In about two months since the launch, Verizon has sold 2.2 million iPhones, giving Apple a big boost in the US. In addition to the iPhone, Verizon activated more than 500,000 4G devices including 260,000 HTC Thunderbolts. It has 104 million customers. Read More »
Bio:Om has more than 20 years’ experience as a journalist covering technology and business news. He was part of the founding team of Forbes.com as a senior editor. He then went on to become a senior writer at Red Herring during its glory days before joining Business 2.0 in March 2003, covering telecom, innovation and broadband. His contributions have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and MIT Technology Review. Additionally, Om is the author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. Om blogs about baseball, life and music on his personal blog, Om.Co. Follow him on Twitter @om
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Broadband
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Mobile Internet
Recent Posts
Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, in a conversation earlier this week, outlined Google’s cloud strategy and its long-term plans, and how it is different from other cloud providers including Amazon Web Services. He talks about Google’s two areas of focus – apps and big data. Read More »
AT&T’s continuing reliance on its fast growing wireless business cannot hide the fact that the wireline broadband growth is slowing for the company, as its first quarter financial results show. Despite competition, Ma Bell has muddled along, choosing to devote all its energies elsewhere. … Read More »
AT&T activated 3.6 million iPhones during the quarter. However, one can see the Verizon iPhone is starting to impact its business. Furthermore, its services revenues were essentially flat compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 and new subscriber additions have taken a dip as well. … Read More »
If the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce is about recreational shopping. So it needs to be a more fun and social experience which gives an edge to companies that encourage deeper social experiences. Read More »
“I haven’t done any deals” in this year’s first quarter, “because it’s crazy out there.”
Mike Maples, an early Twitter investor
It has been a magical few months for Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing startup. It has grown from nothing to more than 3.2 million users, and raised $7 million in funding. In this video, co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom shares the story of Instagram. Read More »
More Must Reads
The biggest frustration I have with my iPhone is when the phone switches between Wi-Fi and 3G networks and just hangs. In solving this problem, MIT researchers used motion sensors, showing how mobile devices need to become an extension of us. Read More »
It has been a long time coming, but now subscribers in the U.S. can sign up for a 100 Mbps broadband connection. Comcast, the largest cable (and broadband) company announced Thursday that it’s launching Extreme 105 across its entire footprint, which covers 40 million homes. Read More »
RIM will launch its much vaunted and eagerly awaited Blackberry PlayBook on April 19. In this review, I take a look at the 7-inch tablet and how it stacks up against its rivals, the iPad and the Honeycomb Android family of tablets. Read More »
The usage of term “cloud” has been hijacked for marketing purposes, thanks to indiscriminate labeling of anything and everything on the Internet. Urs Hölzle, Google’s infrastructure czar tells us what the Cloud really is and what it is supposed to do. Read More »
Pure Digital CEO Jonathan Kaplan sold the Flip video recorder maker to Cisco in 2009 for $590 million. Today, Cisco shut down the video maker and laid off 550 employees. Kaplan shares his thoughts about the news and argues that smartphone didn’t kill the Flip. Read More »
Many who are developing apps and services for mobile devices don’t pay much attention to the innards of the networks themselves. But we should be paying attention to all the underlying networking technologies, mostly because it helps us think about what these front-end services can do. Read More »
From Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, it seems more and more newspapers are turning to tablets in an effort to capture a fraction of our daily attention. As this graphic illustrates, iPad is well on its way. … Read More »
This week, Larry Page took back the reins of Google. In his first task as CEO, Page has shaken up the executive ranks in a reorg that’s about addressing two of Google’s big challenges: its overcomplicated bureaucratic structure and Facebook. Read More »
Wwe need to put more weight on one’s demonstrable capabilities than college degrees and “experience” in our resume, thanks to the emergence of Internet as a platform, we are entering a phase where these capabilities will be on full display for others to see. Read More »
Ever wondered how big data, smart grid and cloud computing will impact an average person? Now you can, thanks to Opower, which molds terabytes of data into delightful insights, shares them with many of us, hoping that we will do our bit as willing conservationists. … Read More »
These days it seems raising funding gets all the focus. Most of us forget that there is a big difference between raising capital and starting a business and actually building a business. Many of us underestimate how long it takes to build a business. Read More »
Rare metals have suddenly become a hot commodity in products from hybrid vehicles batteries, to wind turbines, to compact fluorescent light bulbs to magnets for electric vehicle motors. Some entrepreneurs think it is time to go to the moon and find those resources. Read More »
The most rewarding part of being a blogger/writer is the generosity with which others share their insights. I have learned and evolved my thinking as a result of this process. Here are three responses to some of my writings from this week that are worth sharing. Read More »
Nintendo has released the 3DS, the next generation of its mobile gaming console and successor to the immensely popular DS, at an interesting time for mobile gaming, adding 3-D capability, better graphics and a 3-D camera to the proven dual-screen format of the Nintendo DS. Read More »
When is a technology company dead? It is something that has been on my mind lately. My definition of a dead tech company has less to do with the company’s numbers and more about its abilities. Of course, that is different from what others think. Read More »
