Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! In the past few days, as Facebook’s (FB) stock has continued to collapse, a growing chorus of people have been suggesting that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg needs to say something. Specifically, the grumblers say, he needs to momentarily interrupt his honeymoon and make a statement. Yesterday, I was one [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Fearing the European debt crisis will continue to deteriorate, investors have piled into U.S. Treasuries in a flight for safety. The yield on the benchmark U.S. 10-year (^TNX) has fallen to 1.55 percent, a record low. From businesses to individuals to governments looking to borrow money, low interest rates [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The U.S. economy is slowing, fears of a debt-ceiling debate are rising and Europe is a mess. Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like summer 2011. Last summer, you’ll recall, major averages fell nearly 20% from late July until bottoming in early October. Recent market action has some [...]
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As the world watches Europe crumble, a general consensus has formed that austerity measures have failed: Government cutbacks have led to higher unemployment and lower tax revenues, tripping many of the already struggling sovereigns into recession. The worst off of the European economies is not surprisingly Greece, which agreed drastic austerity measures and is now [...]
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Mobile advertising is a hot market right now. Evidenced most recently by the IPO of mobile advertising network Millennial and Singtel’s $321m acquisition of Amobee. Mary Meeker just released her annual 100+ page slide deck of internet trends, and three of those show why everyone is so excited about mobile advertising.
1. Mobile traffic is growing fast, now up to 10% of all internet traffic.
2. An increasing percentage of that traffic has purchase intent – m-commerce now up 8% of e-commerce in the US
3. Mobile ad spend is lagging way behind mobile media consumption, and the desktop internet proved that over time Ad$ follow eyeballs
On the desktop web ad spend started catching up with time spent in media when the ad formats started working – key drivers were broadband penetration (life was too short to click on ads over dial-up), emergence of search advertising, and then better targeting and more creative display ads. I have every confidence that similar drivers will see the mobile ad spend start to catch up with mobile media consumption over the next 3-5 years.
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Microsoft is offering the feds their very own version of Office 365, the suite of online office tools the software giant introduced last year.
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Facebook’s (FB) first couple of weeks as a public company, most observers agree, now appears to have been an unmitigated disaster. There was the first-day NASDAQ (IXIC) trading scandal, in which many people who bought Facebook stock didn’t know whether or not they owned it. There was a selective [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! On Tuesday, global stocks rallied as investors chose to focus on the ‘good news’ coming out of Greece and ignore the very bad news coming out of Spain. (See: Stocks Rise Even as Spain Starts to Follow the Greek Script) Wednesday was a completely different story: Stocks tumbled as [...]
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Yes, Microsoft will soon embrace Linux on its Windows Azure cloud, reaching another milestone in its efforts to reinvent itself as a friend of open source software.
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The Facebook (FB) fiasco and Europe’s unraveling have taken some of the heat of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan (JPM) for its big trading loss…but not all of it. Following a long weekend of reports about flaws with JPMorgan’s risk management committee, Reuters reported Tuesday the bank has sold about [...]
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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Gold prices have tumbled 20 percent from their August 2011 record highs above $1,900 an ounce. The precious metal closed down more than 1% Tuesday to $1,548.70 after rating agency Egan-Jones downgraded Spanish debt and investors flocked from the Eurozone credit crisis to U.S. Treasuries, pushing up the U.S. [...]
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When I bought my Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone before Christmas my biggest worry was that it was much bigger than my iPhone and it wouldn’t fit comfortably in my pocket. That hasn’t turned out to be a problem and the larger screen size has turned out to be the main reason why I love this phone. I read a lot of books and I can now do exclusively via the Kindle app on my phone. Even when I’m at home and my actual Kindle is nearby I still read on my phone. The reading experience is fine and it is easier to make notes and highlights. In contrast I found reading on my iPhone a little annoying because the screen wasn’t big enough.
I’m not the only one who likes big screens and this morning GigaOM published a piece suggesting we’ll all want a big screen phone soon. In their mind the main driver is mobile video.
Device manufacturers are stepping up to provide big screen devices too. LG announced a 5-inch full HD device last week and Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy SIII also has a 4.8inch screen.
All of this makes me wonder how big the screen will be on the next iPhone. As GigaOM points out a larger screen improves the content consumption experience, and as we know, user experience is everything to Apple. Big phones aren’t for everyone however which will leave Apple with a dilemma. Maybe they will break with tradition and ship two versions of the iPhone with different screen sizes. I would strongly consider switching back to Apple if they offer me a big screen device. Otherwise I will stay with Android.
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Selling Apple prototypes is tricky business. There’s always the chance that Apple will shut it down and ask for the device back. The seller of the dual-dock iPad prototype knew this when he posted his Ebay auction. “I wasn’t expecting the auction to finish, I was expecting Apple to take it down.”
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Dell believes that within four years, twenty percent of servers sold across the world will be driven by chips not unlike the one in your cell phone. And on Tuesday, the company staked its claim to this future market, revealing that it has spent the last two years building such a machine — a server packed with 48 low-power processors based on the same ARM architecture at the core of most iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.
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The Facebook IPO, however rocky, marked a coming of age for the loose collection of technologies and services known as ?social media.? If Mark Zuckerberg had been elected governor of California, it would not have done as much to confer society?s seal of approval. It was almost as if the Internet itself went public.
Almost …
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