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Pioneering smartphone manufacturer predicts substantial shortfall in three-month revenue, sparking precipitous drop in its stock as it battles Apple and BlackBerry

The pioneering smartphone manufacturer Palm, originally renowned for its breakthrough Palm Pilot models, saw its shares plummet 17% on a profits warning as it revealed that its sales are struggling in the face of competition from BlackBerrys and Apple iPhones.

Palm conceded todaythat its latest phones, including the critically acclaimed Pre and the cut-price Pixi, have failed to take off as quickly as it had hoped. “­Driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated,” said Palm’s chief executive, Jon Rubinstein.

A trading update from the Californian company forecast revenue for the three months to February of $300m-$320m (£195m-£210m), far short of analysts’ predictions of about $425m.

The warning is a serious setback for Palm, which has been fighting an uphill battle to challenge bigger players such as Apple and the Canadian company Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry smartphone. By early afternoon on Wall Street, Palm’s shares had slumped by $1.45 to an 11-month low of $6.64.

Although it broke ground early in handheld devices with its Pilot models in the 1990s and later its web-compatible Treo phones, Palm has fallen behind in the race to capture the imagination of ­consumers.

Its Pre phone, released last year, runs on a new operating system called WebOS and incorporates a phone, a GPS system, wireless internet and a slide-out keyboard. It has won several industry awards but has lagged in other areas – for example, few third-party applications are available for the Pre in comparison to the hundreds of thousands written for Apple’s iPhone.

Experts have become increasingly dubious about Palm’s growth prospects. Ehud Gelblum, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, was initially positive but said in a research note that his optimism had waned, blaming Palm’s US network provider: “Verizon has puzzlingly refrained from providing the marketing muscle behind the products that we had expected.”

In the US, Palm has recently launched the budget-model Pixi, priced at $99, in an effort to attract younger customers.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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Mobile phone sales fell by almost 1% last year, according to Gartner researchers. However, sales of smartphones grew, thanks to the success of the BlackBerry, iPhone and Google Android phones

Mobile phone sales declined by 0.9% to 1.211 billion units in 2009, but grew by 8.3% in the final quarter, according to Gartner. “The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner.

Over the full year, Nokia remained the market leader, shipping 441m phones. However, it lost 2.2 percentage points of market share, falling to 36.4%. Nokia was followed by Samsung (19.5%) and LG (10.1%) from South Korea. In fourth and fifth places, both Motorola (4.8%) and Sony Ericsson (4.5%) saw big declines in market share.

In the smartphone market, Nokia’s high-volume sales kept Symbian in first place with 81m units shipped for a market share of 46.9%, down from 52.4%. Research In Motion — known for its BlackBerry smartphones — came second with 19.9%, an increase of 3 percentage points on 2008. Apple’s iPhone more than doubled its unit sales to take the third spot with 14.4%, an increase of 6.2 percentage points,

iPhone overtook Microsoft Windows Mobile, which dropped 3.2% percentage points to take 8.7% of the market, with only 15m units shipped.

Google’s Linux-based Android software did well, shipping 6.8m units for a market share of 3.9%. However, sales of other Linux smartphones fell. Adding Linux and Android together, Linux only gained half a percentage point (from 8.1% to 8.6%).

Gartner principal research analyst Roberta Cozza said Android’s fourth-quarter growth should continue, but some suppliers had “expressed growing concern about Google’s intentions in the mobile market”. If this led them to change their product strategies, “this might hinder Android’s growth in 2010.”

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(Source The Guardian)

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Cisco, HP and Juniper all experienced solid growth in the Ethernet switch
market in 2009, according to the latest figures from
DellOro
Group .

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has won a contract from Swisscom, a telecommunications service provider in Switzerland, to upgrade its mobile packet core network to handle growth in data traffic due to increased use of smartphones. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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BBC says project aimed at delivering English lessons through mobile phones in Bangladesh has got off to a good start

In mobile technology, it is often the developing world that leads the way – by using mobile phones to teach people a foreign language, for example.

In Bangladesh, more than 1m English lessons have been downloaded to mobile phones as part of the BBC’s Janala sercvice, the corporation announced today at the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona.

Offering hundreds of three-minute audio lessons and SMS quizzes for less than 4p, Janala – meaning “window” – provides low-cost education through handsets – in a country where English is not as widely spoken as elsewhere in Asia.

The service is very simple: by dialling “3000″, mobile users access classes ranging from “Essential English” to the more advanced “How to tell a story”. The BBC has also set up a website giving learners free access to content.

