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Another Nationwide Outage For The Blackberry

The Blackberry just doesn’t seem to have the luster it once did. Today, it had another nationwide outage.

According to Data Outage News:

“A number of users are reporting and an escalated RIM tech support call has confirmed data issues affecting WiFi devices NOT connected to a WiFi network. The outage is sporadic and issues are confirmed on at least on Verizon and T-Mobile on both US east and west coasts. Again, if you are connected to WiFi, you likely won’t notice any problems until you are out of WiFi range. This is not affecting ALL WiFi users, the reports are sporadic, but across all carriers, BIS and BES included.”

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What’s going in with the Blackberry? Once the enterprise stalwart, it is now looking like a struggling behemoth. Its interface almost seems antiquated. An analyst group is now saying the iPhone is expected to beat out the Blackberry in 2011 for the number one spot. And now we have another outage.

Twitter users are all over today’s outage. Some people are saying their service has been out since the morning. There have been some reports that the outage is international in scope.

The last Blackberry outage came in December. Reported outages also came in 2007 and 2008.

Blackberry has been facing a lot of of market pressure. The iPhone, the Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series all present challenges to the Blackberry.

A report by Trefis shows the iPhone beating out the Blackberry by 2011.

The iPhone’s surge into the business community is a major reason for it overtaking the Blackberry.

A Trefi analyst write in Forbes:

We expect Apple’s market share to overtake that of RIM by 2011, and for Apple and RIM to have 11% and 8% market share, respectively, by the end of Trefis forecast period. We believe sales of the iPhone will eventually outpace BlackBerry sales for the following reasons:

1. Apple’s ecosystem of consumer products (Macs, iPad, Apple TV) and services (iTunes, iPhone apps) make the iPhone a more attractive phone for many consumers compared to the BlackBerry

2. End of AT&T exclusivity will give Apple’s iPhone wider distribution in the US (comparable to BlackBerry distribution)

3. iPhone is making inroads with business customers that have traditionally preferred the BlackBerry

Discuss

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Prudent scores $22M to rival EnerVault in grid-scale storage

Prudent Energy, a Beijing-based maker of large-capacity flow batteries, has raised a $22 million third round of venture funding. Its products may be too heavy for use in plug-in vehicles, but the company could very likely become a key player in grid storage, both in China and the U.S.

A truly international affair, its batteries were actually designed by a Canadian startup VRB Power Systems, which Prudent acquired in 2009. Because its manufacturing operations are based entirely in China, substantially lowering costs, the company could give U.S.-based competitor EnerVault a real run for its money. Also planning to churn out flow batteries, EnerVault recently raised its own multi-million funding round.

Prudent plans to use its new financing to build out its manufacturing capacity. This will in turn drive growth in U.S. markets. CEO Johnson Chiang said in a statement that the company has already delivered 20-kilowatt flow batteries this year. Its largest customers are telecommunications and utility companies. But really any organization or energy vendor that can’t afford a power outage is a potential customer for flow batteries.

An alternate solution set apart from lithium-ion batteries, flywheels and fuel cells, flow batteries are comprised of huge storage tanks containing positive and negative electrodes that are continuously pumped through an AC/DC converter. This structure allows a battery to continue recirculating and generating power long after most competing storage systems are depleted.

As it stands, Prudent and EnerVault seem to be headed for a showdown. The latter is claiming that it can provide storage at $100 per kilowatt-hour (compare that to $500 to $1,000 per kilowatt hour for lithium-ion rivals). Prudent will not only have to match this price — it will have to beat it if it wants to be a contender in the U.S. market. It will be interesting to see who pulls ahead as demand for grid-scale storage continues to grow, and states begin to pass legislation mandating grid storage to buffer peak periods. California has one such bill pending in the Assembly right now.

The majority of Prudent’s recent round of funding came from Northern Light Venture Capital, a leading Chinese venture firm. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based EnerVault, on the other hand, is backed by U.S. Invest and Oceanshore Ventures. It also scored a $650,000 grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency last year.

