

But is that “someone” to which Heins refers most likely to be Samsung? Misek certainly thinks so — and this isn’t the first time he’s floated the theory. It’s his view that Samsung, through an acquisition of RIM, would gain access to the company’s vast subscriber base and a means of tempering its dependence on Google’s Android OS.

“We believe Samsung is considering ramping up its internal OS [operating system] development efforts, licensing BB10, or buying RIM,” he wrote. “We think any acquisition is unlikely until after BB10 launches.”

Reached for comment, Samsung dismissed speculation that it’s interested in RIM for any reason. “Samsung Electronics has not considered the acquisition of Research in Motion or licensing BB10,” a company spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Yammer Acquisition Rumors Push Jive Shares Up

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:08:42 +0000

“Buy on the rumor; sell on the news.”

That’s an old Wall Street saying that sums up with surprising accuracy the behavior of investors in the presence of uncertain rumors in the marketplace. The rumor in this case is the intention of the software giant Microsoft to acquire the enterprise social collaboration player Yammer for a price said to be in the neighborhood of $1 billion or slightly higher.

It is, as I argued in the wee hours of this morning, a plausible, if not a believable, rumor.

The spillover effect on rival Jive Software has been pronounced. Its shares rose today by $1.60, or more than 9 percent, to $18.33 a share, and has pushed its market valuation to north of $1.1 billion. Though even at that level, Jive is trading at a 35 percent discount to its 52-week high. It held its IPO late last year.

Naturally, there’s some hope among Jive shareholders that if Yammer ends up in the hands of Microsoft, someone else — perhaps Oracle or SAP — might step in and take out Jive at a healthy premium. Oracle has been making moves in the social space, buying Collective Intellect and Vitrue.

At least there’s some basis for the speculation. A deal for one company in a space often leads to a deal for another. We saw this pattern clearly late last year and early this year with a spate of deals for cloud-based HR software companies. The first to go was SuccessFactors last December, which SAP acquired for $3.4 billion. Next was Taleo, which Oracle scooped up for $1.9 billion in February. Meanwhile, Workday, the cloud-based HR play started by two former PeopleSoft execs, is on its way to a fall IPO. The fall of one domino leads to another.

Rumor Mill Ramps Up Production of Cheaper and Smaller iPads

John Paczkowski — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:24:22 +0000

The Apple rumor mill has kicked into overdrive in advance of next week’s iPad event, pushing out a pair of speculative reports this morning about what lies in the company’s product pipeline.

The most plausible: Taiwanese trade mag Digitimes’ claim that Apple plans to sell a cheaper, 8 gigabyte iPad 2 alongside the iPad 3 in a play for the lower end of the tablet market being staked out by Amazon’s Kindle Fire. I’ve heard nothing about such a plan, but it makes good sense. A new, low-capacity iPad 2 — priced at, say, $299 or even $349 — could wreak havoc on the low-end tablet market, clearing out a raft of struggling competitors and making the choice between Kindle Fire and iPad a much more difficult one for those consumers weighing the two.

The second report, also from Digitimes, is far less credible and resurfaces long-running rumors that Apple is gearing up to produce a “mini” iPad, a 7.85-inch device to compete with the Kindle Fire and Nook, which have created some demand for tablets with 7-inch displays. It’s widely known that Apple has experimented with an 8-inch iPad that would have a screen resolution similar to the iPad 2. But that doesn’t mean the company intends to ever bring the device to market.

As I’ve noted here before, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was a harsh critic of 7-inch tablets.

“One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen,” Jobs said during a 2010 earnings call. “Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. … The reason we [won't] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point, it’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software.”

Never Mind! Cisco Still Totally Hearts Set-Top Boxes.

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:54:40 +0000

Someone certainly wants the world to believe that Cisco Systems is getting out of the business of selling TV set-top boxes and spent what appears to have been a busy weekend telling reporters that it’s happening.

How then to explain Cisco’s strong denials of an interest in selling — and its reaffirmation of love for — the set-top box business it got as part of its $7 billion acquisition of Scientific Atlanta six years ago?

