This week, there’s really one one news items iPhone “Smart Phones.”:
What’s $296M Between Friends?
In April, the financial brains at Credit Suisse famously estimated that Google will spend a good $711m on YouTube this year while pulling in revenues of only $240m. That’s a $470m loss. But a new report from RampRate – a firm that claims better IT knowledge than Credit Suisse – says that number is much too high.
“RampRate estimates that, based on our experience working with other top internet, e-commerce, and media firms, Google’s maximum loss is no more than $174M without challenging Credit Suisse’s revenue assessment.”
Yeah, either way, Google is footing the bill of all this “free” stuff. The point there is that it may be free to consume, but it’s far from free to just distribute. I wonder how the “distribution” costs of YouTube compare to those of cable and satellite companies. That is, is YouTube a cheaper way to distribute content? How much cheaper? Clearly, they’re “subsidizing” that price now if they’re loosing “only” $174M doing it. If it’s a loosing proposing, it’d seem that this “free” model isn’t sustainable. We need to figure out how much the “free economy” actually costs to run, otherwise all this crowd-sourcing, citizen-* stuff is gonna crash once it’s blown out MMS and we’ll be left with a nothing at the end. Love the Internet: KISSES!
GoogleBot Wants Your Voice!
Google last month reserved 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, signaling that it may finally be ready to roll out its long-anticipated Google Voice service.
… Sources could not say when the 1 million numbers may be assigned. Level 3 has been supplying Google with phone numbers since the introduction of Google Voice, so the 1 million numbers are an indication Google is close to adding a significant amount of users.
I use Google Voice. It’s very nice.
AT&T’s Hot Spots
More than 4 million connections were made at AT&T’s U.S. Hot Spots with smartphones, including the iPhone 3G, in the first quarter of 2009 alone.
Half a Million iPhones
Piper Jaffray’s senior research analyst issued a report to clients Thursday in which he estimates that Apple (AAPL) will sell half a million units of the new iPhone this weekend.
That’s half as many as Apple sold the weekend of July 11, 2008, when the iPhone 3G launched and more than a million units walked out the door.
But Munster notes that the 3G went on sale in 21 countries, whereas the 3G S is launching in only eight.
Meanwhile, in Palm-land
Palm’s App Catalog has seen roughly 666,000 app downloads in its first 12 days, according to the mobile analytics firm Medialets. And what’s worse is that the download momentum is slightly slowing down since the initial launch. So don’t be too surprised if one month after the launch, the App Catalog downloads are near 1 million. Yes, 1/60th of what the App Store was doing last year [over 60 million downloads].
So why is that? After all, reports are that the Pre itself is selling pretty well. Well, the reasons are fairly obvious, and are all Palm’s fault. Right now, there are only 30 apps in the App Catalog. That’s up from 18 at launch, but there have been no new ones in just about a week now. How many did the App Store have at launch last year? Over 500. And more importantly, the rate of expansion was massive — which led to those 60 million downloads in the first month.
AIR has 200M Installs
During the Flash Camp Keynote in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch mentioned that AIR reached over 200 million installs. We’ve gotten some questions from developers about that number, so this is a quick post to confirm that as of June 1, 2009, AIR has been installed on over 200 million desktop computers worldwide.
With 100 million installs in the first 10 months of availability, and 200 million in just 16 months the rate of adoption continues to accelerate as more applications are developed and come to market.
Adobe SaaS Signups
Since Acrobat.com first launched in June 2008, 5 million people have signed up to use the innovative service, with over 100,000 people signing up each week.
Austin Airport Traffic Down
For the month of April alone, passenger traffic dropped 8.5 percent. Southwest’s total was up 1 percent while American and Continental were down 11 percent and 8 percent respectively.
Cloggin’ in the Tubes
In 2008, the Internet transferred 9 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1.074 billion gigabytes) worth of data each month. Cisco predicts it will carry 56 exabytes per month by 2013. This means that annual traffic will reach around 2/3rds of a zettabyte (1 zettabyte = 1024 exabytes).
Disclosure: Adobe is a client.
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