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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Twitter Is Now Available In Korean

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As of today Twitter users in North and South Korea can view Twitter.com, the mobile site and the iPhone and Android apps in Korean characters.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who is apparently in South Korean capital Seoul, celebrated the milestone with the above tweet, which translated means "Twitter is a real-time global information network."

Korean is the seventh international language Twitter now supports joining English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. Twitter says it hopes to support more languages by the end of the year, which makes sense as 70% of its user base is international.

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Alexia Tsotsis 19 Jan, 2011

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HubSpot Heating Up, Sequoia And Google Ventures Looking To Invest

Digital marketing startup HubSpot is close to closing a new round of financing, we've confirmed, that may put a valuation on the company in the $200 million range. Google Ventures is likely to invest, we've heard from multiple sources. And Sequoia Capital, which has recently shown an increased willingness to invest in later stage funding rounds, is rumored to be interested in the company as well.

The company last raised capital – a $16 million round led by Scale Venture Partners – in late 2009. They've raised a total of $33.5 million to date.

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Michael Arrington 19 Jan, 2011

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Apple’s Cook On iPad/Mac Relationship: “If This Is Cannibalization, It Feels Pretty Good.”

During the earnings call following Apple's blockbuster Q1 2011 results, a questions was asked about Apple's Mac business as it relates to the iPad business. The iPad business, after all, is growing much faster (and just overtook the Apple portable computer business in terms of revenue). So is it affecting the Mac business by eating into it?

"Was there any cannibalization? Honestly, I don't know for sure. But yes, I think there is some cannibalization," Apple COO Tim Cook (who is the acting head of Apple while Steve Jobs is on medical leave) said in response. This echoes the thoughts Jobs had last quarter when asked the same basic question. "The iPad is clearly going to affect notebook computers," Jobs said at the time.

But Cook also said that he thought there was a "halo effect" as well. That is, just as is thought to have happened with the iPod and the iPhone, certain Apple products are helping the company sell other products. So Cook believes that while the iPad may be eating into some of the would-be Mac sales, it's also fueling other new Mac sales.

He also noted that it's likely that the iPad is not only cannibalizing Mac sales, but also sales for the larger PC industry. Cook pointed out that Apple still has a relatively small share of the overall market. "So the other guys lose a lot more," he noted.

He said that internally, Apple doesn't worry about cannibalization or even think about it. "The iPad team works on making their product the best. Same with the Mac team. Both teams think they can continue to grow," he said.

"If this is cannibalization, it feels pretty good," he quipped.

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MG Siegler 18 Jan, 2011

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Apple’s iPad Business Now Bigger Than MacBook Business. Next Up: Entire Mac Business

Apple had a lot of big numbers to share during their Q1 2011 earnings today. And while the biggest unsurprisingly belonged to the iPhone, the iPad numbers are also very, very impressive. How impressive? The iPad business is already a bigger business than Apple's portable computer business. That includes MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs. And it's within spitting distance of surpassing Apple's entire Mac business in terms of revenue.

Last quarter, Apple sold 7.33 million iPads. Broken down, they made just over $4.6 billion off of the product for the quarter. That puts it ahead of the $3.69 billion the MacBook business made for Apple during the same time frame.

The iPad actually started outselling Macs right out of the gates terms of actual units. But the higher price points of Macs ensured that they maintained an edged in revenues. But the iPad was able to surge past the MacBooks in that category thanks to a huge spike in sales, while the MacBooks rose much less dramatically.

But perhaps even more impressive is that the iPad is already closing in on Apple's total Mac business. The portable plus desktop (iMac, Mac mini, Mac Pro, and Xserver) totaled $5.43 billion in revenue last quarter. So the iPad just needs another $800 or so million to surpass it. That will happen at some point this year. Perhaps even next quarter depending on when the iPad 2 is unveiled.

In total, Apple has now sold 14.8 million iPads since the device's launch last April.

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Erick Schonfeld 18 Jan, 2011

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Apple COO Tim Cook Dismisses Android Tablets As “Bizarre”

Apple's iPad is a hit. The company sold 7.3 million iPads in the December quarter of 2010, a 75 percent increase from the previous quarter. But judging from all the Android tablets announced at CES, it is about to face an onslaught of competition. So far, though, Apple COO Tim Cook has "no concerns" with the tablets that are out there today, and goes so far to call current Android tablets "bizarre." On today's Apple earnings call, Cook characterized the competition as falling into two buckets: Windows-based tablets, which are "big, heavy and expensive" and suffer from "weak battery life," and current Android tablets, which are "scaled-up" smart phones.