According to Sara Chamberlain, the head of interactive for the BBC World Service Trust, the broadcaster’s aim was to make English – the international language of business – within the reach of millions of non-Anglophones. It is aimed at young people living on less than £2 a day.

This news report shows students learning English with Janala.

Since it was launched in November 2009, 1,030,583 Janala lessons have been accessed, with Bangladesh’s 50 million mobile users eager to learn English to improve their access to the global economy.

More than two-thirds of people who use the beginners’ service return, which is impressive considering the 5% “return rate” for mobile products in Bangladesh. The BBC said overall 39% of callers returned to Janala.

An impressive majority of Bangladeshis – 84% – consider English essential to securing a good job and educating their children, according to a BBC survey.

“We knew demand for English was strong in Bangladesh, but the response to BBC Janala has been nothing short of phenomenal,” said Chamberlain.

“The growth of mobile is clearly creating an opportunity to provide access to education in a way simply not possible before.”

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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• Phones with the new software will appear at the end of the year
• Nokia joins forces with Intel to create a free software platform

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer is hoping that 7 will turn out to be a lucky number again. With Windows 7 helping to bury the ghosts of the poorly received Windows Vista in its core PC market, the software group is hoping to repeat the trick with a new version of its software for mobile phones, a device that has refused to yield to the firm’s attentions despite almost a decade of trying.

Windows Phone Series 7 is the result of a complete overhaul of Microsoft’s vision of the mobile phone. It has abandoned its attempts to turn mobile phones into mini-PCs, focusing instead on giving users easy access to social networking, music, video and mobile phone applications. Coincidentally Ballmer’s presentation, at the mobile industry’s annual trade show in Barcelona came hours after the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia revealed a tie-up with chipmaker Intel that is headed in the opposite direction.

The two companies have pooled their software development resources to create MeeGo, a free software platform which they reckon will pave the way for the next generation of wireless communications devices.

Both companies have Apple, Blackberry and Google, with its Android mobile phone platform, firmly in their sights. Fierce competition has eroded Nokia’s share of the market over the past year, and Microsoft fears that if it cannot get back in the game now, it may never manage it.

Ballmer admitted that Microsoft, which has failed to gain any significant share of the mobile phone market, had been forced to “retool and reform” its mobile phone software two years ago. “There is no doubt that the phone market is highly competitive, highly dynamic, super-exciting,” he said. “There was no question in our minds… that we needed and wanted to do something that was out of the box, clearly differentiated from our past and clearly differentiated from other things that are going on in the market.” “We’re taking a big step,” he added. “I hope seven’s our lucky number.”

The first phones using the new software will not appear until the end of the year and Microsoft is being very prescriptive about what they should look like, which has raised questions about whether handset manufacturers will be willing to make Windows Phone devices that they will be unable to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.

Manufacturers including HTC, LG and Samsung have, however, signed up, while Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile and Orange are all likely to sell the devices in the UK. The proliferation of so-called open source software platforms – such as Android – has raised the question of whether Microsoft, which still charges hardware manufacturers a licence fee to use its Windows Phone software, should adopt the same model.

Refusing, as ever, to actually name Apple, Ballmer spoke about “vertical competitors” – companies that make devices as well as the software that sits on them, such as Apple – saying “their model is really clear, it’s sell devices. We sell software to companies that make devices” and that is not going to change. “My mother used to say to me, if something is free, you should take a look and find out what the real cost is.”

Nokia, however, has become a convert to the idea of open source platforms. Having bought out its partners in smartphone software developer Symbian and made that available free to all developers and hardware manufacturers, it announced a tie-up with Intel under which it plans to do the same for the next generation of mobile devices. Nokia was already working on an open source platform for so-called internet tablets, called Maemo, which it used in its recently launched N900 phone. Now it is merging it with a similar programme which Intel ran for laptops, called Moblin, into a new platform called MeeGo.

“It is the future of how we think people are going to use computing,” said ­Renee James, Intel’s head of software and services. “From Intel’s perspective, we see expansive growth which brings new users to computing and at the heart of that has always been software innovation and that happens when there is a stable platform that developers can bet on being there long-term. So I consider this critical to the long term growth initiatives of Intel.” The first MeeGo devices will start appearing in the second half of the year, but Intel already has hardware manufacturers such as Dell, Asus and Samsung making laptops for its existing open source platform and they will all be moved over to MeeGo.

“They have understood the only way to beat Microsoft, Google and Apple is to do it through scale – get the platform to more devices,” according to John Strand, owner and head of Strand Consult after the announcements at the Mobile World Congress fair.

