“Despite increasing smartphone competition, Palm can maintain differentiation and remains well-positioned to launch its products with multiple new Tier-1 carriers in early 2010 by which time it should have a robust apps catalog,” Arya wrote. “While we expect the stock to remain volatile, the recent sell-off creates an interesting buying opportunity, in our opinion, for a company with an attractive platform, selling into a high-growth market, and at a compelling valuation.”

Interestingly, Arya notes that Palm’s webOS application ecosystem, initially something of a disappointment, is growing a bit more rapidly these days with between 50 and 100 apps being added to Palm’s App Catalog each week. He expects growth to continue with the debut of a new feature enabling customers to download apps simply by clicking on a URL. Arya believes this will dramatically improve discovery of apps and attract more attention from developers. His conclusion: With a more robust App Catalog and two attractive handsets, Palm is well-positioned to launch its webOS line with multiple new Tier-1 carriers like Verizon (VZ) in early 2010.

In a 13-page letter to the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday, the carrier again said that Google should play by the same rules as its telecom competitors. AT&T also took issue with the search giant’s claim that Google Voice restricts calls to certain rural areas to avoid the so-called traffic pumpers that route calls there to drive up charges.

“Contrary to the public pronouncements of Google and its allies, Google’s rural call blocking regime is not limited to Google simply blocking calls to ‘adult sex chat lines’ and ‘free’ conference calling services to avoid high access charges,” wrote AT&T’s senior vice president, Bob Quinn, in the letter to the FCC’s wireline bureau. “In fact, Google is blocking calls to, among others, an ambulance service, church, bank, law firm, automobile dealer, day spa, orchard, health clinic, tax preparation service, community center, eye doctor, tribal community college, school, residential consumers, a convent of Benedictine nuns, and the campaign office of a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

My God. Google, the company whose business philosophy proudly proclaims “you can make money without doing evil,” blocking calls to small businesses? To Benedictine nuns? Don’t be evil?

Don’t be evil, my ass.

“We can now see the power of Internet-based applications providers to act as gatekeepers who can threaten the ‘free and open’ Internet,” Quinn continues. “Google’s double standard for ‘openness’–where Google does what it wants while other providers are subject to Commission regulations–is plainly inconsistent with the goal of preserving a ‘free and open’ Internet ecosystem.”

That established, Quinn goes in for the kill, arguing that the FCC should regulate the search giant not just on the wires, but on the Web as well.

“Google’s call blocking begs an even more important question that the Commission must consider as it evaluates whether to adopt rules regarding Internet openness,” he writes. “If the Commission is going to be a ’smart cop on the beat preserving a free and open Internet,’ then shouldn’t its ‘beat’ necessarily cover the entire Internet neighborhood, including Google? Indeed, if the Commission cannot stop Google from blocking disfavored telephone calls as Google contends, then how could the Commission ever stop Google from also blocking disfavored websites from appearing in the results of its search engine; or prohibit Google from blocking access to applications that compete with its own email, text messaging, cloud computing and other services; or otherwise prevent Google from abusing the gatekeeper control it wields over the Internet?”

An interesting question. And one for which Google (GOOG) is presumably already preparing a long-winded answer. This is far from over yet, and we’ll continue to go round and round until the FCC puts a stop to it.

Now, that’s still a trifling number when compared to the 50,000 or so available in Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store, but it’s something, and it shows that Palm (PALM) is managing to convince iPhone-addled developers that writing WebOS applications will be lucrative business.

Among the latest and most promising of those new apps, DirecTV’s (DTV) NFL Sunday Ticket. Though the app–which allows users to watch NFL games on their cellphones–is available for the iPhone as well as for the Pre, it may offer a better experience on the latter, as Pali Research analyst Walter Piecyk notes in a research alert this morning.

“We will be interested to see how this application performs on Sprint’s (S) network compared to how it will perform on the iPhone on AT&T’s (T) network,” Piecyk writes. “Sprint is more likely to allow a less compressed stream and therefore higher quality video on its network as we have seen with Sprint’s implementation of YouTube, which is much higher quality than viewing YouTube clips on the iPhone over the AT&T network. When the iPhone is forced to WiFi, the quality of the YouTube clips improves to the level we experience on the Palm Pre but that kind of defeats the purpose of the mobile internet.”

An interesting point and an interesting potential selling point for Palm and Sprint–especially given the beating AT&T’s network has been taking in the media lately.

It’s going to be a rough couple of months for the wireless industry.

