Tech wrap: Apple changes course on iAd
The WSJ.com reports that Apple is softening its approach to its iAd mobile advertising service due to the tepid response as it loses ground to Google in the fast-growing mobile-ad market.
Marketers say they have been turned off by iAd’s high price tag as well as Apple’s hard-charging sales tactics and its stringent control over the creative process which has forced Apple to make some changes.
Facebook is probably not the first place that comes to mind when contemplating new career opportunities.
But Monster.com, the career search website, hopes to change that with BeKnown, a professional networking app that allows users to build their professional identities within Facebook.
Staying with Facebook, Bloomberg reports that the social networking site is planning its first push into mobile advertising by the end of March, giving the company a fresh source of revenue ahead of a possible initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
With Apple said to be in talks to buy Israel’s Anobit, a maker of flash storage technology, Forbes.com says that Flash memory is becoming one of the biggest tech stories of the year.
U.S. safety investigators called for a nationwide ban on texting and cell phone use while driving, a prohibition that would include certain applications of hands-free technology becoming more common in new cars.
Tech wrap: Adobe scraps Flash for mobile browsers
Score a point for Apple. Software maker Adobe scrapped its Flash Player for mobile devices after a mutli-year battle with Apple over the merits of the technology, which is used to view videos and play games on the Web. Take a look back at the legendary tech spat in this blow-by-blow timeline that stretches back to January 2007 when Apple launched its iPhone with a browser that was not compatible with Adobe’s Flash player. The company said in a blog post it plans to focus its future mobile browsing efforts on HTML5, a competing technology that is now universally supported on all major mobile devices.
Online business reviews site Yelp has hired bankers to lead an intitial public offering that could value the company at up to $2 billion, several people familiar with the matter told DealBook’s Evelyn M. Rusli. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup will participate in the offering, which is expected in the first quarter of next year, one of the sources said.
Cisco Systems singaled a turnaround on Wednesday when it raised its forecast revenue and earnings above Wall Street expectations as demand from government and enterprises for its network equipment remained resilient despite global economic troubles. Earlier, the company reported quarterly earnings per share that beat estimates, signaling that efforts to revive growth are beginning to pay off.
Delays were being reported by some BlackBerry customers on Wednesday, but Research in Motion said it’s not experiencing problems on the scale of an outage last month that knocked out service for four days. “There is no system-wide outage,” a company spokesman told Reuters, adding that the delays being reported are limited to Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa.
Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt reassured its Android partners embroiled in lawsuits that it will continue to support them in their disputes with other firms. That support takes the form of information sharing, industry expertise and access to Google’s patents for licensing and legal purposes, Schmidt said during a visit to Tapei on Wednesday.
Reuters tech correspondent Bill Rigby strolls the streets in Seattle’s South Lake Union district, an emerging technology hub that calls to mind Silicon Valley to the south. In addition to long-time tenant Amazon.com, the neighbourhood has seen a rush of newercomers setting up shop, including cloud computing firm Salesforce.com and online gaming company Zynga. Facebook also recently set up its new Seattle offices nearby.
(This post’s original headline was changed to make it clearer)
Sony: Our tablets are coming… eventually
Sony teased out a few more details about its new Android tablets — codenamed S1 and S2 — and let reporters briefly handle prototypes.
AT&T will be the exclusive U.S. carrier for the S2, a double-screened device that bears a close resemblance to Nintendo’s DS handheld gaming device. Sony showed off how users could turn it into a book.
Executives stressed that the tablets can connect to other Sony products, such as Blu-Ray players, TVs and PlayStation content, something Apple can’t offer. Like the Sony Ericsson Experia Play AKA, “the PlayStation phone,” the Adobe-Flash enabled tablets will come pre-loaded with the retro game“Crash Bandicoot”.
Sony once again vowed to take the No. 2 tablet spot behind Apple despite still not revealing when its new tablets would come out or how much they would cost. That news could be more than a month away but the tablets should be released this year, the company said.
