Author Archive | Ed Oswald

comScore: Black Friday Online Sales Up 1%

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 1, 2008 at 10:23 am

The US’s biggest retail shopping day of the year turned out fine after all, although the results were likely nowhere near as good as investors would have liked. While data shows brick-and-mortar retail sales were up 3 percent, online sales rose only 1 percent.

comScore says that $534 million was spent by consumers online on Friday, likely attracted by better-than-normal deals being offered by desperate retailers. There was some crazy deals: the Epson store offered its R280 photo printer for $29.99, a $70 savings.

Traditionally, heavier online shopping comes today, known as “Cyber Monday.” This is basically due to the fact that as people return to work, they use their downtime to further complete their holiday shopping. It has also been perpetuated by online retailers, which have begun to offer special deals just for the day.

Looking around, there’s not as many deals this year, although Best Buy has its own special page as does competitor Circuit City. comScore says to watch the growth for Cyber Monday: typically it has come within a few percentage points of the overall holiday season growth for online shopping.

If comScore is right, expect that number to be flat. The firm says it sees no growth year-over-year for online shopping.

No comments

Twitter Shuts Down SMS in Canada

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 26, 2008 at 2:41 pm

Twitter logoThe micro-blogging service has now pulled the plug on outbound SMS alerts, citing escalating costs. This is the second market where usage of the SMS functionality has been restricted. The other country to lose SMS was the UK, where the plug was pulled in August.

Canadians will still be able to send Tweets to the Canadian shortcode (21212), but “unexpected changes in our billing” caused the company to stop outgoing texts. It claims costs have doubled over the past two months to continue providing the service.

“There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress,” the company said in a post it its status blog.

It is unclear what this means to the future of Twitter SMS here in the US, although the company has said earlier that deals with carriers are allowing the tweets to continue flowing.

However, with still no real revenue stream, and venture capital funding nearly the entire operation, its not hard to imagine that SMS may be considered non-essential when it comes time to make some cuts to save money.

No comments

eBay Struggles, Pageviews Declining Significantly

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 25, 2008 at 2:12 pm

ebaylogoNext time you hear some media talking head claiming that hurting consumers are running to eBay in droves for better deals, you can call their bluff. Nielsen released data that shows the auction site is continuing to lose eyes as the economy worsens. The data shows a precipitous drop off beginning in September, right around the time the US economy really began to tank.

eBay saw its some of its best times late last year, averaging around 13.5-14.5 million pageviews per month during the holiday season. However, after those good times, the auction site began a essentially steady decline.

You can almost see the point when consumers began to panic. August shows about 11 million pageviews, but by September that had fallen to 9.4 million. October was even worse, ending at about 9.1 million pageviews. The August to September drop was the largest decline outside of the normal post-holiday slump in two years of data.

Now forgive me here — I am no math major — but I’m going to do some number crunching. Using last holiday as a guide, it looks like we can expect about a 10% or so bump up for the holidays. Even if this occurs, eBay’s traffic would be down about 20-30% year over year. This seems about right — October’s traffic numbers were down a third from last year.

The economy may not be the only reason here. Silicon Alley Insider (which I think goes a bit overboard with the title, it is not that bad yet) surmises that stronger competition as well as the fact that eBay’s value proposition isn’t as great is also helping to accelerate the decline.

I’d agree with this: eBay has become less of a bargain these days. I’m noticing that more and more items look like a good deal at first glance, yet the money’s being made elsewhere, whether through “handling” charges, or obviously inflated shipping costs.

eBay’s not helping either, alienating some of its sellers by tinkering with its selling fees far too much.

For those of you that like pretty little charts, I’ve included this data graphically after the jump.

Continue Reading →

7 comments

Confirmed: Cisco Shutting Down For Four Days

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 25, 2008 at 10:25 am

Cisco logoTechnologizer has confirmed claims by UBS Research that Cisco is preparing to shut down for four days at the end of this year in a likely effort to cut costs. It would be the first time in the company’s history, and probably means things in Silcon Valley are worse than we think. The information comes from an employee within the company.

