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Items by Om Malik

AT&T: Simply Addicted to the iPhone

Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 8:10pm EDT by Om Malik

The launch of Apple’s new iPhone 3GS was the best sales day ever for AT&T’s retail stores, while the number of orders taken at its online store also hit an all-time high, according to an internal memo obtained by MacDailyNews, a blog devoted to all things Apple. While the memo doesn’t outline the precise number of devices sold, it does reveal other details.

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

Apple sold a million iPhones the weekend of the 3GS launch. A survey by Piper Jaffrey shows that nearly 56 percent of iPhone 3GS buyers were upgrading from the old device and only 28 percent were switching to AT&T — but that’s still about 280,000 new subscribers that will be handing over a lot of money to the carrier. As I pointed out in a previous post, “[T]he average iPhone user gave AT&T about $94.74 a month vs. an average postpaid AT&T customer, who spends about $59.21 a month.”

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The Bell Tolls for Plasma TVs

Posted: July 2nd, 2009, 11:02am EDT by Om Malik

pioneer-60-plasma In the market for a new TV? These days, there are bargains galore, especially when it comes to those with plasma screens. The Wall Street Journal reports that the growing popularity of their LCD cousins has TV makers such as Pioneer and Vizio phasing out their entire plasma TV line-ups. Others may soon follow suit. (Read an alternative take on the future of Plasma TVs.)

One can hardly blame them — there were 30 million LCD TVs sold in the U.S. in 2008 vs. 4 million plasma TVs, according to Display Search, a market research company. That’s quite a comedown for a technology that once represented the cutting edge of the display market.

Plasma is made of cells. Each cell is essentially two plates of glass filled with neon-xenon gas that is electrically charged, which then strikes phosphors on the screen and that in turns displays the image. LCD panels in comparison are made of two layers of transparent material where one of the layers is coated with a special polymer that holds liquid crystals. Electric current is passed through these crystals which either pass the light or stop it, there by creating an image. (From About.com)

I remember when plasmas trumped LCDs by a mile, both in terms of picture quality and viewing angle. There were some problems with them, of course — they generated too much heat and static images burned into the screen, limiting their lifespan. They’ve since improved a lot, but so have LCDs, which by comparison have better contrast, sharper images and higher refresh rates. NewTeeVee back in February saw the demise of Pioneer’s Kuro TV line-up as a sign that plasma TVs would go the way of the buggy whip.

I paid an ungodly amount of money for a 42-inch plasma screen TV in 2002, only to sell it on Craigslist for a third of that price when I moved to San Francisco in March 2003. It taught me a valuable lesson: Televisions (and most consumer electronics) lose value really quickly, so there’s no point in overpaying by buying the latest and greatest. (I leave that for cell phones, computers and headphones.) Today, I have a 50-inch Panasonic LCD TV — not exactly the best on the market, but it does a fine job as a display for my DVD player and my Apple TV.

Now I’m getting ready to move to a bigger apartment. This would give me a chance to buy another television, this time for the bedroom. I’m thinking about buying a cheap plasma TV — just for old times sake. After all, it will be obsolete by the time I’m ready to move again so I won’t feel that bad about losing my investment.

P.S.: In case you’re still wrestling with which TV — LCD or plasma — to buy, CNet has a handy comparison guide.

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Mobile Phone Sales to Decline Over Next 5 Years

Posted: July 1st, 2009, 10:23am EDT by Om Malik

Mobile phone sales are going to decline sharply over the next five years, to the tune of 1.04 billion devices, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. In its new report, “The Financial Crisis: Analyzing the impact on global mobile markets,” the research firm has revised its forecast for device sales over the next five years down by 14 percent.

Some 6.39 billion devices are forecast to purchased between now and 2013, Informa said, vs. its previous expectation that 7.43 billion devices would be bought. For 2009, Informa revised its forecast for the number of mobiles phones that will be purchased down to 1.12 billion devices from 1.32 billion. This is a brutal revision for a business that has always been about furious growth and razor-thin margins.

The downshift in overall device sales is one of the reasons why companies are shifting their attention away from low-cost devices to smartphones and an emerging category of devices I like to call superphones. Devices such as Apple’s iPhone sell fewer units but have higher profit margins. A recent surge in demand for RIM’s BlackBerry devices and more recently, HTC’s Android-based smartphones show that the incumbents such as Samsung, Nokia and LG are lagging in this higher end of the market. No wonder they’re redoubling their energies to focus on it, as evidenced by Nokia introducing a brand new line-up of its higher-end (and higher margin) N and E-Series of devices.

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What Went Wrong With Joost?

Posted: July 1st, 2009, 1:30am EDT by Om Malik

Joost, a much-vaunted online video startup, today announced that it will offer a white-label video hosting platform, thus entering a crowded market littered with the carcasses of other failed video hosts. The company is also losing its famous chief executive, Mike Volpi, whom it’s replacing with Matt Zelesko, the current vice president of engineering. And it plans to cut a portion of its workforce — ~~between~~ about 70 of its remaining 90 employees, according to Advertising Age. It also shut down its office in the Netherlands.

When I read about all the planned changes at the company earlier today, the first thought that crossed my mind was: Stick a fork in it; Joost is done. After all, this whole white-label video strategy is like a leaky lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The NewTeeVee crew sums up the situation very succinctly: “Becoming a white-label video provider was what a business did when all other strategies failed.”

As someone who has followed Joost from its very inception, when it was known as The Venice Project, I’m amazed at how badly it’s stumbled. It shouldn’t have.

It had everything going for it, including:

Successful, Celebrity Founders: Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis started the company in 2006 after palming off Skype to eBay for billions of dollars.
Proven Technology: Joltid formed the basis for music- and file-sharing service Kazaa and later Skype.
Substantial Funding: It raised $45 million in funding from the who’s who of the tech world: Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Viacom, CBS and Chinese tycoon Li Ka-shing.
Incredible Buzz: The company had incredible pre-launch buzz that helped it to convince thousands of users to download its P2P video client — something that doesn’t happen all that often on today’s web.
Big, Famous Partners: It managed to gain early traction with content providers such as Viacom and CBS, which were also investors in the company.

So what went wrong? Quite a few things, actually. Other startups should learn from the mistakes of Joost and avoid repeating them, such as:

Too Big, Too Fast: Joost hired too many people, too quickly. It never behaved like a startup but instead always felt like a grown-up company with too many bureaucratic layers.
Too Geographically Spread Out: The company was based in multiple geographic locations — New York, London and The Netherlands — and as a result, each location became somewhat of a silo.
Not Enough Focus: Remember what your mom used to say when you took too big of a bite? If you’re not careful, you’re going to choke. Startups are just like that. Unless you focus, you’re going to choke. Joost couldn’t focus on one single market — and startups need to focus on one market at a time in order to win.
Too Much Hype Too Soon: Like many, we were one of the early fans of this startup. Its founder pedigree generated a lot of pre-release interest. Nearly 250,000 folks signed up for the beta version of the software. But when technology problems hit, the pre-release buzz turned into buzzkill.
Slow to Fix Its Technology Problems : Joost’s P2P network had technical problems early on that resulted in user defection. The company didn’t move to address those concerns fast enough. These technology problems have continued to nag the company throughout its life, even when it switched to a browser-based focus.
Client vs. Browser: The company took too long to realize that the client-based strategy was going to lose out to browser-based video services. Its legacy of building clients became its Achilles’ heel.
Didn’t Press Its Early-Mover Advantage: Joost had correctly identified that it needed the blessing of the content owners, but it failed to move aggressively enough to convince them to work with its platform. The client and technology problems didn’t help matters, either.
Big Media Dis-Connect: Its big media investors were never willing to give Joost a content edge over the competition, prompting users to tune it out in favor of other services.
Too Many Internal Problems: The company had some serious management problems, some of which led to the firing of its CTO in January 2008.
Hulu: It started with a simple, easy-to-use interface for its browser-based video service, offered higher-quality video and used content from its backers, NBC and Fox, to become a household name, which in turn allowed Hulu to convince other content owners to sign up for its platform. Now it owns 10 percent of online video traffic.
Chasing Its Own Tail: Joost also made some basic mistakes, such as not having a good SEO strategy. It never quite figured out a social media strategy in order to garner viral growth, either. It was like a tech company from the 1990s — out of sync with today’s web environment.

The dark cloud of doom started to settle over the company last year, as the team at NewTeeVee noticed time and again. NewTeeVee writer Janko Roettgers offered a recipe to fix Joost last fall, but apparently it was too little, too late, even then. The company consistently failed to gain any traction, even after unveiling new APIs and a browser-based offering. In the end, however, it all boiled down to a lack of content.

Photo credit of Mike Volpi pic: Eirikso via Flickr.

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LogMeIn Prices at $16 a Share, Windfall for VC Backers

Posted: June 30th, 2009, 11:02pm EDT by Om Malik

logmeinlogo

Update: LogMeIn is trading at $20.13 a share in its first hour of trading.

LogMeIn, a Woburn, Mass.-based company that is going public, has priced at $16 a share, according to The Wall Street Journal. LogMeIn will start trading tomorrow under the ticker “LOGM.” With 6.7 million shares on sale, LogMeIn raised a total of $107.2 million. It’s $16-a-share pricing was at the high end of the $14-$16 range, showing that there is a significant market interest in this company, as I pointed out in my previous post.

LogMeIn is tapping into two major trends — the rise of the distributed, mobile work force and the need for remote access — which are prompting companies to look at remote work and collaboration, especially as mobile broadband starts to become more and more pervasive. The offering is a massive windfall for its venture backers, highlighting why IPOs are the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. Here are some of them:

Integral Capital Partners sold $5 million worth of stock to own 5.4 percent of the company, a stake worth $18.4 million.
Intel Capital will own 4.2 percent of the company after the sale, worth $14.2 million.
Polaris Venture Partners sold $7.4 million worth of stock to hold 13.9 percent of the company worth $47.6 million.
Prism VentureWorks owns 18.2 percent of stock, worth $62.3 million.

The Wall Street Journal’s Scott Austin points out that these firms invested $20 million in two rounds and now their shares are worth $155 million. Sure M&A can help VCs make money, but it’s IPOs that provide the ultimate windfall.

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Sense Gets New Funding, Focuses on New Markets

Posted: June 30th, 2009, 11:14am EDT by Om Malik

Sense Networks, a location-based services company headquartered in New York, said today it’s raised an undisclosed amount of money from investors led by Intel Capital. Citing a gag order from Intel, CEO Greg Skibiski not only wouldn’t say how much the round was for, he wouldn’t disclose who the other investors were. Such an attempt to control what is just basic information is straight-up bad behavior on the part of the venture arm as far as I’m concerned. VentureBeat reported last week that Sense had raised $6 million following a battle-of-the-funding between Intel and Sequoia Capital. It had previously raised $3 million.

One way or the other, it makes perfect sense that investors would be getting all hot and heavy about this company, which combines historical and real-time data gathered through GPS and Wi-Fi with real-world information to come up with analytics that can help users make better decisions. It was shortly after meeting with Sense Networks’ Chief Scientist Tony Jebara last year that I started to admire the idea behind the company and at the same time to consider the true potential of its underlying platform, Macrosense.

“Imagine mapping foot traffic to, say, Gap or Apple stores. While it would never tell you if people were shopping or not, it would be a great indication of how hot (or not) the store was, enabling you to trade on the information,” is how I described it.

Turns out the company had in fact been targeting the hedge fund industry with its platform, but was forced to change tack once the economic crisis took hold. The new focus has paid off; it’s found lots of takers. “Companies are licensing the Macrosense platform from us in an enterprise model right now,” Skibiski told us.

Among those that have been calling on Sense are phone companies and handset manufacturers, essentially those “sitting on tons of location data from apps like maps or from cell tower triangulation every time there’s a call, SMS or a data connection.”

The platform helps these companies understand their customers better and figure out how to personalize their mobile experiences, such as through optimizing maps and app stores (and advertising) based on the information gathered and analyzed by the platform. I think Sense and companies offering similar services will benefit handsomely from this drive for hyperpersonalization on mobile devices.

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Comcast Starts Selling Wireless Broadband Service

Posted: June 29th, 2009, 3:53pm EDT by Om Malik

Updated with more service related details : Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company and one of the country’s biggest broadband service providers, says it has started to sell a new wireless broadband service called High-Speed 2go across cities in its cable footprint. Here are some facts:

Comcast will offer its own wireless laptop cards and the service will not have any voice component. The card is free with a 1 year contract or it can be purchased for $99 and customers can go month to month. If you switch from a phone company, Comcast will waive off the $99 it charges for the card.
It’s a combination of Clearwire’s WiMAX-based wireless broadband and Sprint’s 3G EVDO data. The nationwide laptop device automatically switches between available 4G and 3G networks. On the 3G service (provided by Sprint) there is a 5 GB amount of data usage included in the plan. The 4G service will follow Clearwire’s terms of service.
Comcast High-Speed 2go Metro service will use a 4G-only data card giving customers the 4G service in their metro coverage area.
The service is available today only in Portland, but will be available in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia and more cities by end of 2009.
Consumers can pay $69.99 a month for a “fast pack” national offering that buys them unlimited wireless data and a 12 Mbps home broadband offering. A metro-only service will cost $49.99 a month.
High-Speed 2go will also be sold to small-to-mid-sized businesses through the Comcast Business Services sales teams.

I think telephone companies will now start to respond more aggressively with their own 3G offerings, possibly lowering prices, which is not such a bad thing from a consumer perspective. I have many other questions — I am waiting, for example, for Comcast to tell me if there are any bandwidth caps as part of this new deal.

I like that Comcast, which had previously invested in Clearwire, is launching this service but its chances are going to be determined by how aggressively it’s available nationwide. I wish it was being launched in more than a one token city. I think that by the time Comcast and Clearwire get their national act together, we can most certainly expect the likes of Verizon to launch its own 4G wireless broadband services.

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Cablevision Network DVR Gets Supreme Court Blessing

Posted: June 29th, 2009, 3:13pm EDT by Om Malik

Cablevision today got further blessings from the Supreme Court, which decided not to hear an appeal in the networked DVR-related litigation. We have been following this story pretty closely, and frankly, it is good to see an end to litigation around this technology. Many studios and TV networks such as Paramount, Disney, CBS and NBC are opposed to network DVRs. A network DVR is a way for consumers to record, save and recall their favorite television programs and movies on the remote servers of the cable company. It eliminates the need for owning a local DVR-type device like the ones made by TiVo. Cablevision will launch the service later this summer, including features that would allow you to pause live television when a Cablevision-provided phone rings in your house.

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Looking Back at Structure 09: Some Fun Moments & Photos

Posted: June 29th, 2009, 1:57pm EDT by Om Malik

Last week, we hosted our second annual day-long infrastructure conference, Structure 09, in San Francisco. The sold-out event brought together some of the industry’s leading minds to discuss the issues surrounding web infrastructure. If Structure 08 was about the what and why of cloud computing, Structure 09 not only looked at the progress made over the last 12 months, but also focused on use cases and the methods of improving the fast-evolving cloud computing paradigm. The increased presence of the who’s who of the technology industry — IBM, HP, Microsoft, EMC and Akamai — is a sign that the cloud is no longer a mere curiosity. You can also read the complete wrap-up of the conference and its key takeaways over on our subscription-only service, GigaOM Pro.

And while Structure 09 was crammed with incredibly insightful moments, the participants made sure things never got too intense. Marc Benioff, the CEO of SalesForce.com, mocked the Zen-like utterings of his mentor, Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of Oracle. He also drew hearty laughs from the audience when he labeled Azure, Microsoft’s cloud effort, “AZune.” Zune is the much-vaunted digital music player Microsoft launched to compete with Apple’s iPod, though it has failed to unseat the iPod from its perch just yet.

I’m sure by now many of you have read about Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Engineering, chastising the equipment makers for failing to understand the needs of web-based companies. He also dismissed the recent performance gains claimed by chip makers Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices. There was some good-natured jousting between Google and Microsoft over web infrastructure management, too. Don’t forget to check out an amazing talk by Akamai CEO Paul Sagan on how the Net really works. (I’ve posted a link to all the blog posts and videos below the fold so you can check them out at your leisure.)

I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for making the event a success, from the generous support of our sponsors to the magnificent participants, attendees and all of you who watched from afar via the live-stream. Nearly 3,000 of you tuned in to watch some 60,000 minutes of conference-related video. Since then 5000 folks have watched a total of 250,000 of Structure related video. To all of you — thanks and see you in 2010.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Photos by James Duncan-Davidson.

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The Strange Tale of Wi-Fi Startup Whisher

Posted: June 24th, 2009, 1:45pm EDT by Om Malik

Back in 2006, when Wi-Fi was all the rage, we saw many startups paint a future in which we’d be able to hop from one hot spot to another seamlessly, sharing the bandwidth for free when we could and buying it when we had to. Well, the future turned out to be entirely different.

Whisher, a Wi-Fi company that launched with much fanfare at DEMO in January 2007, sold itself to WiFi.com, a hot-spot services company, sometime earlier this year, according to founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Puchol. The sale came close on the heels of the firing of CEO Ferran Moreno in October 2008. Now while for most companies, such a sale would signal the end of the story, with Whisher it was the start of a new one. As part of its preparation to merge operations with WiFi.com, Whisher launched an internal audit that turned up certain irregularities, which in turn led to a full-blown investigative audit. What it discovered wasn’t good. From a company statement sent to us by Puchol:

“Whisher announces that after a thorough investigation, on April 23rd 2009, it filed a criminal lawsuit against its founder and former CEO Ferran Moreno Blanca, for the alleged offenses of embezzlement, disloyal administration, and falseness in mercantile documents. The lawsuit is also filed against Jesús Roy Solanas for his alleged intervention in the offenses. Whisher confirms that no other party connected with the company was involved in the case, and that the lawsuit has been accepted by the Spanish courts in Barcelona. Ferran Moreno will declare before the courts as defendant on July 1st.”

Wow, what an interesting turn of events for Ferran, who got into an argument with Martin Varsavsky, founder of FON and his former boss, around the time Whisher was launched. Ferran, who was a longtime employee of the Swiss phone company, Swisscom, had championed the idea to his employers, who ended up seed funding the project. But somewhere along the line things got murky, and fake invoices were submitted, first to Swisscom and then to Whisher, Puchol alleges in his email.

I bet we haven’t heard the last of this saga.

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Comcast: TV Everywhere Will Eat Into Your Metered Broadband

Posted: June 24th, 2009, 11:07am EDT by Om Malik

While on the conference call to announce the TV Everywhere initiative being promoted by Time Warner and Comcast, I asked Comcast CEO Brian Roberts if the content being streamed as part of this new effort would be free from the 250GB-a-month bandwidth quota his company has started imposing on this customers.