Why would a customer choose a Sony tablet over an iPad? Phil Molyneux, Sony Electronics president and COO, said customers looking for a faster, smaller device that can fit in your pocket will turn to Sony’s dual-screen S2 tablet.
“You can’t do that with other devices unless you have bigger pockets,” he said.
Adobe CEO on Apple: “Let the games begin”
The war between Apple and Adobe, which revolves around the use of Adobe’s Flash software on devices like the iPhone and iPad, has simmered down to a low boil, but it certainly hasn’t gone away. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen turned up at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, and the first question out the gate from the interviewer was about — what else? — Apple.
Although Narayen said the media is doing its part to help fuel the spat, he sounded anything but conciliatory:
“There’s a war happening for developers … Adobe has always been about helping people create content for multiple devices, multiple platforms … Apple and Adobe are on different sides of that point of control.”
He continued: “We’re all about a multi-platform, heterogeneous, open ecosystem. And that’s what we’re going to be focused on. And Apple will continue to like to keep that closed and proprietary… so let the games begin.”
And what about that juicy rumor that made the rounds a few weeks ago? Microsoft was said to be talking to Adobe about potentially buying the company, news that sent Adobe’s stock jumping.
Narayen dismissed the rumor, and called the market reaction to it the “nature of the beast”:
“I do meet with Steve (Ballmer) periodically… we continue to talk about how we can be a great ISP… as an independent software company. Absolutely independent.”
Speak, memory! The eternal search for notebooks with flash drives
Good news for us computer geeks! PCs are nearly ready to ditch hard drives for faster, less energy-intensive drives with flash memory, like in a camera or cell phone, according to memory maker Micron, which ought to know. That is exciting news for victims of crashed hard drives and people who always want something new.
“I think it’ll be a story in 2011, and it’ll be pretty good penetration in 2012. But, you know, maybe I’m wrong,” said Mark Durcan, president and chief operating officer of Micron, during the Reuters Global Technology Summit.
Sadly, he may well be right about the last part. The last Micron exec to speak about so-called solid state drives to an appreciatively nerdy Reuters summit was CEO Steve Appleton, who in November 2005 predicted that flash drives would replace hard drives within five years. Actually, he’s still got time, but folks better hurry!
There are some notebooks with flash drives (like Apple’s super-thin MacBook Air) and Durcan says consumers love ‘em. Hiccups with the technology from a year and a half or so are gone — power efficiency now beats hard drives, and annoying problems which slowed solid state drives have been solved, he said, comparing now with when Appleton spoke, on the cusp of 2006.
“In 2006 it was the promise. It wasn’t the reality. But it’s real now.” Still, he added, computer makers are wary of the volatile prices.
Hopefully by next year’s Tech Summit that will all be worked out.
from Summit Notebook:
SanDisk’s Eli sings the Blu-Ray blues
The flash memory business may be suffering its worst slump ever, but SanDisk CEO Eli Harari is carving tombstones for other businesses.
The No.1 endangered technology, Harari said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Tuesday, is the Blu-Ray DVD. Because the discs don't work with smartphones, which consumers are increasingly using to watch video, Harari says their days are numbered.
He did not give a time frame for this extinction, though he did note at one point that the average period of time it takes for a new technology to render an existing technology obsolete is five to seven years.
Floppy discs, once a standard component on PCs, have been replaced by flash-based USB drives. And photographic film for cameras has become a fading memory since the advent of digital cameras.
Of course, SanDisk has been striving for several years to make inroads in the market for music CDs, offering prepackaged tunes on its flash memory cards, but CDs have yet to disappear.
And the long-hyped solid state, flash-based hard drives are still struggling to compete with the traditional mechanical hard drives found in most PCs today.
Harari said the battle with hard drives is still in its early days. But compared to his DVD death sentence, he seemed somewhat more accommodating for hard drives.
