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US phone companies have been losing access lines to cable rivals (and to a lesser extent, VoIP companies like Vonage) for the past few years. But could the trend be slowing?

Richard Lindner, AT&T’s chief financial officer, says he believes the access line losses have reached a plateau. "Cable companies tend to make big penetration gains in the first year and then tail off," he told his audience at a Credit Suisse Media and Telecoms conference in New York.

"Our expectation is that 2007 will not see an increase in access line losses."

Continue reading "Line Losses"

"The market today is so obsessed with search advertising, people aren’t getting the bigger picture."

When I heard that at Yahoo last Friday from Usama Fayyad, chief data officer, I was tempted to diagnose a case of sour grapes. With Project Panama still delayed, Yahoo has shown no sign of being able to catch up with Google in search monetisation. But Fayyad has a point.

For a start, search’s share of overall online advertising may soon plateau. A forecast from Merrill Lynch on Monday suggests search will continue to be the hottest area in the US next year, growing by 27 per cent compared to 20 per cent growth in online branded advertising. After that, though, it will level off at 43 per cent of the overall market.

Continue reading "Beyond search advertising"

Sony finally has something (good) to shout about. Apparently US sales of the Sony Reader - a paper-back sized electronic book reader with a six-inch screen - are well ahead of expectations despite the Reader’s relatively pricey $349 price tag and some annoying niggles.

The Japanese electronics giant, plagued by laptop battery recalls and component shortages that have forced it to scale back sales projections for its next generation PlayStation 3 console, says the Reader has been flying off the shelves. "It is much more successful than we expected," said Stan Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics’ US operations.

The Reader, which weighs 9-ounces and can hold up to 80 books in its electronic memory, was reportedly championed inside Sony by Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive.  Sir Howard is also believed to have helped persuade publishers to climb on board and make their titles available for download at a discount from the Sony Connect online store.

The success of the Reader comes despite some complaints about the lack of a backlit screen - presumably to save on power consumption - and that electronic page turning is somewhat slow. Sony has already indicated that it is working on further iterations to address these and other issues.

Wall Street is attracting a growing number of blogs tracking the antics of traders and brokers. They include Under The Counter and DealBreaker. The latter was founded by Elizabeth Spiers, a refugee from Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire.

Now video blogging has come to Wall Street. Wallstrip, a financial site tracking various stocks is a mostly worthy affair. But it also takes a cue from Rocketboom in featuring an easy-on-the-eye young woman presenting a daily bulletin. Rocketboom made Amanda Congdon famous and now Wallstrip threatens to do the same for Lindsay Campbell.

And she is funny too.

Will computer-based voice communications services like Skype (now owned by eBay) eliminate the need for international carriers? Not anytime soon, according to data preparted by the Washington-based TeleGeography consultancy.

Computer-based Voice over IP (VoIP) is nothing new, but Skype was the first PC-to-PC service to break into the mainstream, attracting millions of users worldwide. Skype had 1m simultaneous users within six months of the release of its first version for Windows in July 2004. By the end of the third quarter of 2006, Skype had 136m registered users, and the number of users online now regularly exceeds 8m.

These users generated about 6.6bn minutes of traffic in the third quarter of 2006, and are on track to make over 27bn minutes of PC-to-PC calls this year. Not surprisingly, about half of Skype’s traffic is international.

Continue reading "Skype vs Telcos"

To the Morgan Library in Manhattan to hear about how the Wall Street Journal is slimming down and putting more news online. Like other newspapers in a troubled industry, the Journal is slimming itself down to save money. By trimming a column from its page width from January 2, it will save $18m annually in newsprint costs.

The Journal is making the best of it by redesigning the paper to make it easier to read. It will shorten some stories although it insists that it remains committed to long-form journalism. Paul Steiger, its managing editor, said it intends to carry more breaking news on its website.

The Journal stands out from other newspapers in having a subscription-only internet presence and now claims 800,000 subscribers. But it is making one concession to free content. It is launching a free financial data service, combining content from Dow Jones Newswires and MarketWatch.

