Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée AT&T can’t seem to catch a break. A couple of weeks ago, at All Things Digital, an industry conference, Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s Chairman, got the audience to snicker and roll eyes. The conference is held by the Wall Street Journal, led by its digital guru, Walt Mossberg and, “by invitation only”, $5K [...]
April 26, 2009 – 12:55 pm
Tweet4:00am. I find myself reading an interesting story covering Portfolio’s web site – on my iPhone. As sleep comes back, I reflexively reach for the “save” (for later reading) button that is on every iPhone news application. But I am reading from the magazine’s site, as opposed to running an app on my smartphone; web [...]
April 11, 2009 – 12:09 am
TweetMicro-payments are an old idea, some say a bad fantasy. Chief, we’re rich: I found a way to get a millicent per page view… So far, not much has happened. Unless you look at a tidy, not tiny, little billion-dollar business called iTunes. Three years ago, in February 2006, 1 billion songs served, sold, cashed [...]
TweetYou the attentive reader might ask why VCs like yours truly are interested in netbooks. Hardware made in Taiwan, running Linux or Windows, low prices, even lower margins…Where are the opportunities for entrepreneurs, and for those of us who invest in their creations? This is a different question from: Why are netbooks successful? We know [...]
February 1, 2009 – 7:40 pm
TweetI’m quite fond of Bloomberg’s iPhone application. My insomnia companion is my iPod touch, used as an alarm clock, and as a convenient bedtime newsreader. And the Bloomberg app is my favorite: good navigation, a simple bottom toolbar (News, Markets, MyStocks, StockFinder). In the News section, stories are shown as they are published and each [...]
September 15, 2008 – 8:27 am
Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée . Revelation or revelator? I’m referring to the iPhone, of course. We’ll quickly skip over the revelation part, enough praise (and some well-deserved barbs) already. Instead, we’ll look at the light the iPhone sheds on the cellular infrastructure and on the culture of operators. . The symptoms: spotty 3G coverage, bad reception, [...]
August 17, 2008 – 10:40 pm
TweetSteve shimmers into a bar, materializes next to Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, crying in his mojito and whispers: I can fulfill your fondest dream. You’re the Devil, go away! No, I’m merely Steve Jobs and I want nothing to do with your soul or your chiseled body. Relax, it’s just about money. A little bit [...]
August 11, 2008 – 6:31 pm
Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Simple is hard. Easy is harder. Invisible is hardest. So goes one of the many proverbs of our computer lore. As Apple found out last month with the MobileMe launch misfires, the lofty promise of “Exchange for the rest of us” translated into a user experience that was neither simple nor easy [...]
TweetContrary to what I expected, the dust hasn’t settled yet. A week later, people still queue, 2h30 Friday morning before being admitted to the sanctum sanctorum in San Francisco. Besides the long lines, there were glitches: activation problems, trouble with the new MobileMe service, with getting access to software updates for the “old” iPhones. Apple [...]
TweetNo, no, not Steve Jobs but an even higher entity smiling upon the company. As I hope to show, Apple’s hard work years ago is now about to pay huge unexpected dividends on the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out of Steve Jobs’ quasi-divine hands in January 2007, it was a hack, the result [...]