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved a broad inquiry into the wireless market. In a unanimous vote, the agency’s five commissioners–three Democrats and two Republicans–approved two so-called notices of inquiry, one that will examine competition and innovation and another that will evaluate truth-in-billing practices.

“I can’t think of a more important moment to be considering these issues,” FCC chairman Julius Genachowski told a hearing in Washington. “Many Americans are learning to do more with less. A surprise charge on a monthly bill, or a new service that does not perform as advertised, can be a major budget-buster, especially as household spending on communications grows ever larger. This FCC will have a relentless focus on innovation and investment, on competition and consumers.”

Genachowski added that these inquiries could lay the groundwork for the examination of other industries such as cable and Internet. “I hope the new wireless competition report will help set a standard for fact-based, analytically deep analysis of the mobile industry,” he said. “It is essential that the commission develop policies that encourage a new generation of innovators, working with new tools, on new platforms, and having an extraordinary impact on our economy and society.”

The wireless industry’s trade group, CTIA, welcomed the inquiry through gritted teeth, saying it “appreciates the opportunity to respond” to the FCC’s questions. “The wireless ecosystem–from carriers to handset manufacturers to network providers to operating-system providers to application developers–is evolving before our eyes and this is not the same market that it was even three years ago,” said president and chief executive Steve Largent. “In this industry, innovation is everywhere.”

Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimates that Apple (AAPL), though it is only the fifth-largest handset vendor, claimed nearly a third of handset industry profits in the first half of 2009 (see table below; click to enlarge).

“Our analysis indicates that Apple’s iPhone accounted for only 8% of handset industry revenues but 32% of industry operating profits in 1H09,” Sacconaghi wrote in a note to clients today. “Even if we exclude the operating losses generated by Motorola and Sony Ericsson, Apple still accounted for 25% of industry profits. iPhone’s success is akin to Apple’s position in the PC industry–where the company enjoys an estimated 25% of industry profits, despite capturing only 6% of industry revenues.”

Quite an achievement considering that the iPhone is just two years old. How did Apple manage it? According to Sacconaghi, Apple succeeded by claiming a first-mover advantage in an expanding high-end market.

“With the iPhone and its Apps Store, Apple has established a formidable smartphone ecosystem, which history suggests is very difficult to overcome,” the analyst explains. “In fact, Apple has the potential to become a de-facto standard of sorts in the consumer smartphone market, much like it became in the portable media player market with iPods, due in large part to its first mover advantage and tight software and hardware integration.

“We believe that over time,” Sacconaghi continues, “single function standalone handheld devices (portable music players, digital cameras, navigation systems, etc.) will become increasingly converged. Apple’s estimated installed base of 75+ million individual iPod and iTunes users provides customers with a seamless migration path to a fuller featured, higher-end integrated device.”

Though Sacconaghi believes Apple should be able to grow faster than the overall handset market without materially lowering prices, he suggests a lower price point might give a signifigant bump to its iPhone business. “We believe Apple will ultimately need to lower price (and margins over time) to expand its addressable market opportunity, including offering a lower-cost, non-data plan iPhone,” he concludes.

Astonishing, really, when you think about it. In just 12 months, the App Store spawned a thriving developer ecosystem, a new gaming platform and a half-billion dollar software marketplace, an unprecedented achievement in the mobile world. Certainly, Apple’s rivals have all taken note of the company’s success and adopted similar approaches to distributing mobile applications, though–as Jobs notes–it’s going to be tough for them to ever match Apple (AAPL).

Oh, one last point worth making here. You know Steve Jobs is back, really back, when he’s talking smack about rivals in an Apple press release…

Below, a breakdown of apps by category and a graph of their growth over time, courtesy of 148Apps.biz. Click on the charts to enlarge.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to turn the social network’s “stream” of user experiences and information into a revenue stream one way or another. And if that means allowing others to pan its waters for gold, then so be it.

And so, at an event in Palo Alto later today, Facebook will reportedly announce plans to open its stream to third-party developers, offering them the chance to build new services and applications outside the site that–with users’ permission–access the status updates, photos and videos uploaded by users. According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will provide that access via an open standard and it will do it for free.

An attractive proposition for developers: Access to a community with some 200 million members where the only real barrier to entry is a user’s privacy settings. In the months ahead, we’ll undoubtedly see this give rise to countless new services in much the same way Twitter has spawned an ecosystem of developers.

In doing this, Facebook is positioning itself as a social data clearinghouse feeding a myriad of other third-party services. More importantly, by doing so, the social-networking behemoth is also acknowledging that we’re not likely to conduct all our social interactions in a single network.