Companies: EnerVault, Northern Light Venture Capital, Oceanshore Ventures, Prudent Energy, U.S. Invest

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Apple’s App Store said to have 99.4 percent of all mobile app sales, more like 97.5

The latest research from Gartner indicates that, for the year 2009, only 16 million app sales were executed on mobile devices not bearing the infamous bitten apple logo. In reporting this data, Ars Technica inadvertently conflates Apple’s latest announcement of three billion apps downloaded with the notion of three billion apps sold and pegs the App Store’s market share at a whopping 99.4 percent — but more realistic calculations still show it to be somewhere in the vicinity of 97.5 percent. Going off estimates (obtained by GigaOM) that a quarter of App Store downloads are paid-for apps, and taking a rough figure of 2.5 billion downloads in 2009, leaves us with around 625 million app sales performed by Apple, which comfortably dwarfs all its competition. Considering the fact 18 months ago there wasn’t even an App Store to speak of — whereas today Cupertino is gobbling up the best part of $4.2 billion in annual mobile apps revenue — maybe you can now understand why we’re covering every tiny drip of info about that mythical tablet.

Apple’s App Store said to have 99.4 percent of all mobile app sales, more like 97.5 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mouse Computer Lm-mini20 nettop crawls out with NVIDIA Ion
ASUS and Acer have made sure we’d never have a shortage of Ion nettops, but it appears Mouse Computer is sneaking through the cracks with its Lm-mini20. Unlike the company’s CD drive packing netbook, there isn’t really much of note here. The 34800 yen ($376) version has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, 160GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, and NVIDIA ION graphics. And you can configure the standing mini-desktop to your hearts content with a larger hard drive and more RAM. We can’t exactly say we are waiting for this little guy to hit the U.S. market when we have the competent ASUS Eee Box EB1501, but if you must have a Mouse Computer, at least for the jokes, you can hit the source link and order it up.

Filed under: Desktops

Mouse Computer Lm-mini20 nettop crawls out with NVIDIA Ion originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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2010 Predictions

Every year the ReadWriteWeb team tries its hand at predicting the future. Looking back at our 2009 predictions, we got some wrong (I predicted that Facebook would sign up to OpenSocial) but others turned out to be on the money. I correctly guessed that the usual suspects would remain unacquired in ‘09 – Digg, Twitter, Technorati – but that FriendFeed would get bought. OK, so I guessed that Google would be the buyer. But close enough!

Without further ado, here are our predictions for 2010. We’d love to read your predictions in the comments.

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Richard MacManus, Founder & CEO

1. There will be a breakthrough consumer application for Internet of Things – involving the iPhone, RFID tags and a major consumer product such as books or groceries. In general Internet of Things will ramp up in 2010, with thousands more
everyday objects becoming connected to the Internet.

2. Google will acquire PostRank and promptly consign it to the same graveyard Feedburner went to.

3. Microsoft will acquire Wolfram|Alpha and Bing will continue to make small gains in the search market. Google will be distracted by increasing consumer complaints about content farms polluting Google search results.

4. A price war will erupt in the eBook market and Amazon.com will offer the lowest prices, leading to it gaining a dominant position in the market with its Kindle eBook Reader.

5. Google will partner with a large PC manufacturer from Asia, who will launch an inexpensive netbook powered by Chrome OS in the U.S. market. It will become a hot consumer item among school kids and university students.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer & VP Content Dev

1. Google Wave will win some respect back as people discover valuable uses for it and get used to the user experience.

2. Facebook will open aggregate user profile and social graph data for outside analysis.

3. Some serious user interface innovations will blow our minds.

4. Data portability will become more real, standard, expected and viable.

5. A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from, it may be mobile and location-centric, it may focus on personal content recommendations.

Sarah Perez, Feature Writer

1. MySpace doesn’t quite make a comeback, but gets a fresh start of sorts with their music and entertainment offerings. The Gen Y/Gen Z demographic sees growth on the site but the network’s overall numbers continue to decline.

