Old but great Steve Jobs Speech: How to live before you die

Interview with Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, and Dan Morgan, portfolio manager at Synovus Securities

Interview with Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, and Dan Morgan, portfolio manager at Synovus Securities.
Tech giants Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Apple reported earnings in the last week, each posting stronger than expected results.

“Apple is mostly on the consumer side and they had a good showing. If we peel away some of the different segments in these earnings report, you’d have to come to the conclusion that we did have some reasonable strength on the enterprise.”

In the meantime, Munster said Amazon.com’s positive earnings report is only the beginning of what will be a continued upward climb for the online retailer.

A look at Apple Products from 1976 to 2009

A cool visual of most Apple products since 1976. Apple Newton anyone? I cannot live without my lime-green iPods and iPhone 3G. How many do you own?

Pcmag: Top 10 Hottest Windows 7 features

"You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength." - Joker
All this hype for what? Microsoft's Windows 7 is expected to be released sometime this year. So far the hoopla on the latest MSFT Operating System has been well justified.
Below are PC Magazine's top 10 hottest features after testing the beta version of Microsoft's latest and greatest masterpiece. Let's hope it's not anywhere near the mess Vista has been.

1. Send Programmers a Shock Button
2. Instant Plug-and-Play Driver Installation
3. Wake Up!
4. Clippy Returns - helps you with networking-management issues, security issues, and driver updates
5. On-PC Play Support of Video Games - support full on-PC play of Xbox 360 games, even Halo 3, and the emulation of PS3 games
6. Add-On Drives for Burning VHS Tapes
7. Flying Toasters
8. Improved File Management
9. Windows 7 Viper Widescreen Wipers
10. UberDriver Features

fortune: Microsoft Reality Ad - More on "Lauren" - De Long not Conrad

“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

All about Microsoft’s “Lauren”
Her hair is red, her eyes dark brown, her physique slim. She stands 5′2″ in her stocking feet and weighs 113 lbs. in her birthday suit.
Her name is Lauren De Long, and she set a million geek hearts aflutter with her spunky performance in the now famous “you find it, you keep it” PC ad, in which she chose an HP (HPQ) Pavillion running Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Vista Home Edition over any computer in the Apple (AAPL) store.

She’s the young, hip, Volkswagen-driving redhead who stars in the latest Microsoft’s (MSFT) TV campaign. Told that if she can find a 17-inch laptop for under $1,000 she can keep it, Lauren ends up — to the Mac aficionados’ dismay — with an HP (HPQ) running Windows Vista.
“I would have to double my budget, which isn’t feasible,” Lauren says as she drives away from an Apple Store, where 17-inch notebooks start at $2,799. Then she sighs and delivers the ad’s coup de grace: “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.”

Yhoo: Skype announces service for iPhone, BlackBerry

Skype, the Internet telephone unit of eBay Inc, is planning to launch its service for iPhone users on Tuesday and for BlackBerry in May as part of its effort to expand beyond desktop computers.
Skype has been pushing to make its service work on the most popular advanced phones with an aim to expending its more than 400 million users who were mostly lured by the promise of cheap and sometimes free calls made using its computer application.
"The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There's a pent-up demand," Durchslag said in an interview before the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas, where Skype plans to launch the service on Tuesday.

CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood said the new applications give Skype a chance to boost its mobile phone position, which has been weaker than that of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or News Corp's MySpace.
One of Skype's unusual iPhone features is the fact that it allows subscribers use to the phone numbers in their existing iPhone address book so they do not need duplicate lists.
"Whether you're Twitter, MySpace or Facebook you want to be embedded in the address book," said Wood. "This puts Skype firmly into the game."
Skype's iPhone application will be free to download and will allow free calls between Skype users. As with Skype on the desktop, fees will be charged for calls to traditional phones.
The service will also work on later versions of Apple's latest iPod Touch device, which has Wi-Fi links but no cellular connection. The iPod Touch launched September 2008 has a microphone, unlike the first iPod Touch launched in 2007.

