Accounting change lifts Apple fiscal Q1 2010 results to over $15.6 billion
Apple kicked off its 2010 fiscal year with strong first fiscal quarterly earnings -- less than two days before announcing its "latest creation" that bloggers, the news media and the tech community can't seem to stop blabbering about.
During a conference call today, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer described the quarterly results as Apple's best ever. However, Apple instituted new reporting rules for this quarter's results. The accounting change gave Apple's results huge lift, which many news sites credited to record Mac and iPhone sales. Apple sales were inline with analyst expectations and recent growth trends. If not for the accounting changes, Apple's results would more likely have come in slightly above Wall Street's consensus estimates.
Firefox's latest firestorm: Should the Web be made of codecs?
The fabric of the original World-Wide Web is HTML, and perhaps no one now can deny that if anyone who ever wrote an HTML document owed someone a licensing fee, the Web might never have come to fruition. But as the concept of the Web broadens and becomes, even in several specific respects, cloudier, a showdown is brewing among proponents of two equally arguable trains of thought: One side believes that as the Web evolves to encompass broader forms of media, the technologies that enable that media to be shared and distributed, should themselves be shared and distributed and not bound by proprietary arrangements.
The other side believes that too much of the world's intellectual property is already bound to high-bandwidth digital media, particularly video; and if all video were as openly distributable as text, what's already happening now to The New York Times Company will soon happen to Sony and NBC. If Web media is too free, no one can build a business around its creation and distribution.
Media manager doubleTwist becomes the official iTunes of Android...for T-Mobile
Today, the first major carrier of phones with Android support, T-Mobile, announced that doubleTwist media manager is now available across all of its Android smartphones, and that the music, video, and photo sync software can now be downloaded directly from T-Mobile for Windows XP and above and OS X 10.5 and above.
Users who come to the Android platform from iPhone frequently complain about Android's lack of desktop sync and the ability to create music playlists. In fact, the quality of the music ecosystem in general is one of the top ten complaints about the Android platform.
What happened to the Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK?
Late on Friday, Microsoft published the first Windows Mobile 6.5 software development kit, albeit with no announcement or fanfare. Since the operating system was released last October, the only toolkit for Windows Mobile 6.5 development was released as an add-on component to the Windows Mobile 6 SDK.
The SDK came with images for both "Professional" and "Standard" versions of Windows Mobile 6.5, also known as touch enabled, and non-touch enabled, and it reportedly also included support for the 6.5.3 update and widget development.
China is the victim of an Internet smear campaign, alleges its government
In its latest and broadest-ranging official statement since a major policy conference last week at the US State Department, aligning American foreign policy with "Internet freedom" and directing skepticism against China, the Chinese government said this morning it had absolutely nothing to do with any cyber-attack on anyone's Internet assets. China was careful not to mention Google by name, which might have been interpreted as an acknowledgment that such an attack happened.
"Accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China," reads an official China government statement issued through the Xinhua news agency. "We firmly opposed to that [sic]. China's policy on Internet safety is transparent and consistent... China is the biggest victim country of hacking as its Internet has long been facing severe threats of hacker and online virus attacks."
Open source mapping software meets the enterprise
The Open Planning Project (TOPP) is a nonprofit organization that advocates the use of free and open source software in the public sector, and for more than ten years, TOPP's OpenGeo initiative has worked on creating an open environment for sharing geospatial data. Its principal product, GeoServer, is a free Java-based Geographic Information server built on open standards which lets users share and edit public geographic data.
Following the GeoServer 2.0.1 update that was released last week, OpenGeo today released OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 1.0, the complete package of open source mapping software that OpenGeo will professionally support.
Twitter couldn't save Brangelina
I'm not one to follow the lives of celebrities. I don't watch TMZ, and the very sound of Entertainment Tonight's Mary Hart's voice is enough to make me nauseous. I turn my head as I walk past the supermarket tabloids in the checkout aisle because I could care less who Jennifer Aniston is dating this week or that Elvis was spotted in a rural Kentucky laundromat. I've got better things to do with my life than wonder how many more kids Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt want to adopt or when she plans on getting another tattoo.
For all my celeb-fatigue, though, I found it interesting this past weekend when I first learned about the Brangelina supercouple's separation not from television, radio, or a newspaper, but from my Twitter feed. After I sarcastically retweeted the supposed news, I heard from a number of friends that they, too, had gotten the news from online sources.
Early LTE deployments are no faster than HSPA, says report
It appears that the United States isn't the only place where broadband performance in the real world is vastly different from the performance promised by carriers in advertisements.
Leading Scandinavian mobile network operator Teliasonera AB launched the first two commercial 4G wireless networks based on LTE in mid-December. On the company's Web site, the service is being billed as "10 times faster than 3G" with downlink speeds up 50 megabits per second.
