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Dell found in contempt; IBM fails to stop Dell hire of M&A exec; Apple-Psystar case to proceed and Apple sued by consumers again; Germany court readies to fine Rapidshare; the FCC has new chairman, commissioner; Nortel creditors want to halt unit sale to Nokia Siemens Networks; and the DOJ wants more time to vet Oracle-Sun deal.
Via the news letter of publishing consulting Bob Sacks, I learned of a student hoax that won a top prize from the magazine Paris Match. A pair from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts convinced a group of "experts" that a faked spread on "students prostituting themselves or looking for food in ...
You hear a lot of comparison between companies. Google will beat Microsoft, or Microsoft will devastate Google. Twitter will become the New Google, or the New Facebook, or the New Media. Yahoo will become the New Yahoo. You get the idea. But there are two things that become obvious when you think a moment. One is that all these companies are juggling for a future business landscape dominated by communications. The other is that they're all trying to fit a complex issue into their own undersized boxes.
According to iSuppli, the new Mac Mini is a heck of a lot more expensive to make than is usual for Apple. A $599 machine yields just over $200 in margin. For many companies, that would be slick. For Apple, with its legacy of high margin business, this is the financial equivalent of an earthquake. And it's yet the latest piece of evidence suggesting that on the computer front, and probably elsewhere as well, the days of enviable levels of profitability, and the ability to sell expensive hardware, are likely coming to an eventual end.
It's clear that the future of Palm rests on the Pre, as my colleague Michael Hickins noted. Much of the potential success of the Pre -- or any handset, as has been clear from Apple's wild success -- rides on the developers and companies that decide to create applications for the platform. And they are weighing a lot of factors to figure out where to focus their technical and marketing resources and what platforms to support.
A killer application has finally emerged that should allow smartphones to overtake conventional PCs and laptops as the computing device of choice: it's called augmented reality, and as absurd as that sounds, that's exactly what it is. Mobile applications consultant Tomi Ahonen wrote on his mobi...
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Dennis Howlett's analysis"][/caption] My recent post accusing Oracle of lying about its chief rival was close enough to the mark to get under Oracle's skin. Still, it had some holes I couldn't fill, not least of which because of different...
Palm CEO Jonathan Rubinstein doesn't think he has to beat the brains out of former employer Apple, or any other smartphone vendor, in order for Palm to succeed. It's a remarkably calm assessment from the leader of a company whose future depends largely on the success of a single product launch, and ...
In the book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that consumers buy goods because of subconscious, deeply-seated motivation to find mates and procreate. And a prime example of a company that has ridden Darwin all the way to the bank is Apple.
Sirius XM has been notifying subscribers of a price hike that the company ascribes to increased music royalties that the service is incurring. But while the company is getting charged more, the subscription increases far outstrip the higher royalties, seeming to put the company in conflict with a promise it made the FCC at the time of the merger between former competitors Sirius and XM.
Microsoft has seen the fury of the masses and like Atlas, shrugged. A Twitter campaign astroturfed by email marketing campaign vendor Freshview is asking (or is it begging?) Microsoft to reverse course on a key technology decision made for Office 2007 in its next release of Outlook, slated for ne...
By allowing the Web to become a universal operating system, and making mobile devices more powerful than low-end laptops, HTML 5 is transforming IT more profoundly than any development since the advent of the Internet. As HTML 5 becomes the widely-adopted standard for authoring on the Web, it will r...
Being underwater seems to be a fact of life for the US Patent and Trademark Office, and things have only been getting worse. With current applications down, so are fees and, therefore, USPTO revenues. The agency has frozen hiring and just cut examiner overtime, meaning that patent applications will only pile up even more. Will a Senate attempt to throw a lifeline help?
When you hear corporations beating their chests over their competitive position, there's always a good bet they are trying to make things look sunnier. My colleague Michael Hickins caught Oracle in posturing. But he mentioned SAP claiming that, where it competes with Oracle, it was "doing very well, thank you." So I dug up SAP's last financial statement, and if that's doing well, I'd hate to be doing badly.
Two diametrically different companies -- Fortune 100 IT vendor HP, and tiny Norwegian browser company Opera -- have separately demonstrated how a subtle but important shift in the technology landscape could eat into the fabric of Google's revenue tapestry. According to HP's Billy Hoffman, who d...
