Author: Om Malik

No, no…Cisco isn’t buying Motorola. Rather it’s agreed to buy Moto Development Group, a design consultancy based in San Francisco. It’s Cisco’s attempt to give its consumer products division a boost. Moto has developed products for Sirius, Intel, Logitech, LiveScribe and other startups. As a group, Moto has been pushing the envelope on some of the new technologies such as running Android on e-Readers and DIY home energy monitors.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cisco says that the new design team will report to Cisco Consumer Products Chief Jonathan Kaplan. CCP is responsible for Linksys, Valet and Flip Video product lines.

My take on this deal: It’s a small price and one worth paying if Cisco is really serious about consumer products. At least the San Jose, Calif.-based router maker knows that it’s a bit out of its depth in the consumer market and isn’t shy about looking help elsewhere. However, over the long term I have my doubts that Cisco will be a huge player in the consumer markets. But the company gets an “A” for effort from me.

NorthScale, a Memcached-focused startup based in Mountain View, Calif., says it has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Mayfield Fund. Previous investors Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners also invested in this round of funding. NorthScale has so far raised a total of $15 million in two rounds of financing. Memcached is used by thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, Twitter and Flickr. It’s a “high-performance, distributed memory object caching system and it is a way to speed up dynamics web applications by alleviating the database load.”

In addition to the new funds, NorthScale has hired a new president and CEO: Bob Wiederhold, a veteran of enterprise-focused companies including Transitive Corp. (acquired by IBM) and Cadence Design Systems. NorthScale was started by folks involved with the Memcached technology and it makes two major products: NorthScale Memcached Server and the Membase Server. It’s one of the many companies that are part of the noSQL movement.

German Internet entrepreneurs have a new friend — Hanse Ventures, a Hamburg-based Internet incubator that has been co-founded by Jochen MaaB, founder of Internet marketing firm, artaxo and Sarik Weber, formerly of XING and co-founder of Cellity. The founding share holders of the new investment group are publishing house Gruner+Jahr’s Chairman Dr. Bernd Kundrun and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, CEO of Sony Music Entertainment.

Weber and MaaB are responsible for the operational aspect of Hanse, which already has taken stakes in eight Internet start-ups. These include Carmio, a price comparison engine for auto parts and HochzeitsPlaza.de, a online wedding portal. Hanse Ventures plans to add between 6-to-8 start-ups every year for next three years to its portfolio. The start-ups are getting the usual physical infrastructure along with other services such as design, programming and online-marketing.

While Germany has become known for spawning “copy cat” start-ups that imitate the business models of some of the more successful US web companies, Weber tells us that the new group is focused on companies with original ideas. Hanse Ventures is part of a growing trend — several groups are trying to build a new start-up ecosystem that allows web upstarts cheaply develop ideas and products.

Photo by Eriwst via Flickr under Creative Commons License.

As many of you might have noticed, I have been largely absent from the blog over the past few weeks. Thanks to a flu gone wild, I was forced to take a break from the Interwebs, and frankly in the process missed a lot of good stuff on which to pontificate. Oh well! Such is the nature of the beast; there will be something new to riff on soon enough.

During my time off, I had another setback: My T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9700 died. It went into an endless loop of booting and re-booting, forcing me to use Google’s Nexus One phone, the online store for which is being put to rest. When the device first launched, I was among those most impressed by it.

I especially liked its screen, its fast processor and the fact that it worked well with Google apps and after using it for just 10 days, I called it the best Android phone yet. What a fool I was to jump to that conclusion. Over past few weeks I had to use it as my primary phone, and let’s just say that topping my list of things to do now that I’m feeling better is to get a new BlackBerry.

On the Nexus One, some of the most basic tasks — such as sending instant messages or typing out email — feel tedious and not at all smooth. And imagine my angst when I missed an important call because the Google calendar pop-ups prevented me from switching to the phone feature. On a case-by-case basis, these are minor things but encounter them often enough, and it’s easy to get annoyed. In fact I got so annoyed that I dug up an old T-Mobile Motorola RAZR and for the past couple of days have been using that to call folks. (How I wish and pray that Apple would sell the iPhone on a network not called AT&T.)

