Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen gave a keynote speech this morning at the EmTech conference, running today and tomorrow at MIT. He spoke of tech innovations and — perhaps most importantly — the need to turn them into sustainable, profitable businesses. During the question-and-answer session, which always manages to be more interesting than the actual talk, Verwaayen shared his three requirements for a product to be successful:
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Adobe said today it’s agreed to buy analytics and metrics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion in cash, or $21.50 a share. Customers want to integrate Adobe’s online products like Flash with services like those offered by Omniture, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said during the conference call announcing the deal. With the purchase, Adobe diversifies its product offerings and takes advantage of the fast-growing SaaS market, on which Omniture focuses. Continue »

Intuit said today it’s spending $170 million to acquire Mint.com, a site that helps people manage their personal finances through budgeting and spending trackers, among other features. Mint has around a million users and has amassed a treasure trove of data on their historical spending and financial habits — data which is worth a fortune in the right hands, and which Mint has thus far stored but ignored. Continue »

The iPod Touch might be hiding in the shadow of its big brother, the iPhone — both in volume, and revenue — but is it possible that the Touch is more disruptive than its cellular sibling? The iPod Touch has seen huge growth within Apple’s iPod category, with Touch sales growing more than 130 percent year over year, while total iPod shipments dropped 4 percent. Apple noted in its quarterly earnings call last month that while it expects total iPod purchases to continue to decline, it is cannibalizing its own sales with the Touch and iPhone. I suspect the Touch’s growth will accelerate as customers transition from simple music players to more multifunction pocket devices — and that switchover has the potential to seriously shake up the world of mobile gadgets. Continue »

Sacre bleu! Amazon and Google’s digital book efforts could force publishers to slash prices and put them out of business, says Arnaud Nourry, head of French book publisher Hachette. He is concerned that unilateral pricing by e-book resellers like Sony, Amazon and Barnes & Noble could destroy publisher profits. “On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Nourry was quoted as saying in today’s Financial Times.

This is only partially true, of course. Books have a long and very rich history that cannot be easily replaced by electronic versions. Continue »

Many companies are slashing budgets to improve the bottom line — or at least postponing purchases until later — but not all. Thirty-nine percent of small and medium businesses reported budget cuts this year, averaging a 22 percent reduction in IT funding, according to Spiceworks’ annual survey of SMB tech departments released this morning. However, 31 percent said budgets were flat year over year, and 30 percent saw their budgets increase in 2009, averaging 27 percent. Overall, IT spending was down barely 1 percent. Spiceworks polled 1,130 IT pro’s supporting companies with fewer than 500 employees. So, whether the budgets were smaller or larger, where was all the money going? Continue »

African cell phone penetration rates are at an impressive 37 percent, according to a recent study by Ernst & Young. Impressive because a year and a half ago, at the beginning of 2008, the penetration rate was only 28 percent. That’s a huge increase, and it’s only going to continue — and all these cell phones are going to need some serious data connections. PC ownership is very rare on the continent, but cell phone ownership is booming, with a 49.3 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) every year since 2002. By comparison, Brazil and Asia have reported 27.5 percent CAGR over the same time period. Ernst & Young expects African cell phone market penetration to reach 60 percent by 2012. Continue »