When it launched on July 10, 2008, Apple’s iTunes App Store held just 552 apps. Today, Apple tells us, it boasts more than 100,000. Astonishing, really, when you think about it. The App Store isn’t even two years old yet. Nor is the iPhone SDK.
Here’s an interesting data point from Apple’s recent 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: The company has budgeted $1.9 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2010. That’s 70 percent more than the $1.1 billion it spent in 2009. What does Apple plan to do with those additional funds?
“We always said 2009 would be a tough year.” SAP CEO Léo Apotheker made that remark during the company’s third-quarter earnings call today and, sadly, SAP’s worse-than-expected performance and reduced forecast for the year would seem to bear him out.
In the rhetorical battle over net neutrality, Google may have regulatory capitalism with which to bludgeon and batter AT&T, but AT&T has Benedictine nuns, an entire convent of them. In a 13-page letter to the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday, the carrier took issue with Google’s claim that its Google Voice service only blocks calls to adult sex chat lines, asserting that it also blocks calls to small businesses and Benedictine nuns.
The inexorable march of technology made wires and cable obsolete in the wake of Bluetooth and may soon do the same to the short-range wireless protocol. The Wi-Fi Alliance this week announced Wi-Fi Direct, a new short-range wireless standard capable of performing many of the same tasks as Blutooth, but at Wi-Fi speeds.
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.
Google and Verizon Wireless have evidently gotten over their 700-MHz spectrum auction-inspired differences. This morning, the two companies announced an agreement to deliver mobile applications and devices.
Apple seems to have gotten over its aversion to apps duplicating core iPhone functions. This morning, Internet telephony company Vonage released an app that allows iPhone users to make calls over Wi-Fi and AT&T’s voice network.
Oh, it’s really on now. This morning Palm announced webOS 1.2.1, another point release to its new webOS platform that restores media synchronization with the latest version of Apple’s iTunes (9.0.1). Moreover, the company has gone the extra step of extending that synchronization feature to photos.
Google is violating the Net neutrality principles it so strongly advocates–according to AT&T, anyway. In a letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau Friday, the telephone company described Google as “one of the most noisome trumpeters of so-called net-neutrality” and asked the FCC to order it to “play by the same rules as its competitors.”
Though its shares are up more than 900 percent since January, Palm remains a “show me” story. So says Susquehanna Financial analyst Jeffrey Fidicaro, who seems to think the Street is putting a bit too much faith in the company’s next-generation platform, webOS, and the devices that run on it.
Well, what do you know? Like Apple, Microsoft is also developing a tablet computer. It’s called “Courier” and it’s remarkably different from what Apple is imagined to be cooking up.
Last Friday was a particularly productive day for the Apple team that reviews submissions to the iTunes App Store. AppShopper reports that 1,394 new applications were approved that day. An impressive number when you consider that Apple employs only 40 full-time reviewers and requires at least two of them to scrutinize each app.
That was fast. Just hours after Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, unveiled his open Internet proposal, a number of Republican senators stepped forward to oppose it. Arguing that Net Neutrality will “impede investment and innovation of new technologies,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas), proposed an amendment to an Interior Department appropriations bill that would bar the FCC from using federal funds to implement the proposal.
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.
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.
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.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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