Sirius XM Still Shedding Customers, Albeit More Slowly

Sirius XM continues to bleed customers, although at a much slower pace than the first quarter of this year, numbers released Thursday morning show. The satellite radio provider shed 186,000 customers in the second quarter, an improvement from the 404,000 customers it lost in the first.

Regardless, the satellite radio provider is still losing customers, the wrong way to go when you’re already struggling to make money so as it is. Pro forma revenue was in at $608 million, which was a 1% improvement year over year. Losses were $171 million, an improvement over last years $203 million loss.

Some of this improvement can be credited to a further reduction in subscriber acquisition costs, now down to $57 from a year ago. Additionally, monthly average revenue per subscriber edged up 11 cents to $10.66.

It is also continuing to pull a bigger profit from operations, now up to $132 million in the current quarter.

There is still trouble ahead for Sirius XM however. Beginning this month,  a $2 royalty fee at minimum will be tacked on to every subscriber’s bill. It will be interesting to see the effect this may have on subscriber numbers. If we see a worsening again in the third quarter numbers out this fall, we’ll know the likely cause.

Regardless, the company must keep a hold of its customers. All this improvement can easily be stymied or wiped out if the company has an increasingly smaller base of customers. The biggest thing now is focusing on keeping current customers happy.

Programming — which from the looks of things appears to be Sirius XM’s weak spot — is job one. It’s clear that many are not responding to the “FM-plus” strategy carried over from Sirius, and much rather would prefer deeper playlists, which was XM’s biggest strength.

I’m reserving judgement until next quarter whether this merger can ever be a success. I’m still not sure yet.

The Mice That Didn’t Make It

Once again, I’ve been happily wallowing in old documents at Google Patents. This time, I emerged with a bunch of patents for mice and other input devices–none of which had the impact that their creators hoped, and some of which are downright bizarre.

View Mouse Trouble slideshow.

Mouse Trouble: 20 Weird Pointing Device Patents

Build a better mousetrap, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously told us, and the world will beat a path to your door. On the other hand, computer-industry folks have been trying to build a better mouse for years–and the world has stayed away from 99 percent of them, including some fascinating works of unbridled mad genius. I’ve assembled a gallery of ill-fated mice (plus a few trackballs and mousepads), mostly drawn from the invaluable Google Patents. Some of these presumably turned into real products; others never got off the drawing board. Herewith, brief moments of delayed glory for all of them.

Bing Gets a Jingle

I just this very moment formulated a new theory about search engines: It may be impossible to do good TV-style advertising for them. They’re free, you can try them at will, and if they’re not pretty self-explanatory, they’ve failed from the get-go. All of which makes it hard to spend thirty seconds saying anything useful about them.

With that in mind, my instinct is not to judge the user-generated Bing jingle video that won Microsoft’s contest too harshly. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler compares it to Hell; I just find it…odd. (Possibly intentionally so, and odd in a catchy way, at least.) And except for the fact that the lyrics wouldn’t scan, it could be about any other search engine on the planet, from Google to a tenth-stringer like Mamma.

(I’m not going to stoop for criticizing the ad for the fact that the queries shown, such as “Learn to dance like Jonathan,” don’t provide useful results in Bing or any other search engine.)

Also looking on the bright side: It’s nowhere near as odd and ineffective as years and years of Ask.com ads that cost that company way, way more money than the $500 that Microsoft paid its contest winner.

Another plus: Bing’s new singing, dancing spokesman doesn’t vomit onscreen.

(Full disclosure: Bing is an advertiser on this site, and I’m a contributor to the Bing-sponsored BingTweets.)

Google Acquisition Could Move HTML 5 Ahead

Google’s $106.5 million acquisition of video technology maker On2 Technologies today could signal that it intends to make technology freely available for the next version of HTML, someday eliminating the need for plug-ins such as Flash for video playback on the Web.

On2 Technologies is best known for its VP7 and VP8 video codecs. The codecs could be used to enable seamless video playback within HTML 5 compatible Web browsers such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Opera, and Safari.

HTML 5 is an upcoming version of the HTML standard that has support for audio, graphics and video, as well as interactive document editing. It is incomplete, and has been implemented in browsers in a piecemeal fashion.

HTML is the lingua franca of the Web, but the Web had changed a great deal since HTML 4 was published in December 1997. Industry powerhouses have been plugging away at the HTML 5 draft specification ever since.

The scope of the next-generation Web protocol is very ambitious, and not surprisingly, it has not been without controversy. HTML 5 includes a video element to enable playback without requiring any additional plug-ins or software, and the HTML 5 working group has been split over what uniform video codec should be used.