To be clear, Cisco is no longer in the business of actually making these boxes. It unloaded the Mexico-based manufacturing portion of the business to Taiwan’s manufacturing giant Foxconn as part of its sweeping reorganization last year.

The “Cisco is selling” story appeared both in the online trade publication Light Reading and also in the New York Post (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.)

This is a familiar rumor that crops up from time to time. The last time was in the fall, and the source was a speculative report in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

Typically, companies can ignore this type of chatter and dismiss it with the standard “no comment on rumor and speculation.” But seeing how this is the kind of rumor and speculation that often turns out to be true, and as such has a way of sapping the morale of otherwise productive employees, Cisco sought to get in front of it by professing its love for its set-top box unit in a statement to Light Reading.

CEO John Chambers recently stressed his commitment to set-top boxes even as the business dragged down Cisco’s overall gross margins. Analyst Sanjiv Wadhwani of Stifel Nicolaus estimates that Cisco’s gross margins on set-tops are in the mid 30 percent range, which is about what you’d expect for competitive hardware of any kind, but it’s also half of what Cisco gets across the rest of its business. As such, a sale would boost Cisco’s gross margin overall by about 1 percent, he said in a note to clients today.

During a conference call to discuss earnings earlier this month, Chambers said Cisco is “very much committed to this marketplace.” The point for sticking with it is to help customers move from old-school set-top boxes to IP-based products like Cisco’s Videoscape, he said. Presumably, the transition work means holding on to the set-top box customers.

But if you’re one of the writers who fell for the latest bit of rumor-mongering — and who doesn’t once in awhile? — you’re probably quoting Emily Litella from 1970s-vintage “Saturday Night Live” and sheepishly saying, “Never mind.”

Apple Spotted Shopping Around for TV Parts

John Paczkowski — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:02:43 +0000

The Macintosh TV

If Apple doesn’t already have a smart television in the pipeline, it’s almost certainly considering building one. That’s the latest from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who says the company has been scoping out the TV component supply chain as a prelude to entering the market.

“In January we spoke with a major TV component supplier who has been contacted by Apple regarding various capabilities of their television display components,” Munster wrote in a note to clients today. “We see this as continued evidence that Apple is exploring production of a television. This latest data point follows January 2011 meetings in Asia that led us to believe Apple was investing in manufacturing facilities for LCD displays ranging from 3.5″ mobile displays to 50″ television displays.”

So Apple’s reportedly been shopping around for parts that might be used in TVs.

Not the hardest of evidence that the company will actually produce one. That said, the signs do appear to be adding up. Over the past few months we’ve heard chatter claiming Apple televisions have been prototyped and that Sharp has been retooling a production line at one of its factories to produce the modified amorphous TFT LCD displays that will grace them.

If that is the case, it’s entirely possible that the TV market will be the next one Apple attempts to reinvent. And if it pulls it off, the rewards could be great. Some say Apple stands to gain an incremental $50 billion to $100 billion in market cap if it produces a compelling HDTV, one that not only trumps the competition but steals market share away from it, as the iPhone has from incumbent smartphone producers.

RIM Jumps on Samsung Buyout Rumors, but Licensing Deal More Likely

John Paczkowski — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:49:35 +0000

A rare good day for Research In Motion on Wall Street today. Shares in RIM spiked nearly 9 percent to $17.61 Tuesday afternoon on renewed speculation that it is looking to sell off portions of its business, or perhaps even the company as a whole.

This time around, Samsung is said to be the leading suitor, or rather the company with which RIM would most like to strike an agreement — though once again its leadership is believed to be asking for too much money.

There is an alternate theory making the rounds, though, and this one seems far more plausible than the breathless “RIM is desperately trying to sell itself” blathering: RIM is talking to Samsung about a licensing deal for its forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS.

This seems a far more likely scenario. After all, it would take a bold company indeed to pay the premium RIM would almost certainly demand for itself. And what would it be purchasing? The chance to turn around RIM’s deteriorating business? An opportunity to do damage control on the ill-starred PlayBook? The chance to arrive late to market with another ill-conceived BlackBerry? And then to go head-to-head with Apple and Google, which have already wiped the floor with it?