Add to this some details from Om Malik, who claims that an “major annual internal event” has also been postponed, and you must begin to question how well Cisco’s doing. Altogether, the effort would save the company about $1 billion. (Our source says he knew nothing about any event cancellations).

This is in addition to a hiring freeze and cutback of non-essential events as part of a broader plan to save money in 2009. With such uncertainty, that is probably a good idea.

No comments

Zune Pass Update is Just A Band-Aid, Nothing More

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 24, 2008 at 2:52 pm

Ed Bott’s take on Microsoft’s new Zune Pass update over at ZDNet is glowing. But there’s no part of it that I agree with. Where do we start?

Essentially, the price of the subscription service stays the same at $15, but now you are given 10 free “credits” to keep some of the tracks you have downloaded.

This means the subscription portion of the service costs an extra $5 per month. Nothing really new here: Yahoo was offering a $5 a month subscription service years ago, so its not like this price is some novel idea. Zune was overpriced to begin with.

Continue Reading →

19 comments

Apple Sued Over Safari Mobile Technology

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 24, 2008 at 12:53 pm

apple-logo-2Apple is the target of a lawsuit over its use of certain technologies within Safari Mobile, the browser used on both the iPhone and iPod touch devices. Filed in US District Court in Tyler, Texas, the suit alleges technologies that allow Apple to display and navigate web pages infringes on a patent awarded just last month to a Los Angeles based firm who also apparently has a location in Tyler.

EMG Technology is the holder of the patent. The company was founded by Elliot Gottfurcht along with two partners. Apple may not be the only one to be sued: the company said that it is also looking into suing HTC and RIM as well for similar infringement.

The patent involved, #7,441,196, is described as such on the US Patent Office website: as an “apparatus and method of manipulating a region on a wireless device screen for viewing, zooming and scrolling internet content.”

Lawyers for EMG elaborate:

“the ‘196 patent claims cover the display of Internet content reformatted from HTML to XML on mobile devices — the industry standard currently displayed by the iPhone. Additional patent claims include the technology for manipulating a region of the screen for zooming and scrolling.”

It did admit in an interview with Reuters that it specifically targeted Apple due to it’s popularity. I have to say, however, wouldn’t it have been probably more worth it to go after RIM since it has about three times the share right now? Just a thought.

Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro have been tapped to represent EMG in the case. This law firm has experience in prosecuting some large infringement cases, including a $1.35 billion verdict against Medtronic in 2005, one of the largest judgements ever for an intellectual property dispute.

Damages in this case are unspecified, however.

Apple is not commenting on the situation as it has a standing policy of not commenting on ongoing litigation.

3 comments

Twitter Sounds Like a Good Fit for Facebook

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 24, 2008 at 9:09 am

twitterNews has surfaced from Kara Swisher at AllThingsDigital about apparent talks that had been ongoing between Twitter and Facebook. Under the discussed terms, Facebook would have acquired the micro-blogging site for $500 million in Facebook stock. Facebook initiated the talks in mid-October, but they seemed to have broken off sometime around the beginning of this month.

The reasons for the breakdown in talks was the typical merger concerns over integration and whatnot. However, it also appears as if some within Twitter wanted to first try to build up the revenue side of their business on their own before looking outside of the company.

As it is well known. Twitter has no real revenue stream, and is being funded by venure capalists. With the economy going sound — and VC with it — now may be a good time to get that going.

In any case, it seems at least to me that Twitter would be a great fit for Facebook. The social networking site’s users are already familiar with twitter-like functionality through status updates, and Twitter users could stand to benefit from Facebook’s development team which likely could assist in making the service more stable.

$500 million is also more than a fair price to offer for Twitter. The latest round of funding put a value of the company at about $100 million, and as I’ve said previously, it has no real incoming revenue.

I’m not sure how Twitter thinks it is going to monetize the system, or why they should wait. With such uncertianty in the economy, just take the money and run.

