Erwin
Begin forwarded message:
From: "SiliconValley.com" <e-news@newsletters.siliconvalley.com>
Date: 3 November 2009 12:53:21 AM GMT+08:00
To: erwin huang <erwinhuang@mac.com>
Subject: Good Morning Silicon Valley: The iPhone -- black and white and read all over
Reply-To: "SiliconValley.com" <kwrqblbvskjprjrlwv@newsletters.siliconvalley.com>
Good Morning Silicon Valley
The iPhone: black and white and read all over
By JOHN MURRELL
A few months after Amazon introduced the Kindle in late 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs scoffed at the market for digital books and e-readers. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," said Jobs. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore." Well, even noted visionaries can have an off day. Not only is the e-book market taking off, but according to one analytics outfit, the biggest threat to the Kindle's current dominance may be ... Apple's iPhone.
According to San Francisco-based Flurry, which monitors mobile applications, the Games category of the App Store drew the most new content each month from the store's launch in mid-2008 through August of this year — enough that the iPhone was able to bite into the business of the leading handheld gaming platform, the Nintendo DS. But in September, for the first time, more books were released to the App Store than games, and in October, Flurry says, one out of every five apps introduced for the iPhone was a book. Flurry's conclusion? "The sharp rise in e-book activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the Media & Entertainment space," it said. "Further, with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition."
Meanwhile, Nintendo, looking for ways to fight back against the iPhone on the gaming front, is considering taking a page from the Kindle business model. Currently, the DS handheld is able to download games and connect players only over a Wi-Fi connection. But, says Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, future models may include built-in free access to a 3G wireless service. "I'm interested because it's a new business model in which the user doesn't bear the communications cost," Iwata told the Financial Times. "Only people who can pay thousands of yen a month [in mobile phone subscriptions] can be iPhone customers. That doesn't fit Nintendo customers because we make amusement products," he said. "In reality, if we did this it would increase the cost of the hardware, and customers would complain about Nintendo putting prices up, but it is one option for the future."
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Q U O T E D
"This was going to spell the demise of the network TV model. Now they seem to be reveling in it."
— Brad Adgate, senior VP for research at media buying firm Horizon Media, says TV networks have come to appreciate the DVR partly because, contrary to expectations, nearly half the people watching recorded shows are also passively sitting through the commercials.
Comment on this postImproved clarity reported in Skype talks: Being over a barrel cannot be a comfortable position for any extended period, so it's not surprising to hear a report that a resolution may be near in the legal tussle complicating eBay's desire to sell controlling interest of its Skype telephony unit to a group of investors (see "EBay finds a winning bidder in Skype auction"). EBay acquired Skype in 2005 for around $3 billion, but the deal didn't include the service's core technology, which remained in the hands of founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. The pair, who had mounted their own unsuccessful bid to buy back the company, filed a series of suits entangling all parties to the sale, demanding a halt to the unlicensed use of the technology, which would force Skype into a complex change of its architecture (see "And with your purchase of Skype, you also get this lovely matching lawsuit").
Facing that unpleasant prospect, eBay and the prospective buyers have considerable motivation to reach some sort of settlement with Zennstrom and Friis. And according to one of Om Malik's sources close to the matter, such negotiations are indeed going on, reportedly at a "sensitive stage" that could produce a speedy resolution or fall apart altogether. A settlement would clear the way for the Skype transaction, but, as the Merc's Chris O'Brien wrote over the weekend, it may not be enough to salvage the reputation of valley golden boy Mike Volpi, tarnished by his conflicted roles in helping to assemble the investors' bid for Skype while at the same time working for Zennstrom and Friis as CEO of Joost, another of their companies.
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New BitTorrent protocol exercises self-control: The widely used BitTorrent protocol for peer-to-peer sharing of large files has been a bandwidth bugaboo for Internet service providers for several years now — estimated to account for a quarter to a half of all Net traffic, depending on location, and held up as justification for the kind of heavy handed traffic management that got Comcast in trouble last year (see "FCC to Comcast: Go forth and sin no more") and helped bring the issue of net neutrality to the fore. Those days, however, may be nearing an end.
BitTorrent Inc. says it is currently testing and will soon be launching a new version of the protocol, uTorrent 2.0, that is built to be aware of network congestion and will throttle its own traffic (primarily upload speeds) as warranted, thus saving ISPs the trouble and expense. "If uTP is successful it should result in a multibillion dollar windfall in terms of savings for ISPs," said Simon Morris, BitTorrent's VP of Product Management. The resulting reduction in congestion should also mean better performance for users. "We're excited that this creates a better experience for millions of consumers," said Morris, "and it also potentially has a massive impact on ISPs — greatly reducing (even eliminating) any justification to manage or shape BitTorrent traffic and allowing ISP networks to handle more BitTorrent traffic, without resulting congestion forcing capital network upgrades ahead of schedule or the ?need' to invest in DPI [Deep Packet Inspection] or other traffic shaping gear."
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Off topic: With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall near, a BBC World Service special site on the 1989 revolutions across Europe, photographer Eric Lusito's images of abandoned Soviet bloc military bases, and the Civil Defense Museum.
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Send first-class seats on Pan Am to jmurrell@bayareanewsgroup.com.
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