Steve Jobs left an indelible imprint on Silicon Valley. Part of Jobs' Silicon Valley legacy is the concept of wanting to "surprise and delight" people.
The new campus Apple is building in Cupertino, California, is a shrine to delight. In an official planning document, the company says it wants the new "campus to provide an on-site venue for the introduction of Apple's new products that will generate surprise and delight."
Yahoo, Square, Instagram, Dropbox and many other Silicon Valley companies are following suit, reports the Los Angeles Times. Read more
A rendering shows Samsung's new campus for its semiconductor division in San Jose.
Samsung and Apple's battle to dominate the world's smartphone markets has mostly been waged from their respective sides of the Pacific. Now the South Korean tech giant is storming rival Apple's backyard, launching an aggressive expansion into Silicon Valley, reports the Los Angeles Times. Read more
The biopic about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher will be released by Open Road Films in April. The Jobs biopic is already set to close the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
In ancient Greek mythology, Pandora received the gift of music from Apollo. According to the myth, when Pandora's box was opened the evils of the world escaped. By time the box was closed, the only thing that remained was hope.
Right about now, the trendsetting streaming music startup Pandora probably thinks the evil that escaped the mythological box is Apple. The Silicon Valley titan controls 70 percent of online music sales, according to marketing research firm NPD Group. Pandora hopes that Apple's recent efforts to stunt the growth of alternative streaming music services, which has prompted a preliminary federal antitrust probe, will be unsuccessful.
Apple announced a new subscription plan last month that gives them a 30 percent cut of all payments made through its App Store. Many feel the new plan is an attempt by Apple to stymie the growing popularity of Pandora and other streaming services. The loss of an important source of revenue may have affected Pandora's plans for an IPO.
"I think this could delay the Pandora IPO," said a source associated with the public offering that was quoted by the New York Post. "Apple has crossed the line. They are either going to have to walk this one back, or face enforcement action, or a lawsuit."
About one-fourth of the U.S. population uses Pandora. The Oakland, CA-based startup has the most popular Internet radio service, according to Ando Media. Pandora's future growth is tied to the trend by nearly all the major auto makers to integrate Internet radio into the dashboard.
Pandora is the Internet radio service used by most car makers. "The car is definitely the big new story for us," says Pandora CEO Tim Westergren. Pandora is available now on the BMW Mini and Ford Sync. Car dashboards with controls for Internet radio "will probably be our biggest market," says Westergren.
Cars and Internet television are the new frontiers for streaming music. One of Pandora's rivals is Mog, which is based in nearby Berkeley, CA. "People listen to music while driving more than anywhere else, so its critical for us to offer Mog in the car," say Mog CEO David Hyman. "The car is the holy grail." The BMW Mini also uses MOG, which the startup demonstrated at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX.
Auto manufacturers and consumer electronics makers have formed a consortium to develop standards for integrating mobile phones with car dashboards and steering wheel controls. Nokia played a leading role in the formation of the group. Among the founding members of the Car Connectivity Consortium are Daimler, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen. Other members of the group include Samsung, LG Electronics and Panasonic.
The group may adopt the Terminal Mode standard developed by Nokia and CE4A (Consumer Electronics for Automotive), an association of car makers. Some upcoming models for BMW, Toyota and GM use a platform that supports Terminal Mode.
Streaming music is projected to expand rapidly in the next five years, according to ABI Research. Most of this growth, says ABI, will come from the growing popularity of streaming apps on mobile phones.
Apple could lose a substantial amount of its music business as streaming alternatives proliferate. ABI thinks that Rhadsody and Spotify, a European service that wants to enter the American market later this year, could be the chief beneficiaries of the streaming trend.
Both Rhadsody and Spotify will be gravely damaged by Apple's plan to take a 30 percent cut of their revenue from the App Store. Spotify is in talks with Universal Music and Warner Music to license their catalogues. The European startup already has agreements with Sony and EMI.
Spotify, which is headquartered in the U.K. and has research and development facilities in Stockholm, recently celebrated the milestone of reaching one million European subscribers.
Apple is rumored to be in talks with the major music labels to gain increased access to their catalogues.
As part of its plan to confront the growing threat from Pandora, Spotify and Rhadsody, Apple is expected to overhaul its MobileMe cloud service to allow the free storage of music, videos and photos. Apple's new $1 billion data center in North Carolina will be a hub for iTunes and MobileMe.
The revamped MobileMe service could be available next month, reports Apple Insider.