But it’s also betting that we may be willing to conduct many of them through one. And in the end, that’s just as good–especially if that social network is Facebook.

UPDATE:

Moments ago Facebook announced the Open Stream API which will allow third party developers to create new apps and services that will allow users to read an interact with Facebook member streams without having to actually visit Facebook.

“The stream is the flow of information on Facebook, which manifests itself on a user’s home page as the News Feed and on the user’s profile as the Wall,” Facebook explains in its developer Wiki. “It represents the content a user shares with friends in a real-time setting. Initially the stream content appeared only on Facebook, and now with the Open Stream API, developers can connect to their users’ streams and let their users read their streams wherever they want. This means that for the first time, you can build new user interfaces for the stream everywhere including Web, mobile, and desktop applications.”

A bold move. And one that will almost certainly let some of the steam out of Twitter’s pistons.

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. ‘Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,’ he asked, then walked away.”

– Peter Kafka, MediaMemo

CEOs and Palm evangelists convinced that Palm’s new Pre handset is anything more than table stakes at the handset poker game would do well to consider two bits of Apple (AAPL) news and rumor that suggest Cupertino may be hard at work on a next-generation handset capable of mercilessly beating all others into sobbing submission.

The first: A rumor that iPhone 3.0 will support quad-core processors destined for an upcoming iPhone hardware revision. If this proves true and Apple (AAPL) does release a multi-core GPU iPhone–which is not as much of a stretch as you might think–it would likely support features we’re more accustomed to seeing on the PC. And as The Apple Core’s Jason O’Grady notes, “It would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market.”

The second: Apple has applied for a patent on a behind-screen camera that could capture images “while the display elements are in an inactive state (in which the display elements are darkened and at least partially transparent).” It doesn’t take much of a leap to see that technology brought to bear on a next-gen iPhone and the long rumored iChat AV Mobile.

Those are two potential killer features for a device that already has three things the Pre does not: a maturing platform, a thriving developer ecosystem and a market leading music player and store. Are they just rumor and speculation? For now, certainly. But given the pace of innovation in the mobile industry, and more specifically, at Apple–where the multi-touch phone that Palm (PALM) is now aping originated two years ago–they’re not beyond the realm of possibility, are they?

Virtually everyone agrees that “OS X Leopard is far superior to Vista,” says Cook. He goes on to tout the Mac’s software. He speaks of compatibility and Boot Camp, which allows Windows to be run on a Mac.

Cook notes that Microsoft Vista’s failure at market–one of the greatest missteps in Microsoft (MSFT) history, according to Cook–has afforded Apple (AAPL) an unprecedented opportunity to win over Windows users to the Mac platform. He says Apple retail stores receive 400,000 visitors a day and that 50 percent of the company’s sales are now to Windows users.

Mac has outgrown the market 14 out of last 15 quarters, Cook continues. The Mac retail share has grown to 18 percent of U.S. retial sales, with a revenue share of over 31 percent, which means that one out of every three dollars spent on computers is spent on a Mac. Quite an achievement.

Finally, Cook points out that Macs now account for 47 percent of computers at universities. Apple has sold more Macs in in the last three quarters than it sold in all of 2007.

Good thing then that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang intends to dramatically improve the company’s performance and put it back on a winning path. How? A top-to-bottom, 100-day review of the company. “I intend to spend the next 100 days mapping out a game plan and working with … the team to put the right organization in place and make any necessary changes,” Yang explained. “We need to invest in areas that are most critical to our success and de-emphasize those that are underperforming or don’t match up with our priorities. There will be no sacred cows.“

There will, however, be an “ecosystem,” which Yang and Co. mentioned no less than 17 times during the course of yesterday’s earnings call. It is apparently either a euphemism for Yahoo’s business, the outfit worn by Yang in the photo above, or the self-sustaining biosphere where the company keeps Yahoo co-founder David Filo.

From Yang and Yahoo President Sue Decker:

“Yahoo is an ecosystem that involves several hundred million participants every single day.

“We plan to create value through our ecosystem.

“When I step back and think about how we can fully leverage our ecosystem, I see a world where Yahoo is a place that consumers love.

“We’re really focused on understanding how Yahoo as an ecosystem can drive value long-term.”

That’s great to hear. And it’s nice that Yahoo’s new management has a new buzzword. But, really, who cares? Crucial executives are still fleeing the Yahoo “ecosystem.” Google is still eroding it. And in the end, its most recognizable feature is still the company’s deteriorating financial performance.