Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Verizon Wireless iPhone Upgrades?

Lenovo to Focus on Tablets, Phones

Lenovo Group Ltd. will form a new business unit focused on mobile Internet and "digital home" devices, as it continues pushing to expand beyond its core personal-computer business.

PC and consumer electronics manufacturers have been invading each others' turf for some years, and the smartphone and tablet devices have emerged as growth areas for consumer electronics, so the move is no surprise.

Lenovo's Mobile Internet and Digital Home Business Group will make tablets, smartphones and devices for other categories like smart TV and cloud computing as well.

Record Apple Earnings

How Soon Will Linear TV Face a Real On-Demand Challenge?

Deloitte doesn't think a major challenge to linear TV delivery is going to happen soon. That shouldn't be taken as a firm judgment that on-demand formats will not be big at some point, or pose a grave challenge to the current model.

But most transitions of this magnitude take much longer than most supporters expect. But after the inflection point does occur, change will occur more rapidly than expected. It's a bit like an ice cube melting or water boiling: you can raise or lower temperature for quite some time and you still see a solid or a liquid. Then there is a quantum change. Most significant technology innovations get adopted in the same way. There is a longer than expected gestation period. Then there is rapid change.

Verizon Wireless Offers $200 Trade-In for an iPhone

Current Verizon customers who purchased and activated new smartphones, feature phones or certified pre-owned phones between Nov. 26, 2010, and Jan. 10, 2011, are eligible to receive up to a $200 Visa debit card when they purchase an iPhone 4 at full retail price by Feb. 28, 2011 and return their existing phone.

This offer is only available on consumer accounts with five lines or less, who are purchasing iPhone 4 through Verizon Wireless retail stores, telesales, or through verizonwireless.com.

Ad Analytics Firms Create Consortium

The Consortium for Accountable Advertising, founded by Cross Commerce Media, Clickable, MediaMath, and TARGUSinfo, hopes to provide an alternative ad analytics alternative to Google.

Companies that join agree to allow their customers to share data. So much of ad tech these days is taking impression data or response rates and combining it with other data to better target ads or analyze how existing campaigns are doing. If an ad agency wants to start using MediaMath, they should be able to take all of their data from past campaign’s from Clickable and pour it into MediaMath’s engine, and vice versa.

Acer to Phase Out Netbooks in Favor of Tablets

Acer seems to have concluded that tablets are a better business than netbooks. Acer says it will release both a 7-inch and a 10-inch tablet in 2011.

The new tablets are intended to gradually replace the company’s line of netbook computers, said Acer’s Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-Hsian. “That’s the direction of the market.”

Oddly enough, as tablets proliferate, and get adopted by enterprises and consumers, it is getting harder to determine whether tablets are a new product category, or a replacement form factor for PCs.

The Roots of our Discontent

Political disagreements these days seem particularly intractable for all sorts of reasons, but among them are radically conflicting ideas ab...