HELSINKI (Reuters) - Struggling phone maker Nokia has knocked 10-15 percent off the prices of two of its top of the range smartphones, hoping to boost sales before newer models arrive in markets in November.
Nokia has cut the price of the Lumia 800 by around 15 percent and the Lumia 900 by 10 percent in Europe, according to device pricing data compiled by British research firm CCS Insight. Nokia declined to comment.
Earlier this month, Nokia launched Lumia 820 and 920, which many see as crucial for the Finnish company's survival. But the newest models will only go on sale in November, leaving the company's sales team struggling with older smartphone models for over a month.
Nokia had already slashed the price of the Lumia 800 by around 15 percent earlier this month and made smaller cuts for its other Lumia models.
Once the world's biggest mobile phone maker, Nokia fell behind rivals in smartphones and has racked up more than 3 billion euros ($3.86 billion) in operating losses in the last 18 months.
In early 2011, it bet its future on Microsoft's Windows Phone software. Windows accounts for only around 3 percent of global smartphones, while Google's Android platform controls two-thirds of sales and Apple has around a quarter.
Competitive pricing is considered crucial for Nokia to lure back customers, even though pricing does not seem to be an issue for rival Apple. In Belgium, for example, more than 10,000 people have pre-registered for the latest iPhone even before a local price has been set.
(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Jane Merriman)
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Friday, September 28, 2012
New art-house app lets you take just one picture, ever
One Momento is an interesting social experiment in what's truly important in lifeThere are a lot of terrific camera apps out there. Most people prefer Instagram for its filters and ability to share your photos with others, while some prefer the more powerful set of tools Snapseed offers. One of the newest camera apps for your iPhone is One Memento, a curious "photography experiment" that allows you the ability to take just one single photograph.
Once you've signed in to the app through Twitter, you can flick your fingers to ceremoniously break the app's seal and take one - and only one - photograph. Once the picture is taken and edited using the supplied filters, the app assigns your memento a number, and uploads it to a searchable database. Even if you're not interested in taking a photo to share, you can still look through the gallery of what appear to be some very impressive pictures. You can choose to like a photo, or share it with your friends.
We're somewhat intrigued by what some of the One Memento users have shared thus far. For Memento #1375, for example, uploader "Andy" shared a picture of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, explaining "I always wanted to visit the Great Sand Dunes and don't want to forget it." It's a great shot, and it's a great idea - by allowing only one picture per person, One Memento is creating a database of 250,000 images that have actual meaning to the photographer.
You can download the free One Memento app on the Apple App Store.
[via Laughing Squid]
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca
More from Tecca:
- Beginner's guide to digital photography
- Instagram Guide: Everything you need to start snapping and sharing
- Look out Facebook and Instagram, Google just bought Snapseed
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BlackBerry maker's outlook brightens, but risks remain: analysts
(Reuters) - Research in Motion Ltd's turnaround potential has improved after the struggling BlackBerry maker's better-than-expected quarterly results, analysts said, with one summarizing his view by saying 'the patient has a heartbeat.'
Analysts said risks remained, with the company's future riding on the release of its BlackBerry 10 model early next year, but an improved cash position provides breathing room.
National Bank Financial upgraded RIM's stock, while BMO Capital Markets and Barclays Capital were among brokerages that raised price targets on the company's shares.
RIM not only reported a smaller-than-expected loss for the second quarter, it beat market estimates for revenue and shipments while arresting its cash burn ahead of the crucial launch of BlackBerry 10. Subscriber numbers also rose in the quarter, surprising analysts.
'This performance is nothing short of shocking as RIM has found a formula to entice its global carrier customers to sell (its) product,' said National Bank Financial's Kris Thompson.
RIM is offering aggressive pricing for its BlackBerry 7 and may be discounting on network service fees, Thompson said.
Thompson, who is rated five stars by Thomson Reuters StarMine for the accuracy of his estimates on RIM's earnings, upgraded the stock to 'outperform' and increased his price target on the stock to $12 from $8.
The analyst said he expected RIM's management, which has succeeded in maintaining the company's subscriber base, to continue with steps to sustain that base ahead of the launch of the next-generation BlackBerry early next year.
Until Thursday's results, RIM was increasingly being written off by analysts because of its failure to keep pace with innovations from rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co.
'While RIM delivered marginally better results, we believe it is still too early to get constructive,' said Phillip Huang of UBS Investment Research, in a note titled 'Not Out of the Woods Yet; 1Q13 Key'. RIM is expect to launch BlackBerry 10 in the first quarter of the new year.
Huang, who has a neutral rating on the stock, did not change his view or price target of $9.50.
BMO analyst Tim Long, who said RIM continues to incur meaningful costs to sell older and uncompetitive products, said the company's fate now hinged on BlackBerry 10.
'The app line-up for BB10 still appears very weak, particularly when compared to (Apple's) iOS and (Samsung's) Android,' said Long, who raised his price target to $8 from $7.
Barclays raised its target to $7 from $6.
William Blair and Co's Brian Nugent, while detecting RIM's 'heartbeat', said he was maintaining his 'market perform' rating. '...Nothing led us to be incrementally positive, and we continue to believe that company's structural challenges persist,' he said.
RIM's Nasdaq-listed shares shot up more than 20 percent to $8.60 in extended trading on Thursday, and were trading around that level before the bell.
(Reporting by Fareha Khan, additional reporting by Aditi Sharma; Editing by Joyjeet Das and Ted Kerr)
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Analysts said risks remained, with the company's future riding on the release of its BlackBerry 10 model early next year, but an improved cash position provides breathing room.
National Bank Financial upgraded RIM's stock, while BMO Capital Markets and Barclays Capital were among brokerages that raised price targets on the company's shares.
RIM not only reported a smaller-than-expected loss for the second quarter, it beat market estimates for revenue and shipments while arresting its cash burn ahead of the crucial launch of BlackBerry 10. Subscriber numbers also rose in the quarter, surprising analysts.
'This performance is nothing short of shocking as RIM has found a formula to entice its global carrier customers to sell (its) product,' said National Bank Financial's Kris Thompson.
RIM is offering aggressive pricing for its BlackBerry 7 and may be discounting on network service fees, Thompson said.
Thompson, who is rated five stars by Thomson Reuters StarMine for the accuracy of his estimates on RIM's earnings, upgraded the stock to 'outperform' and increased his price target on the stock to $12 from $8.
The analyst said he expected RIM's management, which has succeeded in maintaining the company's subscriber base, to continue with steps to sustain that base ahead of the launch of the next-generation BlackBerry early next year.
Until Thursday's results, RIM was increasingly being written off by analysts because of its failure to keep pace with innovations from rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co.
'While RIM delivered marginally better results, we believe it is still too early to get constructive,' said Phillip Huang of UBS Investment Research, in a note titled 'Not Out of the Woods Yet; 1Q13 Key'. RIM is expect to launch BlackBerry 10 in the first quarter of the new year.
Huang, who has a neutral rating on the stock, did not change his view or price target of $9.50.
BMO analyst Tim Long, who said RIM continues to incur meaningful costs to sell older and uncompetitive products, said the company's fate now hinged on BlackBerry 10.
'The app line-up for BB10 still appears very weak, particularly when compared to (Apple's) iOS and (Samsung's) Android,' said Long, who raised his price target to $8 from $7.
Barclays raised its target to $7 from $6.
William Blair and Co's Brian Nugent, while detecting RIM's 'heartbeat', said he was maintaining his 'market perform' rating. '...Nothing led us to be incrementally positive, and we continue to believe that company's structural challenges persist,' he said.
RIM's Nasdaq-listed shares shot up more than 20 percent to $8.60 in extended trading on Thursday, and were trading around that level before the bell.
(Reporting by Fareha Khan, additional reporting by Aditi Sharma; Editing by Joyjeet Das and Ted Kerr)
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Thursday, September 27, 2012
RIM surprises with cash boost and resilient sales; shares surge
TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd reported a narrower-than-expected loss on Thursday and the struggling BlackBerry maker bolstered its cash reserves, sparking optimism ahead of the launch of its make-or-break line of next-generation smartphones.
Shares of RIM surged 20 percent in after-hours trade on indications the company will have plenty of cash to ramp up production of its new BlackBerry 10 devices and mount a robust marketing campaign for the revamped line, due in early 2013.
It was the biggest jump for the stock since a 50 percent surge in December 2003, underlining the importance of the BB10 launch. The company, which has fallen far behind its rivals in a smartphone market it once dominated, has staked its future on the BB10 and its completely redesigned operating system.
RIM's second fiscal quarter brought shareholders additional glimmers of hope, a break from a succession of dreadful quarterly reports. The company not only generated more revenue than Wall Street had forecast but it topped expectations on the number of devices shipped in the period, which ended on September 1.
'It's very impressive,' said Jefferies & Co analyst Peter Misek. 'I didn't expect they could execute on the business given the models they have in the market, but they obviously did really well in emerging markets.'
RIM was also able to bolster its cash pile by collecting on cash owed to the company, drawing down inventories and cutting costs.
ONE-TIME PIONEER
A one-time smartphone pioneer, RIM has failed to keep pace with rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, and its stock price has tumbled about 70 percent over the past year while its market share shriveled.
But the latest quarter showed that RIM is still able to lure buyers for its lower-end smartphones in the more price-conscious emerging markets. And that has helped make up for ground the BlackBerry has lost to cutting-edge devices such as Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S III in North America and Europe.
'RIM and its products, however obsolescent, are still relevant in the parts of the planet where most people live,' said CCS Insight analyst John Jackson. 'The bad news is that these results have little or no bearing on what remains true, and that is, RIM still needs to execute on BB10.'
In an attempt to create a buzz, Chief Executive Thorsten Heins gave a preview of the new smartphone and its features to app developers at an event on Tuesday in San Jose, California.
Analysts said RIM struck the right chords at the event but cautioned that it is hard to evaluate how well the BB10 devices will work in real world conditions until they are on the market.
'We are now just a few months away from our launch and our teams are working night and day to meet the expectations we have of ourselves,' said Heins on a conference call after the results were released on Thursday.
Heins said RIM executives have met with dozens of carriers in more than 16 countries in the last few weeks and the feedback on the new devices so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
QUARTERLY RESULTS
Shipments of BlackBerry smartphones were 7.4 million in the quarter, easily outpacing Wall Street's expectation of about 6.9 million.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.
Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, a gain of 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to report a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
'You still have revenue declining 31 percent on a year-over-year basis but it's certainly not the train wreck that a lot of people feared,' said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. 'They live to fight another day.'
CASH PILE
RIM also increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.
'In the last two quarters RIM has done a really good job on collecting on receivables,' said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, but he cautioned that this was not sustainable over the long run and RIM would have to return to a profitable business model for it to thrive once again.
While RIM has warned that it faces another operating loss in its fiscal third quarter, it expects its cash position to remain stable unless it is hit by restructuring charges.
Wu believes that the company can achieve this by continuing to draw down on its receivables, which stood just shy of $2.2 billion as of Sept 1.
RIM's chief financial officer said the company had entered into a new secured credit facility of $500 million which expires in September 2013, and in the first half RIM realized some $350 million of the up to $1 billion in cost savings it hopes to achieve in fiscal 2013, which ends on March 2 of next year.
The company, which earlier this year said it would cut about 5,000 jobs to save money, said it has already laid off roughly 2,500 workers.
'It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected,' said Wu. 'These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that.'
RIM's U.S.-listed shares surged 20 percent to $8.55 in trade after the closing bell on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp, Allison Martell and Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty and Edmund Klamann)
This article is brought to you by BUY A COMPUTER.
Shares of RIM surged 20 percent in after-hours trade on indications the company will have plenty of cash to ramp up production of its new BlackBerry 10 devices and mount a robust marketing campaign for the revamped line, due in early 2013.
It was the biggest jump for the stock since a 50 percent surge in December 2003, underlining the importance of the BB10 launch. The company, which has fallen far behind its rivals in a smartphone market it once dominated, has staked its future on the BB10 and its completely redesigned operating system.
RIM's second fiscal quarter brought shareholders additional glimmers of hope, a break from a succession of dreadful quarterly reports. The company not only generated more revenue than Wall Street had forecast but it topped expectations on the number of devices shipped in the period, which ended on September 1.
'It's very impressive,' said Jefferies & Co analyst Peter Misek. 'I didn't expect they could execute on the business given the models they have in the market, but they obviously did really well in emerging markets.'
RIM was also able to bolster its cash pile by collecting on cash owed to the company, drawing down inventories and cutting costs.
ONE-TIME PIONEER
A one-time smartphone pioneer, RIM has failed to keep pace with rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, and its stock price has tumbled about 70 percent over the past year while its market share shriveled.
But the latest quarter showed that RIM is still able to lure buyers for its lower-end smartphones in the more price-conscious emerging markets. And that has helped make up for ground the BlackBerry has lost to cutting-edge devices such as Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S III in North America and Europe.
'RIM and its products, however obsolescent, are still relevant in the parts of the planet where most people live,' said CCS Insight analyst John Jackson. 'The bad news is that these results have little or no bearing on what remains true, and that is, RIM still needs to execute on BB10.'
In an attempt to create a buzz, Chief Executive Thorsten Heins gave a preview of the new smartphone and its features to app developers at an event on Tuesday in San Jose, California.
Analysts said RIM struck the right chords at the event but cautioned that it is hard to evaluate how well the BB10 devices will work in real world conditions until they are on the market.
'We are now just a few months away from our launch and our teams are working night and day to meet the expectations we have of ourselves,' said Heins on a conference call after the results were released on Thursday.
Heins said RIM executives have met with dozens of carriers in more than 16 countries in the last few weeks and the feedback on the new devices so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
QUARTERLY RESULTS
Shipments of BlackBerry smartphones were 7.4 million in the quarter, easily outpacing Wall Street's expectation of about 6.9 million.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.
Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, a gain of 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to report a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
'You still have revenue declining 31 percent on a year-over-year basis but it's certainly not the train wreck that a lot of people feared,' said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. 'They live to fight another day.'
CASH PILE
RIM also increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.
'In the last two quarters RIM has done a really good job on collecting on receivables,' said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, but he cautioned that this was not sustainable over the long run and RIM would have to return to a profitable business model for it to thrive once again.
While RIM has warned that it faces another operating loss in its fiscal third quarter, it expects its cash position to remain stable unless it is hit by restructuring charges.
Wu believes that the company can achieve this by continuing to draw down on its receivables, which stood just shy of $2.2 billion as of Sept 1.
RIM's chief financial officer said the company had entered into a new secured credit facility of $500 million which expires in September 2013, and in the first half RIM realized some $350 million of the up to $1 billion in cost savings it hopes to achieve in fiscal 2013, which ends on March 2 of next year.
