Bloomberg: Apple, which has $145 billion of cash, said yesterday it plans to use debt to help finance a $100 billion capital reward for shareholders after a 42 percent stock plunge. Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s responded by ranking the company a level below their top grades, with Gerald Granovsky of Moody’s citing […]
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China Mobile May Need the iPhone
Tech In Asia (emphasis mine): China Mobile announced a minuscule 0.3 percent profit growth over the first quarter of this year and a rather terrifying 2.98 percent drop in monthly average calling compared to the same period last year. China Mobile is China’s biggest telecom and has been one of the country’s fastest-growing state-owned enterprises. […]
The S4 Design Stinks; Does It Matter?
David Pierce at The Verge (all emphasis is mine): I don’t like holding this phone, and I can’t overstate how much that informs the experience of using it. It makes an awful first impression, slippery and slimy and simply unpleasant in your hand. My white review unit is completely smooth and glossy, with a subtle […]
Apple had record sales and awesome growth. Here’s why its stock is being hammered anyway.
Neil Irwin: Apple has shown less public interest in plowing money into projects far outside of their core expertise than some tech giants, in particular Google with its efforts to create driverless cars.1 So Apple’s stock price is essentially a minute-by-minute referendum on the ability of the company to find some big new thing that […]
The Visual Case for a Low-Cost iPhone
Yesterday Horace Dediu posted this very interesting chart showing the average revenue per mobile-cellular subscription in 2010 by country: Average revenue per mobile-cellular subscription in 2010 by country. Would love to have more than 60 countries. twitpic.com/ckybnl — Horace Dediu (@asymco) April 21, 2013 I combined this data with browser share data from StatCounter. Countries […]
The Week in Review – April 14-20, 2013
The world of technology often seems all-encompassing, occupying all of one’s time and attention. But not this week. A bombing at a marathon. An industrial explosion that devastated a town. Poison in the mail. A city deserted. Another devastating earthquake in China. At the risk of being crass, the real world news was useful perspective […]
Amazon Reportedly Acquires Siri-Like Evi App
Techcrunch: When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S it seemed like a magic piece of software. The future had arrived. But it wasn’t alone. True Knowledge, a British startup with a natural language search engine developed in university labs, had been working out what to do next. Siri was the ‘boom’ moment. They licensed Nuance’s […]
A Common Thread
Asymco: The Windows PC market is contracting. The market data has been showing unit shipment declining for some time with the latest quarter having perhaps the steepest decline for two decades. What remains undocumented however is how the market looks when considering economic value. A more complete picture would be to show revenues, average selling […]
Facebook Thinks You Might Like Up to Three Video Ads in Your News Feed Each Day
Delightful headline-writing by The Verge. From the article: Expected to launch in the summer, Facebook’s new video ad units may prove to be a revenue success for the company, but they may also become another nuisance for users. According to AdAge, Facebook is currently in talks with various agencies to secure its first video ad […]
The Facebook First at the AT&T Store
I paid a visit to my local AT&T store1 on the occasion of the Facebook First being officially available for sell. There was more promotion than I expected, including a dedicated installation and a huge promotional banner behind the counter. That said, there wasn’t really any effort by the salespeople to push me on the […]