$1.7 Million Worth of BlackBerry PlayBooks Stolen
I used to always hear jokes about electronics “Falling” off the back of a truck but this is a bit crazy. Bla1ze @CrackBerry (Thanks Tashanna!) noticed a story about a semi-tractor full of BlackBerry PlayBooks being stolen this past Thursday.The driver coming out of Plainfield, Ontario was transporting 22 pallets of PlayBooks when he went to get something to eat and grab a shower.
Currently the police have no suspects but they have contacted the FBI. I wonder where 22 pallets of PlayBooks would wander off to… More details over at the Hearld Bulletin.
Electric-Powered Rolls-Royce Finishes World Tour ( Slideshow)
Rolls Royce Motor Cars said its 102EX model called the Phantom Experimental Electric, returned to its headquarters in West Sussex, England, this week after completing a globetrotting program of testing and test-marketing.
The world tour served as a shakedown cruise to check the car’s systems to see how they work in everyday driving. The trip was also an attempt to answer questions about the feasibility of electric power in the ultra-luxury car segment.
Early this year the car maker revealed the EE during the Geneva Motors Show and has since been trying to get a sense of potential interest from longtime customers as well as prospective new buyers.
Rolls-Royce, which is a unit of BMW AG, says information gathered during the tour will help it develop a strategy that could include alternative drive systems for its vehicles. Rolls said it will release results of its recent market-research in the first quarter of 2012.
Will Android Reach Its Sell-by Date In 2012?
Weight watchers will know how it feels: to cut the flab and get going with more energy, more buzz. Stephen Elop
is now on that side. The Nokia president and CEO has got two new
phones, Lumia 800 and 710, out of the lumbering giant in under nine
months. They were launched in India three days ago.
For a
moment, ignore Lumias' specifications (they don't read half bad). Don't
compare them with other Windows Mango devices. Consider what it means
for the company. From idea to the store shelf, the Lumia journey is a
quick turnaround from handset industry standards. Benchmark it to the
old Nokia, it looks like a sprint.
But the real mad dash was
the slew of dual SIM phones. More than two years late into India and
other emerging economies, the company has announced seven such phones
since June. And though late, Nokia came good. It loaded the dual SIM
phones with features: Ovi services and specific innovations. The result:
it shipped over 18 million such phones since their launch.
Elop is already gushing. In a media interaction in September he claimed
that the success of dual SIM phones had a "halo effect on our single-SIM
phones. India has shown that brand plus team plus great execution can
deliver strong results".
Innovation and agility at both ends of the handset market: does this signal that Nokia is getting its act back together? Or do the
achievements pale against the goings on in Apple, Samsung and local
manufacturers in emerging economies?
ET on Sunday dissects the
anatomy of the dual SIM success to find out whether it can be
replicated across phone segments and questions whether Nokia's Lumia can
win mind and market share in the iPhone era.
BEST LATE THAN NEVER
There are a lot of things that Nokia did right in the dual SIM segment.
But the most important one is that it entered this market at all. Many
consumers bought Indian brands because there was no Nokia option. As
soon as they had one, the choice was Nokia.
"The brand enjoys
high credibility, especially at the low-end. It did the right thing by
launching handsets at competitive price points. A consumer did not have
to spend more, if anything at all, to switch from an Indian brand to a
Nokia dual SIM," says Kunal Bajaj , director India, Analysys Mason, a telecom consultant.
But Nokia did not rely on brand power alone. It included relevant
value-additions and innovated for the consumer. Says D Shivakumar,
managing director, Nokia India: "We refused to treat the dual SIM market
the way the industry was treating it, as a vanilla commodity. We
segmented the dual SIM user on parameters like form factors and usage
patterns and addressed the pain points of owing multiple SIMs."
Americans losing addiction to 'CrackBerrys'
New York: To understand what ails BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd in the US market, just ask eBay Inc Chief Executive John Donahoe.The world's biggest online auction site had about a hundred engineers developing new iterations of eBay's shopping app for Apple Inc's iPhone a few months ago, and another hundred engineers working on Google Inc's Android mobile platform.