The company, which earlier this year said it would cut about 5,000 jobs to save money, said it has already laid off roughly 2,500 workers.
'It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected,' said Wu. 'These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that.'
RIM's U.S.-listed shares surged 20 percent to $8.55 in trade after the closing bell on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp, Allison Martell and Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty and Edmund Klamann)
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RIM delivers pleasant surprise to investors; shares surge
TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd reported a narrower-than-expected loss on Thursday and the struggling BlackBerry maker bolstered its cash reserves, sparking optimism ahead of the launch of its make-or-break line of next-generation smartphones.
Shares of the RIM surged 20 percent in after-hours trade on indications the company will have plenty of cash to ramp up production of its new BlackBerry 10 devices and mount a robust marketing campaign for the revamped line, due in early 2013.
It was the biggest jump for the stock since a 50 percent surge in December 2003, underlining the importance of the BB10 launch. The company, which has fallen far behind its rivals in the smartphone market it once dominated, has staked its future on the BB10 and its completely redesigned operating system.
RIM's second fiscal quarter brought shareholders additional glimmers of hope, a break from a succession of dreadful quarterly reports. The company not only generated more revenue than Wall Street had forecast but it topped expectations on the number of devices shipped in the period, which ended September 1.
'It's very impressive,' said Jefferies & Co analyst Peter Misek. 'I didn't expect they could execute on the business given the models they have in the market, but they obviously did really well in emerging markets.'
A one-time smartphone pioneer, RIM has failed to keep pace with rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, and its stock price has tumbled about 70 percent over the past year while its market share shriveled.
But the latest quarter showed that RIM is still able to lure buyers for its lower-end devices in more price-conscious emerging markets. That has helped make up for ground the BlackBerry has lost to cutting-edge devices such as Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S III in North America and Europe.
'RIM and its products, however obsolescent, are still relevant in the parts of the planet where most people live,' said CCS Insight analyst John Jackson. 'The bad news is that these results have little or no bearing on what remains true, and that is, RIM still needs to execute on BB10.'
In an attempt to create a buzz, Chief Executive Thorsten Heins gave a preview of the new smartphone and its features to app developers at an event on Tuesday in San Jose, California.
Analysts said RIM struck the right chords at the event but cautioned that it is hard to evaluate how well the BB10 devices will work in real world conditions until they are on the market.
'We are now just a few months away from our launch and our teams are working night and day to meet the expectations we have of ourselves,' said Heins on a conference call after the results were released on Thursday.
Heins said RIM executives have met with dozens of carriers in more than 16 countries in the last few weeks and the feedback on the new devices so far, has been overwhelmingly positive.
QUARTERLY RESULTS
Shipments of BlackBerry smartphones were 7.4 million in the quarter, easily outpacing Wall Street's expectation of about 6.9 million shipments in the period.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.
Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, or 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to reported a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
'You still have revenue declining 31 percent on a year-over-year basis but it's certainly not the train wreck that a lot of people feared,' said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. 'They live to fight another day.'
CASH PILE
RIM increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.
'They also lost a lot less money than expected, and the cash balance, even though they lost money, they were able to grow it slightly,' said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu.
Having sufficient cash on hand is seen as crucial to a successful launch of the BB10 line, as RIM will have to pour significant amounts of capital into marketing the devices.
RIM's chief financial officer said the company had entered into a new secured credit facility of $500 million which expires in September 2013, and in the first half RIM realized some $350 million of the up to $1 billion in cost savings it hopes to achieve in fiscal 2013.
The company, which earlier this year said it would cut about 5,000 jobs in a move to save money, said it has already laid-off roughly 2,500 workers.
'It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected,' said Wu. 'These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that.'
RIM's U.S.-listed shares surged 20 percent to $8.55 in trade after the closing bell on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp, Allison Martell and Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty)
This news article is brought to you by SAVING MONEY BLOG - where latest news are our top priority.
Shares of the RIM surged 20 percent in after-hours trade on indications the company will have plenty of cash to ramp up production of its new BlackBerry 10 devices and mount a robust marketing campaign for the revamped line, due in early 2013.
It was the biggest jump for the stock since a 50 percent surge in December 2003, underlining the importance of the BB10 launch. The company, which has fallen far behind its rivals in the smartphone market it once dominated, has staked its future on the BB10 and its completely redesigned operating system.
RIM's second fiscal quarter brought shareholders additional glimmers of hope, a break from a succession of dreadful quarterly reports. The company not only generated more revenue than Wall Street had forecast but it topped expectations on the number of devices shipped in the period, which ended September 1.
'It's very impressive,' said Jefferies & Co analyst Peter Misek. 'I didn't expect they could execute on the business given the models they have in the market, but they obviously did really well in emerging markets.'
A one-time smartphone pioneer, RIM has failed to keep pace with rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, and its stock price has tumbled about 70 percent over the past year while its market share shriveled.
But the latest quarter showed that RIM is still able to lure buyers for its lower-end devices in more price-conscious emerging markets. That has helped make up for ground the BlackBerry has lost to cutting-edge devices such as Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S III in North America and Europe.
'RIM and its products, however obsolescent, are still relevant in the parts of the planet where most people live,' said CCS Insight analyst John Jackson. 'The bad news is that these results have little or no bearing on what remains true, and that is, RIM still needs to execute on BB10.'
In an attempt to create a buzz, Chief Executive Thorsten Heins gave a preview of the new smartphone and its features to app developers at an event on Tuesday in San Jose, California.
Analysts said RIM struck the right chords at the event but cautioned that it is hard to evaluate how well the BB10 devices will work in real world conditions until they are on the market.
'We are now just a few months away from our launch and our teams are working night and day to meet the expectations we have of ourselves,' said Heins on a conference call after the results were released on Thursday.
Heins said RIM executives have met with dozens of carriers in more than 16 countries in the last few weeks and the feedback on the new devices so far, has been overwhelmingly positive.
QUARTERLY RESULTS
Shipments of BlackBerry smartphones were 7.4 million in the quarter, easily outpacing Wall Street's expectation of about 6.9 million shipments in the period.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.
Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, or 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to reported a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
'You still have revenue declining 31 percent on a year-over-year basis but it's certainly not the train wreck that a lot of people feared,' said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. 'They live to fight another day.'
CASH PILE
RIM increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.
'They also lost a lot less money than expected, and the cash balance, even though they lost money, they were able to grow it slightly,' said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu.
Having sufficient cash on hand is seen as crucial to a successful launch of the BB10 line, as RIM will have to pour significant amounts of capital into marketing the devices.
RIM's chief financial officer said the company had entered into a new secured credit facility of $500 million which expires in September 2013, and in the first half RIM realized some $350 million of the up to $1 billion in cost savings it hopes to achieve in fiscal 2013.
The company, which earlier this year said it would cut about 5,000 jobs in a move to save money, said it has already laid-off roughly 2,500 workers.
'It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected,' said Wu. 'These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that.'
RIM's U.S.-listed shares surged 20 percent to $8.55 in trade after the closing bell on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Alastair Sharp, Allison Martell and Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty)
This news article is brought to you by SAVING MONEY BLOG - where latest news are our top priority.
RIM reports quarterly loss but cash pile grows
TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd reported a narrower-than-expected loss on Thursday and the struggling BlackBerry maker said it increased its cash pile, a hopeful sign for the launch of its make-or-break line of revamped smartphones next year.
Shares of RIM rose more than 15 percent as investors were encouraged by indications the company will have sufficient cash to push ahead with a robust marketing campaign of its next-generation BB10 devices, due out in early 2013.
In another rare ray of optimism for the embattled company, RIM posted a loss that was smaller than expected and it generated more revenue than forecast.
'It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected,' said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. 'These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that.'
The company has staked its future on BB10. A one-time smartphone pioneer, RIM has failed to keep pace with innovations by rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co. RIM's share price has tumbled about 70 percent over the past year as the BlackBerry's market share tumbled.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter, ended Sept 1. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.
Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, or 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to reported a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
RIM increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.
'They also lost a lot less money than expected, and the cash balance, even though they lost money, they were able to grow it slightly,' said Wu.
Having sufficient cash on hand is seen as crucial to a successful launch of RIM's line of revamped smartphones that will run on its new BB10 operating system.
RIM's U.S.-listed shares surged more than 15 percent to $8.22 in trade after the closing bell on Thursday.
(Reporting by Euan Rocha, Alastair Sharp, Allison Martell and Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty)
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Shares of RIM rose more than 15 percent as investors were encouraged by indications the company will have sufficient cash to push ahead with a robust marketing campaign of its next-generation BB10 devices, due out in early 2013.
In another rare ray of optimism for the embattled company, RIM posted a loss that was smaller than expected and it generated more revenue than forecast.
'It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected,' said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. 'These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that.'
The company has staked its future on BB10. A one-time smartphone pioneer, RIM has failed to keep pace with innovations by rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co. RIM's share price has tumbled about 70 percent over the past year as the BlackBerry's market share tumbled.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter, ended Sept 1. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.
Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, or 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to reported a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
RIM increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.
'They also lost a lot less money than expected, and the cash balance, even though they lost money, they were able to grow it slightly,' said Wu.
Having sufficient cash on hand is seen as crucial to a successful launch of RIM's line of revamped smartphones that will run on its new BB10 operating system.
RIM's U.S.-listed shares surged more than 15 percent to $8.22 in trade after the closing bell on Thursday.
(Reporting by Euan Rocha, Alastair Sharp, Allison Martell and Cameron French; Editing by Frank McGurty)
This article is brought to you by CHEAP COMPUTERS.
EU set to charge Microsoft over ruling breach
WARSAW/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp will be charged for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering it to offer a choice of web browsers, the European Union's antitrust chief said on Thursday, which could mean a hefty fine for the company.
U.S.-based Microsoft's more than decade-long battle with the European Commission has already landed it with fines totaling more than a billion euros ($1.28 billion).
The Commission, which opened an investigation into the issue in July, is now preparing formal charges against the company, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said.
'The next step is to open a formal proceeding into the company's breach of an agreement. We are working on this,' Almunia told reporters at a conference in Warsaw.
'It should not be a long investigation because the company itself explicitly recognized its breach of the agreement,' he said.
This is the second time Microsoft has failed to comply with an EU decision. If found guilty of breaching EU rules, it could be penalized up to $7.4 billion or 10 percent of its revenues for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012.
U.S. chipmaker Intel holds the record for the biggest ever fine at 1.06 billion euros ($1.36 billion), which was imposed in 2009 and represented 4.15 percent of its 2008 turnover.
Keen to avoid more regulatory problems, Microsoft, the world's largest software company, has blamed the latest run-in with the EU watchdog on a technical glitch.
Microsoft declined to comment on Thursday.
MAKING AN EXAMPLE OF MICROSOFT
Antitrust experts said regulators may use the case to deter other companies which do not follow through on their commitments.
'They (regulators) would be looking to make an example, given the size or the company and the long-running saga. The size of the fine could be fairly significant,' said antitrust lawyer Rachel Bickler at Brussels-based Nabarro.
Market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Europe has roughly halved since 2008 to 29 percent so far this year as it has lost clients mostly to Google's Chrome.
Chrome controls 29.3 percent of the European browsing market, while Mozilla's Firefox has 30.3 percent of the market, according to web research firm Statcounter.
Microsoft agreed nearly three years ago to allow European consumers better access to rival browsers in its Windows software, settling an antitrust case and avoiding a penalty.
The company acknowledged its mistake in July, saying it was now distributing software with the browser option and also offered to extend the compliance period for an additional 15 months.
Almunia also warned Google of a lengthy legal process ahead if it does not do more to soothe concerns that it may have undermined competitors.
'If remedies offered by Google can eliminate our concerns, we will succeed in reaching an agreement. Otherwise, the legal road is a long one,' he said on the sidelines of a forum on competition in the Polish capital.
Google is in talks with the Commission to resolve concerns about its business practices, following complaints from Microsoft and other rivals.
(Additional reporting by Tarmo Virki in Helsinki; Writing by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by David Holmes and Jane Merriman)
This news article is brought to you by RELATIONSHIPS ADVICE 201 - where latest news are our top priority.
U.S.-based Microsoft's more than decade-long battle with the European Commission has already landed it with fines totaling more than a billion euros ($1.28 billion).
The Commission, which opened an investigation into the issue in July, is now preparing formal charges against the company, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said.
'The next step is to open a formal proceeding into the company's breach of an agreement. We are working on this,' Almunia told reporters at a conference in Warsaw.
'It should not be a long investigation because the company itself explicitly recognized its breach of the agreement,' he said.
This is the second time Microsoft has failed to comply with an EU decision. If found guilty of breaching EU rules, it could be penalized up to $7.4 billion or 10 percent of its revenues for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012.
U.S. chipmaker Intel holds the record for the biggest ever fine at 1.06 billion euros ($1.36 billion), which was imposed in 2009 and represented 4.15 percent of its 2008 turnover.
Keen to avoid more regulatory problems, Microsoft, the world's largest software company, has blamed the latest run-in with the EU watchdog on a technical glitch.
Microsoft declined to comment on Thursday.
MAKING AN EXAMPLE OF MICROSOFT
Antitrust experts said regulators may use the case to deter other companies which do not follow through on their commitments.
'They (regulators) would be looking to make an example, given the size or the company and the long-running saga. The size of the fine could be fairly significant,' said antitrust lawyer Rachel Bickler at Brussels-based Nabarro.
Market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Europe has roughly halved since 2008 to 29 percent so far this year as it has lost clients mostly to Google's Chrome.
Chrome controls 29.3 percent of the European browsing market, while Mozilla's Firefox has 30.3 percent of the market, according to web research firm Statcounter.
Microsoft agreed nearly three years ago to allow European consumers better access to rival browsers in its Windows software, settling an antitrust case and avoiding a penalty.
The company acknowledged its mistake in July, saying it was now distributing software with the browser option and also offered to extend the compliance period for an additional 15 months.
Almunia also warned Google of a lengthy legal process ahead if it does not do more to soothe concerns that it may have undermined competitors.
'If remedies offered by Google can eliminate our concerns, we will succeed in reaching an agreement. Otherwise, the legal road is a long one,' he said on the sidelines of a forum on competition in the Polish capital.
Google is in talks with the Commission to resolve concerns about its business practices, following complaints from Microsoft and other rivals.
(Additional reporting by Tarmo Virki in Helsinki; Writing by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by David Holmes and Jane Merriman)
This news article is brought to you by RELATIONSHIPS ADVICE 201 - where latest news are our top priority.
