9gezegen writes “An offer for free tickets to theme parks for service members turned out to be an email scam, a ploy that was in actuality a security exercise run by the Army. Involved servicemen and DoD civilians received an email, allegedly coming from the ‘Army Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command Office,’ and directed them to a phishing site which asked for personal information. After rebuttal and warning by Army MWR, the website revealed that it was a security exercise after all. Army MWR later verified the exercise and announced they weren’t informed beforehand.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Mobile Minute

How often have you been out walking your dog when it suddenly occurs to you that you forgot to order the latest Lemony Snicket book? Well, now you can place your order without going to a store or waiting until you home and plop yourself back in front of a personal for the rest of the day. Just pull out your cellphone and send a text message with an item name to AMAZON (262966) thanks to a new Amazon service called TextBuyIt.

While we don’t think anyone anticipates you to do all of your shopping from your phone (especially if you don’t have an unlimited data plan), you can search for items by keyword, or ISBN UPC code. That means you can easily check prices on items while you’re in a bricks and mortar store. Want to see if that personal, blender, or video game on the shelf is reasonably priced? Just check it out with Amazon.

[via The Associated Press]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Earnings reports, Products and services, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Apple Inc (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), Palm Inc (PALM)

When you’re a small country stacked right up against the mighty U.S., you tend to take pride in any success by a fellow countryman. Such is Canada’s fate, and if you ask any Canadian, he’ll be able to name you all the Canadian actors who made it in Hollywood. Similarly, ask about successful companies and Canadians will proudly mention Research in Motion Ltd. (NASDAQ: RIMM). Indeed, the company didn’t disappoint this afternoon when it reported that fiscal fourth-quarter profit and sales more than doubled.

The BlackBerry maker earned $412.5 million, or 72 cents per share, up from a profit of $187.4 million, or 33 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier. Revenue more than doubled to $1.88 billion from $930 million. This beat expectations of 70 cents per share and sales of $1.86 billion. And that’s not all. A key figure, subscriber base, was boosted as RIM shipped about 4.4 million of its smartphones and added 2.2 million new subscriber accounts during the quarter, bringing its total subscriber base to more than 14 million. Sure enough, the company also projected profit and sales for this quarter above analysts’ estimates. One cause for concern is RIM’s contracting gross margin as the company relies more on hardware sales.

According to the company, it was retail presence as well as an expanded product line that included enhanced smartphones with cameras and music-playing abilities, like the Curve, that helped boost sales. While such features put it in competition with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)’s iPhone, Apple was already adding improved features to the iPhone to attract business customers, so it seems competition was inevitable. RIM plans to have even more products with more features to appeal to consumers. Despite the competition, according to different research firms, both RIM and Apple are increasing their market share in the smartphone segment for now, mostly at the expense of Palm Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM).

And if you think RIM has reached a saturation point, let me remind you that two-thirds of its customers are in North America. There is still a massive world to expand to out there. In fact, global expansion has already contributed to its performance in the fourth quarter.

It’s no surprise RIMM shares are up some 4.7% in after-hours trading.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Business, World wide web, Web services

Online auction site eBay is changing its policy on digital items that are delivered electronically. Instead of selling these items via auction, eBay now requires sellers to take out 30-day classified ads for $9.95 to sell digital goods. The change is intended to prevent sellers from artificially boosting their feedback ratings by selling thousands of identical downloads for as tiny as pennies. There’s no feedback involved in the classifieds section, but classified ads will show up in a regular eBay search.

The inherent problem with digital downloads is that there are pretty much no delivery costs, and once you produce an item you can sell it over and over again, which gives sellers the capability to game the system. Of course, we know a few record company execs that don’t see things that way. And to be perfectly honest, we’re not convinced the classifieds section is the right place for digital goods, because while we don’t want to see anyone beating the feedback system into submission, if you legitimately sell items that have value on a regular basis, it would be nice to get some positive feedback for your efforts.

Users can still sell digital goods in traditional auctions — as long as they provide physical media which requires shipping. If you’ve got software on a CD or DVD for sale, that’s fine. Just don’t offer buyers the option of digital downloads or you’ll be in violation of eBay’s new terms of service. That stated, when we checked this morning, there were plenty of auctions still available for digital downloads. It’ll probably take eBay a while to clean home.

[via Techdirt]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Other issues, Products and services, Industry, Consumer experience, Rants and raves, Competitive strategy, Amazon.com (AMZN), Marketing and advertising, Books

In the last few days, bookselling giant Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) has made a few more enemies in the publishing world by forcing the little-known group of print-on-demand (POD) publishers to either submit to using its POD subsidiary, Booksurge, or risk being prohibited from selling on its industry-leading website. No matter the cost and complications of breaking off relationships with other vendors, reformatting books and a host of other problems, Amazon laid down the law, saying convert — and do it swiftly — or face the consequences.