His answer: No. The streaming bandwidth consumed when watching videos using the TV everywhere system. would be counted towards the total monthly bandwidth usage quota. He said (and I paraphrase) that since You’re not going to get close enough to hitting the monthly quota anyway, he said, so why worry? We (and many of our readers) disagree. We feel that while 250GB might look very generous today, it isn’t much when you start streaming or downloading HD-quality video.

I think it’s also disingenuous for the company to promote the usage of web-based video (and thus the consumption of more bandwidth) while imposing a meter on the bandwidth and at the same time charging for the same video (as cable subscription.) Now that’s some double-dipping, baby!

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Comcast, Time Warner Team Up to Control TV on the Internet

Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 10:54pm EDT by Om Malik

Updated: Sometime tomorrow, Comcast and Time Warner will announce a partnership to promote the concept of TV Everywhere. Jeff Bewkes, chairman and CEO of Time Warner, and Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast, will have a joint media conference tomorrow in New York. The deal makes it painfully obvious that everything cable companies do — including introducing the draconian metered broadband policies — is done to save their video franchises.

With the pervasiveness of broadband and easy availability of tools that allow web video to leap onto your television, cable companies see that their video distribution pipes are becoming less relevant. So they want to control how you watch premium content online and want to impose fees via an authentication system. Time Warner and Bewkes have been championing this concept — essentially an authentication system that requires viewers to have cable, telco or satellite subscriptions in order to watch certain premium content online or on other platforms. Bewkes recently said he wanted to launch the system during the second half of 2009. (NewTeeVee has just published a great FAQ on TV Everywhere.) Time Warner spun out its cable business as a separate company. Time Warner owns premium services such as HBO.

This coming together of large media companies and cable companies over Internet video should put the anti-trust officers in Washington on red alert. They should be paying attention to not only these moves, but also the metered broadband efforts of cable companies. The cable industry and its large media partners form a cozy cabal, though on paper they dislike each other.

Cable operators need media companies’ channels to overcharge the working stiffs like you and me. Media companies need the cable operators to share subscription revenues to pay for their highly inefficient and archaic businesses.

“The majority of profits for the big entertainment companies is from cable programming,” Stephen Burke, president of Comcast, tells The New York Times. “That stream is so important to every entertainment company that everybody is looking at that and saying, if we are not careful we could start to harm that model.”

Here is the irony: If Comcast thinks it is keeping the status-quo go, Time Warner’s Bewkes thinks he is inventing the future. “We’re talking about taking the TV industry to a new era,” he tells the Times. When I read that, I LOL-ed. That is rich coming from a guy who runs a company that has proven to be the Internet equivalent of the village idiot. Anyway, here are some minor details about this system that is going to be TV’s future.

The first test of the new system, which will authenticate cable subscribers online and make available programs on the Web for no additional charge, will be announced Wednesday, between Comcast and Time Warner. The trial will involve about 5,000 Comcast subscribers, and television shows from the Time Warner networks TNT and TBS.

Comcast and others such as Viacom have been championing their own authentication systems. There is a massive battle brewing where content owners and cable operators will soon find themselves on opposing sides. Cable companies (and large media companies) are unwilling to come to terms with the fact that their brands don’t matter as much in this age of content atomization.

It is not clear if consumers are really willing to deal with these confusion authentication systems. When our sister site, NewTeeVee, asked its readers if they would pay $10 per month to Comcast, nearly 70 percent said, No!

The complete press release is here:

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) announced today that it has partnered with Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA, CMCSK) to develop broad principles for the TV Everywhere model to guide the distribution of its television content online. The agreement between the companies will make it possible for Comcast customers to access programming from Turner Broadcasting’s award-winning entertainment networks free online and on demand. In addition, Comcast announced it will begin a national technical trial of its “On Demand Online” service in July carrying programming from Time Warner’s Turner networks TNT and TBS.

The companies endorsed a framework that would bring significantly more television content to customers online in a manner that is consumer-friendly, pro-competitive and non-exclusive. To ensure rapid adoption and deployment of online television content across the industry, a set of principles for the TV Everywhere model was designed to be simple and attractive for any programmer and any video distributor to elect to adopt.

The companies agreed to the following principles:

Bring more TV content, more easily to more people across platforms.

Video subscribers can watch programming from their favorite TV networks online for no additional charge.

Video subscribers can access this content using any broadband connection.

Programmers should make their best and highest-rated programming available online.

Both networks and video distributors should provide high-quality, consumer-friendly sites for viewing broadband content with easy authentication.

A new process should be created to measure ratings for online viewing. The goal should be to extend the current viewer measurement system to include advertiser ratings for TV content viewed on all platforms.

TV Everywhere is open and non-exclusive; cable, satellite or telco video distributors can enter into similar agreements with other programmers.

Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bewkes said: “TV Everywhere is no longer just a concept, but a working model to deliver consumers more television content over broadband than ever before. We consistently look to make our popular, branded content more accessible to consumers in order to grow our business. This progressive approach to delivering television content online will enable the continued vibrancy and growth of distribution outlets, their content partners and advertising clients.”

Brian L. Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast said, “Today’s announcement is all about giving our customers exponentially more free content, more choice and more HD programming online as well as on TV. We have been working for a year to bring more TV and movie content to our customers online and we are thrilled that Time Warner is joining us in our national technical trial. Ultimately, our goal is to make TV content available to our customers on all platforms.”

The innovative agreement for this national On Demand Online technical trial will deliver more TNT and TBS programming online, free of charge to Comcast video customers, than previously available. Comcast customers in the trial will be able to access TNT’s award winning programming like The Closer and Saving Grace, as well as the TBS line-up including Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns and My Boys. The shows will be initially accessible on Comcast.net, Fancast.com and will soon be available on TNT.tv and TBS.com.

The On Demand Online technical trial will involve premium long-form content with approximately 5,000 customers. The trial period will be dedicated to testing the new authentication technology on a national basis that will enable secured access to the content. This national trial will give customers an opportunity to explore the service and provide feedback that will help to shape the service over time. The initial trial is the first phase of a multi-phase rollout that will expand the amount of content, features and functionality of the service as subsequent iterations are implemented.

In the coming weeks, Comcast expects other programming networks to participate as the nationwide trial expands. Time Warner expects to announce similar trials with other distributors.

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Goodbye Old Friend. R.I.P. Rajeev Motwani

Posted: June 5th, 2009, 9:10pm EDT by Om Malik

Updated: Rajeev Motwani, one of the savviest angel investors in Silicon Valley, a Stanford professor and most importantly a close and personal friend passed away earlier today. He was 45 and is left behind by his wife Asha and kids.

It is hard for me to write this post — this morning the news of Steve Jobs’ improving health put me in a good mood. My day is ending with a broken heart and tears in my eyes. It is the day which reminds you of the unpredictability of life. Rajeev and I had been swapping emails, hoping to get together for a cup of coffee and discussions about technology. Alas, that shall never be.

After working tirelessly in anonymity, his tutelage of two Stanford University young grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, made him a household name in Silicon Valley. He started the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS) and was one of the earliest backers of Google. He was an early investor in Paypal and a special advisor to Sequoia Captial.

That success never came in the way of Rajeev’s quest for knowledge and innate desire to help others. There wasn’t a startup he didn’t love. Like his chosen specialization of search, Rajeev was searching for the unknown. He was still active as a professor and was teaching a couple of classes as recently as the last semester.

I have known Rajeev, his wife Asha and their family for a long time. Rajeev, like me, was from New Delhi. In my professional career (and personal moments of crisis) Rajeev was only a phone call away, sharing his vast rolodex. Just like a true friend. Only a few weeks back, I had a simple Indian lunch in his house with his family. I am sure, I am not the only one who has benefited from his generosity of time and knowledge and his ability to create connections and help others.

My prayers go to his young family. I hope god gives them strength and courage to navigate through these rough seas of life.

Sergey Brin pays his tribute on his blog. “…Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched. Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it,” he writes.

David Hornik of August Capital writes: Rajeev just wanted to be helpful. And he was. To so many of us. Perhaps that is why so many of us thought of Rajeev as a friend. It is one thing to be friendly with someone in the business world. It is another thing altogether to consider them a friend. Rajeev genuinely liked people and people genuinely liked him.

If you have a Rajeev story you would like to share with rest of us so we can all remember and grieve together, please leave it in the comments section or email me.

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Boxee vs Hulu: Battle of The Words

Posted: June 5th, 2009, 2:13pm EDT by Om Malik

Chris Albrecht over on NewTeeVee has a video interview with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen thought of Hulu’s recent launch of its desktop app. He also talks about the new TV-friendly browser YouTube launched this week. Also check out my post about why Hulu doesn’t quite much care about Boxee.

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Ma Bell and Its Vanishing Phone Lines

Posted: June 5th, 2009, 11:15am EDT by Om Malik

Three years ago, the wireline revenues of U.S. phone companies were forecast to decline about 3.3 percent annually through 2009. Talk about underestimating those numbers — take a look at the following graph and you see that AT&T’s consumer line business is evaporating faster than raindrops in the Sahara.

Roughly a year later, I pointed out that the phone companies would always be in a race against time — the more lines they lost, the less chance they’d have to able to convert their customers to faster broadband.

That is indeed a problem that continues to haunt the incumbent carriers — across the board. Cable companies have done a good job of snatching voice customers. Many, like me, have switched entirely to wireless. The down economy has only exacerbated these issues.

Verizon has countered with a better broadband proposition in the form of fiber and a better wireless network. It’s also getting rid of its wireline business as quickly as it can, fetching as much cash as possible for a business that is going nowhere fast.

In comparison, AT&T’s problems are reflected in the fact that it now likes to present itself as a “wireless company.” That’s the same line Sprint used to use before it got rid of Embarq.

What I find more surprising is that AT&T is slowing down its U-verse rollout. From the looks of it, people actually like this product (mostly because they hate their cable companies) and want Ma Bell to offer this higher-speed broadband and IPTV package. Heck, even I would sign up for AT&T U-verse…if it were available in my neighborhood, that is.

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Shozu Says No to Ads, Instead Will Sell Apps

Posted: June 4th, 2009, 6:13pm EDT by Om Malik

Shozu, a mobile software company that has so far made money by selling advertising on its services, has decided to change models. Shozu software allows mobile users to upload photos and videos captured by mobile phone cameras to various online services such as Flickr and social networks.

It has been particularly successful on the iPhone platform. Now instead of advertising, the company will charge for its applications that will be sold via various app stores, including Apple’s iTunes and Nokia’s Ovi store. In other words, it will be charging for its “mobile applications.”

Shozu will charge only new users. Current users will not pay for updates, either. The company will continue to allow consumers to upload photos and video via MMS, mobile email, desktop computers and through a web browser.

As part of their decision to enter the App Stores, ShoZu also decided to not actively sell ad space. Instead, the company considered the various App Store financial models available and chose to go with a modest, one-time download charge for new users of the application ($4.99 or the minimum charge based on the specifics of the App Store).

The New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller has been blogging about many ad-supported startups looking for non-ad revenues in a series for the Times’ Bits Blog.

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AT&T’s Slowing Down on U-verse

Posted: June 4th, 2009, 5:39pm EDT by Om Malik

at$t AT&T executives have been shouting from the top of the rooftops that they are a wireless company, touting mobile as key to the carrier’s future. And while they have been making those pronouncements, Ma Bell has been quietly slowing down its U-verse deployments. Earlier today, in a note to his clients, John Hodulik, an analyst with UBS Research, wrote:

AT&T has slowed the pace of its U-verse build. We initially  expected AT&T to pass 11M incremental homes in 2009 but scaled back our  expectations to 7M after the company pushed out its build-out plans. We now  expect the company to pass just 4-5M new U-verse homes in 2009, down from  9M in 2008.

Now that is a significant slowdown. So we asked the folks from AT&T to comment about the report. The company declined to comment on the “exact figures included in the UBS report, as we don’t know where their estimates came from.” According to AT&T:

Our U-verse build and expansion plans remain aggressive. We will continue expanding into new markets and turning up more households that are currently passed by our U-verse network.

In a broader sense, we announced earlier this year that given the current economic environment, we are taking a conservative approach to managing our business. With this measured approach, we now plan to pass 30M living units with our U-verse fiber network by the end of 2011 — one year later than previously planned.

In sharp contrast, Verzion continues to push ahead with its FiOS rollout. The company is also aggressively pushing its TV service. As for AT&T’s higher-speed broadband and IPTV plans — well, let’s just say they are lagging for now.

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Will AT&T Buy DirecTV?

Posted: June 4th, 2009, 10:02am EDT by Om Malik

Chase Carey, chief executive officer of DirecTV, is leaving the satellite TV provider and going back to News Corp. to take the chief operating officer reins from Peter Chernin. He will also be the deputy chairman and president of Rupert Murdoch’s company. John Malone, who bought DirecTV from Murdoch, can’t be happy about this. That said, the company is continuing to do fine in a tough economy and beating its cable industry rivals.

DirectTV added 460,000 new subscribers during the first quarter of 2009, thanks to promotions from a new AT&T partnership. And it’s in the process of being merged into the entertainment division of Liberty Media, which is then slated to be spun out into a separate, publicly traded company. Still, many are wondering what’s next for DirecTV, especially since Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei called a sale of DirecTV to a phone company following the spin-off “possible.” UBS analyst John Hodulik makes a compelling case for that company to be AT&T:

Believe the end game is an AT&T purchase of DirecTV

Wireless penetration is nearing 90 percent and industry growth is slowing. Meanwhile, AT&T has slowed the pace of its U-verse build to 4-5M incremental homes in 2009 vs. 9M in 2008. DTV would give AT&T cost synergies and boost consumer revenue trends.

AT&T’s sales are dropping: Consumer revenues fell 6.8 percent in the first quarter while business revenues dropped 6.7 percent. Total wireline sales were down 5.4 percent. The company is riding the iPhone juggernaut, but that isn’t enough. Wireless post-paid additions are slowing down. Ergo, AT&T needs someone like DirecTV to goose up its revenues.

Wall Street has linked AT&T to digital satellite providers before. There were rumors that AT&T was almost ready to buy DirecTV competitor EchoStar. That deal never came to pass. Will this one?

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What’s in a Name? For Cheap PCs, Nothing

Posted: June 3rd, 2009, 3:45pm EDT by Om Malik

null Yesterday Intel Corp., and today Microsoft, gave us more proof that their branding skills are as limited as my ability to strike out a major league baseball player.

Intel wants to name its new thin, light and low-power consuming notebooks CULV, aka Consumer Ultra Low Voltage. Many of these devices will be nearly as thin as the MacBook Air. Today, an executive disclosed that Microsoft wants to call mini-notebooks “low-cost small notebooks.” Both of these monikers are about as appealing as the sensation one gets after accidentally rubbing sea salt on a fresh wound.

There are other category-defining names that have been floated by various companies over the past few months, such as smartbooks, UMPC, netbooks and cloud computers. Whatever the name, they are essentially cheap PCs. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, summed up my feeling when he said, “Netbooks are not a new category, instead they are just cheap PCs. The $399 PC is here to stay and it will get better and better.” Coming up with a fancy (or convoluted) name isn’t going to change that!

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Sony Ericsson the Latest to Join the App Store Frenzy

Posted: June 3rd, 2009, 2:06pm EDT by Om Malik

Updated: Hey if carriers aren’t shying away from starting “app stores,” then why should Sony Ericsson? The company today announced plans to sell applications through its PlayNow service — which has so far been used to sell mobile content — in 13 different countries for use on 38 Sony Ericsson phone models, with support for more devices to come later. Sony Ericsson has taken a pragmatic approach to its app store. Instead of forcing developers to support yet another platform, Sony Ericsson’s app store will initially accept Java and Symbian OS applications and later support other platforms. Update: According to this press release, GetJar, an indie mobile app seller, is going to be providing apps for Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow service. (Related GigaOM Pro Research: Will Google Lead the Way in Mobile App Innovation?)

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U.S. Census Data Shows What We Know: Internet Growth

Posted: June 3rd, 2009, 11:09am EDT by Om Malik

We don’t quite need the U.S. Census to tell us that most (but not all) people love the Internet. Breakneck growth in the number of broadband connections, growing sales of cheap computers, and our growing reliance on modern communication tools, such as email, instant messages and Facebook, have become so pervasive that even the homeless need to be connected. That reliance has increased over the past 12 years, as shown by 2007 U.S. Census data. Here are some of the highlights from that data (which is now about 2 years old).

64 percent of people over 18 used the Internet in 2007 vs. 22 percent in 1997.
62 percent of households used the Internet at home in 2007 vs. 18 percent in 1997.
50.8 percent of households accessed the Internet at home over a broadband connection. Dial-up access had 10.7 percent of households.
Alaska and New Hampshire residents had among the highest rates of Internet use from any location (home, work or public access).
There were 38.3 percent households with no Internet use at home.

These stats, while 2 years old, are a good mile-marker that explains why we are still continuing to see growth in services such as Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Google. I wonder what the next census will look like? With 4G wireless broadband around the corner, will we even bother to ask the question: Internet access from home? More importantly, will there be anyone still dialing up for Internet access? :-)

Year	Households	Household with computer at home	Household with Internet use at home
2007	117,840	(x)¹	61.7
2003	113,126	61.8	54.7
2001	109,106	56.3	50.4
2000	105,247	51.0	41.5
1997	102,158	36.6	18.0
1993	98,736	22.9	(x)²
1989	94,061	15.0	(x)
1984	87,073	8.2	(x)

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, November 1984, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2003. Internet Release date: June 2009.

^1. In 2007 respondents were not asked any questions about computer access or ownership. Additonally, question wording regarding both computer use and Internet access have differered from year to year.

^2. In 1984, 1989, and 1993, respondents were not asked any questions about the Internet.

^3. The householder refers to the person (or one of the persons) in whose name the housing unit is owned or rented (maintained) or, if there is no such person, any adult member, excluding roomers, boarders, or paid employees. If the house is owned or rented jointly by a married couple, the householder may be either the husband or the wife. The person designated as the householder is the “reference person” to whom the relationship of all other household members, if any, is recorded.

Hat Tip, Gary Price.

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StatShot: Mobile Ad Spending to Grow to $5.7 Billion

Posted: June 3rd, 2009, 10:41am EDT by Om Malik

Advertising budgets for spending on mobile channels will hit $5.7 billion by 2014, according to UK-based market research firm Juniper Research. That will be just 1.5 percent of global ad spend, the firm predicts. Still, it looks like a good enough opportunity for Google and upstarts such as AdMob.

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With 2M Downloads, Where Is Right on Track

Posted: June 2nd, 2009, 7:45pm EDT by Om Malik

Where, a location-based mobile application from Boston-based uLocate, is quickly becoming a must-have on newer mobile platforms such as the iPhone and Android. It’s been download 2 million times and garnered a million registered users, numbers that are likely to head further north once Palm launches its Pre — Where is a showcase application on Palm’s new WebOS.