Update: Here is Jeff Jarvis’s view

The countdown resumes on our Tech Grinch’s Xmas List of the many things you won’t be able to enjoy this Christmas:
9. Halo 3 - The most that Master Chief fans can expect to see of this Microsoft video game this Christmas is the new 60-second trailer showing in the breaks during the next Monday Night Football in the US and on Xbox.com and Xbox Live Marketplace thereafter. The biggest fans will also have the chance from Monday of registering for the public beta programme for Halo 3, which will begin in the spring. The games industry is coy about delays and some games may be pushed back for genuine reasons around timing. But Microsoft had to get out Gears of War as a Halo substitute to combat the launch of the PS3 and its Resistance: Fall of Man game.  Gears sold 1m copies in its first two weeks. Sony is waiting on some big ones as well - such as the successor to Gran Turismo 4 and the high definition online version intended for this month but postponed this week.  The next major Grand Theft Auto is still in the works and Will Wright’s long-awaited Spore is still being spawned by Electronic Arts. If you just bought a new quad-core gaming PC for the latest games for four brains - sorry, none available right now. But look out for Supreme Commander, a dual-screen military strategy game, in the New Year.
The countdown:
10. An Enzo Ferrari

Some realism from Microsoft engineer (and blogger) Erik Selberg about just how tough it will be to catch Google. Sample:

When I first arrived, our management had set a (standardly super aggressive) goal of having relevance that beat Google after 2 years… and when 2 years came and went… well, let’s just say the duration of achieving that goal is still under some discussion.

Everybody knows  that the $250bn plus global semiconductor market is being driven these days by the whims and fancies of a 17-year-old girl.  Well, a universe of 17-year-old girls, as consumer products of all kinds raid the chip shop for novelty and new features.  That said, the semiconductor industry looks as if it is heading for a period of slower growth with TSMC, the Taiwan-based manufacturer that is the world’s leading silicon foundry, predicting  only single figure sales  growth - admittedly high single figure sales growth - next year compared with the high teens it enjoyed in 2006.  Loss of momentum in the fixed and mobile phone and personal computer businesses are being blamed.  The industry remains cyclical but not perhaps as cyclical as before, old hands reckon.

Nevertheless, the growing influence of fashion and the desire for trendiness in the consumer space is  being reflected in the fact that a two-year chip manufacturing cycle is being squeezed into 12 months as the market demands new features and applications at ever shorter times to market.  The trend to greater complexity is remorseless.  TSMC manufactures to order chips designed by its customers - over  7bn eight inch wafers or their equivalent this year alone. It has been tuning up its two lines capable of handling giant 12 inch wafers, the silicon platters on which individual chips are inscribed. 

And here’s the killer: several start-up companies whose designs are to be manufactured by TSMC next year will go straight to the industry’s most advanced technology - 65 nanometre - rather than starting in traditional fashion with a less taxing regime (say, 1.3 micron) and then moving up.  This is a dramatic change, brought about by the pressure to deliver, and deliver rapidly. 

But unless you’re thinking big, don’t bother starting this small.  You’ll need an estimated $250m a year in sales to justify the cost of design, prototyping and fabricating a chip in 65 nanometre technology.

- London

Ladies and gentlemen, you saw it here first. Take your first look at Apple’s new iPod phone!

Unfortunately, you’re sure to be disappointed. Apple included more than a dozen drawings of its new combination "cell phone" and "music player" (or parts of it, at least) in a patent application that was published today.

Alas, when we tried to view the images in Internet Explorer and Firefox, the files stopped downloading partway through, and all we got was a handful of truncated files with all the good bits cut out. Here’s one of the better ones:

Ho there, is that the top of the Golden Gate Bridge?

Curiously, the file format for the truncated images is Quicktime, which is owned by Apple, whose penchant for secrecy is unmatched by anyone this side of North Korea. We don’t usually subscribe to conspiracy theories, but we’re about to break out the tinfoil hats on this one. Has anyone had better luck?

Update: The tinfoil hats can come off, thanks to our intrepid commentator, Dariush. Read more after the jump. 

Continue reading "Drawing a blank on the Apple phone"