The CTIA’s annual U.S. wireless technology showcase in Las Vegas was quieter than usual this year as vendors sent fewer employees and rented less floor space for their booths in an effort to crimp spending due to the recession.

Aside from a lot of talk about cellphone applications and a software store launch from BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, the show offered few surprises.

A handful of operators and vendors, however, offered insights into their technology strategies — even if they were less than keen to indicate how their businesses were faring exactly. Some even launched new gadgets.
    
AT&T, the exclusive operator for the iPhone, used the show as an opportunity to talk up application sales for its less fancy phones, which have brought it $1 billion in revenue in the last few years. In comparison, it does not get a revenue share for iPhone apps, which kicked of the craze for application stores when they launched last year.

However, the carrier noted that its more traditional phones are a much bigger business than high-profile, advanced devices like iPhone.

“About 25 percent of our portfolio is smartphones. That means that 75 percent of them are not,” AT&T chief marketing officer David Christoper told reporters at a lunch on the sidelines of the show on Thursday.
    
AT&T, behind only Verizon in subscriber numbers, also talked about the need to offer new pricing options for mobile data in future. It is expected to be a year or more behind Verizon Wireless in upgrading its network to a high-speed technology known as “long term evolution”.

But when it does, likely in 2011, it expects to cut data access fees and stop charging for phone calls by the minute. Instead it may charge data access fees based on how much netwok capacity a customer uses up.

“It will be an environment where people buy the amount of data they need,” Ralph de la Vega, the head of AT&T’s mobility business, told reporters. “We’ll be able to sell them a lot more data than we do today for a lower price.”

Qualcomm investor relations executive Bill Davidson declined to comment on prospects for a general return for chip demand, but in an interview with Reuters, he said that the company is expecting big growth from markets such as China and India.

While China is often cited as the emerging market for wireless growth, Davidson said the expected award of licenses to build 3G high-speed networks in India, could bring even more growth.

“The Indian market is going to be a very good market for 3G, even more so than China, because its under-served on the wireline side,” Davidson said in an interview.

At its booth, Qualcomm showed a prototype consumer electronics charger called eZone, which could charge as many as five gadgets such as phones, cameras or music players simultaneously. The gadgets are placed in no particular order on a flat rectangular plate that is plugged into a power source.

Qualcomm said it is talking to different device manufacturers about incorporating the technology in their devices. If it brings the product to market it would likely have partner companies manufacture the device.

(Reuters Photo: Ralph de la Vega  at CTIA by David Becker)

There’s the story, and there’s always the side-story. The snarky, juicy, lip-smacking stuff. 

Case in point is last night’s news that Jerry Yang is stepping down as chief executive of Yahoo — which itself is an interesting tale. But we’d like to draw your attention to RealDanLyons.com, where you’ll find a wonderfully catty distraction.  

In his blog, Dan Lyons rips into Kara Swisher, the AllThingsD honcho and prominent tech writer, who apparently took issue with him for not crediting her with getting the scoop on Yang’s departure. 

“Kara, honey, I love you dearly, but girl-child, having a company send you a press release ten minutes before they put it on the wire isn’t a scoop. That’s called taking dictation,” he writes. ”One thing you have to admire about Kara is that in a blogosphere that all too often resembles an echo chamber, she’s managed to cut out the middleman; she just echoes herself. And while others engage in logrolling, Kara keeps it real and rolls her own log. Kara, listen. You’re not the story. Bokay? You’re the reporter. This isn’t about you. It really isn’t. Now stop it or I will fly out there and sit you down for a talk. You’re getting Mossberg Syndrome, honey, and that’s not a good thing.”

Is Swisher going to take that? No way, no chance.

“How would a snarktastic wonder like you know what a reporter was?” she responds in the comment section. ”I was teasing you, you twit, as you well know (I would dearly love to mangle emails you sent to me recently about your work, but I am too much of a gentleman!). When you come here, we’ll have a “talk” all right–my people like to call it a “sit-down” though. Love and kisses, Kara.”

What a way to start the morning.

Keep an eye on:

• AT&T Inc, the No. 1 U.S. mobile service, said it would sell LG Electronics Inc’s first smartphone aimed at the U.S. market in time for the holiday shopping season (Reuters)
• Forbes and TV Guide separately unveiled sweeping cutbacks yesterday, while The New York Times Co. shut down its critically acclaimed sports magazine Play (NY Post)
• PepsiCo has moved the high-profile advertising duties for Pepsi and Diet Pepsi to TBWA\Chiat\Day, an agency owned by Omnicom Group, as it looks to reinvigorate sales of its best-known soft drinks (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Wall Street sell-side analysts seemed to be unsurprised by AT&T’s decision to pick DirecTV as its video marketing partner for its version of the ‘triple play’ package, in regions where it hasn’t built out its U-verse digital service.

