The iPhone is finally coming to the world’s most wired country. South Korean regulators on Wednesday cleared the iPhone for sale. Great news for Apple. The South Korean market is a robust one, and analysts say that with the right carrier partner, Cupertino could be looking at first-year sales ranging from 500,000 to two million.
“We’re growing dramatically faster than our competitors, and our target really is to beat IBM. If we maintain our trajectory and IBM maintains their trajectory, we could pass them as early as the end of this year or certainly next year to be the No. 2 player in middleware.” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made that prediction last September, and a little over a year later it’s come to pass–according to Ellison, anyway.
Since 2005, the South Korean government has required all cellphones sold in the country to support WIPI (Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability), the country’s cellular middleware platform. And for Apple, as well as other handset manufacturers like Nokia and Sony Ericsson, redesigning their devices to do so is a costly proposition. So costly, in fact, that they didn’t bother, leaving the country’s handset market to Samsung and LG, which now dominate it.
On April 1, 2009, that will all change.
Carl Icahn’s recent appeals to BEA Systems management to discuss a possible sale of the company seem to have set Oracle’s salivary glands flowing. This week the CRM gourmand made an unsolicited $6.66 billion bid for the business-management software maker.
Looks like Larry Ellison’s long-suffering accountant won’t have to reach for the Mylanta next time the mercurial CEO maxes out his more-than-a-billion-dollar credit limit. Yesterday Oracle reported surprisingly strong growth in what is traditionally its weakest quarter of the year. The company’s fiscal first-quarter profit grew 25%, easily besting Wall Street analysts’ expectations.
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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