Author: Tricia Duryee

It’s been more than six months since Google (NSDQ: GOOG) agreed to pay $750 million for AdMob and the company is still waiting for government approval.

Many sources have said the FTC is considering blocking the deal between Google, the dominant online advertising company, and AdMob the largest mobile ad network. In an interview with Reuters today, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said they are prepared to fight “very hard” if regulators stop the deal. Additionally, he believes it should be approved in order for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) to have more competitors.

A decision has been expected at any moment for the past couple of weeks, but Schmidt opened up the possibility to it taking longer by saying he anticipated a decision over the next few weeks.

To be sure, Google has faced significant delays. After Google announced its acquisition, Apple announced it was buying Quattro Wireless, and has since been able to integrate the company and relaunch its services as a mobile ad network called iAd.

Schmidt said the waiting period has translated to a “significant disadvantage” for AdMob in competing against Apple and other rivals. “It would be better if the AdMob acquisition can be approved to see if Google can get a more competitive market on the iPhone platform.”

If the FTC denies the acquisition, the two companies could be in limbo for many more months as its tied up in litigation. Schmidt said: “We’re likely to fight very hard…It’s a very strategic acquisition for Google.” Google’s incentive may also come in the form of cash. One report pegged Google’s kill fee at $700 million if the deal were to fall apart for any reason.

Related

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• What If This Isn’t The Year For Mobile Advertising?
• Requests May Signal That FTC Will Block Google’s AdMob Purchase

Facebook has unveiled a new mobile web site that will allow people in more than 45 countries, who aren’t accustomed to paying for data plans on the phone, to access its site quickly and for free.

According to a company blog post, the deal has been inked with more than 50 mobile operators around the world, ranging from carriers in Barbados to Indonesia to Madagascar. Facebook says more countries are on the way.

The web site, which is accessible at 0.facebook.com, has all the same key features as Facebook’s regular mobile web site, like posting status updates and viewing the news feed. There’s just one catch: the photos are not viewable from the main page, and to view them, regular data fees will apply.

The deal is still pretty good since usually carriers start charging from the moment a web browser is opened on the phone. With 0.facebook.com, users will only get charged to view photos or to browse to another mobile site. A notification page will appear to confirm that they will be charged if they want to leave 0.facebook.com. Because of this special arrangement, the light-weight version of the Facebook is only available on the certain networks. Other users will still have to access Facebook’s typical mobile site at m.Facebook.com and pay data fees.

While the obvious target market for a service like this is emerging countries where data plans have not become common, like Rwanda, Sudan and Bolivia, there’s also developed nations on the list, such as Finland. Australia, France and New Zealand are coming soon.

T-Mobile USA has unveiled two new prepaid plans that emphasize texting over talking. The announcement is in line with what other prepaid providers are offering—big bundles of services from voice to email and internet access for one low price without the commitment of a contract.

While they represent fairly good bargains, it’s unclear how much this growing segment of the U.S. market is interested in adding all of the bells and whistles to a prepaid plan. Instead of offering on an unlimited basis, T-Mobile’s new plans are a little less comprehensive. For $15 a month, users can have unlimited texting and calls for 10 cents a minute. For $50 a month, you get unlimited texting and talking. For occasional data use, T-Mobile offers a “Hour Pass,” which provides unlimited Web access for 99 cents an hour.

Sprint (NYSE: S) is being the most aggressive in the prepaid market, by launching several brands including Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM), Boost Mobile and even an exclusive brand available at Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) called Common Cents Mobile. The Virgin Mobile “Beyond Talk” offer also stresses texting over talking. At the low end, it costs $25 for unlimited messaging, email, data and Web with 300 voice minutes a month. For $40, you get 1,200 minutes, and for $60, you get unlimited calling. The Wal-Mart brand offers no unlimited buckets, but rather charges seven cents per voice minute, and seven cents for each text message under no contract.

Is anyone making money from all these apps? That’s the big question that Alex Ahlund, the former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, which was recently acquired by mobile app directory Appolicious, tried to answer in a guest column for TechCrunch.

Ahlund asked for sales data from developers to provide some overall metrics. He said of the 96 respondents, the range included everything from blockbusters to stragglers. He said the takeaways should be considered informational, and not true averages because of the variance involved:

—The average total number of units sold was 101,024 within a period of 261 days.
—The average number of units sold per day was 387.
—The average price was $5.49, although the data skews due to the $49.99 outlier. In most cases, the price point was $0.99.
—The average total development cost amounted to $6,453, including 3.89 updates.
—On average, iPhone developers are seeing a return of more than 15 times their initial, albeit small, development costs.

For comparison purposes, he also ran the numbers after removing the top 10 percent most successful applications—which brings everything back down to earth. In that scenario, 23 percent of the apps sold less than 1,000 units since their launch (ranging from 12 to 370 days), and only 10 percent achieved sales of 127,000 to 3 million units.