Here is his response to the question, based on MG's notes:

Q: What about iPad competitors?

TC: There's not much out there as you know. There are two kinds of groups today (in the market) — the ones using a Windows-based operating system. They're big, heavy and expensive. Weak battery life. Need keyboard or stylus. From our point of view, customers aren't interested in that.

Then you have the Android tablets. The variety shipping today, the OS wasn't designed for a tablet — but Google said this. So you wind up having the size of a tablet that's less than reasonable. Or one that's not even a real tablet experience. It's a "scaled-up smartphone" – that's a bizarre product in our view. Those are what is shipping today. If you do a side-by-side with an iPad, some enormous percentage are going to pick the iPad. We have no concern there.

In terms of next generation. There's nothing shipping yet. So I don't know. "Today they're vapor." However, we're not sitting still. We have a huge first-mover advantage. And a huge user advantage from iTunes to the App Store. Huge number of apps and an ecosystem. We're very confident entering into a fight with anyone.

He thinks Apple is just scratching the surface in terms of fulfilling demand for tablet computing. He notes that there is interest across the gamut from consumers to enterprises.

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Erick Schonfeld 18 Jan, 2011

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Adobe Buys Behavioral Data Management Platform DemDex

Adobe just announced a big acquisition today; buying behavioral data bank DemDex. Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the release.

Demdex, which launched in 2009, captures behavioral data on behalf of Websites and advertisers and stores it in a "behavioral data bank." The company then score each user across more than 40 behavioral and demographic variables to come up with a "traitweight," which helps websites segment their audiences better and advertisers target their messages more exactly.

The beauty of DemDex is that it makes the behavioral data portable and puts it in the control of the Websites and advertisers themselves. They can plug it into whichever ad server or service they are currently using.

DemDex's technology will be added to Adobe's Online Marketing Suite, which is powered by Adobe-acquired Omniture. Of course, Adobe is looking to grab hold of a the $109 billion online ad market by offering ad optimization via its marketing suite. Of course, it should be noted that the data DemDex collects is based on anonymous cookie IDs and consumers can opt out of receiving targeted ads.

DemDex, which is based in New York, has raised $7.5 million in funding.

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MG Siegler 18 Jan, 2011

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IBM Beats The Street; Posts Record Revenue Of $29B, Net Income Up 9 Percent

IBM released strong fourth quarter earnings today, posting record revenue of $29 billion, up 7 percent from the fourth quarter in 2009, and surpassing analyst expectations. EPS were $4.18, up 16 percent; an increase of 16 percent from the same quarter in 2009.

Big Blue also posted record net income in the fourth quarter, $5.3 billion, compared with $4.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, up 9 percent. Net income for the year came in at $14.8 billion compared with $13.4 billion in 2009, an increase of 10 percent. Diluted earnings were $11.52 per share compared with $10.01 per diluted share in 2009, an increase of 15 percent. Revenues for 2010 totaled $99.9 billion, an increase of 4 percent (3 percent, adjusting for currency), compared with $95.8 billion in 2009.

IBM's CEO Samuel J. Palmisano said in a statement: "We completed an outstanding year, with record profit and free cash flow, and exceeded the high end of our 2010 earnings per share roadmap objective…We also capped a decade in which our shift to high-value businesses, our global integration of IBM, our investment in research and development of almost $60 billion and our acquisition of 116 companies have helped us to nearly triple our EPS and return more than $100 billion to shareholders."

Revenues from the Software segment were $7 billion, an increase of 7 percent (8 percent, adjusting for currency) and revenues from from the Hardware Systems and Technology segment totaled $6.3 billion for the quarter, up 21 percent (22 percent, adjusting for currency) from the fourth quarter of 2009.

IBM ended the fourth-quarter of 2010 with $11.7 billion of cash on hand, which is a little bit more than the $11.1 billion leftover in third -quarter earnings. IBM's acquisition spree tapered off in the fourth quarter but Big Blue bought a number of companies earlier in the year, including Initiate Systems, Cast Iron Systems, Sterling Commerce, Coremetrics, BigFix, Datacap, Unica, OpenPages, Netezza and most recently, Blade Network Technology for $400 million.

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MG Siegler 18 Jan, 2011

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