Microsoft Office is obsolete, or soon will be
This month's Office 2010 retail pricing announcement and ongoing discounts for Office 2007 Home and Student are Microsoft's tacit acknowledgment that the productivity suite isn't as valuable as it once was. Office is tracking a course of unplanned obsolescence and the inevitable end shared by oh-so many other products: Commoditization. Desktop productivity suite commoditization is inevitable, and it is a force that Microsoft can resist but not stop. Additionally, Microsoft faces a fundamental shift in what content people create and where. Commoditization and the emerging mobile device-to-cloud services applications stack are Office killers.
I'll ask upfront: Do you really need Microsoft Office on a daily basis? Is Office vital to your work day? Do you use it at home? If you use it at work, how often? If you use it at home or for college, how often? Please respond in comments.
The Internet Explorer fracas: Let's find something else worth dumping
Fair warning, everyone: What follows is my opinion. Given the propensity of opinion traffic on the Web, I shouldn't have to say this: It truly is my opinion. Nothing to which I attach my byline or my face has been adjusted or colored in order to more thoroughly polarize my characterization of the subjects I cover, or to agitate your feelings so as to prompt you to post comments.
In fact, in all sincerity, I realized long ago that I'm not a very polarizing figure, I've accepted that fact, and I've come to embrace it. The art of persuasion, I was taught centuries ago, was developed with the aim of getting other people to agree with you. I'd like to get a hold of the person by the tea bags who came up with this notion that popularity must be driven by populism, which in turn can only be generated through agitation, anger, and outrage, hoist him onto a flagpole, and tell him flat out, "Rush, Americans are smarter, more sensible, wiser, and more capable than you think they are or than you would have them become."
Motorola strikes out against RIM for mobile patent infringement
Mobile technology patents are golden, and the battles over intellectual property between major players in the mobile device space keep getting deeper. Today, Motorola filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission, charging BlackBerry maker Research in Motion with patent infringement.
Motorola is asking the ITC to investigate RIM's alleged infringement of five patents on "early stage innovations" such as Wi-Fi access, user interfaces, and application and power management.
Microsoft, don't give up on Steve Ballmer just yet
Ten years ago last week -- Jan. 14, 2000 -- Steve Ballmer took over the chief executive's position as Bill Gates stepped back to be Microsoft chairman and chief software architect. Ballmer has officially entered his second decade as Microsoft's CEO. There are fairly constant complaints about Microsoft's performance under his leadership.
NBC is sending Conan O'Brien packing; today ends his seven-month career as "The Tonight Show" host. Should Microsoft do something similar -- remove Ballmer and replace him with someone else, even Gates in a move like Jay Leno coming back and replacing O'Brien? I expect that many commenters to this post will answer "YES!" to that question. But I wouldn't give up on Ballmer just yet.
Data encryption tool maker: Antivirus has become ineffective
The following commentary is by Mark Smail, the CTO of Onix International, which distributes a data encryption tool called EncryptStick, designed to work with USB thumb drives. This is not an advertisement; Betanews is merely presenting Mr. Smail's point of view.
Consumers are growing increasingly comfortable storing sensitive information on their computers, USB flash drives, and external hard drives, as well as using Web-based solutions to automate regular tasks such as shopping for holiday gifts, paying bills, and tracking financial portfolios. The push from vendors encouraging their customers to move toward e-billing has also played a major role in more personal information being stored locally on personal computers.
Apple tablet could give ARM the lion's share of UMPC architectures
Convergence in computing is an exciting trend to watch, and as our devices improve, they start to take on the characteristics of each other. Our mobile PCs are getting lighter, flatter, and more touchable with better perpetual connections; and our mobile phone screens are getting bigger, their processors are getting more powerful, and they're interacting with the many of the same services we use on our PCs.
Even if the mystery Apple product next week doesn't look exactly like a "big iPhone," the fact that many people already assume that's what it will be, is a sign of the strong current of convergence in consumer electronics.
Google's deal with the devil: Declaring war in China while competitors wimp out
I was just old enough to remember, and appreciate the significance of, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The iconic image of a dissident standing defiantly in front of a column of People's Liberation Army tanks is as powerful today as it was when we first saw it.
Back then, activists fighting for greater freedom used surreptitiously acquired fax machines to get the word out to the rest of the world. It was an early sign that technology held the potential to undercut control-freak-government efforts to stifle free speech. Now that the Internet has taken over as the platform of choice for Chinese freedom-lovers and freedom-crushers alike, the battleground has shifted irrevocably, and the autocratic Chinese government hardly has enough political officers to keep its spy game machinery in balance.
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