The final decision had seemed obvious to analysts after DISH said earlier this month that AT&T would extend its five-year relationship by just one month to Jan 31.

But what does it mean for the independent DISH and its maverick founder/CEO Charlie Ergen (pictured), with the No. 2 U.S. satellite TV provider already struggling with customer losses in a tough economy?

Here’s what a few analysts say:

Craig Moffett, Sanford Bernstein.

The announcement is a clear negative for Dish Network, and a major win for DirecTV. As a result, we now expect Dish Network to post a sizable (400,000) subscriber loss for full year 2009. We had previously expected approximately flat net growth. For DirecTV, we now expect a gain of 800Kwhere previously we had expected approximately half that.

Ingrid Chung, Goldman Sachs:

While the loss of the AT&T contract should have a positive impact on 2009 free cash flow for DISH (due to subscriber acquisition costs), DISH will be somewhat strapped to do any investing in its own business for the next several months. DISH has $1 billion in debt maturities coming due Oct 1 and has no revolver in place. While DISH can pay down this debt (and $500 million for the AT&T convert) through cash and investments - $1.8 billion at 6/30/08 - DISH will have limited capital to invest in its mobile video initiative or build out its direct sales channel.

But one analyst sees an investment opportunity despite DISH’s troubles.

Todd Mitchell, Kaufman Bros

The net impact of this deal will be to negatively impact DISH’s gross adds while putting greater pressure on churn. However, given DISH’s rather dismal operating performance recently we have already handicapped it pretty heavily. DISH’s performance should improve regardless of AT&T.

(Photo: Reuters)

Keep an eye on:

• WPP, the world’s second largest advertising group, has extended its 1.2 billion-pound    ($2.2 billion) offer for market-research company TNS again, TNS said it continued to recommend shareholders reject the bid (Reuters)
• Goldman Sachs cuts European media companies to reflect greater debt concerns and worsening macro economic outlook, especially in the UK and Spain. (Reuters)
• U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy Co said it amended a credit agreement with its lenders helping it to avoid defaulting on its debt. (Reuters)

The long-expected launch of MySpace Music is happening in drips and drabs. On Sunday MySpace and major music label partners in the joint venture said MySpace Music will launch with four big name advertisers: McDonald’s, State Farm, Toyota and Sony Pictures.

But MySpace still did not confirm when it would launch — though that’s widely expected this week.

In the meantime, several blogs, led by TechCrunch, report that the partners are seeking third party funding of up to $100 million for MySpace Music, valuing the company at around $2 billion. Reuters has not been able to confirm this through our sources yet.

Also, LA Times reports that Facebook’s former chief operating officer Owen Van Natta and ex-Universal Music exec Andy Schuon are said to be in the running to be chief executive of MySpace Music, an appointment that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe had hoped would be confirmed by now.

 Keep an eye on:

• Best Buy agrees to buy Napster for $121 million (Reuters)
• Electronic Arts ends merger talks with Take Two (Reuters)
• AT&T will ‘temporarily reduce’ broadband speeds (Ars Technica)

(Reuters photo of Chris DeWolfe)

You can think what you like about the management of DISH Network Corp, the second largest U.S. satellite TV operator, but they’re nothing if not refreshingly frank about the economy, the state of the market and their competitors’ tactics.

Of course, a lot of that has to do with the disarming candor of founder and Chief Executive Charlie Ergen, whose conference calls tend to avoid the sort of obfuscation and Orwellian double-speak the media and investors have to come expect from C-level executives in corporate America.

Ergen had to be especially blunt today on a day his company announced a loss 0f 25,000 subscribers, which according to Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, was its first ever loss of subscribers.

On competition:

 (There are) really competitive offerings in the marketplace, as the biggest being probably the phone companies and FiOS and U-verse, where there are a lot of introductory offers out there that I think they had about close to 350,000 net additions in the second quarter so they’re taking those some from us and some customers from others. Obviously in the Hi-Definition front we haven’t been as competitive as we would have liked in the second quarter, particularly versus DirecTV.

On AT&T ending a joint marketing partnership and calling for the repayment of a $500 million investment:

They contractually were allowed to do that. Our loan from them was at 3 percent interest, probably their (AT&T) CFO looked at that and made a very logical decision to say ‘we can probably do better with that money’. Their operations people probably said that we’re probably in a better position to have flexibility going forward in video, if we want to stay with a satellite partner, it would be better to talk to multiple partners than one and see what the best deal out there is. So we have to be ready as a company.