Immediately dubbed MeeToo by some analysts, MeeGo will create an open source software platform which Nokia reckons will be used in a new generation of wireless devices. Both companies want to attract a wide range of operators, handset manufacturers and software developers.

“This is not a closed club,” said Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s head of devices. “We are inviting everyone into this. “MeeGo will create a new strong single platform that will drive the future of mobile computing.”

The announcement of MeeGo, however, immediately raised questions about the future of Symbian, but Öistämö stressed: “This is very consistent with Nokia’s software strategy. Symbian is the perfect environment for democratising the smartphone, what MeeGo allows is the future of mobile computing … well beyond what can be done with smartphones today.”

The deal may raise some eyebrows at Google, however, as Intel’s chief executive Paul Otellini has sat on the Google board since 2004.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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Vodafone, Verizon Wireless and nPhase today announced a strategic alliance
designed to drive the growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) deployments in business
markets.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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In rich countries, the consumer buzz around mobile phones is all about iPhones and data and internet. But for cellcos, rich countries equal saturated markets, fierce competition and stand-still sales. They rely on the developing world for just about all their growth.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

Read Full Story…
(Source The Register)

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The only way to encourage developers to create great apps for all mobile phones, and not just Apple’s iPhone, is to reward them – and that means paying more

Easy to use mobile applications of the kind that Apple is pioneering are a huge economic opportunity to generate growth and jobs but also a conundrum. At a time when the whole world of computing is migrating into the “cloud”, with data stored out there on the web rather than on our computer desktops, the mobile world is moving in the opposite direction: nearly all of these games and services are being downloaded on to our mobile devices.

The result is that we are using our apps – and few more so than me – through dedicated silos rather than on the web. This has advantages, not least because data stored on your phone can be accessed more quickly, but also a big downside. This is partly because you are a prisoner of your service provider such as Apple, but mainly because if these apps were made for the web, then every phone would be able to access them, users would have big opportunities to share and developers wouldn’t have to spend money they haven’t got making multiple apps for incompatible phones.

At the moment, if you want to port an iPhone app to devices running Google’s Android operating system, you have to start building again from scratch. Apps would be much cheaper if they could be built to run across different platforms. Tom Hume, managing director of Brighton based FuturePlatforms, points out that Apple developers have to work in the Objective C computer language, whereas the HTML5 standard requires only minor changes between platforms.

FuturePlatforms operates a Google-style “gold card” system, allowing staff time off to do their own things. One developer used this option to produce an unofficial app of the Guardian for phones using Google’s Android operating system which in some ways is more flexible than the iPhone app (eg, it can download the paper during the night).

Make no mistake, something really big is happening with apps as this amazing device we still call a mobile phone extends its tentacles ever deeper into our lives. Today it is games, social networks, reading, search, location-based services; tomorrow health, work, painting, education, who knows what.

The stats are startling. According to technology research company Gartner, physical downloads of apps reached 2.5bn last year. These were overwhelmingly on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. But since iPhones amount to less than 1% of all phones, you don’t have to be a genius to realise the enormous potential. It could be that Gartner’s predictions of 4.5bn downloads this year and an astonishing 21.6bn in 2013, equivalent to more than three for everyone on the planet, will prove an underestimate.

The good – or bad – news, is that a staggering 87% of these downloads will be free for users. That’s great for you and me, but it is not an obvious way to encourage a growing industry to hire people to make up for the black hole caused by the banking collapse. Many of these “free” downloads will be supported by advertising and others will be corporations promoting their brands. But most will be free because creators don’t think they can charge for them.

At the moment, there is a grave distortion in the balance of power. Most of the money is going to the app shops such as Apple – which controls the gateway to the developers, who are often on £60 or more an hour – with the content providers squeezed in the middle of an increasingly crowded market.

I have been talking recently to developers – partly to research this column and partly because I am trying to do an app of my own to see how difficult it is (more of that at a later date, maybe). The overwhelming message is how difficult it is to make enough profit to justify the investment when costs are so high and the market flooded with freebies. Sure there are some who make good money, such as existing branded games being repackaged in mobile form and niche services. The most successful income-earning apps last year – satellite navigation guides at £30 a pop – have been undermined by Google bringing out a free turn-by-turn street navigation option.

Unsurprisingly then, ustwo of Shoreditch – maker of, among other things, mouthoff, an app that enables the phone screen to mimic movements of your mouth, which had mouth-watering publicity here and in the US – couldn’t make a respectable profit at 59p. Indeed, the company admits “the bottom line is that it’s impossible to make money at the 59p price point for 99% of studios”.