I like using the Where app on my iPod Touch, mostly because it acts like a “portal” for a lot a location-based services. It has integrated many individual LBS apps, such as Locate Starbucks and Yellow Pages. But it’s gone beyond simple aggregation to unify various different services into one, seamless experience. For instance it allows you to search for a movie, make dinner plans — and share both with anyone in your address book.

I recently met with uLocate’s executives, who shared Where’s usage data with me. Of those million registered users, they told me, 200,000 are using it on an Android platform — far more than on the iPhone. That’s mostly because the iPhone version of the Where app is a year old and in need of a major performance upgrade. The company plans to release a new iPhone version shortly.

According to uLocate execs, Social Networking, Local Search, Weather, Movies and News are the five most important usage categories. Among the top brands “searched” via Where are Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, Target, Papa Johns, McDonald’s, Bank of America and Taco Bell. Clearly people are searching for “fast food” on Where. Big surprise — half of its users are under 44.

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Cloudera CEO: Hadoop Will Go Beyond Web Apps

Posted: June 1st, 2009, 7:55pm EDT by Om Malik

“Hadoop is going to find potential markets in any industry where there are large data sets that need complex analysis,” Mike Olsen, chief executive officer and one of the four co-founders of Cloudera, the startup that’s commercializing the open-source software framework Hadoop, told me earlier today. I spoke with Olsen after the Burlingame, Calif.-based company said it had raised $6 million in new Series B funding from Greylock Partners and Accel Partners.

From the analysis of point-of-sale data to genomics data, the opportunities for Hadoop are plentiful, Olsen said. Bioinformatics and pharmaceuticals are emerging as big opportunities for Hadoop, which first found favor with Web 2.0 and social networking applications looking to optimize advertising. Mike’s comments echo what we heard at the GigaOM Hadoop Meet-up held in our office last year. Eric Baldeschwieler, VP of grid computing at Yahoo, for example, had pointed out that, “Seismology and many other kinds of data collection-intensive pursuits are prime areas where people can get good use from Hadoop.”

Olsen said that interest in Hadoop has grown so much since Cloudera released an easier-to-use version, the company had to raise more cash in order to accelerate its growth. Cloudera is going to release another new version of its software relatively soon. But Cloudera, which currently has some 20 customers, isn’t the only one offering Hadoop’s services; numerous hosted service providers are offering them as well — among them, Amazon.

Check out this comment from one of our readers, who points out the reasons why Hadoop is important and the role being played by the Cloudera team. And note this, from our from our sister site Ostatic:

Apache Hadoop is a Free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers. It enables applications to easily scale out to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System papers. It’s a top-level Apache project, being built and used by a community of contributors from all over the world. Yahoo has been the largest contributor to the project and uses Hadoop extensively in its Web Search and Advertising businesses. Hadoop was named after its creator’s (Doug Cutting, now a Yahoo employee) child’s stuffed elephant.

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Check Out “RWW Guide to Online Community Management”

Posted: June 1st, 2009, 5:00pm EDT by Om Malik

Our friends at ReadWriteWeb have released the “RWW Guide to Online Community Management,” a research report that guides you though the tricky issues that can crop up during community management. I thought I knew everything, but this report opened my eyes. It is chock-full of lessons and worth every penny of its $299 cost. You can sample the report by downloading this PDF file. Half the report is delivered in a PDF, while the other half is online and is called the “RWW Community Management Aggregator.” (Screenshot below the fold.)

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Cloudera, a Hadoop-focused Startup, Gets $6M In New Funding

Posted: June 1st, 2009, 3:30pm EDT by Om Malik

Cloudera, a Burlingame, Calif.-based startup that is building commercial services around open-source software framework Hadoop, has closed $6 million in Series B funding, bringing the total raised by the company to $11 million. The latest round of funding was led by Greylock Partners. Current investor Accel Partners also participated in this round. Cloudera’s other investors include Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware) and Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL). Cloudera was started in 2008 by Mike Olson; Christophe Bisciglia, who created and led Google’s academic cloud computing initiative; Dr. Amr Awadallah, Yahoo’s VP of engineering; and Jeff Hammerbacher, formerly with Facebook. (Related posts: The Data Mining Renaissance and Supercomputers, Hadoop, MapReduce and the Return to a Few Big Computers)

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Netlogic to Buy RMI, an Ambitious Network Chip Maker

Posted: June 1st, 2009, 12:37pm EDT by Om Malik

It was almost five years ago when I first learned about Raza Microelectronics (RMI), which was started by former AMD (and Nexgen) executive Atiq Raza. Raza took three projects from his incubator company, Raza Foundries, and merged them to form RMI. From there, RMI went on to buy Sandcraft, a microprocessor startup, and to raise a total of more than $120 million. Today comes news that NetLogic Microsystems, a Mountain View, Calif.-based fabless chip maker, has agreed to acquire RMI for $183.4 million in cash and stock. Not much of a return for investors, which include Benchmark Captial, Warburg Pincus, DAG Ventures and Advanced Equities. For NetLogic, however, this is a good buy — RMI has a nice portfolio of products that include chips for 4G networks and wireless backhaul networks, both growing opportunities in and of themselves.

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Countdown to Palm Pre: My Super-Quick Hands-On Review

Posted: May 31st, 2009, 11:30pm EDT by Om Malik

The buzz around the much-awaited Palm Pre has started. The make-or-break device that will define the destiny of the iconic handheld maker will hit the market later this week. For Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, it is a highly anticipated device that will hopefully bring out big-spending smartphone buyers. I have been less than sanguine about Palm’s chances, mostly because it is a company running on fumes and is competing in an extremely crowded marketplace, where Apple’s iPhone, Blackberry and Google’s Android have all the attention.

This past Friday, by sheer accident, someone showed me the new Palm Pre. I tweeted about it. As I said, it is a pretty good-looking device, but it feels a little plasticky and is lower in build quality than a BlackBerry. It is squat, has a nice screen, and is easy to grip. It is round in the right places. However, the slide-out keyboard seems flimsy and cluttered. Let’s just say that after the Blackberry Curve 8900 keyboard, it didn’t quite cut the mustard.

Some Pre Facts

Palm Pre will launch on June 6 on Sprint
It will cost $199.99 after a $100 rebate
Best Buy, RadioShack and certain Wal-Mart stores will sell the Pre, along with Sprint’s online store
You will need to buy the Everything Data plan for $69-$99.

There are a lot of features — multi-tasking applications, for instance, that I didn’t get to play around with much. However, thanks to a rock-solid Sprint EVDO network, browsing on the device was really fast. Palm seems to have done a great job of developing a WebKit-based browser. Its implementation seems to be on par with the WebKit-based browsers from Apple and Google. It easily trumps Nokia’s WebKit-based browser.

I liked how Palm has turned WebKit into the user interface for the phone. The phone is good at integrating apps with a unified address book and syncing.

Now, let’s talk about the Palm WebOS, its new operating system. From what you can read on the web, it seems to be one heck-of-an operating system, that is oozing with smarts that include live searching (of the entire phone and the Web), Unified address book (Facebook, Outlook and any other address books), Unified calendaring and dozens of other such features. [From GigaOM Archives]

I wish I had more time to play around with it, but these are very early impressions. Despite all that, I am not ready to rush to the nearest Sprint store and buy the device. Current Sprint subscribers clamoring for a good smartphone will likely be the early adopters of this phone.

In the world of smartphones, there are currently five players — Apple, RIM, Microsoft, Google and Nokia — Palm can bring up the rear. One thing Palm will have going for it: its developer community. Community, a good browser, a decent web-centric (WebOS) operating system, along with the current hype around Pre, should help Palm sell itself to someone more desperate to get into the smartphone business – like Dell.

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iPhone, Web Offer Lonely Planet A New Life

Posted: May 31st, 2009, 9:51pm EDT by Om Malik

It is fashionable for media companies to paint themselves as victims of an increasingly Google-dominated planet. Desperate publishers are happy to collude or play ball with anyone who offers them a straw. Instead, they should be looking at various opportunities offered by technology to find a brighter future.

To learn a trick or two, they should look at Lonely Planet, an Australian publisher of travel books. It is one of the few traditional publishers that has turned new technologies such as social networks, online video, location-based services and smartphones into engines of growth. Started in 1972 by Englishman Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen, the Melbourne-based travel guide company for most of its life made money by selling specialist books and guides to travelers around the world. In 2007, the Wheelers sold 75 percent of the company to BBC Worldwide for an undisclosed amount of money. The deal was rumored to be over $150 million.

New Wine, New Bottle.

“We want to (offer) not just books, but we wanted to provide travel tools and become a travel platform,” said Matt Goldberg, who took over as the chief executive of Lonely Planet. He was previously the senior vice president, Digital Strategy & Operations, at Wall Street Journal Digital. Goldberg contends that in order to succeed in the new digital and mobile world, one can’t approach these new opportunities as a publisher. “We have to think and behave like a digital media company,” he added, and not like a traditional publisher.

For instance, instead of simply repurposing its travel guides for the iPhone, the company took all the content, made it searchable, and enhanced it by embedding maps. It also made all the information geo-aware so as to capitalize on the GPS capabilities of the iPhone, Google phones, and soon the Palm Pre. In less than a month, Goldberg said, Lonely Planet has seen “hundreds of thousands” of downloads of its 20 city guides and several other products. The company is working with Palm and Nokia to develop special offerings for those devices.

The company tries to tailor its offerings so that they capitalize on a platform’s special hardware capabilities. “On Android-based devices, we can leverage the built-in compass to help you find things pretty quickly and help you get somewhere fast,” said Matthew Cashmore, who has a very dot-com title of Innovation Ecosystem Manager at Lonely Planet.”The information just pops up on your screen.”

Traffic, What Is It Good For?

I have often maintained that large portals and publishers have one asset that micropublishers and new web destinations seek — the eyeballs. The trouble is that with the destination web slowly crumbling, over the next few years, we are going to see eyeballs shift from the traditional destinations, further weakening the traditional media brands. Lonely Planet recognizes that.

In addition to its mobile efforts, Lonely Planet has built a blogging platform that allows folks to blog about their travels. The bloggers get to keep the advertising revenues, along with traffic that is funneled from the Lonely Planet web site.

“We get interesting, deeper and rich content on our sites from our community,” says Goldberg, “making the Lonely Planet web site more useful for visitors.” In other words, the company is sharing its traffic with its community.

In addition, it has launched Groups, which uses Google-backed Open Social to help travelers create micro social networks, depending on destinations and topics. The company has also helped foster a traveler community called Thorn Tree, which attracts nearly half a million visitors every month. And it has developed a trip traveler tool.

What next? I wouldn’t be surprised by an emphasis on transactions. Along with Web, Mobile and Books, Lonely Planet has launched a magazine and is producing television shows along with its parent, BBC.

The way I look at it — these guys are doing a good job of embracing change, and evolving with that change. I wish more publishers would think along these lines.

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Check Out Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

Posted: May 31st, 2009, 8:01pm EDT by Om Malik

On June 1, you can attend Mobile Monday Silicon Valley and meet some of the innovative startups, especially many involved with location-based services. Among the startups making presentations, you will find Skout, a mobile location-based social dating service, GV World Surfer, which allows you to point your phone at places to get information, and BooRah, which offers Android-based restaurant searches. The event, which is being held at the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., kicks off at 6:30 p.m. There will be some food and drinks for attendees. The event is free. Register here.

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Why We Are Cautious About Google’s Wave

Posted: May 29th, 2009, 5:00pm EDT by Om Malik

About two years ago, I wrote a column for Business 2.0 magazine entitled “Why We Hate E-mail.”

E-mail became the Internet’s first killer app — and therein lies the problem. As software goes, e-mail is almost socialist: From each according to his ability, to each whether or not he needs it. E-mail ought to be reinvented to meet the needs of our always-connected lives…E-mail has become a crutch, a way of passing the buck. Want to make an appointment? That’s 10 messages back and forth. Then there are corporate updates, birthday announcements, forwarded jokes, and (if you’re me) the occasional amorous ditty. Here’s where e-mail’s socialism turns from strength to weakness: It doesn’t matter if the message comes from a spammer hawking Viagra, your wife asking you to pick up some wine, your boss telling the company that Monday is a holiday, or a client asking for a meeting at his office at 11 a.m. In today’s inboxes, all e-mail messages are equal.

Like Fred Wilson, general partner at Union Square Ventures, the tyranny of email had me wistfully wishing for something more. As I went on to note:

In today’s inboxes, all e-mail messages are equal. In reality, of course, some are more equal than others. Spam, alerts, and calendar items all need to be treated separately. A smart inbox would — all in one interface — catch spam in junk filters, display the wine reminder in an IM, move company news to an RSS feed, and intelligently negotiate appointment requests with your calendar in the background.

So yesterday, as I was watching the Google executives present Google Wave at Moscone Center here in San Francisco, I was genuinely excited by the potential of this new application. It was everything I had dreamed of. My immediate thought, which I shared on my Twitter stream, was: Well Microsoft’s SharePoint team had better be worried because Wave is an extensible platform, with a lot of APIs, and as such could soon become a massive headache for Redmond’s fastest-growing business group. But it was clearly more than just that.

Nevertheless, I wanted to withhold any additional judgment until I’d had a chance to spend time with the product (and not look at it on the big screen). I also wanted to attend the press conference to hear more about what the execs had to say. More importantly, I needed time to think about it. In the interim, Jordan did a good job of summing up the pros and cons of Google Wave. We collaborated closely on his post, and I’m glad we’re being cautious. For it’s not that we don’t believe in the technology, but when something is described as game-changing and the greatest thing since sliced bread, it behooves one to pause and think.

It’s easy to arrive at conclusions that lack veracity. Others might be swayed by the winds and be wildly optimistic, but let’s just say that, thanks to my age and nature, I prefer to veer between “optimism” and “cautious optimism” when it comes to the prospect of new, ground-breaking technologies. “Email is the most successful protocol on the planet…we can do better,” is how Lars Rasmussen, one of the creators of the platform, described the ambition of the effort. He described it as a whole new communication system. No doubt about it –- too new.

My biggest question about Google Wave is how the company is going to bring about a behavior change and find viral growth in order for it to become the standard Google wants it to become. The company wants it to be an open protocol so that people can build their own Waves and at the same time collaborate and federate.

No one doubts the audacity of the idea, but for a project that has been a few years in the making, one would surely like to get some specifics. None were forthcoming during the press conference, however. I asked Google executives, among them co-founder Sergey Brin, these questions:

Why do you think the time for it is now? How do you think you can make it replace email? How long do you think it will take?

“Google Maps was on the edge of browser capability and the Wave is pushing the browser capability further and further,” Brin replied, pointing to the emergence of client (browser) technologies and the increasingly changing nature of communications. But the rest of my questions were brushed aside, mostly because they asked for specifics.

A day later, when thinking about Wave, I am reminded of one of my favorite television shows, “My Boys.” In a recent episode, one of the characters on the show, Mike, claimed that he could strike out a big-league hitter. He was still pitching as the episode ended.

Google’s claim of replacing email sounded much like Mike’s boast. The reality of doing it would be much harder than making the claim. Don’t get me wrong – I want Google Wave to succeed. It is, after all, the product of my dreams.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

A Few Fun Facts About Location-Based Services

Posted: May 29th, 2009, 12:17pm EDT by Om Malik

Compete, the web research company, has come up with some interesting findings about location-based services and their use among smartphone users. According to a survey of 1,000 such people:

1 in 3 currently use a LBS at least once a month.
Smartphone owners who use LBS are likely to spend more each month on their total wireless bill, in some cases more than $125 a month.
Weather, navigation and store locations are among most used location-based services. These are pretty mundane applications but they’re clearly getting a lot of traction.

As we have noted in the past, the emergence of the iPhone has boosted interest in LBS. BlackBerry and Android, meanwhile, are helping grow the total number of LBS-enabled mobile applications.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

Meet GigaOM Pro, Our Subscription-Only Research Service

Posted: May 28th, 2009, 8:00am EDT by Om Malik

When I was looking for funding for GigaOM nearly three years ago, I had a very simple, four-slide PowerPoint presentation that I showed to potential investors. Two slides focused on the past, but the other two — the “money slides” — focused on my plan to build the company. It wasn’t exactly a complicated plan. All I wanted to do was build multiple revenue streams from our core competency of analyzing key technology trends and business news.

Even back in 2006, it was fairly obvious that you couldn’t build a next-generation media entity by relying on advertising as your sole revenue source. But unlike some of the larger media companies, we didn’t want to charge for our existing offerings, aka our blogs. That just doesn’t make sense. Instead, we wanted to do what we do best: provide analysis and context, and offer you more content — content that is worth paying for.

We started out with our main offering, GigaOM, and have since grown into a network of seven ad-supported blogs. In 2007, we started our expansion into events with the launch of NewTeeVee Live, and we now host four major conferences and a handful of smaller events every year. Today, we are taking the next step, with the launch of GigaOM Pro, our subscription-only research and analysis service.

Our goal has always been to provide high-quality content that addresses the needs of our community. Many have privately told us that there’s a need for long-form analysis that is more in-depth than current blog posts, that offers a 360-degree view of the technology landscape. What folks weren’t looking for was another research firm — there are already dozens of them doing a fantastic job, so why compete with them?

So I tasked our team with developing a new kind of offering that would allow us to leverage the on-the-ground expertise and insight of our current GigaOM Network sites to enable deeper conversations with our community. The result is GigaOM Pro.

Using WordPress’ BuddyPress social platform, we have created a research-driven platform that allows informed insiders, our community of readers and our network of analysts, editors and reporters to engage on an ongoing basis. We want this to be your one-stop shop for getting a grip on some of the newer technology trends. We are kicking it off by following some of the most rapidly changing sectors of the technology industry — Infrastructure, Mobile, Green IT and Connected Consumer — and will add more in the coming weeks.

As always, the quality of the offering comes down to the people involved.

We watched many of the top analysts with deep domain expertise become free agents over the past couple of years, either to work as consultants or start boutique firms specializing in the emerging technologies on which we’re focused. Michael Wolf, who heads up our research effort, helped put together a strong line-up of those experts, including occasional GigaOM contributors Juergen Urbanski, George Gilbert and Chetan Sharma, as well as new additions Rachel Happe, Steve Hawley and Clint Wheelock. Their experience and insight into their markets, as well as their work with their individual clients, make them uniquely qualified to deliver fresh, original research on the trends you want to hear about. As of today, we’ve got 17 research pieces that are available for download as PDFs if you subscribe for the service. (Check out “Social Media in the Enterprise” and “Will Storage Go The Way of The Server?“) In the next few weeks, we’ll be adding new reports in all of our topic areas.

Here’s what else you can find on GigaOM Pro:

What: GigaOM Pro, a subscription-only service that allows you access to research and analysis by a team of GigaOM analysts, editorial curators and our in-house editorial team. The service is being introduced at $79 a year and is available at http://pro.gigaom.com. We are keeping the introductory price low enough to include a larger number of people so we can foster stronger conversations within the new site.

