Apple has received a law suit from Taiwanese consumer electronics firm Luxpro saying that it has monopolized the MP3 market and has been putting pressure on its retailers not to stock the Luxpro music player. Apple has been in legal disputes with Luxpro before and has been battling it for the past few years.
Yahoo is one of the first companies to feel the effects of a slowing of advertising spend, and said that it would cut its global workforce by at least 10% in the fourth quarter to prepare for recession. The third quarter showed revenues of $1.8 billion up just 1% year on year, and net income fell to $54 million from $151 million a year earlier. Yahoo still reckons that business generated $215 million of cash. However it will be Google’s numbers that will indicate the real effect on online advertising spend.
Will they won’t they? The deadline for Google and Yahoo to complete the advertising deal that so much of the industry doesn’t want to happen, has been extended yet again. Anti-trust regulators will now be hard pushed to give the search advertising deal the go-ahead, or crush it, before the next US administration. Yahoo is desperate for the deal because it estimates it would put another $800 million a year into its coffers.
Western Union, famous the world over for dominating the money transfer market, has cut a deal with Orascom Telecom to introduce mobile services in some of Orascom’s markets in the developing world. Orascom is an ideal partner for Western Union because it has operations in Algeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Bangladesh, and Zimbabwe, which all have customers which have either no bank account or no home address, which makes them ideal Western Union money transfer customers. Last year Bangladesh received $6.6 billion and Pakistan $6.1 billion, and Egypt $5.9 billion in money transfers.
Apple appears to have sold 13 million iPhones instead of the 10 million it was aiming at, by shipping 6.9 million devices in the last quarter. This puts it ahead of sinking rival RIM which only shipped 5.4 million smart phone units in the last quarter, not that they do the same things really. Apple had quarterly revenue of $7.9 billion against $6.2 million a year ago and net income of $1.14 billion, or up from $904 million. The company shipped 2.6 million Macintosh computers up 17% by value from last year, and 11 million iPods still 3% up in revenue terms despite the arrival of the iPhone. Apple stock went up ahead of the market on the deal.
In the biggest potential shake-up in an eventful year for the cellphone baseband chip sector, Texas Instruments is looking to exit the merchant side of this business, which it led until being narrowly overtaken by Qualcomm last year. TI has come under increasing pressure, losing its exclusive deals with Nokia and seeing reduced revenues from Motorola and Ericsson, and has been vocal about plans to shift its focus more heavily to other areas of strength like analog products. However, its announcement this week that it would lay off 650 people and seek a buyer for the baseband unit still came as a shock.
Twenty-five systems integrators and content management companies have formed the Marlin Partner Program (MPP) around the open source DRM system built with technology mostly contributed from Intertrust, but also from, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony. Marlin can interoperate with OMA DRM so can form a bridge to and from a handset. These 25 companies are broadly geographically based and can help anyone implement interoperable DRMs. Members include Cloakware, CoreMedia, Fujitsu, Hitachi, SafeNet, SecureMedia and Verimatrix.
A ruling from the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has criticized T-Mobile in the UK for running advertising which claims mobile broadband is interchangeable with its fixed line ‘home’ equivalent. The ASA agreed with customer complaints that the HSPA link would not deliver the same speed and quality as wireline broadband, despite the wording of the mailer: “All the benefits of home broadband, on the move. No wires, no waiting, no worries”. The case has implications for all mobile broadband positioning against fixed offerings.
A KPMG report estimates that China will see its internet advertising spend grow by 40% next year to $5.2 billion, by which time it will be roughly in line with the UK market. KPMG says that total ad spend across every media in China will be up 22%, way ahead of global ad spend growth, to reach $37.85 billion.