EU regulators set to charge Microsoft over breached deal
WARSAW (Reuters) - EU regulators are preparing to charge Microsoft Corp for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering it to offer users a choice of web browsers, the EU's antitrust chief said on Thursday.
'The next step is to open a formal proceeding into the company's breach of an agreement. We are working on this,' EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told reporters.
'It should not be a long investigation because the company itself explicitly recognized its breach of the agreement.'
The European Commission opened an investigation into the case in July, the first time a company is alleged to have failed to meet its commitments under EU antitrust decisions.
If found guilty, Microsoft could face fines up to 10 percent of its global turnover.
Microsoft agreed nearly three years ago to allow European consumers better access to rival browsers in its Windows software, settling an antitrust case and avoiding a penalty which could have been set at up to 10 percent of turnover.
The company, which had acknowledged not offering users a choice of browsers in its Windows 7 operating system from February 2011, has been fined more than 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) by the Commission in the last decade for breaching EU rules.
Almunia also warned Google Inc of a lengthy legal process ahead if it does not do more to soothe concerns that it may have undermined competitors.
'If remedies offered by Google can eliminate our concerns, we will succeed in reaching an agreement. Otherwise, the legal road is a long one,' he said on the sidelines of a forum on competition in the Polish capital.
Google is in talks with the Commission to resolve concerns about its business practices, following complaints from Microsoft and other rivals. ($1 = 0.7788 euros)
(Reporting by Karolina Slowikowska; Writing by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by David Holmes)
This news article is brought to you by GIRLS TEACH DATING - where latest news are our top priority.
'The next step is to open a formal proceeding into the company's breach of an agreement. We are working on this,' EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told reporters.
'It should not be a long investigation because the company itself explicitly recognized its breach of the agreement.'
The European Commission opened an investigation into the case in July, the first time a company is alleged to have failed to meet its commitments under EU antitrust decisions.
If found guilty, Microsoft could face fines up to 10 percent of its global turnover.
Microsoft agreed nearly three years ago to allow European consumers better access to rival browsers in its Windows software, settling an antitrust case and avoiding a penalty which could have been set at up to 10 percent of turnover.
The company, which had acknowledged not offering users a choice of browsers in its Windows 7 operating system from February 2011, has been fined more than 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) by the Commission in the last decade for breaching EU rules.
Almunia also warned Google Inc of a lengthy legal process ahead if it does not do more to soothe concerns that it may have undermined competitors.
'If remedies offered by Google can eliminate our concerns, we will succeed in reaching an agreement. Otherwise, the legal road is a long one,' he said on the sidelines of a forum on competition in the Polish capital.
Google is in talks with the Commission to resolve concerns about its business practices, following complaints from Microsoft and other rivals. ($1 = 0.7788 euros)
(Reporting by Karolina Slowikowska; Writing by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by David Holmes)
This news article is brought to you by GIRLS TEACH DATING - where latest news are our top priority.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
New Zealand spy agency rapped over Megaupload blunder
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand's spy agency illegally carried out surveillance on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, an official report showed on Thursday, prompting an apology from the prime minister and dealing a possible blow to a U.S. bid to extradite him.
Washington wants the 38-year-old German national, also known as Kim Schmitz, to be sent to the United States to face charges of internet piracy and breaking copyright laws.
Thursday's report by the Inspector-General of Intelligence, the official watchdog for New Zealand spy agencies, found the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB) had spied on Dotcom, despite a law prohibiting it from spying on New Zealand citizens and residents.
The flamboyant Dotcom attained New Zealand permanent residency status in 2010.
'It is the GCSB's responsibility to act within the law, and it is hugely disappointing that in this case its actions fell outside the law,' Prime Minister John Key said in a statement, adding the blunder was the result of 'basic errors'.
Key apologized to Dotcom and all New Zealanders, saying they were entitled to be protected by the law and that it had failed them.
New Zealand police asked the GCSB to keep track of Dotcom and his colleagues before a raid in late January on his rented country estate near Auckland, which saw computers and hard drives, works of art, and cars confiscated.
The illegal surveillance may deal another blow to the U.S. extradition case after a New Zealand court ruled in June that search warrants used in the raid on Dotcom's home were illegal.
The raid followed a request by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for the arrest of Dotcom for leading a group that netted $175 million since 2005 by allegedly copying and distributing music, films and other copyrighted content without authorization.
Dotcom maintains that the Megaupload site was no more than an online storage facility, and has accused Hollywood of lobbying the U.S. government to prosecute him.
U.S. authorities are currently appealing a New Zealand court decision that Dotcom should be allowed to see the evidence on which the extradition hearing will be based.
The extradition hearing has been delayed until March 2013.
(Reporting by Mantik Kusjanto; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
This news article is brought to you by RELATIONSHIPS ADVICE 201 - where latest news are our top priority.
Washington wants the 38-year-old German national, also known as Kim Schmitz, to be sent to the United States to face charges of internet piracy and breaking copyright laws.
Thursday's report by the Inspector-General of Intelligence, the official watchdog for New Zealand spy agencies, found the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB) had spied on Dotcom, despite a law prohibiting it from spying on New Zealand citizens and residents.
The flamboyant Dotcom attained New Zealand permanent residency status in 2010.
'It is the GCSB's responsibility to act within the law, and it is hugely disappointing that in this case its actions fell outside the law,' Prime Minister John Key said in a statement, adding the blunder was the result of 'basic errors'.
Key apologized to Dotcom and all New Zealanders, saying they were entitled to be protected by the law and that it had failed them.
New Zealand police asked the GCSB to keep track of Dotcom and his colleagues before a raid in late January on his rented country estate near Auckland, which saw computers and hard drives, works of art, and cars confiscated.
The illegal surveillance may deal another blow to the U.S. extradition case after a New Zealand court ruled in June that search warrants used in the raid on Dotcom's home were illegal.
The raid followed a request by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for the arrest of Dotcom for leading a group that netted $175 million since 2005 by allegedly copying and distributing music, films and other copyrighted content without authorization.
Dotcom maintains that the Megaupload site was no more than an online storage facility, and has accused Hollywood of lobbying the U.S. government to prosecute him.
U.S. authorities are currently appealing a New Zealand court decision that Dotcom should be allowed to see the evidence on which the extradition hearing will be based.
The extradition hearing has been delayed until March 2013.
(Reporting by Mantik Kusjanto; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)
This news article is brought to you by RELATIONSHIPS ADVICE 201 - where latest news are our top priority.
Barnes & Noble unveils its first hi-definition tablets
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Barnes & Noble Inc's first hi-definition tablets, unveiled on Wednesday, were well received by analysts who said the devices keep the bookseller in the fight with Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Google Inc - for now.
The largest U.S. bookstore chain introduced a $199 7-inch Nook HD tablet that will go up against similar, recently launched products by Google and Amazon.com this holiday season.
The company also unveiled a $269 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet that will compete with the Apple iPad.
'The devices are in improvement in important ways over the previous generations of the Nook, and they one-up Amazon in some areas,' Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters.
While the new products, thinner and lighter than their rivals, come a few months after Microsoft said it would invest $605 million over five years in Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader and college business, the bookstore chain still faces a daunting task.
'Barnes & Noble is the smallest player trying to do the software and the hardware development, and they don't have the financial means beyond what Microsoft has already fronted them to keep up in the arms race,' said Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom.
Barnes & Noble staked its future on success in the growing e-books industry as the face of declining sales of physical books that led to last year's bankruptcy of the Borders bookstore chain.
In many ways, Barnes & Noble, which operates nearly 700 stores, has defied expectations. It beat Amazon to the marketplace with touchscreen devices and a color reader in recent years, and won plaudits from reviewers this year for its glow-in-the-dark Nook that allows someone to read with the lights off so as not to disturb others.
Since the chain launched its first Nook device, a basic e-reader, in 2009, it has won as much as 30 percent of the U.S. e-books market. Amazon is the leader with about 60 percent.
This race has proven expensive and, so far, unprofitable. The battle with Amazon is taking a toll. Barnes & Noble reported lower Nook sales last quarter, after earlier quarters of torrid growth, hurt by price cuts to fight Amazon's aggressive pricing.
'Barnes & Noble must continue to invest to introduce new products with enhanced features at prices that are the same as or lower than older, less-sophisticated devices,' Barclays Capital analyst Alan Rifkin wrote in a research note. The problem is that hurts profits and margins, he said.
But the company's chief said the Nook devices are essential to helping it generate sales of digital content.
'We're growing the digital content portion of the business, and that's where we envision making our economics,' Barnes & Noble William Lynch told Reuters at a media event on Tuesday.
Shares of Barnes & Noble rose 5 percent to $12.87 in afternoon New York Stock Exchange trading.
BRUISING PRICE WARS
The tablet market is among the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry. Research firm Gartner forecasts that sales will almost double this year, to 118.9 million units.
Barnes & Noble is in some ways at a disadvantage. Amazon can use its Prime shipping service and amazon.com site to draw users to its Kindle tablets, and Apple, which has sold tens of millions of iPads, and has an indisputable 'cool' factor.
So Barnes & Noble needs to focus on its natural customer: the reader that comes to its stores to buy books.
'A key growth area is to get their existing customer base onto the digital platform,' Forrester's Epps said, adding that the new devices would help.
For these new devices, Barnes & Noble added features that allows each member in a family to share a Nook tablet, becoming the first tablet to let each user create a home page and customize preferences.
There are also parental controls that can prevent kids from adult content or going shopping.
The company hopes a new video-streaming and download service for Nook will help narrow the gap with Amazon and Apple, which offer more content on their devices.
Barnes & Noble emphasized features such as image resolution and page-turning technology given the needs of its basic customers, book and magazine readers.
'We are playing in the tablet space, but reading is at our core,' Lynch said.
The 7-inch tablet weighs 11.1 ounces. Its larger sibling is 18.2 ounces, making it lighter than the iPad and making them both more appropriate for reading, he added. The iPad weighs about 23 ounces.
Barnes & Noble's new devices, available for pre-order on Wednesday, will ship in October and be in U.S. stores in November. They will be on sale in Britain beginning in late November at chains including Sainsbury's and Waitrose.
(Editing by Prudence Crowther)
This news article is brought to you by STOCK MARKET BLOG - where latest news are our top priority.
The largest U.S. bookstore chain introduced a $199 7-inch Nook HD tablet that will go up against similar, recently launched products by Google and Amazon.com this holiday season.
The company also unveiled a $269 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet that will compete with the Apple iPad.
'The devices are in improvement in important ways over the previous generations of the Nook, and they one-up Amazon in some areas,' Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters.
While the new products, thinner and lighter than their rivals, come a few months after Microsoft said it would invest $605 million over five years in Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader and college business, the bookstore chain still faces a daunting task.
'Barnes & Noble is the smallest player trying to do the software and the hardware development, and they don't have the financial means beyond what Microsoft has already fronted them to keep up in the arms race,' said Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom.
Barnes & Noble staked its future on success in the growing e-books industry as the face of declining sales of physical books that led to last year's bankruptcy of the Borders bookstore chain.
In many ways, Barnes & Noble, which operates nearly 700 stores, has defied expectations. It beat Amazon to the marketplace with touchscreen devices and a color reader in recent years, and won plaudits from reviewers this year for its glow-in-the-dark Nook that allows someone to read with the lights off so as not to disturb others.
Since the chain launched its first Nook device, a basic e-reader, in 2009, it has won as much as 30 percent of the U.S. e-books market. Amazon is the leader with about 60 percent.
This race has proven expensive and, so far, unprofitable. The battle with Amazon is taking a toll. Barnes & Noble reported lower Nook sales last quarter, after earlier quarters of torrid growth, hurt by price cuts to fight Amazon's aggressive pricing.
'Barnes & Noble must continue to invest to introduce new products with enhanced features at prices that are the same as or lower than older, less-sophisticated devices,' Barclays Capital analyst Alan Rifkin wrote in a research note. The problem is that hurts profits and margins, he said.
But the company's chief said the Nook devices are essential to helping it generate sales of digital content.
'We're growing the digital content portion of the business, and that's where we envision making our economics,' Barnes & Noble William Lynch told Reuters at a media event on Tuesday.
Shares of Barnes & Noble rose 5 percent to $12.87 in afternoon New York Stock Exchange trading.
BRUISING PRICE WARS
The tablet market is among the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry. Research firm Gartner forecasts that sales will almost double this year, to 118.9 million units.
Barnes & Noble is in some ways at a disadvantage. Amazon can use its Prime shipping service and amazon.com site to draw users to its Kindle tablets, and Apple, which has sold tens of millions of iPads, and has an indisputable 'cool' factor.
So Barnes & Noble needs to focus on its natural customer: the reader that comes to its stores to buy books.
'A key growth area is to get their existing customer base onto the digital platform,' Forrester's Epps said, adding that the new devices would help.
For these new devices, Barnes & Noble added features that allows each member in a family to share a Nook tablet, becoming the first tablet to let each user create a home page and customize preferences.
There are also parental controls that can prevent kids from adult content or going shopping.
The company hopes a new video-streaming and download service for Nook will help narrow the gap with Amazon and Apple, which offer more content on their devices.
Barnes & Noble emphasized features such as image resolution and page-turning technology given the needs of its basic customers, book and magazine readers.
'We are playing in the tablet space, but reading is at our core,' Lynch said.
The 7-inch tablet weighs 11.1 ounces. Its larger sibling is 18.2 ounces, making it lighter than the iPad and making them both more appropriate for reading, he added. The iPad weighs about 23 ounces.
Barnes & Noble's new devices, available for pre-order on Wednesday, will ship in October and be in U.S. stores in November. They will be on sale in Britain beginning in late November at chains including Sainsbury's and Waitrose.
(Editing by Prudence Crowther)
This news article is brought to you by STOCK MARKET BLOG - where latest news are our top priority.
Barnes & Noble unveils its first high-definition tablets
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Barnes & Noble Inc's first high-definition tablets, unveiled on Wednesday, were well received by analysts who said the devices keep the bookseller in the fight with Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Google Inc - for now.
The largest U.S. bookstore chain introduced a $199 7-inch Nook HD tablet that will go up against similar, recently launched products by Google and Amazon.com this holiday season.
The company also unveiled a $269 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet that will compete with the Apple iPad.
'The devices are in improvement in important ways over the previous generations of the Nook, and they one-up Amazon in some areas,' Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters.
While the new products, thinner and lighter than their rivals, come a few months after Microsoft said it would invest $605 million over five years in Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader and college business, the bookstore chain still faces a daunting task.
