(My son a few years back in front of a 60-inch Pioneer Elite plasma. He *loved* it.) There was a time when the Pioneer Elite display was the cream of the crop, the top dog, the big kid on the bus, you know, the best damn TV available. But even having the best color and black level reproduction on the market, the expensive line couldn’t withstand the recession and the onslaught of cheap LCDs and plasmas. Pioneer killed the Elite display line in 2009 and a little part of the world died with it. → Read More
You may remember our review during last year’s bag week of the Saddleback laptop case. Expensive, durable, and fervently religious, it’d be a good bag to have during the end times. And depending on whether said Armageddon happens before or after the iPad 2 announcement, you might want some righteous armor for your iPad, too. Not iPad 2. iPad too. Good thing Saddleback now makes an iPad case that protects your touchscreen treasure better than the ark of the covenant. → Read More
The Oscar nominations came out a few days ago, and like a bunch of dorks we’ve been discussing the merits of each movie in our little chatroom. So far we’ve unofficially given thumbs up to Winter’s Bone and Black Swan, while Devin and Greg have admitted to liking The Social Network. (I patently refuse to watch the movie.) Why am I bringing this up? Because every year around this time unscrupulous individuals leak their Oscar screeners to the Internet, allowing the rest of us to join in on the fun.
One enterprising gentleman has put together a spreadsheet with various screener-related information for your perusal. → Read More
I recently over heard someone saying of MySpace – “It used to be dirty, underground, seedy and successful. Now it’s prom at a private school.” The company is struggling to reinvent itself. But traffic continues to plunge. Comscore says they had 80 million worldwide unique visitors in December. They had around 90 million in October before the big redesign. A year ago they had 120 million uniques, says Comscore.
So it’s no surprise they let half their staff go, some 500 people, in early January.
Another, smaller, social network has apparently found a say to be relevant in a Facebook world. San Francisco based Tagged logged revenues of over $30 million in 2010 and are profitable with a staff of 50. We reported on that in late 2010 when I interviewed founder Greg Tseng. They’ve been profitable for the last three years. → Read More
LinkedIn’s S-1 filing was released today, and the filing includes a wealth of information that we’ve never seen before. This includes sales, profit, revenue breakdown and more. One interesting data point shared in the filing is LinkedIn’s largest shareholders and how much each shareholder owns.
Out of the 5 percent stockholders, the company’s largest shareholder is LinkedIn’s founder and chairman Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee, owning 19 million shares or 21.4 percent of the company. He’s followed by Sequoia Capital (16.8 million shares or 18.9 percent), Greylock Partners (14 million shares or 15.8 percent) and Bessemer Venture Partners (4.6 million shares or 5.1 percent). → Read More
Has the pixel to print tipping point been reached? Last July we reported that Amazon’s Kindle eReader books had surpassed hardcover books in terms of sales, selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Now that lead also holds for paperbacks with 115 Kindle books sold for every hundred paperbacks.
The statistic for hardcover books itself has doubled, with three times as many Kindle books as sold as paperbacks in 2010. Free Kindle books are excluded from this number or it would be much higher. → Read More
A week and a half ago, after Apple announced their blowout earnings for the holiday quarter, I wondered if the third and final pillar of Microsoft’s financial strength over Apple was about to fall: profit. In 2010, Apple surpassed their longtime rival in market cap and revenue, but profit has remained elusive (mostly because Microsoft mainly sells high-margin software while Apple mainly sells relatively lower margin hardware). Well it’s still elusive — for at least one more quarter.
As I suspected, Microsoft was barely able to eek out a profit win over Apple. For the quarter, Microsoft earned $6.63 billion in profit compared to Apple’s $6 billion. Assuming the trends hold, Apple should indeed take the profit crown next quarter. → Read More
Oh snap, girl — It’s on. Back in January of 2009, Verizon acquired Alltel, along with Alltel’s customer base of around 13 million subscribers. When they threw that lot in with Verizon’s already massive customer base, it earned Verizon the crown as the biggest carrier in the US (a title previously owned by AT&T as a result of their merger with Cingular) A year later, however, AT&T has managed to snag the crown back. → Read More
Professional social network LinkedIn has just submitted its S-1 filing with the SEC, indicating that it will file for a public offering. The maximum proposed total offering price is $175 million but this is just a placeholder amount. The company also announced the filing on its blog.
In terms of revenue, during the nine months ended September 30, 2010, LinkedIn’s net revenue doubled to $161 million from $80.6 during the same period in 2009. Net income for the first nine months of 2010 came in at $10 million. → Read More
It’s probably a snow day for many of you, so what better way to kill a few hours than to fire up an emulator? “But Nicholas,” you interrupt, “there are so many emulators out there, and so much conflicting information. I wouldn’t know how to start if my life depended on it!” Don’t throw away your life—there’s so much beauty in the world! With this handy guide you should be well on your way to understanding the wonderfully exciting world of emulators. Fingers crossed. → Read More
Microsoft earnings just got released 10 minutes before market close, and aside from growing revenues 5% in the 2nd quarter to $19.95 Billion, their slides reveal some interesting numbers on their entertainment and gaming unit, mainly that they sold 8 million Kinects in the two months since launch.
