RIMM (research in [downward] motion)

The past couple of days have seen Research in Motion erase nearly two month's in gains. This tumble looks very similar to Apple's plunge after the news of the 3G iPhone missing production estimates, yet its due to far less disastrous news. In RIMM's case, they missed their EPS by a penny, and cut outlook slightly, perhaps hinting that their meteoric growth numbers have finally begun to slow in light of market conditions.

While it hurts to see a tumble like this, it also presents a good buying opportunity for a long term play. Research in Motion has terrific underlying economics and their enterprise smartphone market share doesn't seem to be going anywhere, even with the new iPhone claiming they finally have a competitor to the Blackberry. Bberry has its segment, and Apple's iPhone its own . I doubt we'll see much deviation.

gates: shit...microsoft sucks, huh?

Its long been understood that when it comes to consumer-friendly platforms and software, Microsoft is about as friendly as a rabid badger cruisin' on three crack rocks. Installation lag times here, incompatibility issues there...its a mess.

Now it appears that their founder has joined the ranks of haters. From a leaked memo in 2003 from Gates to development, "I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues." His email goes on to describe a tussle he had with Microsoft.com and its downloads section while trying to obtain the application MovieMaker. Check out the full transcript here.

I'm glad that even Bill Gates can recognize the pitfalls of his ginormous company, and can join in the healthy criticism that is so easy its almost not even fun (almost). I think it'd be a nice gesture for Steve Jobs to head up to Redmond and drop off a brand new Mac. 'Cept Ballmer would probably implode.

(Gotta love that mugshot, especially since its for speeding in his 911 in Albuquerque. Nice)

bill clinton playing robert de niro in "bill clinton: its frosty"

Bill Clinton finally endorsed the Barack Obama bid for the White House today after many months of criticizing Senator Obama and his campaign. He refers to his relationship with the Senator as "frosty." Meanwhile, Obama has called for his donors to help relieve Senator Hillary Clinton of her nearly $10m of debt incurred on the campaign trail. Clinton is nearly $22m in the red, a large amount of which is her own dough. Talk about skin in the game...too bad you got burned. Boo ya.

google: thank you for making me clever

You're typing a proposal, a blog post, column, essay or email, and you realize you've used that clever little quip one time too many. Uh oh, they'll see that and think I'm an idiot! Never fear, Google's here. Hop over to Google, type that tired old word/phrase into the search box, and boom, before you know it you not only have a new catchphrase, but have found a clever article, savvy, useless knowledge and a new favorite blog to boot. People have problems with this new found reliance on search-based knowledge at our fingertips, and maybe I'm just lazy...but I'm all for it.

For your enjoyment: noob

fist-a-cuffs, google tv...put 'em up

While Steve Ballmer figures out more ridiculous poses in front of his mirror, the rest of the Microsoft team is busy trying to trump Google, any way they can. Currently in their crosshairs: Google TV. Its kind of like going hunting for an elk, missing, and on the way home sniping a grazing cow in a pasture to make yourself feel better, but whatever.

Microsoft just announced it has purchased the TV ad technology vendor Navic Networks for an undisclosed amount. The company has raised $83m and has about 35m users through its partners Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications and Cox Communcations. Their technology allows TV ads to be "enhanced" with graphics, microblogs, and links to further information about the product being advertised. Clever technology, and very similar to Google TV's set-top targeted service.

While TV ad spending is still growing (cable spending up 4.1%, broadcast up 0.8% in Q1), its shelf life seems to be nearing an end (growth rates have been slowing in recent quarters). Nevertheless, Microsoft seems content on their soon-to-be victory over any Google division, as it was with the proposed Yahoo! deal earlier in the year. "Who cares if the company doesn't represent a sustainable addition to Microsoft, we're gonna beat Google TV!" Keen strategy. Good luck with that.

time may not be on emi's side...but the stones still are

There was speculation over the weekend that the Rolling Stones had followed in the footsteps of Paul McCartney, Radiohead and others by leaving their tired record labels for more creative revenue streams with promoters and merchandisers. However, EMI can breath a sigh of relief (for now), because the Stones have squashed the rumors.

Ever since sophisticated financiers have tried to catch the falling anchors of outdated record labels (see Bronfasauras), artists have been on a moneyless train to nowhere, and are now forced to seek alternative ways to monetize their work (see Madonna and Jay-Z's 9-figure deals with concert promoters, Radiohead's consumer-priced album release and McCartney's Starbuck's partnership). Record labels' roles are getting phased out in the wake of a shopping spree by PE shops for the big 4 (Bronfman with Warner, Guy Hands' Terra Firma with EMI); and these financiers, knowing little about the business to begin with, have only hastened its demise. Coldplay, a band with EMI, agreed to release their newest album under the label's name only if EMI paid for an outside marketing and branding firm (because the internal A&R and marketing at EMI is a complete joke, mostly due to Hands' cost cutting and ridiculous focus on social network marketing).

Seems like Coldplay's move paid off...they now have the highest number of pre-sales for an album in iTunes history. Good work fellas.

avec sarif, sans ice

David Neeleman, founder and former CEO of JetBlue, has transplanted his entrepreneurship south of the equator to create Azul Airlines, a Brazil-based carrier. And Neeleman's switching it up (slightly) from his previous venture: new planes, new country, even new font (Azul uses Helvetica, while JetBlue used a different sans serif font known as DIN). But gee, Azul, that sounds familiar...translation? Azul is Portuguese for "blue." Hmm, maybe its not all that different.

