GigaOM

Lucent Technologies, the poster child of 1990s excess and a classic example of “how to blow your monopoly” is proving to be a better payoff than any odds Las Vegas casinos offer. Mostly luck, and demand from the developing world has helped turn the corner, and things are getting better, like Nortel. This week’s Barron’s reports that investors who bought the stock in 2002 for around 58 cents a share, are feeling might flush these days. Continue »

Is Google the Devil? Continue »

Carl Ichan must be wondering - what does a guy have to do to buy someone these days. The king of distressed buyout failed once again to snap a company he had zeroed in on. He and several other bidders lost out to Savvis Communications, which acquired assets of Cable & Wireless’ U.S. business for about $160 million. According to the terms of the deal, Savvis will pay $155 million in cash, take-on $12.5 million in debt but will get back $52 million in cash sometime after the deal is completed. Savvis is a surprise winner because all this while it seemed Gores Technology Group would walk away with the assets. It is funny in part because Carl was tussling with Gores’ Technology group, and in the end a third party won the bid. Continue »

The big corporations used to feel pretty good about their T-1 connections, while small business users were relegated to narrow band connections. No more! According to a joint survey by Sprint/Covad, nearly 66 percent of the respondents are using broadband to access the Internet. Rest are still using narrowband dial-up and half of those would consider upgrading to DSL type broadband services, according to the survey conducted by Equation Research. These numbers somehow don’t jive with the recent report from Probe Research. Continue »

My cellphone troubles have driven me to drink: enough for me to break my other New Year resolution: no digital buys in 2004. Well that one lasted exactly about 22 days, thanks to T-Mobile’s chronically sick network. I have since taken my own advice, and started shopping for Treo, or anything which goes under the moniker, SmartPhone. Given that I can switch to pretty much any service provider, I cast a wide net, in my search for a SmartPhone. Continue »

Americans, only a short while ago were all about shopping. But these days it is all about texting, also known as SMS addiction. Thanks to a sassy PR person, I am told that total number of text messages per month in the US exceeds a billion. Or as they 2COOL! In “All My Children’s Sexiest Man in America” and in “American Idol”, viewers were asked to text in their votes for their favorite contestant. In “Access Hollywood”, the hosts poll their viewers on that day’s hot topic. Even during the New Year’s Eve TV special, “America’s Party”, people at home could participate by text messaging New Year’s Eve greetings, which were shown across TV screens all over the U.S. It is true that text messages are everywhere. So why did this flack email me? He is pushing something called, Premium SMS messages from a company called Telenor Mobile Interactive. Continue »

Looks like posting is going to be light for a little while as I clean out the stupid comment spam which basically killed the server and bogged down the system yesterday. Have been manually trying to kill the spam messages but I guess it is not working. Wondering about two things: switch to a more secure blogging software system or go hosted to Typepad. Any help would be deeply appreciated. This is not good - at least from the MT perspective. Continue »

Update: Cingular announced fourth quarter 2004 earnings this evening, and if you read between the lines, things are not looking that great for the company, explaining why it is getting a weebit desperate and going shopping. So here is the bottom line - the churn increased marginally 2.8 percent, the net new adds shot up 642,000 but the average revenue per user took a nose dive. ARPU for the quarter was $49, down from $52 from the previous quarter. I am not sure about the others, but 6 percent decline does not look too good. Despite the sharp increase in the number of net adds, overall revenues increased only 5.9% to $3.7 billion. The margins fell to 23 percent from 26%. “ARPU coupled with higher gross adds, increased advertising, and WLNP costs made the EBITDA line look pretty nasty,” says our favorite wireless analyst, Greg Gorbatenko of When2Trade. He predicts that other wireless players will also be under similar margin pressure. I agree mostly with everything Greg says, but I am more bullish about the prospects of Verizon Wireless. Anyway Cingular’s results show that the merger with AT&T is not a luxury, but a necessity. (Yahoo link to Earnings Press Release) Continue »