Will a change in leadership at Research In Motion help change the prospects of this floundering company? The prospects do not appear good. Here’s my video report on location from Davos, Switzerland.
Is this the end of Skype as we knew it?
The first time I used Skype I was in awe. The video quality, the effortlessness it allowed me to see and hear my family far away over my laptop computer screen was magic. It was even more magical when I tried it on my iPhone — a Dick Tracy moment. And it was more impressive than FaceTime because it allowed me to talk to anyone with Skype, not just with those who had an iPhone.
Today, Skype will likely begin to be lost in the maw that is Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft still remains one of the most valuable companies this country has ever produced but aside from the XBox, it hasn’t been on the leading edge of innovation in many years. Apple, Google and companies like Facebook and Twitter are seen at the forefront of the digital age. Microsoft, in comparison, seems like the once great star athlete, a Michael Jordan attempting to regain some glory by playing minor league baseball.
The best case scenario here is that Microsoft rolls Skype into a product like Kinect, which hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, and becomes a simple, easy to use videoconferencing device for the living room, that takes us beyond just hunching over our computers to interact with our friends who are far away.
The reasoning, however, provided in a rather unimpressive press conference by the awkward and uninspiring Steve Ballmer, was to bring new customers to Windows and Office. I can tell you with some degree of experience, business users want screen sharing but they don’t have a great need for videoconferencing. It isn’t a tremendous business advantage or productivity tool.
If, instead, Microsoft predictably turns Skype into Windows Messenger Live Video Vista Professional Edition, then we will have watched one of the most exciting products developed in the last century killed off in the interest of its shareholders.
COMMENT
Did Microsoft actually pay $8.5 billion for a money pit like Skype? Ballmer must be delusional.
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Fear, loathing and apathy about digital security
Is Facebook just an elaborate direct marketer’s masterwork? Should I think twice before using my existing Twitter account to log into various services all around the web? Should I be worried about handing my credit card over to Sony? These and other perfectly valid and simultaneously conspiracy theoretical ideas tend to float in and around my head from time to time. The big scare du-jour, is if Apple’s iPhone and Google’s mobile OS, Android, are tracking and archiving our every movement.
A journalistic tennis match on this topic took place over the course of the last few days. First, this is old news. Apple responded to congress regarding this almost a year ago. Digital forensics specialists have known you could track locations on iOS devices for some time, and have used the data to assist law enforcement. Alex Levinson, an RIT student, even published a research paper and subsequent book last December detailing data acquisition techniques for iOS products, like the iPhone and iPad. He says that Apple is not collecting the data.
The Wall Street Journal added Google to the mix, citing that Apple is not alone in the practice of collecting user information. Julia Angwin at the Journal claims that not only are Apple and Google collecting the data and storing it locally on the phone, but they actually regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google. The endgame? Angwin believes they’re racing to build a massive database of location information in order to tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services. Today, Apple seemed to indicate that was part of their plan, as they revealed they’re building a crowd-sourced traffic service.
Apple outright denies they’re collecting user locations.
“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”
In response to the outcry, Apple will release an update to store less information about location and discontinue backing it up entirely. Apple claims that the information they were receiving was anonymous and only stored the wifi hotspots and cell towers around the phone, which could be up to 100 miles away.
I’m as digitally paranoid as the next guy, but this seems like an odd case and strange timing. Why did something that was discovered months ago only recently receive greater attention? Will we see the same thing happen with the earlier reports about apps collecting and sharing demographic information?
Much like Facebook boycotts, we seem to get up in arms about our data being compromised, captured, leveraged, bought and sold, only to lose interest and go on about our lives. Most of us don’t really have the time to care or feel the convenience and novelty of these devices and websites outweigh the potential of being taken advantage of. That’s exactly what many companies in the business of buying and selling data and demographics are banking on.
The next great tech bubble emerges
An application that wasn’t even in the app store a week ago just raised $41 million.
We’ve reached the point where simply the idea of an app is now enough to raise multi-million dollar capital. Were any of these folks around back in 2000? Certainly some lessons have been learned the first time around. Most investors and companies are avoiding the same mistakes but that hasn’t prevented plenty of head scratching deals to emerge in the last few months.
The app, called Color, is a photo sharing application that allows you to post and view images by people in the same proximity as each other.
“Not since Google have we seen this,” is what one Sequoia Capital partner told Color Labs co-founder Bill Nguyen when he met with them recently.
Those seven words inspire such an abundance of eye rolling that one has to wonder what the guys over at Sequoia are smoking. Better yet, how quickly can I put together a pitch deck boasting some superfluous social, hyper-local, organic, mobile game changer of my own?
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, has a rosier view of the current frothiness of the tech market. He’s poised to take LinkedIn public soon, so his motives for such optimism may be a bit self-interested. “If you look at the crop of companies in the growth phase now, they all have very solid economic models behind them. Some at the center of the pack have business models that could live for a long, long time.”
VC money seems to be funnelling mostly to Internet based startups over the past two years. While there are some ridiculous deals being made, there are real companies making real money on the Internet. Drugstore.com was snapped up today by Walgreens for $409 million dollars, raising the stock up 114% in trading this morning. The Internet based drug retailer had over $456 million in sales in 2010, making it the 8th largest online retailer in the U.S.
The good news is that the victims of the eventual fallout of this current hyper-investment in the tech market will hopefully be limited to these private big shot investors and venture capitalists who have only themselves to blame. The underlying victims may be startups with real business plans and an actual solution to a real problem, who after the crash will find it tough to move their venture to market. All the while the Techcrunches and newly launched Beta Beats of the world will be there to assess the carnage.
