The fight for Skype has ended. After weeks of nasty legal sparring, the Internet telephony service’s founders agreed to join the investor group purchasing it from EBay and dropped the lawsuit that had threatened to bollocks the deal.
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.
The “mid-autumn launch” of Palm’s App Catalog e-commerce beta program now has a firm “Go Live” date: Sept. 24. According to a new company timeline, webOS developers who’ve had their applications accepted for the App Catalog will see them featured there on that day.
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.
With the econalypse still playing havoc with global finances, holiday shoppers are behaving pretty much as you’d imagine. They’re spending less–presumably, saving up for that awful rainy day when discretionary income is better spent holding onto their homes than on another Wii game under the Christmas tree.
Call it the Great E-pression. Online spending growth in October fell to its lowest rate in seven years, and given the tenor of economic news these days, it’s almost certainly headed lower still. According to research outfit comScore, online spending grew by just one percent over October 2007.
Wonderful news. The recession’s impact on the tech sector will not be nearly as pronounced as its predecessor’s, which turned Webvan’s refrigerated Freightliner trucks into hipster moving vans and made the Pets.com mascot piddle itself into oblivion like a submissive puppy. That’s the word from Forrester Research CEO George Colony, who believes the current downturn will be far kinder to tech than the one that heralded The Great Dark Time of 2001-2003.
Not that there’s reason to expect anything different, but online retail sales are expected to slow for the first time ever this holiday season, thanks to the lousy economy. That’s the word from Forrester Research, which expects holiday shoppers to spend $44 billion online this year.
As far as solutions for California’s $14 billion budget deficit go, taxing “digital property” is nearly as outlandish as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed $4.8 billion cut in education spending.
Yet it’s being bandied about by Democratic State Assemblyman Charles Calderon, whose Assembly Bill 1956 would expand the state’s sales tax to digital goods–music downloads, e-books, pornography [...]
It seems investors just can’t get enough of Alibaba. Shares in China’s largest e-commerce company skyrocketed 290% yesterday, its first day trading as a public company.
The company’s stock closed at HK$39.50–155 times next year’s estimated earnings. A jaw-dropping multiple even by the giddy standards of the Hong Kong and Chinese stock markets. Value of Alibaba [...]
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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