The official price of Palm’s new Pixi smartphone is $99.95, but Wal-Mart is now offering the handset for $24.99 with a two-year contract, as is Amazon. That’s a 75 percent price cut. Staggering, considering the Pixi arrived at market just four days ago.
Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have submitted a new version of their digital book settlement, and while it makes concessions to the Department of Justice and others who have raised concerns about how it may violate antitrust laws, the new proposal doesn’t seem to have appeased all of its opponents.
With a handful of new Android handsets arriving at market in the coming weeks, including Motorola’s much anticipated Droid, Palm’s prospects for blowout winter holiday sales are dimming. Earlier this week, analysts at Citigroup and CL King voiced their concerns about the company in the wake of another ugly quarter from carrier partner Sprint. Now, Standard & Poor’s is doing so as well.
$118.49. That’s the price at which Amazon shares closed Friday, a day after the company reported a 69 percent jump in third-quarter profit and a 28 percent gain in revenue. It was a new 52-week high and the stock’s best since December 1999, when it hit $106.68. Which is saying something. Because as you might recall, in 1999, Nasdaq was soaring on the back of the dot-com bubble to levels never before seen.
“We’re eagerly awaiting Apple’s Tablet and the answer to the question of whether there really is a very large market for stand-alone eReaders. We think there is…we see people carrying around stand-alone Readers all the time…they’re called books.”
– Mark Mahaney, Citi Investment Research
According to comScore, Web traffic to Amazon in the U.S. rose 14.8 percent, far outstripping that of overall U.S. Internet traffic, which grew just 3.5 percent. “It appears that Amazon is gaining share the old-fashioned way,” ThinkEquity analyst Ed Weller noted last week, “by acquiring more and more customers…and selling more to each of them.” Judging from the nice gain in third-quarter earnings the company posted after Thursday’s closing bell, that would seem to be the case.
Here’s an interesting Windows 7 stat as we near the operating system’s official release: It’s Amazon U.K.’s biggest pre-ordered product of all time. In fact, the online retailer has received more pre-orders for Windows 7 than it did for J.K. Rowling’s final “Harry Potter” book.
Apple has long been a subscriber to the underpromise-and-over-deliver school of guidance theory, so it’s not unusual to see research houses raising their guidance on the company in advance of its fourth-quarter financials. Among those doing so today: Morgan Keegan, whose Tavis McCourt says the June refresh of the MacBook Pro line and the recent launch of Snow Leopard have juiced sales at Amazon and Best Buy.
Three years after squeezing a settlement out of Microsoft for alleged infringements of its controversial patent on embedded Web applications, Eolas Technologies hopes to do the same to a bunch of other big tech outfits. This morning, the research and development company filed suit against nearly two dozen companies, including Amazon, Apple, Adobe and Google.
Books vanishing from e-readers…magazines on Hulu…DVDs from a kiosk…cats and dogs living together…mass hysteria!
Palm has begun rolling out webOS 1.2.0, a minor point release to its new flagship operating system, which boasts some 70 improvements. Notably absent from this update: The reenabling of iTunes synchronization, which Apple spannered when it released iTunes 9.0 earlier this month.
Apple’s latest 52-week high is well on its way to becoming a 52-week low. In a research note to investors this week, Charlie Wolf of Needham & Company lifted his price target on Apple to $235, from $200, largely on the merits of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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