Business, Financial & Legal - Page 243

Kogan Mobile is in the headlines again, this time for booting a customer off their network for abusing their mobile phone plan. The telco offers an unlimited calls and text pre-paid plan that includes 6GB of data for $29, something they launched in December last year.

Brisbane customer, retail store manager Joel Campbell, was kicked off of the network, with Kogan claiming he was not using his service for "personal use", giving him 90 days to find a new provider. Within section 1.1 of Kogan Mobile's terms of service, they state that their network must be used for "personal use only" - the big problem is that in this seven-page ToS document, it does not state that heavy users would be kicked off of their service.

Campbell said "I have no reason to need a business phone," admitting he was a heavy user, saying that he accessed the Internet on his phone a lot during the day, but didn't think the cancellation of his service to Kogan was "warranted." He adds: "I'm paying for it. At the end of the day if I want more, I'll pay for more. It's not a loss to them."

Bringing you doom and gloom seems to be my job today. Nintendo's Wii U appears to be selling in underwhelming amounts. According to a Macquarie Capital analyst, Nintendo only managed to move 66,000 Wii U consoles in February, though 70 percent of those were the more expensive Deluxe Set.

According to NPD Group, Wii U sales actually went up in February by roughly 40 percent. However, this doesn't account for that many extra units as January's sales numbers were also low. The Wii U's price is likely to blame as it costs as much as, or more than, competing consoles that have extensive game libraries.

It's important to note that the Wii U's February sales numbers are lower than the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360's numbers from any month within the last seven years. Nintendo needs to repeat the success it saw with the 3DS after they dropped the price by dropping the price of the Wii U to a more competitive level.

It's looking as though Microsoft's expedition into the tablet market might not be paying off as much as the company expected. According to people knowledgeable about Microsoft's sales, the company has reportedly only sold around 1.5 million Surface devices, meaning Surface RT and Surface Pro sales combined.

Bloomberg reports that only about 400,000 Surface Pro units and just over one million Surface RT tablets have been sold. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft's expectations which had the company moving two million Surface RT tablets in December alone. The company ordered around three million, so there is quite a bit of stock left.

Part of the problem is the high cost of the Surface device. Another issue is Windows RT. There has yet to be a compelling argument for the operating system. Intel continues to push x86 as a viable tablet chip and it's capable of so much more. Microsoft's Surface advertising certainly hasn't helped, either.

The courts haven't been very nice to companies accused of infringing other people's patents. While this award isn't nearly as bad as the Apple v Samsung case, $30.2 million isn't something companies like to hand out. A jury has awarded $30.2 million to a former Sony employee who claimed Nintendo infringed upon his patent for glasses-less 3D technology.

Seijiro Tomita didn't get quite as much money as he felt he should. By his calculations, he should have received roughly $10 per console sold, which equates to just under $300 million. His actual award came in at just 10 percent of that, which still works out to be a lot of money.

"We are thankful to the jurors for their diligence and hard work," Tomita's lawyer said in a statement. "It has been a honor to represent Mr. Tomita and to protect his invention."

Samsung's Galaxy S IV is being launched in 24 hours, so it is about time Apple's marketing chief, Paul Schiller, came out on damage control. Because, you know, they make the devices that everyone else copies.

Well, the Apple marketing chief has had some interesting things to say about the Android user experience, and how it is not a pleasant experience. Schiller yet again attacked Android's continued fragmentation problems, describing it as "plain and simple". He took a big jab at Android, saying: "Android is often given as a free replacement for a feature phone and the experience isn't as good as an iPhone."

That wasn't all, Schiller also attacked Android for a lack of integrated software solutions - something I personally laughed out loud over - where he said:

Western Digital has invested in Skyera, a start-up focusing on all-SSD products for the enterprise market. The investment comes as part of Skyera's Series B round of financing, in which Skyera raised $51 million.

Radoslav Danilak, CEO of Skyera:

Andy Rubin has resigned from head of Android development. In his place, Google has appointed Sundar Pichai. Pichai has previously been the senior vice president for Chrome and Apps and is a nine-year veteran of Google. This could indicate that Chrome OS and Android will start to get cozy with each other, something that has previously been predicted.

It would be interesting if Google were able to allow Android apps to run on Chrome OS. It shouldn't be that hard of a task, but Pichai has said that it is much too early to discuss whether this is in the cards.

Research firm IDC have their latest report out, which expects to see a tip toward Android being dominant this year in the tablet market, taking the throne from Apple's iPad. IDC have increased their 2013 forecast for worldwide tablet shipments to 190.9 million, up from 172.4 million units.

Interestingly, Jitesh Ubrani, Research Analysts for IDC's Tablet Tracker, has said: "One in every two tablets shipped this quarter was below 8 inches in screen size. And in terms of shipments, we expect smaller tablets to continue growing in 2013 and beyond." Getting into the Android dominance, the IDC report that moving into 2013, Google will continue to expand their share of the tablet market.

Android's share of the tablet market is expected to reach 48.8%, a huge surge compared to the IDC's previous forecast of just 41.5%. Android's increased dominance comes at the expense of Apple's iOS, which is expected to drop from 51% market share to 46% in 2013. How about Microsoft's Windows 8 platform?

It was only a matter of time, but Seagate have reached the milestone first by shipping two billion hard disk drives. It took the storage giant 29 years to reach this goal, and more impressively they shipped one billion drives by 2009, and have shipped one billion since.

The one billion drives shipped in the last four years is thanks to the explosion of demand for storage in mobile applications, cloud infrastructures, social media, business applications and the ever increasing consumer market. Steve Luczo, president, CEO and chairman of Seagate, has said: "This is truly an impressive accomplishment and I am proud to lead this company as we celebrate this success."

John Rydning, IDC's research vice president, for hard drives and semiconductors said:

Chris Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, is looking at getting back into the video website business after selling his video streaming site to Google for a nice $1.65 billion. Hurley has now begun teasing his new venture, where he said during a Q&A session with Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose: "I wish [South by Southwest] was a month later because I could unveil the new product."

He didn't go into much detail, but added that the new product is "primarily video-based...and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content." It looks like we should expect a next-generation YouTube, and that's not a bad thing at all. Digg founder Kevin Rose asked him if that was his intention, where he responded with: "We're not setting up to [kill YouTube]-now. There's always going to be a place for YouTube." His intention, instead, is to create a platform better suited for collaboration."