From The Business Insider, Dec. 17, 2009:

iPhoneWho?

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion just crushed Street expectations for Q3 -- the quarter ending in November -- and issued strong guidance for Q4. Shares are up 9% after hours.

RIM shipped its 75 millionth BlackBerry during the quarter.

The real test will be December, where RIM will have to increasingly compete with Google Android devices at Verizon. But in general, it looks like RIM is surviving despite increased competition in the smartphone industry.

Key stats:

• Revenue: $3.92 billion vs. $3.78 billion consensus.
• EPS: $1.10 vs. $1.04 consensus.
• Subscriber additions: 4.4 million, vs. 4.1 million RBC est.
• Devices: 10.1 million shipped, including 75 millionth BlackBerry

Guidance:

• Revenue: $4.3 billion midpoint vs. $4.11 billion consensus
• EPS: $1.27 vs. $1.12 consensus
• Subscriber additions: 4.55 million midpoint vs. 4.45 million midpoint RBC est.

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From The Business Insider, Oct. 28, 2009:

Google is about to make life trickier for GPS mapping companies, and could make its Android platform more attractive: It's releasing a new, free turn-by-turn GPS mapping service, which will launch next week on Motorola's Droid phone.

It will follow on more Android 2.0 phones, and could eventually follow on Apple's iPhone. According to Gizmodo, "Google implied they are working closely with Apple now on it."

This is potentially bad news for GPS companies such as TomTom and Navigon and telcos like AT&T, which charge up to around $100 per year for this sort of service.

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From All Things Digital, Oct, 26, 2009:

Verizon posted a decent third quarter this morning, besting consensus estimates. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had been expecting earnings of 59 cents on revenue of $27.17 billion. Excluding one-time costs, Verizon reported profits of 60 cents a share on revenue of $27.3 billion. That’s a 10 percent decline year-over-year, but still better than expected.

Wireless-subscribership gains, though they trailed AT&T’s iPhone-bolstered numbers, were impressive nonetheless. Verizon added 1.2 million wireless customers during the quarter raising its total count to 89 million. That’s not the 2 million AT&T added, but it certainly demonstrates that the absence of the iPhone from Verizon’s handset line-up isn’t holding the carrier up all that much.

Verizon also added 198,000 net new customers for FiOS Internet and 191,000 for FiOS TV service.

“Verizon continues to generate strong cash flow, which we have used in building the foundation for sustainable, long-term shareowner value,” Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said in a statement. “Even through the worst of the recession, we have continued to raise our dividend and to add new customers, expand markets and grow revenues based on the power and innovation of Verizon’s wireless, broadband and global networks.”

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Online analysts would like you to know that there's a great new industry growth engine revving up -- mobile ads.

For example, you can't open an analyst's report these days without immediately encountering something like this:

• We're optimistic about mobile ads!
• We're bullish on mobile ads!
• Google's Verizon deal is evidence of the huge new opportunity in mobile ads!

Sounds exciting!

Unfortunately, analysts have been saying the same thing since 1995. And mobile advertising spending is still a rounding error.

Why has mobile advertising been such a disappointment?

Goggle's back in familiar territory. The stock is trading near $500 a share, nearly doubling since plummeting with the rest of the market last December.

As you'd expect, the comeback is built on the resurgence of its search business. Colin Gillis, an analyst with Brigantine Advisors, writes in his latest research report: "The key metric for us is rising CPC (cost-per-click) showing a willingness for advertisers to pay more to reach consumers -- and an indication that clicks are translating into sales … . A combination of paid click growth and a lift in CPC is the formula that drives upside in revenue and the GOOG share price."

Speaking of share price, Gillis has a $600 price target and a buy rating on the stock.

But as Henry Blodget points out in the accompanying clip, if Google wants to grow in the next decade as fast as it did in the last, the company must find its next multibillion-dollar business.

Is the mobile platform Android the answer?

From The Business Insider, Sept. 8, 2009:

Google and Apple are on a collision course.

While the companies are not each others' biggest rivals, they are increasingly competing with each other.

This follows years of enjoying one of the coziest relationships in Silicon Valley -- one that will now get more complicated as the companies compete in more areas.

The latest: Google is developing a movie rental service for YouTube. This is a logical extension of the Web's top video site, as YouTube increases its focus on professional content. But if it happens, it will put YouTube in square competition with Apple's iTunes store, which has offered movie rentals for years.

Video rentals do not generate a huge amount of revenue for either company, so it's not a big conflict. But Google is also increasingly competing with Apple in its more important, core platform businesses.

Their most significant rivalry today is mobile phone platforms, where Google's Android phones compete with Apple's iPhones. So far, Apple has had more success, both in getting consumers to buy its phones, and in getting software companies to develop apps for its platform.

But Google has a big year ahead: It will eventually be distributed by all four major U.S. wireless carriers, while Apple is exclusive with AT&T (for now, at least). And phone manufacturers like Motorola have plans to make lots of mid-range, high-volume phones with Android. Assuming the efforts are adequate, Google could catch up significantly in the next year...