At the same time, I also had a chance to use the HTC Incredible, also an Android-based phone. And compared to the Nexus One, using the HTC Incredible (despite it’s overtly grandiose name) is bliss.

First of all, as a phone it’s just a rock-solid device and thanks to a great network (Verizon), is able to perform web tasks admirably. It is fast, thin and light. It has a great camera. It has a wonderful screen and it works much more smoothly than the Nexus One. And did I mention it runs on a really good wireless network, from Verizon? I wish they made one of these for T-Mobile — considering that I am a T-Mobile customer.

Nevertheless, the point of this post was to point out how much HTC has done for the Android ecosystem. With the HTC Sense, it has not only made the Android experience infinitely more appealing, it has shown the possibilities of where Google’s OS can go. (Related post: How HTC Because a Smartphone Hero.)

Although HTC’s Sense UI originated on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile to help make the OS look pretty and be finger-friendly, Microsoft reportedly won’t allow alternative user interfaces on its next-generation Windows Phone 7 devices due out later this year. Which leaves HTC to focus on making the utilitarian Android interface more attractive to customers.

I, for one, enjoyed the messaging applications, the social integration efforts and most of all, how uncluttered HTC has left this Android device. In a recent post, Kevin highlighted some of the ways some of the ways he improved his Nexus One by layering the HTC Sense UI on top of it:

Android focuses more on utility while the iPhone OS is more polished and refined. Simply put: the Sense UI levels the playing field when it comes to “fit and finish.” Both the HTC apps and widgets are extremely well designed. I’m generally not a fan of most Android widgets, but HTC takes it to another level. Tapping the Home button from the main screen zooms out and shows all seven, making it quick and easy to navigate. I also love the fact that I can cut and paste text from the web far easier than the stock Android method.

Android by itself allows decent customization, but the Sense UI takes it to an entirely new level. There are six pre-loaded “scenes,” each of which is like a theme, complete with wallpaper, widgets and shortcuts relevant to the theme. Social, for example, adds more of the messaging, communications and social networking widgets like HTC’s own FriendStream for Facebook.

Kevin suggests that I should upgrade my Nexus One to HTC Sense UI, but frankly I don’t want to waste any more time on this device.

And regardless, it’s great to be back in the saddle again.

Structure, GigaOM’s flagship conference, returns on June 23rd and 24th for two days of deep insight into the cloud computing industry. Taking place at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, it promises to be our best Structure conference yet.

A new feature this year is the Startup LaunchPad. Held at the end of the first day, this is where our selection of the 10 best startups or major product launches take the stage. From the chips that power the compute clouds to the broadband that transports the computation and the software that ties it all together, cloud computing is creating a fundamental shift in how we think about and buy computing services, and if your startup is going to be one of the major disruptors, we want to hear from you.

Here are some reasons why you should submit your startup for the LaunchPad:

• You will get to pitch your product and service — preference is given to those launching at Structure 2010.
• You will be presenting in front of venture capitalists, journalists and your potential future customers.
• Your presentation will be streamed live — we had more than 5,000 unique viewers for Structure 09.
• You will be given three passes to the conference, where you’ll get to rub shoulders with Paul Maritz of VMware, Erich Clementi of IBM, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and many, many more — take a look at the full schedule.

So do it — enter your startup for consideration in the Structure 2010 LaunchPad today. Full details and the entry form can be found here.

Not part of a startup? Then you should attend in order to find out what cloud computing has to offer. Click here to get $100 off your ticket. But hurry — this event will sell out!

Structure 2010 also represents a great way to directly address one of the most influential tech audiences anywhere. Call Mike Sly at (415) 235-0358 to find out how your company can exhibit.