2. Twitter launches ads.

3. TweetDeck finally launches a web version and becomes the number 1 Twitter client other than twitter.com.

4. Cloud computing heats up. AWS, Google, Microsoft and others begin price wars to compete for customers.

5. The iPhone still rules and grabs more mobile market share than ever before.

6. Meanwhile, Android becomes the #2 mobile platform by year-end.

7. iPhone App backlash begins. There are too many worthless apps and no decent way to find the good ones. Then Apple surprises us with a brand-new feature that improves greatly upon their “genius” offering to help us find new and useful apps via iTunes.

8. iTunes announces a web service, thanks to the Lala acquisition.

9. Spotify finally gets the green light in U.S. and people go nuts for it.

10. The netbook craze dies down. People start buying new “in-between” devices that are slightly larger and more powerful than today’s netbooks – but smaller, more lightweight and cheaper than regular notebooks. Features like better processors, separate GPUs, and SSD HD options set these new “ultra portable” devices apart from the traditional netbook, but they’re still often called “netbooks” because of their size. Market confusion ensues.

Jolie O’Dell, Writer & Community Manager

1. MySpace relaunches as a content network, leveraging the bands and filmmakers they already have on board and dropping the emphasis on social networking.

2. Twitter will find a monetization model and launch things like ads and pro features.

3. Facebook will become the Borg. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as ubiquitous as Google and lay people confuse Facebook with “the Internet.” They’ll make more money and control more data than ever before.

4. iPhone’s exclusivity with AT&T will come to a breaking point and we’ll see network-agnostic iPhones.

5. On the bright side, 2010 will signal the death of the login. Third-party authentications will become the norm, and user data will be entrusted to a discrete handful of online properties. Users will pitch a hissyfit if ever they’re asked to create a username and password and upload an avatar. After all, doesn’t the Internet know they have a Facebook?

6. File-sharing will continue to be shut down around the world; by 2011, we’ll all be downloading via Tor and the U.S. will have instituted a lame 3-strikes-no-Internet policy.

7. Cybercrime will be more of an issue than ever. Expect to see a major governmental security breach in 2010, as the government continues to adopt 2.0 tech without strong and permanent infosec personnel and procedures in place.

Dana Oshiro, ReadWriteStart Writer

1. AR: Geo-locational games and AR will come together in 2010. We’re going to see strange behavior from those playing zombie shooter games on their commutes.

2. Agree with Sarah: Netbooks and gadgets like the PsiXpda are going to gain ground.

3. Mobile Music: Offline music caching will be expected of all streaming music apps.

4. The browser really will be the new OS.

5. Payment Systems: Between Square, PayPal X and advances in internet TV, we’re going to see payment options integrated in unlikely places.

Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise Writer

1. Cloud computing will go through a shake-out. There are just too many companies out there for the market to sustain. The big players will go on a buying spree. The consolidation will deeply affect users. Some companies will fold overnight. Users will lose access to their data, leading to a whole new wave of skepticism about cloud computing. But it won’t be enough to slow down the move to cloud computing. More companies will consider the security risks as less of a factor, compared to the cost benefits and potential for innovation. Cloud computing technology will become more of a commodity. The business applications for cloud computing will take center stage.

2. The big players will come back strong. IBM, SAP and Microsoft will innovate just enough to show big gains with customers.

3. Consumer based social networks will make big efforts to gain wider access to the enterprise, as more companies seek to open up to the social Web. The information architecture of social networks will change to accommodate the greater degrees of control that the enterprise requires. This will bring on the rise of “social middleware,” services that act as a layer between social networks and the enterprise.

4. A new breed of social networks will emerge that act as one-stop shops for applications and services. These will look more like marketplaces than social hubs for conversations around the proverbial virtual water cooler. SaaS leaders will face off for this growing market.

5. iPhone, Android or the Blackberry? I expect the Android to be the talk of the enterprise, especially if the Google Phone does make it to market. Such a phone would eliminate carrier costs and break down walled gardens that have limited application development.