Details: GigaOM Pro is a new approach to research focused on delivering timely, high-value reports and analysis for technology innovators and insiders at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research vendors. Organized around technology verticals, GigaOM Pro provides subscribers with in-depth market research on emerging technologies, including Green IT, Infrastructure, the Connected Consumer, and Mobile, as well as daily insight into developing trends and events.

GigaOM Pro is divided into four verticals. Each vertical offers:

Briefings: classic research reports that focus on future growth opportunities offered by new technologies and trends in addition to helping you understand the disruptive impact of these technologies on various businesses.
Notes: analysts’ deeper dives into more-focused topics such as IPTV market dynamics, Google’s mobile app strategy, and VMware’s vSphere announcement.
Long Views: written by our in-house team, these editorial features look at key new developments in our markets, with a view to helping you spot tech business opportunities.
Quarterly Wrap-ups: reviews of previous quarter’s news in each domain, organized by themes and big events, based on blog posts from the last quarter. These wrap-ups provide larger context to the Green IT, Connected Consumer, Mobile and Infrastructure sectors we cover.
Weekly Updates: highlights of the weekly important news, emerging trends, and critical issues within each topic area.
Curated Links: Hand-picked links from around the web relating to each vertical. They provide you a quick, easy way to get a handle on some of the key developments in all the verticals we track.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

700 Million Broadband Subscribers By 2013

Posted: May 27th, 2009, 9:45pm EDT by Om Malik

The wireless and broadband revolution is finally spreading to the final frontiers of our planet. India, China, Brazil, Russia and the African continent have become major drivers of growth of the telecom networks. Across the planet people are signing up for either mobile services, landlines or broadband connections. And we are not done yet. According to new research by Telegeography, there will be 2.5 billion new subscribers across the planet between now and 2013. The firm also predicts that:

By the end of 2013 there will be 700 million broadband subscribers.
There will be 2 billion wireless subscribers by 2013, up 60 percent from today.
By the end of 2013 there will be no fewer than 2.5 billion net new subscribers or revenue-generating units.
The Asia Pacific region will account for 50 percent of the total subscribers in 2013, up from 28 percent at present.
North America’s share will decline to 7 percent, but they will generate 23 percent of total revenues.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

AT&T Moves Up Its LTE Rollout, Admits To Network Issues

Posted: May 27th, 2009, 2:49pm EDT by Om Malik

Nothing quite works like the threat of the possibility of losing a money-making asset. With rumors that Apple is flirting with Verizon over a future partnership, AT&T has abruptly changed its future wireless broadband plans to include a sudden acceleration of its LTE deployment. LTE is an acronym for Long Term Evolution, the 4G wireless technology that is being favored by most carriers on a global level. Today, AT&T issued a press release touting even faster 3G mobile broadband speeds. Buried in the press release was this little nugget:”AT&T plans to begin LTE trials in 2010, with deployment beginning in 2011.”

Wow! Ma Bell has been insistent that its 3G network has a lot of headroom and it doesn’t need LTE right away. It had hemmed and hawed, saying it wouldn’t begin testing until 2010 or 2011, with full deployment coming after that. What has changed is that, as we pointed out last month, LTE might have been the real reason why Apple and Verizon were getting cozy. As part of today’s announcement, AT&T said:

It will boost 3G speeds to HSPA 7.2, and the network upgrades will end by 2011.
It plans to begin LTE trials in 2010, with deployment beginning in 2011.
The upgraded network platform could allow for theoretical peak speeds of 7.2Mbps, though the speeds you are going to get are likely to be much lower.
It will introduce multiple HSPA 7.2-compatible laptop cards and smartphones beginning later this year. You can count on one of them being Apple’s new iPhone.

Having been a harsh critic of AT&T, I liked that the company is finally addressing its network problems. Even CEO Randall Stephenson admitted onstage at the D Conference that there were problems and the company wasn’t quite ready. Of course, at the time, company executives said otherwise. In fact, most of its 3G-related advertising is misleading.

According to the press release:

In addition to the planned speed upgrade, AT&T is enhancing its mobile broadband coverage by nearly doubling the wireless spectrum dedicated to 3G in most metropolitan areas to deliver stronger in-building reception and more overall network capacity. Also, AT&T is adding thousands of new cell site backhaul connections to support the higher mobile broadband speeds enabled by HSPA 7.2 and LTE.

The company has so far been in complete denial about its network coverage. The limitations of its network were exposed during SXSW earlier this year. AT&T has refused to discuss what it was doing in order to fix the problem, instead putting its head in the sand. Today’s press release is the first step in admitting that it has had a problem. Here are some of the things AT&T is doing:

Almost doubling the radio frequency capacity. It will be deploying more of its 3G network on the 850 MHz spectrum.
More bandwidth to cell sites including adding fiber-optic connectivity and additional capacity to thousands of cell sites across the country this year.
More cell sites. Deployment of about 2,100 new cell sites across the country.
Many AT&T smartphones will be able to switch seamlessly between 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.
MicroCells. Customer trials leading toward general availability of AT&T 3G MicroCell offerings, which utilize femtocells to enhance in-building wireless coverage.
AT&T plans to spend between $17 billion and $18 billion on its network in 2009.

Of course, we wonder what happens to some of those older phones that, like iPhone 1.0, work with the older EDGE network. We wanted to ask Ma Bell about the dropped call problems, but the executives are too busy with meetings or talking to reporters who don’t ask tough questions.

There is an error in the slide. HSPA+ should read 20+ Mbps. It currently reads 20+ kbps. The error is regretted.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

Mobile Data Growth Boosting Backhaul Demand

Posted: May 27th, 2009, 1:45pm EDT by Om Malik

Thanks to the emergence of superphones like the iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and the T-Mobile G-1, we have seen a steady increase in the demand for mobile data services. The easy availability of popular web services such as Facebook and Google Mail on higher-end feature phones has only helped boost the demand for mobile data. And such demand has helped carriers overcome stagnating voice- and text-related revenues, especially in the U.S., as the quarterly results of major phone companies show.

Cole Brodman, chief technology office of T-Mobile USA, in a recent GigaOM interview said that the company is currently providing 6 Mbps per site. “Tomorrow I think the first steps are going to be something more like 20-25Mbps, quickly followed by 50Mbps, and eventually getting to 100Mbps-plus,” he said. T-Mobile isn’t alone in its scramble to bulk up the backhaul as according to some forecasts, there will be more than a billion mobile broadband phone subscribers by end of 2010. While data has been a good way for the wireless operators to scoop up easy cash, they’re all facing a future in which they’ll be spending a lot of money on infrastructure. According to market research firm Infonetics Research:

By 2010, data traffic will surpass voice traffic on mobile networks.
Mobile backhaul equipment investments jumped a healthy 19 percent in 2008 to $4.6 billion worldwide, and revenue is set to explode over the next five years and beyond.
Demand for mobile backhaul equipment is seen topping $10 billion by 2011.

Why? Because as In-Stat, another market research firm, notes, carriers worldwide will need some 90,000 Gbps of capacity in the last mile of the backhaul network by the end of 2013 to support the world’s cellular and WiMAX networks. The big boost will come for the backhaul Ethernet-based equipment, whether in the form of microwave, fiber or copper. Microwave will be a big winner, Infonetics predicts. Roughly 60 percent of backhaul cell site connections in most regions of the world are microwave, the firms estimates, and demand is growing fast, including here in the U.S.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

How Pogoplug Works

Posted: May 22nd, 2009, 8:11pm EDT by Om Malik

Pogoplug, the little gadget that turns any USB-enabled drive into a personal storage locker accessible over the Internet, impressed me as much as it did Kevin over at our sister site jkOnTheRun. But I really wanted to learn how exactly it worked. So I reached out to Pogoplug maker Cloud Engines’ chief technology officer, Brad Dietrich, who in the past has worked in digital device startups such as Mediabolic (which has since been bought by Macrovision). He shared some insights with me via email as the innards of this device, which is a computer in its own right.

Om: Are you using an embedded Linux on this device?

Brad Dietrich: Yes, we are running a Linux 2.6.22.18 kernel on a Marvell ARM SOC. My team and myself have been working in the embedded Linux world for well over 10 years now (my background was at Mediabolic and the digital home) and we are very good at stripping things down to a bare minimum.

Om: Can you share some details?

Dietrich: Since we are so familiar with Linux’s kernel and networking stack, we rely on very little other software than the Linux kernel and the C library. Although the hardware will run the full version of Ubuntu for ARM (and some of our users are running it on their Pogoplugs), we took the approach of owning the majority of the feature stack ourselves so we could produce a good user experience that was fully integrated. We believe that seamless end user integration and location independence is absolutely critical to bringing the complexity of networking devices mainstream.

Om: How does it auto-configure the network connection and overcome some of the challenges posed by firewalls and the heterogeneous nature of home and broadband networks?

Dietrich: First of all, we make some assumptions about what most consumer networks look like today. We have worked with many of the mass market retail routers for many years, and know their idiosyncrasies and standard configurations. As you probably are aware, the security model that many of these devices have always taken is that devices that are physically connected to the LAN side of the Ethernet are implicitly trusted and can immediately receive DHCP addresses and route outbound connections to the Internet. Inbound packets are always denied unless they are responses to outbound-initiated requests. This security model is one of the reasons we chose to make the Pogoplug use only wired Ethernet. Wi-Fi has so many legacy configuration complexities that are nowhere near as transparent to set up.

Om: What happens when Pogoplug is connected to the Internet?

Dietrich: Once the Pogoplug has received a DHCP address and verifies it can speak out to our service on the Internet, technically the device is fully configured and nothing is required to configure. The service will tunnel all requests back from the Internet to the Pogoplug through this outbound connection that is established. If the device is unable to receive DHCP, yet we still have functioning Ethernet, we at least can communicate to the PC over the LAN, and there are fall-back steps to accommodate these more sophisticated network configurations.

Om: How do you ensure that Pogoplug is secure and is accessible for the users?

Dietrich: The only other step that is required in our “activation” is the process of ensuring that a user has access to the device. For this, we make similar security assumptions that the consumer-grade firewall is already making, namely that if the user has physical access to the device at the time the device is first turned on, then they must own the device. We guarantee this physical access by two methods. One, the Pogoplug is on the same LAN as the customer’s PC attempting to activate the Pogoplug; and two, the user has the security code (a 26-digit code) that is unique to the Pogoplug. The result of the user proving this access is to grant that user as the primary owner of the Pogoplug in question, and it is unable to be activated by anyone else until that user unregisters the device from their account.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

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Why It’s the Megabits, Not the MIPs, That Matter

Posted: May 22nd, 2009, 5:30pm EDT by Om Malik

Earlier this morning I read the comments of Eli Harari, chief executive of Flash memory chip maker SanDisk, in which he tells The New York Times’ Saul Hansell that we are counting down to the end of Moore’s Law.

“We are running out of electrons. When we started out we had about one million electrons per cell,” or locations where information is stored on a chip, he said. “We are now down to a few hundred.” This simply can’t go on forever, he noted: “We can’t get below one.’”

In what could be viewed as a karmic retort to The Times’ Bits Blog post, John Gruber reported that Apple was going to increase the speed of its processor by 1.5 times to 600 MHz, making it easier for the iPhone to render web pages and enhance application usage. The two stories elicited a similar response from me: Why are we measuring Moore’s Law using a yardstick from the PC era?

Processing power and cramming more storage onto chips is something that was part of the PC boom, as Gruber so eloquently illustrates in his post. So why aren’t we phrasing the conversation in the context of networks and connectivity? After all, how many of us really use unconnected computing devices? In today’s world, don’t megabits per second (Mbps) matter more than the MIPS?

My COMMputing (Communications+computing) view of the world puts the speed of the networks and the availability of connectivity at a level higher than the raw oomph of a processor or the capacity of a memory chip. I was musing about this as I walked to the office, so when arrived I got on the phone with Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos, who will be appearing at our upcoming Structure 09 conference on June 25. Papadopoulos has been involved with computers — super and small — for a long time, and as such knows a thing or two about Moore’s Law, so I asked him for his take.

“Moore’s Law is a proxy for the PC industry and that’s what it has come to mean,” he told me. But, he added, “It is much more than that.” With virtualization and parallelism, he said, the basic tenets of Moore’s Law live on. “Silicon is like steel. We have not come to terms with that as an industry and as a society.” I most certainly agree. How you use the cheap stuff and build interesting things is far more relevant. As Papadopoulos noted, the emergence of systems-in-a-package, or SiP, technology, “allows you to combine various different type of silicon modules and built something entirely new. Like combining RF modules, DSPs and memory for a mobile phone.” Indeed, SiP “is a major discontinuity in the semiconductor business,” wrote Sramana Mitra back in April 2005. “SiP will put a further brake in the slowdown of Moore’s Law.” And from Wikipedia:

An example SiP can contain several chips — such as a specialized processor, DRAM, flash memory— combined with passive components — resistors and capacitors — all mounted on the same substrate. This means that a complete functional unit can be built in a multi-chip package, so that few external components need to be added to make it work. This is particularly valuable in space constrained environments like MP3 players and mobile phones as it reduces the complexity of the printed circuit board and overall design.

Thanks to such developments, communications are now being embedded natively into devices that were previously “compute only.” Which brings me back to COMMputing. It doesn’t matter how fast the iPhone processor becomes — all that matters is whether AT&T’s wireless pipe is robust enough for me to effectively leverage the “hardware goodness” of the device. If you don’t have a fast enough network, then you won’t have anything to render on the browser.

“If you ask people if they had a choice of getting a computer with a processor that is 10 times more powerful than their current one, or get a connection that is 10 times as fast, most people would opt for the latter,” Papadopoulos pointed out. He’s is a believer in the 4G wireless broadband technology called Long-Term Evolution (LTE) because he knows that multimegabit wireless speeds are going to spawn a brand-new class of devices. These devices won’t have the fastest processor, or the biggest flash memory drive. Instead they will be connected at high speeds and information and services will be served up over the Internet — instantly.

And at that point no one will ask, how fast is that processor?

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

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Pogoplug: My MacBook Air’s Second New Best Friend

Posted: May 21st, 2009, 8:07pm EDT by Om Malik

product-fpo A few weeks back, Kevin over on sister site jkOnTheRun wrote about Pogoplug, a nifty little device made by Cloud Engines, a San Francisco-based startup that recently raised an undisclosed amount of money from Ryan MacIyntre of Foundry Group. Pogoplug is a small gizmo, the size of a power adapter, that turns any USB-enabled drive into a personal storage locker accessible over the Internet. The little device hooks up to a local storage device via USB and can be connected to a broadband connection via a router. It seemed pretty easy to set up, which is precisely is what attracted me to it in the first place.

Earlier this week I received the Pogoplug for review. It came in a nice little box, packaged much like an iPhone. I took it out, plugged it into the power source, connected it to the Internet connection and hooked it up to a 250 Gb Seagate Freeagent drive. I then went to Pogoplug’s web site, entered the serial number on the box as well as my email and password (of choice). A confirmation email was then sent over to me, and less than five minutes after opening the box, I had a 250 Gb drive with my entire jazz collection on the web. To borrow from a popular ad, it was so simple that even a caveman could do it.

You can download special software that puts Pogoplug on your desktop, allowing you to drag and drop files like you would off a locally attached drive, which you can then access remotely. Even on slower 3G connections, it’s fairly easy to grab your files. I now stream music (one song at a time) off my local drive via the browser using the built-in capabilities of the Pogoplug.

The interface for the browser-based access to Pogoplug is pretty slick, utilizing technologies such as AJAX. The file types are represented with large icons. You can share files with others by sending them an email, and access files via a special application on an iPod Touch. I wish they had built a media player application into the app; that would allow me to watch videos, create playlists and enjoy photo slideshows when away from home. Hopefully, that will come sooner than later.

For now, the little device has helped me overcome the space limitations of my MacBook Air. If you own a MacBook Air, just like the Apple Display, Pogoplug is a must-have add-on. And even if you don’t own a MacBook Air, you still should buy one. Pogoplug is perhaps the most useful little gizmo you will come across this year.

Are you looking for opportunities in Cloud Computing? Then check out GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

Is the Latest Apple OS Update Causing Problems?

Posted: May 14th, 2009, 5:38pm EDT by Om Malik

Last last night, I ended up updating my MacBook to Mac OS X 10.5.7, the latest version of the software. It’s caused two problems: The first is that it’s killed the audio output on the computer; in the preferences pane, the only option I have is “digital output.” The second problem has been an overall degradation in performance — think Shaq O’Neal moving around a basketball court with an injured knee.

I ended up tweeting about my audio predicament, and was immediately offered ways on how to fix the problems. Sadly, none of them helped with the audio but they did help restore the system performance. However, since then a lot of people have described a whole myriad of problems associated with this OS upgrade — some have mentioned display problems, others are complaining of slow speeds and many are like me: their computers are without sound. Apple’s support discussion forums are chock full of complaints (though on the flip side, the OS X 10.5.7 does boost the battery life of netbooks.)

If you are a Mac owner, I would say don’t upgrade to the latest OS version…at least not ’til the problems are solved. I am off to the Genius Bar to see if they can fix the sound.

A Few Notable Things In Tech Land

Posted: May 13th, 2009, 4:29pm EDT by Om Malik

Notable Observation:

“In the context of software, the word Enterprise has now officially come to mean software that sucks. Enterprise Software hit the nadir of suckitude at the launch of Enjoy SAP. This is like the American Dental Association launching Enjoy Root Canal. SAP is certainly an easy target, but let’s face it, ‘Enterprise Software’ is generally a poorly integrated mess. Working with Enterprise Software feels a bit like walking through an industrial landfill or an airport hangar. Nothing is built to human scale.” – Miko Matsumura, chief strategist, Software AG

Notable News:

Hitwise says paid search listings are down 26 percent. That can’t be good for anyone, including Google.
Rackspace’s cloud revenues go past $10 million, but bigger growth expected.
Just like IBM and Oracle, even HP wanted to buy Sun Microsystems.
Google Mail now has the ability to integrates tasks.
Lessons from changes in Twitter that caused an uproar among Twitter users.

Notable Fundings:

Babble Media raises $1.25 million from Village Ventures and Greycroft Partners.

Notable Deals:

Oracle buys Virtual Iron, server virtualization management software for an undisclosed amount of money.
SAP buys Clear Standards, a carbon management tech firm based in Sterling, Va.

Tellme Co-Founders to Leave Microsoft

Posted: May 13th, 2009, 4:18pm EDT by Om Malik

tellme_logo Kara Swisher reported earlier today that Tellme founder Mike McCue is leaving Microsoft at the end of June 2009. His Tellme co-founder, Angus Davis, is leaving the company as well. He sent out an email to his friends and family, shortly after announcing the news to the Tellme team. I’ve covered the speech-recognition company from when it was started to the day it became part of Microsoft after the software giant bought it for a rumored $800 million. Microsoft has plans to use voice as a mobile phone interface. Mike and Angus went through some serious ups and downs with Tellme. It was a deal with AT&T that helped Tellme get its mojo. I don’t think their exit disrupts Tellme’s operations. My question is, what do they do next?