What’s more disconcerting is that an official press release was made public only after smaller publishers like Angela Hoy of Booklocker.com started writing publicly about blackmail-type phone calls from Booksurge representatives. Fearful of losing their businesses literally overnight, many POD publishers such as iUniverse and Lulu have capitulated while strong willed publisher PublishAmerica refused to give in — and was swiftly made an example of when Amazon disabled the purchase buttons on their book titles!

As an author selling my own critically-acclaimed POD book An American Hedge Fund on Amazon, outrage has compelled me to write about how unethical and more importantly, monopolistic this all is.

In a short-term business sense, Amazon is right to use its large size to gain marketshare for Booksurge and squeeze out the smaller players, but the problem is this goes against what made it great — offering the lowest prices and widest selection, basically like an on the web Wal-Mart Stores Inc (NYSE: WMT). To authors and publishers, Booksurge is known for its poor product quality and high cost structure, supremely inferior on both fronts to rival Lightning Source (LS) — trust me, I did the research and that’s why I chose LS — the POD subsidiary of Ingram Industries, the leading book wholesaler and the company on which Amazon has clearly declared war.

So, by making Booksurge the only POD option, relegating quality-loving publishers and authors to much smaller websites of Borders Group (NYSE: BGP) and Barnes & Noble Inc (NYSE: BKS), Amazon proves it no longer cares about its customers getting the widest selection at the cheapest prices — oh yes, even publishers that give into Amazon’s demands will be forced to raise their prices — it cares more about its own profits.

Until this latest development, I believed Amazon was the future of bookselling. It was making money, as were the publishers and customers who received the cost/quality benefits, but when a company happily alienates its suppliers whose hardships will inevitably be felt by the company’s customers, I cry foul.

Authors, readers, consumers and businesspeople unite! Sign THIS petition and let Amazon know what it is doing is wrong. That it is only a retail giant because we, the consumers, say so. We, not it, have the power here. While POD publishing is just a tiny niche, it’s a slippery slope; if you let Amazon get away with this, it might be your business and industry it comes after next.

Timothy Sykes writes the blog timothysykes.com, is a former hedge fund manager, star of the Television show Wall Street Warriors and author of the book, An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Wal-Mart (WMT), Amazon.com (AMZN), Target Corp. (TGT), Ideal Buy (BBY)

First, let me admit something up front — I am behind the times. I am not part of the texting culture because I don’t own a cell phone. This makes me odd, I know, and I probably will own one of these devices sooner rather than later, but for now, I’ve to call myself what I am — a texting virgin. Nevertheless, I read with interest the following article about a new initiative by Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN).

The article states that Amazon is launching a program called TextBuyIt, where users can get information on products by searching for them via a name/description or a UPC number. Here’s the massive kicker from the article, though: the author points out that people can, of course, do shopping even while they find themselves in competing real-world stores. So, if a hip texter is in a Best Purchase (NYSE: BBY) or a Target (NYSE: TGT) or a Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), maybe said hip texter might buy a product from Amazon instead of buying it from where he’s at. That’s the implication of the service, at least.

I’m not sure if I buy that this service will add much value to Amazon’s current mobile offerings, though, at least in the short run (also, it sounds like a complicated task to perform). Thing of it is, when you’re on the go, while you might use your cell phone to play games and acquire information, and maybe even put in an order for a stock or two, I’m not sure that anyone outside the most hardcore tech demographic would want to start shopping on Amazon via texting. I mean, if you’re in a store, you probably would want to purchase an item from a store, right? Plus, if you’re on the go, you would probably want to just pop into a nearby store to buy something if you have the urge.

I see the value of brick-and-mortar retailers using texting to establish relationships with customers — e.g., “text in an order and we’ll have it ready for you at the front when you pull in,” sort of like texting a pizza order. For all I know, that might already be happening somewhere. But, I’m not confident this will work for Amazon in the exact competitive fashion it envisions. However, I’ll acknowledge that it is something Amazon must nevertheless experiment with to cover its bases; after all, even though I am not currently part of it, we’re in a texting zeitgeist, whether we enjoy it or not…

Disclosure: I don’t own shares in any of the companies mentioned here; positions can change at any time.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Products and services, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG)

Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) existing Google Docs web-based productivity product just became quite a bit smarter. Care about it or not, that product just became a front-and-center competitor to Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office software by becoming available to use without an internet connection.

