Firefox tops 20% market share

French web survey company XiTi Monitor has published Firefox market share statistics for 2007, which indicate that the open-source web browser is continuing to see gains at the expense of Internet Explorer, particularly in Europe.

XiTi's breakdown of monthly Firefox market share gains for the past year show that the browser climbed from about 20 percent two years ago to 23.1 percent in December 2006 to a record 28 percent in December 2007. Firefox market share hit a plateau and hovered around 27.7 percent between June and September before taking a 0.7 percent drop in October, but then recovered prior to reaching 28 percent last month.

XiTi also provides market share statistics for 32 individual European countries. Finland currently has the highest Firefox market share in Europe with 45.4 percent, followed by Slovenia with 44.6 percent and Poland with 42.4 percent.

Firefox adoption is likely encouraged by the perception of superior security and the availability of extensions and other user-driven enhancements. Firefox's current market share growth rate was decent in Europe in 2007, but the official release of Firefox 3 (which is currently in beta stage) could potentially incite more significant market share increases in 2008.

(Ars Technica)

Facebook Apps anywhere!

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neil at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

(Techcrunch)

Indeed that's a brilliant move by Facebook that will put it ahead of the competition and actually turns it into an application host, not simply a social network.

Apples for sale

Apple earnings climb 58%, but outlook disappoints.

Apple Inc. on Tuesday reported a first-quarter profit that rose 58% from a year ago, but the company's shares tumbled in after-hours trading as the consumer-electronics maker gave an earnings outlook that fell short of Wall Street analysts' forecasts.

Usually, on days when Apple Inc. (AAPL) reports earnings, giddy investors have a chuckle about the company's famously conservative forecasts and proceed to load up on the stock—confident that Apple's closely guarded pipeline of new products will keep sales and profits on the rise. But in a reflection of the gloomy mood on Wall Street over the prospect of a recession, investors found little to laugh about in Apple's latest forecast.

Apple typically gives conservative forecasts, but the latest one delivered by Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer proved particularly disappointing in light of Tuesday's trading session, which saw nearly every major tech stock lose ground in a broad market decline fueled by fears of recession.

Oppenheimer said that Apple expects to earn 94 cents a share on $6.8 billion in sales for its second quarter. The forecast fell below analysts' consensus estimates for earnings of $1.09 a share on revenue of $6.99 billion.

For its fiscal first-quarter, Apple earned $1.58 billion, or $1.76 a share, on revenue of $9.6 billion. During the same period a year ago, Apple earned $1 billion, or $1.14 a share, on $7.12 billion in sales. In a statement, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said that the results showed the company posting its highest quarterly earnings and sales in history.

The company attributed the quarter's performance to a strong holiday season, as Apple said that it sold 22 million iPods and 2.3 million Macintosh PCs during the quarter. Also, about 2.3 million iPhones were sold during the quarter.

Speaking on a conference call to discuss the results, Oppenheimer said that he remains "very confident in our product pipeline and [looking] forward to the rest of 2008."

As of Wednesday noon Apple shares continue their fall further dropping about 20% at 126$.


Analysts look at the bright side and suggest investors use the events as a buying opportunity, in a research note to clients Wednesday morning, analyst Gene Munster said he believes investors are overreacting to the fiscal report and outlook, even given the fact that iPod sales are indeed decelerating.

"Over the last 7 quarters, on average, Apple has guided earnings-per-share (EPS) 9 percent below Street expectations," he wrote. "While the March quarter EPS guidance is more conservative than average, Apple's revenue guidance for the quarter is [only] 2 percent below Street expectations, vs. an average of 4 percent below expectations over the last 7 quarters."

"Mac market share continues to rise, and growth rates are accelerating," Munster advised clients. "Using IDC estimates, Mac market share in December 07 was 3.0 percent, or 50 basis points higher than in December 06, [which represents] the largest gain in Mac market share since we began tracking IDC data seven quarters ago."

Furthermore, the Piper Jaffray analyst noted that Tuesday's approximate 15 percent drop in Apple's stock price means shares are now trading at just 25 times the company's expected per-share earnings over the next twelve months, down from a two-year average of 31 times and a two-year low of 24 times.