'Barnes & Noble is the smallest player trying to do the software and the hardware development, and they don't have the financial means beyond what Microsoft has already fronted them to keep up in the arms race,' said Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom.
Barnes & Noble staked its future on success in the growing e-books industry as the face of declining sales of physical books that led to last year's bankruptcy of the Borders bookstore chain.
In many ways, Barnes & Noble, which operates nearly 700 stores, has defied expectations. It beat Amazon to the marketplace with touchscreen devices and a color reader in recent years, and won plaudits from reviewers this year for its glow-in-the-dark Nook that allows someone to read with the lights off so as not to disturb others.
Since the chain launched its first Nook device, a basic e-reader, in 2009, it has won as much as 30 percent of the U.S. e-books market. Amazon is the leader with about 60 percent.
This race has proven expensive and, so far, unprofitable. The battle with Amazon is taking a toll. Barnes & Noble reported lower Nook sales last quarter, after earlier quarters of torrid growth, hurt by price cuts to fight Amazon's aggressive pricing.
'Barnes & Noble must continue to invest to introduce new products with enhanced features at prices that are the same as or lower than older, less-sophisticated devices,' Barclays Capital analyst Alan Rifkin wrote in a research note. The problem is that hurts profits and margins, he said.
But the company's chief said the Nook devices are essential to helping it generate sales of digital content.
'We're growing the digital content portion of the business, and that's where we envision making our economics,' Barnes & Noble William Lynch told Reuters at a media event on Tuesday.
Shares of Barnes & Noble rose 5 percent to $12.87 in afternoon New York Stock Exchange trading.
BRUISING PRICE WARS
The tablet market is among the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry. Research firm Gartner forecasts that sales will almost double this year, to 118.9 million units.
Barnes & Noble is in some ways at a disadvantage. Amazon can use its Prime shipping service and amazon.com site to draw users to its Kindle tablets, and Apple, which has sold tens of millions of iPads, and has an indisputable 'cool' factor.
So Barnes & Noble needs to focus on its natural customer: the reader that comes to its stores to buy books.
'A key growth area is to get their existing customer base onto the digital platform,' Forrester's Epps said, adding that the new devices would help.
For these new devices, Barnes & Noble added features that allows each member in a family to share a Nook tablet, becoming the first tablet to let each user create a home page and customize preferences.
There are also parental controls that can prevent kids from adult content or going shopping.
The company hopes a new video-streaming and download service for Nook will help narrow the gap with Amazon and Apple, which offer more content on their devices.
Barnes & Noble emphasized features such as image resolution and page-turning technology given the needs of its basic customers, book and magazine readers.
'We are playing in the tablet space, but reading is at our core,' Lynch said.
The 7-inch tablet weighs 11.1 ounces. Its larger sibling is 18.2 ounces, making it lighter than the iPad and making them both more appropriate for reading, he added. The iPad weighs about 23 ounces.
Barnes & Noble's new devices, available for pre-order on Wednesday, will ship in October and be in U.S. stores in November. They will be on sale in Britain beginning in late November at chains including Sainsbury's and Waitrose.
(Editing by Prudence Crowther)
This article is brought to you by BUY COMPUTERS.
The largest U.S. bookstore chain introduced a $199 7-inch Nook HD tablet that will go up against similar, recently launched products by Google and Amazon.com this holiday season.
The company also unveiled a $269 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet that will compete with the Apple iPad.
'The devices are in improvement in important ways over the previous generations of the Nook, and they one-up Amazon in some areas,' Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters.
While the new products, thinner and lighter than their rivals, come a few months after Microsoft said it would invest $605 million over five years in Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader and college business, the bookstore chain still faces a daunting task.
'Barnes & Noble is the smallest player trying to do the software and the hardware development, and they don't have the financial means beyond what Microsoft has already fronted them to keep up in the arms race,' said Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom.
Barnes & Noble staked its future on success in the growing e-books industry as the face of declining sales of physical books that led to last year's bankruptcy of the Borders bookstore chain.
In many ways, Barnes & Noble, which operates nearly 700 stores, has defied expectations. It beat Amazon to the marketplace with touchscreen devices and a color reader in recent years, and won plaudits from reviewers this year for its glow-in-the-dark Nook that allows someone to read with the lights off so as not to disturb others.
Since the chain launched its first Nook device, a basic e-reader, in 2009, it has won as much as 30 percent of the U.S. e-books market. Amazon is the leader with about 60 percent.
This race has proven expensive and, so far, unprofitable. The battle with Amazon is taking a toll. Barnes & Noble reported lower Nook sales last quarter, after earlier quarters of torrid growth, hurt by price cuts to fight Amazon's aggressive pricing.
'Barnes & Noble must continue to invest to introduce new products with enhanced features at prices that are the same as or lower than older, less-sophisticated devices,' Barclays Capital analyst Alan Rifkin wrote in a research note. The problem is that hurts profits and margins, he said.
But the company's chief said the Nook devices are essential to helping it generate sales of digital content.
'We're growing the digital content portion of the business, and that's where we envision making our economics,' Barnes & Noble William Lynch told Reuters at a media event on Tuesday.
Shares of Barnes & Noble rose 5 percent to $12.87 in afternoon New York Stock Exchange trading.
BRUISING PRICE WARS
The tablet market is among the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry. Research firm Gartner forecasts that sales will almost double this year, to 118.9 million units.
Barnes & Noble is in some ways at a disadvantage. Amazon can use its Prime shipping service and amazon.com site to draw users to its Kindle tablets, and Apple, which has sold tens of millions of iPads, and has an indisputable 'cool' factor.
So Barnes & Noble needs to focus on its natural customer: the reader that comes to its stores to buy books.
'A key growth area is to get their existing customer base onto the digital platform,' Forrester's Epps said, adding that the new devices would help.
For these new devices, Barnes & Noble added features that allows each member in a family to share a Nook tablet, becoming the first tablet to let each user create a home page and customize preferences.
There are also parental controls that can prevent kids from adult content or going shopping.
The company hopes a new video-streaming and download service for Nook will help narrow the gap with Amazon and Apple, which offer more content on their devices.
Barnes & Noble emphasized features such as image resolution and page-turning technology given the needs of its basic customers, book and magazine readers.
'We are playing in the tablet space, but reading is at our core,' Lynch said.
The 7-inch tablet weighs 11.1 ounces. Its larger sibling is 18.2 ounces, making it lighter than the iPad and making them both more appropriate for reading, he added. The iPad weighs about 23 ounces.
Barnes & Noble's new devices, available for pre-order on Wednesday, will ship in October and be in U.S. stores in November. They will be on sale in Britain beginning in late November at chains including Sainsbury's and Waitrose.
(Editing by Prudence Crowther)
This article is brought to you by BUY COMPUTERS.
Barnes & Noble takes aim at Amazon, Apple with HD Nook tablets
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Barnes & Noble Inc took a shot at archrival Amazon.com on Wednesday, unveiling its own lighter and thinner hi-definition tablets that can accommodate multiple users in a bid to win a bigger share of the exploding tablet market.
The largest U.S. bookstore chain introduced the new devices with price tags ranging from $199 for a 7-inch Nook HD tablet with 8 gigabytes of memory, to $299 for a 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet, similar in size to Apple Inc's market-leading iPad, with 32 GB of memory. IPad prices are roughly twice as high for similar devices.
The new Nooks are the latest entrants in the fight for sales of tablets and e-readers - and the digital content like books, movies and magazines that goes with them. Barnes & Noble has staked its future on its digital business as the company faces an overall industrywide drop in the sales of physical books.
'A key growth area is to get their existing customer base onto the digital platform,' Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters, saying the new devices were competitive with similar products by Amazon in terms of features and pricing.
Barnes & Noble faces formidable competition from Amazon, which can use its Prime shipping service and amazon.com site to draw users to its Kindle tablets, and Apple, which has sold tens of millions of iPads.
To keep pace, Barnes & Noble added innovative features that would allow each a family to share a Nook tablet, with each user able to create a home page and customize preferences, the first table to do so. There are also parental controls that can prevent kids from reading 'Fifty Shades of Grey' or go shopping on the digital store.
The company is also launching a new video-streaming and download service for Nook, narrowing the gap with Amazon and Apple, which offer more content on their devices.
At a media event in Manhattan on Tuesday, officials said the company had emphasized features such as image resolution and page-turning technology given the needs of its basic customers, book and magazine readers.
'We are playing in the tablet space, but reading is at our core,' Barnes & Noble Chief Executive William Lynch told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
The 7-inch tablet weighs 11.1 ounces. Its larger sibling is 18.2 ounces, making it lighter than the iPad and making them both more appropriate for reading, he added. The iPad weighs about 23 ounces.
The top U.S. bookstore chain launched its first Nook device, a basic e-reader, in 2009 and has held its own with deep-pocketed rivals Amazon, Apple and Google Inc. That success has allowed it to garner as much as 30 percent of the U.S. electronic-books market.
Barnes & Noble's new devices, available for pre-order on Wednesday, will ship in October and be in U.S. stores in November. They will be on sale in Britain beginning in late November at chains including Sainsbury's and Waitrose.
Shares of Barnes & Noble rose 1.9 percent to $12.49 in early New York Stock Exchange trading. On Nasdaq, Amazon dipped 0.3 percent, while Apple fell 1.7 percent.
BRUISING PRICE WARS
The tablet market is among the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry. Research firm Gartner forecasts that sales will almost double this year, to 118.9 million units.
Barnes & Noble's latest Nooks will appear in its nearly 700 stores as well as chains Best Buy Co Inc, Target Corp and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Target and Wal-Mart have decided to no longer carry Amazon's Kindles, giving the Nook an edge at thousands of retail locations.
Amazon.com Inc earlier this month unveiled its own HD tablets. It launched its first last year and says it has a 22 percent share of the U.S. market.
With the new Nooks, Barnes & Noble is also taking aim at Apple, whose iPad is far more expensive, because there is room in the market for a strong tablet at a lower price, Lynch said.
Questions about the Nook's long-term viability arose last month after Barnes & Noble reported that Nook revenue including ebooks last quarter was up only 0.3 percent, hurt by price decreases early in the summer. That has added urgency to developing new products.
Price wars with Amazon have been bruising, but Lynch was undismayed: 'We're growing the digital content portion of the business, and that's where we envision making our economics,' Lynch said.
Last quarter, Barnes & Noble lost business when it didn't have enough Nook devices that allow for reading in the dark. Lynch said the company is now producing HD tablets in numbers sufficient to meet what it expects will be strong demand during the holiday period.
'We believe we'll gain significant share in the tablet category, and we've planned for that from a production standpoint. I believe these are going to be hot holiday gifts.'
(Editing by Prudence Crowther)
This article is brought to you by AFFORDABLE COMPUTERS.
The largest U.S. bookstore chain introduced the new devices with price tags ranging from $199 for a 7-inch Nook HD tablet with 8 gigabytes of memory, to $299 for a 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet, similar in size to Apple Inc's market-leading iPad, with 32 GB of memory. IPad prices are roughly twice as high for similar devices.
The new Nooks are the latest entrants in the fight for sales of tablets and e-readers - and the digital content like books, movies and magazines that goes with them. Barnes & Noble has staked its future on its digital business as the company faces an overall industrywide drop in the sales of physical books.
'A key growth area is to get their existing customer base onto the digital platform,' Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters, saying the new devices were competitive with similar products by Amazon in terms of features and pricing.
Barnes & Noble faces formidable competition from Amazon, which can use its Prime shipping service and amazon.com site to draw users to its Kindle tablets, and Apple, which has sold tens of millions of iPads.
To keep pace, Barnes & Noble added innovative features that would allow each a family to share a Nook tablet, with each user able to create a home page and customize preferences, the first table to do so. There are also parental controls that can prevent kids from reading 'Fifty Shades of Grey' or go shopping on the digital store.
The company is also launching a new video-streaming and download service for Nook, narrowing the gap with Amazon and Apple, which offer more content on their devices.
At a media event in Manhattan on Tuesday, officials said the company had emphasized features such as image resolution and page-turning technology given the needs of its basic customers, book and magazine readers.
'We are playing in the tablet space, but reading is at our core,' Barnes & Noble Chief Executive William Lynch told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
The 7-inch tablet weighs 11.1 ounces. Its larger sibling is 18.2 ounces, making it lighter than the iPad and making them both more appropriate for reading, he added. The iPad weighs about 23 ounces.
The top U.S. bookstore chain launched its first Nook device, a basic e-reader, in 2009 and has held its own with deep-pocketed rivals Amazon, Apple and Google Inc. That success has allowed it to garner as much as 30 percent of the U.S. electronic-books market.
Barnes & Noble's new devices, available for pre-order on Wednesday, will ship in October and be in U.S. stores in November. They will be on sale in Britain beginning in late November at chains including Sainsbury's and Waitrose.
Shares of Barnes & Noble rose 1.9 percent to $12.49 in early New York Stock Exchange trading. On Nasdaq, Amazon dipped 0.3 percent, while Apple fell 1.7 percent.
BRUISING PRICE WARS
The tablet market is among the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry. Research firm Gartner forecasts that sales will almost double this year, to 118.9 million units.
Barnes & Noble's latest Nooks will appear in its nearly 700 stores as well as chains Best Buy Co Inc, Target Corp and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Target and Wal-Mart have decided to no longer carry Amazon's Kindles, giving the Nook an edge at thousands of retail locations.
Amazon.com Inc earlier this month unveiled its own HD tablets. It launched its first last year and says it has a 22 percent share of the U.S. market.
With the new Nooks, Barnes & Noble is also taking aim at Apple, whose iPad is far more expensive, because there is room in the market for a strong tablet at a lower price, Lynch said.
Questions about the Nook's long-term viability arose last month after Barnes & Noble reported that Nook revenue including ebooks last quarter was up only 0.3 percent, hurt by price decreases early in the summer. That has added urgency to developing new products.
Price wars with Amazon have been bruising, but Lynch was undismayed: 'We're growing the digital content portion of the business, and that's where we envision making our economics,' Lynch said.
Last quarter, Barnes & Noble lost business when it didn't have enough Nook devices that allow for reading in the dark. Lynch said the company is now producing HD tablets in numbers sufficient to meet what it expects will be strong demand during the holiday period.
'We believe we'll gain significant share in the tablet category, and we've planned for that from a production standpoint. I believe these are going to be hot holiday gifts.'
(Editing by Prudence Crowther)
This article is brought to you by AFFORDABLE COMPUTERS.
Insight: Italy's slow Internet set for reboot
MILAN/PARIS (Reuters) - IMM Hydraulics, a small exporter of hoses for industries such as agriculture and mining, is the kind of firm that should be at the center of Italy's efforts to rekindle its stagnant economy.