Sean Ammirati, COO

1. Facebook will go public & the IPO will be a huge financial success.

2. Hyperlocal advertising will heat up, delivering another nail in the traditional newspaper industry’s coffin. (Very similar to one of my 2008 predictions, but this time focused on the advertising aspects.) Specifically, it will be more common for a local establishment to pay marketing dollars to Yelp or FourSquare, for example, then their local newspaper.

3. Apple will release an “iTablet” and the world will be a better place for it. Ok, more accurately we’ll all think the world is a better place for it.

4. Agree with Jolie regarding “the death of the login.” I’m hoping for open distributed alternatives along with Facebook and a handful of others.

5. Between Boxee’s continued development and a new AppleTV (hopefully synched with their iTablet), it will become much more common to enjoy the Internet on a TV.

Elyssa Pallai, Marketing & Experience Manager

1. Skype becomes increasingly pervasive, as the younger generations force their parents to get online and consumers find new and interesting ways to cut costs and save money.

2. Software as service becomes ever more popular, as businesses and governments choose to focus on their core business and realize the benefits of lightweight technologies in the cloud – including rapid deployment and the low cost of switching.

3. The online user experience has a renaissance, as web browsers and hardware become more sophisticated and designers / developers take advantage of that.

4. The growth of Internet of Things continues, RFID tags in everything. The initial bugs will make funny things happen all around us.

5. iPhones and other smartphones become the purchasing tool of choice.

6. Consumers bypass carriers and create open wifi networks for all (which is already happening but not en mass).

Jared Smith, Webmaster

1. Backlash against the App Store causes more and more developers to defect to Android and competing platforms.

2. Google Chrome’s market share increases at Firefox’s expense. Internet Explorer continues to lose ground as more rich, HTML5-aware Web apps spring up on the scene.

3. Opera begins to struggle, as WebKit becomes the rendering engine of choice on mobile devices.

4. Social analytics features explode onto the scene in 2010. Twitter opens Pro accounts, including analytics and an API to access them. Google strikes a deal to integrate Twitter analytics with its Google Analytics product.

Discuss

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Google Speed Tracer: Why Is That Web App So Sluggish?

We all notice when a web app is acting a big sluggish. What is causing it to be so slow?Why is it not responding as fast as it should?

These are the kinds of issues that keep developers up at night.

To help solve this problem, Google is launching Speed Tracer, a new tool for the Google Web Toolkit.

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Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension. it gives developers the ability to identify problems in their web apps using a “sluggishness graph,” that shows how the app is doing. If it is zero on the graph’s y-axis then the app is screaming. If the y-axis is 100 then something is wrong. It is acting sluggish.

Speed Tracer is one of several new features added to Google Web Toolkit.

For example, one of the new features in Google Web Toolkit splits code to help speed up the start time of large applications. According to Google, “Code Splitting enables developers to safely and easily slice and dice their application code so that key functionality can load immediately and other features can be loaded later as needed.”

These are the kinds of applications we should expect to see more of as web applications proliferate. We need more ways to do benchmarks. Services like Speed Tracer help diagnose issues to quickly improve performance. That’s a critical issue in today’s market. The speed of an application can be the difference for a customer. If the application is fast, they may stay and check things out. if it is slow they will split.

And when they split, who knows if they will ever come back.

Discuss

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Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009

Every year at ReadWriteWeb, we look at hundreds of new web apps aimed at everyday users. Occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web.

Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009. These are apps and services that helped consumers use the web in new ways this year; and brought technologies that were previously only geared towards advanced users to a mainstream audience.

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Some of these apps aren’t new – but just like last year, we’ve tried to select a mix of applications that either reached the mainstream this year, or that we think will be big in the year to come.

Bing

Until earlier this year, Google didn’t have any serious competition in the search market. Now, however, thanks to Microsoft’s Bing – which launched in July – users finally have a choice when it comes to search engines. Bing’s market share climbed steadily over the last few months, and Microsoft keeps adding interesting new features like visual search, hover previews, integrated Twitter search and a smart integration of some of Wolfram Alpha’s most compelling features.