Toiluxe, a neat 59p iPhone app that uses satellite signals to tell you where the nearest toilet is in London – whether the Ritz hotel or a public convenience – got publicity in several newspapers but not enough to make a respectable return given that the developer only ends up with only 60% of income after Apple and Vat (levied at higher Irish rates where the servers are based).

The obvious answer is to raise prices, but that is easier said than done in an environment where so much is available for nothing – as newspapers in a different neck of the woods know full well.

It is all quite crazy, really. People who pay more than £2.50 for a cup of coffee that is gone in a few minutes are reluctant to pay £1 for a paper that will last for hours or an app that will be with you for ages, probably with free upgrades. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find an app among the hundreds of thousands on offer on the iPhone despite the growth of apps helping you to do just this (ie, looking for relevant apps) such as Chomp, or Mplayit on Facebook or Apple’s Genius. There must be hundreds of great apps that hardly anyone has discovered. Goodness knows what it will be like in a few years time.

There is an elephant in the room even though it is invisible at the moment: the bedroom programmer, shorthand for individuals working on their own. The reason is that it is very difficult to write code for a phone in the way that kids could program their BBC or Spectrum computers in the 1980s, a phenomenon that led the same kids to create a thriving computer games industry. Uncle Steve won’t let you near his phones except on his own terms. It may start to change with Google’s Android operating system based on open source, and I know of at least one developer working on an app to enable people to do their own coding on a phone in a (relatively) simple way.

If that happened maybe a new generation of cloud coders could send the apps revolution off in a whole new – and much cheaper – direction. The best things in life are not always free.

twitter.com/vickeegan

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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Good news for big names

Smartphones shipments leapt 30 per cent year on year during Q4 2009 to 53m units, well ahead of the 12 per cent growth seen by handsets as a whole.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

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(Source The Register)

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Cisco Silver partner
SICL has set itself a £10m revenue goal after celebrating 15 years in business.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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Netbooks taking off, 2 million people with dongles, an iPhone upgrade in autumn and the demise of Vonage … where was I right and wrong about the year just gone?

Now we can get 2009 into perspective, and the hangovers have worn off (less so the credit card bills, perhaps), let’s see how my tech predictions for 2009 went. Time to tot up …

Prediction 1: At least three companies will withdraw from the PC manufacturing business.

They didn’t. Did they? That’s 0/1

Matthew Wheeler points out that MPC did. MPC? “Edge PC owned by Micron Tech, then MicronPC, sold to Gores Tech, changed to MPC, sold to Hyperspace of Utah, then Chap.11,” he explained. And of course there’s Psystar, which thought it could put Mac OS X onto generic boxes, and got told by a judge it couldn’t. (These are hardly the big names I was originally thinking of, though.) And Psystar is still offering T-shirts, according to The Register.

In fact, companies didn’t withraw from the PC-making business; instead, seeing how desktops and even standard laptops weren’t making money, they shifted to netbooks, which saw explosive growth. Lesson: manufacturers like making things. The shift to making netbooks was a sort of evolutionary episode in the punctuated equilibrium of the computer business.

Prediction 2: There will be more “netbooks” – aka ultraportables, aka liliputers, like the Asus Eee PC – than ever, and their sales growth will far outpace that of the PC market.

Bullseye. PC market growth: 1.3% (or -7%, depending whose numbers you like). Netbook market growth: almost 100% (by revenue). 1/2

Prediction 3: Sun Microsystems won’t have a near-death experience, but it’s going to keep shrinking.

True. Being the subject of a (wished-for) takeover by Oracle hasn’t made it grow. 2/3

Prediction 4: Vonage will die. I’m sorry, guys, but your income statement shows you have debts of $276m, cash of $112m, and are paying “interest” (on the debt) of $5m per quarter, which means losses of $7m per quarter. That’s just not sustainable, and debt isn’t going to get cheaper to service, either.

Completely wrong. Vonage is still going. I have no idea how. 2/4

Prediction 5: Palm will come close to death, but advance sales of its Pre webphone, plus a little more money from its venture capitalist backers, will save it.

Its latest figures show that it didn’t do well, and the Pre hasn’t actually been fabulous. But the money from the venture capitalists has certainly helped. 3/5

Prediction 6: Twitter will find a way to charge for its service, from at least some users, and so move towards at least revenue, if not yet profit. Its growth will become explosive.