Instead, the company, located in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, is wrestling with a basic impediment to profitability: a woefully slow broadband connection. With just 2 megabits (MB) per second, IMM Hydraulics' broadband connection lags behind the 5 MB typical in Italian cities, which in turn is well behind an average of 12 MB in France and 16 MB in Germany.
'It takes us days to process an order whereas it could take half an hour,' said finance director Marcello Di Campli. 'Broadband is one of our biggest problems, probably just after our access to credit.'
Europe's fourth-largest economy has long been an Internet laggard, its creaky networks stunting the development of online commerce and banking. Italians pay among the highest prices in Europe for broadband speeds on a par with Estonia or Cyprus. As a result, only half the population uses the Internet at least once a week and Italian firms generate 5.4 percent of sales on-line compared to 13.9 percent elsewhere in Europe.
Now the reformist government of Prime Minister Mario Monti has identified better broadband as a national priority to spur growth and reduce Italy's 11 percent unemployment and bulging deficits.
'The statistics on e-commerce are chilling ... The broadband gap constrains growth by reducing the competitiveness of export-oriented companies,' said Paolo Gentiloni, former communications minister and member of a group of deputies that has made proposals to support online commerce and government services.
In the government's sights is one-time monopoly Telecom Italia, which it believes has long thwarted competition and put off investing in its domestic network because of its huge debts.
Monti's government has enlisted state-backed finance body Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) to work out a plan with Telecom Italia and its rivals to create a nationwide super-fast fiber optic broadband network.
One of the most radical options under discussion is for Telecom Italia to spin off its existing network of decades-old copper lines - worth between 9 and 15 billion euros - into a separate company that would run Italy's fixed telephone and broadband system and sell capacity to other Internet providers on a wholesale basis. The new 'access network company' could be partly state-owned and would have more incentive to invest in broadband, say advocates, because it would have neither debt to pay nor market share to defend.
Such a move would amount to something of a revolution in Europe and would test whether the state can be more effective than the private sector in building national broadband infrastructure.
Australia's government provided the blue-print in 2009 when, frustrated with the slow pace of investment, it became the first country to create a national company charged with building a single open access fiber broadband network to 90 percent of homes by 2021. Britain adopted a slightly different approach, requiring BT Group to create a separate subsidiary to sells wholesale access to competitors and build fiber broadband across the country.
TO SPLIT OR NOT TO SPLIT
Telecom Italia, like other former telecom monopolies in Europe, owns the last meters of copper lines to homes and businesses, which it then rents out to competitors - mobile operators Vodafone, Wind, and Hutchison's 3 - for a monthly fee set by regulators.
In Italy and elsewhere, it is these decades-old copper lines that need to be replaced by fiber optic wires to boost broadband speeds to up to 100 megabits per second. Updating those wires will cost 200 billion euros, says the European Commission, a sum telecom operators will struggle to mobilize.
Italy can't just issue orders to Telecom Italia because the company is no longer owned by the state but by individual shareholders and a consortium of three Italian banks and Telefonica. So government officials are using other ways to persuade it.
After months of fruitless negotiations between Telecom Italia chairman Franco Bernabe and CDP head Franco Bassanini, the state pledged to invest up to 500 million euro in Metroweb, a competing fiber broadband project in Italy's north, to up the pressure, a source close to the Metroweb group said.
Bassanini told Reuters that the CDP was 'absolutely open to finding an agreement' and that talks with Telecom Italia were ongoing on 'a broader hypothesis' than just the Metroweb investment. He acknowledged that the creation of a combined network company that merged all the current Italian network assets would be 'highly sensitive' for Telecom Italia.
According to a person close to Telecom Italia, the CDP has hired Deutsche Bank to analyze the value of its network in preparation for hiving it off.
The pressure is taking effect: Telecom Italia is debating the spin-off idea internally and Bernabe has promised a decision by the end of this year.
Telecom Italia has also agreed to share some infrastructure with rival broadband provider Fastweb and to co-ordinate the rollouts of their respective fiber networks in a bid to cut costs - a deal that could make negotiations over a broader nationwide project easier, analysts say.
But Telecom Italia executives are divided over whether spinning off its fixed network is wise, said two people close to the company. Chief Executive Marco Patuano is backing the move because he believes the infrastructure's value will decline with the advent of super-fast mobile technology known as LTE, as well as competing fiber projects in Italy.
By contrast Bernabe believes owning the last meters of copper into people's homes represents a competitive advantage since rivals must pay to access it to be able to offer broadband to their customers. He has repeatedly said Telecom Italia will not do anything to lose control over its network.
UPGRADE STRATEGIES
Governments around the world are trying different strategies to upgrade their systems.
The United States is relying solely on competition in the private sector while Japan and Korea have ploughed public money into building nationwide fiber-optic networks, a task made easier by dense urban geography. Sweden and Norway became European leaders in fibre-optic broadband penetration via a mixture of tax breaks, subsidies for rural deployments, and in Sweden's case, requiring state-owned municipal utilities to create local networks.
Although it is early to judge Australia's nationwide fibre project, Britain's effective separation of BT in 2005 has taken the country from the middle of Europe's rankings on broadband speeds, cost and usage to near the top.
In the European Union, telecom operators and policymakers have spent the past year fighting. Operators argue they shouldn't have to share the new networks with rivals if they are to bear the cost of building them alone. The wrangling has contributed to upgrade delays in Italy and elsewhere.
Brussels now says member states will not be required to make the operators share fibre networks and has given operators free rein to choose what technology to deploy, in a regulatory framework that will operate to at least 2020.
Crucially, regulators will no longer set the prices at which incumbents sell wholesale access to smaller competitors on new fibre networks, so long as incumbents offer 'equivalent' prices to everyone.
Gabrielle Gauthey, a former telecoms regulator in France who now works at Alcatel-Lucent, argues governments have a role to play in enabling adequate broadband coverage.
'Many telcos just don't have the money to invest the sums that are needed,' said Gauthey. 'It's a massive effort not unlike electrifying a whole country.'
A network spin-off could help Telecom Italia reach its debt reduction targets and cut its 30.4 billion euro debt pile - and the operator seems to be seriously considering the idea. In a recent presentation to investors at a Sanford Bernstein conference, Telecom Italia said the rewards of a separating out its fixed network now outweighed the risks.
A banker close to Telecom Italia put the probability of the group going through with the spin-off at 70 percent, and two other banking sources say the company is considering appointing two banks to advise it on the mechanics.
A decision can't come soon enough for businessmen like Siro Badon, who owns a business in a shoe manufacturing district near Venice where local companies export 92 percent of the 20 million pairs of shoes made every year.
'Some companies in our district work with brands like Louis Vuitton and Armani with stylists in Paris and all over the world. Imagine the huge damage it causes not being able to communicate swiftly,' Badon said.
'Sometimes I feel we are carrying an old country on our shoulders. I wait and hope.'
(Editing by Sophie Walker)
This news article is brought to you by STOCK MARKET BLOG - where latest news are our top priority.
Instead, the company, located in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, is wrestling with a basic impediment to profitability: a woefully slow broadband connection. With just 2 megabits (MB) per second, IMM Hydraulics' broadband connection lags behind the 5 MB typical in Italian cities, which in turn is well behind an average of 12 MB in France and 16 MB in Germany.
'It takes us days to process an order whereas it could take half an hour,' said finance director Marcello Di Campli. 'Broadband is one of our biggest problems, probably just after our access to credit.'
Europe's fourth-largest economy has long been an Internet laggard, its creaky networks stunting the development of online commerce and banking. Italians pay among the highest prices in Europe for broadband speeds on a par with Estonia or Cyprus. As a result, only half the population uses the Internet at least once a week and Italian firms generate 5.4 percent of sales on-line compared to 13.9 percent elsewhere in Europe.
Now the reformist government of Prime Minister Mario Monti has identified better broadband as a national priority to spur growth and reduce Italy's 11 percent unemployment and bulging deficits.
'The statistics on e-commerce are chilling ... The broadband gap constrains growth by reducing the competitiveness of export-oriented companies,' said Paolo Gentiloni, former communications minister and member of a group of deputies that has made proposals to support online commerce and government services.
In the government's sights is one-time monopoly Telecom Italia, which it believes has long thwarted competition and put off investing in its domestic network because of its huge debts.
Monti's government has enlisted state-backed finance body Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) to work out a plan with Telecom Italia and its rivals to create a nationwide super-fast fiber optic broadband network.
One of the most radical options under discussion is for Telecom Italia to spin off its existing network of decades-old copper lines - worth between 9 and 15 billion euros - into a separate company that would run Italy's fixed telephone and broadband system and sell capacity to other Internet providers on a wholesale basis. The new 'access network company' could be partly state-owned and would have more incentive to invest in broadband, say advocates, because it would have neither debt to pay nor market share to defend.
Such a move would amount to something of a revolution in Europe and would test whether the state can be more effective than the private sector in building national broadband infrastructure.
Australia's government provided the blue-print in 2009 when, frustrated with the slow pace of investment, it became the first country to create a national company charged with building a single open access fiber broadband network to 90 percent of homes by 2021. Britain adopted a slightly different approach, requiring BT Group to create a separate subsidiary to sells wholesale access to competitors and build fiber broadband across the country.
TO SPLIT OR NOT TO SPLIT
Telecom Italia, like other former telecom monopolies in Europe, owns the last meters of copper lines to homes and businesses, which it then rents out to competitors - mobile operators Vodafone, Wind, and Hutchison's 3 - for a monthly fee set by regulators.
In Italy and elsewhere, it is these decades-old copper lines that need to be replaced by fiber optic wires to boost broadband speeds to up to 100 megabits per second. Updating those wires will cost 200 billion euros, says the European Commission, a sum telecom operators will struggle to mobilize.
Italy can't just issue orders to Telecom Italia because the company is no longer owned by the state but by individual shareholders and a consortium of three Italian banks and Telefonica. So government officials are using other ways to persuade it.
After months of fruitless negotiations between Telecom Italia chairman Franco Bernabe and CDP head Franco Bassanini, the state pledged to invest up to 500 million euro in Metroweb, a competing fiber broadband project in Italy's north, to up the pressure, a source close to the Metroweb group said.
Bassanini told Reuters that the CDP was 'absolutely open to finding an agreement' and that talks with Telecom Italia were ongoing on 'a broader hypothesis' than just the Metroweb investment. He acknowledged that the creation of a combined network company that merged all the current Italian network assets would be 'highly sensitive' for Telecom Italia.
According to a person close to Telecom Italia, the CDP has hired Deutsche Bank to analyze the value of its network in preparation for hiving it off.
The pressure is taking effect: Telecom Italia is debating the spin-off idea internally and Bernabe has promised a decision by the end of this year.
Telecom Italia has also agreed to share some infrastructure with rival broadband provider Fastweb and to co-ordinate the rollouts of their respective fiber networks in a bid to cut costs - a deal that could make negotiations over a broader nationwide project easier, analysts say.
But Telecom Italia executives are divided over whether spinning off its fixed network is wise, said two people close to the company. Chief Executive Marco Patuano is backing the move because he believes the infrastructure's value will decline with the advent of super-fast mobile technology known as LTE, as well as competing fiber projects in Italy.
By contrast Bernabe believes owning the last meters of copper into people's homes represents a competitive advantage since rivals must pay to access it to be able to offer broadband to their customers. He has repeatedly said Telecom Italia will not do anything to lose control over its network.
UPGRADE STRATEGIES
Governments around the world are trying different strategies to upgrade their systems.
The United States is relying solely on competition in the private sector while Japan and Korea have ploughed public money into building nationwide fiber-optic networks, a task made easier by dense urban geography. Sweden and Norway became European leaders in fibre-optic broadband penetration via a mixture of tax breaks, subsidies for rural deployments, and in Sweden's case, requiring state-owned municipal utilities to create local networks.
Although it is early to judge Australia's nationwide fibre project, Britain's effective separation of BT in 2005 has taken the country from the middle of Europe's rankings on broadband speeds, cost and usage to near the top.
In the European Union, telecom operators and policymakers have spent the past year fighting. Operators argue they shouldn't have to share the new networks with rivals if they are to bear the cost of building them alone. The wrangling has contributed to upgrade delays in Italy and elsewhere.
Brussels now says member states will not be required to make the operators share fibre networks and has given operators free rein to choose what technology to deploy, in a regulatory framework that will operate to at least 2020.
Crucially, regulators will no longer set the prices at which incumbents sell wholesale access to smaller competitors on new fibre networks, so long as incumbents offer 'equivalent' prices to everyone.
Gabrielle Gauthey, a former telecoms regulator in France who now works at Alcatel-Lucent, argues governments have a role to play in enabling adequate broadband coverage.
'Many telcos just don't have the money to invest the sums that are needed,' said Gauthey. 'It's a massive effort not unlike electrifying a whole country.'
A network spin-off could help Telecom Italia reach its debt reduction targets and cut its 30.4 billion euro debt pile - and the operator seems to be seriously considering the idea. In a recent presentation to investors at a Sanford Bernstein conference, Telecom Italia said the rewards of a separating out its fixed network now outweighed the risks.
A banker close to Telecom Italia put the probability of the group going through with the spin-off at 70 percent, and two other banking sources say the company is considering appointing two banks to advise it on the mechanics.
A decision can't come soon enough for businessmen like Siro Badon, who owns a business in a shoe manufacturing district near Venice where local companies export 92 percent of the 20 million pairs of shoes made every year.
'Some companies in our district work with brands like Louis Vuitton and Armani with stylists in Paris and all over the world. Imagine the huge damage it causes not being able to communicate swiftly,' Badon said.
'Sometimes I feel we are carrying an old country on our shoulders. I wait and hope.'
(Editing by Sophie Walker)
This news article is brought to you by STOCK MARKET BLOG - where latest news are our top priority.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Yahoo CEO fleshes out plans, new CFO named
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - New Yahoo Inc CEO Marissa Mayer laid out broad goals for the Internet giant in her first companywide address Tuesday, and received an enthusiastic reception from a workforce that has faced years of uncertainty and management turmoil.
Mayer mainly sketched broad visions rather than concrete details for her turnaround strategy, according to several people familiar with what was said in the tightly controlled meeting.
But her personal credibility as a long-time senior Google Inc executive, combined with some recent morale-boosting moves such as providing new iPhones and free food for employees, have had a dramatic and positive impact on the 'vibe' at the company, one of the people said.
Speaking at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, California headquarters, Mayer stressed the importance of personalizing Yahoo's Web services and adapting the company's products to mobile devices, AllThingsD reported. Although her speech touched on frequently mentioned industry themes, Mayer's delivery nonetheless won spontaneous applause from the workforce, according to a second person with knowledge of the company meeting.