3 comments

Double Whammy of Economy and Apple is Doing Palm In

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 21, 2008 at 2:02 pm

palmlogoPalm sure is having a rough go of it. For all intents and purposes, the company is getting it from both sides as intense competition from Apple eats into its already lagging market share and the economy worsens. This adds up to a lot of pressure on the company’s bottom line, and whenever that happens you know layoffs are not far behind.

Valleywag is reporting that Palm will layoff about 10 percent of its workforce. The company is confirming that the reports of job losses are correct, however it wouldn’t confirm the number. With about 1,000 employees, this would mean about 100 or so will find themselves out of work really soon if the reports are correct.

I can’t see why they would not be. Look at the company’s stock price. It has taken an absolute beating, falling from a September high of around $8.50 a share in September to $2.24 as of the stock market close Friday. That means the company has lost nearly 75% of its market value in just two months.

Secondly, the market share issue. Just using enterprise market share shows how fast Palm has fallen. In February 2007, the company held about 22 percent of the market, according to ChangeWave Research. Now, it holds only five percent. Compare this to Apple. It has gone from no market share to 22 percent in that same period.

Pretty obvious where Apple is getting its newfound marketshare from, isn’t it?

Add to this that the company is currently undergoing some restructuring under new chairman Jon Rubenstein, and the layoffs do make sense. Of course, these are happening at a horrible time, and its going to be tough for folks handed the pink slips to find comparable work.

Bottom line is it has to be done. The company is quite vulnerable right now, and if it does not act quickly, it could find itself in a whole its not going to be able to dig itself out of.

2 comments

Fox News: Pentagon Target of Cyber Attack

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 21, 2008 at 1:22 pm

Fox News is reporting that the Pentagon was the target of a cyber attack so severe that it has now banned the use of all external memory devices, such as flash drives and the like. Apparently, some type of worm or virus has been unleashed on the agency’s computer network, and is quickly spreading throughout the system.

Officials are not specifing what type of worm or virus it may be, only saying an alert had been posted for it, and that it was “taking steps to mitigate the virus.” The computers affected are part of the Global Information Grid, or GIG, and for security reasons the Pentagon does not speak on the specifics of intrusions to that system.

A guess as to what the malware may be could be gleaned from a post to the Symantec Security Response blog from Wednesday. It warns of an increase in USB-based malware attacks, and listed several different viruses and worms known to be using removable drives as a way to propogate themselves.

No comments

iSuppli Slashes PC Sales Outlook for 2009

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 20, 2008 at 2:48 pm

Next up on the bad tech economy news parade: iSuppli. The analyst firm sent out an advisory Thursday indicating that it was reducing its PC unit shipments forecast for growth by a stunning two-thirds. The reason? You guessed it, the economy.

The changes mean that instead of the 11.9 percent growth it had projected back in September (with the way things have been changing so rapidly, that now seems like an eternity ago), it now sees only 4.3 percent growth in 2009. iSuppli has also revised down its forecast for 2010, although it does show some improvement over 2009 nonetheless: 7.1 percent growth, down from its earlier forecast of 9.4 percent.

Analyst Michael Wilkins directly mentions the credit crisis as having a large impact on larger-ticket purchases like PCs, and its hurting the consumer as well as the enterprise.

“The result of the financial turmoil is less money to spend, and often that money is itself more expensive,” Wilkins said. “With less money to spend, application markets, like PCs, have been impacted.” All in all, we shouldn’t really complain. The PC market has had solid growth for the past five years, growing at double digit rates. 2008 was to be the sixth straight year, but now it appears as if that will not happen.

Regardless of market conditions notebook PCs should still manage to post growth, up 15 percent this year. Desktops on the other hand will continue to see shrinking sales, down five percent from 2007.

No word from either Gartner nor NPD, which also produce PC sales forecasts on whether they’ll be doing some face-saving by tamping down growth numbers a bit.

2 comments