We may now have a clue about how Time Warner Cable plans to implement its own Aereo-like service. Unnamed sources have told Bloomberg that Time Warner Cable is considering buying an equity stake in Hulu and “could offer Hulu to its customers as a bundled service inside and outside of the home with its current products,” meaning customers could access their favorite shows on Hulu without paying a monthly subscription fee for Hulu Plus. Under the plan being discussed, Time Warner Cable would take a 33% stake in Hulu with the rest held by co-owners Disney, Comcast and News Corp. Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt recently said that the cable industry’s “structure needs more flexibility” and that he wants to offer customers “smaller, more affordable packages” that don’t cost them upward of $100 a month.
Samsung’s marketing Death Star isn’t just hovering over the United States — it has designs on conquering the entire world. Per Barron’s, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry thinks that Apple may have a tougher time in India than other markets because BlackBerry and especially Samsung have already blanketed the country with ads touting their smartphones as elite products that consumers simply see as less expensive versions of the iPhone. Because of this, he says that the companies have created ”an environment where they tend to mentally enslave the consumer to buy their products.” Chowdhry says this is particularly true of Samsung, which he says airs TV ads once every 15 minutes in India.
Millenial Media, a leading mobile advertising platform, is out with another Mobile Mix report. It shows Amazon’s tablets gaining share in the mobile content market at a fairly dizzying clip. The Mobile Mix report is based on billions of monthly ad impressions and it offers an interesting glimpse of emerging trends in mobile content consumption. Perhaps the biggest bombshell is that Amazon is now hogging 28% of ad impressions served to Android tablets; just marginally behind Samsung’s tablets that get a 35% share. No other Android vendor has achieved double digits. The cheapo Kindle tablet strategy has helped Amazon to already vault to the top tier of the U.S. tablet market when it comes to content consumption. More →
College graduates would love to land a job at Google, Apple or one of the many startups in Silicon Valley. But according to a survey from Universum Global, there are quite a few students who would prefer the rainy days in Washington over working in the golden state. The American Student Survey asked students from five different fields of study — business, engineering, IT, natural sciences and liberal arts — about their ideal company to work for. Companies such as Google and Apple unsurprisingly topped the charts in almost all categories, however there were some surprising results: Microsoft consistently outranked both Facebook and Amazon. The company ranked higher than Amazon in all fields of study and even higher than Apple in IT. Students found Microsoft more appealing than Facebook in almost all categories as well, with the exception of liberal arts.
Google’s shares continued to rise on Wednesday in the wake of the Google I/O conference, closing at over $900 for the first time and giving the company a market cap of over $300 billion for the first time in its history. The company’s stock value has been increasing at a rapid pace all year, growing from the low $700 range at the start of 2013 to the low $900 range by the end of trading on Wednesday. The continued rise in shares Wednesday was somewhat curious given that Google didn’t unveil a new Nexus tablet or a new version of Android at I/O this year as many had been expecting. Some analysts have slapped the company with a $1,000 price target in recent months and it appears that it has a legitimate shot of hitting that target now that its shares have surged past the $900 mark.
Google CEO isn’t very happy that Microsoft decided to integrate its Google Talk messaging service into its Outlook webmail platform without extending a similar offer to Google for the Gmail platform. Page, speaking during the Google I/O developers conference Wednesday, said that Google always pushes to have open-source platforms that other companies can use but lamented the fact that much of the tech industry doesn’t extend the same courtesies for many of its own innovations. Page went onto say that he was “sad” that companies such as Microsoft were “milking off” Google’s innovations by not being as open with their own software.
Want to know why Google is nervous about Samsung’s dominance of the Android ecosystem? Look no further than new research from Strategy Analytics showing that the company accounted for 95% of all Android operating profits in the first quarter of 2013. The research firm says that this is a record high for Samsung and shows that rival Android manufacturers are increasingly finding it difficult to make any money off the platform. Although Strategy Analytics’ new research is certainly striking, it isn’t all that surprising given that other data has shown that Apple and Samsung together account for all the smartphone industry’s profits while all other smartphone vendors find themselves lucky to simply escape the red in any given quarter.
The PC market isn’t the only tech sector in trouble. According to Gartner’s new numbers, Asia-Pacific is the only region in the world where mobile phone volumes are still growing. Phone sales in the United States are now dropping at 9% annualized pace. Globally, phone volumes were practically flat in Q1 2013, inching up a mere 0.7% year-over-year. Smartphone growth came in at a torrid 43% during the quarter, several points above what was expected a few months ago. This contrast means that feature phone sales are in a real free fall. This is particularly clear in Latin America, where even the hot smartphone growth is not enough to prevent overall phone sales from declining by nearly 4%. More →
We have seen mixed reports regarding BlackBerry’s performance with the BlackBerry Q10, its first QWERTY toting BlackBerry 10 smartphone. Most industry watchers seems to think early Q10 sales have been strong, though a few analysts have strayed from the pack. RBC Capital Markets’ Mark Sue is in the first camp, though he noted in a new research note on Monday Q10 sales might not blow us away. Regardless, however, the analyst says BlackBerry has already succeeded in one respect: The Q10 is buying BlackBerry some time to turn things around. More →
Sharp needs help. The consumer electronics company on Tuesday posted a worse-than-expected $5.4 billion loss for the previous fiscal year, and it released its plan to turn things around over the coming three years. For one thing, the company intends to tap banks for $1.5 billion in funds. Sharp also said it will look to boost smartphone display sales to Samsung as business with its top client Apple begins to slow. More →
At the company’s BlackBerry Live conference on Tuesday, BlackBerry announced what could be interpreted as zero positive news for the company. First, there’s the BlackBerry Q5 mid-range QWERTY handset that runs BlackBerry 10. Pricing was conveniently not announced. Industry watchers are chiming in saying that BlackBerry really needs to hit a $250 price point at full retail in order to compete in Asia and other similar markets. Let me spoil it for you. More →
When BlackBerry really began its tailspin in the summer of 2011, the reason was clear. Handsets in the new Bold lineup were too expensive for emerging markets and the cheap Curve phones were suddenly slammed by cheap Android competition. BlackBerry has known for years that its real problem is pricing. It was the Latin American demand shift for low-end Android phones that broke the company’s back two years ago. This is why it’s so puzzling that BlackBerry had chosen to kick off its comeback with two very expensive devices, the Z10 and the Q10. This in turn means that the vendor’s first budget device, the Q5, is absolutely crucial for BlackBerry’s future. More →
