Good news for long-suffering Sprint Nextel investors: Customer retention has finally improved to the point where the carrier is able to report actual gains in postpaid subscribers, rather than losses.
Hewlett-Packard bought Palm for its technology and talent, not for its brand. So it’s hardly surprising that the Palm logo and name were nowhere to be found at HP’s big webOS event Wednesday. Not in the signage. Not in the videos or slides included in the onstage presentation and not on any of the new hardware on display. The TouchPad, Veer and Pre3 all sport silver HP logos and “HP” as a prefix, not Palm.
Palm gets its second chance at a rise-from-the-ashes rebirth today-–this time under Hewlett-Packard’s aegis. At an invitation-only event in San Francisco (wisely scheduled after the CES tablet deluge of 2011), HP uncrated its first webOS hardware since its acquistion of Palm: the TouchPad tablet and two smartphones–the Pre 3 and the little Veer.
The executive turnover at Advanced Micro Devices continues. Robert Rivet, who has served as the company’s COO since 2000, has left the company, according to an 8-K filing. His last day was yesterday and his executive biography on AMD’s Web site is already returning 404s.
Nokia CEO: Remember, Only You Can Prevent Platform Fires … 
While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind. … We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.
Nokia, our platform is burning.
– Excerpt from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s rumored ‘burning platform’ memo
Some encouraging new search metrics for Bing. Experian Hitwise data for January shows Microsoft’s search engine with 12.81 percent of the market, up from 10.6 percent in December–-a 21 percent gain. Add to that the 14.62 percent share claimed by the now-powered-by-Bing Yahoo, and Bing’s got more than a quarter of the U.S. search market.
Eric Schmidt recently joked in a tweet that he was stepping down as Google CEO because the company’s younger co-founders no longer needed “adult supervision.” Or wanted it–at least not the kind that Schmidt’s been offering recently, which was on display once again today in yet another PR gaffe.
Hewlett-Packard’s not the only company with an enterprise-ready Windows 7 tablet. Dell’s got one as well and plans to launch it later this year.
Nearly 56 million tablets will be shipped in 2011–200 percent more than were shipped in 2010. That’s the latest forecast from NPD’s DisplaySearch, which expects that number to hit 172.4 million by 2014.
So those rumors that had Apple developing a “World iPad” based on one of Qualcomm’s multimode CDMA-GSM chips? There may be something to them after all. An iFixit teardown of the CDMA iPhone 4 headed for Verizon reveals a world mode chip in the device’s innards: Qualcomm’s MDM6600, which supports CDMA and EVDO network standards as well as GSM and HSPA+.
Hewlet-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker says he doesn’t think the company has been telling its story as well as it could have over the past few years. On Wednesday, he’ll have his first chance to begin retelling it when HP’s Palm division holds an invitation-only event in San Francisco, at which it’s expected to introduce its long-rumored webOS tablet.
With the hard launch of the CDMA iPhone at Verizon now just three days away, analysts are tweaking their sales forecasts to reflect its impact. The latest to issue an upward revision: Susquehanna’s Jeff Fidacaro, who raised his price target on Apple this morning to reflect strong presale demand for the Verizon iPhone and a significant increase in its production.
Apple may not want to disclose its CEO succession plan, but at least it has one. Which is more than you can say for quite a few other companies.
Normally, I wouldn’t remark on news coming out of Corning’s analyst day, but there is one metric the company released today that’s worth mentioning here: The company’s forecast for growth in the tablet market.
Apple closed its big government affairs office in Washington, D.C., in the late ’90s and since that time has maintained a fairly low profile inside the Beltway, relative to other big tech firms. But now the company has hired a high-powered new lobbying firm: Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Harlem River Garbage Dump?
What concerns us most about The Newspaper is its lack of Wi-Fi. Battery life, however, is a plus …
Third prize is … I’m your father
A continually spamming collection of unanswered questions created, edited and organised by no-one who uses it.
GRAMMAR HULK: “HULK GET INVITATION THAT SAY ‘PLEASE RSVP BY RESPONDING.’ HULK’S RAGE MITIGATED BY OPPORTUNITY TO WEAR TINY PURPLE TUXEDO PANTS!”
If there is one cable I would whole-heartedly trust to my Chimera-hunting needs, this would be the cable. No other cable has the tensile strength to properly and efficiently garrote a lycanthrope, asphyxiate an Esquilax or even gag a mermaid.
It’s 1985 and I’m Tom Selleck. I’m filming episode 109 of Season 6 of Magnum P.I., “Kona Winds,” and the crew is resting between takes of a montage showing me walking thoughtfully on rugged Hawaiian shores.
