Huge and expensive patent battles aren’t going away anytime soon– in fact, they’re likely to continue to pick up steam this year. Efrat Kasznik, of Foresight Valuation Group, lays out some of the intellectual property battlegrounds of tomorrow. Read more »
Although some believe the death of brick-and-mortar retail is inevitable, Mark Sigal, CPO of Unicorn Labs, thinks we all have a vested interest in seeing the industry reboot itself for the modern age. He outlines three paths for physical retail stores to avoid extinction here. Read more »
MetroSprint? MetroPCS came within “hours” of joining forces with Sprint, according to a report, before the deal was killed by Sprint’s board. The $8 billion deal would have seen further consolidation in the wireless industry, but would have been tough sledding. Read more »
Lemon, a personal spending tracker service, has proven pretty popular with 1 million users signing up in less than four months. Now, the company is looking to go beyond just receipt storage into Mint territory with an update that helps categorize and total up spending. Read more »
Meet the new boss, Motorola employees: Google reportedly plans to name Dennis Woodside, a veteran Google sales executive overseeing the merger, as the new CEO, replacing current Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard continues to be rocked by a flood-induced hard drive shortage; its go-to printing business is sputtering; the company as a whole continues to spend too much on too many products; and it needs to get its design-and-execution mojo back. Read more »
Precise’s Zohar Gilad explains how his company shaved more than $2 million from its annual IT budget by migrating its IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Read more »
As the former CEO of OpenTable, Jeff Jordan can attest that most CEOs believe they intuitively know which product developments will make the biggest impact. In this article, Jordan makes a compelling case for letting data — and not the CEO — drive product development. Read more »
Apple has once again cut prices on its iAd system for rich in-app advertising on iOS applications, as ad buyers continue to balk at the up-front cost of participating in Apple’s vision of how mobile advertising should work. Read more »
It’s kind of amazing to consider how passé the iPod, the gadget that defined a decade of music, has become at Apple: the iPhone is the now the halo maker, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Read more »
NBCUniversal will once again use its Olympics coverage to search for what it calls the “holy grail” of audience measurement. This time, however, the company is approaching the development of this metric with a little more urgency. Read more »
Netvibes, the San Francisco–based startup that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS feed dashboards, announced on Wednesday evening it has been acquired by French enterprise software firm Systèmes. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Read more »
Apple’s huge iPhone sales numbers from its latest quarterly results helped it grow its mobile phone business by 128.4 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new report. That makes it the third-largest mobile phone maker by volume. Read more »
The most highly anticipated initial public offering in today’s tech world is officially happening. Facebook filed S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon to raise a maximum of $5 billion. According to the filing, Facebook made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011. Read more »
If you bought a Mac last year, you probably have a Thunderbolt port on your computer doing nothing right now. As of Wednesday, however, Seagate’s GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter is available to order, which means you could soon be transferring data to GoFlex drives at lightning speeds. Read more »
It’s clear that Pinterest is really hot, but a new study shows just how powerful the virtual pinboard company has become. Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. Read more »
China Telecom is getting very near to launching Apple’s iPhone 4S on its network, according to a new report. China Telecom subsidiary Beijing Telecom said it will likely offer a CDMA version of the iPhone 4S by the end of February or the beginning of March. Read more »
Codecademy, the startup that makes an interactive and social web application aimed at teaching people how to write computer code, has gone the platform route. On Monday, the company debuted Course Creator, a platform that allows anyone to make educational courses to teach programming techniques. Read more »
Apple is the king of the PC heap, so long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at PC sales, focusing on the fourth quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing with the iPad included. Read more »
Microsoft announced a partnership with TechStars today that will allow it access to more than 400 startups around the world so it can sell its Azure cloud platform. But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, can it compete against Amazon? Read more »
Apple’s iPhone was a hot seller in the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2012, but that’s nothing compared to what one analyst predicts we could see in just a couple of years’ time. Morgan Stanley thinks Apple’s efforts in China could pay big dividends by 2013. Read more »
Could Apple spend its $100 billion in cash to create a virtual cable operator to compete with Comcast and the like? Sure. But it would have a really hard time offering a competitively priced service and building a profitable business out of it. Read more »
Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC has closed investment on its third fund at $55 million, making Fund III its biggest fund yet.
