The semiconductor industry has been through so many ups and downs over the course of more than 60 years. If anyone should know how to get through the turmoil, it’s the chip makers who have become the elder statesmen of Silicon Valley.
But the greatest recession since 1929 is pulling the chip industry deeper into the [...]
But the greatest recession since 1929 is pulling the chip industry deeper into the mud than ever before. Sales fell 28 percent in January compared to a year ago. It’s getting ugly. Not quite auto industry ugly. But the wheels are coming off; the chip industry is expected to shrink in 2009 for the first time since 2001.
I shouldn’t be surprised, since the chip makers are stuck with capacity that is like an albatross around their necks. Chip makers are always vulnerable to economic swings that leave them holding the bag on a $2 billion factory with no orders to keep it busy. In such times, they hold their breath until they can come up for air, awaiting the inevitable economic upturn to lift their sales and fill their factories. The ones that survive are the ones who created war chests during good times.
No one in Taiwan wants to see a repeat of what happened to Qimonda, Germany’s big memory chip maker. Qimonda filed for bankruptcy in January, and it looks like many of Germany’s chip jobs will vanish. The DRAM chip makers may lose $5 billion to $6 billion as an industry in the fourth quarter, on sales of just $9 billion to $10 billion, according to Denali Software analyst Lane Mason.
The flash memory industry is just as bleak. SanDisk is hemorrhaging money, prompting a takeover bid from Samsung. But SanDisk is going it alone for now, and Samsung has dropped its bid. Last week, Spansion laid off 3,000 of its employees and gave them no severance pay. On Sunday, it filed for bankruptcy protection, but it also gave raises to retain key employees. The laid-off employees contend that Spansion broke the law by not giving them their 60-day notice.
Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices has enlisted the help of the government of Abu Dhabi in its fight against Intel. Since it has subsidies from the German government, AMD has the benefit of using two foreign governments to fight Intel. On top of that, a whole coalition of companies led by IBM are trying to build factories that can match Intel’s best manufacturing technology. I can’t say I pity Intel, which can afford to spend $7 billion on its own factories.
Nvidia and Intel, two partners joined at the hip, are in a hot war. Nvidia makes graphics chips, while Intel makes microprocessors. Both are necessary in the modern PC. But Intel sued Nvidia because it alleges it didn’t give Nvidia the right to make chip sets for the newest Intel-based computers, even after Nvidia granted Intel the right to make chip sets with Nvidia-based SLi machines.
Nvidia’s head of investor relations, Mike Hara, acknowledged that Nvidia may have to make its own x86-based (Intel compatible) microprocessor. And Intel is making its own graphics chip. That’s because we’re rapidly heading toward computers with just a single chip. Intel recently bad-mouthed Nvidia’ Ion platform, even though Ion is built to work with Intel’s Atom chip. What is really happening is that Intel and Nvidia have figured out there is only going to be one chair left in the game of musical chairs. There isn’t room for two. Is it ugly, bare-knuckle fighting? Yes, no surprise there.
I hesitate to think about what would happen if AMD goes under and Nvidia gets crushed. What will happen if the U.S. memory chip makers disappear, leaving the industry concentrated in the hands of two Korean companies and maybe some Japanese firms?
The danger is that this industry that has persisted for a long time with one structure is headed toward another. There have always been about 20 big companies and a flowering of startups with every innovation cycle. The startups have pretty much gone away, since it costs sometimes $100 million to get a promising chip company off the ground. And I worry that the 20 companies will go down to three, much like the auto industry. We’ll see more monopolies, more government-sanctioned cartels, and all of the economic chains that come with such structures.
The problem is that nobody is talking about this. The bailouts of homeowners and auto companies is taking precedence. We don’t have the attention span to think about the implications of losing a big chunk of the country’s electronics foundatio.
But we should. Once the companies founder and the jobs disappear, they don’t come back. In many key industries, we will be dependent on foreign suppliers. Don’t be surprised if we spend all of our energy saving the car industry, only to lose another, even more strategic business through our own neglect. I’m not asking for a chip industry bailout just yet. But we need to be aware of who else is circling the drain, besides the auto makers.
