Seth Gilbert, 04-24-2009
Amazon beat the street Thursday with a 24% gain in earnings and operating margins well ahead of expectations but true to form, the company broke out little detail on its high buzz, in-house, product, the Kindle.
Kindle is a tiny part of Amazon’s larger retail and services businesses and at this point, the company is choosing to keep the product’s performance metrics under wraps. Fortunately, for those looking for color, iSuppli recently completed a tear-down of the eBook reader. The results can’t shine a light on sales totals or consumer demand but they do give a hint at the margins Kindle’s making on hardware sales.
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Jon Miles, 04-23-2009
Last week under the weight of the economy Google reported its first sequential drop in revenue since going public in 2004. Thursday, Microsoft revealed similar wounds.
Hurt by weak PC sales, the company posted its first year over year revenue decline in twenty three years.
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Seth Gilbert,
The iPhone is a great device, there’s no denying its innovations but the phone’s greatest competitive advantage may well be the platform not the product. A few minutes ago, Apple’s supporting “App Store” passed a billion downloads.
A billion downloads in about nine months? That translates to an estimated 37 million customers (representing Apple’s disclosure for combined iPhone and iPod Touch unit sales), downloading 27 programs a piece – and with no sign of slowing down.
It took Apple six months to hit 500m in January. It took only three months, to double up.
Apple will no doubt promote the achievement, but even without any hype – it’s staggering. It’s hard to think of any product or service (technology or otherwise) that’s had that kind of consumer uptake in comparable scale and speed.
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Seth Gilbert, 04-22-2009
In the second quarter, despite the economy’s effect on consumer sales, Apple’s train continued to roll ahead with plenty of steam. Wednesday, the company announced the best non-holiday earnings in its history.
After the close of market, Apple reported net income of $1.33 a share ($1.21b), up 15% year over, on revenue of $8.16b. Both numbers bested Apple’s own conservative guidance, and expectations.
On a non-GAAP basis, adjusted as Apple’s begun doing, adjusted sales totaled $9.06 billion for quarter. That’s $900 million higher than reported revenue. Adjusted gross margin was $3.62 billion and adjusted net income was $1.66 billion.
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Seth Gilbert,
When former AOL chief Jon Miller took the tiller to steer News Corps digital efforts a few weeks ago as Chairman and CEO of the Digital Media Group, and News Corp’s Chief Digital Officer, there was no masking the fact that change was gonna come. Miller wasn’t taking a job reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch in order to be a chaperon. He was going to be expected to do much more.
Today, expectation started to become reality. After only a few weeks on the job, Miller is changing up the staffing chart at MySpace. Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder and CEO of the social network is out.
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Seth Gilbert, 04-21-2009
While Silicon Valley and the rest of California suffered under an unprecedented spring heat wave, Yahoo announced earnings today that were anything but hot. Largely in line with expectations, but off 78% year over year, net income dropped to 8 cents a share, or $118m, down from 37 cents a share ($536.8m) last year. Revenue fell 13% year over year to $1.58 billion.
Markets found reassurance lingering behind the digits in comments that showed new CEO Carol Bartz knows what she wants to do, even if the challenges are substantial.
"We have a lot of people running around here telling engineers what to do, but no one is f***ing doing anything,” she colorfully said during the earnings call, and that’s going to change. That, and a whole lot more, as she continues to guide the company’s restructuring after her first full quarter on the job.
Yahoo will cut another 5% of staff, about 700 jobs, in the next two weeks, and refocus its efforts on core areas of the site including the home page, news, finance, sports, entertainment, mail and mobile.
From Bartz perspective, it’s all about the “wow” factor and user experience. “If we are a hot site, advertisers follow.” she said during the analysts call.
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Seth Gilbert, 04-20-2009
Other than a cryptic comment about having some ideas, or remarks the market opportunity is still nascent, Apple has not said anything about making a netbook computer. Still, the frequency of rumors about the so far non-existent device rate second on the Applevine only to iPhone chatter.
In early March, the big gossip was Wintek being contracted to supply touchscreens. Now the latest? Today, Digitimes reported on the potentially lucrative manufacturing contract.
Citing reports first printed by the Chinese language news source Commercial Times, the report says Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) “is in the running” for the prize.
As is common for many of these Commercial Times reports that find their way into English on Digitimes, the article cites unnamed sources in the supply chain.
Gossip? Fact? Tech tabloid fodder?
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