Archive for December 23rd, 2009
Apple Tablet Mystery! ‘You Will Be Very Surprised’ By How You Interact With It (AAPL)
The New York Times‘ Nick Bilton also takes a stab at today’s Apple tablet reports, with a few new juicy bits:
- “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet,” says a current “senior” Apple staffer.
- “Yet another recently departed Apple employee tipped me: ‘You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet’.”
Nice! So what’s the mystery user interface? Voice control? Handwriting? A stylus? Brain sensors?
Bonus: See 25 guesses about what the tablet will look like →
Earlier: Apple To Demo Tablet In January, Asks Developers To Get Apps Ready
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See Also:
- Apple Tablet Event: Jan. 26 In San Francisco, Says FT
- Apple Could Sell 1.4 Million Tablets At $600 Next Year: Munster
- Apple To Demo Tablet In January, Asks Developers To Get Apps Ready
Apple Tablet Event: Jan. 26 In San Francisco, Says FT (AAPL)
More details on the Apple tablet event we reported this morning: The FT says it could take place on Tuesday, Jan. 26 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
David Gelles, Financial Times:
The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.
Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th. Both YBCA and Apple declined to comment.
The company most recently used the YBCA stage in September, when chief executive Steve Jobs made his first public appearance after a medical leave and showed off new iPods.
Bonus: See 25 guesses about what the tablet will look like →
Image: Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:
- Apple Could Sell 1.4 Million Tablets At $600 Next Year: Munster
- Apple To Demo Tablet In January, Asks Developers To Get Apps Ready
- 20 Guesses About What The Apple Tablet Will Look Like
Twitter Buys Startup To Help With Geolocation
Twitter has acquired the startup behind a location service called GeoAPI as geolocation becomes a bigger part of the company’s strategy going forward.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced the deal in a blog post, but did not specify terms. It is likely a very small deal focused on acq-hiring the ex-Googlers who created GeoAPI and some of the technology itself.
The GeoAPI team — known as Mixer Labs — includes:
- Elad Gil, cofounder and CEO, former cofounder of Google’s mobile team, worked on Android acquisition.
- Othman Laraki, cofounder and President, former Googler who worked on toolbar, Gears, early Firefox extensions.
- Tom Wuttke, ex-Googler, also designed the original game engine for “You Don’t Know Jack.” (Cool!).
- George Lee, iPhone and Twitter whiz, worked on iGoogle analytics and algorithms at Google.
- And more!
We first reported on Twitter’s increased focus on location in June when it hired Ryan Sarver away from location startup Skyhook Wireless to work on Twitter’s platform team.
Here’s how Google CEO Evan Williams describes the deal:
The Mixer Labs crew has been working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years and just recently launched GeoAPI, a comprehensive service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications. As of today, they’re part of Twitter and will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. We want to know What’s happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering “Earthquake!” alone is not as informative as “Earthquake!” coupled with your current location.
We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities. We look forward to building features together that will make Twitter even more interesting and relevant to your daily life, no matter where you are. Please join us in welcoming this fine new crew to Twitter Headquarters—795 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA.
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See Also:
- Twitter’s Next Project: Location
- Twitter Will End The Year Profitable
- Twitter Lets Multiple Users Tweet To The Same Account
CHART OF THE DAY: AdMob Hits Pause On Growth To Focus On Smartphones (GOOG, AAPL)
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Google is buying mobile ad network AdMob — assuming the Feds let the deal through — to help make Google a ton of money off mobile advertising, as the smartphone market — iPhones, Android phones, BlackBerry devices, etc. — matures.
To do that, AdMob has recently taken its foot off the growth gas pedal, and seems to be dropping some publisher relationships to focus on apps and smartphone sites, especially for Apple’s iPhone.
As a result, AdMob’s overall growth — as measured by billions of ad requests per month — peaked in August at 10.57 billion requests, and has declined over each of the past three months, to 9.76 billion requests in November. Meanwhile, ad requests from Apple iPhones and iPod touch devices have continued their strong growth, highlighting the future of AdMob’s business.
What happened? Our understanding is that AdMob is being more selective over the publishers it works with, and is limiting traffic from some less desirable publishers, based on how they perform for advertisers.
This makes sense, as the company’s focus right now should be on courting all the top smartphone app publishers and mobile Web publishers, improving its products and revenue opportunities, and preparing to integrate with Google. The major growth opportunity for smartphone ads is still on the horizon.
