Digital Zone 201: Goliath vs. Goliath

Posted by Patrick Wiscombe on March 22, 2010 under Tech Podcasts | Be the First to Comment

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In this edition of the Digital Zone, we talked about:

• Palm’s Pre is tanking
• Facebook vs. Google
• HTC vs. Apple
• Kindle books come to the Mac
• YouTube attacks Viacom
• IE9 kills support for XP

Palm reported sales of the Pre smart phone and said their having a difficult time getting consumers to pay attention to its phones. The company said they shipped 960,000 smart phones to stores and distributors during the last quarter. Of the 960,000 phones sold to the channel, consumers purchased 408,000, down 29 percent from the previous quarter. By comparison, Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones in its most recent quarter. Palm reported a loss of $22 million for the quarter. In the same period a year ago Palm lost $98 million. Revenue was $350 million, up from $91 million a year ago. Palm now expects sales in the current quarter to be less than $150 million, partly because carriers now have big stocks of phones to sell off.

New industry data show that U.S. visits to Facebook last week exceeded Google’s, the first time that’s ever happened. The amount of web traffic Facebook and Google generates now account for about one in every seven visits by Internet users. The report issued by Hitwise measured visits, not visitors, meaning one visitor could go to Facebook, quit and return several times in a day for multiple visits. The data suggest Facebook fans return more frequently than Google fans. Hitwise’s report doesn’t count traffic to Google-owned sites such as Google Maps or YouTube, but only to the primary Google.com domain. It also doesn’t measure searches through a Google box embedded into another site. Facebook has 400 million active users and has reported that it added about 100 million users in the last six months ending in February.

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HTC, accused by Apple of infringing on 20 iPhone patents, said it will “fully defend” itself against the charges. Apple said the 20 Apple patents were related to the “user interface, underlying architecture and hardware” of the iPhone. Apple which has sold more than 40 million iPhones worldwide, is asking for unspecified damages and an injunction to prevent HTC from making or selling products using the patents in dispute. In case you didn’t know, HTC is the manufacturer of the Nexus One, Google’s iPhone competitor. Apple is currently being sued by Nokia for patent infringement. Apple has filed a countersuit. Research in Motion has been accused of patent infringement by Motorola in a suit filed in January. Eastman Kodak filed lawsuits against Apple and RIM saying both companies infringed Kodak digital imaging technology.

Amazon has released a free program that allows Kindle electronic books to be read on Apple’s Mac computers and said they will also be available on the upcoming iPad. Amazon said the “Kindle for Mac” application can be downloaded in more than 100 countries from their website. Amazon has already released free applications that allow Kindle e-books to be read on the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the Blackberry, and PCs running Windows. The programs allow a reader to switch between devices without losing their place in a book.

YouTube has accused Viacom of uploading infringing content. The company said Viacom “continuously and secretly” uploaded its own content to YouTube for years and openly complained about the presence of infringing, Viacom-owned video on YouTube. YouTube also said Viacom hired no fewer than 18 marketing firms to upload content to YouTube. The company also says those marketing companies added a handful of impurities to make the video look as though it were taken from a second-hand source and said the firms would send out their employees to create anonymous YouTube accounts under fake e-mail addresses and upload videos from their local Kinko’s copy center. After the content was uploaded, Viacom would even issue demands that its own videos should be taken down. YouTube also points out that Viacom “tried repeatedly” to buy YouTube.

Microsoft’s new browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), will not run on Windows XP, now or when the software eventually ships. The move makes Microsoft the first major browser developer to drop support for XP. No other major browser maker has announced plans to stop supporting Windows XP. The IE9 Platform Preview can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site.

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PODCAST SPONSORS: Please support the companies that make the Patrick Wiscombe podcast network go and take advantage of the special offers only available to our listeners.

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