Apple seems to have gotten over its aversion to apps duplicating core iPhone functions. This morning, Internet telephony company Vonage released an app that allows iPhone users to make calls over Wi-Fi and AT&T’s voice network.
Geekfighting may never become its own UFC event, but following tech news this week seemed, in places, like a view to a big, well-funded cage match.
It’s been a long time between weekend updates, and a long week without Peter Kafka, All Things D’s intrepid MediaMemo reporter. He returns Monday, and just in time, too, since John Paczkowski and Digital Daily will be out all next week. Must be August–do Europeans still take the whole month off? Or is that an urban legend? No matter; it definitely has not been sleepy around here.
Can this really be true? Vonage posted another quarterly profit? Indeed it is. The Internet phone service provider reported a second-quarter profit of $2.3 million, or a penny a share. Wall Street had been expecting a loss of three cents a share. Great news. Sadly for Vonage, it was tainted by an increase in subscriber defections.
Well, what do you know. Vonage posted a quarterly profit. The Iong-suffering Internet phone company reported first-quarter earnings today and with them its first profit ever: $5 million on revenue of $224 million. Sadly, that profit was only made possible by “a $13 million mark-to-market adjustment relating to the derivative liability in the Company’s convertible debt.”
Vonage’s slow death is … well, it’s slowing.The financially struggling Internet-phone company reported today a smaller first-quarter loss thanks largely to prudent cost cuts.
About the best thing to be said about Vonage’s third quarter was that it was an improvement over the second. Which isn’t saying much–especially since the $161.8 million loss the company reported was more than double that of a year ago, weighed down by the legal costs of a pair of major patent disputes.
Still, quarterly [...]
Unlimited local and long-distance calls aren’t the only things Vonage is selling at a steep discount these days–check out its stock. Shares of the Internet phone company, which went public in May 2006 at $17, are this morning trading at $1.32, down 14.29% on news that AT&T has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against it.
In a [...]
Vonage lawyer Louis Jameson was right. Vonage doesn’t owe Sprint Nextel a dime. It owes the company 800 million of them. Vonage settled its patent dispute with Sprint Nextel this morning for $80 million–$35 million for past use of Sprint’s patented technology and $40 million for future licensing, along with a $5 million prepayment.
If things truly are destined to get worse before they get better, then Vonage may have something to look forward to. Yesterday afternoon the Internet telephony company suffered another costly legal defeat when a federal jury ordered it to pay $69.5 million in damages and a 5% royalty on future revenues to Sprint Nextel for using its patents.
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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