Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog.
He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving media property. After founder Michael Arrington left in 2011, Schonfeld became Editor in Chief.
Prior to TechCrunch, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, The Next Net. He also launched an online video series with CNN/Money and hosted regular panels and conferences of industry luminaries.
Schonfeld started his career at Fortune magazine in 1993. In 1999, he won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30.
He appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, and NY1, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.
Schonfeld graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.
If you look closely at Netflix’s fourth quarter earnings, it will become clear why the company wanted to split its DVD and streaming businesses. This is the first quarter that the company is splitting out each business and reporting revenues, profits, and margins separately.
While the streaming business is growing (adding 220 subscribers domestically in the quarter), and the DVD business sis shrinking (it lost 2.76 million subscribers domestically), it’s margins are much worse than the legacy DVD business. The streaming business has an 11 percent profit margin, compared to a very healthy 52 percent margin for the DVD business. → Read More
While the topic didn’t make its way into President Obama’s Sate of the Union speech last night, Mr. Obama’s former transition team co-chair, John Podesta, thinks creating a “Digital Library of Congress” comprised of “the vast holdings of the federal government” deserves executive level attention. He’s calling the initiative, “Yes We Scan”
My suggestion to him: get Google to do it for free in return for a reprieve from the government’s never-ending antitrust investigations. I am only half-joking. → Read More
Brands and businesses can track their reputations online and connect with consumers through social media. But what about in the real world? One of the biggest prizes in Startupland will go to whoever can figure out how to connect real-world shopping to brands and businesses. Steve Carpenter is going after that prize with his latest startup, Endorse.
Carpenter has been incubating the company for a year as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel. (He sold his last company, Cake Financial, to Etrade in 2010). Endorse just raised $4.25 million in a Series A led by Accel, with SV Angel also investing. His co-founders and team include early employees from YouTube and Paypal (Erik Klein, Mayrose Dunton, and Franck Chastagnol). → Read More
Apple ended last quarter and the year with almost $100 billion in cash ($97.6 billion, to be exact—much of that is held overseas for tax purposes).
What should Apple do with all of that money? They could buy Facebook, which is supposed to IPO at around a $100 billion valuation. But “it is not in Apple’s nature to do big acquisitions,” points out BGC analyst Colin Gillis at the tail-end of this video interview. “In fact, a big acquisition would probably be disastrous for Apple.” He thinks Apple should give some of that money back to shareholders instead through share buybacks or dividends. Watch the rest of the video, as e discuss Apple’s biggest quarter ever. → Read More
One of the big questions hanging over Apple this quarter was whether or not iPad sales would continue its rapid growth. Last quarter Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire at $200 (well below the iPAd’s entry-level $500 price) and there was concern that even Apple diehard fans might delay their purchase of a tablet until the iPad 3 comes out—rumored for later this year. But iPad sales came in well above expectations at 15.4 million units.
During the conference call today, Tim Cook predicted: “I think there will come a day that the tablet market is larger than the PC market.”
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Apple blew away expectations in its December quarter, which it just announced this afternoon after markets closed. After trading down 1.6 percent ($7) during the day, shares are up more than 7.8 percent ($30) in after-hours trading to $453. → Read More
Everyone is expecting a record quarter from Apple, which reports earnings today. “We expect a big quarter from Apple,” writes analyst Colin Gillis of BGC in a research note, “and we expect most investors expect a big quarter from Apple. Our pet fish expects records from Apple.” Apple is expected to announce record revenues, earnings, iPhone sales, iPad sales, and Mac sales.
Here are the numbers Apple needs to beat today for an upside surprise when it announces after the markets close: → Read More
A year ago in January, 2011, Apple dominated mobile video views, with iOS devices accounting for 87 percent of all mobile views, according to data from video encoding and short-url service Vid.ly. Android had a scant 5 percent. By December, 2011, Android’s share of mobile video watching grew to 32 percent, while Apple’s shrank to 52 percent. → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg added his touch to a graffiti wall at Facebook’s new headquarters. In the video above, graffiti artist David Choe, who was commissioned to paint the wall, incorporates a stick figure painted by the Facebook founder into a mohawked trollish creature wearing a wife beater with a raised fist. It’s quite a transformation.