No. A licensing deal is much more plausible, as Jefferies analyst Peter Misek observed in a research note to clients today.

“We see a licensing deal announced within the next 3 months with actual BlackBerry 10 handsets out in Q4,” Misek said, adding that he feels the company will likely charge a licensing fee of $10 per device. “We believe this is the main way RIM will be able to maintain its services revenues and build ecosystem momentum. We believe Samsung and HTC would do this to gain access to the RIM subscriber base [and] diversify away from sole dependence on Android.”

RIM declined comment on the rumors, citing company policy on market speculation.

UPDATE: This just in from Samsung via Reuters: “We haven’t considered acquiring the firm and are not interested in (buying RIM).”

Supply Chain Chatter Has Two Apple TVs Targeted for Midyear Launch

John Paczkowski — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:50:38 +0000

The rumored Apple television now has a rumored launch date and a few rumored screen sizes as well.

Supply chain sources tell the occasionally reliable Digitimes that Apple hopes to launch the device in either the second or third quarter of 2012 and that initially it will be available in two sizes, 32 inches and 37 inches. The so called “iTV” will reportedly run on a Samsung chip and feature modified amorphous TFT LCD displays manufactured by Sharp, which has been rumored to be retooling a production line at one of its factories specifically to manufacture them.

Assuming Digitimes’ report is accurate, which is a big assumption, Apple would seem to be gearing up to disrupt yet another industry with one of its trademark seismic shifts. And if it succeeds, the rewards could be massive.

UBS analyst Maynard Um says Apple stands to gain an incremental $50 billion to $100 billion in market cap if it manages a successful television-set offering, one that not only stands out from the competition but steals market share away from it, as the iPhone has from incumbent smartphone manufacturers.

PREVIOUSLY:

What if Apple Television Is an iMac?

Apple’s iTV Could Have a Sharp Picture

Apple TV? Think Bose VideoWave, Only More Apple-ish.

Crackdown Coming? Internet Rumors Compared to Drugs

Loretta Chao and Yoli Zhang — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:00:27 +0000

The Chinese government is stepping up efforts to get Internet users to say no to rumors.

A state-media anti-Internet rumor blitz appears to be the latest development in Beijing’s campaign against harmful information on the Internet, with the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily and the state-run Xinhua news agency running multiple pieces that draw colorful parallels between rumors and drugs.

People on the Internet can “irresponsibly and unscrupulously produce and spread rumors,” the People’s Daily in a commentary published late last week (in Chinese). “Such ‘Internet psychological drugs’ are very easily addictive, and make people want to know more and learn more while reading,” it said, adding that it is as harmful as “Internet pornography, gambling and drugs.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Really? Two New iPads and a Reboot of Apple's Entire Product Portfolio Next Year?

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:00:24 +0000

Break out the salt lick for this one, because it’ll take more than a grain …

Apple typically updates many of its products each year, sometimes extensively, sometimes less so. But in 2012 it’s got big plans for a number of them. Supply chain sources tell the occasionally reliable Taiwanese trade mag Digitimes that Apple will “completely overhaul” its product portfolios this year — everything from the iPad and iPhone to the iMac and MacBook Air. And evidently it’s already hard at work on the iPad and has requested flat panel modules and LED light bars for two prototypes.

Details beyond that are slim indeed, though in a separate report Digitimes says we can expect two next-generation iPads next year: An upgraded iPad 2 around March and a true iPad 3 late in the third or fourth quarter.

Two iPads launched between March and December? Seems dubious to me. As I said, break out the salt lick. Still, you never know.

Apple Launching iPhone 5 in October

John Paczkowski — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:40:07 +0000

So those rumors claiming the iPhone 5 will debut in late September? They’re wrong.

Instead, it’s going to be an October surprise — the month in which Apple plans to launch its next-gen iPhone.

Sources with knowledge of the situation say reports claiming AT&T has blacked out employee vacations during the last two weeks of September in preparation for the retail debut of the next iPhone are misinformed.