For GigaOM Readers: Mobile Monday Amsterdam on June 1

Posted: May 13th, 2009, 4:11pm EDT by Om Malik

momoamsterdam My friends in Amsterdam are organizing a special Mobile Monday event on June 1, 2009, that features some of today’s great mobile thinkers, such as Howard Rheingold and Alan Moore. An all-star lineup will discuss the future of mobile and mobile applications. If you are in or around Amsterdam, you should check out the event. You can RSVP by emailing Yuri van Geest at yuri @ mobilemonday.nl. They are saving some seats for GigaOM readers.

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Twitter’s Tipping Point

Posted: May 3rd, 2009, 10:28pm EDT by Om Malik

This past weekend, while walking around San Francisco’s Union Square shopping area, I decided to stop by at one of my favorite stores — Thomas Pink — to see if they had any exciting new shirts worth buying. While shopping options remained tame, I did get into a discussion with one of the salespeople, who in our chitchat picked up on the fact that I’m a technology writer.

“So what is this Twitter all about?” he asked me. I was taken aback by such a question in a decidedly non-tech and retail setting, but then quickly realized that Twitter perhaps is one of the most commonly used words in the media today. Everyone from Oprah to blathering potato-heads on cable television channels are touting their Twitter accounts, and that interest has started to spill over into the mainstream. This is making an already hot service by a San Francisco-based startup even hotter. Twitter added 5 million new users in March 2009, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a market research firm. Nielsen says nearly 60 percent of new Twitter users bail on the service as they try to figure it out.

In the past, I have pointed out that Twitter is many things to many people. The many definitions of Twitter are what actually make it very powerful. (Dave Winer, on the other hand, believes that soon there will be “many different Twitters” for precisely those reasons.)

Take my Thomas Pink salesperson. After some basic questions about Twitter, he leaped to the money question: How he could boost his sales at the store via Twitter? Now Twitter as a channel for e-commerce is something I don’t actively think about, but his question did make me think: A salesperson could create a list of followers to whom he or she can broadcast messages such as “your favorite striped shirts are available at 30 percent off” — or something like that.

Regardless of how Twitter mutates, this weekend shopping trip turned out to be yet another proof-point that Twitter might be hitting a tipping point.

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Verizon’s Wi-Fi Network: Is That a Marketing Stunt As Well?

Posted: May 1st, 2009, 6:13pm EDT by Om Malik

Back in February, Cablevision announced a Wi-Fi initiative that would give free access to its customers in parts of New York and New Jersey. In response, a Verizon spokesperson told The New Jersey Star-Ledger:

“New Jersey is a fast-growing area for Verizon, so industry insiders know that our gains are coming from someone’s losses,” said spokesman Rich Young. “We consider cable’s local Wi-Fi initiatives to be nothing more than a marketing stunt.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Vishesh Kumar has the scoop on a new Wi-Fi effort by Verizon.

Verizon Communications Inc. is preparing to offer free Wi-Fi access at hotspots to subscribers to its home broadband services, according to people familiar with the matter. The phone giant will partner with Boingo.

Verizon had earlier embarked on a Wi-Fi buildout, changed its mind and instead pushed for the sale of its EVDO service. They plan to launch a limited version of their 4G Wireless service, which uses LTE technologies, sometime later this year. So why this sudden need for Wi-Fi?

Maybe they want to show Apple that they have a Wi-Fi network and are on par with AT&T. In doing so, they could make a strong case for getting the iPhone or some other Apple device on their network(s.)

Cloud computing has shifted from an idea to reality. Hear from senior execs at Salesforce, Amazon, Akamai, Google, Sun, HP, Facebook and 60 more! Learn more »

Twitter Is Giving Facebook an Inferiority Complex

Posted: May 1st, 2009, 6:06pm EDT by Om Malik

I’m not sure why, but Facebook seems to be completely thrown off its game by Twitter and all the attention being lavished on San Francisco-based start-up. First Facebook added Twitter-styled status updates, much to the chagrin of its users. And now we’re noticing a marked increase in the number of communiques from the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network’s press department that roughly translate into, “Look at me, I’m bigger than Twitter. Seriously, pay attention to me — I am bigger than Twitter. Take this email from earlier today:

You may have seen that the White House has created an official page on Facebook. This was done in parallel with official presences on MySpace and Twitter, which makes for an interesting case study in distribution. Check the scoreboard at ~1:40pm PDT - Facebook (31,281 fans), Twitter (8,507 followers) and MySpace (4,052 followers.)

Today’s email reminded me of the ones I used to get from MySpace’s PR department when Facebook was taking its place as the media darling, in which they would go to extreme lengths to point out how much bigger they were. Why is it that the biggest, most powerful companies always have the thinnest skin? Being in a Friday kind of mood, I’m just going to chalk it up to insecurity.

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Inside Facebook’s Photo Factory

Posted: April 30th, 2009, 6:30pm EDT by Om Malik

Ever since I got BlackBerry 8900 with a 3.2 Megapixel camera, I’ve been busy taking photos -– randomly at times -– and uploading them to my Facebook account to share with 2,000 or so of my closest friends. Apparently I’m just one of millions of people who upload nearly 220 million images to Facebook every week.

In a blog post today, Facebook shares some secrets of its photo infrastructure, which is based on its core innovation, Haystack. First let me give you some fun facts about Facebook Photos, which will help you understand why what they’ve done is so impressive.

Facebook users have uploaded more than 15 billion photos to date, making it the biggest photo-sharing site on the web.
For each uploaded photo, Facebook generates and stores four images of different sizes, which translates into a total of 60 billion images and 1.5 petabytes of storage.
Facebook adds 220 million new photos per week or roughly to 25 terabytes of additional storage.
At the peak there are 550,000 images served per second. (See more in this video.)

Growth at such speeds made it almost impossible for Facebook to solve the scaling problem by throwing more hardware at it; they needed a more creative solution. Enter Doug Beaver, Peter Vajgel and Jason Sobel –- three Facebook engineers who came up with the idea of Haystack Photo Infrastructure.

“What we needed was something that was fast and had the ability to back up data really fast,” said Beaver in an interview earlier today. The concept they came up with was pretty simple and yet very powerful. “Think of Haystack as a service that runs on another file system,” explained Beaver. It is a system that does only one thing -– photos -– and does it very well. From the Facebook blog post:

The new photo infrastructure merges the photo serving tier and storage tier into one physical tier. It implements a HTTP based photo server, which stores photos in a generic object store called Haystack. The main requirement for the new tier was to eliminate any unnecessary metadata overhead for photo read operations, so that each read I/O operation was only reading actual photo data (instead of filesystem metadata).

The Haystack infrastructure is comprised of commodity servers. Again, from the post:

Haystack is deployed on top of commodity storage blades. The typical hardware configuration of a 2U storage blade is: 2 x quad-core CPUs, 16GB – 32GB memory, hardware raid controller with 256MB – 512MB of NVRAM cache and 12+ 1TB SATA drives

Typically when you upload photos to a photo-sharing site, each image is stored as a file and as a result has its own metadata, which gets magnified many times when there are millions of files. This imposes severe limitations. As a result, most end up using content delivery networks to serve photos — a very costly proposition. By comparison, the Haystack object store sits on top of this storage. Each photo is akin to a needle and has a certain amount of information — its identity and location — associated with it. (Finding the photo is akin to finding a needle in the haystack, hence the name of the system.)

That information is in turn used to build an index file. A copy of the index is written into the memory of the “system,” making it very easy to find and in turn serve files at lightening-fast speeds. This rather simple-sounding process means the system needs just a third the number of I/O operations typically required, making it possible to use just one-third of the hardware resources — all of which translates into tremendous cost savings for Facebook, especially considering how fast they’re growing.

Next time I upload a photo, I will be sure to remember that.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

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Flickr Hit Hard by Yahoo Layoffs

Posted: April 30th, 2009, 1:12am EDT by Om Malik

Updated: Yahoo layoffs have started and they seem to have hit the Flickr team. Many engineers from the service have been either laid off or are leaving on their own. Rev Dan Catt, Ashot Petrosian and Neil Kandalgaonkar were amongst those who tweeted about their exits. Catt, for instance, is moving back to UK. I am told Cal Henderson, Flickr Architect – a rock star developer — has also left, though I have not been able to confirm that. His name is missing from Flickr’s About page , but I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

I dropped Henderson an email to confirm. He emailed back this morning. “I have left Flickr/Yahoo. I don’t have any plans yet, besides playing lots of video games and enjoying the san francisco summer,” he wrote back. Kara Swisher says he’s is working with Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, on a new stealthy startup.

Meanwhile check out his presentation about scalable web architectures. Flickr was spared from cuts for a long time but in recent months has been slowly trimming its staff. Frankly, cutting the Flickr team is a bit of a head-scratcher: That group is one of the few pockets of future-thinking tinkerers at Yahoo, especially when it comes to building new media experiences around “social objects” such as photos.

Update#2: We’re hearing that further changes at Yahoo’s Flickr are going to be announced shortly, including exits of some senior/director-level people.

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Verizon: Cablevision’s 101 Mbps Broadband a “Parlor Trick”

Posted: April 29th, 2009, 11:18pm EDT by Om Malik

Earlier this evening, a Verizon spokesperson sent out a link to a post on Verizon’s blog about the recently announced 100 Mbps broadband offer from Cablevision, a Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable company. The offer was a “parlor trick,” Verizon said. That argument is one we’ve heard often when it comes to cable broadband.

With today’s technology, you don’t have to break much of a sweat to deliver 100 Mbps to a few customers. But given the inherent limits of the cable platform, a cluster of bandwidth junkies living near each other could be a real problem. One estimate is that a single 101 Mbps customer would use some 60% of the capacity in a neighborhood. Other users? Outta luck.

DSL Reports’ Karl Bode has the best response to that charge. “We watched Cablevision completely take the brakes off of DOCSIS 2.0 by offering consumers uncapped (in the true sense of the word) 30Mbps connections, and the company managed to survive the last three years without any sort of ‘coaxapocalypse,’” he writes.

I had the same thought and had a back-and-forth with Verizon’s spokesperson, who essentially said that GPON is a better technology option and they deliver what they promise. Fair enough — I have yet to hear anyone complain about bandwidth delivered by Verizon’s FiOS. At the same time, no major hue and cry has broken out over Cablevision’s cable broadband performance. Cablevision is selling broadband to half the homes in its service area, so any problems would be aired pretty quickly.

To me, Verizon’s response to the Cablevision offer shows that they are finding themselves on the back foot. They don’t have a 100 Mbps service. Cablevision’s offer puts pricing pressure on Verizon’s 50 Mbps offer, which costs upwards of $140 a month. Any price competition gives Verizon, which has spent $23 billion on its FiOS buildout, fiscal heartburn.

I bet we haven’t heard the last of this battle of broadband service providers. That’s OK — I’m glad to see that at least in one part of the country, broadband competition is working and resulting in better options for consumers. I wish that were the case in San Francisco.

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With MySpace Changes, a Social Networking Era Ends

Posted: April 23rd, 2009, 2:56am EDT by Om Malik

Murdochs & MySpacers Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe in Happier Days. (Photo via Flickr courtesy of Oxfam America)

The legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra is rumored to have said about a restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.” That is precisely how I feel about MySpace, which apparently has a lot of visitors, especially in the U.S., where it is marginally ahead of Facebook, but no one I know actually uses it.

Things are only going to get tougher — Google’s deal with News Corp is going to end soon, and with it a steady spigot of cash will be turned off for a service that is struggling to grow revenues. Like an ’80s rock band, MySpace’s time has come and gone. And nothing reflects that more than the exits of MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and his long-time cohort, President Tom Anderson. DeWolfe ran the company from 2003, helped sell it to News Corp for $580 million in 2005 and later helped negotiate a $900 million advertising deal with Google. Since then, MySpace has lost its buzz to Facebook (which is in turn losing that buzz to Twitter). It attempted to become an app platform, but that hasn’t worked out as well. Being a media entrepreneur, I have religiously studied Rupert Murdoch’s career. At the first sign of diminishing returns, Murdoch puts a media entity up for sale, and tries to swap his tin mine for one producing gold. He tried to do that when he attempted to pawn off MySpace to Yahoo.

The clock has been ticking on MySpace and its executives. Earlier this year, COO Amit Kapur and two other long-time MySpace employees left the company because they couldn’t get the contracts they wanted. Their exit was spun by News Corp. After reading various accounts of DeWolfe’s exit, you can see they left Chris out to dry — something I find particularly distasteful.

Regardless of his exit, there is a strategy in place that could turn MySpace into a decent enough money maker: MySpace Music. By looking to social network’s musical roots, MySpace executives realized that they could build the MTV of the broadband generation. Combining text, audio, video, and social abilities with its audience, MySpace can thrive as a niche yet lucrative musical destination. A lot has to go right for that to happen, though. I have outlined a long list of reservations about MySpace Music.

Back in November 2008, Kevin Kelleher noted, “Social networks spent too much time trying to build audiences without building a solid business model.” With a recession raging and the advertising market in a slump, the social networks have to figure out business models — fast. For MySpace it could mean capturing music industry dollars. MySpace wouldn’t be the first social network looking for niche riches. Hi5, a San Francisco-based social network that’s popular outside of the U.S., recently cut half of its workforce and is said to be pivoting into becoming a social gaming destination. Others are going to soon follow. Folks, what we are seeing is an end of general purpose, broad social networking.

Finally, after nearly two years of us saying so, social is now simply part of the web fabric. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recognized that and since then has been pushing hard on Facebook Connect, which is a simple authentication method that also allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. With over 200 million Facebookers, Mark has somewhat of a future.

DeWolfe should take this unceremonious exit as a blessing in disguise. Or as Yogi would say, “It gets late early around here…”

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For VMWare Growth Is Vanishing

Posted: April 23rd, 2009, 1:21am EDT by Om Malik

To zoom, click on the image.

Virtualization pioneer VMware reported first-quarter 2009 earnings that were great, but the days of super growth are over. Revenues were $470.3 million, down sharply from the fourth quarter of 2008. Though a key player in the hot cloud computing market, VMware is facing the prospect of sales that will be either flat or down during the second quarter of 2009. There is commoditization pressure, especially for the base-level hypervisor, which is being given away for free by rivals. Technology Business Research’s senior analyst Allan Krans thinks the way forward for VMware is to move into premium products. VMware yesterday announced a whole soups-to-nuts solution that fits the bill. Whether it sells — that remains to be seen.

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Why AT&T Is Desperately Addicted to the iPhone

Posted: April 22nd, 2009, 8:35pm EDT by Om Malik

A few weeks ago, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told the Wall Street Journal that his company was interested in extending its exclusive contract with Apple through 2011. It was interesting to see a senior executive at one of world’s largest telecom companies tip his hand publicly. Fast-forward to today, when Ma Bell reported its first-quarter 2009 earnings, and you start to get a handle on why AT&T is hooked on Apple and so desperately needs it to introduce new iPhone models. First a little math from their earnings release: AT&T added 875,000 new postpaid subscribers in the most recent quarter and 1.6 million iPhone activations, “more than 40 percent of them for customers who were new to the company.” That means roughly 640,000, or a whopping 73 percent of their total net new subscribers, came to AT&T because of Apple’s iPhone.

To better illustrate the growing Apple addiction at AT&T, let’s go back to AT&T’s fourth-quarter 2008 results. During that three-month period nearly 1.9 million 3G iPhones were activated, and 40 percent of them, or about 760,000, were new to AT&T. In other words, 36 percent of AT&T’s new customers signed up because of the iPhone.

From a revenue perspective, during the first quarter of 2009, the average iPhone user gave AT&T about $94.74 a month vs. an average postpaid AT&T customer, who spends about $59.21 a month with the company. (Actually if you took all iPhone monthly subscriptions out of the equation, that number would be even lower.) At $94.74 each, the 640,000 net new subscribers bring in about $60 million a month in additional revenues for AT&T. Given how drastically AT&T’s landline and business voice sales are tanking, it makes sense why AT&T is so desperately stuck on the iPhone.

“Those numbers underscore why the exclusivity and the refresh of the (iPhone) product line are pretty important for AT&T,” said John Hodulik, telecom analyst with UBS Research. Like most, he expects Apple to introduce new phones sometime this summer. We’ve heard rumors of both a new higher-end device as well as a lower-priced one. Whatever form they come in, they will be crucial for AT&T, which has even started to spend money on upgrading its pokey 3G networks to meet the data demand.

The AT&T and Apple relationship can be best summed up by the 80s pop band, Huey Lewis & the News:

We’ve had some fun, and yes we’ve had our ups and downs 
Been down that rocky road, but here we are, still around 
We thought about someone else, but neither one took the bait 
We thought about breaking up, but now we know its much too late 
We are bound by all the rest
Like the same phone number
 All the same friends
And the same address  
Yes, it’s true, (yes it’s true) I am happy to be stuck with you

Also: Saul Hansell at The New York Times outlines reasons on why AT&T needs to keep iPhone away from Verizon. He talks about LTE amongst many reasons.

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With an IPO on Its Mind, Skype Shows Growth

Posted: April 22nd, 2009, 5:10pm EDT by Om Malik

Regardless of what happens to Skype — if it’s resold to founders, merged with another web giant or spun off via an initial public offering — one thing remains clear: The company is showing raw growth in both its revenues and registered user numbers. For the first quarter of 2009, the company reported revenues of $153.2 million vs. $145 million in the first fourth quarter of 2008.

It added 37.9 million new users during the quarter and now has a total of 443.2 million registered users. In comparison, the company ended 2008 with 405 million subscribers. In the previous quarter it added about 35 million new registered users. Skype, which has become the largest long-distance company, has been experiencing slowdown in its per-user revenues. The company logged 2.9 billion Skype Out minutes, or about 6.53 minutes per user.

skypeq12009

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For Stock Market Junkies, AOL’s iPhone App, DailyFinance

Posted: April 22nd, 2009, 1:55pm EDT by Om Malik

Thanks to a tip over the weekend from my buddy and eco-blogger Paul Kedrosky, I’ve discovered AOL’s DailyFinance app, which has live stock quotes, interactive charts and real-time news and offers the ability to create and track portfolios. Along with the Bloomberg app, it has quickly become one of the apps I use most on my iPod Touch. Apparently I’m not the only one who likes it, either — it’s ranked No. 1 in the Finance category on the App Store. This app proves one thing: AOL is good at creating aggregated content experiences and as such should make that its focus, instead of mucking around in other businesses.

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Review: Skype for iPhone. Verdict: Awesome.

