Digital Daily » third party

Nokia Buy Palm? Riiiiight.

John Paczkowski — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:39:12 +0000

Palm shares are trading higher today, bolstered by anticipation of the Nov. 15 launch of the Pixi, the company’s second webOS handset and by some silly rumors about a potential takeover by Nokia (NOK). Does the company really need another software platform to add to Symbian, Maemo and Qt? C’mon.

At $12.34, Palm (PALM) is up well over seven percent as I write this, a nice gain that more than offset the four percent drop the company’s shares suffered last week. Clearly, the market is expecting a lot of the Pixi, and according to some analysts, it may get it. In a note to clients Friday, RBC analysts said they “expect positive consumer reception and healthy sell-through,” for the Pixi.

But not everyone agrees with RBC’s cheery assessment. Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Northeast Securities, has a much dimmer view of Palm’s prospects in the months ahead. He says his sell-through checks show a “substantial decline” in recent Pre sales.

“As a fading brand, carriers are likely to see better returns on their promotional and advertising dollars with other vendors,” Kumar writes. “WebOS has negligible smartphone OS share, 0.2 percent per Gartner estimates, and is unlikely to attract any meaningful third-party application support. Palm has bet the farm on webOS and there is a real possibility that they may not achieve critical mass.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not. We’ll see in the months ahead.

Apple Breaks Palm Pre Media Synch a Third Time

John Paczkowski — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:00:03 +0000

“As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

When Apple said it does not support iTunes integration with third-party digital media players, it meant it.

With iTunes 9.0.2, Apple (AAPL) has once again disabled the Palm Pre’s ability to synch with the media software, a feature re-enabled by Palm (PALM) earlier this month after Apple disabled it in response to Palm’s re-enabling of it following its first disabling by Apple.

And if you think that round-and-round sounds asinine, just wait until Palm releases webOS 1.2.2.

Microsoft Store Overhauled to Encourage More Windows Shopping

John Paczkowski — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:24:04 +0000

Microsoft’s first brick-and-mortar retail store isn’t scheduled to open for another few hours, but the software giant is already selling PC hardware and third-party software titles–on the Web. This morning it unveiled an expanded online store that will better reflect its new real-world counterpart.

“On the new online Microsoft Store, we’ve added a bunch of new products, including Windows 7 PCs as well as select 3rd party software and accessories,” Trevin Chow, senior lead program manager for Microsoft Store, said in a blog post announcing the move. “And let’s not forget a ton of gaming products that have been added including a bunch of the top selling Xbox 360 titles.”

Interesting. Not exactly sure what the upside is to selling PCs online when you don’t make them. It’s not like Microsoft (MSFT) will be offering a better experience than, say, Best Buy (BBY), HP (HPQ) or Dell (DELL). And an online outlet doesn’t afford the company the same opportunity to cultivate the “Microsoft Experience” it’s clearly going for in its brick-and-mortar outlets. So why bother?

A unified experience online and off, I suppose. And, if the infrastructure is in place to sell through one channel, why not sell through both? Of course, the downside is that if you don’t execute well, you risk giving customers another lousy experience with which to associate your products.

Apple "Fixes" Pre-iTunes Sync

John Paczkowski — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:25:19 +0000

Apple rolled out iTunes 8.2.1, a minor point release of its popular media software that provides “a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.”

And devices masquerading as them.

Like the Palm (PALM) Pre. Because among this release’s “fixes” is one that prevents the Palm Pre from syncing with iTunes. Seems Apple (AAPL) has made good on the threat it made last month when the company warned that it does not support iTunes integration with third-party digital media players.

“Apple designs the hardware and software to provide seamless integration of the iPhone and iPod with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and tens of thousands of apps on the App Store,” the company said at the time. “Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players.”

And that is clearly the case with iTunes 8.2.1 which, as Apple spokesperson Nat Kerris explained to me, “disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre. As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

And what does Palm think of all this? Is the Pre maker gearing up for a cat-and-mouse game with Cupertino? Who knows? At this point, the company is recommending that Pre users who want to preserve the syncing feature stick with an earlier version of iTunes. “Palm’s media sync works with iTunes 8.2. If Apple chooses to disable media sync in iTunes, it will be a direct blow to their users who will be deprived of a seamless synchronization experience,” said spokesperson Lynn Fox. “However, people will have options. They can stay with the iTunes version that works to sync their music on their Pre, they can transfer the music via USB, and there are other third-party applications we can consider.”

Below: Video of Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein showing off the Pre at our D7 conference in late May.

[ See post to watch video ]

Apple to Palm: Talk to the Hand

John Paczkowski — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:00:18 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

"Unsupported Third-Party Digital Media Players." Hmm, Wonder Who That Could Pre…

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:13:43 +0000

Palm’s Pre is the first non-Apple device to successfully link with iTunes in years. And it may be the last. On Tuesday, Apple issued an advisory warning that it does not support iTunes integration with third-party digital media players.

Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.

Translation: The Pre won’t be syncing with iTunes for long.

Now, Palm isn’t explicitly named in the advisory, but it’s clear that this is a broad shot across its bow. And it’s not like we didn’t see it coming. Did anyone really think that Apple (AAPL) would permit the Pre to sync with iTunes by masquerading as an iPod?

Funny. Asked last month at D7 if Apple might take issue with the Pre’s iTunes integration, Palm investor Roger McNamee said, “I don’t think so. They are practically a monopolist and this is what consumers want. Consumers own all this media. I find it hard to believe that Apple will get bent out of shape.” (see video below)

Well, believe it. That said, Palm (PALM) seems unfazed by Apple’s implied threat. Reached for comment, the company said Cupertino will only harm consumers if it disables iTunes integration with the Pre. “Palm’s media sync works with the current version of iTunes,” Palm spokesperson Lynn Fox told me. “If Apple chooses to disable media sync in a future version of iTunes, it will be a direct blow to their users who will be deprived of a seamless synchronization experience. However, people will have options. They can stay with the iTunes version that works to sync their music on their Pre, they can transfer the music via USB, and there are other third-party applications we could consider.”

[ See post to watch video ]

NOK, NOK. Who's There? Not You Any More…

John Paczkowski — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:09:36 +0000

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s (NOK) ambitions in that area, and Apple’s (AAPL) success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices. Said Niklas Savander, Nokia’s executive vice president of services, “The planned changes are aimed at improving and simplifying the user experience of Nokia services, increasing opportunities for third party developers and other partners to create compelling services, and accelerating the development of a common platform for Nokia’s different service offerings.”

In other words, the planned changes are aimed at catching up with Apple. “As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry,” Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, told Reuters. “Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that never done it before.”

Overall, Nokia’s announcement is good news for mobile app developers, bad news for the ones handling them internally at Nokia. It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming, though. The econalypse has been having deleterious effects on Nokia. In January, the company warned that world-wide sales in ’09 are likely to fall 10 percent year-to-year. As CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo put it at the time, “the macro environment is challenging and, we believe, will remain so in 2009.”

Facebook: Islands in the Stream [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:35:32 +0000

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.

iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal. No It's Not. Who Cares?

John Paczkowski — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:42:47 +0000

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That as long as Apple’s iPhone is locked, there will be those who wish it open. And that as long as this is the case, iPhones will be jailbroken and outfitted with third-party applications not vetted by Apple. And this will remain so regardless of whether or not Apple manages to convince the U.S. Copyright Office that jailbreaking an iPhone is copyright infringement and a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So all this jawing over Apple’s legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking is ultimately for naught.

So the Electronic Frontier Foundation can argue that jailbreaking is protected under fair-use doctrines. And it can urge the Copyright Office to add a jailbreaking exemption to the DMCA on the grounds that “the culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy.” And Apple (AAPL) can insist that such an exemption is “an attack on Apple’s particular business choices with respect to the design of the iPhone mobile computing platform and the strategy for delivering applications software for the iPhone through the iPhone App Store.”

And they can go round and round and round. But their sparring and bloviating will ultimately be meaningless. Because if Apple’s history with iPhone jailbreaks (see stories below) has taught us anything, it’s that they’re essentially unstoppable.

PREVIOUSLY:

Microsoft's Next Move Still Imminent

John Paczkowski — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:00:17 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Smartestphone?

John Paczkowski — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:00:53 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Telcos to Ribbit: What's Green and White and Red All Over?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:42:03 +0000

Ribbit is as much “Silicon Valley’s first telephone company” as the region’s first to boast a silly name and grandiose claims.

Still, the Silicon Valley start-up, which officially opened its Web-based telephony platform to third party developers this morning, is generating a lot of buzz for its Flash/Flex-based telephones (see video below), and rightly so. The company has essentially built a software version of an operator-class telephone switch that connects Internet-based voice communication services with mobile and landline phones and other Web-based phone applications.

Using its Ribbit API, developers can write applications that support full telephone capabilities–voice mail, call-logging, text-to-speech transcription services, etc.–and because they’re Flash/Flex-based, they can be embedded into Web sites and integrated into Web-based services.

“What we have done is made voice an object that you embed into your workflow (or software),” said Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs. “We didn’t want to change how people did things, like communicate via Skype, and wanted to integrate the platform to work with any phone.”

Smart, eh? But how’s the company going to make money? Ribbit says it plans to charge for services like calls to traditional landlines, voice-mail transcriptions and billing. A reasonable plan, but as Ovum analyst Brett Azuma notes, an unproven one. “Unless there’s a foolproof way to get the products out there and make them successful,” Azuma told Wired. “I think the consumer applications are a little unclear for now. Being able to use text-to-speech transcription services and archive voice calls are many of the features that consumers have shown interest in over the years. However, whether or not they’re willing to pay for these features is going to be the big question.”