“I don’t know why AT&T’s calling for all hands on deck those weeks, but it’s not for an iPhone launch,” a source familiar with Apple’s plans said.

So when can we expect the company to uncrate the iPhone 5?

“October,” the source said, while declining to offer a hard-launch date. Other sources said it will be later in the month, rather than earlier.

The source offered no details on the device’s design, but supply-chain chatter has previously indicated that the iPhone 5 will use the faster A5 processor on which the iPad 2 runs, a Qualcomm dual mode GSM/CDMA baseband, and a higher resolution eight-megapixel rear camera.

Some iPhone Rumors Get No Respect

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:00:08 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)

IPhone 5 Release Date Rumors May Persist Until Fall

John Paczkowski — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:09:34 +0000

Another report to add to the pile of prognostications claiming Apple will launch the next iPhone in the fall, not the summer as it has in the past. Three unnamed sources tell Reuters iPhone 5 will hit manufacturing in July or August and ship in September.

Not the first time we’ve heard such a thing and I’m sure it won’t be the last. As I’ve reported here before, Apple doesn’t plan to unveil a new iPhone at its Worldwide Developers Conference. And increasingly, I’m hearing the company may use its annual September media event to launch the device instead.

Apple Rumors Publishing Flowchart

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:54:14 +0000

The Problem With Those Rumors of an AMD Buyout

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:30:29 +0000

It all seems so simple. At chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, a sudden and unexpected sweeping away of management–starting with CEO Dirk Meyer, followed within weeks by COO Robert Rivet and Marty Seyer, senior VP for corporate strategy–has left the company looking disorganized and vulnerable, the thinking goes.

And while a search for Meyer’s replacement is underway, I’m told it could easily extend into the summer.

It didn’t take long for rumors about “takeover chatter” concerning AMD to emerge, and briefly yesterday, Dell was mentioned as a possible buyer. AMD shares traded up 4 percent for part of the day but closed down 3 cents during the regular session. Dell more or less shot down the rumor. During its earnings conference call, CEO Michael Dell, answering a question on acquisitions, said, “…we’re looking for relatively smaller sized ingredient acquisitions where we can leverage them with our substantial customer access and distribution.” With AMD currently trading at a valuation north of $6 billion with about $2.2 billion in long-term debt, it’s not the kind of target that would qualify as “smaller sized.”

There will always be rumors of this sort about the perennial number two in the PC microprocessor business. Those who trade on them don’t get something fundamental about AMD: That it would be a complicated company to buy and to own.

Any deal to acquire AMD will necessarily include a third party: Intel. For decades Intel and AMD have operated under a series of patent cross-license agreements that give AMD access to the crown jewels of Intel’s intellectual property, including the x86 instruction set. These patents are on the technology that make a PC a PC, and they are fundamental to the success, or failure, of both companies.

When AMD first sought to spin off its manufacturing operations into the company that became GlobalFoundries, Intel asserted that AMD couldn’t assign access to these patents to a third party without its say-so. This dispute ultimately got the two companies talking and resulted in what I like to call the Treaty of Maui, the settlement of a sweeping antitrust dispute in 2009, a story I reported at the time for BusinessWeek.

There are, however, some limits governing Intel’s conduct in this scenario. When it settled an antitrust case against it last year, Intel agreed to hold off on suing any company that buys one of its competitors for a year, in order to hold “good faith negotiations” over the terms of that patent cross-license agreement. What this all means is that any company that first concludes a deal to buy AMD will then have to pivot and face the possibility of lengthy negotiations with Intel that could, if not successful, end in a costly and distracting patent lawsuit.

Intel may turn out to be willing to play ball, and cut a reasonable deal with any new owner, but the fact remains that every so often the cross-license arrangement has to be renewed. And that’s not to say a determined buyer couldn’t ultimately cut through all this and get a deal done. Dell has $15 billion in cash and could conceivably get a deal done, and being an AMD customer could arguably benefit from owning AMD over the long term, but it has signaled that it’s not interested, and probably never was in the first place.

There are other considerations: AMD is 20 percent owned by the Mubadala Development Company, the investment arm of the Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which changes the potential deal dynamic a bit. Then there’s the big question concerning the wisdom of competing with Intel. As AMD’s prior CEOs will tell you, simply grappling with Intel in the marketplace is a dangerous, thankless job.

But the complication of the Intel cross-license agreement alone should be enough to give any company mulling an AMD buyout serious pause. At the same time it should serve as food for thought for anyone wanting to trade on the latest AMD buyout rumor. This surely is not the last.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Says Company Needs to Unify Its Experience Across Devices

Ina Fried — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:28:40 +0000

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said on Monday that although the service is available on nearly every phone, the company has a long way to go to make the product consistent across devices.

“The experience has to be the same,” Costolo said during an afternoon keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “I shouldn’t have to think how to use Twitter.”

About 40 percent of tweets come from a mobile device, while half of all active users are active on more than one device, he said.

Until not that long ago, Twitter built only the product for the Web and let third parties handle phones and other devices. In recent months, though, it has scooped up various app makers and now offers official apps for the major smartphones. However, given that those official apps stem from different acquisitions, they often work in different ways.

Costolo said the company also wants to make sure that one doesn’t have to sign up and follow lots of people to get something out of the service.

“We want Twitter to be instantly useful,” he said.

With Twitter for Windows Phone 7, the company introduced the notion, already present on the Web, that one shouldn’t have to be an active user to have Twitter on their phone.

His talk is still ongoing and I’ll update things as it continues.

5:32 pm: Costolo said the company will begin offering crowdsourced translations of the service into Russian, Turkish and Indonesian and, later this year, will have its own translation to Portuguese.

5:33 pm: Some stats from Super Bowl, this year.

4,000 tweets per second at the end of the game and 3,000 tweets per second during the game. That was 27 tweets per second in 2008.

The overall record is New Year’s Eve in Japan (the country has a single time zone) and the prior sporting event record was from last year’s World Cup.

5:34 pm: Twitter is actually bringing things back to live TV and away from the DVR.

“That’s not just happening with live sporting events,” Costolo said. He cites game shows in the U.K.

5:36 pm: “Glee,” for example, has 30 times the number of tweets about it when the show is on.

Takeaway: the long-talked about second screen of interactive TV is here and it is Twitter.

5:38 pm: About Twitter as a business: The short answer is we are already making money, Costolo said. The really good thing, he said, is that businesses can use the service in the same way as others–building community around shared interest.

5:41 pm: A viral campaign of note. Al-Jazeera highlighting its coverage of the events in the Middle East and North Africa with the hashtag #demandaljazeera to get its programming on U.S. cable systems.

5:44 pm: Costolo, on the role of Twitter and Facebook in recent events there:

“I think that takes away from what these people have accomplished,” he said. “We are probably a very small piece of the puzzle.”

5:47 pm: On to Q&A. Battery is running low, but hoping to make it through the question period.

First question came in over Twitter and asks what is the company’s biggest fear.

“Twitter’s biggest fear is lack of execution,” Costolo said, saying he tries to convince workers not to focus on competitors. “If we execute on what we are trying to do we will be successful.”

5:48 pm: A couple of questions on local trends and translations. Costolo said that crowdsourcing offers a way to do more translations quickly, while the trends piece requires more work on Twitter’s part, some of which should be done this year.

5:53 pm: What is the biggest mistake Twitter has made?

Costolo said company’s founders would say they shot themselves in the foot, head and everywhere else not hiring or scaling fast enough.

“I think we are out of the woods on that one,” Costolo said.

Next question is on what Twitter is doing in response to its pivotal role in Arabic-speaking countries right now. Costolo noted that Twitter doesn’t yet support right-to-left languages.

On being blocked, Costolo said Twitter is only a 350-person company and doesn’t have the resources of some larger companies. “We try to just leverage our own platform to plead for help,” he said.

5:58 pm: Costolo is asked if there is a need for Twitter-branded smartphones.

“No,” Costolo said. “I believe there is a need for Twitter in the existing platforms.”

Earlier in his keynote, Costolo said he wants deep integration so that when a user takes a picture they don’t have to open a separate app to tweet out that picture.