The working group’s inability to move beyond the impasse has threatened the inclusion of the video element in HTML 5. One camp (that includes Apple and Google) has supported H.264, a codec that requires implementers to pay patent licensing royalties. Others, including Mozilla and Opera, favor Ogg Theora, an open source solution.

Google has already incorporated elements of HTML 5 into its Chrome Web browser, and has begun to utilize it in its Web applications. It has also been experimenting with an HTML 5 edition of YoutTube–sans Flash.

“Today video is an essential part of the Web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, in a prepared statement. “We are committed to innovation in video quality on the Web, and we believe that On2′s team and technology will help us further that goal.”

HTML is obviously a part of the company’s long term technology plan, and ushering it along by releasing the On2 codecs into the public domain would be compatible with that goal.

Hands-On With GameFly’s G-Box Kiosk

Apparently I missed the news that Gamefly is trying to pull a Redbox with video game rental kiosks, because the first I heard of it was this morning, when an e-mail alerted me to their existence.

The e-mail — sent to me as a Gamefly subscriber, not a journalist — included an offer for a free, one-night rental, normally valued at $2. For gaming, one night is essentially nothing unless you don’t plan to sleep, but nonetheless I headed to one of the two 7-Elevens listed in the e-mail to take a look. (Strangely, Gamefly’s G-Box landing page doesn’t say where else you can find the kiosks.)

Continue reading this story…

Windows 7: Already Buggy?

InfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy has blogged about reports of a bug with the Chkdsk utility in the RTM (final release version) of Windows 7 that could cause the OS to blue-screen. Kennedy attempted to replicate the problem on three Windows 7 configurations; they didn’t blue-screen, but did spawn a memory leak that gobbled up massive amounts of RAM.

Meanwhile, Ed Bott has also looked into the situation and concludes that whatever’s happening isn’t likely to crop up often enough or cause serious enough grief to be classified as a showstopper. And as Ed notes, Windows head honcho Steven Sinofsky has commented on another blog that reported on all this, saying that Chkdsk intentionally grabs a lot of memory to speed things up, and that Microsoft hasn’t been able to replicate the crash but it is looking into it.

Assuming that this is a real Win 7 issue that Microsoft can fix– but not in time to get it onto the first Windows 7 PCs–I suspect that it’ll roll out a patch that will be ready and waiting for installation by the time Windows 7 arrives on October 22nd.  Swatting bugs during the time between finishing RTM code and software actually getting to consumers seems to be standard practice these days; I’ve even talked to industryfolk (not at Microsoft) who cheerfully admit that it’s part of how they make deadlines.

Whether the issue Kennedy wrote about is a serious bug, a minor one or (as Sinofsky says) a feature, Windows 7 will be buggy. So will Apple’s Snow Leopard when it ships. So is all software–especially major updates to big, complex applications such as operating systems. That’s why Kennedy’s concluding advice makes sense:

What this latest episode has taught me is that no major release of Windows –- not even one that is more or less a supersized patch of the previous version –- deserves a pass, and that the old wisdom of “wait for the first service pack” still applies with Windows 7.

I’m enthusiastic about Windows 7 myself–hey, I’ve been running pre-release versions since last year. But I’ll still advise many friends (especially the less adventuresome among them) that it can’t hurt to let other people discover Windows 7′s worst glitches before making the move from XP or Vista.

The T-Poll: Apple’s iPhone App Acceptance Policy

Hey, let’s try something new–a fresh T-Poll (powered by the wonderful PollDaddy) every weekday. For our first one, let’s revisit the ongoing story of Apple’s, um, unpredictable behavior when it comes to approving third-party applications for the iPhone App Store–the latest chapter of which involves it censoring a dictionary and then restricting sales to people over 17 anyhow. (Here’s John Gruber’s account over at Daring Fireball, which includes some of the words Apple required be purged.)

More Tablet Naysaying

Over at Cnet, Rafe Needleman joins the chorus of entirely rational skepticism that the world is ready for a tablet computer from Apple or anyone else:

But what you can do with a screen-only computer gets really limited when you expand the device beyond pocket size. There are two big limitations. First, you need a keyboard for doing real work. At least most people do. Perhaps a generation of kids will grow up that are as speedy on a virtual keyboard as they are on a real one, but until then anyone who does more than write quick e-mails and Twitter messages on a computer will want to take a keyboard with them. And typing on the screen, even if you can do it, is an ergo disaster. Either you have to keep your hands up in the air (if the computer is mounted vertically in front of you) or you have to hunch over your screen to see it. Maybe it’s the national chiropractors association that’s pushing this form factor.

Well said–except that I think it’s possible that the Apple tablet, if it exists, will skirt the issue by focusing on stuff that requires minimal typing. You don’t need a a keyboard to watch movies, listen to music, or play games; you barely need one to read e-books; you can do a lot of stuff on the Web that involves typing only a few words here and there.