'It was some of the same types of lines that had been said before, but people believe it now,' said the person, who declined to be identified because the information is private.
After a steady stream of occasionally embarrassing reports, Yahoo in recent months has clamped down firmly on leaks to the press. Attendees at Tuesday's assembly were instructed to shut their laptops during Mayer's address.
Yahoo declined repeated requests for comment.
Mayer first presented her strategy to Yahoo's board in meetings last week, outlining plans to bring back advertisers and expand the company's user base, said a third source, who declined to be identified because the information was not public.
Yahoo also announced that it appointed as its new chief financial officer Ken Goldman, formerly CFO at cybersecurity software firm Fortinet.
The appointment comes two months after Yahoo's board tapped Mayer to restore a household Internet name overshadowed by rivals like Facebook Inc and Google in recent years.
Yahoo remains one of the world's most popular websites, with more than 700 million monthly visitors who use products like its email service and read its news pages, according to the company. But Yahoo's revenue has stagnated as online display advertising prices have fallen and as it faces competition from Facebook and Google.
Mayer, Yahoo's third CEO in about a year, arrived after a tumultuous period in the company in which former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than 6 months on the job over a controversy over his academic credentials. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang had also stepped down as CEO, and an internal reorganization eliminated thousands of jobs.
Mayer's latest hire, Goldman, replaces Tim Morse, who served last year as interim Yahoo CEO while the company underwent another episode of leadership turmoil.
BOOST MORALE, SCANT DETAILS
Since taking the helm, Mayer has sought to boost morale at the nearly two-decade-old Internet company, eliminating corporate bureaucracy and introducing perks such as free cafeteria food and state-of-the-art smartphones for employees that are standard fare at other Silicon Valley Web companies.
But Mayer has so far offered scant details about her plan to revive revenue growth and to expand its audience - a challenge that has frustrated a string of her predecessors as well as countless shareholders.
Many analysts and investors believe Mayer will renew Yahoo's focus on Web technology and products rather than beefing up online content, as appeared to be the mission during interim CEO Ross Levinsohn's brief tenure.
That has raised concerns among some investors that Mayer will embark on an expensive acquisition spree.
Mayer assuaged some of those fears last week when Yahoo closed the sale of half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Group. Yahoo said it would give shareholders $3 billion of the deal's $4.3 billion in after-tax proceeds.
(Reporting by Peter Lauria, Alexei Oreskovic and Gerry Shih; Editing by Richard Chang)
This article is brought to you by AFFORDABLE COMPUTERS.
Mayer mainly sketched broad visions rather than concrete details for her turnaround strategy, according to several people familiar with what was said in the tightly controlled meeting.
But her personal credibility as a long-time senior Google Inc executive, combined with some recent morale-boosting moves such as providing new iPhones and free food for employees, have had a dramatic and positive impact on the 'vibe' at the company, one of the people said.
Speaking at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, California headquarters, Mayer stressed the importance of personalizing Yahoo's Web services and adapting the company's products to mobile devices, AllThingsD reported. Although her speech touched on frequently mentioned industry themes, Mayer's delivery nonetheless won spontaneous applause from the workforce, according to a second person with knowledge of the company meeting.
'It was some of the same types of lines that had been said before, but people believe it now,' said the person, who declined to be identified because the information is private.
After a steady stream of occasionally embarrassing reports, Yahoo in recent months has clamped down firmly on leaks to the press. Attendees at Tuesday's assembly were instructed to shut their laptops during Mayer's address.
Yahoo declined repeated requests for comment.
Mayer first presented her strategy to Yahoo's board in meetings last week, outlining plans to bring back advertisers and expand the company's user base, said a third source, who declined to be identified because the information was not public.
Yahoo also announced that it appointed as its new chief financial officer Ken Goldman, formerly CFO at cybersecurity software firm Fortinet.
The appointment comes two months after Yahoo's board tapped Mayer to restore a household Internet name overshadowed by rivals like Facebook Inc and Google in recent years.
Yahoo remains one of the world's most popular websites, with more than 700 million monthly visitors who use products like its email service and read its news pages, according to the company. But Yahoo's revenue has stagnated as online display advertising prices have fallen and as it faces competition from Facebook and Google.
Mayer, Yahoo's third CEO in about a year, arrived after a tumultuous period in the company in which former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than 6 months on the job over a controversy over his academic credentials. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang had also stepped down as CEO, and an internal reorganization eliminated thousands of jobs.
Mayer's latest hire, Goldman, replaces Tim Morse, who served last year as interim Yahoo CEO while the company underwent another episode of leadership turmoil.
BOOST MORALE, SCANT DETAILS
Since taking the helm, Mayer has sought to boost morale at the nearly two-decade-old Internet company, eliminating corporate bureaucracy and introducing perks such as free cafeteria food and state-of-the-art smartphones for employees that are standard fare at other Silicon Valley Web companies.
But Mayer has so far offered scant details about her plan to revive revenue growth and to expand its audience - a challenge that has frustrated a string of her predecessors as well as countless shareholders.
Many analysts and investors believe Mayer will renew Yahoo's focus on Web technology and products rather than beefing up online content, as appeared to be the mission during interim CEO Ross Levinsohn's brief tenure.
That has raised concerns among some investors that Mayer will embark on an expensive acquisition spree.
Mayer assuaged some of those fears last week when Yahoo closed the sale of half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Group. Yahoo said it would give shareholders $3 billion of the deal's $4.3 billion in after-tax proceeds.
(Reporting by Peter Lauria, Alexei Oreskovic and Gerry Shih; Editing by Richard Chang)
This article is brought to you by AFFORDABLE COMPUTERS.
Google says Maps not waiting in wings for iPhone 5
TOKYO (Reuters) - Google Inc has made no move to provide Google Maps for the iPhone 5 after Apple Inc dropped the application in favor of a home-grown but controversial alternative, Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said.
Apple launched its own mapping service earlier this month when it began providing the highly anticipated update to its mobile software platform iOS 6 and started selling the iPhone 5.
But users have complained that Apple's new map service, based on Dutch navigation equipment and digital map maker TomTom NV's data, contains glaring geographical errors and lacks features that made Google Maps so popular.
'We think it would have been better if they had kept ours. But what do I know?' Schmidt told a small group of reporters in Tokyo. 'What were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It's their call.'
Schmidt said Google and Apple were in constant communication 'at all kinds of levels.' But he said any decision on whether Google Maps would be accepted as an application in the Apple App Store would have to be made by Apple.
'We have not done anything yet,' he said.
Google and Apple were close partners with the original iPhone in 2007 and its inclusion of YouTube and Google Maps. But the ties between the two have been strained by the rise of Google's Android mobile operating system, now the world's leading platform for smartphones.
Schmidt said he hoped Google would remain Apple's search partner on the iPhone but said that question was up to Apple.
'I'm not doing any predictions. We want them to be our partner. We welcome that. I'm not going to speculate at all what they're going to do. They can answer that question as they see fit,' he said.
Google provides Android free of charge and allows developers to add applications on an open basis, betting that by cultivating a bigger pool of users - now at over 500 million globally - it can make more money by providing search functions and selling advertising.
'Apple is the exception, and the Android system is the common model, which is why our market share is so much higher,' Schmidt said, adding that success was often ignored by the media, which he said was 'obsessed with Apple's marketing events and Apple's branding.'
'That's great for Apple but the numbers are on our side,' he said.
At one point, Schmidt, who was in Japan to announce the launch of Google's Nexus tablet here, used the device to show off a new function of Google Maps.
The feature allows users to shift their view of an area by moving the device in the air without touching the screen, similar to the effect of looking around.
'Take that Apple,' he said, adding quickly, 'That was a joke by the way.'
(Writing by James Topham; Editing by Ryan Woo)
This article is brought to you by COMPUTERS.
Apple launched its own mapping service earlier this month when it began providing the highly anticipated update to its mobile software platform iOS 6 and started selling the iPhone 5.
But users have complained that Apple's new map service, based on Dutch navigation equipment and digital map maker TomTom NV's data, contains glaring geographical errors and lacks features that made Google Maps so popular.
'We think it would have been better if they had kept ours. But what do I know?' Schmidt told a small group of reporters in Tokyo. 'What were we going to do, force them not to change their mind? It's their call.'
Schmidt said Google and Apple were in constant communication 'at all kinds of levels.' But he said any decision on whether Google Maps would be accepted as an application in the Apple App Store would have to be made by Apple.
'We have not done anything yet,' he said.
Google and Apple were close partners with the original iPhone in 2007 and its inclusion of YouTube and Google Maps. But the ties between the two have been strained by the rise of Google's Android mobile operating system, now the world's leading platform for smartphones.
Schmidt said he hoped Google would remain Apple's search partner on the iPhone but said that question was up to Apple.
'I'm not doing any predictions. We want them to be our partner. We welcome that. I'm not going to speculate at all what they're going to do. They can answer that question as they see fit,' he said.
Google provides Android free of charge and allows developers to add applications on an open basis, betting that by cultivating a bigger pool of users - now at over 500 million globally - it can make more money by providing search functions and selling advertising.
'Apple is the exception, and the Android system is the common model, which is why our market share is so much higher,' Schmidt said, adding that success was often ignored by the media, which he said was 'obsessed with Apple's marketing events and Apple's branding.'
'That's great for Apple but the numbers are on our side,' he said.
At one point, Schmidt, who was in Japan to announce the launch of Google's Nexus tablet here, used the device to show off a new function of Google Maps.
The feature allows users to shift their view of an area by moving the device in the air without touching the screen, similar to the effect of looking around.
'Take that Apple,' he said, adding quickly, 'That was a joke by the way.'
(Writing by James Topham; Editing by Ryan Woo)
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IBM CEO Virginia Rometty takes on chairman title
ARMONK, N.Y. (AP) - IBM President and CEO Virginia Rometty is taking on the added role of chairman, as Samuel Palmisano prepares to retire at the end of this year.
The technology company said Tuesday that Rometty, 55, will take on the expanded role Oct. 1. Palmisano, 61, will serve as a senior adviser until he retires in December.
Rometty, the company's former sales and marketing chief, became IBM Corp.'s first female CEO in January. Joining the Armonk, N.Y.-based company in 1981 as an engineer, Rometty later was instrumental in the formation of IBM's business services division, including overseeing the $3.5 billion purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers' consulting business in 2002.
IBM has sustained a nearly decade-long streak of earnings growth as it shook off the economic jitters that have undercut several other technology companies.
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The technology company said Tuesday that Rometty, 55, will take on the expanded role Oct. 1. Palmisano, 61, will serve as a senior adviser until he retires in December.
Rometty, the company's former sales and marketing chief, became IBM Corp.'s first female CEO in January. Joining the Armonk, N.Y.-based company in 1981 as an engineer, Rometty later was instrumental in the formation of IBM's business services division, including overseeing the $3.5 billion purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers' consulting business in 2002.
IBM has sustained a nearly decade-long streak of earnings growth as it shook off the economic jitters that have undercut several other technology companies.
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CEO of BlackBerry maker makes case for comeback
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Research In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins says the company's BlackBerry phone is poised to regain its stature as a trailblazing device even as many investors fret about its potential demise.
Heins took the stage Tuesday at a conference for mobile applications developers to rally support for the upcoming release of a new operating system for the BlackBerry.
The San Jose, Calif. gathering gave Heins and other top Research in Motion Ltd. executives the opportunity to show off a few features of the Blackberry 10 system. The redesigned software won't hit the market until a still-unscheduled date early next year.
Delays of the operating system's release have raised concerns that the once-iconic BlackBerry will fall even further behind Apple's Inc.'s iPhone and other hot-selling devices running on Google Inc.'s Android software.
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Heins took the stage Tuesday at a conference for mobile applications developers to rally support for the upcoming release of a new operating system for the BlackBerry.
The San Jose, Calif. gathering gave Heins and other top Research in Motion Ltd. executives the opportunity to show off a few features of the Blackberry 10 system. The redesigned software won't hit the market until a still-unscheduled date early next year.
Delays of the operating system's release have raised concerns that the once-iconic BlackBerry will fall even further behind Apple's Inc.'s iPhone and other hot-selling devices running on Google Inc.'s Android software.
This article is brought to you by BUY A NEW COMPUTER.
Einstein's brain is now interactive iPad app
CHICAGO (AP) - The brain that revolutionized physics now can be downloaded as an app for $9.99. But it won't help you win at Angry Birds.
While Albert Einstein's genius isn't included, an exclusive iPad application launched Tuesday promises to make detailed images of his brain more accessible to scientists than ever before. Teachers, students and anyone who's curious also can get a look.
A medical museum under development in Chicago obtained funding to scan and digitize nearly 350 fragile and priceless slides made from slices of Einstein's brain after his death in 1955. The application will allow researchers and novices to peer into the eccentric Nobel winner's brain as if they were looking through a microscope.
'I can't wait to find out what they'll discover,' said Steve Landers, a consultant for the National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago who designed the app. 'I'd like to think Einstein would have been excited.'
After Einstein died, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey performed an autopsy, removing the great man's brain in hopes that future researchers could discover the secrets behind his genius.
Harvey gave samples to researchers and collaborated on a 1999 study published in the Lancet. That study showed a region of Einstein's brain - the parietal lobe - was 15 percent wider than normal. The parietal lobe is important to the understanding of math, language and spatial relationships.
The new iPad app may allow researchers to dig even deeper by looking for brain regions where the neurons are more densely connected than normal, said Dr. Phillip Epstein, a Chicago-area neuroscientist and consultant for the museum.
But because the tissue was preserved before modern imaging technology, it may be difficult for scientists to figure out exactly where in Einstein's brain each slide originated. Although the new app organizes the slides into general brain regions, it doesn't map them with precision to an anatomical model.
'They didn't have MRI. We don't have a three-dimensional model of the brain of Einstein, so we don't know where the samples were taken from,' said researcher Jacopo Annese of the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego. What's more, the 1-inch-by-3-inch Einstein slides on the app represent only a fraction of the entire brain, Annese said.
Annese has preserved and digitized another famous brain, that of Henry Molaison, who died in 2008 after living for decades with profound amnesia. Known as 'H.M.' in scientific studies, Molaison participated during his life in research that revealed new insights on learning and memory.
A searchable website with images of more than 2,400 slides of Molaison's entire brain will be available to the public in December, Annese said.
'There will be another Einstein and we'll do it like H.M.,' Annese predicted. For now, he said, it's exciting that the Einstein brain tissue has been preserved digitally before the slides deteriorate or become damaged. The app will spark interest in the field of brain research, just because it's Einstein, he said.
