February 2012
24 posts
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The FriendFeed 70x Exit →
When Facebook acquired FriendFeed in the summer of 2009, it was widely-reported to be a fairly straightforward “acqui-hire” deal. The price was more complicated.
$50 million sounded good on paper, but it was believed that only a small amount was in cash, the rest was in Facebook stock. It was Facebook stock which was just valued at $6.5 billion thanks to the DST investment. Some felt...
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I haven’t been drunk in 3 years... and I’ve been... →
Fantastic post on the joys of not drinking by Darius Monsef.
Google's Mysterious “Entertainment Device” →
If I were a betting man, I’d bet on Google getting into the hardware game with an unexpected device at some point this year. Nice find by Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm.
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Apple Controls 75% Of The Profits In The Key... →
Speaking of crazy charts… these great ones by Horace Dediu of Asymco are just bonkers.
In the first, you’ll see that Apple retains the top rank in profitability among mobile phone OEMs for the third straight year…
In the second chart, you’ll see that Apple snatched the revenue crown back from Samsung last quarter.
But the third one is the best. It’s not just that...
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Size Matters
Earlier, I linked to this set of three pie charts by Ed Bott, but it’s worth mentioning something else about them. The subtle point that it seems Bott is trying to make is that out of Microsoft, Apple, and Google, Microsoft has the best business because it’s the most well-rounded. (Meanwhile, Google has the worst because it’s entirely dominated by one thing: advertising.)
At a...
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Panasonic Comes In At Negative $10 Billion →
Swimming in a sea of red, Panasonic is the bloodiest yet. A $10.2 billion annual loss. That’s not just bad, it’s insanely bad.
But again, they’re hardly alone. Reports Tim Kelly and Yoko Kubota for Reuters:
Together, Panasonic, Sony and Sharp Corp expect to lose $17 billion this year, highlighting the savaging of Japan’s electronics industry by foreign rivals led by...
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How Does Facebook Make Money? →
Great chart by Dan Frommer.
Facebook, like Google, makes the vast majority of their revenue from advertising. But, unlike Google, Facebook has been seeing a meaningful trend towards diversification of their revenue stream.
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iBooks Author 1.01 out with updated EULA →
Notes Megan Lavey-Heaton for TUAW:
The change is an important one though, clarifying that Apple has rights over the format a book is in, not the content.
And we have yet another bit of controversy to file away under: Apple Is Not Fucking Stupid.
I haven’t weighed in on the EULA hubbub for this exact reason. If Apple was actually trying to suggest that they own the content of all iBooks...
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I Paid, Now What?
In the don’t-call-them-comments notes section on my post about Tumblr’s new Highlighted Posts feature, Jenna Wortham brings up a good point:
Def agree its smart of Tumblr to try new things - but the return here seems minimal. You aren’t broadening yr audience by highlighting content to people who already read you. Best case: Someone spends an extra 5 secs looking at your post. Then...
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RIM Offering Free PlayBook Tablets to Android... →
Personally, I would have gone with the following headline: RIM Offering A Cup Of Shitty, Hot Coffee To Those In Hell.
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The 1% →
The good news: In the past month, the spread of Ice Cream Sandwich across Android devices has nearly doubled.
The bad news: “Nearly doubled” means going from 0.6% of devices to 1% of devices.
Three months in, 1%. That’s progress.
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Verizon's Cozying Up With Comcast Draws Attention →
There has been a lot of talk behind the scenes, but not a lot of talk in the public recently about a few deals that sure make it seem like Verizon and Comcast are in the midst of a sort of de facto merger.
Or, said another way, collusion.
Good to see people are starting to take notice.
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The Peek Bites The Dust →
Can’t believe a service/device predicated solely around the worst thing in the world, email, would fail to catch on.
Next they’ll be telling us the Tax Time! board game wasn’t a big hit this holiday season.
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"Think Loss." →
Speaking of profit problems, Sony lost $2 billion on revenue of $23.37 billion last quarter. For the full year, the losses are going to be more like $3 billion. Ouch.
The upside is that they just got a new CEO, Kazuo Hirai. Maybe he can come in and do the “Think Profit” moves. Sony needs it. Badly.
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Fathoming Facebook
Amidst my snark, there are a few high level things about Facebook’s numbers that I find interesting.
First:
So Facebook had nearly double the profits of Amazon in 2011…
— MG Siegler (@parislemon) February 1, 2012
Second:
Facebook revenue and profit are both about about 1/10th that of Google (which went public 7.5 years ago). They. Are. Coming.