The global smartphone market saw its best quarter for the first time in almost three years, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

It found that global smartphone shipments jumped by a gigantic 50 percent to 54 million in Q1 from 36 million in the year-ago period. Smartphones accounted for 18 percent of all smartphones shipped. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) shipped a record 21.5 million smartphones to have a leading market share of 40 percent. RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) shipped the second-most handsets to beat Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). The BlackBerry-maker’s market share stands at 20 percent, while Apple’s is at 16.4 percent.

Separately, IDC also released its first-quarter report today, which looks at the overall market for mobile phones—not just the upper echelon. It said that the broader market grew by 21.7 percent to 294.9 million compared to 242.4 million units in the first quarter of 2009. That’s a drastic change in a year ago period when the market declined 16.6 percent.

This quarter’s growth was fueled by smartphones, and for the first time ever, RIM moved into the top five vendor rankings to replace Motorola (NYSE: MOT).

IDC’s Top Five Mobile Phone Vendors:

1. Nokia
2. Samsung
3. LG
4. Research In Motion
5. Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs surprised Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) today by publishing a 1,671-word essay on his thoughts on why Apple does not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. This afternoon, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, made an appearance at the WSJ’s office to participate in a live blog, and to defend the company, against what he called was an “extraordinary attack.”

Without a referee, there could be no winner. Jobs accused Adobe and Flash of being a closed and proprietary system, and Narayan chuckled in response, calling Flash “an open specification.” Jobs said Flash drains batteries, and Narayan said that’s “patently false.”

While Jobs railed on about the downsides of Flash, Narayan stuck to the benefits: that Apple should let customers decide and that Adobe’s ultimate goal is to create a platform that lets content be written once for multiple platforms, and that a more cohesive world will “eventually prevail.”

Be your own judge and read the full text of the interview with Adobe’s Narayan here, and Jobs’ full essay here.

Paris-based Gameloft (EPA: GFT), a world leader in making games for mobile phones, said revenues totaled $43.7 million (Euro 33 million) in the first quarter of 2010, jumping 7 percent compared to the same period a year ago, and up 3.8 percent compared to fourth quarter.

The company, which considers itself an iPhone powerhouse with 63 games in the App store, said 21 percent of the company’s sales in the first quarter came from the iPhone—compared to 14 percent in all of 2009.

However, it said it was optimistic about other platforms, including recent device releases from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Palm (NSDQ: PALM), Samsung, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and therefore continues to expect revenue growth in 2010. As usual, Gameloft did not provide any other financial results, or specific forecast in its release.

The one figure it does break out is revenues by region. Europe represented 37 percent; North America, 34 percent and the rest of the world 29 percent, which is fairly comparable to last year’s figures.

If anyone was hoping that Palm’s financial problems would lead to a less cluttered mobile operating system market—you are out of luck.

HP (NYSE: HPQ) was resoundingly clear this afternoon during a conference call discussing its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. It intends on investing heavily in the webOS platform, and more broadly into the mobile devices market, which it calculates is worth more than $100 billion.

HP did not say how much it will be investing beyond the acquisition, but plans to bring the webOS platform to multiple form factors including phones, slates, tablets and netbooks. The pitch from Todd Bradley, HP’s EVP of Personal Systems: “Together HP and Palm (NSDQ: PALM) can make a powerful combination. With a long history in Silicon Valley, our values and vision are consistent and complimentary. Together, we can move forward and coupled with our scale global reach and investments in ecosystem, we expect to see solid growth, compelling, connected mobile experiences.”

HP, which has barely been participating in the mobile-phone space for the past few years, could be a viable contender when taking on such large and dominant brands, such as Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and others. It said that one out of five PCs shipped around the world comes from HP, or in other words, two per second. It clearly will be bringing that scale to Palm, which had been too small to move quickly.

When asked why HP decided to buy its own operating system, rather than rely on Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android, Bradley said the market was just too big to pass up. “Our breadth of products between smartphone slates and netbooks is an enormous opportunity for our customers,” Bradley explained. “It’s an early stage market, the developer community will develop a suite of applications that will make it [Palm] more compelling than it is today. We are a strategic partner of Microsoft’s, and we’ll continue to be so. We believe there’s a unique opportunity with Palm to create an HP experience across these connected products.”

Otherwise, HP was very coy on the call in providing any hints as to how it will integrate Palm into its operations, or the timeline for any products. On the decision to keep Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein on board, HP said they have a retention plan in place for all key employees, and that Rubinstein in particular, is “very excited about staying and executing his vision for webOS, and HP brings him the capabilities to do that, and his team is excited too.”

Related

• HP Buys Palm For $1.2 Billion
• Palm: A History In Links
• Palm’s Back-Up Plan If Its List Of Buy-Out Candidates Shrinks To Zero

After all the speculation, HP has agreed to buy Palm (NSDQ: PALM) for $1.2 billion, or roughly $5.70 a share.

Palm, which was running short of cash and struggling to compete against the Apple’s and Google’s of the world, will now have HP’s deep pockets and worldwide scope. While HP is no stranger to the mobile phone world—with its line of iPAQ phones—it has a lot of catching up to do and could benefit from branching out to phones and tablets from its a laptop and PC driven line-up.

