| Mobile World Congress--Take That, Apple!
If press conferences from Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung are any indication, it's that Apple's one-size fits all approach to the market with its popular iPhone is doomed to failure. Executives at the major phone makers made absolutely no mention of Apple in their speeches, but they clearly appeared to be moving to address the perceived gap in lovability between their phones and the iPhone. Nokia and Samsung had nearly identical mesages, suggesting that they alone were capable of producing a mobile phone for every lifestyle—including all you old-timers who (shudder) simply want a phone to make calls. On the high end where they currently are competing with Apple for mindshare and marketshare, the phone makers opted mainly for evolutionary updates on existing models. Nokia's new dual-band HSDPA N96, for instance, doubles internal memory to 16GB from the N95, while adding LED lights to the 5 megapixel digital camera for flash and video lighting.
A new digital pen
This may come off as a naked plug for a new gadget, but it's actually a sober technology assessment. You have my word on this as a journalist, husband, father, and President of the United States. I'm always interested in new user interface hardware and I've just run across the Digital Pen from Livescribe. The system uses specially-marked paper and a miniature pen-mounted camera to track strokes, then synchronizes with a PC to upload the data as an image or (see below) to convert the strokes to machine-readable text. As an input device–particularly for students who have to draw diagrams–it's hard to beat. But it goes further. As you take notes, Livescribe's pen records the surrounding audio. So if you're listening to a lecture, you automatically save those parts of it that are related to the notes you take.
Takahashi: Dress this cell phone according to mood
Dov Moran has a bright idea for the coming age where fashion and electronics will become intertwined. When you want a new look for an MP3 music player, put a new skin on it. If you want your phone to play cool videos, give it a jacket. And when you want to turn that phone into an alarm clock, find it a mate. Moran is chief executive of modu, an Israeli company that has created a tiny cell phone with a built-in flash memory music player that is highly modular. When you want to change the look and feel of the device, you simply slide it into another device. It's like adding a memory chip card, except it changes the identity of the new device. With it, you can change your electronic gear in chameleon fashion to suit your mood. You can, for instance, take your little modu phone and slide it into a digital camera.
Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion
Yahoo, in a statement, said its board will carefully evaluate Microsoft's proposal, which it described as unsolicited. Microsoft expects the market for online advertising to almost double in size over the next three years, from $40 billion in 2007 to $80 billion by 2010. A merger will allow it to realize economies of scale and reduce capital costs as it addresses this market, it said. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own," said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, in a statement. Microsoft expects to cut costs by $1 billion a year by realizing synergies with Yahoo in four areas: obtaining economies of scale as its audience increases; combining its research and development efforts with Yahoo's to innovate faster; eliminating operational redundancy to cut costs, and pooling expertise to innovate in video and mobile.
Mix: Gameloft, Safari HD, iPhone, Poolga
During a recent speech, Gameloft founder Michel Guillemot featured an image of an iPhone running a Gameloft game in one of his slides. Pocket Gamer suggests that although the image may have been a mock-up, given Gameloft's past relationship with Apple on iPod games, it would not be surprising to see the company develop games for the iPhone. Safari HD, an unofficial hack for the Apple TV that allows users to browse the internet using the set-top box, has been released and updated for compatibility with Apple TV software 2.0. Safari HD uses the WebKit rendering engine, and supports web plugins such as Flash and any others supported by Safari. A panel at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last week praised the iPhone for its ease of use and interface.
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