Intel:5% profit increase on notebook chips demand

Intel's third-quarter profit rose nearly 5 percent, to US$2 billion, on strong demand for chips for notebook computers.

The New York Times reports (19 October) that Intel said it missed Wall Street's earnings goal by a penny a share, citing an unexpected legal settlement.

Intel, a bellwether stock of the technology industry, earned 32 cents a share for the third quarter, compared with 30 cents a share in the year-earlier period. Revenue rose 18 percent to US$9.96 billion. A survey of analysts by Thomson First Call had forecast earnings of 33 cents a share and revenue of US$9.9 billion, reports the newspaper.

Intel said it expected fourth-quarter revenue of US$10.2 billion to US$10.8 billion, slightly lower than analysts had estimated.

The NYT reported that the third quarter included a charge of US$140 million in the settlement of a patent infringement lawsuit filed last year by MicroUnity. The settlement cut earnings about 2 cents a share. A tax increase of US$250 million, related to a decision to repatriate foreign-earned income, reduced earnings 4 cents a share.

Intel said that shortages of certain chip sets would continue through the end of the year and into the first quarter of next year.

A company spokesman said that, as in the last several quarters, Intel had its greatest growth in chips for notebook computers, which account for roughly a third of all computer sales worldwide.

Intel said notebook chip sales rose 48 percent, to US$2.3 billion, while sales of chips that power desktop computers and servers increased 9.2 percent, to US$4.9 billion.

Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry wireless email devices, has said it expects to form partnerships with up to 10 Asian carriers over the next 6 months to tap strong demand.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (19 October) that RIM said the market is huge.  The company was in Bangkok to promote its BlackBerry services through unlisted TA Orange PCL, Thailand's third largest mobile phone operator.

According to Reuters, the Canadian firm enters markets worldwide by signing agreements with local wireless carriers, which then offer services using the BlackBerry name and signature PDA-like devices.

It now offers services through 16 partners in 8 Asian countries: India, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

According to Reuters in the NYT report,RIM said it is also working with China Mobile (Hong Kong) to offer BlackBerry services in China, the world's biggest cellular market.

Its Asia expansion comes amid an aggressive worldwide campaign that saw its subscriber base rise significantly in recent years. RIM has about 3.65 million subscribers worldwide, more than double the 1.657 million users of a year earlier, and is expected to reach 5 million at the end of the fiscal year ending February 2006, the company said.

TA Orange, 83-percent owned by True Corp, Thailand's largest private fixed line operator, has about 4 million subscribers, or 14 percent of the Thai market.

Mobile phone giant Nokia has announced three new phone models, saying they were being pitched at the ``style-conscious'' market.

Reuters reports in The New York Times (19 October) that Nokia said the new models, the 7360, 7370 and 7380, would be part of its ``L'Amour Collection'' and would go onto the market in the first quarter of 2006.

The 7380 is designed with enhanced voice commands, and includes a 2-megapixel camera and an MP3 player. It is expected to retail for about 500 euros, excluding taxes and subsidies, the company said in a statement.

Reuters said Nokia said that the compact 7370 includes a 1.3-megapixel camera, color screen and stereo speakers, and will retail for 300 euros, excluding subsidies and taxes. The 7360 will have a VGA camera and stereo FM radio, and will retail for 200 euros.

MySQL is fast approaching majority market share among software developers, with 44 per cent using the open source database to meet their needs.

The Register reports (18 October) that Use of MySQL has surged 25 per cent during the last six months according to EDC.

Overall deployments of open source databases have grown 20 per cent. EDC polled 400 developers in North America.

EDC did not go into why MySQL in particular is growing, says The Register, but noted that database security is an important facet of database development overall. EDC found that proprietary database servers are almost twice as likely to have suffered a [security] breach in the last year compared to open source database servers.

The register says that a major factor in MySQL's success has been its close association with Linux, the Apache web server, and the Perl/Phython/PHP scripting languages - a combination known collectively as the LAMP stack.

LAMP is being used by a growing number of developers to provide a low-cost, reliable platform for web-based applications. MySQL has also been especially successful in embedded systems, which compose more than 60 per cent of the company's business, reports the publication.

Yahoo has reported that it had brisk growth in its third-quarter revenue from online advertising and fees from its broadening relations with providers of high-speed Internet service.

The New York Times reports (19 October) that Yahoo's performance in the fastest-growing internet market - web search - continued to lag behind that of Google.

Google not only attracts more web searchers than Yahoo, says the newwspaper, but it earns substantially more revenue from the advertising on each search because it has more sophisticated technology for selecting which ads to place on each page of search results.

"Yahoo gets 60 cents for every dollar that Google gets" displaying a search results page, said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray & Company, the NYT reported.

Motorola has reported that its third-quarter earnings more than tripled on record sales as it continued to increase its share of the global cellphone market.

Earnings climbed to US$1.75 billion, or 69 cents a share, from US$479 million, or 18 cents a share, a year earlier, Motorola said, as rep[orted by The New York Times (19 October).
 
The newspaper says that Motorola's revenue rose 26 percent, to US$9.42 billion, from US$7.5 billion a year ago.

Motorola said sales rose 41 percent in the cellphone unit, its biggest, as it increased its market share to 19 percent, up 5.5 percent from a year earlier and about 1 percent from the second quarter of 2005.