It’s rare to see our political leaders use common sense when making decisions, so when they do, we should celebrate. House Republican leaders led by House Minority Leader John Boehner have reportedly sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking her to allow the use of Skype for video conferencing purposes. Broadband Breakfast quotes the following bits from the letter:

Among these barriers is the current House rule prohibiting members of Congress from using certain video-conferencing software applications such as Skype…often expensive, video teleconferencing activities with their constituents, but forbid them from using Skype – which is practically free – for such activities…We are certain that Skype, an increasingly relevant communication tool for Americans already widely used in the private sector, could be easily implemented in Congress in a manner that would not reduce the security of the House IT infrastructure.

Indeed, Skype is no longer a curiosity among early adopters. With more than 560 million subscribers, many of which are in the U.S., it makes perfect sense for politicians to use the technology.

“I don’t like getting questions about my purchases at lingerie shops. What I wear is my own business.” Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer on Blippy, an online service that allows you to share your recent purchases with a network of friends. Blippy has been at the center of a security breach storm that has angered many Blippy customers.

Gear6, a Mountain View, Calif.-based maker of Memcached-based appliances for the cloud, seems to have hit hard times, as it’s filed for assignment for the benefit of creditors. The 4-year-old company has a pretty heavyweight line-up of executives, including Tom Shea, formerly CEO of Roxio and Mirra, and Martin Patterson, formerly head of Sun’s N1 Grid System and co-founder of Terraspring, as its VP of engineering.

According to industry sources, Gear6 filed to liquidate its assets on Friday; I’ve reached out to the company but am still waiting to hear back. Rival Schooner Infotech, meanwhile, is wasting no time feasting off Gear6 — it’s offering to help Gear6 customers looking to transition to its hardware.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

What Cloud Computing Can Learn From NoSQL

Earlier this morning I went to check out Quora, the well-funded discussion site started by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, who previously led Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

Quora is one of the few web services I actually enjoy using, mostly because of the high quality of engagement with other Silicon Valley people. But before letting me through the door today, it asked me to agree to new terms of service. Though the question-and-answer site is still in private beta, current users have been contributing their knowledge without any terms of service in place.

A friend who pinged me later called the terms of service draconian, and I have to agree. Quora now says that it essentially owns everything you do on its service. It’s given itself the right to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” any content contributed by users. (See the graphic below.)

For comparison, we decided to take a closer look at the terms of service of sites that deal with our content. According to the Blogger TOS, Google “claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services.” Automattic, the service provider behind WordPress.com (see disclosure below), outlines very clearly that:

By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.

Wikipedia ToS states:

To grow the commons of free knowledge and free culture, all users contributing to Wikimedia projects are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, as long as the use is attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works. Therefore, for any text you hold the copyright to, by submitting it, you agree to license it under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 (Unported)

And Facebook, where Quora’s founders come from, tells its users that:

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings.

So while user-generated content sites typically have fairly gnarly terms of service, Quora’s ToS goes too far.

Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Pandora

Success, they, say has many friends. Tim Westergren (founder) and Tom Conrad (chief technology officer), the guys who are the public face of the much-in-demand online music startup, Pandora, would undoubtedly agree. After struggling for most of its life, the company, whose service allows you to create a radio station based on the music you like, is suddenly a Silicon Valley darling.

Such adoration was made clear at the f8 conference yesterday, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg singled out Pandora’s service and its tight integration with the social networking site’s new platform. He’s not the only one who’s fallen in love with Pandora. A few weeks ago, it was showcased by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the launch of iPhone 4.0 OS. Phone companies and even Ford talks about it in reverential tones. In short, Pandora is everywhere.

And why not? According to Appitzr, Pandora is the most popular free app on the iPhone platform; it’s among the most downloaded and used apps on the Android platform as well. Pandora has more than 50 million listeners, nearly 40 percent of which access the service on mobile platforms.

Which is somewhat ironic given that the company, which is 10 years old, was until recently always a half-step away from being in trouble. Whether it was running out of money or faced with draconian royalty rules, Pandora seemed like a Silicon Valley tragedy.

But I have known Westergren and Conrad for a long time and as such, have learned a lot about them as people. And I believe that much of their success can be attributed to their never-die (and sometimes foolish) optimism.

Westergren looks like a surfer dude; he has a totally chill vibe. When things got really hard back in 2008, he kept his wits about him, never once letting his emotions get the best of him — all while managing to keep Pandora up and running. We entrepreneurs should learn from that.

Tom & Tim at Apple's iPhone 4.0 OS launch event.

Did you know, for example, that he did more than 300 meetings with venture capitalists, most of which resulted in bupkiss? Of course, all that changed with the arrival of the iPhone and Pandora’s iPhone app. And in July 2009 the company raised $35 million. With total sales of about $50 million last year, it is well on its way to being profitable and has investors lining up to give it more money. There’s even talk of an initial public offering.

I bumped into Westergren and Conrad at f8 and joked about the company’s darling status. They just looked at me, grinned sheepishly and excused themselves. Amazingly, all this success hasn’t changed them.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Forget Syncing, Let’s Put Music in the Cloud!

In October 1997 Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Computer when asked about what would he do to fix Apple, he quipped: “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Well after posting record revenues and record profits yesterday, at the end of trading day today Apple had a market capitalization of $235 billion (roughly $259 a share) behind only Exxon and Microsoft. Dell, in sharp contrast ended the day with a market capitalization of $33 billion. Look who’s laughing now!

Nokia, another company whose executives mocked Apple now has a market cap of $55 billion. As for Google – it ended the day at $175 billion. Palm, another company that doubted Apple’s renaissance is up for sale and is worth about $820 million on the stock markets. Which makes me wonder if Microsoft, whose CEO once dismissed an iPhone as a toy will be lapped by Steve Jobs & Co?

Related: GigaOM Interview with Michael Dell.

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering

At the Facebook’s F8 developer conference, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the company would have a billion likes by end of the day. That is a big number that would make anyone think twice about the load it might put on their web infrastructure. Not Facebook – or at least that is what Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering and Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of tech operations told me when I ran into them earlier today. Both of them were looking awfully relaxed for guys who were in charge of an infrastructure being put to stress test.

“We do a lot more traffic every day than the load a billion likes” might generate,” Schroepfer remarked. It is clear that Facebook has learnt from Google that infrastructure is a vital and a strategic advantage. No wonder they are building their own data centers. I think that is one of the reasons they allow their chief to set audacious goals such as the “entire web is going to be social.” Otherwise Facebook can become the single point of failure for this social web.

DSL Phantom Mode Explained. Click to view the graphic.

In this era of fiber to the home, it is easy to dismiss copper-based DSL, the broadband connectivity technology commonly sold by phone companies world wide. Looks like it is too soon to completely write off this technology. Alcatel-Lucent, a company whose lineage is as old as the phone itself says its research arm, Bell Labs has been able to achieve downstream speeds of about 300 Mbps (over a distance of 400 meters) or 100 Mbps over a distance of one kilometer.

This is possible using a technology called DSL Phantom Mode.

At its core, DSL Phantom Mode involves the creation of a virtual or “phantom” channel that supplements the two physical wires that are the standard configuration for copper transmission lines. Bell Labs’ innovation and the source of DSL Phantom Mode’s dramatic increase in transmission capacity lies in its application of analogue phantom mode technology in combination with industry-standard techniques: vectoring that eliminates interference or “crosstalk” between copper wires, and bonding that makes it possible to take individual lines and aggregate them.

The idea behind DSL Phantom Mode is that the incumbent phone companies such as AT&T who are heavily invested into the aging copper infrastructure can keep using those pipes for a lot longer. However, phone companies such as Qwest will need to install new gear in the central office and in consumer homes.

Alcatel-Lucent’s efforts aren’t the only attempts to extend copper’s life and make DSL go faster and faster. Stanford University profession John Cioffi is working on a gigabit DSL solution and has started a company to give DSL a lift.

We all marvel at Facebook and its number of users, which at last check stood at around 400 million. For context, consider Skype, which at the end of the fourth quarter of 2009 had 560 million registered users, a data point Skype’s chief technology strategist, Jonathan Rosenberg, shared with the attendees of the eComm conference currently under way just south of San Francisco.

Skype, when it was still part of eBay, issued quarterly updates but those have now stopped. Nevertheless, here are the latest numbers:

• Skype added 39 million registered users in the fourth quarter to end the year with a total of 560 million.
• The number of Skype-to-Skype call minutes totaled 36.1 billion in the final three months of 2009.
• Skype users made more the 250 billion minutes worth of Skype-to-Skype calls from the time the service was launched through the end of 2009.
• Skype in 2009 accounted for 12 percent of the world’s international calling minutes, a 50 percent increase over 2008 when it accounted for 8 percent of international calling, according to TeleGeography Research.
• 36 percent of Skype-to-Skype calls as of the end of the fourth quarter included video — in other words, Skype is going to figure prominently in the video conferencing business, challenging more established players with its no-cost solution. Skype CEO Josh Silverman in a guest post for GigaOM explained why he views video as the future of Skype.

Here are some other random Skype stats:

• At peak times, 23 million users are logged into Skype (as of March 2010).
• Skype is available in 29 languages and is used in almost every country around the world.
• 35 percent of Skype users utilize it for business purposes.

My Mom says it’s bad form to toot your own horn. Well, today I’m going to risk upsetting her and do exactly that. We — and by that I mean GigaOM — have been nominated for a Webby, one of five sites nominated in the Business Blog category. The nomination is all thanks to the hard work of the GigaTeam.

We would love to get your support and votes in order to win the People’s Voice award. We are up against some formidable names, including the New York Times’ DealBook, so every vote counts. Voting for the 14th annual Webby Awards ends April 29th. You can vote here. The final results will be announced on May 4th.

Oh no, here we go again. Two years after a series of cable cuts disrupted Internet and telephony operations in Europe, Middle East and other parts of the world, the word comes of yet another outage. SeaMeWe-4, a cable that connects Europe to the Middle East, has been cut. In case you were wondering, folks from the research firm Telegeography in a press release said that there are only three cables that connect Europe and Middle East (SeaMeWe-3, SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Euro-Asia) and they take pretty much the same path under the Mediterranean Sea and as a result are equally vulnerable. SeaMeWe-4 accounts for about 89 percent of the total lit capacity, and any outage means trouble. Etisalat, the UAE-based phone company and Internet service provider, says its network has been severely impacted by the cut.

Led by Berkeley, California, at the end of 2009, college towns are among the fastest cities in the US, according to Akamai’s The State of the Internet report. In order to qualify, Akamai put a filter of a minimum of 50,000 unique IP addresses. Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Stanford (California), Durham (North Carolina) and Ithaca (New York) made up the top five cities in the US.

US might not rank top in most broadband categories, but it was interesting to note that Berkeley, Chapel Hill and Stanford are the top three fastest cities in the world, followed by Masan (South Korea) and Oxford (Great Britain.) San Francisco and other Bay Area cities are no where to be found on the top 100 cities list, and neither is New York. US towns/cities that play host to colleges and universities are well represented in the global top 100 cities list — once again showing the importance of educational institutions and networks to the overall evolution of the Internet.

When Akamai source data based on the number of unique IP addresses seen by Akamai, New York City was the fastest city with average speed of 5.139 Mbps, followed by San Diego, Oakland, Las Vegas and Baltimore. San Francisco didn’t make the top ten. Delaware is the fastest state in the Union — 7.6 Mbps, a jump of 5.2 percent from the third quarter. The increase in the number of mobile connections also brought down the average Internet connection speeds. Overall, 31 states saw average connection speeds increase in the fourth quarter – up from 25 the prior quarter. Notable gains included South Dakota’s 18 percent jump to 4.5 Mbps.

The FiOS Effect.

