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Carl Icahn is not being conservative about his opinion that Motorola (NYSE: MOT) will be a more valuable company once it has been split into two publicly held entities. Rather, the shareholder-activist billionaire, who has been investing in the handset-maker since 2007, has bet an additional $111 million into the company in just the past week. His stake now stands at around 250 million shares, or 10.7 percent, reports Barron’s.
In February, the non-profit global Mobile Marketing Association took steps to tap into the soaring awareness of mobile by breaking up the organization into four operating regions. Today, it is announcing further measures to make sure that the MMA continues to be relevant as the market matures, by announcing new principles and logo.
As if a sign of the times, Verizon Wireless is offering data to smartphone users who prefer to pay by the month and not commit to a long-term contracts for the very first time. However, the service is neither discounted, nor more expensive than what you get if you did sign a contract. Furthermore, there’s much cheaper plans available in the universe, so this deal will really only appeal to someone who is specifically interested in Verizon’s network, or the variety of phones that it offers.
Since Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sold three million iPads during the device’s first 80 days on the market, its closest rivals have been busy working on several copycats. Samsung is no different, and has unveiled the Galaxy Tab today, a device very similar to the iPad, although smaller and powered by the Android OS. Samsung believes it can ship 10 million units and take a third of the global tablet market next year, reports the WSJ.
Most media owners are strong believers in a strategy of “any-and-every-platform” ubiquity.
But, for this season’s mobile strategy, the makers of the UK’s popular X Factor TV show are launching an “exclusive” app only on Nokia’s Ovi store.
Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) today announced a slew of new products and features on its phone, music and video viewing offerings. Check out a visual tour of Steve Jobs’ presentation, as well as our coverage, below:
Samsung is getting ready to combine both state-of-the-art mobile phone design with an entire content strategy in recognition that in order to remain the U.S.‘s largest handset maker you can no longer rely on hardware alone to stand out of the crowd.
To that end, it has created partnerships with book publishers, movie studios and social networking providers. The true content portion of this strategy is called Media Hub, and is not yet available to users, but is expected to launch this fall through over-the-air updates to its lineup of Android-powered devices.
Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent is acquiring OpenPlug to have its own solution for helping developers move applications from one platform to the next operating system. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. This is the second acquisition Alcatel-Lucent has made in the past three months to help it expand beyond telecom infrastructure to get into the application ecosystem. In June, it acquired ProgrammableWeb, a company with API-related content.
Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is trying to close the loop between music discovery and iTunes Store’s music purchasing, by injecting a brand new social network in to iTunes itself.
Integrated in to new iTunes 10 and in to the iTunes Store app on iOS, “Ping” lets users “follow” friends to see what they’re downloading from the store, which concerts they’re attending and what opinions they are posting about songs.
Apple’s annual fall event kicked off this morning with the company’s visionary leader Steve Jobs doing a couple of minutes of bragging, which has become typically at these kinds of launch events.
The latest numbers:
—iOS family of devices: Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has shipped 120 million iPod, iPads and iPhones to date, which results in about 230,000 activations a day. (In comparison, Android is activating 200,000 and Symbian activates 300,000.)
Sony will begin selling updated versions of its Reader Pocket and Reader Touch devices today, but it is still months away from releasing its new Daily Reader with WiFi access. In practical terms, that means that Sony (NYSE: SNE) will not be directly competing with the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) Nook, but Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division, isn’t too concerned about that. “We like to say that we’ve been looking at the e-books market through a crystal ball and a rear-view mirror, and that has proven a lot of early assumptions we and others have made wrong,” Haber told paidContent during a demo of the new Readers. Among the surprises that Sony executives say they’ve discovered: WiFi isn’t that big a deal to e-book readers.
Sprint’s board of directors is reportedly debating whether to let rival U.S. carrier T-Mobile USA invest in Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR), according to the WSJ, which spoke with three people familiar with the situation.
But in reality Sprint (NYSE: S) has no say in the matter. Despite owning a majority of Clearwire’s shares, it doesn’t have operational control over the company. In addition, T-Mobile has not put a proposal on the table, so it’s unclear whether it is even interested in making an investment. The only thing that Sprint may debate is whether it wants to make an additional investment in Clearwire, or leave it up to another company.
AOL (NYSE: AOL) is buying Rally Up, a startup behind a social networking app for the iPhone and iPad that lets users share their locations with select friends. The app pitches itself as a social network for “people that actually should know your location,” such as family members and close friends. Users can direct message each other and “check-in” to locations. So, why is AOL buying the startup? AOL says the deal is part of its new approach to the mobile market.
Gameloft (EPA: GFT) is one of Apple’s biggest fans. In the first six months of the year, revenues from Gameloft titles grew 82 percent in the App Store, and in the first quarter, it claimed that 21 percent of all of its revenues came from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) products, as well. But that’s not where it sees the only opportunity.
Revenues from mobile content, defined as music, games and video, are expected to top out at $3.53 billion in the U.S. thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, according to eMarketer, which released new estimates today. Last year, the combined market for all three of those segments came in at less than $1.15 billion. “An improved user experience, and the ability to access an ever-expanding variety of content from the cloud, will attract many new mobile content consumers in the next five years,” said said Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst.
Target won’t be the only bricks-and-mortar retail outlet for Kindles much longer. Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is adding the Staples office supplies chain to the mix this fall, making that two options for would-be buyers to try out the device. The deal will put Kindle in Staples—the chain has more than 1,500 U.S. stores—just in time for the 2010 holiday season. Staples’ global presence suggests the possibility for some international expansion but U.S. consumers are the target for now as in-store e-reader competition heats up.
As luck would have it, I was on the go when the U.S. leg of the tennis Grand Slam started Monday, providing a good chance to test the live streaming video for iPad and the new mobile features from USOpen.org. The USTA went iOS-centric with an iPad-optimized browser and an iPhone app, but included a WAP site. My first take across the board:
Three weeks into his new job at HP (NYSE: HPQ), Todd Achilles was pulled into the $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm, which was struggling to gain traction as its cash reserves dwindled. As Hewlett-Packard’s VP of Telco Sales, Achilles is now running a combined sales team of HP and Palm (NSDQ: PALM) employees for the Americas.
It’s taken nearly nine months for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to launch a Bing search application on Android after launching it first on the iPhone—and still, it will only work on Android devices using the Verizon Wireless network.
Google (NSDQ: GOOG) continues to buy up social-related firms in preparation for the launch of the new social networking effort it has under way. Its latest acquisition is mobile game startup SocialDeck, which is behind several very-addicting mobile games, including Shake & Spell, a spelling game that users can simultaneously access and play from various platforms, including BlackBerry, the iPhone and Facebook.
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