Facebook software maker Slide gets $50 million

Social-network software maker Slide said on Friday it had closed a $50 million institutional financing round, marking the rising valuations of start-ups riding fast-growing Facebook's wave of popularity.

Slide, a 65-employee company founded by Max Levchin, 32, the Ukrainian-born co-founder of online payments company PayPal, is the creator of several of the most popular software programs running on Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace.com. Its Facebook programs include Top Friends, FunWall, and SuperPoke.

Levchin said the new cash will be used to boost the size of the San Francisco-based company to about 100 employees and expand the applications it offers on the upgraded MySpace platform. Acquisitions of other so-called social software developers will be a low priority, he said.

Slide started in 2005, originally self-funded by Levchin and backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. PayPal went public and then was quickly acquired by eBay in 2002.

Subsequent funding was provided by leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures, the former Nokia venture arm, Khosla Ventures, and Founders Fund, Thiel's venture fund.

These earlier rounds of funding totaled in the "low tens of millions of dollars," one of the sources said.

(Cnet)

2007 Crunchies

Hello guys, Yesterday Techcrunch has picked the 2007 Crunchies, A great evening was had by all as some of the leading startups gathered for the first annual Crunchies, a joint production between Read/Write Web' VentureBeat, GigaOm

Check out the winners (and losers) I can just tell you that the bigest winner of the evning was Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. ׁ and TechCrunch.

Breaking down Macworld 2008 from all sides

Hello folks, Steve Jobs keynote speech is over, and we got some pretty interesting stuff, including the thinest notebook in the world.
Cnet has put a nice story which covers Jobs keynote.

MacBook Air -- I'm not crazy about the name, but this is a nice-looking laptop. Ultraportable laptops are prestige products for both the vendor and the customer; Apple gets to show off what it's capable of designing, while the customer gets to show off his or her taste and style.

These $1,799 laptops are not for the masses. Most people will have to make too many compromises with the MacBook Air, from the lack of an optical drive, Firewire, and an Ethernet jack to the battery, which like the iPhone and iPod can't be replaced by the user.

What's in the envelope? The super-slim MacBook Air.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

But this is a nice addition to Apple's lineup of notebooks. It definitely will appeal to a group of people who aren't worried about making those trade-offs, and it gives Apple another design accomplishment to crow about.

Especially since the rest of the PC industry probably won't be able to duplicate Apple's thin approach without taking advantage of Intel's new packaging technology for its Core 2 Duo chip. Intel will probably offer that packaging technique to the rest of the PC industry, but as Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 pointed out, Dell and Hewlett-Packard probably didn't know about that breakthrough until this morning. That would put them about six months behind Apple.

iPhone/iPod touch software upgrades: Apple introduced several new helpful features for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, such as the ability to put an icon for a specific Web page on the home screen, and the ability to send a text message to more than one person. I think the enhanced Maps application, however, will prove the most compelling.

Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple, demonstrated the Maps application for me after the keynote. There's a little button on the lower left corner of the Maps application that brings up an icon resembling the cross-hairs from a gun's sight. Apple teamed up with Skyhook Wireless to allow the iPhone or the iPod Touch to triangulate its position to a certain degree of accuracy simply by hitting that button. The smaller the cross-hairs, the more precise the fix on your location. Then you can just use Maps to get directions to your destination from your current location, even if you don't know exactly where you are.

The first grumble of the day from the Macworld crowd came when Jobs announced that similar software upgrades would cost iPod Touch users $19.99. Granted, iPod Touch users did get five new features already found on the iPhone--Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes--in addition to the location-finding technology and customized Web bookmarks on the home screen, which Apple calls Web Clips.

I think our good friend The Macalope is onto something, however, when iAntlers points out that Apple didn't include the iPod Touch along with the other products using subscription-based accounting, namely the iPhone and Apple TV. After the whole $2 Wi-Fi debacle, Apple made sure to announce up front that the company would record revenue from iPhone and Apple TV over a period of 24 months, which would allow it to deliver free upgrades to the product over that period of time. I e-mailed an Apple representative asking whether the iPod Touch is getting the subscription treatment, but I haven't heard back.