One of the reasons I hope Apple does indeed launch a tablet in September is simply so the world can start critiquing the real thing rather than a theoretical Apple tablet–whether the world turns out to love it or hate it…

Chrome Gets a New Version. No, Not for the Mac.

Google has released a new beta of the Windows version of its Chrome browser. The company says it’s faster, and it’s also added basic skinning, an improved New Tab feature, tweaks to the Omnibox address bar, and more HTML 5 support.

I say “the Windows version,” but that’s the only version of Chrome to receive a formal release to date, more than eleven months after Google got into the browser business. Developers builds of the OS X version are increasingly polished, though. Wouldn’t it be cool if Google celebrated the browser’s first birthday by finally bringing it to Mac users? (For now, Chrome is the browser I use most often these days when I’m using one of my Windows PCs; when I’m on a Mac, I’m usually a Firefox person.)

Five Net Tricks to Save You Money

“You’re a bargain hunter,” one of my more polite friends says. My wife’s more to the point: She calls me a cheapskate. I like being frugal, but what do I know? Call me whatever you want (you will anyway), I don’t like paying retail and I’m always looking for a deal, especially when shopping online.

The Internet gives me the chance to comparison shop, see how shipping figures into the price, look over specifications, and feel confident I’ve found the best buy. Here are some of the sites I use.

* You can pick up a decent amount of background info on an assortment of activities and projects at WhatItCosts. Some of it’s fluffy — what it costs to become a stuntman or to buy a Diane Von Furstenberg dress. Other topics are worth a look: buying a hearing aid or contact lenses, hiring a landscape architect, or learning how to fly fish. [Thanks, Mike.]

* The showstopper when I’m shopping online is the cost of shipping. I’ll find something that looks like a bargain, say, a $3 chew bone for Popcorn, TechBite’s HR specialist. When I get to the checkout page, I discover shipping’s $11. I want to smack the site’s owner on the back of the head. That’s why I’ve added FreeShipping to my shopping arsenal. Sure, not everything’s a good match and I often get the same info if I go directly to the site. Yet I got lucky recently when I spotted dog.com’s $5 flat-rate shipping and ended up placing a $25 order. (And yes, prices were actually lower than competitors on the Water Hole water dish I was looking for.)

* I discovered AntiRebate a couple of months ago and now I get its daily RSS feed. AntiRebate finds bargains — coupons, discounts, and deals — that don’t require a rebate. For instance, I spotted a 2GB microSD card for $5, including shipping, and last year I picked up a $10 Office Max gift card for filling out a short, one-minute survey for DHL. The site has mostly high-tech offers, yet I’ve seen occasional glassware, cookware, and furniture deals.

* I hate it when I get to the end of the checkout process and I see an annoying “Enter your Coupon Code” field. So I kill 40 minutes Googling around, searching for a code, one that sometimes doesn’t exist. (Yeah, sure, like you don’t do it? Right.) Try CurrentCodes, a handy spot for looking up, well, the current codes for tons of online stores. Like these other sites, sometimes it’s a terrific resource, other times, as Jon Stewart says, not so much.

* If you clip supermarket coupons, take a look at Shortcuts, MyCoupons, CouponCabin, and CouponMom.

[This post is excerpted from Steve's TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up--it's delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it's free.]

5Words for Wednesday, August 5th 2009

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Google buys a video company.

Mozilla’s online store gets hacked.

Netbook users: hide Gmail labels.

Microsoft: Yes, Linux threatens Windows.

BlackBerry Curve: top-selling smartphone.

Sprint’s WiMax-and-3g router.

Are fuel cells almost here?

Apple censors an English dictionary.

Give away stuff with Listia.

iPhone users: they’re revolting! Maybe…

The Search for the World’s Best Presentation

I’ve been writing about presentations and tools and tips for creating and conducting them since the Mesozoic era–way back when you most likely created your slides with Harvard Graphics, and maybe even printed them out on overhead transparencies. Today, I’m pleased to be one of the judges of The World’s Best Presentation Contest ’09. The competition is being held over at Slideshare, the neat service for embedding presentations in Web pages–so everyone who’s interested can see all the entries. And there are some neat prizes to be won, including a MacBook Pro, a Kindle DX, an iPhone 3GS, an HP TouchSmart laptop, and copies of Adobe’s Acrobat 9 and Creative Suite CS4.

I’m one of the judges for a category for presentations created with Acrobat 9–Adobe is the sponsor of the whole contest this year–along with Scott Belsky of Behance and Julie Hansen of The Business Insider. And three presentations I put together are on Slideshare. The contest is running through September 8th–check out the entries and spread the word!