Posted: March 30th, 2009, 2:53pm EDT by Om Malik

UPDATED: In a few short hours, you will be able to download the native Skype iPhone client and install it on your iPhones and iPod Touch devices. And when you do, you’ll be able to replicate almost all of Skype’s functions. The reason I say almost is because the iPhone version of the app doesn’t support video.

When I got my hands on an early version of the app a few hours ago, I simply installed it on a borrowed iPhone, signed in using my existing Skype username and password, and I was able to start using it within seconds. It’s an attractive and almost perfect adaptation of the desktop version of Skype; the user interface is intuitive, simple and easy to navigate. And it offers a number of pleasant surprises, such as the ability to attach photos to your contacts by way of the iPhone’s built-in camera. You can also toggle between all your contacts and just those online, and adding new contacts is pretty simple.

Of course, what really matters about this Skype app is its communication quality. To that end, a call I made to a friend in Israel sounded better than a regular mobile phone call. Few of the calls I made got dropped, and those that were can be attributed more to network congestion than to Skype. Update: This free app only works on Wi-Fi, not 3G networks.

It helps that we have a lot of bandwidth here in the office, which is always good when making Skype calls. I placed a couple of SkypeOut calls as well, and while the quality was good, it wasn’t as clear as Skype-to-Skype calls. The SkypeIn calls worked as advertised for me as well. I was most impressed with the Skype IM, which is the primary way I stay in touch with my friends in Europe and Asia. I almost forgot how fast I can type on the iPhone, even despite the touchscreen.

I only had a problem when I started chatting with more than one person at a time, as I had to constantly toggle between them. But at least the chat icon in the navigation bar was there to tell me how many chats I had waiting for me.

Many of you responded to my initial post about this Skype iPhone app by wondering how it would impact the iPhone’s battery. Well it’s been about three hours and no substantial impact has been made to the battery yet. Of course, that might change once I start incessantly calling people. On the iPod Touch, things are not going that great; Skype is running down the battery pretty fast.

My Verdict: For those of you that use Skype on a daily basis and own an iPhone, this could very quickly become the simplest way to make long-distance calls. And I’m predicting a big upsurge in Skype as an “IM client” with this release.

To Skype developers who worked on this product, I have two words: Great work! Of course, it would be even better if you got it launched on the BlackBerry so that I could use it on my Curve 8900.

If you have any more questions, please let me know. I will do my best to answer them.

BetaWorks Raises Around $2M for Bit.ly, Spins It Out

Posted: March 30th, 2009, 2:29pm EDT by Om Malik

bitlylogo If you’re an active Twitter user, then you’re already familiar with Bit.ly, a web service that not only allows you to shorten URLs to meet the 140-character limit of the Twitter system, but offers up analytics, such as how many people clicked on the link and also talked about it somewhere on the web. Use of the service has been growing like wild mushrooms after a heavy downpour. Last week alone, 20 million folks clicked on Bit.ly-shortened URLs (though TinyURL is still the biggest URL shortener on the web).

bitlygrowth That popularity has helped Bit.ly’s creator, New York-based incubator Betaworks, to raise close to $2 million in Series A funding from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Jeff Clavier, Mitch Kapor and Howard Lindzon to spin it out into an independent company. Bit.ly will use the new funding to compete with a growing number of rivals, including StumbleUpon and Digg.

Betaworks has been actively building and or investing in Twitter-specific products; it sold the Twitter-focused search engine, Summize, to Twitter last year. Since then Betaworks has invested in Tweetdeck, a Twitter client built with Adobe AIR.

New Twitter Add-On For Fring

Posted: March 30th, 2009, 9:59am EDT by Om Malik

Fring, a mobile messaging client that works across different smartphone platforms, today released a new Twitter 2.0 add-on software that allows folks to see other Twitter profiles, check out their own followers and see who’s following them, conduct keyword searches and open links like Tiny URL’s in their incoming tweets. More details on the Fring blog. (Also see our previous Fring coverage.)

Charles River Has Another $320 Million To Invest

Posted: March 30th, 2009, 9:19am EDT by Om Malik

Charles River Ventures (CRV), well known for its network infrastructure and chip investments such as Big Band Networks, Netezza and Virtusa, has closed its fourteenth fund at $320 million. They have also invested in consumer web companies, with investments in Social Media and Vlingo, among other companies. One of their more interesting investment is ParaScale, a cloud-centric storage startup.

Confirmed: Skype on iPhone

Posted: March 30th, 2009, 12:46am EDT by Om Malik

Skype will release a version of its VoIP application for the iPhone and the iPod touch on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal. I was the first to report news of the pending release last week. (Gee, thanks for giving us credit, WSJ and CNET’s News.com.)

If you skip past what is essentially a lot of repackaged information in the WSJ, there are two valuable bits of new information: Skype will use Wi-Fi networks, and calls to landlines will cost 2.1 cents a minute. There is no calling over the 3G network. (Not that AT&T’s network can actually take any more pressure.)

SkypeIn and SkypeOut, along with Skype Chat, are the key features of this new version of the Skype application. This is a native P2P application for the iPhone and the iPod touch. It allows group chats and conference calls and is tightly integrated with Apple’s Address Book.

As an aside, I wonder how long before special WiFi-enabled Skype phones go the way of the dodo, now that Skype has got mobile religion.

Facebook Video No YouTube, But Growing Real Fast

Posted: March 30th, 2009, 12:21am EDT by Om Malik

Facebook has become such an integral part of life for more than 175 million people that little about the company really surprises me anymore. A few months ago, they became world’s largest online photo site. Today, Liz Gannes points out over at NewTeeVee that the site is getting a whopping ~~260,000~~ 415,000 video uploads a day, nearly 40 percent of which are from webcams. These are random videos that people have casually recorded and uploaded. Sure, that’s nothing compared to 15 hours of video uploaded per minute to YouTube, but it’s still a stunning number. Of course, when you have an audience that is the size of Facebook, any service you introduce can be real big, real fast. (Read the full story on NewTeeVee with additional details.)

Thanks To Truphone, Mobile VoIP Prices Falling Fast

Posted: March 29th, 2009, 9:00pm EDT by Om Malik

Truphone, a London-based mobile VoIP startup, tomorrow is expected to introduce a flat-rate plan (TruUnlimited for Landlines) that would allow its customers unlimited calls to landlines in 38 countries for just over $14 a month. In some countries — the U.S., Canada, China and Hong Kong, for example — the plan would also allow unlimited calls to mobile phones as well. Truphone is also offering another plan (TruUnlimited for Mobiles) that would allow unlimited calls to mobiles and landlines in 64 countries for about $35 a month. With Skype for iPhone (and iPod) likely to be introduced later this week, this seems to be a pre-emptive move by Truphone.

In a previous post, I noted that the iPhone had turbocharged Truphone’s growth. Skype threatens to take some of that sizzle away. Skype’s entry into mobile VoIP will give everyone a heartache. Truphone and Nimbuzz are betting that by being über-communication clients, they can continue to thrive.

If the reaction to my post about Skype’s debut on iPhone is any indication, the world’s largest international voice service is going to become a major player in mobile VoIP pretty quickly. I’m pretty likely to switch to Skype, mostly because my SkypeIn number has a local number — a service Truphone doesn’t offer just yet.

BlackBerry owners in the U.S. will be happy to hear that Truphone is finally releasing Truphone Business, a BlackBerry application enabling business users to make international phone calls from their devices at wireline rates. You download the application. It works in the background. The minute you dial a number that’s international, Truphone intercepts the call and connects it to the international destination via the Truphone network. This doesn’t need Wi-Fi, unlike Truphone on Nokia and iPhone.

Having been an ardent fan of mobile VoIP startups (including Truphone), I am beginning to worry about the company now. We have seen this movie before — low prices, flat-rate pricing and price wars were all strategies used by desperate broadband voice startups that burned through millions of dollars in venture funding. Will history will repeat itself?

Jeff Bezos vs. Bailout CEOs

Posted: March 29th, 2009, 12:45pm EDT by Om Malik

Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer and founder of Amazon, is a proponent of a Japanese philosophy called kaizen — which loosely translated means continuous improvement. As part of this belief, he has been working alongside folks at his company’s distribution centers in Lexington, Ky., perhaps to find out what else can he do to make Amazon better. This news was widely covered in blogs. What caught my eye was the comments in response to Saul Hansell’s piece in The New York Times blog.

Some of them pointed out the difference between Bezos and Bailout CEOs, who are good at offering excuses. Or others, like Auto Industry executives, who are often compared to lazy, brainless lumps. As someone points out, the bailout money is going to companies that are big, not necessarily the best. The best companies wouldn’t need to be bailed out because they would be good at what they do. Part of running a good company is knowing how each little part works and recognizing the importance of every person who contributes to the effort. Bezos clearly gets that. The bailout CEOs don’t.

Photo courtesy of Etech via Flickr

Scenes From Our Green:Net 09 Conference

Posted: March 28th, 2009, 12:13pm EDT by Om Malik

Enjoy this photo montage of our first Green:Net conference. Many of these photos were taken with my Blackberry 8900 Curve. Others were captured by volunteers and our very own Joey Wan.

Smartphone Sales to Keep Growing

Posted: March 27th, 2009, 5:00pm EDT by Om Malik

ms09_pho_2h08_chart Recession or not, smartphone sales are expected to remain strong for the foreseeable future, according to Infonetics Research, a market research company. The mobile handset makers had a flat 2008 in terms of revenues — some $156 billion worth of mobile phones were sold, essentially the same as 2007– and 2009 isn’t going to be pretty. Infonetics is forecasting an 8 percent drop in the total number of mobile phones sold, to 1.1 billion worldwide. But they predict that just like 2008, smartphones are going to buck the trend, growing on both a units sold and revenue basis.

This is good news for smartphone makers such as Research in Motion, Apple, Nokia and HTC. By comparison, companies like Motorola are going to fall further behind, as they currently have no meaningful way to address the smartphone demand, which Infonetics is predicting will continue growing through 2013.

Symbian is still the top dog in the smartphone operating system market, followed by the BlackBerry, which regained its No. 2 spot after being overtaken by the surge in iPhone units in the third quarter of 2008. What’s driving demand for smartphones? Faster 3G networks. I think it’s the availability of the iPhone, which forced handset makers to embrace a more open web via standards-based web browsers and thus changed the mobile landscape forever.

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Akamai Data: Internet, Broadband Still Going & Growing

Posted: March 27th, 2009, 11:25am EDT by Om Malik

The launch of super high-speed DOCSIS 3.0 cable broadband technology, the increased deployment of fiber and faster DSL lines resulted in a sharp increase in the average speed of broadband connections during the fourth quarter of 2008, according to data collected by Akamai for its “State of the Internet” report, expected to be released on Monday. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company that runs the world’s largest content delivery network compiles data pertaining to many different aspects of the Internet.

globalfastbroadband

According to Akamai data, the average global broadband speed in the last three months of 2008 was 1.5 Mbps, though South Korea had an average speed of 15 Mbps. The U.S. came in at No. 17 with an average speed of 3.9 Mbps, though I’m sure that’s going to change in coming years with the wide-scale adoption of DOCSIS 3.0-based broadband from Comcast and fiber offerings such as Verizon FiOS.

usstatebroadband

Among U.S. states, Delaware ranked the highest with an average speed of 7.28 Mbps, while New York came in at No. 4 with 5.37 Mbps. California, with an average speed of 4.36 Mbps, took the No. 15 spot, while Alaska was the slowest state in the U.S., with 2 Mbps. The data collected by Akamai shows that thanks to Verizon FiOS and increased competition between the cable and phone companies, broadband speeds were faster on the East Coast of the U.S. than the rest of the country. Maine, Florida and Vermont showed high triple-digits gains in broadband connectivity during the fourth quarter 2008 over the same period the year before.

usstatebroadband2

One astounding part of the report was the continuing and relentless growth of the Internet and the number of devices that are connected to it, as demonstrated by the number of unique IP addresses seen by Akamai’s global network.

globalipbycountry

At 400 million, that figure was up almost 6 percent from the third quarter 2008 and 28 percent higher than the fourth quarter of 2007. Similar to the prior two quarters, nearly 30 percent of those IP addresses came from the U.S. and 10 percent came from China.

Among some of the interesting factoids from around the world was data showing that in India, the average speed was 772 Kbps, with just 0.6 percent of broadband connections faster than 5 Mbps. In China, too, only about 0.6 percent of broadband connections are faster than 5 Mbps; the average speed there was 833 Kbps. Sweden had the fastest broadband in Europe, with an average speed of 5.6 Mbps.

globalpenetrationbroadband

BlackBerry Gets Sling Player, More Video

Posted: March 27th, 2009, 9:11am EDT by Om Malik

RIM desperately wants its BlackBerry devices to become more than just email. It wants them to become multimedia hubs, thanks to a bit of iPhone envy. And video is getting some serious attention. Yesterday, Liz had the scoop about their new TV show streaming service. And now Sling Media, a place-shifting gear maker, reported that it’s releasing SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry, which is now available for over-the-air downloads for $30 a download. Yikes…that is expensive. The app — for now — works only when using the Wi-Fi connection and shuns the 3G connections. As a result, the software works only with many of the newer, WiFi-enabled BlackBerry devices, such as the Bold, Curve 8900 and Pearl Flip 8220. Sorry Storm owners — no Sling love for you guys. These announcements are ahead of the likely launch of the BlackBerry App store.

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Java: Coming Soon to Google’s App Engine

Posted: March 26th, 2009, 1:30pm EDT by Om Malik

google_app_engine_logo_wtxt Google will soon announce comprehensive support for the Java programming language on its Google App Engine (GAE) offering. We are trying to get more details. Rumors of such a development emerged last year, but we can now confirm that it is going to happen. We have have confirmed the news and expect the announcement later this spring, perhaps at the much-vaunted Google I/O event on May 27-28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

What does this mean? GAE currently is a Python-only app hosting environment and Java has been one of its most-requested features. Google’s support would help Java hosting get a mainstream push. Thus far most people have pushed PHP, Perl or Rails-related hosting services. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google uses a variant of its own Java VM, code-named Dalvik, which is currently being used in Android and Google Mobile OS. Dalvik is a non-Sun-licensed Java environment.

With this Java support, Google can actually turn GAE into the cornerstone of all Android-related apps in addition to getting traction as a platform for many custom enterprise apps written in Java. But in order for all that to happen, Google would have to kick off with what has to be more than just a very barebones environment.

Even in its basic installation, Google should offer a Java environment that can be leveraged by Android app developers, who can host their apps off the GAE. An integration with Google Voice API would make the App Engine even more useful, as app developers could start building special apps for, say, Google Android-based netbooks and have them run off the Google App Engine.

Most importantly, our developer friends believe that it would be good for Google to integrate this GAE-based Java environment with the Eclipse development environment. Google announced its App Engine in May 2008 and quickly attracted about 150,000 developers. However, many developers seem to prefer the more flexible Amazon Web Services, which recently started supporting the Eclipse development environment.

Skype for iPhone to Be Released as Early as Next Week

Posted: March 26th, 2009, 1:00pm EDT by Om Malik

Exclusive Heads up: A few months ago, I asked Skype CEO Josh Silverman when was he going to launch the iPhone version of the P2P voice and IM service that has now been downloaded more than 405 million times. He smiled and said, “Stay tuned.” And so we did.

A tipster — a very reliable one — tells me that Skype is almost ready to launch that iPhone version, perhaps as soon as next week. CTIA Wireless, a large mobile industry trade event, kicks off in Las Vegas next Wednesday, so perhaps the announcement will be made there. I am working on getting more details, as well as screenshots of the service.

The biggest clue about Skype’s pending iPhone launch came when iSkoot decided to move on from its Skype-centric strategy. The company had been offering a client that allowed cell phone users to use Skype services. Skype already offers a Windows Mobile version of its client.

As I’ve said before, Skype will have to turn to mobile to keep its growth intact. In recent months, many services, among them Truphone and Nimbuzz, started supporting Skype in their communication clients. However, a standalone Skype client would get a lot of traction among the Skype faithful. In the meantime, I think Skype is slowly flexing its muscles and swatting away little VoIP players with some of its recent moves.

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Poll: Friends Don’t Let Friends Buy AT&T’s iPhone

Posted: March 26th, 2009, 11:00am EDT by Om Malik

UPDATED: Ever since I broke up with my iPhone, not a day passes without me hearing from someone who shares the same sentiments about AT&T’s network. AT&T, of course, has done little more than hem and haw about the problem, which is much more widespread than we think.

This week at our Green:Net conference, a number of people came up to me to share their frustration with the iPhone/AT&T 3G network; most said they switch to the slower EDGE and/or Wi-Fi in order to use their iPhone. So in an attempt to gauge the extent of the problem, we have created a poll/survey. Update: To be clear, we have issued this in an effort to understand the extent/nature of the problems that folks are having with the AT&T iPhone. If you are happy with it, please fill out only the questions that reflect that and skip the ones that don’t apply to you. We will present the results in context.

Poll is now closed.

Downturn or Not, Mobile Broadband Is Growing Fast

Posted: March 17th, 2009, 10:00pm EDT by Om Malik

Earlier this week, comScore reported that daily web usage on mobile devices had doubled in the last 12 months, with nearly 22.4 million U.S. mobile users using their devices to go on the web.

Today, another research firm, Infonetics Research reported that despite the global economic downturn, the demand for mobile broadband is only going increase. They expect that there will be more than 1 billion mobile broadband users by 2013 vs. 210.5 million at the end of 2008. These are connections that use 3G technologies such as W-CDMA, HSPA, CDMA 2000 and EVDO. The sales of mobile broadband PC cards (and embedded 3G modules) were around $4.1 billion in 2008 and show no signs of slowing down.

2009-infonetics-mobile-bb-cards-rtrs-svcs-subs-mkt-fcst-1st-delivery-chart

Net-net, this is good news for mobile carriers, which raked in $49.8 billion in mobile broadband revenues in 2008. Infonetics predicts that these revenues will grow, percentage-wise, in the double digits over the next 5 years. If that is the case, then companies like AT&T need to improve their network quality. Right now, buying a 3G from AT&T is like buying a confiscated car in an auction lot: You just don’t know what you’re going to get.

null This mobile broadband growth is creating lot of opportunities for the entire wireless food chain, from interesting applications for Apple’s iPhone to backhaul equipment providers to equipment makers like Cisco Systems and Ericsson.

Why We Need Fat Mobile Pipes.

Variable pricing coming to mobile broadband

No stopping the mobile internet growth

Some Small Design Mods to GigaOM

Posted: March 17th, 2009, 9:45pm EDT by Om Malik

threadedcomments Folks we made some minor design changes to GigaOM in response to your feedback. We have a cleaner (and simpler) style for GigaNET posts that aggregate some of the best posts from across our network of blogs. We are also introducing threaded comments that hopefully will allow you to follow conversations better. In an effort to offer a better engagement experience, we are also separating comments from track backs. These two were among your most requested features.