SuperP&L! Application Adds Serious Fun to LinkedIn

John Paczkowski — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:01:13 +0000

LinkedIn, Facebook’s dour older brother, joined Google’s OpenSocial development platform today, announcing the Intelligent Application Platform–a service that will open the social-networking site to third-party software developers.

Like the Facebook Platform, “InApps” allows developers to create productivity applications for LinkedIn or to port some of the site’s features to outside Web sites. But unlike Facebook, these widgets must be approved by LinkedIn before they’re deployed.

Clearly, the company has no intention of offering users the chance to send electronic hamburgers to each other, or pop their zits. “What we are trying to do is make professionals more productive by making them able to find one another, learn more about each other and communicate efficiently with each other,” LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye told Reuters. “It’s not a place where you waste two hours of your time trying to find a date.”

Launching in concert with InApps are a new look and a number of new features designed to make the site more interactive. Among them: a news feed customized by the company and the industry in which a user works and an interesting BusinessWeek application that lets you see how you’re connected through LinkedIn to people and companies mentioned in its articles. With such upgrades, LinkedIn–which claims 17 million registered users globally and about 5 million unique per month–hopes to dominate the business of business networking. Personal networking and self-expression, it seems to be saying, are best left to others.

But is it reasonable to think that people will continue to maintain two social-networking profiles–one for their personal life and another for their professional life? LinkedIn CEO Nye says it is, especially given the value proposition LinkedIn offers its users. “…People have profiles on both services,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But on LinkedIn, you’re not going to get poked, there’s no zombies and you’re not going to share your music list. … Now when someone says, ‘Hey, let’s go down and meet at Starbucks,’ you don’t have to ask five people if they’re Tom.”

DiaperFetishFactory.com Is Sending a Story to Your Profile!

John Paczkowski — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:09:17 +0000

“Once every hundred years media changes,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this month of the social network’s imaginatively titled “Facebook Ads.” And that may be so. But not, it would seem, without a few legal warnings and the occasional online petition.

Liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org launched a campaign yesterday against Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements, which transform member transactions on third-party partner sites into product/service endorsements and insert them into their friends’ “news feeds.” Facebook members, or should I say “fansumers,” are automatically opted-in to the program, and while they are offered the chance to opt out, they can do so only on a case-by-case basis.

MoveOn considers that to be a glaring violation of privacy and has launched an online petition protesting it. “Facebook users across the nation are outraged that the books, movies and gifts they buy privately on other sites are being displayed without permission to lots of people–and Facebook needs to reverse this massive privacy breach,” MoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green said in a statement. “They should respect privacy by switching to an opt-in process like most other Facebook applications, not opt-out–which was solely designed to benefit corporate advertisers.”

Facebook, of course, says it’s not violating anyone’s privacy. “Information is shared with a small selection of a user’s trusted network of friends, not publicly on the Web or with all Facebook users,” the company said in a statement. “Users also are given multiple ways to choose not to share information from a participating site, both on that site and on Facebook.”

Of course they are. But as Forrester’s Charlene Li notes, they’re easily missed and don’t give users nearly enough control over their behavioral data. “The biggest problem is the lack of transparency,” Li explains. “Facebook is right in that I would really like to have some things that I do on third-party sites to conveniently appear in news feed, e.g. events I’m attending from Evite or eBay/craigslist listings so that my friends know about them. That’s the promise of Beacon. But I need to be in control and not get blindsided.”

The Mobile Apps Are Great, but the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Dial Function Really Makes It

John Paczkowski — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:00:14 +0000

In a press conference following Google Analyst Day, company Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin confirmed Google’s plans to bid in the FCC’s upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, but declined to discuss the mobile-phone strategy that might make use of it–apparently leaving that task to The Wall Street Journal.

According to a report in the publication today, Google will officially disclose its long-anticipated plans for Google-powered phones within the next two weeks. The devices will reportedly feature Google’s standard mobile applications (Maps, etc.) and more interestingly, a customized open-source operating system, which would allow third-party developers to build applications beyond those offered by Google. From the Journal:

The Google-powered phones are expected to wrap together several Google applications–among them, its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail email–that have already made their way onto some mobile devices. The most radical element of the plan, though, is Google’s push to make the phones’ software ‘open’ right down to the operating system, the layer that controls applications and interacts with the hardware. That means independent software developers would get access to the tools they need to build additional phone features.

“Developers could, for instance, more easily create services that take advantage of users’ Global Positioning System location, contact lists and Web-browsing habits. They also would be able to interact with Google Maps and other Google applications. The idea is that a range of new social networking, mapping and other services would emerge, just as they have on the open, mostly unfettered Web. Google, meanwhile, could gather user data to show targeted ads to cellphone users.”

And don’t forget the mobile commerce element. Google-powered phones might even offer customers a way to pay for goods from vending machines and retailers via text message.

Anyway … The company has approached a number of handset makers and wireless operators about partnering in the effort, which it hopes to bring to market by the middle of 2008.

Previously: