Once upon a time, Motorola was the king of cell phones. AT&T invented the cellular network, Motorola, already a leader in radio technology, designed the mobile devices and, in 1983, introduces the Dyna-Tac, the first of a long line of clearly superior products, all ending in Tac.  In the late eighties and nineties, MicroTacs and [...]

Something to keep our mind off the Wall Street catastrophe. Who knows, we might be on the verge of a “nuclear winter” as the Bush administration wakes up to another consequence of its intellectual shallowness, of its inability to understand that for markets to be really free they need to be regulated with an effective, [...]

by Jean-Louis Gassée
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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.
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The symptoms: spotty 3G coverage, bad reception, ‘bandwidth’ (meaning download speed) [...]

This is the Fall season of business plans for the coming year. The numbers will mean pain for the media industry. Below is a set of facts and figures to keep in mind when considering newspapers, advertising, search, mass collaboration… and coffee.
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The newspaper industry’s overall condition
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80% gone: Within the last 12 months, the market value [...]

Steve 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 [...]

by 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 — [...]

“Welcome to the Weekend Web”, said Business Week. Internet browsing differs from weekdays to weekends. In this story, Google Mobile’s chief says that the biggest part of traffic on the search giant’s mobile sites occurs Saturdays and Sundays. The weekend’s mobile web promenade involves mostly classified and local sites. Among them (on the US market), [...]

ComScore, the internet measurement company, announced it was acquiring M:Metrics for $44m. Not a deal comparable to last year acquisition of Telephia by Nielsen, for $440m but still a significant event. This acquisition confirms that tracking the expansion of mobile devices as well as the behavior of its users is as important as the data [...]