As Mobile Data Grows, People Want Wireless Carriers To Buzz Off

Posted: March 16th, 2009, 10:49pm EDT by Om Malik

No one really gives two hoots about carriers’ attempts to sell mobile applications via cellular phones. And yet, they keep trying and trying. Maybe a recent survey by Zogby (commissioned by Skype) would help persuade them to leave selling mobile apps to those who know how to do it. Folks like Apple , RIM and maybe Nokia. Skype is going to release the full results of the survey tomorrow. Zogby, a market research firm polled 3,000 mobile users in four markets — the U.S., UK, Spain and Japan — and came up with some interesting findings.

62% do not yet view their mobile device as an extension of their computer.
Only 23% feel that they have more or the same level of control over their mobile device as they have over their computer.
70% have never downloaded an application to their mobile device.
67% want to be able to choose their mobile applications for themselves, rather than have their carriers choose for them.

According to the survey, about 19 percent of folks in the UK thought of their device as a phone and a computer. In the U.S., that number rose to 19.3 percent, while in Spain that number rose to 27.2 percent. In Japan, nearly 28.4 percent of people saw their mobile device as a combination of phone and a computer. That is a good sign for all independent app developers — we are seeing the emergence of mobile as a platform ripe for innovation. The usage of mobile data only reinforces that fact. Earlier this week, comScore reported that in the U.S. alone, nearly 63.2 million people accessed the Internet on their mobile devices, and nearly 22.4 million did so every day.

With that kind of growth, Skype, which commissioned the survey, has to be thinking hard about its mobile strategy, especially as it reaches saturation on the desktop. The company recently tied up with Nokia, and there have been other standalone offerings from startups such as Truphone to get Skype-on your mobiles. Skype also has two mobile-focused beta products currently available for testing as well.

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Cisco’s Data Center Moves: Who Wins, Who Loses?

Posted: March 16th, 2009, 8:30pm EDT by Om Malik

Cisco Systems today announced its new blade server, first reported by us in March 2008, along with a Unified Computing strategy that converges storage, compute and networking into a single layer (thanks to virtualization technologies) that is managed by a specialized piece of software. Stacey has captured the intricate details of the news, while I have already posted about the imperative behind these moves.

This new comm-puting approach adopted by Cisco is unique, in that it is the first time a company is selling a single packaged offering so to speak. People have sold either storage related equipment, or network layer gear or just servers. So, what does Cisco’s announcement mean for existing vendors?

Prior to Cisco’s announcement, Sun Microsystems and eGenera, a Marlboro, Mass.-based early stage company have often talked about such a unified, network centric future. Even IBM takes a holistic view of the data center.

Cisco, by virtue of being a late comer to the market, has managed not only to lap them, but has also posed a serious challenge to two major blade server makers – Hewlett-Packard and Dell. You can put Rackable in this category as well, but it’s a small player compared to these behemoths. One of the main reasons these companies are at risk is because they have typically innovated on cost and performance metrics, not a whole 360-degree view of the changing data center infrastructure. Google, as a company, has reinvented data centers by building its own gear, and taking a holistic approach to the data centers.

About three years ago, I wrote a piece for Business 2.0 about how the mega computers were dictating the technology trends of the future. Many gear buyers were frustrated that companies weren’t building “Internet class” stuff. Today, when I talked to Saavis CTO Bryan Doerr, he reiterated that point and said that one of the reasons he was excited about Cisco’s data center moves was because they were finally making service provider class equipment.

Cisco’s Impact on Other Sever Makers:

Dell	Negative
HP	Negative/Netural
Sun	Neutral
IBM	Neutral
Others	Negative

What he didn’t say was that it would literally get Dell and HP get off their duffs, rethinking their approach to server computing going forward. If I had to pick a company likely to respond with a resounding slap to Cisco, it would be HP. It already has elements of what Cisco wants to sell as part of its HPC product line; it has software capabilities (remember, HP bought LoudCloud) — and it also has the capability to buy a whole slew of companies.

Dell has an existing relationship with eGenera, but I really don’t see it as a technology innovator, so I feel it will be reduced to selling “commodity” servers with commodity type margins. I also expect Sun and IBM to get supercharged and start aggressively positioning themselves against Cisco and its new systems. All these companies would like to partner with Juniper Networks or acquire some of the existing switch makers to become more competitive with Cisco.

Now the good news: they all have time — but not a lot — to respond to Cisco. Cisco has challenges – its products are still in beta. For instance, the company is new to the server market and will have a different market dynamic to deal with. The sales cycle for these new offerings are going to be long, and there is plenty of room for Cisco to stumble. Secondly, I wouldn’t count on its software to work flawlessly. The company has a checkered past when it comes to software.

I am sure there are many who will resist Cisco lock in, as articulated by one of our readers who writes, “Cisco is trying to own everything in the datacenter…which sounds good to them $$. How many datacenters do you know run entirely on one or two vendor’s gear??”

I agree. Cisco talks about APIs and working with legacy equipment, but like our reader points out, the truth is always harsher. Most importantly, in these tough economic times, many companies would be wary of the excessive margins typically built into Cisco’s products.

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Why Won’t AT&T Admit to Its Wireless Network Problems?

Posted: March 16th, 2009, 7:05pm EDT by Om Malik

ref_iphone3g_pair Last summer, when Apple introduced its 3G iPhone device, I brought up the issue of AT&T not being ready for the data usage brought on by the data-centric touchscreen phone. Company officials of course denied having such problems, assuring me that they were ready.

Ready or not, a lot of people signed up for AT&T’s service, and many were soon disappointed by the lack of backhaul bandwidth. For me personally it got so bad, that I switched away from the iPhone (which I love, by the way) to T-Mobile’s 8900 BlackBerry and a plain old phone from Verizon.

AT&T keeps denying that it has any network bandwidth problems and continued its state of denial in an article in the New York Times this past weekend. Kristin S. Rinne, senior VP of architecture and planning for AT&T, blamed the phones and the chipsets on handsets for some of the problems.

Bad news for them – the article coincided with the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival, which is attended by hordes of iPhone-totting early-adopter techies. AT&T’s network choked and suddenly everyone was up in arms. And then Ma Bell got in touch with Stacey, who reported that AT&T was boosting its network capacity.

How did they do this? By switching on 850 MHz band on eight cell towers to blanket the downtown Austin area. This was in addition to the existing capacity on the 900 1900 MHz band. AT&T is going to make the same arrangements in San Francisco and New York by end of 2009, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega told Engadget.

This move to fix the bandwidth issue is a clear sign that AT&T knows it has network problems. It is time for the company to step up and acknowledge that this is indeed the case, and make a clear and coherent statement on how it is fixing it. By not doing so, it is clearly selling 3G phones (iPhone and BlackBerry Bold) under false pretenses. I think this is where the new FCC should step up to the plate and force their hand!

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In Europe, VoIP Grows & Grows

Posted: March 6th, 2009, 6:15pm EST by Om Malik

Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, once famously said that voice was going to be free. She was wrong in ponying up billions of dollars for Skype, but she was right in her assertion about voice. Thanks to European broadband service providers treating voice as a loss leader to attract triple-play customers, local voice has become almost free in Europe, according to research conducted by Telegeography, a division of market research firm PriMetrica.

In 2008, VoIP represented 26 percent of total fixed lines in Europe but brought in only 10 percent of the total fixed-line revenues. I bet a big chunk of the VoIP-related revenues are coming from VoIP-to-mobile phone calls. Mobile calls are seriously expensive in Europe, and as a result, any attempts by mobile VoIP companies such as Truphone have been met with resistance by the carriers.

Telegeography estimates that there were more than 35 million European households with VoIP service in 2008. That’s up from just 1.9 million VoIP lines in service in Europe in 2004. Telegeography also estimates that, during every quarter of 2008, more than 2 million homes signed up for VoIP service. Just to give context, in the U.S., we had about 19.4 million VoIP subscribers at the end of 2008. In 2004, there were 1.2 million VoIP lines. Telegeography analysts estimate that Europe will continue to exceed U.S. growth in VoIP lines.

evoip_growth_2009

Household penetration of VoIP telephony at mid-year 2008 ranged from slightly less than 50 percent in France to less than 3 percent in Spain, and annual subscriber growth rates ranged from 544 percent in Portugal to a comparatively anemic 13 percent in Norway.

One of the main reasons why France is so far ahead of rest of Europe is because of the presence of a truly disruptive company: Iliad, which offers a flat rate triple rate service under the brand Free. (Related article: Xavier Niel, France’s Broadband Maverick). Free’s offering forced everyone — including incumbent France Telecom — to offer similar, simpler triple-play plans, resulting in increased VoIP penetration.

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In 2008, Broadband Growth Slowed

Posted: March 6th, 2009, 2:45pm EST by Om Malik

broadband2008 Broadband growth and net new additions in 2008 declined sharply, according to a report by Durham, N.H.-based Leichtman Research Group. For 2008, big telephone and cable companies added a total of 5.4 million new subscribers vs. 8.5 million in 2007 and 10.4 million in 2006. The large carriers accounted for a total of 67.7 million subscribers. The cable companies ended the year with 36.9 million broadband subscribers, after adding 3.2 million broadband subscribers in 2008.

The slowdown has continued in the first quarter of 2009 as well. With net new additions slowing down, cable operators are looking to up-sell higher speed packages and impose bone-headed metered broadband packages. Comcast recently boosted speeds on its offerings in the San Francisco Bay Area and started offering a super-pricey 50 Mbps service.

Google Chrome Makes Friends With Real

Posted: March 5th, 2009, 7:00pm EST by Om Malik

Apparently people still download Real Player, because Google is choosing to bundle its Google Chrome browser with the multimedia player. And while I personally don’t download any “software bundles,” I can’t blame Google for friending Real Networks. Google has been desperately trying to promote its new browser, which still has just over 1 percent of the total browser market share and is available only on Windows platforms. It has competition from the new Safari 4.0, which is not only fast but is available on both Macs and PCs. (Related: Browser wars: Opera Says It’s Not Down or Out.)

What Should Fortune Brainstorm About?

Posted: February 27th, 2009, 8:30pm EST by Om Malik

Last night, I attended a dinner hosted by Fortune magazine at the La Mar, a new-ish Peruvian restaurant in San Francisco. The dinner, which was emceed by Fortune magazine managing editor Andy Serwer, attracted more than 20 of the better-known technology industry insiders and investors, among them Alan Patricof (GreyCroft Partners), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Ann Winblad (Hummer Winblad), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Ron Conway (Silicon Valley angel investor), Max Levchin (Slide) and Mark Pincus (Zynga).

Fortune editors wanted to find out what was on the mind of technology insiders so that they could craft the right agenda for their Brainstorm Tech 2009 conference, scheduled for later this summer in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The discussions were wide-ranging and the topic suggestions, diverse.

Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, believes that even people who find themselves unemployed are unlikely to give up their $50-a-month broadband connection; after all, it’ll be a way for them to find bargains, hunt for jobs or seek out cheaper apartments. She thinks more time will be spent online, including on social networks. Recent upsurges in the usage of Twitter, Facebook and other such services offer a good proxy for Gina’s predictions.

It was also suggested at one point that this downturn would be the end of licensed packaged software. And some think we’re on the cusp of personalized medicine, thanks to the availability of diverse biomedical resources and their marriage to ever-cheaper computing. But by and large, the focus was on our government, in particular the bailouts and the impact of the credit crunch. And most expressed belief in the power of innovation and optimism.

Just to be clear, being a devotee of technology, I am still an optimist, just a more pragmatic one. My view is that most of us (including myself) who live very comfortable Silicon Valley lives don’t quite grok the current economic crisis and the sociological upheaval it’s unleashing across the world.

My view stems from the fact that an increasing number of people live in sub-human conditions. Others, thanks to closing factories and moribund economic activity, are losing jobs and facing their own bleak futures. These are bad tidings that could result in chaos. However, just like the Renaissance followed the dark and chaotic Middle Ages, we will see a revival. Call it Renaissance 2.0 or whatever, but this adversity is going to result in an innovation boom.

I plan to write up some of the individual conversations I had as blog posts, but I first want to take this opportunity to ask you guys: What are the big themes that Fortune should cover at its Brainstorm Tech 2009 conference?

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Can Apple Please Kick-start Micropayments?

Posted: February 27th, 2009, 1:47pm EST by Om Malik

Saul Hansell in an blog post article for The New York Times today wonders why iPhone users are ready to pay for content. His conclusion? “Apple has created an environment that makes buying digital goods easy and common.” We concur! In a guest column for us, Narendra Rocherolle wrote about a new class of software “…that I call “impulseware” — cheap enough and easy enough to buy on a whim. I would be spending a lot more if Apple extended the API to allow for the ability to transact within apps.” Nothing like buying a song, an application or a ringtone with a simple click, only to be billed in a batch, later. Such buying habits are the reason why we believe Apple’s iPhone could prove to be an ideal micropayments platform.

Alaska Airlines to Offer In-flight Internet Access

Posted: February 27th, 2009, 8:53am EST by Om Malik

as-history-overview4 Alaska Airlines has started a trial of satellite broadband technology from California-based Row 44 that will allow customers to get — what else? — Internet when on the go. Row 44 had predicted commercial rollout of its service in 2009. This new service will be called Alaska Airlines Inflight Wi-Fi; the trial will begin on an afternoon flight between Seattle and San Jose, Calif., and will run for about 60 days. If successful, the airline will roll out the service to its entire fleet. Row 44 has tied up with Southwest Airlines and is challenging Aircell and its gogo service. Aircell has teamed up with Virgin America, American Airlines, Delta and others. Row 44 used Ku band satellites, while Aircell is based on an air-to-ground system. JetBlue-owned LiveTV and ViaSat are two other players vying to carve out a piece of the inflight broadband market. (Related: Inflight Broadband Cheat Sheet & Boeing, Boeing… Gone.)

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iPod, Kindle, Facebook — and a Nomad Called Me

Posted: February 26th, 2009, 3:57pm EST by Om Malik

kindle21 On my way back from India, cooped up in a big tube flying at super speeds over Eurasian skies, I really missed having something to read. As Matt lost himself in a Seth Godin piece on his Kindle, I was reduced to watching old episodes of “Numbers” on my laptop, which I had left pretty much untouched throughout most of the trip. I wished desperately that I had brought one of those e-readers with me. Ironically enough, Amazon released the new and improved version of the Kindle today, one day after I returned. The Kindle, of course, like other popular gadgets such as the iPod and iPhone, is part of a larger trend brought on by the digitization of, well, everything.

Taking Our Home To Go

These days, we want to carry the contents of our homes with us wherever we go. Photos, once housed in beautiful frames and curated in albums, are now stuffed into our iPhones, and our relationships are nurtured on social networks via electronic address books from anywhere on the planet. I know Coltrane, Miles, Dizzy, Ella and Thievery all come for a walk with me whenever I pull the door behind me. Thanks to the rise of place-shifting and devices such as Sling Media’s SlingBox, even my television travels with me. And when that’s not possible, I just buy and download shows from either Amazon or Apple. I even took my favorite television show, “Criminal Minds,” for a ride across the country (or rather, the planet) last week.

Now I want to carry all my books with me, too.

Books, music, videos…they all represent the proverbial hearth. My library, easy chair and music system have long constituted what I considered home. But over the past few years, that has started to change — whether it’s just me or the new human condition, I’m not sure. I think it’s a bit of both. Thanks to the availability of cheap wireless connections, we are getting rid of another fixture in our homes: the landline phone. Every quarter, there are roughly 3 million fewer landline phones. A few changes of clothes and a computer, and suddenly home is not where the heart is, but where there’s a connection.

The Big Societal Shift

This is part of a societal change I wrote about in a column for Business 2.0 about the concept of life streams, driven primarily by the rise of ever-pervasive Internet connectivity. My argument was that since humans have an overwhelming need to interact with one another, in this new always-on, increasingly connected society, we would want to mimic our offline interactions online. Instead of using connectivity to just communicate in real time, the world would transition to interacting in real time. It would be a way to share your life with those close to you, no matter how far away. Leisa Reichelt, a smart digital ethnographer, calls it ambient intimacy.

The companies that seem to have grasped this notion most effectively are Amazon, Apple and Google. Some startups have glommed onto this shift as well — for example Qik, Kyte and others, though I hardly think they are the answer. Rather the answer lies with Facebook and to some extent, FriendFeed, both of which are promoting the concept of news feeds of our lives. About three years ago, over a cup of coffee, Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of Webshots and more recently 30 Boxes, showed me a feature known as the news feed. It was a way to collate information from one’s social network (calendar), and marry it to Flickr photos and other such information. It was essentially Facebook’s News Feed. It was so powerful and so obvious to me, especially considering that I was already dealing with information overload.

A Once In a Century Change

Fast-forward three years, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is proclaiming that his service represents a once-in-100-years kind of media shift. Despite the derision such a comment was met with by most people, I think he is quite right (though Facebook’s first implementation of Beacon was as wrong as Botox injections are for a 75-year-old). By turning its news feed into a newspaper for our social life — one that is updated constantly — it makes us feel like we’re in touch with our friends, family and other people we consider important in our lives.

With more than 175 million people signed up across the planet, Facebook in many ways has started to resemble our real-life social networks. On my trip to India, sitting in a Barista coffee shop with Wi-Fi, the Facebook app on my iPod Touch allowed me to keep up with everyone on my network. My BlackBerry Facebook App allowed me to post status updates and photos to the service as I traipsed around Delhi. Just like my iPod lets me carry my music library with me, Facebook brings with me my entire social life. All I need is a connection.

At 35,000 feet in the sky, there is no connection (just yet). But as long as you have a Kindle, who cares?

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Panther, CDN Networks Merge. More CDN Consolidation Ahead?

Posted: February 26th, 2009, 1:09am EST by Om Malik

Updated: Quietly, CD Networks and Panther Express, two also-ran content delivery networks, have merged their businesses. The terms of the deal were not announced, which can also be also be interpreted as a fire sale by one of the parties. Update: A source familiar with one of the parties told me that it was indeed a fire sale and Panther was sold for less than the money put into the company, essentially wiping out the common shareholders.

Panther Express, on the other hand, has been known for its aggressive pricing in the U.S. It has been growing fast but it is still far behind leader Akamai. Panther’s founders included alumni of DoubleClick, and the company raised over $23 million in funding from Greylock, Index Ventures and others. CD Networks is a Korean CDN provider well known for providing content delivery services to the gaming industry.

The merger once again brings into focus that the CDN business has become highly commoditized, thanks to the presence of too many players with very little value added services. The guys at Akamai realize that and have been building new value-added features such as software controls that allow dynamic site acceleration to stand out from the me-too CDNs. The current credit crisis has stopped the flow into CDN startups that were trying to cash in on the growth of online video, and one should expect more consolidation.