Apple was awarded 23 patents today, including one for its video conferencing iChat service and several related to the design of the iPhone 4, reports Patently Apple.
Social networking is apparently Apple's new motif. The company has filed six social networking patents in the past year. The development of social networking apps are a key part of plans for the next generation iPhone 5 and iPad 2.
Apple recently submitted a patent application that indicates the company is working on a way to improve blurry photos. In the past week alone, Apple has filed a total of 10 camera-related patents in a major push to improve the quality of pictures taken with the iPhone. Jack Purcher takes a detailed look at the latest patents in a blog post in Patently Apple. Read more
Apple spent $4 million to fix up a subway station and build a beautiful plaza in front of its newest Chicago store. Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury News suggests that Apple's genius for public works should be a model for future stimulus programs. Read more
Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are becoming more than just dominant technology companies. They are well on their way to becoming the news, entertainment and communications networks of the 21st century, reports Wired. Read more
It's been a long time since I've seen a good fight. I'm a lifelong boxing fan. I have fond memories of watching the Gillette Friday Night Fights with my dad in our South Central Los Angeles apartment in the late 1950s. We moved to the tough inner city neighborhood from a tenement on the southside of Chicago, the windy city where my mother was born. The current battle between the two Silicon Valley titans, Apple and Google, is the closest thing to a good heavyweight fight that I've seen since Muhammad Ali's Thrilla in Manila and Rumble in the Jungle boxing matches captured the public's imagination over 35 years ago.
This current Silicon Valley battle, like the Ali-Frazier and Ali-Foreman fights, has seen a lot of trash talking - a veritable vanilla rapper's delight. Like contemporary rappers, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has the bling. And Google will tell you to show me the ad money. They like to talk about cash money - dollar bills, yall.
Google co-founder Sergy Brin has his hands full
Cash is king at Google. It has $33.4 billion in cash, and cash equivalents.
Their recent introduction of Google TV is, in part, an attempt to tap into the lucrative television advertising market, estimated to be worth $83 billion, according to the Difffusion Group.
Google recently predicted that online display advertising will grow to become a $50 billion market by 2015. Yahoo has long been the display ad market leader. Google has made great strides in this area recently and is now running neck and neck with Yahoo. With the integration of YouTube and its lucrative display ad business into its new TV platform, Google threatens to surpass and dominate Yahoo in display advertising like it does in online search advertising.
When announcing its recent third quarter results, Google said that its display ad revenue has reached $2.5 billion on an annual basis. This includes YouTube advertisement and ads on the DoubleClick platform. YouTube sales are growing as they are now monetizing over two billion views per week. That's an increase of 50 percent over last year.
YouTube Leanback was recently released to coincide with the launch of Google TV. Leanback was designed, in part, to recreate the traditional TV experience. Currently, people who watch YouTube videos spend, on average, about 15 minutes a day viewing clips. However, they spend an average of five hours a day watching television. Prior to its integration with Google TV, lab results indicate that people spent twice the 15-minute average watching customized Leanback videos. That will significantly increase potential ad revenue.
"Google TV is going to revolutionize the way we use media," declares Shattuck Groome, president of New York ad agency Gotham Direct Interactive. "It's the future of advertising."
Google TV will let advertisers reach viewers faster. The Google TV platform will also give advertisers more transparency when analyzing viewer data. Advertisers will know exactly who viewed their ad, how many people clicked on it, and how many viewers used a "click-to-call" feature to contact advertisers immediately.
TV advertising is much less expensive with Google TV. An online video ad cost about $30 per 1,000 viewings, according to the Diffusion Group. Jeroen Coppelmans, a vice-president at Spotzer Media, which puts together video ads for small businesses, says that "someone with a budget of a couple of dollars a day could do TV advertising."
The new Google TV is integrated in high-definition Sony televisions and Blu-ray players and a set-top box made by Logitech.
The most notable of the numerous apps designed for Google TV is one for NBC's CNBC that allows users to track stocks and access news alongside the business channel's live broadcasts. Both Amazon and Netflix have video apps.
Square, a San Francisco startup headed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is preparing to rollout a device that plugs into a smartphone and allows users to process payments. The ground-breaking scanning device is currently being mass produced and used in a private beta.
Square's new payment service will face competition from a new mobile phone scanning unit being developed by Intuit. Apple is also rumored to be planning a competing product.