On March 12 in Brussels, Plugg, the European startup conference organized by TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters, promises to be an excellent event with a host of knowledgeable speakers and a startup competition.
Wauters has extended a 15% discount off the €450 list price. Simply head on over to the registration page hosted by Amiando and enter the [...]
Wauters has extended a 15% discount off the €450 list price. Simply head on over to the registration page hosted by Amiando and enter the promotional code plugg09-media-venturebeat at the bottom.
Speaking at the event are some of Europe’s most prolific tech pundits, each of them specialized in a specific area which they’ll highlight in a keynote or panel. Speakers include Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK), Gerd Leonhard (Media Futurist), Bart Decrem (Tapulous), Anil Hansjee (Google), Dries Buytaert (Drupal, Acquia), Inmaculada Martinez (Stradbroke Advisors), Lisa Sounio (Dopplr), Fred Destin (Atlas Ventures), and more.
Plugg recently announced the 20 finalists, selected out of a group of 133 companies. These finalists will each pitch to the audience and a professional jury on stage at the conference.
ShopSavvy is one of the most popular applications on Google’s Android mobile platform. It has over 400,000 users who actively use it on their G1 phones to scan barcodes and look up items online to comparison shop in real-time. And the new version, dubbed “Gigan,” which is launching today, should make the app even better.
The [...]
The big new feature of this release is the addition of location provided by Skyhook Wireless. While the app previously had location features, it accessed them through the G1’s GPS chip. This process took anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to work properly, Big In Japan’s (ShopSavvy’s developer) Alexander Muse tells me. And because GPS is really meant to be used outdoors, it also wasn’t that great at finding you even after you waited all that time. Skyhook Wireless’ solution, which uses a hybrid model of GPS data plus Wi-Fi and cell tower triangulation, will work much better.
And that’s important for a few reasons. First, as a shopper, if you’re in a store looking up a product and notice it’s for sale somewhere else at a cheaper price, you’ll want to know where that other store is in relation to where you are. If the location data is off, ShopSavvy may not even realize that you’re near a store with a deal. Second, retailers want to offer special deals or coupons through ShopSavvy to customers, but it’s much better for everyone if they can do that when the customer is actually in the store. With good location data, they’ll be able to tell that.
And that, in turn, will allow Big In Japan to make money from ShopSavvy. The app currently has affiliate deals with online shops when customers shop and buy there, but the coupon angle is a potentially lucrative one.
There are other, smaller features that come with this Gigan release of ShopSavvy as well. The most notable is the improvements made to the barcode scanning software. It work about a noticeably faster now, Muse tells me, and it will also be more accurate.
These improvements are actually thanks to the work Big In Japan is doing in developing its iPhone version of ShopSavvy. The application isn’t available on that platform yet, but is being tested. By the time the next release rolls around, which should have a payment option integrated in it, Muse hopes the iPhone version will be ready to roll.
He says they are also looking at a Windows Mobile version, as well as a version for the Palm Pre, when that device is available later this year.
This Gigan release for Android will also feature a “stealth” mode for scanning items in stores. Muse notes that while scanning items isn’t illegal, many users felt awkward given the loud beeping noise ShopSavvy would make when scanning items. That can now be turned off.
On the social front, you’ll now be able to send out alerts of your ShopSavvy use to Twitter, to let others know when you find good deals.
Big In Japan was one of the original winners of the Android Challenge back in September for ShopSavvy, which was then known as GoCart. That win brought the team $275,000, and led to a subsequent angel round of $700,000 from Architel LP, a network and IT company which Muse also owns.
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When Boxee was forced to pull Hulu support a few weeks ago, users were outraged. And rightfully so. It’s not like Boxee, a software media center startup, was blocking the advertisements Hulu was showing, it was really just another way to view the content, almost like another browser. But the powers that be behind Hulu [...]
A new “bleeding-edge” release of Boxee (which is its way of saying that it may not be stable) features an RSS reader optimized for video. This means that any Hulu content which has a public RSS feed can now be pulled in and viewed through that. Boxee warns that it’s not as nice as the solution it previously had with Hulu, but it gets the job done in some cases.
I had heard from a source last week that Boxee was meeting with Hulu as well as representatives of Fox and NBC (which are backers of Hulu) to try and resolve matters and bring the service fully back. Those talks proved unsuccessful for now, Boxee has confirmed.
“We met with Hulu and their content providers, but they weren’t ready to work with us yet. When they are, we look forward to bringing a more robust version of the Hulu application back to Boxee with their help. To meet the needs of our users. In the meantime, we’ve included an RSS reader in this version of boxee that is optimized for video. As with any other RSS reader like Firefox, NetNewWire, or Google, this feature allows users to access publicly available RSS feeds from Hulu, Google Video. YouTube, and many others,” a Boxee representative tells me.
In its post on the matter, Boxee seems to go out of its way to say nice things about the big media companies who, let’s face it, are really the ones calling the shots here. In the usual lowercase posting style that Boxee specializes in, it writes:
while we don’t come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. it is a complex business. the fact that it’s becoming easy to consume Internet video on a TV brings into question many of the industry’s business models that developed before the web. the people in the industry “get it”. they are users. they read the blogs. they talk with users. they are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time.
Which is to say, they need time to make sure that Boxee is not a threat to the online money pipeline they see with Hulu.
As a bonus, Boxee has thrown another two other features into this new alpha release as well: A new service called “App Box” and auto-update functionality.
App Box is the interesting one, as it’s Boxee’s take on the app store craze that has swept the mobile world. Basically, this store will allow for new apps and plugins to be listed and easily installed within Boxee, including those from third-party developers. Yes, Boxee it’s becoming a true platform.
And it will be continue to be an open platform. “There is also native support for third-party repositories, so you don’t have to rely on Boxee as a gatekeeper for what goes into the official Boxee app store,” the company notes.
Meanwhile, the auto-update feature will finally let users know when a new version of the software is available, within the software. Rather than checking the site or Boxee’s Twitter feed, users will now be prompted to download a new version when it’s ready.
Speaking of new versions, as I noted, this latest release may be fairly unstable, but Boxee wanted to get it out there. It plans to have a more stable release ready in time for its New York City meetup on March 24. At that event, it also plans to share information about the beta release of the product.
Boxee raised a $4 million first round of funding from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital in November.
While RIM, Microsoft and Palm ready their mobile app stores for release this year, the one that inspired them all, Apple’s App Store, continues to chug along at an impressive pace. The store now features more than 25,000 applications, according to numbers from the site 148Apps. And after hitting 20,000 just a few weeks ago, [...]
But I’m more interested in the money aspect of these huge numbers. For example, if you tried to buy every app in the App Store at once, it would cost you $71,442.69, according to 148apps’ numbers.
The most popular price? While you might assume it would be free, it’s actually $0.99 — by a long shot. 10,274 apps cost $0.99 versus 6,044 that are free. The next closest is of course $1.99, which 3,302 apps sell for. That’s interesting in light of the news that RIM’s BlackBerry App World will have a minimum price set at $2.99 for apps (though there will be free ones). As I’ve talked about, that could limit the crap applications, but it will also undoubtedly limit the potential popularity of the store.
As I predicted several months ago, $9.99 app are holding their own. It’s currently the sixth most popular price point, with over 700 apps selling at that price.
The most popular category by far is “games” with 5,263 apps, followed by “entertainment” with 3,497 apps. But the third most popular category may surprise you a bit: Books. Yes, there are over 2,405 book apps in the App Store, numbers that are in line with recent reports of surging popularity — something reflected by Amazon’s decision to release a Kindle app for the iPhone.
The least popular app category? Weather.
Apple, for whatever reason, didn’t acknowledge the 20,000 app landmark last month, after making a big to-do about 15,000 apps (though, that milestone was also timed with 500 million app downloads).
And it should be noted that the App Store may not officially have the 25,575 apps that 148apps lists in it right now, as that may just be the number that have been accepted since its launch (but some have since been removed). For what it’s worth, AppShopper pegs the number of current apps at 23,758. But still, it’s impressive growth anyway you look at it.
When President Barack Obama was inaugurated, I wrote a post about the new presidential website titled, “WhiteHouse.gov takes a page from Twitter’s playbook.” At the time, I thought the headline was a joke — because, ha ha, no one would expect nuanced policy discussion on the micro-blogging site with a 140-character limit — but it [...]
When President Barack Obama was inaugurated, I wrote a post about the new presidential website titled, “WhiteHouse.gov takes a page from Twitter’s playbook.” At the time, I thought the headline was a joke — because, ha ha, no one would expect nuanced policy discussion on the micro-blogging site with a 140-character limit — but it looks like I was actually peering into the Twitteriffic future.
On Friday, 20 “young business leaders” are headed to the White House to discuss the economic crisis. Among those leaders are investor and former Googler Chris Sacca and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams (insert obligatory joke about Twitter’s business model here), and both of them decided it would be a good idea to ask Twitter users for suggestions. Even using Twitter’s new front-and-center search feature, I haven’t been able to count the flood of the responses, but there are a lot — Williams alone seems to receive a new policy suggestion every few seconds.
Now, I’m a bit skeptical that many worthwhile ideas will come out of this attempt to tap the wisdom of the crowds — Sacca and Williams both seem like really bright guys (duh), but this is an exercise that begins, “Guys, give me an economic stimulus plan in 10 words or less!” so, uh, yeah, I have my doubts. But as a peek into the Twitter hive mind, it’s much more fascinating than, say, the list of Twitter trends.
Naturally, there are quite a few platitudes about entrepreneurship and innovation, plus some complaints that the media reporting on bad news is making things worse (surprise! I disagree), but I was glad to see some genuinely thought-provoking tweets, as well as delightfully out-there thoughts, not to mention a few good jokes. Here are some favorites, good and bad:
“Create a federally funded homeless shelter for failed entrepreneurs”
“you could tell them to talk to Rep. Ron Paul. He has a fantastic economics policy!”
Unless he was misquoted, Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee suggested today that all iPhone owners are going to switch to the Palm Pre when their contracts expire.
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee told Bloomberg today. “Not one of those people [...]
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee told Bloomberg today. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
Wow, that’s a bold statement. One that will be repeated over and over again in the press if the Pre fails to live up the high level of hype Palm has built for it. But McNamee, whose firm has invested nearly half a billion dollars in Palm and owns a large chunk of the company (around 40 percent), undoubtedly knows that Palm absolutely needs the Palm to be a hit.
Palm is struggling badly as it waits for the launch of the Pre. The company recently announced that its third-quarter sales will be well below expectations — sales for the quarter were between $85 million and $90 million while Wall Street was looking for something more like $155 million. Ouch.
Worse, the company is going through money like it’s going out of style. It spent between $95 and $100 million in cash for the quarter. It still has between $215 and $220 million remaining, but obviously it can’t keep going at that rate. Especially when you consider that it has now lost money for six straight quarters and has already essentially burned through all of the money Elevation re-poured into it in December, as ZDNet points out.
McNamee’s words are also likely to further ignite a testy relationship between Palm and Apple, the maker of the iPhone. The Pre will be the first mobile device since the iPhone to use multi-touch, the touch screen gesture technology. Apple has many patents on the technology and has said it will do everything in its power to protect its intellectual property, which everyone assumes is a shot across the bow of Palm — a company full of ex-Apple employees.
If you can read beyond his fighting words, McNamee also seemingly reveals a launch window for the Pre: Sometime before July 29. Despite rumors of a delay, Palm has said it remains on track for a launch in the first half of this year. That would of course mean June, so perhaps the launch window has been pushed a bit, but it definitely sounds like it’s coming soon and that it’ll come out swinging.