See more from The Business Insider:

• 7 Ways Google Is Trying to Kill Apple
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From The Business Insider, Aug. 31, 2009:

Well, that didn't take long.

In a decade, Apple has gone from niche-market roadkill to a company whose growing dominance and competitive tactics in a booming market are thrilling investors, angering competitors, and drawing regulatory scrutiny. 

Unless Apple shows a quick change of attitude, the benefit of its market position--power, scrutiny, and tens of billions in profit--are only going to grow.

Apple is no longer the beloved underdog that Microsoft kept alive in the late 1990s to improve its own standing in the eyes of regulators (remember the investment and agreement to keep building Office for the Mac?).  Apple is now the wildly profitable owner of the dominant iPod platform and rapidly-becoming dominant iPhone platform, which are really one in the same. Unlike any other competitor in the industry, moreover--including the still PC-centric Microsoft--Apple has managed to link the two big personal computing platforms together, through its software and resurgent Mac business...

See also from The Business Insider:

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Click "more" to view the full post.

From Silicon Alley Insider, Aug. 24, 2009:

People just won't stop buying iPhones!

As U.S. retail sales dropped 9% in the first six months of 2009, sales at Apple (AAPL) stores increased by 2.5% to $3 billion compared to the same period last year, Bloomberg reports.

The stores' performance can be credited to the iPhone, an analyst tells Bloomberg. The traffic to the Apple stores increased 22% to 38.6 million visitors in Q2 '09.

The star if the show is definitely the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The 10,000 square-foot store has 500 employees, and it is open 24 hours, seven-days-a-week. It's annual sales are $350 million.

To put that number in perspective, consider that Microsoft Zune sales are down to below $100 million per quarter.

Read the entire Bloomberg story here.

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From The Business Insider, Aug. 12, 2009:

Apple's (AAPL) iPhone App Store is most popular for its free and cheap apps. As a result, most apps and casual games are available for 99 cents or less. But there are plenty of expensive apps in the App Store, too, and people do buy them.

The 10 most expensive aps are:

1. iRa Pro - $899.99 (or Direct - $499.99): The two priciest SKUs in the iTunes store are basically the same app, so we've bundled them together. iRa Pro and iRa Direct are used to view and manage super-expensive enterprise surveillance camera installations. Clients could include corporations, schools, government, etc.

2. MATG - SAP BusinessOne - $449.99: Hooks into SAP's BusinessOne financial management software. Designed for sales reps or marketing/finance execs. Also available for Microsoft Dynamics GP.

3. PDR Quote - $349.99:  Business software for auto repair: Create quotes and invoices, includes huge database of cars, forms you can personalize, etc.
4. Mobile Cam Viewer - $349.99: ...

Click "more" to view the full post.

To view the apps in a slideshow, click here.

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From All Things Digital, June 26, 2009:

Palm shares are on a tear Friday, rallying on the company’s fourth-quarter financials and the promise of its new Pre handset. Palm is trading at $15.30 as I write this, up more than nine percent in reaction to the company’s claims that the Pre and Palm’s webOS are off to a strong start.

“We think the Palm Pre is by far the best product we’ve ever shipped and I am very happy with how we are managing the launch,” CEO Jon Rubinstein said on an earnings call Thursday, though he refused to disclose actual sales numbers. “We are successfully ramping supply to meet demand that is strong and growing.”

Rubinstein gave strong emphasis to Palm’s new operating system. “The most important indicator of our success is that customer response has been simply great, especially to Palm webOS. Just as Palm pioneered PDAs in the 90s, we believe it has now pioneered the mobile operating platform for the next 10 years and beyond. WebOS integrates information and services from the cloud and offers a true multi-tasking environment. We feel it takes better advantage of the benefits of Web 3.0 than any other mobile platform available today.”

Quite a claim, especially given the incumbents in the market and Palm’s history. The company has never been strong on execution, and while it’s done a great job of bringing the Pre and webOS to market, it has clearly stumbled a bit. Thanks to supply constraints, Palm may be leaving some sales on the table. And it hasn’t done itself any favors by delaying the release of the webOS software development kit.

WebOS won’t be the “the mobile operating platform for the next 10 years and beyond” unless developers are actually, you know, writing applications for it. And there are far too few of them doing that right now because Palm has, so far, restricted access to the SDK.

Rubinstein says that will soon change, though. “We are eager to expand access to our SDK but we need to do so in a measured and methodical fashion, so we can be sure we are providing a great development experience,” he said Thursday. “Over the next few weeks, we expect the program to grow from hundreds to thousands of developers and our goal from there is to make our SDK available to everyone by the end of this summer.”

OK. So Palm would rather do things right than too quickly. That’s understandable–especially if it has more products in the pipeline, as it most certainly does. Given the rivals against which it must compete, the company cannot afford even a single misstep...

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Click "more" to view the rest of the post.