Time capsule: This was the first thing Jobs announced, and I have to say, I was underwhelmed. Time Capsule is a combination wireless access point/external hard drive that gets around a common complaint regarding Time Machine, the otherwise noteworthy automatic backup feature that Apple included with Leopard. Time Machine requires that your Mac be physically connected to an external hard drive in order to back up your files each night, and that's not the most convenient way to use a laptop.

If you don't have an access point, and you don't have an external hard drive, then Time Capsule might make a lot of sense at either $299 for 500GBs of storage or 1TB for $499. But the answer to the wireless Time Machine question--for those of us who already have wireless routers and external hard drives--is to have us shell out at least 300 more bucks for a piece of hardware that replaces the perfectly good hardware we already have? Sorry, I don't quite understand that one.

iTunes movie rentals/Apple TV: The biggest announcement of the day, in my opinion, even if some of the luster was lost as news leaked out over the past two weeks. My colleague Greg Sandoval, who covers the entertainment industry much more closely than I, weighed in with his thoughts on industry impact of the decision, but I'll take a moment to consider the impact on Apple TV.

With more features and a cheaper price, Apple TV is suddenly much more compelling.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

This instantly makes Apple TV more credible. Apple can finally stand behind its message that Apple TV can replace your DVD player. As it stood before, you could only get movies on Apple TV if you were willing to buy them. So, you'd still need your DVD player for those movies you thought you might like but weren't totally sure justified a purchase, which is just about all of them these days.

I'd still like to see an Apple TV with a browser (yeah, yeah, I know you can hack it--for now) so I can access all the other kinds of video available on the Internet, not to mention things like weather, maps, and stock reports that would be nice to have on a television. Of course, Apple wants you to buy movies from iTunes rather than getting your entertainment for free. But the company also didn't want to just dump a bunch of features into Apple TV just for the sake of doing so, Joswiak said.

"We hate to make these things into computers; we want to make them into things that people use in their lives," Joswiak said after the keynote. Apple TV is infinitely more useful with movie rentals, although I agree with Daring Fireball's John Gruber, The New York Times' David Pogue, and countless others: 24 hours is way too short a window to finish a movie that I already started. If you start a movie at night after work, and don't finish it because something came up, you better not have plans for tomorrow night if you want to finish that movie. That's not exactly on-demand content.

While Macworld 2008 wasn't exactly a sensation (the "one more thing" was Randy Newman, for crying out loud), Apple certainly didn't made any major missteps Tuesday that would put a dent in its momentum heading into the new year. The Mac and iPod businesses appear to have had solid holiday seasons, and Jobs announced that Apple sold 2.6 million iPhones from the end of September until the end of December, for a total of 4 million since iPhone Day in June.

There's still plenty of things to keep watching for, including a MacBook and/or MacBook Pro redesign and third-party applications for the iPhone, to name two at the top of my list. I think the iTunes Rental Store bears the most watching of Tuesday's announcements because of its potential impact both on Apple's iTunes Store business and the industry at large, and we'll be sure to keep track.

(By Tom Krazit, Cnet)

Best of CES

Howdy guys! Cnet has put together all of their incredible videos of CES, which took place last week at Las Vegas, check it out.
Here are their 2008 Finalists.

Apple Retail- the unsung hero of Jobs' post-return?

Hello folks, Appleinsider has posted a really interesting perspective made by a new investment note from Bernstein Research.

It looks like Apple(AAPL) retail segment is doing really well, and as one user wrote in a comment; it seems its the unsung hero of Steve Jobs' post-return success.

Everyone talks about the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, expanding the company into consumer electronics, etc. But none of that would have really been possible without the retail initiative. iPods would have gotten buried on CompUSA and Best Buy shelves.
It was his boldest and riskiest move, one that very few gave any chance of succeeding.
But it was the foundation for everything that has happened since, and it will pave the way far into the future.

The report states that Apple stores' Mac sales beat PC stores sales by 10-to-1.

