Filed under: Launches, Industry, Competitive strategy, Apple Inc (AAPL), Nokia Corp. (NOK), Research in Motion (RIMM)

The head of Nokia (NYSE: NOK) thinks the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone and RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry are awesome products. Since his company has 40% of the world market for handsets, that may not be good news. He wants more of the high-end, high-profit part of the industry.

According to Reuters, Nokia President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo stated “We will exceed the RIM client (BlackBerry) in some months with a very good e-mail system.” Coming from anyone else, that claim would be foolhardy. Coming from Nokia, it is a threat. Nokia launched it first touchscreen phone today.

Shares of Apple and RIM already trade near 52-week lows. Within the last week, both stocks hit levels that were 50% off their highs for the last year. Investors are worried that the poor economy will injured sales for expensive phones and that the fourth quarter, a large selling season, will be weaker than it has been in several years.

If Nokia makes a very aggressive move into smartphones, Apple and RIM shares might not stage massive rallies anytime in the near future. Forty percent of the global market is too huge a number.

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

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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Podcasting, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

FeedDemon has been the ideal RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they purchased FeedDemon. The ideal news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth each penny), it’s now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is simple to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator’s web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the capability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you select to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

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Filed under: Industry, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Wal-Mart (WMT), Circuit City Stores (CC), Sears Holdings (SHLD)

One sign the snow is coming is that retailers begin their marketing for the holidays. In a bad economy the discount signs are coming early this year. It is time to break out the salt. The ice is already on the driveway and the front walk.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) stated it will cut prices on some of the most popular toys and speed up the opening of Christmas shops in its stores nationwide as it tries to lure budget-conscious shoppers and jump start its biggest selling season.”

The news can hardly be good for most other large, national retailers. Discounts mean lower margins and discounts early in the season mean pressure on earnings for the fourth quarter. Wal-Mart has the balance sheet and cashflow to support price cuts. That might not be true of some other store operators.

The move by Wal-Mart puts pressure on much less healthy retailers like Sears (NYSE:SHLD) and Circuit City (NYSE:CC). In a credit crisis financing inventory will be hard and in some cases impossible. How may banks want to give a failing firm like Circuit City credit to purchase TVs and PCs for the holidays? Not many.

Wal-Mart’s move may speed up the inevitable. Some retailers won’t be around to greet Santa.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Text, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Commercial, Freeware, Search

Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger’s favorite iPhone and iPod Touch apps. We thought here at Download Squad that we’d take that same approach and apply it to our favourite Windows applications. This first post is my first of three in this vein that’ll cover Evernote, FeedDemon, and MindManager.

Evernote

It seems you can’t go very far online these days without someone extolling the virtues of Evernote. While this note-taking application has been around for a long time, it has recently been reborn as a cross-platform powerhouse. The original concept behind Evernote was that you had one scrolling piece of note paper that you could continue to add notes to, then easily search within them both based on content and based on a timeline of when your notes were created. While this paradigm still exists, it’s no longer Evernote’s claim to fame.

Evernote now has a powerful web application that serves as a central nervous system for your note taking. All of your notes that are created in the local Evernote client on your Windows (or Mac) computer are synchronized to Evernote’s servers, where they have the ability to apply OCR (optical character recognition) to any images that you have included in your notes. This means that you can search for a word that is visible in a pic, and Evernote will find it.

Evernote’s interface has been refined over the past few years and is very simple to navigate and use. On the Windows platform most people seem to pit Evernote against OneNote from Microsoft, and in my thought with the advent of Evernote’s server-based system and reliable synchronization, it’s no contest.

A free account at Evernote is enough for most users, offering up to 40 MB of file transfer per month, but if you find you are a heavy user you might need to upgrade to a Premium account, which offers 500 MB of transfer per month, plus other features.

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Filed under: Bad news, Products and services, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Ford Motor (F), General Motors (GM), Toyota Motor Corp. (TM), Economic data, Recession, Financial Crisis

September proved to be yet another tough month for American auto maker Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) as the company saw its U.S. sales drop by a huge 34% during the month.

The company noted that we’re in the middle of an “atmosphere of caution” as the troubled economic environment, and tightening credit conditions are still taking their tolls on the automotive industry.

We will hear more troubling news later today as more auto makers release their September numbers, and analysts are expecting to hear more of the same from the other major names in the industry. Fellow Detroit auto maker General Motors Corporation (NYSE: GM) is expected to announce sales dropping around 27%, while Japanese maker Toyota Motor Corporation (NYSE: TM) is expected to show a sales decline of around 17%.

