Baidu Undergoing Turbulent Times as Users Move to Mobile

by

Baidu’s user transition to mobile and rising competition may continue to dampen top line growth, with margins likely to be under pressure in the near term. However, given encouraging new customer acquisition and continued development in the mobile space for future growth.

Mobile search traffic has continued to grow faster than PC search in this quarter, but management notes that the growth rate has been ‘soft’. We estimate that mobile traffic currently contributes more than 25% of Baidu’s total search traffic in 4Q12. We believe mobile search traffic is largely incremental to PC search traffic and, thus do not expect significant cannibalization to PC search traffic. Baidu’s current priority

Read more

Insight into the Oracle’s Acme Packet Deal

by

Database Giant Oracle’s strategic interest is in building out its communications vertical market offering, particularly in voice over IP with upcoming demand for LTE, rather than signaling any intention to enter the software defined networking space in competition with Cisco or Juniper. Oracle already delivers database, infrastructure software and applications software to the telecom vertical. Oracle is usually opportunistic in its acquisitions, and further details on why this acquisition is taking place at this particular time may become clear with disclosures upcoming in the proxy statement.

With the acquisition announcement, Acme Packet reported 4Q numbers that beat expectations for both product and total revenues. For the full year, product revenues declined 17%, while total

Read more

4G / LTE Patent battle Gets Hot with InterDigital Complaint

by

On 31 January, the US International Trade Commission (USITC) started an investigation into Huawei, ZTE, Samsung, and Nokia for alleged patent infringement based on claims by InterDigital (IDCC US, not rated) filed on January 2, 2013. According to Forbes (“US ITC to investigate Samsung, Nokia, Huawei, ZTE for patent infringement”, 1 Feb 2013), the patent infringement lawsuit involves products such as smartphones, data cards, USB dongles, PCs, and other mobile Internet devices with cellular capabilities.

InterDigital is an R&D firm that develops wireless technologies and generates revenue by licensing those patented technologies to third parties. It owns 7.6% of 4G patents according

Read more

Google’s Chromium NaCl SDK run on ARM based Devices

by

One of the core value propositions of Google’s Android, because of its integration of Java, has been the “write once run everywhere” credo Java claims, but has not delivered so far. Though Java, Flash and HTML5 are trying for ubiquity as technology platforms so that applications written by a programmer can run across all devices, none has achieved complete success yet.

Google has updated its Native Client (NaCl) programming technology with the latest version 25 SDK release, enabling it to run apps on ARM-based devices such as smartphones and tablets. According to Chromium, Google has
taken a step further as the NaCl technology has been updated to allow it also run apps on ARM-based devices, which powers most of the smartphones, tablets and other devices. NaCl allows developers

Read more

Blackberry 10 Launched – Nothing Innovative compared to iPhone / Android

by

Blackberry 10 Review at the Launch EventRIM announced nothing new when launching BB10 given that most of the pending features and devices had already become public. The only disappointment was that there were no surprises up management’s sleeves. The emphasis was on the user experience rather than the device, on features that differentiate BB10 and provide a clear value proposition.

Key Blackberry 10 success factors analyzed
Hardware – The Z10 boasts a full touch screen and looks rather like most other touch screen phones. It’s not a wow phone but covers all the bases with a good sized high quality screen, reasonably thickness, and the ability to replace the battery and add more storage.

User Interface The user interface is clearly differentiated relative to iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Multi-tasking strikes us as clearly better than on any rival device. The typing experience is very

Read more

Most Popular SmartPhones in China 2012

by

A Flagship Mobile Handset of a company decides the fate of other SmartPhone Models in Emerging Markets like India and China. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S3, no doubt an expensive phone for the Indian Mass market, yet it captures the mindset of Mobile Phone Shoppers and they tend to choose a Phone model from … Read more

Mobile Internet – Emerging trend but lacks demand, holds growth of 3G

by

Majority of Indian urban subscribers access Internet at their homes / offices using a wireline connection. Mobile Internet (2G/3G) is the second most preferred option, ahead of cyber cafes. 33% of the respondents use mobile phones to access the Internet when their first preference is not available. The most popular applications are the less data heavy email, web browsing and social networking.

3G uptake has been lackluster in the urban areas and has little/no subscriber awareness beyond the urban areas. Lack of opinion about quality of 3G/data services of various operators among a large fraction of urban subs also points to the current disinterest for data.

Read more

VMWare Vision & vCloud Suite

by

VMware is a high quality franchise and a leader in the important virtualization space. Last quarter’s acquisition of Nicira expands VMware’s addressable market by adding a key asset in the software-defined networking space – a complementary addition to VMware’s software defined data center offering. VMware management has shown great product vision in the vSphere server virtualization market and now is attempting to extend this to the next generation of what they refer to as the software defined data center and cloud infrastructure management products that VMware has been adding to its product portfolio.

VMware launched its vCloud suite using technology from

Read more

Can Windows Phone & ASHA – New Touch Interface save Nokia ?

by

It seems that Asha Touch’s main sales proposition is low cost of ownership. Devices are good value and consumer less data than a traditional smartphone. Yet, low-end Android phones are falling below the $100 level and can be equipped with data efficient proxy browsers (e.g. Opera) and can be set up to utilize WiFi for data heavy usage.

Asha Touch has many similarities to Symbian (Nokia’s failed smartphone platform). Both were based on relatively old Nokia software – Both were upgraded primarily

Read more

CDMA auctions may add a new competitor

by

The Cabinet will decide on the proposals to reduce the base price on the 800MHz CDMA spectrum by 30-50%. Although the auctions for CDMA did not attract any participants in November, we believe that Sistema could likely expand its footprint in the CDMA category, since it already owns 2.5MHz of spectrum. The recently concluded auction … Read more