TWTRCON Hits the Nation’s Capital

Back in May, the first edition of TWTRCON–the conference on Twitter for business which I’m proud to have come up with–was held in San Francisco.  It was a hit. And Modern Media, the events’s organizers, are taking the show to Washington DC. TWTRCON DC 09 will be held at the Grand Hyatt Washington DC on October 22nd; the keynote speaker is Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and folks from Dunkin Donuts, the NHL, H&R Block, Intuit, and PepsiCo have agreed to share their knowledge, with more to come. As before, the topic is how to leverage the power of Twitter to make your business more successful, but given the venue, there will also be discussion of Twitter and government.

It should be a productive, provocative time–I hope you’ll attend if you’d like to learn what some very smart people are doing with the country’s hottest social network. Check out the TWTRCON site for ongoing updates on plans for the event.

Nintendo’s Wii Vitality Sensor: Vaporware?

Okay, so it’s becoming clear that Nintendo doesn’t know exactly what to do with the Wii Vitality Sensor. The gadget, which supposedly measures pulse and other vitals from a player’s finger, was briefly introduced at E3 to a curious, if not bewildered press. Two months later, Nintendo brainchild Shigeru Miyamoto still won’t say how, exactly, the peripheral will be used.

“Ideally we would have been able to talk about this in terms of the software implementation rather than just the sensor itself,” Miyamoto told Mercury News. “I don’t have any indication for you (of what we have in the works) other than to say that we have lots of very creative ideas.”

Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera calls the sensor’s unveiling a misstep, because Nintendo failed to furnish any software that makes the hardware seem irresistible. I’ll take this a step further and say the Wii Vitality Sensor is headed towards Nintendo’s small but historically significant pile of video gaming vaporware.

The most notable of these half-baked failures is the Nintendo 64DD. This hardware expansion had considerable clout among my neighborhood friends, promising what seemed like infinite gaming muscle and endless possibilities. We read about it in Nintendo Power, waiting for a North American release that never came. Long after we had forgotten it, the Nintendo 64DD was released mainly as a subscription service in Japan, where it flopped.

There are other examples, like the Sony-developed SNES CD that ultimately evolved into the Playstation, along with “Project Atlantis,” a powerful successor to the Game Boy that was never officially confirmed, though it surfaced from obscurity this year. Though not exactly vaporware, there was also an unnamed, unexplained Nintendo handheld that was completed a few years ago and then scrapped.

It’s said that when Nintendo shelves an idea, the company tends to recycle it into future projects. This happened with a touch screen peripheral for the Game Boy Advance that eventually became the Nintendo DS, and I can see it happening again with the Wii Vitality Sensor. It’s not a flat-out bad idea, but it’ll have a tough time standing on its own. If we ever start hearing about the sensor in any significant detail, I’m guessing it will have already morphed into a different product altogether.

Sony Shrinks the Size and Cost of E-Books

If Sony is a bit nonplussed over all the attention for Amazon’.coms Kindle, it’s understandable. The Japanese consumer-electronics behemoth beat Amazon to market with e-book readers that share much of the Kindle’s appeal and technology, and their current touchscreen model arguably has a better interface than the Kindle 2. (Of course, the Kindle benefits hugely from its wireless connection and large selection of new books.)

Now Sony’s striking back with a couple of interesting new e-readers–including one called the Reader Pocket Edition (seen at left) that has a five-inch e-ink screen and a $199 pricetag, $100 less than the Kindle 2. Its very name pitches it as being pocketable; I haven’t seen one in person, but I’m guessing that the five-inch display means it’ll be a tight fit in a shirt pocket. (The pocket-filling iPhone has a 3.5-inch screen).

I’ll be intrigued to see if a relatively cheap, relatively small e-reader will appeal to folks who haven’t splurged on a Kindle. It’s true that iPhones and iPods Touch already make pretty pleasing e-readers thanks to apps like Kindle for iPhone and Eucalyptus, but the Pocket Edition’s screen is larger and its E-Ink display should let it run for days on a charge.

Sony is also announcing the Reader Touch Edition (at right), a touchscreen model which matches the Kindle’s six-inch screen and $299 price, but doesn’t have wireless. (Sony told ZDnet that it’s working on a wireless device.) It’s also matching Amazon’s price of $9.99 for bestsellers and new releases–down from $11.99–and touting its million-book library, although that figure includes a lotta public-domain tomes from Google.

People keep treating the Plastic Logic reader as the Kindle’s principal rival, and maybe it will be, once it stops being vaporous (it’s due sometime next year). For now, though, it’s really an Amazon-Sony battle–and it’s nice to see Sony coming back for more.

Are you any more interested in a $199 five-inch Sony e-reader (sans wireless) than in a $299 six-inch Amazon one?