Motorola remains the world's second largest cellphone maker after Nokia of Finland, reports the NYT.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile operator, has unveiled a new line of high-speed phones with a walkie-talkie feature that was first made popular in the United States.

DoCoMo said its winter lineup of six 3Gphones would include the function known as ``push-to-talk,'' which lets users talk to a group of people at the same time with the push of a button rather than dialing a phone number, reports Reuters in The New York Times (19 October).

The newspaper says that telecoms operators worldwide see the feature as a potential new source of revenue in increasingly saturated markets. The feature has allowed US mobile operator Nextel to gain a loyal following of business customers and report one of the US industry's highest average revenues per user.

Both KDDI Corp.and Vodafone K.K., Japan's No. 2 and No. 3 mobile operators, are also expected to launch phones with push-to-talk in coming months, according to the NYT.

DoCoMo said it planned to target both consumers and business users with the new service, which it dubbed ``Push Talk.'' The service will cost five yen per ``push'' or 1,000 yen per month under an all-you-can-use plan. Users can speak to up to 20 people at the same time under an upgraded plan that costs 2,000 yen per month.

According to ther newspaper, the new 3G phones, by companies such as NEC, Matsushita Electric Industrial and Mitsubishi Electric, will be rolled out in time for the December bonus season when many consumers have extra cash to spend.

Video phone pioneer 3 UK is bringing to Britain a service that could allow its customers to make thousands of pounds by shooting their own video clips -- and charging others to watch them.

According to a Reuters report in The New York Times (18 October) the smallest of Britain's five mobile phone network operators has said that customers could now use their mobile phone to make a 30 second video and upload it onto a ''See Me TV'' channel for others to view.

Each time a clip is downloaded by one of 3 UK's 3.2 million customers, the performer gets paid one penny.

Credits from downloads are accumulated in an account and then a transfer made via online payment service Paypal. A spokesman said customers at the company's Italian sister, 3 Italia, had already made thousands of euros from the service.

According to the AP report, 3 UK, which is owned by Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa (0013.HK) and which is being groomed for a possible market debut next year, also took a step deeper into the digital music market by announcing that every audio track its customers download onto mobile phones would now also be available online for no extra charge.

Mobile phone companies have been keen to grab a revenue share from portable music player companies such as Apple Computer and its iconic iPod music jukebox, says AP., but adds that customers who buy tracks on their mobile phones have so far not been able to access the music on other devices.

3 UK said the market for digital music had now overtaken the value of the global singles market, with researchers such as Forrester predicting that digital music revenues in the UK will top 204 million euros by 2007.

A trademark dispute has forced Google to re-brand its Gmail web mail service in the UK. Existing users get to retain their Gmail address (at least for now) but from Wednesday onwards new UK users will be given a Googlemail email address instead, according to a report in The Register (19 October).

The Register says that UK-based financial services firm Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) said its subsidiary ProNet Analytics has been using the Gmail name for a web-mail application since the middle of 2002, two years before Google began offering Gmail accounts to consumers. The email service offered by ProNet, by contrast, is used mainly by investors in currency derivatives.

The two companies entered talks into the right to use the Gmail brand but the negotiations broke down several months ago after they failed to agree a financial settlement, reports The Register.

The publication says an IIR-commissioned assessment put a minimum value on the Gmail brand of £25 million (US$46m), a figure Google's senior European counsel described as "exorbitant". Google continues to dispute IIIR's trademark claim.

Google told the BBC that to "avoid any distraction to Google and our users" it was switching brands to Googlemail in the UK while trademark lawyers attempt to resolve the dispute.

A separate trademark dispute forced Google to switch from Gmail to Googlemail in Germany back in May, reports The Register.

Macromedia will develop a version of its popular Flash player for Qualcomm's BREW runtime, helping both companies dig deeper into the market for mobile application developers.

According to a report in The Register (19 October) a version of Macromedia Flash Lite is due next year that extends Macromedia's relationship with Qualcomm, signed earlier this year, to develop a set of applications for Qualcomm's Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW). The agreement also means Flash will be available on BREW for the first time outside of Japan.

The Register says that Flash opens the door to dynamic multimedia applications and user interfaces for BREW handsets, built using Macromedia's relatively simple application development environment - an environment that is popular among more graphically-oriented developers. Macromedia claims it is up to five times easier to use Flash than similar environments.

According to The Register, the deal is designed to help both companies expand their footprints in the mushrooming field of mobile applications and services. BREW should help extend Flash's ubiquity on PCs to mobile devices. Macromedia estimates 98 per cent of internet-connected PCs are installed with Flash, compared to 40 million of the world's estimated 500 million mobile devices.

Lax oversight by federal regulators has helped waste millions of dollars in a government program that aims to connect schools and libraries to the internet, according to a congressional investigation.

The E-Rate program, which is overseen by the Federal Communications Commission, provides discounted internet access and connection equipment to help expand internet availability, especially in rural and low-income areas, reports The Associated Press in the New York Times (18 October).

According to AP.,the US$2.25 billion program ''is extremely vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse, is poorly managed by the FCC, and completely lacks tangible measures of either effectiveness or impact,'' said a report released Tuesday by the oversight subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The commission is working on developing performance standards.

AP reports that the subcommittee's two-year investigation cited problems with the E-Rate program in Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta. For example, the report said more than US$100 million was provided to Puerto Rico for an E-Rate funded network that was implemented only in a few schools, and almost no students had access to it. In Chicago, more than US$8 million in unused connection equipment sat in distribution warehouses.