[MobileRatty] tag: losses

AT&T pinpoints EDGE/3G data network outage problems

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:27:52 +0000

When the premier data network in the US takes a nose-dive, people pay attention. Especially those people that were left without data access for hours.

AT&T, reeling from the enormous bad-press generated by a multi-state data network outage on the East Coast, left us all hanging with their promise to find out exactly what caused 3G and EDGE data users to go through wireless data-withdrawal. Today, AT&T spokesperson Brad Mays told Ars Technica that the network has been repaired and that the root of the data network outage has been pinpointed. “There was a routing issue affecting some wireless data use in the Northeast region. AT&T technicians determined the cause and restored service at 11:56 a.m. EDT,” said Mays. “Voice calling, text messaging and BlackBerry email were unaffected.”

That’s it folks. No downed cell towers, no massive power losses. AT&Ts’ data network blackout was caused by a simple routing issue.

Now, if AT&T could move on to shoring up their 3G infrastructure to help support the flood of iPhone 3G demand…

[Via: ArsTechnica]

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Compeq handset PCB shipments expected to reach 180 million units in 2008

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:26:25 +0000

Compeq Manufacturing, a Taiwan-based maker of handset-use PCBs, is seeing strong orders from the mid-range and high-end segments driving its sales, with shipments for 2008 expected to grow 20% to 180 million units, according to market sources.

Handset PCB shipments in the second half of 2008 will total 96 million units, compared to 84 million units in the first half, the sources said.

With its orders growing stronger than those of fellow competitors, Compeq will see its utilization rate rise to 80% later in the second half of the year, the sources said.

Compeq's clients in the mid-range and high-end handset market include High Tech computer (HTC) and Apple, the sources disclosed.

The shipments to the mid-range to high-end segments are giving Compeq better margins, which are expected to help the company swing back to profitability in the second half, the sources said.

Compeq has reported net losses of NT$185 million (US$5.81 million) for the first half of the year due to heavy currency exchange losses in the first quarter, and reduced average selling prices (ASPs) amid low seasonality in the second quarter.

source

PHS operator Fitel in financial woes

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:26:23 +0000

First International Telecom (Fitel), a PHS mobile telecom service operator and a WiMAX licensee, failed recently to honor checks worth NT$86 million (US$2.7 million). Its financial woes are likely to continue to swell if the company fails to raise fresh capital through a planned private placement, according to the company and market sources.

Although the company has made part payments for checks bounced recently, Fitel is obligated to pay over NT$100 million in debts before the end of this month, according to company chairman Charlie Wu.

Fitel now owes NT$3.5 billion in bank loans, with interest payments reaching NT$15 million per month, the company said. In addition, Fitel also owes a payment of NT$40 million, including operating license fees and spectrum utilization fees, to the National Communications Commission (NCC).

Fitel currently generates revenues of about NT$350 million a month, but net cash flow totals around NT$20 million which is barely enough to pay its interest payments and operating expenses, said Fitel.

To tide over its financial difficulties, Fitel hopes it can fulfill its plans to raise NT$1 billion of new capital via an issuance of 200 million preferred shares before the end of this month, Wu noted.

FIC Global, one of the major shareholders of Fitel, is reportedly likely to take up a 17% share of the planned private placement. However, the Sinn Kong Group, another major shareholder, has not yet decided to join the capital increment project.

In other news, the Chinese-language Commercial Times cited data from Fitel as indicating that Fitel has accumulated total losses of NT$3.08 billion as of June this year.

Compal Communications profits down and Arima Communications losses improve in 1H08

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:12:00 +0000

Two leading Taiwan ODM handset makers – Compal Communications and Arima Communications – have reported mixed financial performance for the first half of 2008, with Compal seeing its net profits decline sharply while Arima managed to cut its losses significantly during the six-month period.

Compal saw its net profits plummet 67.2% on year to NT$702 million (US$22.2 million) in the first half as revenues declined 33.5% on year to NT$17.63 billion during the period, the company said.

Although Compal will continue to make new W-series low-cost handsets for Motorola, as well as beginning to ship 3G smartphones to the vendor, a major pick-up in handset shipments from Compal is not expected until 2009, according to sources from Taiwan's handset industry.

