The Pixi, the Palm Pre’s diminutive smart-phone sibling, arrives at market a few days from now (Nov. 15), and despite some potential pricing confusion with the Pre, analysts expect it to be another catalyst for the company’s comeback. In a note to clients today, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya said Palm is well-poised for growth in 2010.
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.
Once the plucky underdog in the browser battle, Mozilla’s Firefox is today the second most popular browser worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Since it was first released in November 2004, the browser has succeeded not just in dislodging IE from its dominant market position, but in proving that an open-source project can become a widely used consumer application. At 7:47 am PDT this morning, the browser reached its billionth download.
Microsoft has signed off on Windows 7. On Wednesday, the company released the final version of the operating system to manufacturers, a piece of software that it hopes will restore the engineering reputation that Vista so badly tarnished.
When it launched on July 10, 2008, Apple’s iTunes App Store included 552 apps. Today, the App Store boasts more than 65,000. And in a celebratory press release issued this morning, Apple tells us they’ve been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times in its first year of business.
Despite some glaring omissions in its channel lineup, Sirius XM’s new iPhone app has earned considerable traction in the iTunes App Store. It was downloaded more than one million times in the first two weeks it was available–this despite the fact that the app doesn’t include access to Howard Stern, the personality Sirius often claims is responsible for driving more subscriptions than any other.
The parental controls included in iPhone 3.0 have opened up a a rich and fertile frontier in Apple’s App Store: Porn. An app called “Hottest Girls,” which previously featured pictures of women in their skivvies, this week began featuring ones of ladies wearing quite a bit less.
Looks like Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s second estimate of Apple’s weekend iPhone sales underestimated demand just as badly as his first. Apple didn’t sell 500,000 units of the iPhone 3GS over the weekend, as Munster first predicted. Nor did the company sell 750,000 as he said in a research note this morning. It sold over one million. Moreover, downloads of Apple’s new iPhone 3.0 software, launched last Wednesday, have already reached six million.
Just as the mobile Web and the wired Web are converging, so too are their audiences, which are destined to reach parity in size–and sooner, rather than later. According to the latest metrics from comScore, day-to-day mobile Internet usage in the states doubled over the last year.
A song purchased from iTunes or Amazon is no different from one bought from a brick-and-mortar retail outlet, despite the vast differences in the economies of distribution between the two. That, in a nutshell, was the jury verdict handed down in a case brought by rapper Eminem’s former production company, FBT Productions, against Universal Music Group.
“What has become of the Sony known for its technology?” Japanese Economy, Trade and Industry Minister and former Sony employee Akira Amari asked in October of 2006. “I hope it will solve its problems soon to quickly recover its brand image reputed for technological prowess.” If Amari can recall when that was Sony’s image, he has a good memory. Because Sony lost its dominant position in consumer electronics to rivals in Japan, South Korea and the U.S. long ago and has yet to regain it. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the the company’s videogame division.
Since its July debut, some 10,000 iPhone applications have been released to Apple’s App Store and 9,887 of them are still available for purchase. 10,000 apps. An impressively broad ecosystem for just under five months of development. Apple’s year-end list of Top App Store Downloads for 2008, then, is both handy and timely.
Not that it would ever have happened anyway, but Apple will not be shutting down the iTunes Store in protest over increased royalty rates paid to songwriters and publishers for CDs and digital music downloads.
The Apple rumor mill has such a hair trigger, that even passing mention of an unreleased product can set it into yammering motion. As happened today after Digg founder Kevin Rose offered up some purported insider information about the focus of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” media event in San Francisco next Tuesday.
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.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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