'It's a beautiful collection to have opened up to the public,' Annese said.
Some may question whether Einstein would have wanted images of his remains sold to non-scientists for $9.99.
'There's been a lot of debate over what Einstein's intentions were,' museum board member Jim Paglia said. 'We know he didn't want a circus made of his remains. But he understood the value to research and science to study his brain, and we think we've addressed that in a respectful manner.'
Paglia said the app could 'inspire a whole new generation of neuroscientists.'
Proceeds from sales will go to the U.S. Department of Defense's National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Md., and to the Chicago satellite museum, which is set to open in 2015 with interactive exhibits and the museum's digital collections.
___
Online:
Einstein brain app: http://bit.ly/QeQSnu
___
AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/CarlaKJohnson .
This news article is brought to you by MOVIE CRITIC NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
While Albert Einstein's genius isn't included, an exclusive iPad application launched Tuesday promises to make detailed images of his brain more accessible to scientists than ever before. Teachers, students and anyone who's curious also can get a look.
A medical museum under development in Chicago obtained funding to scan and digitize nearly 350 fragile and priceless slides made from slices of Einstein's brain after his death in 1955. The application will allow researchers and novices to peer into the eccentric Nobel winner's brain as if they were looking through a microscope.
'I can't wait to find out what they'll discover,' said Steve Landers, a consultant for the National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago who designed the app. 'I'd like to think Einstein would have been excited.'
After Einstein died, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey performed an autopsy, removing the great man's brain in hopes that future researchers could discover the secrets behind his genius.
Harvey gave samples to researchers and collaborated on a 1999 study published in the Lancet. That study showed a region of Einstein's brain - the parietal lobe - was 15 percent wider than normal. The parietal lobe is important to the understanding of math, language and spatial relationships.
The new iPad app may allow researchers to dig even deeper by looking for brain regions where the neurons are more densely connected than normal, said Dr. Phillip Epstein, a Chicago-area neuroscientist and consultant for the museum.
But because the tissue was preserved before modern imaging technology, it may be difficult for scientists to figure out exactly where in Einstein's brain each slide originated. Although the new app organizes the slides into general brain regions, it doesn't map them with precision to an anatomical model.
'They didn't have MRI. We don't have a three-dimensional model of the brain of Einstein, so we don't know where the samples were taken from,' said researcher Jacopo Annese of the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego. What's more, the 1-inch-by-3-inch Einstein slides on the app represent only a fraction of the entire brain, Annese said.
Annese has preserved and digitized another famous brain, that of Henry Molaison, who died in 2008 after living for decades with profound amnesia. Known as 'H.M.' in scientific studies, Molaison participated during his life in research that revealed new insights on learning and memory.
A searchable website with images of more than 2,400 slides of Molaison's entire brain will be available to the public in December, Annese said.
'There will be another Einstein and we'll do it like H.M.,' Annese predicted. For now, he said, it's exciting that the Einstein brain tissue has been preserved digitally before the slides deteriorate or become damaged. The app will spark interest in the field of brain research, just because it's Einstein, he said.
'It's a beautiful collection to have opened up to the public,' Annese said.
Some may question whether Einstein would have wanted images of his remains sold to non-scientists for $9.99.
'There's been a lot of debate over what Einstein's intentions were,' museum board member Jim Paglia said. 'We know he didn't want a circus made of his remains. But he understood the value to research and science to study his brain, and we think we've addressed that in a respectful manner.'
Paglia said the app could 'inspire a whole new generation of neuroscientists.'
Proceeds from sales will go to the U.S. Department of Defense's National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Md., and to the Chicago satellite museum, which is set to open in 2015 with interactive exhibits and the museum's digital collections.
___
Online:
Einstein brain app: http://bit.ly/QeQSnu
___
AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/CarlaKJohnson .
This news article is brought to you by MOVIE CRITIC NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Barron's slams Facebook, stock falls
NEW YORK (AP) - Facebook Inc.'s stock took a hit Monday after an article in the financial magazine Barron's said it is 'still too pricey' despite a sharp decline since its initial public offering.
Though Facebook's stock has plunged since its May IPO, Andrew Bary at Barron's said the stock trades at 'high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows.'
At issue is the shift of Facebook's massive user base to mobile devices. The company is still figuring out how to advertise to people who use their mobile phones and tablet computers to access the social network. Bary said success in the mobile space is 'no sure thing' for the company. Mobile ads must fit into much smaller screens, which doesn't give Facebook 'much room to configure ads without alienating users,' Bary said.
Facebook also has what Bary called 'significant' stock-based compensation expenses. Last year, the company issued $1.4 billion worth of restricted stock and $1 billion so far this year, he noted. Yet technology companies such as Facebook 'routinely encourage analysts to ignore stock-based compensation expense - and most comply. This dubious approach to calculating profits is based on the idea that only cash expenses matter,' Bary wrote. 'That's a fiction, pure and simple.'
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook's stock fell $2.20, or 9.6 percent, to $20.66 in afternoon trading. The company went public on May 18 at a share price of $38, which it has not hit since.
Bary said he thinks Facebook's stock is worth $15, well below its current price even with Monday's drop.
'That would be roughly 24 times projected 2013 profit and six times estimated 2013 revenue of $6 billion, still no bargain price,' he wrote.
Facebook declined to comment.
Last week, research firm eMarketer said it expects Google Inc. to surpass Facebook in U.S. display advertising revenue this year. In February, eMarketer predicted Facebook would stay ahead of Google. The social networking company had surpassed Google in 2011. But Facebook's ad revenue has fallen short of the expectations eMarketer set in February.
That said, some analysts are still bullish on Facebook. Last week an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald started coverage of its stock with a 'Buy' rating and a target price of $26. The analyst, Youssef Squali, said he's 'positive on the stock long-term' despite its botched IPO and the worry that Facebook's stock will be held down as employees become eligible to sell their stock in the coming months.
'We see significant opportunities ahead of Facebook, largely from brands moving online seeking mass reach and user engagement and from the explosion of mobile advertising in the next 2-5 years,' Squali said in a note to investors.
This news article is brought to you by CELEBRITY GOSSIP NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
Though Facebook's stock has plunged since its May IPO, Andrew Bary at Barron's said the stock trades at 'high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows.'
At issue is the shift of Facebook's massive user base to mobile devices. The company is still figuring out how to advertise to people who use their mobile phones and tablet computers to access the social network. Bary said success in the mobile space is 'no sure thing' for the company. Mobile ads must fit into much smaller screens, which doesn't give Facebook 'much room to configure ads without alienating users,' Bary said.
Facebook also has what Bary called 'significant' stock-based compensation expenses. Last year, the company issued $1.4 billion worth of restricted stock and $1 billion so far this year, he noted. Yet technology companies such as Facebook 'routinely encourage analysts to ignore stock-based compensation expense - and most comply. This dubious approach to calculating profits is based on the idea that only cash expenses matter,' Bary wrote. 'That's a fiction, pure and simple.'
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook's stock fell $2.20, or 9.6 percent, to $20.66 in afternoon trading. The company went public on May 18 at a share price of $38, which it has not hit since.
Bary said he thinks Facebook's stock is worth $15, well below its current price even with Monday's drop.
'That would be roughly 24 times projected 2013 profit and six times estimated 2013 revenue of $6 billion, still no bargain price,' he wrote.
Facebook declined to comment.
Last week, research firm eMarketer said it expects Google Inc. to surpass Facebook in U.S. display advertising revenue this year. In February, eMarketer predicted Facebook would stay ahead of Google. The social networking company had surpassed Google in 2011. But Facebook's ad revenue has fallen short of the expectations eMarketer set in February.
That said, some analysts are still bullish on Facebook. Last week an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald started coverage of its stock with a 'Buy' rating and a target price of $26. The analyst, Youssef Squali, said he's 'positive on the stock long-term' despite its botched IPO and the worry that Facebook's stock will be held down as employees become eligible to sell their stock in the coming months.
'We see significant opportunities ahead of Facebook, largely from brands moving online seeking mass reach and user engagement and from the explosion of mobile advertising in the next 2-5 years,' Squali said in a note to investors.
This news article is brought to you by CELEBRITY GOSSIP NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
New York Times closes on $300M sale of About Group
NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times has completed its $300 million sale of The About Group to Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp.
IAC, which operates online businesses including Newsweek, The Daily Beast and dating site Match.com, announced the deal last month.
About.com provides information on a wide variety of topics and also operates ConsumerSearch.com and Calorie-Count.com. The site's content is written by paid experts known as guides.
The New York Times said Monday that it anticipates receiving about $290 million from the sale and plans to use those funds for general corporate purposes.
IAC says The About Group will become part of its search and applications segment.
The New York Times Co. purchased About.com in 2005 for roughly $410 million. About.com has suffered in the past year because of a change in the way Google handles search results. The change made About.com content difficult to find.
The New York Times Co.'s stock added 6 cents to $9.64 in midday trading, while IAC/InterActiveCorp's stock fell 71 cents to $52.51.
This news article is brought to you by TECHNOLOGY NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
IAC, which operates online businesses including Newsweek, The Daily Beast and dating site Match.com, announced the deal last month.
About.com provides information on a wide variety of topics and also operates ConsumerSearch.com and Calorie-Count.com. The site's content is written by paid experts known as guides.
The New York Times said Monday that it anticipates receiving about $290 million from the sale and plans to use those funds for general corporate purposes.
IAC says The About Group will become part of its search and applications segment.
The New York Times Co. purchased About.com in 2005 for roughly $410 million. About.com has suffered in the past year because of a change in the way Google handles search results. The change made About.com content difficult to find.
The New York Times Co.'s stock added 6 cents to $9.64 in midday trading, while IAC/InterActiveCorp's stock fell 71 cents to $52.51.
This news article is brought to you by TECHNOLOGY NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
Apple says more than 5 million iPhone 5s sold
NEW YORK (AP) - Apple Inc. said Monday that it has sold more than 5 million units of the new iPhone 5 in the three days since its launch, less than analysts had expected.
Apple shares were down $15.31, or 2.2 percent, at $684.79 in premarket trading.
The iPhone 5, the most eagerly awaited phone of the year, went on sale Friday in the U.S., Germany, France, Japan and five other countries.
When it launched the iPhone 4S a year ago, Apple sold 4 million in the first three days.
Apple could have sold more iPhones if it had more available: demand exceeded supply for most models. Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White said the phone was sold out at 80 to 85 percent of the U.S. Apple stores he and his team contacted Sunday evening, and the ones that were still available were mostly Sprint models.
Online delivery times have stretched to three to four weeks.
White had expected Apple to sell 6 to 6.5 million iPhone 5 units in the first three days.
The phone will go on sale in 22 more countries this Friday and in more than 100 countries by the end of the year.
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Apple shares were down $15.31, or 2.2 percent, at $684.79 in premarket trading.
The iPhone 5, the most eagerly awaited phone of the year, went on sale Friday in the U.S., Germany, France, Japan and five other countries.
When it launched the iPhone 4S a year ago, Apple sold 4 million in the first three days.
Apple could have sold more iPhones if it had more available: demand exceeded supply for most models. Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White said the phone was sold out at 80 to 85 percent of the U.S. Apple stores he and his team contacted Sunday evening, and the ones that were still available were mostly Sprint models.
Online delivery times have stretched to three to four weeks.
White had expected Apple to sell 6 to 6.5 million iPhone 5 units in the first three days.
The phone will go on sale in 22 more countries this Friday and in more than 100 countries by the end of the year.
This article is brought to you by BUY COMPUTERS.
Apple supplier halts China factory after violence
BEIJING (AP) - The company that makes Apple's iPhones suspended production at a factory in China on Monday after a brawl by as many as 2,000 employees at a dormitory injured 40 people.
The fight, the cause of which was under investigation, erupted Sunday night at a privately managed dormitory near a Foxconn Technology Group factory in the northern city of Taiyuan, the company and Chinese police said. A police statement reported by the official Xinhua News Agency said 5,000 officers were dispatched to the scene.
The Taiwanese-owned company declined to say whether the factory was involved in iPhone production. It said the facility, which employs 79,000 people, would suspend work Monday and reopen Tuesday.
Foxconn makes iPhones and iPads for Apple Inc. and also assembles products for Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. It is one of China's biggest employers, with some 1.2 million workers in factories in Taiyuan, the southern city of Shenzhen, in Chengdu in the west and in Zhengzhou in central China.
The fight in Taiyuan started at 11 p.m. on Sunday, "drawing a large crowd of spectators and triggering chaos," a police spokesman was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
Order was restored after about four hours and several people were arrested, said the company, a unit of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. It said 40 people were taken to hospitals for treatment.
The violence did not appear to be work-related, the company and police said. Comments posted on Chinese Internet bulletin boards said it might have erupted after a security guard hit an employee.
Photos posted on microblog service Sina Weibo showed broken windows, a burned vehicle and police with riot helmets, shields and clubs.
Phone calls to police headquarters and the Taiyuan city hall were not answered. People reached by phone at restaurants and other businesses in the area said they had no details about the clash.
The company has faced scrutiny over complaints in the past about wages and working hours. It raised minimum pay and promised in March to limit hours after an auditor hired by Apple found Foxconn employees regularly were required to work more than 60 hours a week.
___
AP researcher Flora Ji contributed.
___
Foxconn Technology Group: www.foxconn.com
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The fight, the cause of which was under investigation, erupted Sunday night at a privately managed dormitory near a Foxconn Technology Group factory in the northern city of Taiyuan, the company and Chinese police said. A police statement reported by the official Xinhua News Agency said 5,000 officers were dispatched to the scene.
The Taiwanese-owned company declined to say whether the factory was involved in iPhone production. It said the facility, which employs 79,000 people, would suspend work Monday and reopen Tuesday.
Foxconn makes iPhones and iPads for Apple Inc. and also assembles products for Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. It is one of China's biggest employers, with some 1.2 million workers in factories in Taiyuan, the southern city of Shenzhen, in Chengdu in the west and in Zhengzhou in central China.
The fight in Taiyuan started at 11 p.m. on Sunday, "drawing a large crowd of spectators and triggering chaos," a police spokesman was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
Order was restored after about four hours and several people were arrested, said the company, a unit of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. It said 40 people were taken to hospitals for treatment.
The violence did not appear to be work-related, the company and police said. Comments posted on Chinese Internet bulletin boards said it might have erupted after a security guard hit an employee.
Photos posted on microblog service Sina Weibo showed broken windows, a burned vehicle and police with riot helmets, shields and clubs.