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Nokia’s Brave New Strategy: Laptops

Posted: February 26th, 2009, 12:47am EST by Om Malik

Nokia sells a lot of $50-$100 phones. In places like India, where I just returned from, Nokia’s ringtone is part of the urban soundscapes. It accounts for about 40 percent of total global handset sales. Much like McDonalds and Coca Cola, Nokia is everywhere. (Except in the U.S., but that is a whole different story.) Like those big, lumbering mature companies, it is unable to move nimbly.

It has yet to launch a credible touch screen phone to compete with LG, Samsung, HTC and every other handset maker. Simply put, Nokia facing innovator’s dilemma has become calcified with caution and is unable to invent markets. Instead of fighting off iPhone and other touchscreen phones, Nokia is thinking about selling laptops. Yes, you heard that right. Nokia will consider making PCs. Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told Finnish national broadcaster YLE (via Reuters) that the company was looking at getting into the PC business.

Maybe it is Nokia’s way to handle competition from Lenovo, Asus and Acer. This is quite amusing because most of these PC makers redefine the word “loser” when it comes to making money. You might hear some analysts say that it is a good idea since mobile operators want to sell connected netbooks. I am not convinced that netbooks can be very profitable. If Nokia does indeed get into the PC business, it will be running and wheezing after more nimble competitors. You only have to look back at its failed attempts to sell underpowered tablets to know how this PC experiment is going to end.

What do you guys think about Nokia’s new likely diversification into laptops?

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Programming Alert: Back On The Job

Posted: February 26th, 2009, 12:06am EST by Om Malik

After a short break that involved a whirlwind trip to New Delhi to see my parents and keynote at WordCamp Delhi, I am back in San Francisco and will be back on the job later tomorrow, or whenever I can kick the jet lag. Regardless, it was a fun trip and it was good to see my family. You can read my essay about Delhi and how it is changing. It is running on my personal blog and has some stunning photos snapped by Matt Mullenweg.

Facebook Was Made for the iPhone

Posted: February 17th, 2009, 1:30pm EST by Om Malik

It’s been about five days since I ditched my iPhone and made the BlackBerry Curve 8900 my primary device. There are many things I miss about the iPhone, such as surfing the Internet with a full-blown browser. More importantly, I miss Facebook Mobile. And I am missing it even more on the road, since I’m trying to limit my computer usage while on this trip.

The Facebook for iPhone app allowed me to get through a whole lot of stuff really really fast. It was easy to click and upload photos, approve friends, respond to events and send short messages. I constantly changed my status and, most importantly, enjoyed checking out photos of my friends.

The Facebook for BlackBerry app allows me to do all of those things, too, just not nearly as easily. While one would think that a full keyboard would make things better, the app is challenging to use (other than, admittedly, answering messages, which is actually much faster — but that’s about it). It’s like driving around a sleek Aston Martin (Facebook Mobile on iPhone) for a year, only to have it replaced by a Honda (Facebook on BlackBerry).

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Destination: New Delhi, WordCamp India

Posted: February 17th, 2009, 10:50am EST by Om Malik

By the time you read this post, I will be somewhere in Europe — either about to land in Frankfurt or already hanging around the city’s aging airport. I am on my way to India to spend a short week with my parents and also attend WordCamp India, a gathering of WordPress (see disclosure below) users in New Delhi.

I will be attending WordCamp with Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and the guy who started the WordPress movement. We plan to get on stage together and talk about — what else? — blogging. Of course, we are not just going to be working; Matt and I are going to curry it up. (I’m also going to be photoblogging on my personal blog, if you’re interested.)

I am looking forward to the trip, though the 22-hour journey and the toll it takes on my body isn’t something to tweet about. I’d like to use it as an opportunity to actually slow down my pace and stay somewhat disconnected. So I plan to restrict my writing to one post a day, which I will be sending to the team back in San Francisco.

Disclosure: WordPress is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Your Mobile Carrier Will Sell You for Pennies

Posted: February 16th, 2009, 12:40pm EST by Om Malik

Five major UK carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores? First they charge you hundreds of dollars for calls, then they sell you for pennies.

This is no different than, say, Phorm, NebuAd or any of the other tricks being cooked up by service providers in a desperate attempt to recreate Google’s business model. In the process, they are playing loose and fast with people’s privacy. Jeez, no wonder people hate their phone companies. :-)

When placed up against a larger canvas, it seems clear that Internet companies — be they providers of web, broadband or wireless services — have little to no regard for consumer privacy or consumer rights. Giving such efforts fancy names like “behavioral targeting” or “contextual advertising” is merely an attempt to make them more palatable to users.

Remember the Beacon advertising system by Facebook? It looked innocent enough, until one dug underneath the surface, that is. Speaking of Facebook, have you read about some of the changes to its terms of service? The move may not mean anything to its 175 million-odd customers, but it’s a great example of the prevailing attitude towards privacy (or rather, the lack thereof) on the Internet.

Getting back to the wireless data consortium — they talk about using that data anonymously. Which is utter poppycock. There is no such thing as anonymous data on the web. Look at how A-Rod got nailed. The New York Times writes:

We are typically told that personal information is anonymously tracked for one reason — usually something abstract like making search results more accurate, recommending book titles or speeding traffic through the toll booths on the thruways. But it is then quickly converted into something traceable to an individual, and potentially life-changing.

The article quotes Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who calls it “the surveillance business model.”

We took whatever was done offline and put it on steroids…It requires compliance with the kind of promises that comes with this kind of data collection.

EFF says that online services should voluntarily destroy all the data they collect or else they risk finding themselves in the same situation as the baseball player’s union. They didn’t destroy the samples and well, now we have the A-Fraud debacle.

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No Stopping the Mobile Internet Growth

Posted: February 15th, 2009, 9:34pm EST by Om Malik

By now you all know that despite the spotty coverage and expensive rate plans, I am a big fan of Mobile Internet. Down economy or not, I want my 3G wireless connection. Apparently I’m not the only one. According to a survey of 50,000 wireless customers in the U.S. and five major Western European mobile markets, nearly 71 percent of wireless users are likely to use some kind of wireless data services. These countries collectively have about 200 million mobile data users and more than half expect to increase their mobile data usage. The survey was conducted by Nielsen on behalf of telecom equipment maker, Tellabs.

Average intended usage increase over the next 24 months	U.S.	Europe
Current users	58%	55%
Non-Users	27%	28%

Take a look at how the new users will likely use the networks: mobile Internet access, MMS and photo-sharing are the top reasons people are going to sign up for the data services.

What that means is that mobile operators should expect more network traffic and hence bigger stress on their respective backbones. I’m sure that like me, many of you are frustrated by slow networks and their choppy performance. If more and more people come onto the network, wireless backhaul networks are going to be put under further stress.

As I have explained in the past, the backhaul networks that feed into wireless broadband are a big opportunity. Infonetics Research predicts that demand for backhaul-related gear is going to exceed $10 billion by 2011, as today’s T-1 based infrastructure is going to be replaced by fiber and microwave links. Infonetics predicts that in the near term, microwave-related sales are going to grow 83 percent by 2011, from $3.9 billion in 2007. That’s good news for all sorts of companies, including Ericsson, NEC, and a gaggle of startups such as Exalt Communications, which recently introduced a 5 GHz radio with 440 Mbps throughput.

Intended use amongst non-users	U.S.	Europe
Mobile Internet	49%	34%
MMS	38%	39%
Uploading Photos	34%	27%
Software/App Downloads	30%	30%
Email	28%	32%

The carriers — despite the economic downturn — don’t have much choice other than to spend on their data networks. For AT&T and Verizon, mobile data represented 10 percent and 12 percent, respectively, of their overall revenues for the fourth quarter of 2008. Unless they spend big to keep the data users happy, this gold mine is going to dry up real fast.

Judging by the reaction to my break-up with the iPhone, there are a lot of people who are ready to divorce AT&T’s service and switch to an alternate carrier. In a down economy, when carriers are struggling to find growth, that’s a risk they can’t afford.

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Slowing Economy Slowing Broadband Growth

Posted: February 14th, 2009, 12:00am EST by Om Malik

The demand for broadband skidded sharply during the fourth quarter of 2008. We went through the latest quarterly financials of all the major broadband service providers and collated the net new subscriber additions –- and so far, things aren’t looking good. Of the 12 majors, five companies, including Cablevision, aren’t due to report their quarterly results until later this month or early March.

Nevertheless, the sharp decline in net new additions is pretty clear (see the chart below). The downturn has been particularly hard on cable companies, especially Time Warner Cable, which saw a 44 percent decline in new additions.

Verizon has posted the best performance so far, while AT&T is seeing some benefit from the rollout of its Internet TV service, U-verse, which commands higher bandwidth. AT&T lost about 1,600 DSL subscribers in the most recent 3-month period.

Qwest, Embarq and Windstream all saw declines in their subscriber additions – mostly because they cover territories where the housing downturn has taken its toll. Now even if the remaining companies report the same number of new subscriber additions for the fourth quarter of 2008, the overall broadband additions for the last three months of 2008 will still be down sharply.

	Q3	Q4
Comcast	382,000	331,000
Cablevision	32,000	TBA 2/26/2009
Cox	60,000	TBA 03/04/2009
TimeWarner	222,000	124,000
Insight	20,500	TBA
Verizon	225,000	282,000
ATT	148,000	236,000
Qwest	61,000	54,000
Embarq	24,000	24,000
Windstream	28,400	16,000
CenturyTel	21,000	TBA 2/19/09
Total	1.371M	1.06M

Source: Company Filings

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Will Google’s Android Power the New Fourth Screen?

Posted: February 13th, 2009, 1:35pm EST by Om Malik

Back in the late 1990s, Microsoft introduced its Windows CE embedded operating system. While aimed primarily at PDAs and pre-netbook devices, it quickly spread to be included in additional devices, among them point-of-sale systems and medical equipment, and has become the core of many other Microsoft products as well. Google’s Android may have a similar impact, expanding beyond its mobile phone core focus to other network-connected devices, such as set-top boxes, netbooks and digital frames. John Roese, former CTO of Nortel, discussed this new class of broadband devices in his post, Broadband’s Kindle Paradigm.

I came to this conclusion after our Mobilize conference, and outlined it in a post entitled Where Will Android Go Next? We’ve already heard of efforts to port Android to netbooks — but today it appears another, more important milestone has been reached. Moto Development Group ~~Motorola, which is banking on Android to save it,~~ says its Moto Labs has succeeded in making Android work with E Ink display screens. E Ink is an electronic paper display technology with a paper-like, high-contrast appearance, ultra-low-power consumption and a thin, light form; Moto Labs has developed a way to marry Android to the E Ink development kit. And while the fruits of this labor won’t show up in a commercial product for some 12-18 months, it’s still big, big news.

Why? Because now you can have this low-power screen device updated via wireless Internet access. Marry that to touch-based interface and the opportunities are endless.

You could theoretically get your newspaper delivered in electronic form, wirelessly, with an e-Ink display married to a 3G mobile phone, many times a day. It’s a scenario that my former Business 2.0 boss, Josh Quittner, touched on in a very prescient story for Time entitled “The Race for a Better Read,” in which he talked about how the future of print was in appgazines.

That’s why I believe the old print business ought to take advantage of what’s doable now so that it’s ready to provide a new reading experience once the iPod of readers finally arrives. For magazines like this one, that means creating hybrids — what I’ve come to think of as “appgazines” — that act more like computer programs than Web or printed pages.

Indeed, if you take all the emerging technology trends — multitouch, wireless connectivity, cheap silicon, better batteries, location-based services and a move toward open-source operating environments — and marry them to the explosion of digital information taking place, what you have is the opportunity for yet another screen in our increasingly digital lives.

And suddenly Amazon’s Kindle stops being just another e-book reader. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Jeff Bezos and his crew are miles ahead of the competition.

* A netbook with Android: far fetched or coming soon?
* Where will Android go next?
* Android: What it means, what experts think.
* Keynote by Google Android co-founder Rich Miner at our Mobilize conference.
* GigaOM Interview with Jeff Bezos.
* GigaOM Interview with Ian Freed, VP of Amazon Kindle.

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Amazon Motivates Savvis Into Offering a Compute Cloud

Posted: February 12th, 2009, 3:46pm EST by Om Malik

Savvis, long a provider of co-location and dedicated hosting services, today unveiled a new cloud compute offering aimed at large corporations. Unlike Amazon, whose array of services are focused on the broader market, Savvis will start off with an on-demand computing service called Savvis Cloud Compute.

This new offer is based on a legacy Savvis product called Virtual Intelligent Hosting, which was built on Hewlett Packard servers, VMWare software and 3Par storage. Savvis has re-tweaked that offering by developing a portal to access the compute services and marring them to management tools, also developed by the company. The portal is called the Savvis Station Portal.

The service will come in two flavors. One will be a dedicated offering for the exclusive use of a corporation, and the other will be a multi-tenant service much like Amazon’s EC2. Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer of St. Louis, Mo., based Savvis, doesn’t see the company as an Amazon competitor. The pricing model is quite different from Amazon, and the service isn’t quite as granular. “Not all clouds are created equal, and there is a lot of room in the market,” he said in a conversation earlier this morning. Doerr reiterated the point we have been making for a long time — there will be many clouds, each with a different focus and unique features. Many believe that cloud computing is going to grow much faster than, say, managed IT services, because it helps corporations retain control and gives them more flexibility.

“Enterprises want to be more in control of the asset base and what we are making available is just that,” Doerr said. IDC estimates spending on IT cloud services to grow nearly threefold by 2012, to $42 billion, up from $16.2 billion in 2008. Like Savvis, other large managed services providers such as Rackspace and Terremark have expanded to cloud services.

When I asked Bryan if this move was as a result of a competitive threat from Amazon, he said not. “Amazon has done a good job of showing that there is a market for the user-directed, flexible platform we call the cloud experience,” said Doerr. “It has captured the imagination of all buyers. That is a motivation, clearly.” He wants to build that cloud experience into all of his company’s products targeting the big corporations.

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Facebook Pokes Nokia. Will They Hook Up?

Posted: February 12th, 2009, 1:09am EST by Om Malik

Sometimes, analysis comes ahead of the news. Like today. Last night I posted my analysis of why mobile is critical to Facebook and its future. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook is in talks with Nokia, the world’s largest phone maker, to embed its social network into Nokia phones. The Journal reports that Nokia is torn between starting its own social network or working with Facebook. It is a no-brainer — starting its own social network would be yet another not-so-smart move by Nokia, which still has to show that it has web chops. Partnering with Facebook, MySpace and others is the right way to go.

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Who’s Worried About Facebook? Not Twitter

Posted: February 9th, 2009, 12:05am EST by Om Malik

null On Friday, Facebook released a series of upgrades to its platform, allowing developers access to many core functionalities, such as Facebook Video and Notes, and giving them the ability to integrate them into their applications. But it was the opening up of a Status API that got the most attention. Given that Twitter had rightfully rejected a $500 million offer from Facebook, it’s been perceived as a Twitter-killer. VentureBeat did a good job of explaining why the Facebook vs. Twitter meme was a case of severe hyperbole.

In reality the decision to give broader access to its status application programming interface (API) is a recognition by Facebook that status and presence are core to its future as a real-time web company. Facebook developers I spoke with explained that, by allowing third-party developers access to Status, Facebook is hoping to compete with Twitter, which has slowly started to steal developer mindshare away from other platforms. When it comes to the Internet, real time web is obviously the next logical step. Status and presence are key components of this future, and it is good to see Facebook to recognize this and openup its platform in a more meaningful way. But as TechCrunch points out, “status” has a different meaning on Facebook and Twitter. The guys at Twitter say they’re not too worried about Facebook’s moves. In response to my emailed query, Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, wrote:

It seems like great news for developers. No doubt we’ll soon see some very cool applications providing more ways for friends to share status, links, notes, and videos. Lots of folks are saying “hello” to Twitter every day. There is overlap in some aspects of our services but there is also plenty of room for Twitter to grow, evolve, and become relevant to many more lives around the world.

I totally agree. While the company still struggles with its identity (a service provider or a platform?), the Twitter API has some serious developer mindshare. On an almost daily basis I am contacted by developers who are doing interesting things with it (though admittedly the API has some serious challenges).

Brendan Gahan, my research assistant, points out on his blog that “with Open Social, Twitter, Android and iPhone, Facebook has more competition for developers than ever before. If they want the platform to survive, they’ve got to keep developers happy, as opposed to crushing their spirits and shrinking their profits.”

Status API is part of that move — killing Twitter will have to wait for a while!

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With Demand Growing, MySQL CEO Calls It Quits

Posted: February 6th, 2009, 5:30pm EST by Om Malik

Marten Mickos, who was chief executive officer of MySQL prior to its billion-dollar sale to Sun Microsystems, has decided to leave the company, the second high-profile MySQL executive to do so in as many days. On Thursday, Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL co-founder and original developer, left Sun to set up a consulting firm, Monty Program Ab. According to published reports, Marten was frustrated by the bureaucracy at Sun. MySQL is an open-source database software that is commonly used by web companies, including high-fliers such as Facebook.

“It is the sort of typical situation with (a) chief executive of an acquired company,” he said when I called him, diplomatically deflecting my question as to why he was leaving. “I love being the CEO of a small company and proving unproven business models.” He said he’ll work through the end of March, then take some time off. “I decided to leave without anything specific in mind, but I want to work on stuff that has a big impact,” he said.He said the Sun acquisition has helped MySQL in many ways, including providing it with new resources that have helped extend its reach. The acquisition has proven to be a good one for Sun as well, and it has helped them reach markets in which people paid little or no attention to Sun. On their most recent conference call, Sun executives pointed out that: “MySQL and Infrastructure software billings grew 55 percent year-over-year.” Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz added that, “We are again seeing great growth in opportunity around MySQL and our open-source operating system and middleware platforms.”

Marten and I first met in 2004. At the time, MySQL was about to hit its tipping point, as I noted in my post, MySQL - The Real Broadband Brain. Since then, the company has grown manifold, even flirting with an IPO.

After years of closely tracking MySQL, one thing I have learned is how closely entwined Marten and Monty are with MySQL and its community; I think their exits are sure to rock the boat there. But Marten disagrees. Companies survive long after their founders and key executives have left, he said. “I have built this for eight years and we have built a model. I have people who report to me who are much smarter than I am and they are trained to do this,” he said.

“It’s great to be a figurehead, but many times figureheads get too much attention,” he said. “Most of the times, the culture and the pulse and the execution of an organization is spread among a number of key individuals.”

In other words, MySQL is now much bigger than the sum of its individuals. I kinda agree with him, and from personal experience I can tell you that with good management, companies do march on. And as we’ve already pointed out, we are entering a new phase, one in which the importance of databases and data warehouses will only grow. From that perspective, Marten says, “The power is not in our product, but it is in our ecosystem.” He pointed to companies like Infobrite, which are using MySQL but building a new kind of data warehouse. “That is how MySQL will continue and evolve.” Of course, it also depends on Sun and how it treats its database business.

Photo of Marten Mickos courtesy of Wikipedia.

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