Zuckerberg needs to practice first, admitting: “I’ve actually never spray painted anything.” → Read More
Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. “We are effectively Salesforce but social,” he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle).
Ferrara just hired away the product director who made Chatter Mobile, Jason McDowall, who will now head up the team building Nimble’s mobile apps.
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How much does Google make in advertising from mobile? Cowen analyst Jim Friedland estimates that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet). This includes both search and display advertising in mobile apps on both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads). Thanks to the rapid growth in smart mobile devices from an estimated 509 million last year to nearly double that in 2012 to an estimated 914 million, Google’s mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012 (see chart).
The controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been pulled and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is on hold. The Internet won this round, it seems. But don’t celebrate just yet. The forces behind these acts are simply regrouping. Should SOPA and PIPA be killed, or can they be fixed? We invited Viacom’s General Counsel and EVP Michael Fricklas and David Sohn, General Counsel and Director of the Center for Democracy And Technology, to debate the issue in the video above. → Read More
The engine of Google’s business is search advertising, but its display advertising business is becoming a very large business. During today’s earnings call, CEO Larry Page that Google’s display advertising business is at an “annualized run rate of $5 billion.” That doesn’t mean that $5 billion of Google’s $38 billion in revenues in 2011 came from display advertising. It means that if you annualize the display advertising revenues in the fourth quarter, you would get $5 billion.
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Apple’s latest foray into digital textbooks today raises a lot of questions about the future of the textbook publishing industry and digital textbook startups who now find themselves going up against Apple. One of the highest profile digital textbook startups is Kno, which started out with its own oversized tablet but now focusses on delivering textbooks through its iPad app.
On the surface, things don’t look so great for Kno, but CEO Osman Rashid is nonplussed: “We love the fact that so much light has been put on digital textbooks. Now we will fight on who has the better product, more interactive features, and a bigger catalog.” → Read More
Apple is making a play for the textbook market with its launch today of iBooks 2 and the new textbooks within that app. It’s Apple, so they are going to reinvent the textbook industry, right?
Well, maybe not today. If you fire up your iPad and update to the latest version of iBooks (Apple’s app for books with its own store separate from iTunes), you can check out all of the new textbooks Apple just introduced. All 8 of them. That’s right, there are only 8 textbooks available in the new format. → Read More
Armed with pitchforks and hindsight, class action lawyers are gathering up mobs of angry shareholders who lost money and going after the company. Earlier this week a lawsuit was filed against Netflix senior management for not disclosing the short-term nature of its contracts to stream certain movies. And this morning a shareholder rights group called Robbins Umeda announced an “investigation” which could lead to another class-action suit. → Read More
Last year, the Steve Jobs biography was the best-selling book on Amazon. But there is another book about Apple coming out which isn’t authorized that delves into the culture of secrecy at Apple. Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works was written by Fortune senior editor at large Adam Lashinsky, based on a Fortune story he wrote last summer. (Lashinsky spoke with Andrew Keen on TCTV—Part 1 of that interview is up).
The book details how Apple keeps its secrets by policing both internal and external leaks. Employees are kept in the dark about what their colleagues are doing and restricted where they can go on campus. → Read More
The online uproar against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress is already causing some in Washington to abandon the SOPA ship. A couple of co-sponsors of the bill are pulling their support. Representative Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) is no longer a co-sponsor, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.) is also planning to remove his name from the co-sponsor list, according to Politico. One Congressman, Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) is even joining the protest movement. He changed his Facebook profile picture and added the added the note below to his Facebook page. → Read More
Amazon just added a new cloud computing service to its suite of Amazon Web Services, a distributed database called DynamoDB. Web applications can spike suddenly in demand or grow so big that they tax traditional databases, or even clusters of traditional databases, which are hard to maintain, especially for smaller companies. With DynamoDB, Amazon offers and on-demand web-scale distrubted database to the tens of thousands of customers who already use other cloud computing services from Amazon.
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