Even more amazing is that in tems of retail efficiency, For fiscal 2007, all of the Cupertino, Calif.-based firm's retail space earned roughly $4,500 per square foot.

The figure contrasts starkly with big-box retailer Best Buy, who despite its success has only managed to earn $930 for the same floor space. Even the very profitable jeweler Tiffany & Company netted just $2,750 for every square foot in the same timeframe and was free from the competition of a shopping mall.

Change brewing at Starbucks

Hello guys, Starbucks (SBUX) has just released a statement that Chairman Howard Schultz will take on the additional role of chief executive to replace Jim Donald, effective immediately. Schultz said he will slow the pace of U.S. store openings and close a number of underperforming locations. He will accelerate expansion outside the U.S., redeploying a portion of the capital originally earmarked for domestic stores to the international business. Schultz will also work to realign the company's organization, streamlining management.
(Marketwatch)

I like Schultz, and I think he could bring tremendous momentum and inject some much needed energy and sprint into the coffee giant.

Google Presentation now includes embedded slideshows

Google Docs just added some cool new features to its Web-based Presentation software: slide shows that you can embed anywhere on the Web. Check it out below:

Early Macworld bets

After a holiday spent freezing in the wilds of Connecticut and pondering the mysteries of the chip industry, I felt it was time to take stock of the latest Macworld Expo rumors.

The craziness is just 12 days away and undisturbed this year by that big gathering in the desert taking place the prior week. The predictions are starting to come in, and the early bets have mobility in mind.

For months, the betting odds have favored the introduction of new MacBooks at Macworld. It's been awhile since Apple tweaked the basic hardware design of the MacBook, and with new mobile processors expected from Intel this quarter, it seems like a natural fit. But what kind of notebook are we talking about?

The most persistent rumor is that Apple will release an ultraportable notebook, or a sub-notebook, or whatever you want to call it. Think small and thin, a 12-inch or smaller screen and a weight of less than 3 pounds. This is a small segment of the overall notebook market, but it's one of prestige, and it's not hard at all to imagine Apple wanting to put its stamp on the thinnest and lightest category of notebook computing.

The latest item to point in that direction? A patent filing for a docking station that would incorporate such a device surfaced this week, lending some credibility, if not confirmation, to the ultraportable rumor.

If you want to watch high-definition movies on your notebook, American Technology Research's Shaw Wu thinks you'll have a better idea of Apple's HD video plans following Macworld. Wu put out a research note Thursday predicting that Apple will confirm its support for Blu-ray drives, and could use the occasion to announce plans to ship notebooks with new optical drives. Apple is already a member of the Blu-Ray Disc Association, so this isn't much of a stretch, although it has held off releasing Blu-ray-equipped products to this point.

There's also some sentiment that Apple could use the Macworld stage to announce its take on the Tablet PC, revealing some sort of slate-like MacBook based entirely on flash memory, and perhaps incorporating many of the touch-screen features found on the iPhone. We've also heard this discussion center on a Apple-ish UMPC, which would ostensibly use Intel's upcoming Silverthorne chip.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is unlikely to miss a chance to talk about the iPhone as well, as we approach the first anniversary of its first public unveiling. The software development kit for the iPhone is due in February, and some analysts think that Jobs will use the occasion to unveil a 3G iPhone.

The biggest news to emerge from Jobs' January 15 keynote might just be an iTunes movie rental service, as was reported over the holiday break. But I'd advise holding off for a few weeks if you were thinking about buying a notebook from Apple.

(Tom Krazit, Cnet)

Will Apple Rescue Intel's Silverthorne?

Appleinsider has posted a fascinating article aboutthe latest Apple rumor which states that Apple is eyeing a new mobile processor from Intelcode-named Silverthorne for use in a new generation of handheld devices.


That has broad implications for Apple's expanding role in consumer electronics, and holds out the prospect for the company to play the savior for a chip originally designed to power the second-generation of Microsoft's beleaguered UMPCs.

The article includes a long revision of the history of mobile PC handheld devices from Go's PenPoint OS, to Apple's Newton MessagePad, Windows CE, Palm , and most recent Tablet PCs which have been swimming in troubled water for the most part.