Phone calls to police headquarters and the Taiyuan city hall were not answered. People reached by phone at restaurants and other businesses in the area said they had no details about the clash.
The company has faced scrutiny over complaints in the past about wages and working hours. It raised minimum pay and promised in March to limit hours after an auditor hired by Apple found Foxconn employees regularly were required to work more than 60 hours a week.
___
AP researcher Flora Ji contributed.
___
Foxconn Technology Group: www.foxconn.com
This news article is brought to you by FREE ROMANTIC DATING SITE BLOG - where latest news are our top priority.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Many US stores report being sold out of iPhone 5s
It was possible to walk into a store Saturday and buy an iPhone 5. But it took some hunting.
Some stores reported having Apple's newest phone available for walk-up customers, though not all versions of it. But a random check of about a dozen stores indicated that most were sold out.
A Verizon store in New York City said the 32 and 64 gigabyte models, but not the 16 GB version, were available. A Sprint store in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., said all but the most expensive 64 GB iPhone 5s were sold out.
The iPhone 5 went on sale Friday, igniting explosive interest around the world. Apple's website said phones bought online would ship in three to four weeks. Verizon's website said they would ship by Oct. 19.
It's hardly uncommon for supply shortages to make it difficult to get new iPhones in the first days of their release. For Apple, the iPhone introduction is the biggest revenue driver of the year. Analysts say the company will likely sell millions of phones in the first few days.
There were long lines Friday at Apple's stores in Asia, Europe and North America as customers pursued the new smartphone. Apple and the phone companies haven't provided sales figures from the first day. Apple is expected to announce early results Monday.
Last year, Apple said on the Monday after the launch of the iPhone 4S that it had sold 4 million in the first three days.
__
Freed contributed from Minneapolis. AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson in New York contributed to this report.
This news article is brought to you by CELEBRITY MUSIC NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
Some stores reported having Apple's newest phone available for walk-up customers, though not all versions of it. But a random check of about a dozen stores indicated that most were sold out.
A Verizon store in New York City said the 32 and 64 gigabyte models, but not the 16 GB version, were available. A Sprint store in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., said all but the most expensive 64 GB iPhone 5s were sold out.
The iPhone 5 went on sale Friday, igniting explosive interest around the world. Apple's website said phones bought online would ship in three to four weeks. Verizon's website said they would ship by Oct. 19.
It's hardly uncommon for supply shortages to make it difficult to get new iPhones in the first days of their release. For Apple, the iPhone introduction is the biggest revenue driver of the year. Analysts say the company will likely sell millions of phones in the first few days.
There were long lines Friday at Apple's stores in Asia, Europe and North America as customers pursued the new smartphone. Apple and the phone companies haven't provided sales figures from the first day. Apple is expected to announce early results Monday.
Last year, Apple said on the Monday after the launch of the iPhone 4S that it had sold 4 million in the first three days.
__
Freed contributed from Minneapolis. AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson in New York contributed to this report.
This news article is brought to you by CELEBRITY MUSIC NEWS - where latest news are our top priority.
Oracle pay for CEO Ellison jumps to $96 million
Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle Corp. and one of the wealthiest people in the world, saw his pay jump to $96.2 million last year.
The pay, disclosed in a corporate filing, was up 24 percent from the previous year's total of $77.6 million. Most of Ellison's pay came from stock options that were valued at $90.7 million when they were granted in June 2011.
Those options, to buy 7 million shares at $32.43 a share, have value only if the stock is trading above that price. The options have been under water for most of the time since they were granted. But on Friday, Oracle stock rose 21 cents to close at $32.47.
The company cut Ellison's performance-based bonus to $3.9 million, down from $13.3 million a year earlier. Other senior executives endured similar cuts. That was because Oracle's profit growth for the year came in below its goals, according to the yearly filing it made Friday.
Oracle's net income rose 17 percent to $9.98 billion for the year that ended May 31. Revenue rose 4 percent to $37.12 billion.
The company said compensation was $51.7 million for both Safra A. Catz, its president and chief financial officer, and Mark Hurd, its president. Nearly all their pay was also in stock options that had little value as of Friday.
Oracle said its compensation committee recognizes that Ellison, 68, already 'has a significant equity interest in Oracle, but believes he should still be eligible for an annual compensation package because of his active and vital role in our operations, strategy and growth.'
Ellison's salary was only $1 for the year that ended May 31, 2012, unchanged from the previous year.
Forbes this week estimated Ellison's net worth at $41 billion. That ranked him as the sixth-richest person in the world and the third-richest in the United States, behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
The Associated Press' calculation isolates the value the company's board placed on the executive's total compensation package in the last fiscal year. It includes salary, bonus, performance-related bonuses, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted.
The calculation doesn't include changes in the present value of pension benefits. And they sometimes differ from the totals that companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The statements to the SEC reflect accounting charges taken for the executive's compensation in the previous fiscal year.
This article is sponsored by build website.
The pay, disclosed in a corporate filing, was up 24 percent from the previous year's total of $77.6 million. Most of Ellison's pay came from stock options that were valued at $90.7 million when they were granted in June 2011.
Those options, to buy 7 million shares at $32.43 a share, have value only if the stock is trading above that price. The options have been under water for most of the time since they were granted. But on Friday, Oracle stock rose 21 cents to close at $32.47.
The company cut Ellison's performance-based bonus to $3.9 million, down from $13.3 million a year earlier. Other senior executives endured similar cuts. That was because Oracle's profit growth for the year came in below its goals, according to the yearly filing it made Friday.
Oracle's net income rose 17 percent to $9.98 billion for the year that ended May 31. Revenue rose 4 percent to $37.12 billion.
The company said compensation was $51.7 million for both Safra A. Catz, its president and chief financial officer, and Mark Hurd, its president. Nearly all their pay was also in stock options that had little value as of Friday.
Oracle said its compensation committee recognizes that Ellison, 68, already 'has a significant equity interest in Oracle, but believes he should still be eligible for an annual compensation package because of his active and vital role in our operations, strategy and growth.'
Ellison's salary was only $1 for the year that ended May 31, 2012, unchanged from the previous year.
Forbes this week estimated Ellison's net worth at $41 billion. That ranked him as the sixth-richest person in the world and the third-richest in the United States, behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
The Associated Press' calculation isolates the value the company's board placed on the executive's total compensation package in the last fiscal year. It includes salary, bonus, performance-related bonuses, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted.
The calculation doesn't include changes in the present value of pension benefits. And they sometimes differ from the totals that companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The statements to the SEC reflect accounting charges taken for the executive's compensation in the previous fiscal year.
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Friday, September 21, 2012
Review: iPhone evolves into jewel-like '5'
NEW YORK (AP) - If you run your finger over one of the joints where plastic and metal meet on the rim of the iPhone 5, you feel just the slightest hint of the seam. The materials have been machined to blend into one another with astonishing, jewel-like precision.
This is the essence of Apple: creating a product that looks and feels so good, you just know it has to be good.
The iPhone 5 lives up to its looks in the sense that it's the best iPhone yet. It's also the biggest overhaul to the line since the release of the 3G, four years ago. Compared to other high-end smartphones, however, it's more of a catch-up move.
The iPhone has a winning recipe already, and Apple's upgrades are careful and thoughtful. Beyond the beauty and thinness of it, there are no new hardware features you can't get with other phones.
For instance, the screen is bigger, but not big. It's the first time Apple is increasing the screen size of the phone, from a diagonal of 3.5 inches to one of 4 inches. The width has stayed the same, so the entire increase has come from making the screen taller.
Other smartphone makers have increased their screen sizes in the last few years, after realizing that a big screen is something customers like -and something Apple had refused to provide. Samsung's flagship Galaxy S III has a 4.8-inch screen, for instance.
The taller screen means that third-party apps will be hemmed in by black bars until the developers get around to updating them for the new dimensions.
The other major upgrade in the iPhone 5 is that it now comes with the ability to connect to 'LTE' networks in the U.S., Canada, and a few other countries. These are the latest, fastest data networks, and they'll make a huge difference, at least for Sprint and Verizon customers, who have been stuck on the relatively slow, older networks of those carriers (though Sprint customers will be hard pressed to find any LTE towers - the company has just started building out the network.) For AT&T customers, the difference will be noticeable but not as big.
When it comes to LTE, Apple is trailing the pack. The company skipped the first generation of LTE-capable chips, which went into competing phones as far back as a year and a half ago, because they were too power-hungry. Now that the chips have improved and LTE is a near-standard feature in smartphones, Apple is coming on board.
Apple is pushing the envelope on screen technology by adopting a display that eliminates one glass layer. Ahead of Apple's announcement, company watchers were betting it would use the space freed up by the new technology to increase the battery size for the benefit of LTE users, keeping the size of the phone the same.
But Apple has actually made the phone considerably thinner, while keeping the stated battery life at an impressive eight hours of LTE usage (I did not have enough time with the phone to test this claim).
This, along with obsessive attention to fit and finish, makes for an exquisitely tight, light phone that seems perfect for the hand.
The phone is really too pretty to cover with a case - I'd get a good insurance plan for it instead. The glass on most of the back has been replaced with frosted aluminum, which will probably scratch and wear considerably, but it should be less fragile than the notoriously breakage-prone backs on the 4 and 4s.
One victim of the slimmed-down body is the old connection port. It was just too big to survive. Apple has replaced it with a much smaller port it calls 'Lightning.' This means the iPhone 5 won't fit into your iPod dock. Old charging cables won't work, either. You'll have to buy an exquisitely overpriced $29 adapter from Apple or wait for knock-offs.
It would have been nice, and uncharacteristic, of Apple to go with the flow and use the micro-USB port every other phone uses these days. That way, you could charge iPhones with other chargers, and vice versa. The Lightning port is better than micro-USB because it provides a deeper, more secure fit and it's reversible, you don't have to worry about whether you're trying to fit in the cable upside-down. But as the number of gadgets in the home keeps rising, standardizing on one port would have been welcome help with managing the chargers.
There's something else that now has a deeper, more secure fit: the new earbuds. These 'EarPods' are completely redesigned. Instead of broad, round speakers, they have small, oval outlets that beam sound into the ear canal. The sound quality is outstanding. They can be bought separately for $29, and this time, that price tag looks modest.
The hardware updates mean that I'm still comfortable recommending the iPhone as the best phone out there. They don't break much new ground, but they support the things that really set the iPhone apart: the slick, reliable operating system and the multitude of high-quality, third-party applications. There's a reason Apple can sell two-year-old phones (like the '4'') while other manufacturers retire theirs after a year or less. The iPhone phenomenon is about so much more than the phone.
___
Peter Svensson can be reached at http://twitter.com/petersvensson
This news article is brought to you by RELATIONSHIPS ADVICE - where latest news are our top priority.
This is the essence of Apple: creating a product that looks and feels so good, you just know it has to be good.
The iPhone 5 lives up to its looks in the sense that it's the best iPhone yet. It's also the biggest overhaul to the line since the release of the 3G, four years ago. Compared to other high-end smartphones, however, it's more of a catch-up move.
The iPhone has a winning recipe already, and Apple's upgrades are careful and thoughtful. Beyond the beauty and thinness of it, there are no new hardware features you can't get with other phones.
For instance, the screen is bigger, but not big. It's the first time Apple is increasing the screen size of the phone, from a diagonal of 3.5 inches to one of 4 inches. The width has stayed the same, so the entire increase has come from making the screen taller.
Other smartphone makers have increased their screen sizes in the last few years, after realizing that a big screen is something customers like -and something Apple had refused to provide. Samsung's flagship Galaxy S III has a 4.8-inch screen, for instance.
The taller screen means that third-party apps will be hemmed in by black bars until the developers get around to updating them for the new dimensions.
The other major upgrade in the iPhone 5 is that it now comes with the ability to connect to 'LTE' networks in the U.S., Canada, and a few other countries. These are the latest, fastest data networks, and they'll make a huge difference, at least for Sprint and Verizon customers, who have been stuck on the relatively slow, older networks of those carriers (though Sprint customers will be hard pressed to find any LTE towers - the company has just started building out the network.) For AT&T customers, the difference will be noticeable but not as big.
When it comes to LTE, Apple is trailing the pack. The company skipped the first generation of LTE-capable chips, which went into competing phones as far back as a year and a half ago, because they were too power-hungry. Now that the chips have improved and LTE is a near-standard feature in smartphones, Apple is coming on board.
Apple is pushing the envelope on screen technology by adopting a display that eliminates one glass layer. Ahead of Apple's announcement, company watchers were betting it would use the space freed up by the new technology to increase the battery size for the benefit of LTE users, keeping the size of the phone the same.
But Apple has actually made the phone considerably thinner, while keeping the stated battery life at an impressive eight hours of LTE usage (I did not have enough time with the phone to test this claim).
This, along with obsessive attention to fit and finish, makes for an exquisitely tight, light phone that seems perfect for the hand.
The phone is really too pretty to cover with a case - I'd get a good insurance plan for it instead. The glass on most of the back has been replaced with frosted aluminum, which will probably scratch and wear considerably, but it should be less fragile than the notoriously breakage-prone backs on the 4 and 4s.
One victim of the slimmed-down body is the old connection port. It was just too big to survive. Apple has replaced it with a much smaller port it calls 'Lightning.' This means the iPhone 5 won't fit into your iPod dock. Old charging cables won't work, either. You'll have to buy an exquisitely overpriced $29 adapter from Apple or wait for knock-offs.
It would have been nice, and uncharacteristic, of Apple to go with the flow and use the micro-USB port every other phone uses these days. That way, you could charge iPhones with other chargers, and vice versa. The Lightning port is better than micro-USB because it provides a deeper, more secure fit and it's reversible, you don't have to worry about whether you're trying to fit in the cable upside-down. But as the number of gadgets in the home keeps rising, standardizing on one port would have been welcome help with managing the chargers.
There's something else that now has a deeper, more secure fit: the new earbuds. These 'EarPods' are completely redesigned. Instead of broad, round speakers, they have small, oval outlets that beam sound into the ear canal. The sound quality is outstanding. They can be bought separately for $29, and this time, that price tag looks modest.
The hardware updates mean that I'm still comfortable recommending the iPhone as the best phone out there. They don't break much new ground, but they support the things that really set the iPhone apart: the slick, reliable operating system and the multitude of high-quality, third-party applications. There's a reason Apple can sell two-year-old phones (like the '4'') while other manufacturers retire theirs after a year or less. The iPhone phenomenon is about so much more than the phone.
___
Peter Svensson can be reached at http://twitter.com/petersvensson
This news article is brought to you by RELATIONSHIPS ADVICE - where latest news are our top priority.
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