SAI: AdMob's iPhone Ad Business Exploding (AAPL)

"Mobile ad network AdMob has moved aggressively into the iPhone ad market, and it's paying off. In the last year, the company's iPhone ad business -- measured by ad requests -- grew more than 35x.
Last month, the company served up 1.2 billion ads worldwide to Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch devices, or about 18% of its 6.56 billion total ad requests. In Feb. 2008, it served up about 33 million ads to iPhones, or about 1.3% of its 2.56 billion total ad requests."

FierceMobile: iphone 3.0 promises 100+ new features

iPhone OS 3.0 promises more than 100 new features

"Apple said the new operating system would be available to current iPhone users at no charge sometime this summer. It will sell for $9.95 to owners of the iPod Touch." - NYT


Apple officially unveiled its iPhone OS 3.0 beta Tuesday, promising more than 100 new features to bolster the functionality of iPhone and iPod touch applications. According to Apple, the SDK for iPhone OS 3.0 boasts more than 1,000 new APIs, including support for apps to communicate with hardware accessories attached to iPhone or iPod touch devices. The update will also include the long-promised [1] Apple Push Notification service, which offers developers a channel to alert users of new information, even when your application isn't running--developers may now send text notifications, trigger audible alerts or add a numbered badge to their application icon.

Additional highlights of the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK include:

In App Purchase, which enables users to purchase content or services from an application, e.g. new levels of a game or additional chapters of an e-book. Apple's new Store Kit framework will supervise the financial aspects of the transaction, process payment with the iTunes Store and provide the application with information about the purchase.

Peer-to-Peer Connectivity, which enables mobile game developers to add multi-player capabilities.

In addition, the new Game Kit framework allows any application--not only games--to communicate between devices via Bluetooth.

Map Kit, another new framework that enables programmers to embed maps within their applications. Map Kit works with the Google Mobile Maps Service to offer panning and zooming, custom annotations, current location and geo-coding.

iPod Library Access, which enables applications to directly access music, podcasts or audio books in a user's iPod library by means of the updated Media Player framework.

At Tuesday's press preview, Apple also confirmed rumors [2] iPhone OS 3.0 will add support for MMS and cut, copy and paste functions--in addition, it will extend Spotlight, a desktop OS feature that allows users to conduct searches through all information on the device. Apple added that the new OS will be available free to iPhone users sometime this summer, although iPod touch owners must fork over $9.95 for the update.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists look for clean slate in China

"Silicon Valley venture capitalists have started to take a greater interest in clean technology investments in China.
"Ten years ago, I would have said no to doing deals in China," said John Rockwell of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. "There were too many political risks and too many business risks. But China is developing rapidly now."
Rockwell, a managing director of DFJ Element, the clean technology affiliate of the Menlo Park company, has made two investments in Chinese clean tech companies and is hoping to close another China deal soon.
The statistics show that environmental technology is indeed among of the fast-growing segments for venture capitalists that operate in China. Clean tech investments in China increased 147 percent from 2005 to 2006, from $170 million to $420 million, according to a recent report by the Cleantech Group, a research and investment institution with offices in San Francisco, Beijing, London, Toronto and Ann Arbor, Mich. "

Wired Blogs: Unlocked iphone

"Currently, Fred Wilson’s blog is the number one result on Google for the term “unlocked iPhone,” so the VC could be in for a windfall of ad dollars if those promising unlocked iPhones get the devices ramped up soon."


Click here for information from "DVD Jon" on how to unlock the iphone. Good luck.

iSuppli: Apple To Generate Margin Of 55% On Each 8GB

"Apple Inc. (AAPL) is expected to generate a margin of more than 55% on each 8-gigabyte iPhone it sells, a report from U.S. market research firm iSuppli Corp. said Tuesday.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based research firm said the 8-gigabyte phone launched in the U.S. late last month and retailing for US$599, has a total hardware bill- of-materials and manufacturing cost of $265.83.

The researcher said Infineon Technologies AG (IFX) of Germany is expected to benefit from increased sales of the iPhone. Infineon supplies the digital baseband, radio-frequency transceiver and power-management device for the new phone, which enable much of the core communications capability. iSuppli said Infineon's chip content accounts for $15.25 worth of the iphone's bill-of materials, representing 6.1% of the 8-gigabyte version of the product's total cost."



But the researcher said the biggest winner among the component suppliers for the iPhone is South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. (005930.SE)."