Sounds like a minor event, but Microsoft’s Office productivity software suite brings in billions of dollars in revenue per quarter. It’s one of the company’s most lucrative software packages, and even though there have been freely available alternatives for quite some time, Microsoft Office still reigns supreme for word processing and spreadsheets. One of Google’s massive problems with most of its products centers around offline access. Customers need to have an active world wide web connection to work with virtually all of its web-based products.

Will Google’s word processing and spreadsheet programs begin taking a larger bite out of Microsoft’s Office by offering workable access without an internet connection? For some customers, yes. Tyler Dikman with Cooltronics states this move “gives Google a bigger pool of users to go after with more potential to increase their market share. And it sends a wake up call to Microsoft that Google Docs is not some experiment. This is something Google is investing a lot of time and money to make work.”

This may seem like a small step from Google Docs, but it’s aimed squarely at Microsoft. Whether Google can make inroads into the office software productivity market remains to be seen. However, its efforts just took a massive leap.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Products and services, Launches, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Apple Inc (AAPL), Intel (INTC), Research in Motion (RIMM), QUALCOMM Inc (QCOM), Texas Instruments (TXN)

A month ago, Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC), introduced a new chip category, the Atom brand, specifically designed for mobile internet devices, or what Intel it calls MIDs. After missing out on the market for cellphone chips, Intel is trying to push this technology and will use a conference in Shanghai to proclaim it as the next huge thing in consumer gadgets.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Intel also said “25 hardware companies have decided to make portable Internet devices using its latest chip technology” for gadgets that are smaller than a laptop but larger than a smartphone. Apparently, the devices will begin appearing in late Might and early June on store shelves in China, Japan and South Korea. N.America and Europe distribution will come at a later date.

I find it fascinating that a new category of product is being pushed from the chip level rather than from the manufacturer level. But perhaps manufacturers are bound by chip capabilities and with the Atom, specifically designed to draw tiny power and thus conserve battery power, it makes sense.

As PDAs seem to have all but disappeared from the market, most of us these days rely heavily on our laptops and mobile devices, separating the functions of both, especially when travelling. One is more for email, the other more for work and browsing abilities. A device that could potentially combine both may be exactly what is needed. At a $500 price tag, when an Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone or a Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry costs nearly the same, this might just find its place among those on the move.

Intel will not find the field lacking of competition with Qualcomm Inc. (NYSE: QCOM) and Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) already improving Web abilities of cellphones and other devices with ARM designs. It might come down to battery vs. calculating power between the two designs.

And perhaps, what many consumers have been hoping for since the launch of the iPhone, with this new Intel chip Apple could finally take the Mac laptop and the iPhone/iPod Touch to crate a device that would combine the favorite functionalities and feature of both into one. Now, that would be nice!

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Analyst reports, Forecasts, Competitive strategy, Apple Inc (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), Palm Inc (PALM)

Research from ChangeWave shows that Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM)’s BlackBerry still holds the lead in the smartphone business, but Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is marking important inroads. Palm (NASDAQ: PALM) continues to be in a bad spot.

The data is from a check of almost 4,000 consumers interviewed from March 17 to March 24. According to the research, the RIM BlackBerry maintains its massive lead among consumers with 42% of the market while second place Palm continues a two-year decline in its share and now holds 16% . This was the seventh-consecutive ChangeWave survey in which Palm’s market share has dropped.

Apple’s market share is now up to 9%, astounding given the short time the iPhone has been in the market.

In terms of people being “very satisfied” with their handsets, the poll shows Apple with a rating of 79%. RIMM comes in at 54% and Palm at 22%. Of those planning to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days, 35% plan to purchase the Apple product.

Research In Motion appears to be holding its own in what is a fast-growing market for smartphones. The iPhone continues to be a once-in-generation product. Palm is toast.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Deals, Bad news, Industry, Competitive strategy, Motorola (MOT), Nokia Corp. (NOK)

Part of Motorola’s (NYSE: MOT) strategy in spinning off its weak handset unit is the hope of finding a buyer. The business lost over $1 billion last year on revenue of $19 billion. This year, with unit sales still dropping, those numbers will get worse.

So far, no one has stepped up with an offer. Firms like Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Samsung, and Sony Ericsson might be better off watching the US handset maker bleed to death. That takes away much of the incentive of being a buyer.

Yesterday, China’s Huawei Technologies, a large handset maker in the massive Asian country, said it had no interest in Motorola. According to Reuters, “Huawei stated it was not interested in buying the business as it is focused on selling its phones under the brand of its mobile operator customers, while Motorola sells phones to consumers under its own brand.”

At $9.47, Motorola still trades near a 52-week low, despite plans to break the company into two pieces. That gives the company a market cap of $21 billion. The firm’s home mobility and enterprise systems divisions are profitable. That means the handset division is worth very little.

Motorola can’t even give it away.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Share This

Share This