Contributor Steve Cheney is currently Head of Business Development at GroupMe, and formerly an engineer and programmer with a rich technology background across consumer, mobile, infrastructure and web industries.
A Silicon Valley native, Steve spent the majority of his career at Integrated Device Technology, marketing hardware and software to Apple, Cisco, Intel, Google, Nokia, Foxconn and hundreds of other OEMs/ODMs worldwide.
Steve has also worked as an M&A investment banker at Morgan Stanley and in educational roles both independently and at Kaplan. During college he founded an independent software business which developed custom productivity solutions for construction and law firms, and co-founded a ten-person construction firm which grew to serve thousands of residential clients.
He has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MBA from Columbia University with an emphasis in finance and strategy.
On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later.
Some startups go crazy… → Read More
Lately it seems like there is endless news around messaging, VoIP and video calling. Apple recently announced they’d added FaceTime support for the Mac, and had shipped 19 million FaceTime-enabled iOS devices since June. Google Voice also made headlines last week for an outage, but I think the bigger news associated with that downtime is how fast they’ve been growing. And there’s been a… → Read More
During the Back to the Mac event, Steve Jobs made a particularly witty remark that made the audience giddy with laughter:
“We asked ourselves, what would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? Well, this is the result, we think it’s the future of notebooks.”
There is always a deep strategic intent with the things that Apple does, especially when it comes from Steve Jobs. The first… → Read More
Last week we saw the carriers’ growth numbers for Q3 2010, and AT&T completely blew away Verizon with new subscribers. Despite mass availability of Android phones, Verizon only added 1 million subscribers in Q3, its lowest total in years. AT&T added 2.6 million.
It’s now completely clear why Verizon has finally capitulated and cozied up with Apple—even with tons of Android… → Read More
Back in August I broke the news that Apple was lining up a component purchase of several million chipsets from Qualcomm for a CDMA-powered Verizon iPhone due in January. Last week, over two months later, the Wall Street Journal confirmed this story.
Now that folks are finally celebrating the iPhone’s imminent arrival to Verizon, speculation has shifted to whether the January model will take… → Read More
Intel’s recent acquisition binge has been enormous—they’ve spent almost $10 billion in the past month on TI’s cable modem division, security software maker McAfee, and Infineon’s Wireless Solutions (WLS) business.
At last week’s Intel Developer Forum, CEO Paul Otellini talked about this massive acquisition spree like it’s predestined to succeed. But if we peel the onion back on… → Read More
As I was writing this, news of the HP / Dell bidding war for 3PAR broke on the front page of Yahoo. This made me laugh, as it typified just how crazy this story has become—few things outside of a bidding war will make a storage acquisition sexy enough to make mainstream news.
At $30, HP’s current offer is the sixth bid, a 200 percent premium over 3PAR’s previous $10 share price. Not only… → Read More
Updating your location in the background on mobile apps is gaining momentum as a use-case, most recently with an app allowing you to Check-In On Foursquare Without Taking Your Phone Out Of Your Pocket.
Problem is—though this sounds really amazing—such uses of background location services are bound by hardware / software limitations and aren’t quite ready for primetime. The Future Checkin… → Read More
Apple’s earnings and revenue growth in mobile have been awe-inspiring to witness. From zero presence three years ago, Apple is now the most profitable cell phone maker in the world.
Apple’s success in this compressed period has helped it become an enormous buyer of components. In fact iSuppli projects that next year Apple will become the second-largest semiconductor buyer worldwide and may… → Read More
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