6:03 pm: As for rumors that Google might be willing to pay $10 billion for the company.

“I don’t know where these things come from,” Costolo said. “It’s just a rumor.”

6:03 pm: End of keynote. (just as my battery was on its last sliver of red, too!

Verizon iPhone Lines Inversely Proportional to Verizon iPhone Rumors

John Paczkowski — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:25:09 +0000

After the nearly interminable buildup to the iPhone’s launch on Verizon–the years of anticipation, rumors and speculation–you’d think the device’s official debut would be given a fervid reception by the folks clamoring for it. You’d think eager buyers would be camping out in front of their local Apple Store. You’d think Verizon Stores would literally be overrun with frustrated AT&T iPhone users looking for relief.

But evidently that’s not the case.

Pre-orders were huge, of course, cutting down the need for people to go out to a store, so early reports from around the country revealed a far more sedate response to a long-awaited event that ironically seems pretty uneventful. Fifteen minutes before the the Verizon iPhone went on sale, there were just eight people in line at Apple’s flagship store in New York, according to CNNMoney. At a lower-Manhattan Verizon store, 21 people queued up to buy the iPhone.

The scene was largely the same around the country, according to other reports: 20 folks at a Gainesville Verizon Store, 10 at another in Plainview, a dozen in Milwaukee, a “few dozen” in Lincoln, Neb.,. And before you the blame cold temperatures for the modest turnout, consider this: The line in front of Apple’s Stockton Street flagship store in San Francisco this morning was just two people long. Said News.com’s Marguerite Reardon, “Upon arriving here about five minutes (before the 7 a.m. opening of the store), there were literally more Apple Store employees, police officers and reporters–each–than people in line to buy iPhones.”

So, a pretty staid turnout for a device that’s generated such monomaniacal interest for so long. That said, it’s important to remember that Verizon isn’t launching the iPhone into a market with a vast untapped demand for it. In reality, most folks who absolutely had to have an iPhone bought one from AT&T. And those who refused to leave Verizon to do so likely pre-ordered one last week. In the end, the lines (or lack thereof) we’re seeing today have very little to do with how big a seller the iPhone will be for Verizon (and for proof of that, one need only look to foreign markets with multiple iPhone carriers). Sales estimates vary pretty widely, but many suggest Apple will sell between 9 million and 13 million iPhones through Verizon this year–a big boost no matter how you look at it. The big lines will return with the debut of iPhone 5.

PREVIOUSLY: Verizon’s iPhone Sales So Amazing They Can’t Even Put a Number On It

[Image Credit: Christine Bartolucci ]

Hello World (iPhone)

John Paczkowski — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 12:00:31 +0000

So those rumors that had Apple developing a “World iPad” based on one of Qualcomm’s multimode CDMA-GSM chips? There may be something to them after all.

An iFixit teardown of the CDMA iPhone 4 headed for Verizon reveals a world mode chip in the device’s innards: Qualcomm’s MDM6600, which supports CDMA and EVDO network standards as well as GSM and HSPA+. It’s the same chip used in the Droid Pro, Motorola’s “global ready” Android phone.

In other words, Verizon’s CDMA iPhone isn’t a world phone–but it could have been, given a SIM card and some additional engineering. Which makes it likely that the next iteration of the iPhone will be. And if iPhone 5 proves to be global ready, iPad 2 likely will be as well, as Wedge analyst Brian Blair, who first floated the idea of the World iPad, notes.

“This is the proof of my thesis, I think,” he said of iFixit’s findings. “This is a dual–band GSM/CDMA chip that I believe will not only be in a “World iPad” in April as I mentioned last Fall but I also expect it will be in the new iPhone 5 in June. It makes sense for many reasons: but the main one is that Apple engineers will only have to design a product one time, same guts and parts for GSM as for CDMA.”

[Image credit: iFixit]

Facebook Phone Rumors Make the Newsfeed Again

Ina Fried — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:25:34 +0000

Rumors of the Facebook Phone are once again back in the news, this time with a report that the social network will announce a deal with HTC at next month’s Mobile World Congress that will have the Taiwanese mobile device maker building Android phones with the Facebook name and color.