It is interesting to see how much of a positive impact Verizon’s FiOS has had on the broadband situation. A break down of top ten states shows that whenever available, more and more people are opting for higher broadband speeds. The presence of fiber-based FiOS has pushed rival cable companies to upgrade their networks and offer higher tier services. You can see that reflected in the speed breakdown as shown by this chart.

Internet as we know it is not only getting bigger and faster, but it is also becoming more mobile with more and more people accessing Internet-based services from their smartphones. These are some of the key findings of Akamai’s The State of the Internet report for the fourth quarter of 2009. The report uses data collected from Akamai’s global content delivery network to draw conclusions that are good representation of the Internet.

A Bigger Internet

Upon looking through the report, I saw that during the last three months of 2009, nearly 4.7 percent more unique IP addresses were connecting to Akamai’s network. At the end of 2009, there were about 465 million IP addresses from 234 countries vs 401 million at the end 2008 and 312 million at the end of 2007. US and China account for nearly 40 percent of the total 465 million unique IP addresses. What that tells us — more people around the world are using the Internet.

Planet Mobile

The rapid growth in the unique IP addresses is going to decline mostly because of the law of large numbers. In addition, many service providers including mobile carriers are using network address translation (NAT) and proxy/gateway technology to cope with the exhaustion of the IPv4 addresses. I bet as we start to see more and more “connected” devices, there will be a burst in the number of unique IP address. Ericsson recently forecasted 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

Akamai studied 109 mobile providers and found that over 40 had average measured connection speeds of over 1 Mbps in the fourth quarter, while 11 had broadband-level connectivity — which Akamai defines at speeds of 2 Mbps or greater. Austria currently is home to the fastest mobile broadband provider — 3.2 Mbps while Russian Federation is fractionally lower followed by Italy and Poland.

Interestingly in the US, it seems Clearwire (Sprint) is doing a great job of holding the mantle of a wireless broadband leader. According to Akamai, “data for a leading WIMAX network provider in the United States – at an average measured connection speed of approximately 1.8 Mbps, they place within the top 20 mobile providers globally. This provider showed a quarterly speed gain of 11.5%, and a yearly gain of 5%.”

Faster Faster Broadband

Ironically the growing popularity of mobile phones is bringing down the global average connection speeds, despite substantial network and speed upgrades in many countries. A good case in point is South Korea where a launch of the Apple’s iPhone in November 2009 was so successful that it brought down the average connectivity speed by 24 percent. Now remember this is South Korea — home to some of the fastest broadband connections anywhere in the planet.

“As the average observed connection speed for this mobile provider was a fraction of that observed from wireline connections in South Korea, we believe that this launch was likely responsible for the significant drop in South Korea’s average observed connection speed in the fourth quarter,” Akamai report notes.

That said, the Internet got a lot faster. Even though the total broadband connections to Akamai’s network grew only 1.6 percent, now nearly one-fifth of the connections to Akamai’s network had speeds of 5 Mbps or more, up 6 percent from the Q3 3009. In the US, nearly 25 percent of connections now are 5 Mbps. For further break down check out the chart which breaks down the top markets and speed shares.

I think it is most interesting to see the share in the ultra-broadband: 25 Mbps or more. The rollout of FTTx/DOCSIS 3.0 technology-based networks is only going to increase and that will have a long term implication on all types of web services and service providers. Tiny countries like Switzerland, Monaco, Slovakia and Croatia are seeing massive broadband adoption.

Palm might be on a slippery slope to nowhere with its future might look bleak, but one New York based investor, Harbinger Capital Partners, is betting on a good outcome. They have invested an undisclosed amount of money buying up 16 million shares or roughly 9.48 percent of the company.

Harbinger which is headed by investor Phil Falcone, also owns stakes in The New York Times and some satellite companies which plan to develop a wholesale broadband network in the United States. Given that these guys bet on crazy assets for a living, I am sure they have a good reason for making this trade. I’m in minority for feeling that whoever buys Palm is going to end-up like Palm sooner or later.