Tricky, this. Twitter’s growth did become explosive, helped along by Oprah, and Iranian election, and so on. Is it charging you or me to use it? No. Is it, however, charging Microsoft and Google to use its database for their “real-time” search engines, putting it squarely into revenue and, arguably, profit? Yes. Can we call Microsoft and Google “Twitter users”? I don’t see why not – I’ve previously argued that it should charge for use of its API, and charging those two giants for that is good enough.
So, 4/6

Prediction 7: Many – as in thousands – of IT jobs will be lost. Lots will go in finance as that industry shrinks; but there’s a general trend now where small companies are beginning to rely on cloud services from companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those don’t need a lot of people. (Ever seen a job advert to work on a cloud service?).

(The point about this was that the jobs were being lost in developed countries, of course, rather than in total all over the world.) Has there been a dramatic uptick in the number of IT jobs? Not thinking so. 5/7

Prediction 8: IT will more and more resemble the building business. Either you specialise, or you’re coordinating the project, or you’re doing simple, low-paid work that someone from another country can and will do for less.

This ties in with the one above. Cloud-based services mean that setting up a business that relies on downloads, for example, is simple. (Twitter caches your pictures on Amazon’s S3 service, for example.) Are IT people becoming multi-specialists? Or finding it harder to get general work? We’re still hearing that there’s a skills shortage in IT – but the shortage is at the top end, in the project coordination side, or in getting the services set up. There’s less demand for bodies. These days, you either specialise, or get out. Though I realise that this could be described as my biased view, without data. So let’s call it a half. (Data either way to prove or disprove very welcome.)
5.5/8

And now we come to that ever-popular subject, Microsoft.
Prediction 9: Windows 7 will be pushed out of the door in time for the end of the year, and particularly for Christmas sales. It won’t be perfect, but it will get corporates interested in an upgrade from XP, which Vista didn’t.

It certainly was pushed out for the end of the year; October 22 is good enough. While you could argue that it’s not perfect, it’s considered by lots of people to be very, very good. And it certainly has corporate customers very interested in an upgrade. Come on, that’s solid.
6.5/9

Prediction 10: Microsoft will buy chunks of Yahoo (after being forced to overbid by challenges from Google), which will raise yowls of pain from all over the web. And then in six months people will have forgotten all about it.

Microsoft did buy chunks of Yahoo – well, sort of. Specifically, it bought the right to put its ads against search, which it would do. Google didn’t challenge it at all. Though this one sounds right, when you examine the detail, it’s wrong.
6.5/10

Prediction 11: XP will finally be declared dead once Windows 7 is released, because a version of Windows 7 will be made to run on netbooks.

Yes, Windows 7 is made to run on netbooks. XP hasn’t formally been declared dead (apart from the fact that it’s been declared dead ages ago) but it’s vanishing.
7.5/11

Prediction 12: Internet Explorer will continue to lose share to Firefox, Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome.

Oh, yes, that did keep happening. Firefox has reached historical highs. And Internet Explorer (all versions, cumulative) keeps slipping.
8.5/12

Prediction 13: No Zune phone, and no Zune in Europe either.

Can I claim two? No? Damn. There was a moment in November where I worried – er, hoped – no, worried that there might be a Zune in Europe. But it turned out that Microsoft was just using the name, a bit, for its online video marketplace in Europe. Microsoft hasn’t launched a Zune Phone (it’s doing badly enough with Windows Mobile without trying to make its struggling music player mimic the iPod’s transition into the iPhone) and the Zune remains an idea that has yet to make sense in the US, let alone Europe.
9.5/13

Ubiquity

Prediction 14: Dongles will fall in price, and data charges will too as the phone networks realise that it’s a great way to tie people to lucrative contracts without having to subsidise them with mobile phones. So they’ll become pervasive. Let’s put a number on it: 3 million users, PAYG or contract, by the end of the year.

Result: true, and data charges have as well. There are actually about 13 million mobile data users in the UK. How many dongles? At least 3m of them, surely.
10.5/14

Prediction 15: Being able to transfer sound and, increasingly, video around your home between different devices will become more important, and more and more products will appear built around the DLNA standard to assist it.

