GigaOM

Elite Financial, a PR firm used to spam me with these releases from a little company called Xybernaut Corp. The damn things would slide through the junk filters and what not. In total 110 press releases came into my In-Box, and went into the trash bin. I never believed in all the hype this company was trying to create around its wearable computing products. Sure it sold some to Tesco and the Army, but Dell wasn’t running scared if you know what I mean. Continue »

Now I love Tetris as much as the next guy, but I won’t pay $137 million for it. But Jamdat would, and did! MobilePlaya points out that “Tetris could be the perfect mobile game,” and lauds the Jamdats’s $137 million purchase of Blue Lava Wireless. The deal gives Jamdat a 15-year worldwide license for all Tetris properties. Jamdat is flush with cash these days it seems. Continue »

I am watching this whole scandal about NBC Today show tech editor Corey Greenberg who gets paid to say nice things about consumer gizmos on NBC affiliate shows. Apparently he got about $15,000 to talk up products from the likes of Apple, Sony, HP and Creative. NBC officials deny that they had knowledge of this financial relationship. (More here) Now this report on NBC executive Jeff Zucker saying that network anchors like Brian Williams should blog. Take the two bits of news in context, and you can see that network anchors blogging with be a colossal disaster. Why? So that they can force their bad stories of murder and mayhem on the blogsphere. network news is the anthesis of blog world. Blogsphere is about niches, and stories that are meaningful to the end users, and in this model there is no room for stars. If Greenberg is a proxy, well then we might get compromised stuff out in the blogs as well. Continue »

There is a whole new movement around “making a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.” Which essentially is a euphemism of how to make money off people who don’t have much money. California-based Hop-On which is aiming for a whopping 2% of the global cell phone market share, feels that its sub-$50 phones are the way to go. Strategically it all makes a lot of sense. People in India, China and African continent cannot afford expensive phones, but want to use mobile services. Ergo, super affordable phone. Motorola and Nokia, they all want to build that gizmo. Maybe they will - but their cost structures are going to make it tough. What about Hop-On? I just saw two of their new phones including 1813, made specially for the Indian market. Both are butt ugly, and I can promise you will fail to take off. Continue »

Rojo, the latest entrant to throw its hat in the news reader ring is out of beta, and is ready for general consumption. Given that I prefer to live in the three-pane world of Net News Wire, I was pleasantly surprised that I actually liked the service. Since I have used it for only a few days, it hasn’t passed my longevity test. Nevertheless, I am suitably impressed. Clean interface, easy to add tags, and most importantly easy discovery of similar minded feeds, and content. In other words, it is everything Bloglines 2.0 should have been. Frequent feeds and recommended links have a certain addictive quality to them, because they bring the most recent and most relevant information in a couple of clicks. Still Chris and his team have a big task ahead of them - convincing users to switch from the comfortable confines of their current feed readers - whether on the desktop or on the web. (I can track this simply be scrolling through my referral logs - bloglines is #1 for now!) Continue »

London is a massive city - 10 million people and much more sprawling than New York or even San Francisco Bay Area. So perhaps a tiny sliver of it is now a hot zone should not be big news. Still, I think the idea of free Internet access for folks who walk down “The Technology Mile” is a good start for all big cities. It is a perfect example of city governments and commercial interests coming together and still keeping in mind that is all about the end user. I like the fact that Islington Borough Council is using WiFi as a tool for economic regeneration of an urban area. More here Continue »

The big Enron Broadband trial started today, and as per Reuters: federal prosecutor Lisa Monaco in her opening statement said, “The mission of Enron Broadband Services (EBS) was to pump up the Enron stock price by telling investors they had a solution — a solution to the congested Internet.”

“I don’t care about that lipstick and rouge you paint that bitch up with, she’s still just dead meat lying on the sofa, threatening to steal the show,” Monaco quoted the worker, Bill Collins, as writing in an e-mail to Yeager and others. Continue »

Lucent Technologies, thanks to wireless equipment sales has managed to somehow over come the negative trends overwhelming the telecom markets. In the fiscal 2Q 2005, the company reported sales of $2.34 billion and net income of $282 million, essentially flat sequentially and up marginally year-over-year. Of the total, company’s sales from Wireless sector were $1.2 billion, up 24% year-over-year from $967 million in 2Q 2004. Income from that business increased $34 million to $404 million. Clear sign that Lucent’s wireline business is falling faster than Yankees chances in the AL East. The situation is so bad, that the company under the guise of management shake-up and new operating structure is telling investors: you will not get the details into the wireline business anymore. Or as one smart man says: masking the truth till the day reckoning finally arrives. Continue »