Previous rumors had the company building a phone with INQ Mobile. One of the challenges is that in addition to any true Facebook-designed phones, there are also a whole lot of phones with deep Facebook integration–including plenty of Android devices and the entire Windows Phone 7 product line. So it’s not clear where exactly the line is between a phone with good Facebook connections and a true “Facebook Phone.” However, I’d say if it is blue and bears the Facebook logo, that would count in my book. For its part, HTC declined comment.

Dispatches From the Supply Line Stoke iPad, iPhone Chatter

John Paczkowski — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:44:53 +0000

With the first-year anniversaries of the iPad and iPhone 4 fast approaching, and both devices destined for an update per Apple’s annual mobile device refresh cycle, the Apple rumor mill is undergoing a refresh of its own.

Supply chain sources tell China’s Economic Daily News that Apple has lined up four new component suppliers for the iPhone 5, which they claim is scheduled for a summer launch. Meanwhile, Taiwanese trade pub DigiTimes is reporting that Apple recently bolstered its printed circuit board (PCB) supply chain in preparation for the next iteration of the iPad. Where the company once used just three PCB suppliers for the device, it’s now using seven. Not a surprise, really, given the 14.8 million iPads Apple sold in 2010. DigiTimes’ sources claim they’re scheduled to begin small-volume shipments next month, before going all out in April. Which jibes nicely with that annual refresh cycle I mentioned earlier and rumors of a spring launch.

As I’ve noted here before, the iPad 2 is expected to be thinner than its predecessor and manufactured with the same unibody approach Apple’s been using for the MacBook. It’s also expected to feature an LCD backlit display, a front-facing camera and Facetime video chat support. Finally, some reports suggest it is powered by one of Qualcomm’s multimode chips and will run on both GSM and CDMA-based networks around the world.

Report: Apple Orders 21 Million iPhones, 6 Million Verizon-Ready

John Paczkowski — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 15:15:55 +0000

Apple has reportedly raised its iPhone shipment target for the first quarter of 2011 by up to 2 million. This according to the occasionally reliable Digitimes which claims the company has told its component suppliers it now wants 20-21 million units, instead of the 19 million it originally requested. Interestingly, five to six million of the total order are believed to be CDMA devices presumably intended for Verizon or, perhaps, CDMA operators abroad.

Will Oracle and Microsoft Bid on Autonomy?

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:24:46 +0000

There’s a sketchily sourced report in the U.K.’s Daily Mail this morning saying that the British software concern Autonomy may be the subject of a bidding war between Oracle and Microsoft after the first of the year.

Interest from the two software giants would seem a plausible explanation for the peculiar circumstances around Autonomy’s on-again, off-again talks about making an acquisition.

In April it said it would sell convertible bonds to raise money–nearly $800 million–to fund an acquisition, though it never named a target.

Then suddenly last month the company said the deal it had been working on was being put off because of another unspecified opportunity, which promptly sent its stock reeling. Autonomy shares, which trade on London’s FTSE, are down 27 percent from their 52-week high. It could be that whatever deal the company was working on was put on the back burner following unexpected overtures from Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer.

Autonomy specializes in what it calls Meaning Based Computing. Its software is designed to recognize the relationships between structured data–what you find in an organized database–and unstructured data–which can be anything from words in a written document, a speech or conversation, or anything else that has information that isn’t organized into rows and columns. Its customers run the gamut from businesses such as FedEx, the NYSE, Louis Vuitton and Goodyear to tech firms like Adobe and Cisco Systems.

On its face this rumor is interesting because now that the battle to roll up the data storage firms is largely resolved following Dell’s acquisition of Compellent, one of the next dealmaking battle fronts for the large IT vendors is going to be software that makes managing data in all its various forms easier, more powerful and less costly.

Autonomy certainly fits that bill, and at market valuation in the $7 billion neighborhood, both Oracle and Microsoft could get it done.

However, the cynic in me wonders if this is just a deliberate rumor intended to goose Autonomy’s flagging stock price. If that’s the case, it appears to have worked.