But David's favorite distinction? There ain't no ice in Brazil to ground 1,100 planes.

one decent guy

What better way to follow the sale of collegehumor.com to IAC than to open up a....donut shop? Ah the wit of a hipentrepreneurster. One day, sell your wildly successful web start-up to Barry Diller; the next, open a sweet donut shop in Williamsburg, where the "donuts will be scratch-made by cute girls imported from Bavaria," (his words). The next? Maybe some sick silk screening (see embedded video above). And all of it with such modesty. Strong work, Zach Klein.

i'm leaving for uhh...good reason. can i have my $2 billion now?

Carl Icahn's very public proxy battle with Yahoo has finally yielded a result: if he wins the battle by vote, the $2.4b severance plan Yahoo put together as a blowfish defense against Microsoft will be activated. This is what we call a lose-lose-lose...-lose.

1) Yahoo loses because if and when Microsoft decides to step in when Yahoo's stock is sitting in the toilet, it'll have even more reason to cut its number due to the higher cost of the plan.

2) Carl loses because he started this battle hoping for a low 30's takeover price, which won't happen for a whole list of reasons (tacking this one onto that list).

3) Microsoft loses because its now looking at an even more bloated target to swallow.

4) The shareholders lose because now tired executives who are fed up with this whole mess have incentive to leave it all behind (at a huge cost to the shareholders), and plenty of wiggle room too (citing "good reasons" is sufficient for resignation + severance).

At least you still have those cool shades, Carl.

best employee handbook ever

If anybody has the gall to resurrect sluggish, nerdy old Microsoft from its very public playground-esque beatdown by Apple in the recent "Mac vs. PC" campaign, its these guys. Crispin Porter + Bogusky have been behind Coke Zero's "taste confusion" lawsuit with its more classic brother, freaked people out with Whopper shortages, and got the Burger King King in bed with Brooke Burke. Surely they can get Mac to say uncle by year's end. With a $300m retainer, they better.

With employee guidelines like "don't throw sand" and no meeting policies, they seem to be headed in the right direction. They may need to reeducate Ballmer a bit, because I'm pretty sure he can't take a piss without holding a staff meeting to figure out who's job it is to zip him up.

Check out CPB's website for a full list of their work.

what? apple's production line not a sure thing?

Poor Steve. Projected 3G numbers of 12m units by the end of Q3? No longer. It now looks more like 10-10.5m units by the end of Q4. From Barron's this week: "These sources [tech hedge-fund managers] say that Apple has slashed its internal expectations for iPhone unit sales by up to 16%." Now this certainly doesn't affect the financial performance of Apple (the iPhone is minuscule in overall financial contribution), but it certainly will affect sentiment, and ultimately the stock, given the rumors prove even slightly founded. This comes at a bad time, just after reports that while Apple's smart phone market share dropped 7.5% from Q4, RIM's and Palm's market shares rose 9.4% and 5.5%, respectively. Perhaps its Steve who's having nightmares of Lazaridis boldly beating him with, well, a Bold.

Maybe I wasn't crazy for getting out at $189...I guess we'll see.

Delay culprits: Infineon (IFX); Foxconn International Holdings; AAPL

a solution to this mess from a karaoke king

When he's not rocking out karaoke-style to appease his Japanese business partners, he's locked in the "Idea Lab" of Cupertino, California-based Encrio Inc., inventing things like Push-to-Talk and flash memory...five years before their applications were even conceivable. Now if I could only get Nagesh Challa to stop stealing my IP...

He now has his sights set on solving the problem shown in the picture above: clutter. Wallets filled with credit cards, coupons, movie tickets, boarding passes--to Challa there's a solution, and its in our phones.

People have tried without success to figure out a way for phones to carry around barcodes for quite some time. The brick wall was always in reading the code; the scanner would always pick up light reflections from the phone's screen, making the code unreadable. Then Challa noticed that little LED light that blinks on the top of the handset. And so MoBeam was created. The technology uses LED light that mimics the sequences of the bar code, so you can carry your credit card, boarding pass and online movie tickets around in one gadget. Pretty handy. Could we make that a TV remote as well? I'm tired of flipping cushions.

that traveling salesman is NP-hard

Flipping through this month's issue of Technology Review, I came across an interesting article on a company I hadn't heard much from in some time. British Columbia-based D-Wave Systems, the "Quantum Computing Company," has been claiming to have developed the first (ultimately) commercially viable quantum computer for a little over a year now, with little evidence to support their claim.

Though they're efforts thus far have only yielded an inefficient (and quite pricey) prototype with a mere 28 quantum bits (or qubits), the thought of an applicable quantum computer is pretty astounding. While that size isn't anything to write home about, the direction they're taking (and the amount of sophisticated VC dollars pumped into the venture) looks to lead down an interesting road.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of quantum computing, my excitement stems from the possibilities that could be if we were able to utilize quantum parallelism in computation. While classical computers process information broken down to a bit level yielding two possibilities, True or False, Yes or No (or as they are symbolically represented, 0 and 1), quantum computers can, theoretically, register or explore 0 and 1 simultaneously (known as superposition). What this allows for is the ability to explore exponentially possible candidates for an answer in parallel, creating processing speeds many many times faster than exist today. And so the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). While the problem requires a search for a solution among exponentially many possibilities, a quantum computer could (eventually) test all of those possibilities simultaneously, and signal with complete certainty when it found a successful solution.

The applications are endless: What is the meaning of Life? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Toostie-Roll Pop? Longoria or Mendes? Endless...