The Palm Pre has gotten a little brother, the Pixi. And as is often the case with younger siblings, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Pixi, available Nov. 15 from Sprint, feels at least a little bit inferior.
In design, the Pixi looks like a slicker and more modern version of the Palm Centro, the last phone to run the old Palm OS software. It’s very nearly the same length and width as the Centro, but significantly thinner and lighter. It’s a quarter-inch (6 mm) thinner and 1.5 oz. (43 g) lighter than the Pre. It runs the same Palm webOS and the same applications as the Pre.
The big question is, unless getting a very small phone is your highest priority, why you would want a Pixi rather than a Pre. The Pixi costs $100 after a $50 instant rebate and a.$100 mail-in rebate. The Pre costs $149. Amortized over the required two-year contract, with the cheapest offering being Sprint’s $70 a month unlimited data, 450 voice minute Everything Data plan, the Pixi works a out to $74.15 a month and the Pre to $76.25. Not much to choose from there in budgetary terms.
How do you find what to watch online? Sites for finding and watching video abound, from search engines such as Blinkx and Truveo to hosted video sites such as YouTube and Hulu.com. And of course there are conventional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, the last of which just introduced a new video site.
But there's nothing quite like a TV Guide for mainstream Web video--television shows and movies. That's what Clicker hopes to create, and more.
The nearly one-year-old Los Angeles-based company launches its Web video programming guide today to the general public after two months in test mode. Clicker has organized more than 400,000 legally available full TV episodes from 1,200 sources around the Web. And it now will index 30,000 movies from Netflix's Instant Streaming and Amazon.com's video on demand, which both charge fees.
What Clicker has done more than other sites is organize the Web's farflung offerings, using a structured database of listings rather like Wikipedia, Yelp, and the Amazon movie site IMDB.com do, into a format that makes it easier to find what kinds of video you're looking for. As with Tivo, you can also set up season passes to shows. "It's no longer about when something is on, it's what's on, wherever it is," says Lanzone.
The company also hopes to spark a social element where people can share their favorites with friends on Facebook and Twitter. "That could be the thing that really makes it different," says Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.
Not least, Clicker, which has 30 employees, has some formidable backing. CEO Jim Lanzone ran the ASK search engine for six years until January 2008. Sling Media founder Blake Krikorian recently joined the board. Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures are investors in the $8 million round last year.
Lanzone says the goal is to build a big audience before bringing in advertising.
More details from the company after the jump, starting with the basic features:
PC peripherals maker Logitech International has done its largest ever acquisition, by purchasing videoconferencing system maker LifeSize Communications for $405 million. This definitely represents an interesting new twist in the videoconferencing space. Given Cisco Systems' $3 billion acquisition of market leader Tandberg a few weeks back (now contested by investors who want a higher price), I would have thought that Polycom or Hewlett-Packard would have gone after LifeSize to fill out their product lines. The Austin-based company, which I've written about a few times, has been one of the faster growers thanks to its less expensive, easy to use gear.
What's most interesting is the potential for Logitech to accelerate the commoditization of videoconferencing. The company specializes in high-volume manufacturing of PC mice, keyboards and other gizmos; it's video business is essentially webcams, which bring in roughly $250 million of the company's $1.9 billion in annual sales, says Logitech president Gerald Quindlen. LifeSize, on the other hand, makes stand-alone gear that lets users launch a HD-quality videoconference with a few keystrokes. Quindlen says Logitech will be able to apply its economies of scale and other cost savings to "make video mainstream." Says LifeSize CEO Craig Malloy, "the opportunity is drive price points to the point that it's a no brainer for every office and conference room in the world."
Evidently, LifeSize wasn't going to pull that off on its own. While rapidly growing, the company is very vertically-integrated for a company its size--with in-house chip designers and other high-priced technology experts. And one source with knowledge of its performance says sales actually dipped slightly in its most recent quarter.
But together, LifeSize should get the resources to make a go of its strategy to bring videoconferencing down maket. Malloy admits he was puzzled when Logitech first came a courtin', as he had talked mostly with Cisco, Polycom and other traditional market players. But Quindlen shared his view that videoconferencing was nearing an inflection point when sales would take off--the way the netbook market did, when the chips, displays and software got cheap enough.
With LifeSize off the market, the pressure on Cisco to complete its Tandberg bid rises a notch. That's because there simply aren't many players of consequential size in the videoconferencing market.
Mark Pincus has become the poster boy for the booming business of social online games. His company, Zynga, brings in more than $100 million in annual revenues, and owns the most popular Facebook app of the year, FarmVille. Zynga is even considered by analysts and observers to be a candidate to go public next year.
So what does Pincus make of video game stalwart Electronic Arts recently scooping up Playfish, one of Zynga's top rivals, in a deal that's worth up to $400 million? He says EA paid a justifiably high price to enter the social gaming space. "The founders got a really good cashout, and EA got to catch up to a business that they had kind of missed the start of," Pincus says.
Zynga may benefit indirectly from the marriage, since EA marketing savvy could bring more attention to the social gaming space, he says.
Pincus isn't worried about Playfish's newfound access to more capital making it a stronger competitor. But he admits that EA's popular game brands including The Sims and Madden have a lot of potential in the social gaming space. "There’s a good chance for them to try to leverage EA’s major brands and take Sims and other [games] into the market," he says. This could be a "risk" for Zynga and others that don't have a stable of recognizable game franchises to draw on, Pincus says.
These days, it seems that everyone wants to be pals with Twitter, the microblogging phenom. On the morning of Oct. 21, Microsoft announced a deal for its Bing search engine to search for Twitter updates known as tweets. Just hours later, Google announced a similar deal.
Not to be left out, the professional online networking service LinkedIn on Nov. 10 is announcing its own integration with Twitter. Users of both services will be able to sync some or all of their tweets on Twitter and "network updates" on LinkedIn.
Specifically, users in LinkedIn will be able to check a "tweet this" box near their network update post to Twitter. And while on Twitter, they can add the hashtags "#in" or "#li" to their posts to appear on LinkedIn. Finally, a new app called Tweets will let users put their Twitter streams on their LinkedIn profiles.
Here's a video with LinkedIn Executive Chairman Reid Hoffman and Twitter cofounder Biz Stone:
And here are the details in a blog post from Allen Blue, a LinkedIn cofounder and vice-president of product strategy:
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BusinessWeek writers Peter Burrows, Cliff Edwards, Steve Hamm, Rob Hof, Olga Kharif, Steve Wildstrom, Aaron Ricadela, Douglas MacMillan, and Spencer Ante dig behind the headlines to analyze what’s really happening throughout the world of technology. One of the first mainstream media tech blogs, Tech Beat covers everything from tech bellwethers like Apple, Google, and Intel and emerging new leaders such as Facebook to new technologies, trends, and controversies.
The Palm Pre has gotten a little brother, the Pixi. And as is often the case with younger siblings, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Pixi, available Nov. 15 from Sprint, feels at least a little bit inferior.
