Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
Twitter confirms new round of funding
September 25th, 2009 | 
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Yes, Twitter’s mega-cash infusion is real. CEO Evan Williams confirmed on the company blog Friday that Twitter has raised a new round of investment from Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital.
Williams says it’s “a significant round.” He didn’t say just how close it was to the roughly $100 million that the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Nor did he say whether this values Twitter at $1 billion.
“It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value,” Williams wrote in the blog post. “Twitter’s journey has just begun and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I’m proud of the team we’ve built so far and I’m confident in the future we’ll build together.”
Before the end of the year, Twitter is expected to start rolling out paid corporate accounts to businesses who see use the service for marketing, promotion, and customer service.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10361763-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
BlackBerry sales and profit disappoint
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion said Thursday it sold fewer BlackBerry phones than analysts had expected, and the company’s quarterly earnings were hurt by a legal settlement.
The company said earnings fell 4 percent in the second fiscal quarter due in large part to charges associated with a legal settlement.
For the quarter that ended August 29, the company said it earned $475.6 million, or 83 cents a share, compared to profits of $495.5 million, or 86 cents a share, for the same period a year ago.
Revenue rose to $3.53 billion from $2.58 billion a year earlier.
Analysts had expected earnings of $1 a share on revenue of $3.62 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
Even though sales were strong and revenue was up, RIM reported it shipped slightly fewer devices than what analysts had expected. The company said it shipped about 8.3 million BlackBerry devices during the quarter, adding about 3.8 million new subscribers. Analysts had expected the company to add about 4 million new subscribers on shipments between 8.5 million and 8.6 million.
But what really hurt the company was a charge of $112.8 million related to the settlement of a patent dispute with Visto Corp. Excluding this charge, RIM said it would have earned $588.4 million, or $1.03 per share for the quarter.
RIM said it expects revenue between $3.6 billion and $3.85 billion for the third fiscal quarter that ends November 28. And the company expects earnings per share to be in the neighborhood of between $1 and $1.08.
Analysts expect RIM to introduce a new version of its touch-screen Storm later this year on Verizon Wireless’s network. This devices is supposed to compete head to head with Apple’s iPhone. But RIM has other competitors in the touch-screen arena as it approaches he holiday season. There are also other devices, such as the Palm Pre and handsets from HTC and Motorola that use the Google Android software.
Source :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10361155-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Blackberry, cell phone, Communication, Internet, Tech | 
Tags: Blackberry, cell phone, smart phone | 
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Gmail outage hits ‘small subset of users’
Gmail was unavailable Thursday morning for what Google said was a “small subset of users,” the latest outage from a company that prides itself in running advanced computing systems.
On the Google Apps status dashboard, the company said at 7:29 a.m. PDT that it was aware of the problem. However, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail through software such as Outlook or Thunderbird still works, the company said.
Even a small subset can be a lot of people, though, as carping on Twitter indicates.
Gmail outages hit Google itself sometimes, providing extra incentive to improve reliability. One company spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said on Twitter, “Gmail down (for Googlers too).”
Google had Gmail outages in February, April, and very widely on September 1.
Gmail was working for me Thursday morning, but slowly and without access to my contacts at 8 a.m. PDT. By 8:13 a.m., it was behaving properly.
Updated 9:15 a.m. PDT – Many users are reporting that their e-mail is back to normal, but there are still problems with Gmail contacts. Google posted the following advisory at 8:29 a.m. PDT.
“The Gmail issue should now be resolved for most of our users. There still might be issues with your contacts. For Gmail users: Use www.google.com/contacts to access your contacts For Google Apps Customers: www.google.com/contacts/a/yourdomain-name.com.”
The Google Apps status dashboard flagged the Gmail problem Thursday morning.
Another $100 million for Twitter?
That business plan had better be close on the horizon, because according to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has some new investors on board: Mutual fund T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, and a handful of others have reportedly pumped $100 million into the microblogging phenomenon.
TechCrunch reported last week that Twitter was putting together a round of funding at around a $1 billion valuation. But that report suggested that the company would do so by raising about $50 million–half of what it actually has, per the WSJ, in a deal expected to close Thursday.
Twitter still doesn’t make significant revenue. But its founders have said that paid corporate accounts, in the form of a sort of “analytics dashboard,” are imminent. Advertising isn’t out of the question either, despite what some of the company’s executives have said in the past.
The company’s initial round of Series B funding last year valued it at about $80 million, but soon added to the round in a deal that upped the valuation well into the hundreds of millions.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10360818-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
AT&T takes the phone out of iPhone
Three weeks ago, I got a call on a friend’s iPhone while in the middle of a desert; cell phone coverage had come to Burning Man. By contrast, several calls I made last night to my parents from my San Francisco apartment were dropped and a subsequent connection became garbled.
That happens daily when I try to converse on my first-generation iPhone in my apartment and in certain other neighborhoods. I’ve come to anticipate that if I can even make a call it’s likely to be short-lived or poor quality.
Frustrated by the numerous interrupted calls, I decided to try to find out why my iPhone service is so poor that it’s easier to have a Web video conference over AIM with my boyfriend because neither of us can use our iPhones (his is 3G) reliably inside either of our homes.
This is not a new problem. AT&T was criticized when traffic from attendees at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, overwhelmed the network earlier this year. And there were widespread complaints about dropped calls and spotty service after the launch of the iPhone 3G a year ago.
I wondered why, a year later, the service still seemed unreliable. I called AT&T (on my reliable landline at work) to find out. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel blamed the problem on the increasing amount of data traffic iPhone users are creating, which CNET News and others wrote about earlier this month.
“We lead the industry in smart phones,” he said. “As a result, we are having to stay ahead of what is incredible and increasing demand for wireless data services.”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10358156-245.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in Apple, cell phone, Communication, Internet, iPhone |
Tags: 3G, AT&T, iPhone |
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