Clavier talked to GigaOM about why SoftTech decided to go so big, how the new cash will be invested, and the larger tech industry landscape. Read more »
One of the year’s largest smart grid conferences — DistribuTECH — closes today in San Antonio, Texas. It’s like the CES for utilities, power companies and the vendors that are trying to sell them stuff. Here are the top 10 trends I took away. Read more »
From 1990s through 2011, DSL, a broadband technology, had a strong run at large phone companies in America. Now it is falling behind cable broadband and fiber. The latest data from Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable points to its declining fortunes. Read more »
Apple’s iPad sold 15.4 million units during the final calendar quarter of 2011, representing a 111-percent year-over-year increase in tablet sales. Android tablets may have gained market share during the same period, but it’s PC makers that should fear that growth. Read more »
AT&T posted its fourth quarter results for 2011 on Thursday, highlighting smartphone sales in particular, which reached a record high of 9.4 million devices, beating the standing record by 50 percent. Apple should be pleased: Of those smartphones, 7.6 million were iPhones. Read more »
Apple reported impressive financial results on Tuesday, setting new records in its quarterly revenue and profit. Now, data from online portfolio manager SigFig indicates that the old Wall Street adage of “buy on the rumor, sell on the news” did not hold true in this case. Read more »
Apple’s iPhone 4S has helped it regain ground lost to Android in consumer smartphone market share, but it’s also having a very positive effect on enterprise adoption, according to a new report. The iPad remains by far the top tablet in business. Read more »
Ad-targeting company 33Across is acquiring link-tracking specialist Tynt Multimedia, resulting in a combined user graph spanning 1.25 billion users. Both are storing and analyzing billions of transactions daily, and they will use that data to help publishers compete on ad sales against mega sites like Google. Read more »
Apple’s record quarter is prompting a lot of analysts and Wall Street watchers to up their estimates for the stock’s performance. A slew of investor notes released Wednesday suggest few believe Apple’s fortunes have reached their apex. Investors seem to agree, as Apple’s stock opened strong. Read more »
Apple is looking to sharpen the teeth on a recent import ban it secured from the ITC against HTC smartphones, according to an appeal filing discovered Wednesday. The appeal seems to at least seek to broaden the scope of the ITC’s ruling. Read more »
Apple blew away observers and analysts on Tuesday with record earnings that included 37 million iPhone sold, which helps explain why research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said Wednesday that Apple’s U.S. smartphone market share now exceeds that of Android devices. Read more »
SquareTrade, a San Francisco-based company that provides warranties for gadgets like the iPhone, landed a $238 million investment from Bain Capital. The new investment is being made jointly by Bain’s private equity and venture capital affiliates. Further financial details about the deal have not been disclosed. Read more »
Yahoo’s newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson wants the discussion over whether Yahoo is a media or tech company to come to an end — according to him, Yahoo can be both. But in this age of increasing specialization, is that a realistic goal? Read more »
Following Apple’s announcement of record revenue and profit for its first financial quarter of 2012, its stock is surging in after hours trading. Share value has climbed to around $452, or 32 points above closing, which translates to a market cap of roughly $421 billion. Read more »
Social Q&A site Formspring has experienced a dip in monthly unique visitors, as the two-year-old startup transitions out of the role of hot newcomer. The company is looking to aggressive mobile web and app development and an updated design to get the growth back on track. Read more »
In a note to investors today, Sterne Agee’s Shaw Wu discussed his company’s expectations for Apple’s earnings call Tuesday afternoon, which were up once again from earlier predictions. Wu’s revised estimate joins a chorus of rosy outlooks about the Mac-maker’s performance. Read more »
Apple spent the most on semiconductors in 2011, beating out Samsung and HP to take the crown. HP dropped from the top spot, thanks to overall weakness in the PC market, while Apple soared upward on the rising tide of smartphones, tablets and the MacBook Air. Read more »
LuxeYard, a site selling high-end home decor products, is launching Tuesday. Yes, it’s technically another flash sales site. But what’s interesting about LuxeYard is that it’s doing things a bit differently from the established players in the space such as One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe. Read more »
