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Apple's iPhone 3GS and Palm's Pre has captured a lot of hype but don't count out Research in Motion's BlackBerry just yet, say experts.
"The buzz about other signature devices can make people overlook RIM's success," said Ryan Reith, senior research analyst at IDC.
While the iPhone enjoyed an initial pop in market share after the second generation version was released last July, that share has been nearly cut in half.
In the first quarter of this year, BlackBerrys had a 55.3% share, compared to 19.5% for iPhones, according to IDC data.
Author: golf Page 8 of 22
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I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.
Several years ago I started saying that “my social graph is in email.” I found it interesting that Facebook and LinkedIn used email as a primary messaging layer to remind me to come back to Facebook and LinkedIn respectively to check what was going on. This signaled confirmation to me that these systems were making sure they were using the most persistent messaging layer to build and reinforce their social graphs. -
Lots of services try and rate the reputation of online users, particularly in the world of online commerce. So it’s not surprising that attention is being paid to rating users in the social networking space. Enter TweetGrade.
Purewire Inc. launched TweetGrade last week, calling it the authority in online user reputation on Twitter. “TweetGrade provides a quantitative assessment of a user’s reach and influence in the Twitter community, and it helps people understand a user’s online reputation, legitimacy and safety.”
The company pointed to some of the scams encountered on the micro-blogging site as evidence that its service is necessary, such as a “Best Video” scam. “Attacks such as this make it imperative to know the reputation of those people with whom you interact online. TweetGrade assures this trust by providing evidence of Twitter account legitimacy, protecting users from malicious or illegitimate accounts that attempt to send spam or spread malware.”
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In March, the organizers of a computer-security conference called CanSecWest challenged attendees to break into any one of five smart phones, among them Apple’s popular iPhone. The perceived difficulty of the task–especially breaking into the iPhone–meant that few researchers made any attempt to hack the devices, and none succeeded.
Now two researchers hope to make things considerably easier for would-be iPhone hackers. Next month, Charles Miller, a principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, and Vincenzo Iozzo, a student at the University of Milan, in Italy, will present a way to run nonapproved code on Apple’s mobile device at the Black Hat Security Conference, in Las Vegas. -
When Guy Kawasaki talks about business innovation, as he did recently at a University of Pennsylvania technology conference, he brings more than 25 years of major-league experience to the conversation — a background that the good-humored investor and entrepreneur calls “my checkered past.” After getting a psychology degree at Stanford and an MBA at UCLA, the Hawaii-born Kawasaki became the second software “evangelist” at Apple Computer, where his job from 1983 to 1987 was to convince people to create software for the Macintosh. Kawasaki fondly recalls his colleagues at Apple as visionary, driven and “arguably the greatest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California — though the record has subsequently been broken by Google.”
I live and work in Arlington, Virginia, and as this hilarious video points out, it is the toughest town West of the Potomac and East of the Beltway.
The funniest part of the video for me was that I was sitting in a Starbucks wearing my brown flip flops when I first watched it. Check out this video if you want to understand the inside humor here. 🙂
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If you like to search for “music lyrics” or “free” things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And “free music downloads” puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm’s way of malicious software, known as “malware.”
A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.
The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask — and analyzed 413,000 Web pages. -
As the automobile industry sheds jobs, it comes as good news that over the last decade or so the Internet has created 1.2 million jobs, many paying higher salaries than average, a new study finds.
Internet business contributes 2.1%, or $300 billion, to the total GDP (gross domestic product) of the U.S. And IT and related online business may be faring better in this recession than they did in the dotcom bubble of 2000-2002, still growing revenue but at slower pace.
Consumers are now making 10% of their retail purchases online, with the exception of groceries, on the Internet, and Internet-based advertising has increased four-fold since 2002 to more than $20 billion, said John Deighton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and one of the authors of the study along with Hamilton Consultants Inc.
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Here it is, kiddies: the latest iPhone. Just one year after Apple announced the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 3G S has been announced. There is much to love in this update including larger storage options, a faster CPU, HSDPA support and a better camera all for the same price as the current set.
The OS should now run faster thanks to a 50% bump in CPU speed; it now runs at 600MHz. The system memory has doubled to 256MB as well.
Apple didn’t forget about the camera – well, sortof. The iPhone 3G S did get an upgrade in that department too, but it’s only with a 3MP camera. It does finally support auto-focus, but it’s still not up to par with other flagship smartphones. Plus, this iPhone can now shoot video at 30 FPS with auto lighting and auto focus.