Generally, Palm’s technology is viewed as solid, it was just poor timing that hurt the smartphone-makers’ chances. Of all the rumored potential acquirers from Dell to HTC and Huawei, HP was never considered a likely candidate. Palm’s current chairman and CEO, Jon Rubinstein, who received a bit of flak for Palm’s recent poor performance, is expected to remain at the company. Release.

In a brief statement on Palm’s web site, they point out that HP is one of the largest technology companies in the word, adding: “Can you say “webOS acceleration”? We’re pretty excited, and pleased we surprised the world again.”

Over the past year, Palm’s stock had been trading as high as $18 a share to more recent lows around $3-$4 for a total market capitalization of around $781 million. After a brief pause in trading, Plam’s stock surged 27 percent to $5.90 a share. The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors, but is still pending customary closing conditions and the approval of Palm’s shareholders. Under the agreement, Palm shareholders will get cash for each share. The transaction is expected to close during HP’s third quarter ending July 31.

HP will be hosting a live audio webcast for analysts and shareholders to discuss HP’s agreement to acquire Palm. It can be found here.

Apple’s not hesitating to put a dent in its gigantic cash horde.

A day after the New York Times reported that the Cupertino, Calif. company bought Intrinsity, a small chip company known for making a faster processor that uses less energy, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has purchased Siri, an iPhone application that acts as a personal assistant on the phone. Of course, both deals follow Apple’s purchase of Quattro Wireless, a mobile ad network.

The Siri deal was first discovered by Robert Scoble, who spotted an obscure document on the FTC web site. Apple did not return requests for comment. UPDATE: Two of Siri’s board members, Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures, and Gary Morgenthaler confirmed the sale in an interview with mocoNews.

Siri’s current application is built for the iPhone 3GS and the iPod Touch in the U.S., and is pitched as a “virtual personal assistant,” which allows you to search for the closest Sushi restaurant, ask what’s playing at Carnegie Hall, or look for a nearby movie theater or gas station. So far, the company has integrated 40 service providers into the application.

The company is not a voice-recognition company. In fact, it licenses that technology from Nuance Communications. Rather, it bills itself as Artificial Intelligence. The company’s background is a bit unusual. It was started as a five-year project at SRI, a research institute that brought together 22 top-notch universities and DARPA to create artificial intelligence for the battlefield, so that commanders can assemble information in real-time to make decisions. The U.S. military still uses it today, but in 2008, SRI worked with VCs to spin-off a team that would have exclusive rights to commercialize the technology. Apple now owns those exclusive rights.

In its short history, Siri, which has 26 employees, raised $23.5 million in funding. When Apple called, it was not currently raising funds, or looking to be sold, Morgenthaler said. Rather it had just secured additional cash from the Li Ka-shing Foundation, known for having a $120 million stake in Facebook.

It’s unclear how Apple will integrate the technology into their offerings, and neither Morgenthaler or Carolan were allowed to comment on Apple’s future plans. However, they were able to say where Siri was headed next with the technology. For now, the mobile software along with server software takes natural language commands to anticipate the users’ intent. But with more intelligence, such as addresses, credit card numbers and logins, more actions can be executed on the behalf of the user—rather than limited to hailing a cab, or finding out the weather.

What the company isn’t, they say, is a search engine. Carolan: “Siri is not a search engine in any form, nor is it in direct competition with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) or anyone else. Siri is a vehicle to execute transactions.” The business model was to make money from referrals, not advertising. Morgenthaler: “What Siri gives you is the natural language and domain expertise. This is a fundamental new paradigm for mobile user interaction. Apple is the ideal company and vehicle to take the company to the marketplace, I couldn’t imagine a better acquirer.”

Generally speaking, there’s a ton of applications like do similar actions on the mobile phone today, ranging from the basic search engine from Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Bing or Google to more specific apps that specialize in restaurants, movie tickets, etc. Another similar applications is WHERE, which is available for most platforms lets people search for gas stations, restaurants or movie theaters from the home screen, but isn’t necessarily pitched as a personal assistant. Handmark’s MyAssist takes the idea a step further by providing an application that lets you contact live people for help for $9.99 a month.

While one company sues, another partners.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) said today that its long-standing handset partner, HTC, which makes both Windows and Android phones, has agreed to a broad patent agreement in conjunction with the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android platform. Details of the agreement were not disclosed, but HTC will have to pay Microsoft royalties.

Not all disagreements are so graceful. In March, Apple sued HTC for infringing on 20 Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) patents. That case is under review by the U.S. International Trade Commission. Microsoft played up the collaboration bit, by saying that it has entered into more than 600 licensing agreements over time. In a statement, Microsoft said: “As you may be aware, many technology companies active in the growing smartphone space have been taking increasing steps to protect their inventions…Microsoft views this agreement as an effective example of how industry leaders can reach commercially reasonable arrangements that address intellectual property concerns.”

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