— MG Siegler (@parislemon) February...
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Longform for iPad →
Great new app by the Longform guys. They auto-stock and auto-curate longer form articles from various publications for you to read on your iPad (optionally using Readability to remove the clutter).
I’m a big fan of services like Instapaper and Read It Later, but I recognize that plenty of people don’t want to take the time to go out and find their own content to read later (though...
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Zuckerberg's S-1 Letter →
The most interesting part:
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what...
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From Cupertino With Love →
No clue if this 1.3 megapixel-equipped iPod nano is real or not (though it has a certain legit quality to it). But the idea of a super-stealth spy cam appeals to me. Embassies worldwide will be put on alert for the new iPod nano.
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The Bing Backup Plan →
Microsoft is going on the offensive. And they’re not just targeting Google Search, they’re targeting Gmail, Google Docs, and Chrome as well with their “Putting People First” ad campaign.
Given Google’s stumbles, Microsoft’s timing is right. But these battles ultimately are ultimately still about the products themselves. It’s not enough to say...
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BGR Kills Comments Too →
Continuing the trend, BGR has decided to shut down comments as well — at least temporarily until they can come up with a better option.
Ever notice how everyone is always in search of the “better option”? At some point we’re probably all going to have to recognize that the actual problem is a part of human nature.
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Amazon Feels The Profit Squeeze →
Just to follow up, Amazon has released their numbers. As expected, net income doesn’t look great — $177 million, down 58 percent year over year. But at least it’s not a loss (which Amazon had warned it might be).
That $177 million is on sales of $17.4 billion. Crazy. That’s what low margins — and selling hardware at a loss — will do to you.
Speaking of 177, that’s also...
January 2012
148 posts
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A Tale Of Two Catalysts →
Amazon will announce their earnings later today. As I outlined in October, the results this past quarter will highlight the difference between Apple and Amazon.
Writes Tricia Duryee:
Here’s one data point: For the holiday period, Apple’s gross margin was an impressive 44.7 percent, up from 38.5 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, analysts are estimating that Amazon’s operating margin will fall...
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Apple Updates Final Cut Pro X →
After all the hoopla, it sounds like these are all great updates, as Jim Dalrymple details. Enough to appease the old Final Cut Pro diehards? We’ll see.
This will help:
There is also good news from Final Cut Pro developers. Intelligent Assistance is releasing a new app today called 7toX that will allow users to import Final Cut Pro 7 projects into Final Cut Pro X. The app uses Final Cut’s...
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Responding to Feedback, Microsoft Makes Changes to... →
That’s fine. But the real question is: how on Earth did anyone working at Microsoft look at something like this nonsense and think it was fine in the first place?
The fact that they needed this feedback is actually the most troubling thing here.
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Fading To Gray →
Nelson Minar’s thoughts on the recent Google issues succinctly capture what many other Googlers (both past and present) have been expressing privately in recent weeks.
His main point:
I imagine half of my readers are smugly thinking “See, I told you Google was evil all along”. I don’t think that’s right. In particular I refuse to give in to a cynical view of...
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Apple Becomes World's Biggest Maker of Computers,... →
Cue dozens of people screaming bloody murder: “THE IPAD IS NOT A PC!!!!!!!”
Cue millions of the rest of us laughing at those people.
Just as with the move from desktops to laptops, the transition to tablets (or “pads” as Canalys humorously refers to them) is underway.
“But, but, but… it doesn’t have a keyboard!” Yes it does.
“But, but,...
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"Spouting Nonsense" →
Tim Worstall, a Forbes contributor, absolutely rips apart the anti-Apple tone of the recent stories about Chinese factory conditions.
This, alongside Tim Cook’s response and the letter to The New York Times from BSR President and CEO Aron Cramer refuting just about everything attributed to an anonymous “BSR consultant” in the most recent NYT story, certainly makes it seem even...
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The Hector, Achilles, and Ajax Of Tennis →
“Golden ages” in sports are weird things. They’re usually only declared after the fact — and often well after the fact. It’s often the “too far in the forest to see the trees” syndrome mixed with a lack of historical context, so perspective is lacking until further down the line.
But that’s not the case with men’s tennis right now.
Because there...
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Microsoft’s Facebook Investment: Smartest Deal... →
Todd Bishop of GeekWire asks the question, I think the answer is “yes” (though the continued investment in Xbox and elements like Kinect should ultimately be close).
To me, there are two things that are most interesting about Microsoft’s Facebook investment.