It’s an enduring mystery why this hasn’t been more visible. But in fact more and more people are moving video around the home. What do you think the iPlayer is all about? Except, of course, they don’t tend to link it to their TV. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii though are changing this, by offering iPlayer (PS3, Wii) and film (PS3, Xbox) streams. That’s not, though, what I’d imagined, which is people actually storing data centrally in their home and shifting it. Though “more” DLNA products have appeared (I loved the LaCie 1TB NAS drive, for example, which has DLNA compatibility). My feeling though is that this hasn’t happened.
10.5/15

Prediction 16: Femtocells – which improve mobile reception inside homes and businesses by providing a mini-cell, and pushing the data over your broadband connection – will struggle because the mobile companies will price them wrong, thinking they should be a niche, and hence expensive, product.

I also said during the year that femtocells weren’t going to make it, which brought lots of plangent cries from femtocell companies saying that no, really, 2010 was the year they were aiming at. I was sent a femtocell to try. (Thank you, Vodafone. Afraid I made little progress.) Have you seen a femtocell anywhere? Anywhere at all? (Mobile phone company employees and femtocell manufacturers excluded.) I think this can’t be anything but correct.
11.5/16

Prediction 17: Mobile networks will tout phones on the basis that they let you contact your friends on Twitter – rather than last year’s favourite, Facebook – via the data connection. (SMS will remain too expensive for Twitter to use outside the US.)

Facebook remained the powerful force and the reason people wanted to connect: plenty of phones were marketed on the basis that you’d be able to check Facebook; none that I saw on the basis on twittering. (A classic case of early adopter over-optimism about Twitter’s penetration on my part – though it has completely entered the language, having been used in a scene in Gavin and Stacey.) And Twitter re-introduced SMS updates outside the US. So wrong on both counts.
11.5/17

Linux

Prediction 18: Advocates will declare that 2010 is going to be “the year of desktop Linux” while the bugs are ironed out this year.

This was bound to fail. Linux advocates always say that this year is the one when desktop Linux is going to take off. Ubuntu got plenty of fans, especially for version 9.04 in April.
11.5/18

Prediction 19: But in fact the sales of netbooks running Linux will mean that it’s best-selling year for desktop Linux ever.

Then again, this one was bound to succeed. Desktop Linux has had so few avenues for sale that it wasn’t going to fail to have its best-ever year once a few machines with it were sold. Of course, I overlooked the popularity of Android, Google’s mobile phone operating system, which is Linux. Had I forecast that mobile Linux would have a standout year, that would have been a really worthwhile prediction. Still:
12.5/19

Apple

Prediction 20: Let’s start with a banker. No self-replicating worm for Mac OSX or the iPhone’s OSX by the end of the year.

Correct. It always is, year after year.
13.5/20

Prediction 21: Snow Leopard will be released for sale in May 2009 … this date means it will have been slightly more than the average delay for OSX releases since Leopard’s release in October 2007 – which leaves time for an announcement and release schedule.

Wrong. Wrongy, wrongy, wrongy wrong wrong. Snow Leopard was released in August 2009.
13.5/21

Prediction 22: Snow Leopard squashes down application sizes, and uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) to help processing. But why would you want to do that? It feels oddly as though Apple is imagining a Flash drive-based machine able to run Snow Leopard, with a comparatively weak processor that uses the GPU to hide the fact. Plus it owns a chip design company. Even so, I don’t think it will offer a tablet computer. Or a netbook. Neither fits with its strategy – which is all about the iPhone, and pricey computers.

Apple turned up its nose at the idea of a netbook. (Even if I did suggest that it should. Yes, accuse me of wanting it all ways.) It also didn’t announce a tablet computer in 2009. (2010, ah, perhaps different.)
14.5/22

Prediction 23: Apple will charge for the Snow Leopard upgrade – just as much as it has for previous upgrades.

Yes, it did charge – but not as much as for previous upgrades. That’s a miss.
14.5/23

Prediction 24: ZFS won’t be built into the kernel for Snow Leopard; it’ll be an optional install, for server honchos.

In fact, ZFS has disappeared from Apple builds. The cause seems to be intellectual property problems. Ah well. It would have been a nightmare.
15.5/24

Prediction 25: Steve Jobs will remain chief executive through the year. That might sound like an obvious prediction. It isn’t.

Hmm – technically, he was the chief executive, but he stepped aside to have a liver transplant and recuperate for six months. This prediction was made amid all the rumours of Jobs’s illness at the tail-end of 2008. The rumours were that he would have to step down because of the condition (at that time, still a secret). My feeling was that it wasn’t such a big thing. Turns out it was a Big Thing. I think this is half-right – no more.
16/25

Prediction 26: The iPhone hardware won’t be updated before the autumn.