Said Peter Klien about the Kinect’s success, “We are enthusiastic about the consumer response to our holiday lineup of products, including the launch of Kinect. The 8 million units of Kinect sensors sold in just 60 days far exceeded our expectations. The pace of business spending, combined with strong consumer demand, led to another quarter of operating margin expansion and solid earnings per share growth.” → Read More
Amazon just released results for its for its fourth quarter ending December 31, 2010. The company’s sales came in at $12.95 billion, which is up 36 percent from $9.52 billion in fourth quarter 2009. Net income increased 8 percent to $416 million in the fourth quarter, or $0.91 per diluted share, compared with net income of $384 million, or $0.85 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2009. Analysts expected $0.88 per share on revenue of $13 billion, which is short of the quarter’s sales of $12.95 billion.
Founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos said in a statement: We had our first $10 billion quarter, and after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com. Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected – and it’s on top of continued growth in paperback sales. → Read More
Microsoft just released positive earnings for the fifth quarter in a row, with second quarter revenues of $19.95 billion, a 5% increase from last year. Diluted earnings per share were $0.77 per share. The company beat the street as analysts expected revenue to come in at $19.14 billion and diluted earnings per share of $0.68. Operating income and net income for the quarter were $8.17 billion and $6.63 billion, a decrease of 4% and 0.4%, respectively, over the same time last year. → Read More
Now that Facebook will require all games on the social network to use Facebook Credits, it is adding new features to encourage players to spend money on virtual goods. At the Inside Social Apps conference a couple days ago, Facebook announced new features to help grease the wheels of its budding virtual economy. One of these features is “frictionless micropayments,” or instant credits, which allows players to buy up to 30 credits in-game without having to stop the game, and even without having to enter a credit card number.
One game developer, OMGPOP, is already using it as part of the beta, and it is working out great. OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter tells me that “Facebook credits drives higher transaction volume on Facebook—especially the instant credits.” He adds that ” because of instant credits we are seeing a higher than usual conversion rate, probably 3 times higher than a standard Facebook game, but the transaction value is lower because there are fewer items and they are priced less.” So it is tripling the number of virtual goods it is selling, but not the dollar amount. → Read More
Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone maker by volume, this morning reported another profit fall, its third in a row. Net earnings dropped 21 percent in the fourth quarter, from 948 million euros in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 745 million euros in Q4 2010.
Nokia said its estimated market share shrunk to 31 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, down from 35 percent a year before. The silver lining: market share actually went up one percent compared to the third quarter of 2010. Sales came in at 12.65 billion euros.
In a separate release, Nokia announced a reshuffle in its board of directors. → Read More
Do you know how much I loved the original Sidekick? Seriously — Picture me spreading my arms REALLY, REALLY far apart, as if I’m bragging about the size of a fish I caught. That’s how much I loved the original Sidekick. It was, for the most part, the first phone that made me really, really like phones. Then the Sidekick 2 came along, and it was amazing. Then the Sidekick 3 came along, and it was… not as amazing. Then a bevy of crappy Sidekicks came along and sort of stomped all over the Sidekick name. Well, friend, the Sidekick is back. And it’s running Android. → Read More
Baby it’s cold outside and, if you’re parents to a young child, you probably currently have no dignity. So why not get some Mommy Mittens? These things look like the rubber and duct tape hand guards the delivery guys around Brooklyn tape to their scooter handlebars to keep themselves warm but they attach to your stroller instead! And they’re “water resistant, insulated and lined with fleece for a cozy experience.” → Read More
Social Q&A startup Quora recently hired an iOS developer, so chances are we’ll soon see an official iPhone (and iPad?) application emerge, even if its website already functions quite well on smartphones.
While you await said official app, be sure to check out Social Questions. Developed by Thomas Ricouard, the app will let you access and browse the Quora mobile website with a couple of handy additional shortcuts and faster navigation. → Read More
For Salesforce, Chatter is the company’s major foray into the social enterprise and a way to capitalize on the “Facebook for the Enterprise” market. Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced in November of 2009, was launched into public beta in June 2010 after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform’s first three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 60,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce’s client base using the platform. And most recently Salesforce debuted a new version and made the application free for users, with premium features as an optional add-on. Today, Salesforce is adding a number of new features, including Trending Topics on the network, and the ability to ‘Like’ actions, post a hashtag and send @replies to contacts in status updates.
Sound, familiar you say? Clearly Salesforce drew inspiration from both Twitter and Facebook for the new features. Ironic considering that Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff was quick to denounce Chatter as a social network when the platform first launched in 2009. → Read More
We’re pretty big fans of Viber around these parts, as evidenced by Robin calling it “amazingly amazing” when it launched for the iPhone last month. Built to allow 100% free VoIP calls over 3G and WiFi, it’s one of a small handful that dares venture into the same territory as the seemingly-untouchable giant, Skype. Whether or not Viber ever finagles any sizable chunk of the mobile VoIP market out of Skype’s grasps, competition is always a good thing.
Vibers main drawback, at this point, is that it’s only available for iOS. As it’s built only for Viber-to-Viber calls, that meant the free calling goodness was limited to others rockin’ an iPhone or iPod Touch. Viber promised an Android app was on the way — and today, we’ve learned a bit more about when we’ll see it. → Read More
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