Today’s news from the major names should really come as no surprise, since we have been hearing much of the same through most of the year. Through August, nationwide sales of vehicles was down 11.2%.

As consumers continue to express their concerns over the overall economy it is going to continue to be tough for vehicle dealers to get shoppers into their showrooms. More massive incentives should help a little, but until consumers start to turn more positive on the overall economy, it is going to be tougher and tougher to sell them new automobiles.

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

You might think that the last thing the world needs is yet another desktop client for Twitter. And you’d probably be right. But that doesn’t make new kid on the bloc Toro any less pretty to look at.

Toro doesn’t have a ton of features when compared to the reigning champs like Twhirl and Alert Thingy. It doesn’t have a shortcut for sending direct messages and doesn’t have a tab for direct tweets. And it has exactly two options in the settings dialog (turn alerts on and off, and turn sounds for alerts on and off).

But that stated, Toro is one of the most physically attractive Adobe AIR-based Twitter clients I’ve seen. Items like Current, Public, and Replies are separate into tabs. There’s an integrated search feature. And you can view a list of your friends and followers in the Friends tab. I don’t know why most desktop Twitter clients insist on having colorful backgrounds, but there’s something about the black and white simplicity of Toro that makes it an attractive alternative.

[via RefreshingApps]

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Filed under: Internet, Web services

Thinking about picking up a new T-Mobile G1, but want to know how massive it is first? Pective is a new web service that will show you pictures of various items in actual size. Just select the size of your monitor and Pective will do the rest.

The service isn’t perfect. For example, I’ve a 15.4 inch widescreen display, while Pective only grants you to choose a 15 or 16 inch display. So the picture of a CD it displayed was slightly more massive than the actual CD I held up to the screen to make a comparison. But it was close. Close enough that I I have the ability to figure out how much space an iPhone would take up in my hand, or how hard it would be to type on the G1’s thumb keyboard.

Right now there are only a handful of items to sift through on Pective. But that works out well because there’s also no search function. You can only browser. Users can add their own images, and anyone can report whether the sizes for uploaded images is accurate or inaccurate. As more items get added, I certainly hope Pective adds a search box.

[via Digital Inspiration]

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By Nora Dunn

In tough economic times, financial planners are on the front lines. They are the gateway to investment returns when the markets are good, and are the buffer against financial disaster when the markets are bad.

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Filed under: Deals, Competitive strategy

Sonic Corp. (NYSE: SONC) is looking to refranchise hundreds of its company-owned restaurants, as franchised locations have been outperforming of late.

It’s a good idea. Franchisees are more motivated to produce strong results than paid-by-the-hour managers, and getting out of the operations business and living on franchise fees and royalties will reduce risk and could increase returns.

But the problem, according (subscription required) to The Wall Street Journal is that tight credit markets and a weak economy could make it difficult for prospective franchisees to make the investment to purchase or open Sonic locations.

The other problem is that refranchising stores is such a great idea that everyone else is doing it: Applebee’s, Steak n’ Shake (NYSE: SNS) and many others have announced similar plans to refranchise company-owned locations.

Adding to the problem, Sonic has not been reporting strong results of late and it seems doubtful that its brand is strong enough to make the company stick out from the glut of restaurants trying to dump company-owned stores in a tough market.

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services

What’s the first thing you do after you layoff 10 percent of your workforce? You go on a buying spree, right? That’s what eBay appears to be doing anyway. The company, which currently employs about 15,000 people plans to layoff about 1,000 full time workers as well as a number of temporary employees. At the same time, eBay has announced it will spend over $1.3 billion to purchase two companies.

First up, eBay will purchase Danish competitor DBA for more than $380 million. But the big news for folks who don’t live in Denmark is the $945 million the company is spending to buy Bill Me Later, a company which allows web sites to perform instant credit checks based on your birth date and last four digits of your social security number allowing online retailers to extend you instant credit and send you a bill later.

Bill Me Later’s technology will be used to complement eBay’s existing PayPal on the internet payment system.

There’s no question that eBay needed to do something to deal with increasing competition from Amazon Marketplace and other on the web stores/auction houses. But I have to state, if I were one of the 1,000+ people getting laid off, I wouldn’t be to happy to see my former employer spending this kind of cash on acquiring new properties.

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