By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Trane’s Blues, a nice John
Coltrane collection:
Just like I said at the beginning of the season: Pittsburgh
and Seattle
in the Super Bowl. Why’d you ever doubt me?
Now here’s how to double your money: Take Pittsburgh and the
3 ½ Vegas line. The Steelers are going
to destroy those people.
…
Now’s not a great
time to be Vodafone. The British mobile colossus is tottering, buffeted
by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, their CEO Arun Sarin’s getting
henpecked by shareholders and the news won’t be good Tuesday, when they
announce their subscriber numbers.
Oh there’ll be plenty new customers – about seven million,
give or take. But some heavyweight investors, the ones whose opinions matter,
want to see Vodafone “sell its struggling business in Japan and its minority
stake in Verizon Wireless of the US,” Britain’s Sunday
Telegraph reports.
Some industry observers put the Verizon stake as the biggest
problem. Susie
Mesure says “some in the City [London’s financial district] are losing
patience and want to see Sarin offload Vodafone’s 45 per cent stake in America’s
Verizon Wireless, thought to be worth $44 billion, and return cash to
shareholders.” Vodafone’s “struggling Japanese business” isn’t viewed with much
enthusiasm by analysts either.
Add the fact that revenues in Germany and Italy are falling,
that organic revenue growth is dropping from 6.9 per cent in the second quarter
to 6.2 per cent, and that its week-long drop in share price has resulted in a 20
percent loss over the past quarter, slicing over $10 billion from its market
cap – 6.5 per cent of the total – and seven million new customers doesn’t seem
all that wonderful.
And as the Telegraph
says, the stock’s tanking, one of the worst performers on the FTSE “despite a
15 per cent rise in the dividend payment, announced in November, and an
increase in the company’s share buyback program.”
Vodafone’s forging ahead with a service streaming songs
directly onto customers’ mobile phones, albeit with the somewhat unfortunate
name “Radio DJ.”
Slated
for release later this year, it’s a cool idea to offer such themed collections such as “British rock” or “Hip-hop”, songs “chosen
by DJs or celebrities,” New Zealand industry observer Reuben Schwarz
writes, “and a personal channel customized to each listener… [tailored] to
their tastes by rating the songs that are streamed to their phone. The service
then uses software to find songs with a similar beat and harmony. On any
channel, if listeners don’t like a song they can skip to the next track.”
Customers pay a monthly
subscription free providing unlimited access to the service, and can buy songs
for permanent download while they are being streamed.
But even when they’ve got hold of
a good idea, it seems Vodafone puts their foot in it. Schwarz cites Ovum
analyst John Delaney saying sure, they’ll be lining up for the service, but
naming it “Radio DJ?” One of the biggest selling points of the service is “that
the music is not punctuated by annoying prattle from a DJ,” Delaney says.
Sure there’s bitter competition, and T-Mobile’s certainly doing
its part to kick Vodafone when it’s down, claiming over 750,000 customers in
Britain lo these past three months, which might make Sir John Bond, the
incoming chairman of Vodafone, wonder just what he’s getting into.
It’s not all gloom, however, there’s a bit of grim schadenfreude for Vodafone to raise a
glass to, as today’s the last day of independent operation for O2,
Vodafone’s biggest UK rival, which will be digested by Spain’s Telefónica at
the end of the month.
But the dark cloud behind that silver lining is that the
churn rates and subscriber acquisition costs which doomed O2 to sailing under
the Spanish flag are haunting the entire industry. One stock analyst described
the situation as “blockbuster customer growth, but [revenue] pain may
overshadow.” In other words sunny weather, with rain.
Industry observer Philip
Aldrick writes that Vodafone is also “struggling to prove that
third-generation technology will generate the promised long-term growth in
Western markets. Data services, excluding text messages, account for only 5 percent
of revenues in key British, German and Italian regions. In Japan, the figure is
23 percent.”
As a result, he says, Vodafone’s keying up expansion into
developing economies, “where customer growth remains strong.” And the jury’s
still out on Vodafone’s announced plans to use its mobile network to offer
fixed-line services in New Zealand, taking on Telecom New Zealand’s
stronghold.
It is believed – i.e. the Telegraph reporter thinks – that “Vodafone has decided against
bidding for Millicom, the $3.6 billion Nasdaq-listed mobile network operator,
which last week announced that it had received a number of expressions of
interest.”
…
And hey, what with running around trying to fill my reading
list with recommendations from whichever terrorist is currently spewing garbage
in the late Osama bin Laden’s name – tossup whether William Blum’s Rogue State or the Oprah-backed A Million Little Lies by James Frey is
the more meretricious read – some things just got lost in the shuffle around
here, and First CoffeeSM neglected to mention that Qpass,
a digital commerce software vendor, announced late last week that “the Qpass
digital commerce software solution has
processed more than $1 billion worth of premium content transactions,
making Qpass the first company ever to achieve such a record.”
“This value represents more than 400 million paid downloads
processed and delivered via the Qpass platform,” company officials note.
Chase Franklin, CEO, Qpass nods to “the many content
providers and mobile operators around the world who have deployed these
services.” Champagne all around might be in order, Chase.
In 2005, the volume of transactional revenue that the Qpass
platform processed was nearly three times the volume of 2004, averaging more
than $2 million in revenue value per day. And although ring tones continue to
represent the largest single category of premium content revenue; mobile games,
video services and new types of downloadable applications – such as eBay,
Mapquest, MobiRadio, and instant messaging – were the fastest-growing
categories in 2005.
What Qpass actually does is enable the buying and selling of
digital goods and services over any network. Their platform manages hundreds of
thousands of content applications and services across mobile, VoIP, and WiFi
networks and the company manages the entire digital commerce transaction
process, from content sourcing, to merchandising and delivery, to billing and
customer care.
…
Those allergic to unbearable tech geekiness, avert your eyes.
As a public service to the pocket-protector crowd First CoffeeSM
reports that O2Micro International Limited, a supplier of power
management and security components and systems for the computer, consumer,
industrial, and communications markets, has announced its SifoWorks M520 Version 2.01.06, internet security gateway appliance
product, has passed the 1.0D criteria
for ICSA Labs IPSec Product Certification and may use the ICSA Lab
Certification logo on its SifoWorks model M520, Version 2.01.06.
The SifoWorks M520 IPSec VPN-Firewall product is based on a
proprietary ASIC and achieves a wide range of high performance security
functions at wire speed. The SifoWorks M520 contains security applications that
operate with what company officials claim as “minimal latency,” including deep
content detection and filtering, URL blocking and VoIP H.323 blocking.
The SifoWorks M520 is marketed primarily to medium and large-scale enterprises,
universities, systems integrators and OEMs.
Whew. Reminds me of Steve Martin’s plumber joke.
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for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.