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See Also:
- CHART OF THE DAY: eCommerce Ekes Out Tiny Holiday Gain Over Last Year’s Catastrophe
- CHART OF THE DAY: AOL Robots Should Assign Stories About Google Doodles
- CHART OF THE DAY: iPhone Blows Past Windows Mobile
Barclays Sees Upside At AOL; Credit Suisse Analyzes The Google Phone; Apple Takes On Traditional TV
Our take on today’s news and analysis:
Barclays Initiates On AOL And Sees Upside
Doug Anmuth initiates with a $30 Price Target – 29% above the current price:
“Around the time when AOL began to trade in the when-issued market, investors were concerned about the degree of page views and advertising revenue generated by Access subscribers. Since then AOL management has clarified that the vast majority of traffic is coming from non-paying users.
As of 3Q09 AOL had 5.4 million Access subscribers while unique visitors trended close to 100 million per month according to comScore. Even at 2+ screen names per account we would not expect Access subscribers to account for more than 20% of overall traffic and page views.“
Our Take: We agree. We continue to believe improving the company’s email business is central to any successful turnaround at AOL. In addition, we believe the company has the opportunity to retain a lot of this valuable email traffic by improving its email product. Management has taken initial steps in the right direction but there is a lot of heavy lifting to be done.
Credit Suisse Sees 3 MM To 11 MM Google Nexus One Sales In Year One
Telecom analyst Jonathan Chaplin does not release official estimates for sales of a potential Google Nexus One phone, but does give a range that indicates he believes it could potentially sell:
“The iPhone sold about 5.4MM units in its first year and 6.6MM units in its second year, while consensus estimates for the Droid are for about 0.9MM unit sales for 4Q (3.6MM annualized). Both of these devices were sold by a single carrier that accounts for roughly a third of the market and we would regard a range of 3 – 5MM unit sales as the upper bound for an extremely successful device that is launched with one carrier.
It is difficult to know how much greater sales would be if the device were available at all carriers simultaneously – the addressable base would be larger; however, the carriers may not promote a device as heavily without the benefit of exclusivity. In addition, sales will be reduced if the device is not subsidized in some way.
The 2.5-10% of sales used above implies unit sales of 2.8MM – 11.4MM, which seems reasonable to us. We would note however, that this is not an official estimate, but rather a range of possible sales, which enables us to do further analysis on the implications to wireless carriers.”
Our Take: Regardless of how the Phone sells, Google’s Android strategy is working. The company is taking a page out of Microsoft’s book–spraying software across a large number of hardware providers–and Android should soon begin to challenge RIM and Apple in smartphones. The fact that Google is selling a phone directly is an odd departure from this strategy, one that could create major conflict with its hardware partners.
Apple Moves A Step Closer To Killing The TV Business (WSJ)
According to the WSJ Apple is in material talks with CBS and Disney to cut licensing deals for its cable killer Apple TV in which subscriptions would be delivered to the TV over the Internet:
“The proposed service by the maker of iPhones and iPod music players could, in at least some scenarios, offer access to some TV shows from a selection of major U.S. television networks for a monthly fee, according to people familiar with the discussions. Apple is pushing to complete licensing deals and hopes to introduce the service in 2010, some of those people said.
Apple faces an uphill battle assembling a critical mass of TV networks to sign up, a factor that could delay or scuttle a launch. A broad swath of media companies—including News Corp., Viacom Inc., Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting and Discovery Communications Inc.—appear to be opposed to or leaning away from signing on, at least to Apple’s initial proposals, according to people familiar with the matter. It is unclear if NBC Universal, in which Comcast is buying a controlling stake, is interested.”
Our Take: Internet TV services like Hulu or the proposed Apple TV service are clearly threats to cable TV operators. However, cable companies are so far facing this challenge with their “TV Everywhere” services, which offer a deep programming selection from most of the networks on cable TV – but only for cable subscribers.
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See Also:
- Citi’s Mahaney Defends Kindle EPS Estimate, Tries To Address Our Concerns
- Citi Defends Bullish Kindle Estimates, RIM Blows Out Quarter, Palm Just Blows
- Goldman Doesn’t Hate AOL, Sony’s Latest Futile Attempt To Attack Kindle, Google Buying Yelp