1) Nearly everyone in the tech press at the time panned the deal as a ridiculous rip-off, sign of another bubble, etc....
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Uncensored →
Hunter Walk and Eric Ries brought together a pretty killer group of contributors — including yours truly — for a good cause: supporting the open internet.
Uncensored is an eBook featuring a collection of blog posts on a range of topics. They’re asking you pay at least $4.99 (and suggesting a payment of $9.99), with all of the profits are being donated to the Electronic Frontier...
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The Obama Campaign Is Now Using Square For... →
Very cool. Though I’d also like a Card Case option as well — maybe every time I’m within 10 miles of President Obama, open my tab and donate…
Update: Romney campaign too!
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Google, The Patent Pusher? →
Charles Arthur of The Guardian makes the case for why Google will have to get aggressive with their patents, lest the Motorola deal look like one of the worst purchases in recent years — maybe ever.
Writes Arthur:
The really profitable bit of the business is the “Home” division, which makes set-top boxes, but has been bumping along at around $900m revenues for the past year. It...
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No Disputing This "Winning"
OH- “the best part of having an android phone is that my kids never want to play with it”.
— Bryce Roberts (@bryce) January 29, 2012
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Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic →
Fantastic post by Brian Lam thinking deeply about technology addiction (and technology news addiction).
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No, Now We Have
In his (rather ridiculous) new PandoDaily column, Farhad Manjoo pegs Android’s high-water mark as last April, and points to this post by Fred Wilson as an example of when the sky seemed to be the limit for Android. In that post, Wilson writes:
Roughly six months ago, I put up a blog post suggesting Android was going to be the dominant mobile phone operating system and that developers...
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The Android Oil Rig →
An interesting pipedream by Farhad Manjoo: in order to make more money, Google should close down Android and start charging a licensing fee.
Of course, it will never happen. Never. Such a move would be the single biggest example of hypocrisy in the history of technology.
There’s another problem with this argument. Manjoo sets it up as solely a money-making ploy in the face of Apple — but...
A 28-Day Window Before You Can Even *Think* About... →
Ben Fritz for the LA Times Company Town blog:
Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues.
Creating a 28-day window between DVD release and rental period was ridiculous. When that didn’t work, doubling the window to 56 days was...
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“Here’s something that might blow your mind: In 1990, the Royals’...”
– Rob Neyer talking about baseball contracts and payrolls in the wake of Prince Fielder’s $214 million deal with the Tigers.
I’m not sure what’s crazier: that Fielder’s $23.77 million a year average salary is roughly the same as the top team payroll in 1990. Or that the Kansas...
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In Dreams
I first encountered 955 Dreams about a year ago when I came across a magical iPad app called The History of Jazz. When I sat down with co-founder Kiran Bellubbi to talk about the app for a TechCrunch story, it was immediately apparent that his vision extended far beyond just one beautiful app.
I kicked off my story with something he said to me: “The shallow experience for a user has to...
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“We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues. What...”
– Tim Cook responding to the NYT piece about awful working conditions in Chinese factories where many Apple products are assembled.
It’s not a response to the press, it’s a response to the Apple team, which Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac was able to get ahold of.
It’s a good response,...
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"I Had Four CEOs!" →
Speaking of prison terms, Josh Topolsky scored an interview with Jon Rubinstein on his way out of the door from HP.
Rubinstein tries — and fails — to hold back his contempt for the past few HP regimes. It reads like he and fellow HP VP Todd Bradley had a grand plan (this one, perhaps?) for HP/webOS that disintegrated when then-CEO Mark Hurd was ousted. That, of course, kickstarted months of...
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Ruby Released →
Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm (and former Apple executive), has left HP.
With Palm hardware now dead and webOS now open-sourced, the writing has been on the wall for this to happen for a while. To hear HP tell it, this was the plan all along. As Arik Hesseldahl writes:
Rubinstein is said to have no immediate plans, and had completed a 12-24 month commitment to stay with HP after the...
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This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
A lot of people have asked for my take on The New York Times piece yesterday about the true cost of making Apple products in China. Let me first just say that it’s an important piece full of good reporting by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza. Parts of it are very sad — sickening, really.
But let’s be honest. The post focuses on Apple because Apple is now arguably the most successful...
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Samsung's Q4: $4.7 Billion In Profit →
In other words, they’re the bizarro-Motorola.
Or, put another way, in order to acquire such a company at the market price Google sets, it would take something like $14 trillion.