Like many investors, I dumped Google's stock following its January 12 announcement that it would no longer censor the results of its search engine in China. Google was one of the top holdings of my Silicon Valley 2.0 fund. The portfolio has outperformed the S&P by over 30 percent annually for the last two years and I did not want to let Google's China Syndrome drag the fund down.
The tide has begun to turn for the Silicon Valley titan recently as its Google Voice initiative gains traction. Its stock has outperformed the tech-laden Nasdaq since its August 25 announcement that Google Voice has been enhanced to allow its users to make and receive calls through Gmail. The emergence of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and the distinct possibility that Google may dominate this telecommunications paradigm shift, has settled the nerves of anxious investors.
An epic battle is brewing over the future of communications. When Google Voice introduced its Gmail feature, it was advertised as an historic event. A promotional infograph and short video chronicled the history of modern human communications. It's ironic that a Federal Communications Commission investigation into Apple's initial rejection of a Google Voice app for the iPhone involves the three most important corporations in the past, present and future of communications. The third party to the FCC investigation, AT&T, was once the most widely held stock, largest and most respected company in the world. Riding the coattails of the shift to wireless communications and the popularity of the iPhone, Apple now reigns supreme. Google does not appear to have lost its mojo, however, as it waits in the wings while it lays the groundwork for the future - VoIP.
The VoIP market is set to double in the next five years to $20 billion, according to forecasts by ABI Research. A huge part of that growth comes from the rapidly increasing deployment of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking, which enables voice and video communications over the internet. The proliferation of SIP trunking has led to the skyrocketing use of Session Border Controllers, devices that control the traffic and provide security for VoIP networks. "The SBC market is on fire," exclaims Diane Myers in an Infonetics Research report last month.
The SBC market leader is Acme Packet. The Bedford, Massachusetts company is the top holding in my iTech fund, which has outperformed the S&P by over 31 percent annually. Acme's stock has more than quadrupled over the past year. Its revenue is forecast to grow some 54 percent for the fiscal year ending in December.
As efforts to stem the erosion of legacy landlines have proved futile, both AT&T and Verizon have begun to deploy residential VoIP services more widely. Last year, Verizon announced that it plans to move to an all-IP network in seven years. VoIP services for Verizon Wireless customers are also being overhauled as the telco giant builds out its next generation LTE network. "By 2012, the voice we sell on LTE will be VoIP," says Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless CEO.
Silicon Valley startup Lala is building the next generation in digital music. Last year, Lala unveiled a service that provides web access to an existing music library such as iTunes. Lala is trying to move beyond the approach of uploading MP3 files from a PC. The Palo Alto-based firm gives users the option of paying 99 cents to download one song, or paying 10 cents for a Web-hosted song that they can access from any internet-connected device. The service allows you to sample any song in the their catalog once for free, and keep up to 50 songs in their online collection. "Music belongs online," say CEO Geoff Ralston. Before taking the helm at Lala, Ralston helped to create RocketMail, the predecessor to Yahoo! Mail.
Lala was launched in 2007. It initially started as a CD-swapping service. They later morphed into internet radio. Last year, however, they finally found their niche. All four major music labels and many independents are now onboard. Unlike other similar music services, Lala does not have a subscription fee, and it is free of advertising. The downloads are also DRM-free.
Lala and a host of streaming music sites with free content are being used by a growing number of listeners as a substitute for buying music, reports BusinessWeek. Read more
Windows' market share increased last month following the January release of a public beta for its successor to Vista, reports Computerworld. Following the release of the Windows 7 beta, Apple's Mac OS X witnessed its largest monthly market share decline in more than a year and a half.
A Faces and Places feature in Apple's new iPhoto lets you organize and search for photos by who is in them and where they were shot. IPhoto is part of the latest iLife '09 software suite. The updated iLife also features new versions of iMovie and GarageBand.
Premiere Pro CS4's new features include the ability to import and complete projects from Apple's Final Cut Pro professional video editing software. Avid and Final Cut are Premiere's chief competition.
Google plans to launch a service that will allow users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to TG Daily. Google Drive, or Gdrive, will pose a major challenge to Microsoft's Windows. Gdrive is essentially cloud-based storage where Google data centers have the capacity to hold your entire hard drive.
Twenty-five years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh. He pulled the 20-pound Mac from a bag, and let the Macintalk speech synthesizer do part of the introduction. AppleInsider has chronicled Apple's 25-year history. Time has captured the moments in pictures.
Despite the recession, IT salaries are still high in Silicon Valley and London. In the Bay Area, software development managers were paid the most, at $136,000 per year.