On on-going litigation between DISH and TiVo which might impact 4 to 6 million DISH subscribers if the satellite company loses:

What we did was we designed around the TiVo patent and patent law encourages people to be innovative and our guys were very innovative and used some very sophisticated algorithms and so fourth to design around the TiVo patent. I believe we’ll prevail but TiVo, we’re going to have conversations with TiVo one way or the other about how we work together, and again, I’m just stubborn. I know this case inside and out. I’ve sat through trials. I’ve sat through the engineering models. I’ve sat and had the best and the brightest explain this to us, and I’m just stubborn. We don’t violate their intellectual property today, and I want to prove that. And so we’re going to go to the September 4th hearing and see who is right and so far, TiVo has been right.

On the management’s role in the subscriber losses:

We really haven’t done as good a job executing for the last year and the second quarter is the first quarter we made progress, and that is kind of the first step, and again it’s all my fault. I really wasn’t on top of this business from an operational point of view as well as I should have been but as I got into it and I traveled around and I saw our operations the first thing was we really had to make sure we had the right people in the right place and that was done pretty much in the end of the first quarter … (In the) third quarter we’ll do a better job and fourth quarter we’ll do a better job.

(Photo: Reuters)

(Here’s an updated chronology. This first posted June 9)  

2007

January 9 - Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs unveils iPhone in the tech industry’s most anticipated new product introduction of the decade.

June 29 - Apple and U.S. carrier partner AT&T Inc start selling iPhone as technology enthusiasts form long lines outside Apple stores.

July 25 - After big build-up, first weekend sales figures reports disappoint investors. Apple and AT&T sold 270,000 iPhones in first 30 hours; but customers only activate 146,000 of the devices due to initial AT&T service problems.

Sept 5 - Apple cuts price on iPhone with eight gigabytes of storage to $399 from $599. Discontinues sales of four-gigabyte version. Also introduces iPod Touch, an iPhone without the phone, with Wi-Fi connections.

Sept 7 - Apple offers $100 rebate to appease customers angered over iPhone price cut.

Sept 10 - One millionth iPhone sold 74 days after launch.

Sept 24 - Apple warns users against unlocking iPhones to work with network carriers other than Apple’s exclusive U.S. partner, AT&T.

Nov 9 - Apple introduces iPhone in Europe through exclusive deals in Britain with 02, in Germany with T-Mobile, and in France with Orange.

Dec 3 - Apple sued for patent infringement related to iPhone’s visual voicemail feature by Klausner Technologies Inc.

Dec 31 - Apple sold 3.7 million iPhones in its first six months on sale.

2008

Feb 5 - Apple introduces 16-gigabyte iPhone for $499.

March 6 - Apple says its plans to enable corporate e-mail on iPhones, pitting it against business e-mail market leader Research in Motion and its Blackberry line of devices.  Apple offers tools for independent developers to build iPhone software.

March 31 - Apple has sold 5.4 million iPhone units to date. Apple ranks as world’s third largest maker of smartphones, with 5.3 percent versus mobile phone giant Nokia’s 45.2 percent and Blackberry-maker Research in Motion’s 13.4 percent, market researcher Gartner Inc says.

April 23 - Apple CFO reaffirms the company’s original mid-2007 goal of selling 10 million iPhone units by the end of 2008. 

April/May - Apple stores run out of iPhones. Apple announces plans with carriers in South Asia to sell iPhones in Australia, India, the Philippines and Singapore.

June 9 - Apple unveils 3G iPhone, with faster Web links than its predecessor and the ability to support third-party applications such as games and email. The eight-gigabyte 3G iPhone is priced at $199, while the 16-gigabyte phone is priced at $299. 

July 11 - iPhone 3G goes on sale in 22 countries. Fans around Asia queue for two days before the phone’s launch. Websites are swamped with early orders. 

Reuters iPhone 3G coverage
Sources: (Reuters, Apple Inc, SeekingAlpha.com, Gartner Inc)
(Photos: Reuters, Apple Inc, Scoble: Brian Solis/Flickr.com)

So who’s winning the pay-TV so far this year? With days to go until two of the biggest cable operators (Time Warner Cable on Wednesday and Comcast on Thursday)  report first quarter financial results, Reuters canvassed eight Wall Street analysts for their estimates of subscriber net additions during the period.

At first glance it doesn’t look like it will be a good quarter with these analysts forecasting Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision to lose around 100,000 basic TV subscribers collectively, while satellite TV plays DIRECTV Group and DISH Network will add around 320,000.

Even more worrisome for cable companies?  AT&T and Verizon added around 410,000 new TV subscribers between them during the quarter.

Yet at least one analyst cautions investors  not to read too much into cable’s basic video subscriber losses as this metric is not as important to growth as the addition of other revenue generating units in particular Internet access and phone.

“It would be missing the point to focus on basic video subscriber adds,” says Chris Marangi, an analyst at Gabelli & Co. which holds shares in Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision as well as the two satellite TV companies.

“Voice services and high speed data subscribers is what drives revenue growth,” says Marangi.

(Photo: Reuters/Glenn Britt (l), Brian Roberts (r))