The iPhone 3GS was released in June, and Stephen Fry reviewed it in the same month. June is not autumn, not even in the southern hemisphere.
16/26

Prediction 27: The iPhone software will be updated to 3.x, which will bring copy-and-paste and photo messaging. About time.

It was, and it did. Finally.
17/27

Environment

Prediction 28: Oil prices are diving, but electricity is still not getting cheaper. Expect more companies – even quite big ones – to reduce their in-house server usage in favour of outsourced pay-per-process services offered by Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

This is the move to cloud computing, and it’s one-way traffic at present. Do you know of anyone who has brought their computing back in-house from the cloud?
18/28

Free Our Data

Prediction 29: The government will take a deep breath and acknowledge that it must make a significant part of Ordnance Survey’s data available for free unfettered reuse – and will do it.

I was there at 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown, flanked by Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the web, you know) and Martha Lane-Fox, announced precisely that. Actually, I’d have traded all the other predictions for this one – but this one is a great one, a huge year-end bonus to the Free Our Data campaign and to everyone who is going to benefit from it.
19/29

Processing

Prediction 30: In 1992 I wrote a feature based on some analysts’ predictions about how in five years we’d all be using speech-to-text input for our computers. We didn’t. … [but] by the end of the year, we should see programs able to turn the ad-hoc spoken to the written almost faultlessly.

Er, we didn’t. From the revelation of the people behind the curtain at Spinvox, to the nearly-good-enough-but-not-perfectness of Dragon Dictate on the iPhone, we’re still some way off perfect trasncription. (Believe me, we’re always looking for one so we can turn our Tech Weekly podcast back into words for the hard-of-listening.)
19/30

So that’s 19/30, or 63%. For comparison, in 2008, my predictions hit 20.5/30, or 68%. Look, what’s a mark and a half between friends? Certainly not statistically significant. Basically, what I think we’re seeing is that you can rely on me to be wrong about one-third of the time. You can decide whether that’s better or worse than a weather forecaster. (The Met Office suggested there was a 1-in-7 chance this would be a cold winter in its long-range forecast.)

And what about the things I missed? The biggest was Google – the rise of Android, and the announcement of its Chrome OS for netbooks. That’s going to be huge this year, I think – so come back for my predictions for 2010 next week. Oh, and tell me what other important events of 2009 I missed.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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BBC iPlayer figures provide revealing snapshot

The technology may have changed, but tech-savvy consumers still watch their favourite TV shows on mobile phones at the same times as they used to watch TV, with a healthy dose taking the BBC iPlayer to bed at weekends.

The BBC, which has provided a revealing snapshot into how consumers are using BBC iPlayer on their mobiles to watch TV, found that peak time viewing is about 9.30pm.

The prime time period for evening mobile viewing runs from about 7.30pm to 11pm across the week, a similar pattern to the viewing habits of people watching on a television. The BBC is keen to learn more about the trend and is contemplating research into the pattern. The corporation also found that mobile TV watching is lower on Friday and Saturday evenings when the younger people are likely to be out socialising.

Weekend mornings, when users are having a lie-in, have also proved to be a hit for the iPlayer on mobiles with a significant bump in viewing between 7am and 10am. The BBC said that, overall, Sunday is the most popular day for watching catch-up TV on mobiles.

The BBC did not provide any figures on how many shows are being viewed by mobile. Numbers are thought to be relatively small, but growth is expected to be high as the iPlayer has jumped from being available on four to 22 devices in a year.

The BBC also revealed that Top Gear was the most watched TV programme of the year on the BBC iPlayer, based on figures to 13 December. Viewers used the device on computers, on Virgin Media’s TV service and on the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. There were a record 1.67m views of the first episode of the 13th series of the hit BBC2 show on the iPlayer. Of the top 20 TV shows it is notable that BNP leader Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time prompted huge catch-up viewing. It ranked fourth with almost 1 million views.

The second day of the fifth Test of England’s gripping Ashes win over Australia at the Oval, broadcast by 5 Live’s Test Match Special, was the most popular radio show online. The show was listened to 183,000 times on the radio catch-up service.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, bbc, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, growth, line, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, new, phone, phones, sam, service, sim, sol, station, test, uk, virgin

Far east fanbois

The iPhone continues to gain market share worldwide. No news there. What’s interesting is the country where it achieved its highest rate of growth during 2009: Japan.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

Read Full Story…
(Source The Register)

Tags: 12, 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, growth, iphone, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, phone, sol, source the register, uk, world

Servassure’s 2010 growth plans have got off to a flying start after the
service provider secured Accredited Service Partner status with Samsung.

