Interesting footnote in AT&T’s earnings this morning: The carrier everyone loves to hate has quietly become the carrier of choice for e-book readers from Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble. They generated a million new subscriptions last quarter, and now the iPad will bring more.
Is there big money in mobile payments–systems that let people buy stuff using their phones? Not yet, perhaps. But investors are betting there will be.
Latest example: Boku, a mobile payment start-up that raised $13 million last June, has added another $25 million via a C round led by DAG Ventures. Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures are all re-upping.
Here’s another e-reader clamoring for attention in a Consumer Electronics Show full of e-readers: The Skiff Reader, produced by a company funded by publisher Hearst Corp. and supported by Sprint. But in many ways, the Skiff Reader’s specs are beside the point, because the real point of its parent company isn’t to produce e-reader devices at all–it wants to create a publishing and distribution platform. Does this sound familiar? And does it sound like something another publisher might want to buy?
Live in New York City? Want to buy an iPhone? Don’t try ordering one from AT&T’s Web site: The wireless carrier, at least for now, won’t sell New Yorkers a new phone online, citing “increased fraudulent activity.” Huh?
Google plans to sell its new phone on its own Web site, without getting a wireless carrier to subsidize the cost of the handset. But that doesn’t mean Google won’t also work with a carrier: The search giant intends to launch its touchscreen phone next year with the help of T-Mobile say sources familiar with its plans.
But will the other big telcos come around? Or not?
How do you get Web users to pay for content? Get an iPhone into their hands.
That’s one conclusion you can draw from a new survey showing that people who own Apple handsets are more willing to pay for stuff than the average Internet surfer.
Adobe is preparing to put magazines on Apple’s purported wondertablet. But what if that device, like Apple’s iPhone, doesn’t want to work with Adobe?
Here’s yet another content creator that’s convinced Apple has a tablet device in the works: Condé Nast says it will have a digital version of Wired magazine ready for the purported gadget by the middle of next year and will eventually create similar versions for all of its 18 titles.
But Condé, like other publishers, says Apple won’t actually talk to the company about its plans for the device–or even acknowledge that it has plans.
It’s easy to get the impression that everyone uses Twitter. And many people do! But new statistics indicate that four of five Web users are still Twitter-free. Worth keeping in mind as Google and Microsoft start plugging tweets into search results.
Not sure what Barnes & Noble has to say about the “Nook” that it didn’t discuss yesterday, when it unveiled its new e-reader. But the bookseller’s press conference this morning, scheduled for 9:30 EDT, gives us an opportunity to try a little crowd-sourcing experiment: Send me any questions you have and I’ll try to ask the company on your behalf.
Had to see this one coming: Amazon is chopping the price on its plain-vanilla Kindle e-book reader and is introducing a new version that will allow users to download books when they’re outside the U.S. Your move, Sony–and every other would-be Kindle competitor.
Sony did indeed have a bit of news to announce at the New York Public Library: Its most direct challenge to Amazon’s Kindle to date. Like the Kindle, the “Daily” reader will feature a wireless connection–Sony will use AT&T, while Amazon uses Sprint. And unlike current versions of the Kindle, the Sony device will feature a touchscreen.
But it will come at a price: The device will retail in December for $399. That’s $100 more than the current price of Amazon’s Kindle 2. And that price point is almost certain to drop in coming months.
Here’s another set of customers for AT&T: People who buy e-book readers from Plastic Logic, the would-be Kindle killer due out next year.
Privately held Plastic Logic says it will rely on AT&T to supply its gadgets with a wireless connection, in the same way that Sprint is the network provider for Amazon’s Kindle.
This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…
Did you wait in line this morning to buy a new iPhone 3G S? If you want to take advantage of its “tethering” feature and use it as a modem, you’re going to have to wait a while longer. And you’ll have to pay–though it’s unclear how much that’s going to cost.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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