Google is launching a new +1 feature that allows folks who are users of Google services such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Reader and Google Profiles to rank the search results. Think of it as Google’s retweet gesture or the equivalent of liking something on Facebook. Read More »
The economics of attention is much more ruthless and unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. Just as it is hard for a movie to recover from a bad opening weekend, today’s “apps” lose if they don’t make a good first impression. Read More »
INQ, the upstart handset maker from London has created a smartphone that is less Android and more Facebook. And by adding Spotify music service to the mix, the company has created a Facebook addict’s dream phone. Sometimes you wonder why Google apps are even there. Read More »
Auction giant eBay said today that it will buy GSI Commerce, a provider of e-commerce and marketing services, for a whopping $2.4 billion in cash and debt. The deal is part of eBay’s continued makeover from an auctions-oriented company to an e-commerce platform. Read More »
Entrepreneurs at their very core are like artists, says Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur, author and start-up guru. In this video conversation, he talks about the current bubble, how startups can take advantage of it and how long will the technology up cycle last. Roll tape! Read More »
Paul Baran, one of the legends of the Internet who started seven companies and came up with the concept of packet switching passed away at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He died of lung complications. Baran was 84. Read More »
Do you speed too much time on Twitter? Is life without Facebook seem impossible? Can’t go an entire day without Tumbling or sharing pictures on Instagr.am? Well, it seems like it might be time for you to get a social media detox. Read More »
The crowded consumer Internet has made it difficult for startups and services to get attention from the people who really matter: the end users. The question is: How do you get that much-needed attention? Not with VC dollars. Instead it is something less tangible. Read More »
Mapr, a stealth-mode start-up with about 30 employees is developing a version of Hadoop and plans to compete with the likes of Cloudera. The company is likely to launch later this year and has been funded by Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA. Read More »
There are obvious opportunities stemming from Wi-Fi Direct and Apple’s Airplay technologies, but how does one look beyond point solutions and hardware products to find the larger opportunity? The answer came to me during a conversation with Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP of engineering at Google. Read More »
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others have established Open Networking Foundation, an industry group that seeks to push the radical new Open Flow technology and the idea behind it, Software Defined Networking (SDN) in new directions. This push could have major ramifications for incumbent gearmakers. Read More »
I wonder about the implications of the big merger announced Sunday: AT&T buying T-Mobile USA for $39 billion, of which $25 billion was in cash. I was hard-pressed to think if there were any winners apart from AT&T and T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom. Read More »
AT&T is buying T-Mobile USA for a whopping $39 billion in cash and stock. The questions are who wins and who loses in this deal. It is hard to find winners apart from AT&T and T-Mobile. Here a list of who loses this deal: Read More »
For environmentalist and entrepreneur Bill Liao, a round trip to San Francisco takes three months: He doesn’t fly. It takes a lot of conviction to go against convention like this, but that dedication is necessary if you truly want to have a breakthrough product. Read More »
There is re-definition of the consumer electronics landscape and we are seeing a future for hardware that combines hardware, software and connectivity with specific services. Without the services, the devices may lose our attention and end up at the back of the proverbial drawer. Read More »
With baseball season around the corner, basketball in full swing, and March Madness upon us, Hitpost, a San Francisco-based start-up is releasing mobile apps to share photos of sports events. It is the latest of many apps that are building mobile-based immersive experiences. Read More »
Virgin Media, a U.K.-based cable company, has introduced a 100 Mbps broadband connection at reasonable prices. It might not be as cheap as broadband in Japan, but at least it’s better than what we’ve got in the U.S. Read More »
FaceTime, Netflix, and Pandora were built for the Wi-Fi network. It’s hard to imagine the phone bill if all this data was streaming over the 3G networks. These services, and others like them, have blossomed, thanks in part to the increasing ubiquity of the Wi-Fi network. Read More »
The very fact that Google has to go through an exercise to codify a process for building managers points to the fact that the company is now focusing all its energies on its biggest challenge: overcoming the curse of size. Read More »
The horrific earthquake and the ensuing tsunami in Japan have caused widespread damage to undersea communications, according to data collected by telecom industry sources. Initially, the damage to the cables that connect Japan to other parts of the world was said to be limited. Read More »
It’s unlikely you missed the big brouhaha between San Francisco-based startup Square and VeriFone, a payment processing services provider. VeriFone accused Square of not being secure and being easily hackable. Dorsey denied. This week’s dust-up makes me wonder if VeriFone quite understands its own business. Read More »
Twitter, the micro-messaging company that is now said to be worth $10 billion didn’t start off that way. It was a germ of an idea that has become what I have often called, the megaphone for the planet. Check out this video of its origins. Read More »
Foursquare released its new version 3.0 application. It is an application that moves beyond check-in, and many ways foretells the future of geo-local services. It might be time for location-aware apps to make an appearance and in the very near future start offering “suggestions.” Read More »
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