LG Buys webOS From HP

Hewlett-Packard has sold some of the rights to its webOS mobile operating system to LG Electronics for use in smart TVs manufactured by the South Korean electronics giant.

LG has agreed to acquire the source code, webOS engineering team and other assets from HP, in a deal announced on Monday. LG will also license HP patents related to webOS and cloud technology, the companies said.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

HP acquired the mobile operating system, along with device maker Palm, in February 2010. HP used the OS on its short-lived TouchPad device, which debuted in mid-2011 then disappeared weeks later.

HP announced a new tablet, the US$169 Slate 7, on Sunday. The Slate 7 will run the Android operating system.

LG will lead the Open webOS and Enyo open-source projects as part of the deal, the company said. HP will retain ownership of all of Palm’s cloud computing assets, including source code, talent, infrastructure and contracts.

HP said it will also continue to support Palm users.

LG will use the technology to expand the Web capabilities of its smart TVs, said Sam Chang, LG vice president and general manager of innovation and Smart TV, in an interview.

LG bought the webOS assets in part for the engineering team, which includes user experience engineers, he said. The webOS engineers who remained at HP — the companies aren’t saying how many there are — are to join LG’s Silicon Valley labs.

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Apple Squashes Rumors

Apple will not develop a new, inexpensive iPhone just for the sake of offering a cheaper alternative, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a speech on Tuesday.

The company’s focus is on creating great products, and it will not make a smartphone that does not past the quality test, Cook said during a webcast from the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference, which is being held in San Francisco.

“There are other companies that do that, that’s not who we are,” Cook said. “Our North Star is great products.”

Instead, the company is now dropping prices on the older iPhone models. That has been successful, and the demand for iPhone 4 models in December was greater than supply, Cook said.

“It surprised us as to the level of demand we have for it,” Cook said.

Lowering the price on older models is just one of the approaches Apple is taking to reach out to price-sensitive buyers. It’s not easy to balance quality and price, and that’s when innovation comes into play and new products could be created to meet consumer demand, Cook said.

“Sometimes you can take the issue … and you can solve it in different ways,” Cook said.

For example, the first iPod that shipped in 2001 was priced at $399, and now users can buy an iPod Shuffle for $49. There was also a big demand in the past to drop the price of Macs to under $500, and Apple tried and couldn’t do it, so it created the iPad tablet.

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LinkedIn DropS BWP API

LinkedIn has shut off its API access to “Bang With Professionals,” a Web service that was intended to facilitate more, say, intimate connections among users of the business-oriented social networking site.

The service was designed to allow LinkedIn users to anonymously search for people in their LinkedIn network who would be interested in meeting up for casual sex.

“We all had a good laugh,” the founders of Bang With Professionals said on last Friday on the website, less than a month after its launch. “We all knew it was a matter of time before our API key was revoked.”

LinkedIn said it shut off API (application programming interface) access for the free site, which was intended to work on all desktops and mobile devices, because it violated the social network’s terms of use in a manner that was “inconsistent with the goals of our developer program.”

Among other things, API access isn’t allowed for any application that contains or displays adult content.

Data about the site’s 6,000 subscribers is safe and all their user IDs have been deleted, the founders said. The only thing that remains now is the site’slanding page.

The origins of Bang With Professionals are not unique in the fast-paced social networking landscape. The site was built “by two guys in three days,” the landing page says. The total launch cost was US$57: $40 for stock images, $12 for the domain name and $5 for an account on the server CloudFlare.

The Twitter handle for the site has since been deactivated, but at press time, the Bang With Professionals blog on Tumblr was still accessible.

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Developers Gaining Interest In WP8

Developers are becoming increasingly interested in developing apps for Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10.

According to ABI Research, Android and iOS remain dominant platforms, with Android in the lead in the smartphone space and iOS dominating the tablet market.

However, developers are also focusing on Windows Phone and BB10. AI analyst Aapo Markkanen believes 45 million Windows Phone devices will be in use by the end of the year, along with up to 20 million BB10 devices. Redmond will also have 5.5 million Windows powered tablet by the end of the year.

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Blackberry Makes A Comeback

Research In Motion has hinted that it will unveil two new handsets early next month to accompany the release of its BlackBerry 10 operating system.

RIM is expected to unveil the phones at an event in New York City on Wednesday and will begin promoting BlackBerry 10 to consumers the following Sunday, Feb. 3, when it will air a TV commercial during the Super Bowl.

The sporting event attracts one of the largest TV audiences of the year in America, and companies pay millions of dollars for a 30-second advertising spot, underscoring how important it is for RIM that its new BlackBerry platform will be a hit. The same commercial will also air in Canada, RIM’s home country.

In announcing its publicity plans Friday, RIM also hinted at when the phones will be available to consumers. It said the TV spot “kicks off a week of worldwide launch activity for RIM’s BlackBerry 10 platform, along with the first two devices to run on the new platform.”

If the commercial marks the start of a weeklong buildup to the launch, that would put the North American release of the phones at roughly the start of the second week in February.

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Windows Phone Is Making Gains

Microsoft’s Windows Phone mobile operating system is slowly increasing its market share in the UK, while Apple edges closer to archival Samsung.

That’s according to the latest numbers from research firm Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, which show that Microsoft’s Windows Phone has increased its UK market share from 2.2 percent to 5.9 percent in the past 12 months. The mobile operating system is doing even better in countries such as Italy, where it boasts a 13.9 percent market share.

Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel Comtech said, “At the end of 2012 the global OS picture shows Android on top, but clearly the rate of growth it experienced over the past year is beginning to slow as easy wins from first time smartphone buyers begin to reduce.

“It has been far slower than Microsoft would have liked, but Windows Phone is now starting to gain respectable shares in a number of key European countries.”

“However, its performance in the Chinese and US markets remains underwhelming. As the two largest smartphone markets in the world these remain key challenges for Microsoft to overcome during 2013.”

Kantar Worldpanel Comtech has also revealed that Apple is edging closer to rival Samsung, with each firm clinging to 32 percent and 35 percent of the smartphone market, respectively. Given that Samsung had a much healthier lead this time last year, these numbers seem to suggest that Apple’s iPhone 5 has sold better than rumors had indicated. However, all will be revealed during Apple’s quarterly earnings call tomorrow.

Apple and Samsung could soon have a third challenger on their hands, though, as research also shows that Nokia’s sales are improving in the UK smartphone market. Sales of the firm’s smartphones have increased 50 percent year-on-year, putting the firm’s market share at 5.2 percent.

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Ericcson Transfers Patents

Ericsson has agreed to transfer 1,922 patents and 263 patent applications to Unwired Planet in exchange for a share in ongoing revenue that they will generate.

The transfer includes 753 U.S. patents related to 2G, 3G and LTE technologies, Unwired Planet said Thursday. Four months ago, the company owned just 200 U.S. and foreign patents, and around 75 pending patent applications.

“Our patent portfolio now extends to all layers of the telecom handset and infrastructure stack,” said Unwired Planet’s CEO Mike Mulica during a conference call. The patents cover application stores, location-based services, mobile search and mobile advertising as well as network protocols, antennas and many more topics, Mulica said.

The portfolio will continue to grow, as Ericsson has also committed to transfer a further 100 patents each year from 2014 through 2018.

Mulica said the company wants everyone who uses the patented technologies to pay a license fee. “We will use litigation when necessary,” he said.

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AP Goes With Twitter

The Associated Press began using its official Twitter account as an advertising platform on Monday, as the news organization looks for new ways to generate revenue.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd was the first sponsor on the @ap account for breaking news, which is followed by 1.5 million Twitter users. The South Korean electronics maker’s initial “SPONSORED TWEET” promoted its events at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

AP did not disclose financial details of the arrangement.

Twitter, which sells ads directly to make money from the social media’s monthly base of 200 million users, will not receive any proceeds from the AP-Samsung deal.

The AP called the initiative part of a new business strategy and stressed that sponsored tweets will clearly be labeled to differentiate them from news tweets.

The ads provide AP a new income source as news organizations from newspapers to television face severe revenue declines in the face of high production costs.

While the AP was founded in 1846 by U.S. newspapers as a breaking news conduit, only 22 percent of its revenue comes from member fees. Photo licensing, advertising on its news application AP Mobile and YouTube channel are other revenue streams.

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Is NFC Catching On?

Near Field Communication (NFC) is steadily gaining adoption in the U.S. for sharing data and music among smartphones, but the technology faces years of slow growth as a replacement for physical wallets.

NFC will take a minimum of three more years to grab hold as a technology that enables so-called mobile wallets as a replacement for credit cards and cash in the U.S., according to a consensus of five analysts. And by “grab hold,” these analysts mean being used by only 10% of mobile phone users to make digital purchases.

Gartner analyst Avivah Litan predicts that NFC payments will hit the 10% threshold in 2015, compared to the process of SMS (texting) payments that is expected to represent 50% of mobile payment volume globally in that same year. “We’re still on the edge when it comes to NFC innovation,” Litan says. “It will take a decade before it’s mainstream across the globe.”

Dozens of new smartphones that run Android, BlackBerry and Windows, and that include an NFC chip, launched last year. But Apple notably did not put NFC in its new iPhone 5 when the phone launched in September. That move “surely had a significant detrimental impact on industry adoption of NFC,” Litan says, given Apple’s influence in the mobile market.

Apple justified the move by saying that consumers already could use its Passbook app, which shows barcodes on the display, instead of NFC. The barcodes contain information that can be scanned by optical readers to let users board planes and redeem movie tickets — tasks that Apple notes are “the kinds of things consumers need today.”

Some have criticized Apple for omitting NFC from the iPhone 5, which has led to a widespread reassessment of NFC’s immediate future, especially in the U.S.

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Was The Prize Stock For 2012?

If you wanted to know the IT company which was a rotten investment this year, you might be thinking Facebook, HP or RIM.

However according to Business Insider is starting to look like the so-called industry leader, Apple might have caused its investors the biggest headaches. More money has been lost in the past three months in Apple stock than has ever been lost in the tech disasters known as Hewlett-Packard and Research In Motion combined.

HP’s stock price peaked above $50 a few years ago, and now it’s trading at $14 and RIM peaked above $140 a few years ago, and it’s trading for $11. However Jobs Mob’s share price peaked above $700 three months ago and is now trading just above $500. This means that on a percentage basis, therefore, Apple’s stock is down much less than either Hewlett-Packard RIM but has cost shareholders a lot more money.

When HP investors have lost about $100 billion since the 2000 peak and RIM has lost $65 billion since the 2000 peak. Apple has cost its shareholders value in three months. What is more amusing is that about four months ago, I was lectured by an Apple fanboy who told me that the company is going to be worth a trillion dollars by the end of the year and he just invested more than $100,000 in the company. Looks like he would have been better off putting it on a horse.

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