It’s Time For A Larger iPhone

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Apple is currently ordering larger screens for the next iPhone. With the usual nonsense, the WSJ cited people familiar with the matter and stated these screens measure at least 4-inches diagonally. Production is set to begin next month, they say. The Journal better be right, though. A 3.5-inch screen is just too small now. At this point to say anything to the contrary is pure fanboi nonsense. The standard argument that consumers don’t want a large phone is tired ...
Baidu’s New Forked Android Phone: China’s Search Giant Wants To Make Windows Phone, iOS Versions Too

Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform , the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a “forked” version of Android — forked Android devices being very popular in China — Baidu says that it doesn’t want to stop there: the idea is to take its platform, the Baidu Cloud ...
Mobile – Facebook And Google Can’t Live With It And They Can’t Live Without It

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of just.me . He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare . Facebook’s Week In Wall Street Hell This week Facebook did a virtually unprecedented thing. In the middle of its IPO roadshow it modified its S1 filing in reaction to questions it had been being asked by analysts. The modification I refer to stated that Facebook wanted to acknowledge a trend; that trend is the declining ARPU ...
OMGWHAT? GREE Acquires Mobile-Social Game Developer Funzio For $210M

Japanese gaming giant GREE just acquired mid-core, mobile game developer Funzio for $210 million in what should boost its ability to build games for Western audiences. Funzio is behind Crime City, Modern War and Kingdom Age, which are graphical RPGs that have had good runs on Apple’s iOS, Android or Facebook platforms. I had heard a few weeks back that Funzio was in a fundraising process at a $350 million post-money valuation and had also been loosely talking to various buyers in an auction-style process. Apparently, the ...
The Decline Of Android Foretells The Rise Of A Total Apple Monopoly

We have always built and destroyed monopolies. Companies often start out good but slowly turn, for lack of a better word, evil. The twin dark stars of profit and market share bring even the kindest companies into a collision course with failure. I’d say Apple is headed down that road. The company announced its 2012 Q2 earnings earlier this week and as MG pointed out , they’re nearly as impressive as the previous blockbuster quarter. A dive at wireless carrier’s financials shows that the iPhone accounted for ...
Acer’s Q1 2012: World’s fourth biggest PC maker made just $11.2 million in profit

Acer's Q1 financial report reveals that the fourth biggest PC maker in the world is feeling weak after posting a very modest profit -- three months after it declared a $212 million loss for 2011. Turnover for the first three months of this year was NT$113 billion ($3.8 billion) and profits after tax were NT$331 million ($11.2 million). In context, the company suffered an 11.4 percent decline in revenue quarter-on-quarter, but still made ...
Unlike “Thermonuclear” Steve Jobs, Apple CEO Tim Cook Says He’d Rather Settle Litigation

Looks like Tim Cook doesn’t quite want to go as “thermonuclear” on rival phone makers as Apple founder Steve Jobs did. Cook didn’t sound so eager to pursue patent infringement suits against Samsung, Motorola and HTC on today’s quarterly earnings call. “I’d highly prefer to settle versus battle,” Cook said on Apple’s earnings call today. “But you know the key thing that’s very important is that Apple doesn’t become the developer to the world.” He added very pointedly, “I’ve always hated litigation. We need people to invent their own stuff.” His words ...
Facebook Acknowledges That It May Cut Its 30% Revenue Share For Apps That Are Not Games

There was a little gem that we almost missed yesterday in Facebook’s amended IPO filing. But it looks like Facebook acknowledged that it may have to move away from a 30 percent revenue share with app developers if it expands Credits, its virtual currency, and payments beyond gaming. This is what it said in the filing yesterday: We receive a fee of up to 30% when users make such purchases from our Platform developers using our Payments infrastructure. In the future, if we extend Payments outside of ...
Onavo Extend stretches your data plan, now with CDMA/LTE support

What's Onavo Extend you ask? It's a free app that lets you save money on your data plan by compressing unencrypted data between your device and the web. The result is that you consume up to five times less data -- convenient when you're on a tiered / capped data plan, when you're roaming abroad or when you're on a slower 2G network. In addition, the app keeps track ...