EBay even had 50 people developing apps for Microsoft's Windows phones, but the e-commerce giant only had "one or two" working on RIM's BlackBerry, according to Donahoe.
By early November, it seemed Donahoe wasn't even using his BlackBerry much any more. When he met with reporters to talk about plans for the holiday shopping season, the CEO whipped out his iPhone to show how eBay's apps ran on the device. When Reuters asked Donahue about his BlackBerry, he said he still had it but didn't bother to bring it into the room.
Such stories are commonly found among RIM's once-loyal corporate and consumer customers, who are deserting the Canadian company after it has struggled to keep up with competitors' innovations.
RIM on Thursday posted a sharply lower quarterly profit, offered a dismal forecast for BlackBerry shipments this holiday season, and delayed the arrival of new phones using a make-or-break operating system in development, QNX.
"It's frustrating because I haven't heard anything good from them in a long time," said long-time BlackBerry user Kevin Nichols, the head of KLN Consulting Group, who was looking at Android and Windows phones at a Sprint Nextel Corp store in downtown San Francisco on Friday.
"They need to come out with new products soon, otherwise it looks like RIM may become the next Palm," he said, in reference to the collapse of the smartphone pioneer Palm Inc. Nichols ignored the latest BlackBerry Torch in a display case nearby, saying the device wasn't "new enough" for him to upgrade.
Even on Wall Street, where users once joked about their addiction to their "crackberries," loyalty is waning.
"The QNX delay is a concern," said Rob Romero, head of hedge fund firm Connective Capital. "Consumers like new products and vendors want something new to sell in their stores."
The chief technology officer of a Connecticut-based hedge fund said that when a top hedge fund manager wants to use an iPhone instead of a BlackBerry they can now switch, even though he prefers RIM security. "When they say I want an iPhone or an iPad configured, they get it," said the CTO, who declined to be identified.
RIM shares fell 11 per cent on Nasdaq on Friday and hit their lowest level in nearly eight years.
Security features
Research firm Strategy Analytics forecast RIM's share of the US smartphone market to fall to 12 per cent this year, a sharp drop from 2007, when RIM had a 44 percent share. By comparison, Apple, which just started selling smartphones in 2007, is expected to grab a 24 per cent US market share this year.
To be sure, BlackBerry still has its defenders. Robert Laikin, CEO of cellphone distributor Brightpoint, said that RIM represents between 5 per cent to 10 percent of the 110 million phones his company handles globally every year.
"I still have a BlackBerry. When I talk to my friends who are business professionals, most of them still have a BlackBerry. Some of them have bought an additional device too," he told Reuters.
"All manufacturers I've worked with in the last 25 years have product delays. What RIM is going through isn't different," he said. "I believe RIM will survive because their product is very sticky."
There are still many companies who prefer their employees use BlackBerrys because they feel that RIM offers the best security features to protect corporate data. But these enterprise customers are shrinking, analysts said.
Gary Curtis, chief technology strategist at global technology consulting giant Accenture, pointed to improvements in security from Apple and Google mobile software in recent years.
"Choice and leveling of the playing field is the fundamental enabling factor for companies being able to say to employees, use the device you like," he said. "It's not a headlong rush ... but they're opening the door to more devices and people make their own choices."
Interviews with other consumers at phone stores on Friday illustrated why the former bastion of corporate smart phones faces tough competition.
"I'm a BlackBerry user but my company makes me use it," said a shopper called John who was playing with a BlackBerry Torch at an AT&T store in San Francisco. He declined to give his last name.
"Anyone who is anyone at my company has an iPhone, but they make us use BlackBerry still," he added. "I think I might break mine and buy an iPhone. The touch screen on this Torch works pretty well, but the iPhone is just easier to use."
A Sprint store manager said BlackBerry phones would sell better if they had more apps. But some app developers aren't interested in the BlackBerry platform, partly because the technology is difficult to work with.
"Of the companies that pitch to us, I can't think of any that are starting out by developing an app for the BlackBerry," said Theresia Gouw Ranzetta of venture capital firm Accel Partners, which invests in mobile app developers.