Bing, which bills itself as a “decision engine,” tries to give its users more than just 10 links. Instead, Bing focuses on giving users answers right on the search results page. A search for a football or baseball player, for example, will bring up recent stats, while a search for flights brings up data from Microsoft’s Bing Travel service.

Wolfram Alpha

No other new web service was greeted with the same amount of hype as Wolfram Alpha this year. Inevitably, Wolfram Research’s “computational knowledge engine” disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer, but Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. If this sounds familiar, it might be because Microsoft’s Bing is trying to do something very similar – even if Microsoft’s approach isn’t quite as radical. Because of these similarities, it also doesn’t come as a surprise that Bing was the first search engine to integrate search results from Wolfram Alpha.

While it isn’t useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha’s knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha’s ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too, though not as useful as the service’s ability to solve complex math problems. We still have to wait and see what the future holds for Wolfram Alpha.

For now, the service is a great experiment and even if it fails (which we don’t think it will), its influence will surely extend to other search engines like Bing and Google Search. In the spirit of trying something different, Wolfram also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha’s web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price.

Google Chrome

Google launched the first beta version of Google Chrome in late 2008. Even though Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn’t offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet, Chrome has already changed the browser market. Chrome’s relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars and even Microsoft now compares the performance of the next version of Internet Explorer to Chrome. Thanks to its fast JavaScript rendering engine and interesting new technologies, Chrome is changing the way developers are thinking about browsers. Even if you don’t use Chrome, you will see Chrome’s influence in the upcoming versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Chrome, of course, is also the basis for Google’s upcoming Chrome OS, so chances are that we will see a lot more of Chrome in the next year.

Posterous

Whether you want to open up a new blog without any fuzz or just share photos and messages easily on multiple services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, light blogging service Posterous has you covered. The service launched in May 2009 and was definitely one of the most interesting new arrivals in the blogging landscape this year. What makes Posterous stand out is its ability to cross-post updates to other services (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or your own blog, for example). In addition, it’s also extremely easy to set up a new blog. Just email a message, photo or video to post AT posterous.com and your new blog is ready to go. Advanced users can also port their own domain names to the service and theme their blogs.

With PicPosterous, the company now also offers an easy to use iPhone app.

Hulu

Thanks to its prominent ads during the Super Bowl, Hulu became a household name in the US this year. Even before this publicity campaign, however, Hulu had already established itself as a the #1 destination for finding episodes of TV shows online. Hulu started out as a joint venture between FOX, NBC and other TV networks. In April, ABC also joined this group. Thanks to this, Hulu now offers one of the only destinations to easily find TV shows online in the US. While Hulu is currently available for free, it’s worth noting that Hulu could start charging for subscriptions as early as next year.

Next page: Consumer web apps 6-10

When AOL Spins Off On December 9, It Will Be Worth About $3.4 Billion

It’s been a long decade, but AOL will once again be an independently traded company on December 9, when Time Warner will spin off shares. Every Time Warner shareholder (disclosure: including me, from when I was employed there) will receive shares in AOL using the following formula: one share of AOL will be distributed for every 11 shares held in Time Warner.

In other words, we finally have an approximate market capitalization for AOL. The business will be valued at 1/11th the value of Time Warner. At today’s market cap of $37.8 billion for Time Warner, based on a closing price of $32, that implies a $3.4 billion market cap for AOL. Unless Time Warner shares surge over the next few weeks, it will be in that ballpark.

So the AOL business which was valued at $5.7 billion just last July when Google sold back its 5 percent stake, is now worth even less—not to mention the initial $20 billion valuation when Google first invested in 2005 or, going back even further, the original $109 billion merger with Time Warner way back in 2000.

But let’s forget about all that. Onwards and upwards. With a little cost-cutting, those AOL shares will shine. Right?

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