Read Full Story…
(Source Yahoo UK News)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, growth, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sam, samsung, service, sol, uk

Better UIs, downmarket Symbian and flat growth

Nokia has laid out its plans for the next year, expecting to maintain its market share in handsets and infrastructure while the industry grows slightly.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

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(Source The Register)

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Apple iPhone owners more wiling to pay for content online than others, finds survey – but news a sticking point

Consumers with an iPhone show more willingness to pay for digital content than the wider online population, according to new research published today, although the chances of getting people to pay for newspaper on the web are slim.

The research, by the media law firm Olswang, adds weight to the growing sense within the media industry that the explosion in popularity of downloadable applications for the Apple device has created a new way of monetising digital content. Crucially, it may represent a more lucrative proposition than the current reliance on online advertising.

The survey shows a marked difference in the willingness to pay for content between people who own an iPhone and the general online audience. The law firm surveyed just over 1,000 adults and over 500 13-to-17-year-olds about their digital habits. John Enser, partner in its media, communications and technology team, said the team were surprised at the difference in attitude between iPhone and non-iPhone users.

“Clearly there is some skew in the figures, as iPhone users do tend to be more affluent, but not enough to explain the very significant differences in the responses,” he said. “It seems to be that people get used to paying for content, such as an application on the iPhone because it is so easy and the idea of paying for something suddenly becomes much less of a barrier than it is online where people are used to getting so much for free.”

Consumers are most likely to pay for film and television content, according to Olswang’s Media Convergence Survey 2009. The survey showed that 58% of people would pay to access online a film just released in cinemas, 52% would pay for access to a film that will not be on DVD for at least two months and 40% would pay to access a film which is already on DVD or pay-TV. Looking at solely iPhone users, however, those figures jump to 73%, 67% and 54% respectively.

Consumers also reported a willingness to pay for some services which are currently free, with 30% of the online population saying they would pay for seven-day catch-up TV – 41% of iPhone users said they were willing to make a micropayment or set up a subscription to pay for catch-up TV.

News content, however, remains a tough online sell. The survey asked how willing consumers would be to buy a newspaper article or column which could be read on a computer or portable device such as a phone or e-reader. Only 19% of respondents expressed any willingness to pay – though that did increase to 30% among iPhone users.

That presents something of a problem for Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp empire is planning to pour more of its newspaper content behind a paywall in the coming months.

“Murdoch really does face an uphill struggle,” said Enser.

A possible alternative is to make a truly compelling mobile phone application, which consumers are more likely to pay for. Several media outlets – including the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Radio Times – are already charging for their content through mobile applications.

“If you look at the Financial Times and the way it gives subscribers access to content through the iPhone and the BlackBerry, that model is a much easier play than trying to persuade people to pay for content on the open internet,” Enser said. The FT’s iPhone application allows readers to access a small number of articles per month for free, but to get complete access requires a full subscription.

The survey also looked at people’s willingness to pay for fiction, travel guides and magazines online or on a portable device or e-reader. The survey found that 30% of people (42% of iPhone users) would pay for an online book; 32% (43% of iPhone users) would pay for an extract from a travel guide; and 29% (38%) would pay for a magazine.

The Olswang research comes as another survey released today shows the growing popularity of Twitter on mobile phones, and the increasing importance of the micro-blogging site as a way of bringing content to people’s attention through the use of shortened web addresses.

Because of Twitter’s 140-character limit, sites such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com are used to shorten often very long web addresses in tweets.

Research by internet mobility firm Novarra shows that mobile page views of those two address-shortening services have grown by 1068% so far this year.

At the start of the year neither bit.ly nor tinyurl.com were even in the top 1,000 sites accessed by mobile phone users, but tenfold growth in their usage has seen them race up the rankings. In the UK, Novarra reckons tinyurl.com ranked among the top 200 sites accessed last month.

“The growth in mobile traffic to sites that shorten URLs demonstrates that Twitter is a great viral tool for exposing consumers to new and interesting content,” said its vice president of marketing, Randy Cavaiani.

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Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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The next five years will see dramatic growth in the European datacentre
market, according to a new survey.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Tags: 12, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, growth, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sol, survey, uk

Acquisitive telecoms firm
Chess posted impressive growth in fiscal year 2009, with revenue up more a fifth and
net profit more than doubling.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Tags: 12, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, growth, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sol, uk

The networking infrastructure firm will move its R&D, along with some of its global services, to countries that are more ‘high-growth’

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(Source ZDNet UK)

Tags: 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, global, google, growth, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, service, sol, uk