Category Archives: Uncategorized

Earnings Season

January 30, 2011 – 9:15 pm

TweetWith three high-tech earnings announcements to cover, this week’s Note will have more breadth than depth. We’ll start with Amazon. The company’s Q4 2010 sales grew 36% to $12.95B, vs. $9.5B for the same quarter in 2009. Great! But not so fast–investors trashed the stock because Amazon’s numbers were “below expectations.” Yet despite losing 7% [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Comments (10)

Channel Checks: Smart or Illegal?

November 29, 2010 – 12:13 am

Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Insider trading isn’t new but it’s still exciting, especially if you don’t play the stock market. For spectators, the cops and robbers game mixes ingenuity, mischief, furtiveness and confederacies. And the unavoidable dunces who talk or do too much and get the miscreants in serious trouble with the Law. The latest episode [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Comments (1)

Fighting Unlicensed Content With Algorithms

November 22, 2010 – 8:51 am

TweetIt’s high time to fight the theft of news-related contents, really. A couple of weeks ago, Attributor, a US company, released the conclusions of a five-month study covering the use of unauthorized contents on the internet. The project was called Graduated Response Trial for News and relied on one strong core idea: once a significant [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Tagged | Comments (8)

What If Google Stored All Our Medical Records?

October 17, 2010 – 8:50 pm

TweetRegard the horrified looks on the faces of the attendees at a California Council on Science and Technology meeting in Irvine six or seven years ago. I’m the only member from the Dark Side, from the venture capital milieu, inside an institution “designed to offer expert advice to the state government and to recommend solutions [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Tagged | Comments (16)

HP’s Board of Directors: Redemption or More Insanity Ahead?

September 19, 2010 – 6:42 pm

TweetHP’s Board of Directors has accumulated an impressive record of bad judgment calls, the latest being the lame lawsuit against their recently deposed CEO, Mark Hurd, who quickly joined Oracle as Co-President and Director. The History Once a revered Silicon Valley icon, HP was arguably the first worldwide success to emerge from pre-war Stanford where [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Also posted in hardware | Tagged | Comments (11)

Understanding the Digital Natives

July 25, 2010 – 8:30 pm

TweetThey see life as a game. They enjoy nothing more than outsmarting the system. They don’t trust politicians, medias, nor brands. They see corporations as inefficient and plagued by an outmoded hierarchy. Even if they harbor little hope of doing better than their parents, they don’t see themselves as unhappy. They belong to a group [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in social networks | Comments (27)

Antennagate: If you can’t fix it, feature it!

July 18, 2010 – 6:46 pm

Tweet…and don’t diss your customer, or the media! Rewind the clock to June 7th 2010. Steve’s on stage at the WWDC in San Francisco. He’s introducing the iPhone 4 and proudly shows off the new external antenna design. Antennae actually, there are two of them wrapped around the side. Steve touts the very Apple-like combination [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Also posted in hardware, mobile internet | Comments (81)

The poison of arrogance

July 4, 2010 – 7:07 pm

TweetArrogance is the most toxic waste-product of technology companies. Past examples abound: IBM, AT&T, Microsoft… All their hauteur got them were expensive antitrust actions and customer backlash. Last week, we got yet another example of the insufferable behavior still prevailing in the high-tech world — with the to-be-expected response from regulators and markets. Navx is [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Comments (34)

Drop that -phone!

July 4, 2010 – 7:02 pm

TweetI’ll explain the ‘’-’’ in a moment. Today’s piece is about the power of words to shape thought, to distort, to mislead. More specifically, I contend “smartphone” is the wrong word for the new genre of mobile devices. I’m not completely naïve, however. In the end, I’ll agree there is little chance we’ll settle on [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Comments (14)

Intel’s bold bet against ARM: visionary or myopic?

June 27, 2010 – 3:50 pm

TweetToday, Intel’s x86 architecture reigns supreme on PCs (and millions of servers, such as Google’s, that use the PC organ bank). Anywhere else, the ARM processors have won; they’re in billions of devices, regular cell phones, smartphones, entertainment devices, navigation systems and legions of other embedded applications. Understandably, perhaps, Intel didn’t want to play in [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Comments (21)