Hotel Tonight, a start-up backed by Accel's Ranzetta, has developed apps for the iPhone, Android phones and an HTML5 version for its last-minute hotel booking service.
"Will they make a dedicated BlackBerry app? Not on the roadmap," she said.
CELL PHONES IN CARS
Driving to distraction on information superhighway
"No call, no text, no update, is worth a human life," National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman said in a statement explaining her panel's recommendation in favor of a complete ban on the use of personal electronic devices in cars. She's right on that score. No phone call or text is worth a life. Still, I think the NTSB went too far in recommending a nationwide ban against using personal electronic devices - including talking on a cell phone - while driving.The unanimous recommendation followed an investigation into an Aug. 5, 2010, pileup involving a truck-tractor, a pickup and two school buses in Gray Summit, Mo., that left two people - the 19-year-old pickup driver and a 15-year-old student - dead. The cause of the accidents, like the cause of other fatal crashes investigated by the NTSB: driver distraction.
Here's what bothers me about this story. It turns out the 19-year-old pickup driver sent or received 11 text messages in the minutes before he was too slow to hit the brakes when road work caused traffic to slow. Thing is, the NTSB found other contributing factors to the pileup. The 19-year-old was sleep-deprived. The driver of the lead bus in the accident was distracted - not by a phone, but by a motor coach parked on the shoulder. The second bus was moving too close to the lead bus.
The kicker: Missouri already had a law that prohibited drivers under 21 from driving and texting.
Thirty-five states have anti-texting laws. They make sense. You cannot tap out text messages and keep your eye on the road. The two are mutually exclusive activities.
But you can talk and drive.
Since California required drivers to use hands-free cell phone devices in 2008, I've had a friendly back-and-forth with the law's author, state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto.
I understand why Simitian feels that his legislation has saved lives and spared families heartache. In the years that we've disagreed, after all, I've seen a lot of boneheaded drivers come close to causing ugly accidents because, state law notwithstanding, their brains were glued to a phone.
Lately, I've even seen people driving while playing with an iPad.
"I think it's not fair to call it a nanny-state law," Simitian told me last week, "because there is a distinction between laws that protect us from ourselves - seat-belt and helmet laws - and laws that protect us from others."
It is not clear, however, that the hands-free law actually protects Californians from other drivers. In 2010 the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released a study that found hands-free laws did not reduce the number of car crashes in California, New York, Washington, D.C., and Connecticut. The good news: Crashes were down everywhere.
Other studies show no real distinction in terms of distraction between drivers using hands-free and handheld phones. In fact, that's the NTSB argument for a complete ban. Distraction is distraction.
"They can't find the difference," Simitian countered. "The fact that they can't find it doesn't mean it isn't there."
Simitian and I agree that the NTSB folks are right to point out that a moment's distraction can spell the difference between a crash and a miss. In that sense, the NTSB recommendation is positive.
Over time, I've found that I am more careful and less likely to use my cell phone when I drive. There are too many bad drivers on the road.
And I understand that driving is not a right, but a privilege.
But I believe that most drivers exercise caution when they are on the phone and behind the wheel. I try to overcompensate for any distraction.
Besides, the state cannot outlaw all distractions. Witness the school bus driver - a professional - who hit the pickup.
Simitian also introduced legislation that banned texting while driving - which I applaud. But he does not support a ban that would include hands-free phones. He called the NTSB proposal "a nonstarter."
Twice I've interviewed Simitian on his hands-free law while he drove between Palo Alto and Sacramento. He always uses a hands-free device. He told me, "It's all hands on the wheel, all eyes on the road."
I opposed the hands-free law, but I obey it. In fact, technology has evolved so that complying is not much of an inconvenience. Still, I habitually see people driving while holding a phone to their heads. They don't care about the hands-free law. And chances are that I've noticed them because they are lousy drivers.
So when I read that the NTSB wants more laws that bad drivers will ignore, I don't see the point. I see another instance of the government imposing a law on people who are careful, when smarter laws don't stop reckless drivers from texting or trolling the Internet.
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