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It sucks to receive complaints. I mean, it is a blow to the ego for sure. But there is a silver lining (or perhaps its platinum)… a complaining customer is an opportunity to improve your service not only for them, but for all future customers. And, if you do it right, you can turn that unhappy customer into your biggest, most vocal fan. Here are 55 tips, donated by TPErs, on exactly how to turn that raging customer into a raving fan:
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How big is the U.S. venture industry?
The National Venture Capital Association says that in 2008 there were 882 firms that had raised at least one fund in the last eight years, a substantial drop from 2007 when there were 1,019 fitting that definition.
Another measure is to look at the number of venture firms that made a U.S. investment in 2008. While that methodology yields a number of active firms – 848 – that is in the same ballpark, it shows a less dramatic decline. But all bets are off this year and next as many funds raised during the tech bubble hit the end of their natural lives.
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Tense negotiations over the value of warrants held by the Treasury Department could prevent some of the biggest U.S. banks from fully shaking off government ownership after they repay billions of dollars in bailout funds in coming days.
Some big banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co are wrangling with officials over the warrants they want to buy back from Treasury, which the government owns in addition to the banks' preferred stock. The banks argue they should get a discount on the warrants because they did not want the money in the first place.
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Every time customers experience your brand, you want them to remember what you do, why it is important to them, and why it is unique to you. By developing a clear expression of what is important to your customers and unique to you — and reinforcing it with every customer interaction — you will help your customers remember what your brand stands for. This starts with developing a brand positioning statement.
Developing a brand positioning statement involves four steps:
1. Describe your customers
2. Define yourself in terms of your competition
3. Explain your greatest benefit
4. Put it together into your brand positioning statement -
Structured like Gmail, the developer and end-user software interoperates with other Web services, such as IM, forums, wikis, and blogs.
At its developer conference on Thursday, Google plans to offer attendees a chance to try Google Wave, the company’s new real-time collaborative communication system.
Lars Rasmussen, who was lead engineer for Google Maps before co-founding the Wave team with his brother Jens, describes Wave as “what e-mail might look like if it were invented today.”
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Palm has done a platform reboot with its new webOS and the company is swinging for the fences with its first webOS device, the Palm Pre. So will Palm strike out or hit it out of the park? Here are five reasons why I expect it to be a homerun.
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For the last decade, I have been convinced that the three most important factors in determining the success of a start-up are (1) team, (2) product or service, and (3) market (timing, size, etc.). Take an A+ entrepreneur, with a great idea for a new product or service, at the right time, and about as fast than you can tweet Susan Boyle you’d have a success brewing.
Recently, I have added one factor to the must-have list: the right start-up culture. In other words, add a dose of bad culture to a team of superstars, a killer product and good market opportunity, the result is almost always death by a thousand backstabs.
What defines a great start-up culture?
Justice Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” standard seems particularly apt here, but not actionable.
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You know you have way to many things on your to-do list. Here are some ways to down-size that list, and turn it into a powerful income generating tool at the same time.
Step One
Acknowledge that it is impossible to do it all. Decide right now that you are going to choose the Highest Leveraged Actions in the important areas of your life, and focus on doing those every day.
Step Two
Do a mind dump. Unfinished business weighs on your mind and drains your energy. Take 10 minutes and make a list everything that’s in your mind that needs to be done, in every area of your life, personal and professional. Just keep writing until without ordering or prioritizing until you can’t think of anything else. This is not a to-do list. This is a cleansing list. I do them periodically; just to be sure I’ve captured everything.
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When I was a venture capitalist there were lots of reasons why we did not make investments in particular startups. My goal was to try to provide some honest feedback/guidance as to the reason for passing on the opportunity. Given the deep deal flow at my fund, this was not always possible, but if I had used up more than a few minutes of the executives’ time learning about their company I tried to give a little bit of the color behind the rejection.
This ranged from “the end market is too small” or “you need more user traction” or “it is too competitive of a market” or “we are not comfortable with this particular technology.” But the fact of the matter was, sometimes there were not great reasons for passing on a company. Many times these were just excuses hiding the real reason: -
The Time Warner board has approved the spinoff of AOL as an independent, publicly traded company, undoing the disastrous merger between the two in 2001, which came to be a symbol of failed synergy between content and web distribution. It also positions Time Warner for a return to its roots: as a dedicated content company.
The spinoff is targeted for the end of the year, after Time Warner buys back the 5% stake in AOL it doesn’t own from Google, which it says it will do in the third quarter of 2009. The deal follows Time Warner’s spinoff of Time Warner Cable earlier this year.