Compal is likely to ship a total of 40 million handsets in 2008, short of its revised shipment target of 48 million units, the sources estimated. The company reduced its annual target for this year from 60 million to 48 million in June.

Arima remained operating in the red during the first half but managed to cut its net losses to NT$186 million, compared to a loss of NT$433 million recorded in the same period of 2007, according to company data.

Arima's handset shipments are expected to hit a record high of five million units in the third quarter of this year, which may help the company's operations return to profits for the first time after recording losses for eight consecutive quarters, according to market sources.

Arima is also expected to sustain its goal to ship 15 million handsets in 2008, the sources indicated.

Falter 2D Pen looks spiffy, you just have to build it first

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:21:24 +0000

When you buy a Falter 2D Pen, don't expect to start writing with it immediately. That flat sheet of iron you see pictured above is what you'll start with. The pen under it is the goal. You'll have to fold and bend your way to something that hopefully still writes, and luckily Falter is happy to help you out. They'll include a key for bending and instructions so you don't end up with some lump resembling what some might call "unusable," or "modern art."

Maybe a disfigured sculpture would help you recoup your losses: This pen's about a billion times more expensive than a Bic at $39. Then again, it's also handmade in Italy.

Uncommon Goods, via Random Good Stuff, via SlipperyBrick

Secret Origin of the OLPC: Genius, Hubris and the Birth of the Netbook [Olpc]

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:00:00 +0000

From the moment Nicholas Negroponte showed off his $100 laptop concept at the Davos world economic summit in January 2005, it was as if the tech world's supermoguls were glowering down on him in judgment. Over the course of the year, Craig Barrett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weighed in, privately declining support and in some cases publicly disparaging the idea.

The naysayers had a point. The mockup Negroponte was toting around that winter was one ugly baby. It aimed to reach the $100 price tag by having a slower processor, a skinnier internal drive, a smaller body and let's not forget that tent-like rear-projection screen that made it look like the conceptual heir to the pop-top VW Vanagon camper. But after three and a half years, Negroponte's crazy idea hasn't only produced the XO, a real laptop co-developed and manufactured by the world's largest notebook maker, it's also become a product most of Negroponte's opponents are now copying.

After interviewing Negroponte himself, along with his original CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, designer Yves Behar, advanced technologies VP Michail Bletsas and others, we can explain how this proposed global humanitarian effort may in fact be more successful as a revolution in hardware design, and how OLPC will continue to influence the hardware you buy, even if you never score an actual XO.

Negroponte—generally Nicholas, occasionally Nick—is a man who is used to coming up with ideas that people laugh at, only to prove them wrong later. He established the not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child organization after years of exploring the more general subject of providing computers for the youth in the world's poorest countries, and he is at the center of any attention that OLPC receives. He has billionaires and heads-of-state on speed dial, and likes to make unusual requests of them. (He may have lacked support from tech's most powerful, but Negroponte's venture had backing from Rupert Murdoch, AMD's Hector Ruiz and others from its inception.)

Sometime in the early spring of 2004, the Negropontes invited Nicholas' MIT colleague Michail Bletsas and his wife over for a dinner of wild turkey—the infrequently eaten northeastern bird, that is, and not the whisky. Shortly after burning Bletsas with the molten sugary part of a freshly baked apple pie during the dessert course, Negroponte announced a secret that had been burning inside him for months: He had dreamed up an ultra-cheap laptop for kids, and he planned to spend the rest of his life working on it.

To say Negroponte is arrogant is to say the Pope has a pointy hat: He founded MIT's Media Lab, for God's sake. He is one of the only people on earth who could have made the XO. But the larger mission of the XO, to become a stimulant of learning and creativity for the world's poorest children before they necessarily have access to electricity and internet connectivity—let alone clean drinking water—that idea has yet to prove itself, and possibly never will.

White Box Syndrome
Negroponte was convinced that you couldn't just go out and buy the kind of laptop he had in mind. Prices are always trending downward, but manufacturers are always countering that by upping specs and adding features. Profit margins remain super-tight, achieved only by reducing costs at the rate of 20% each year.

"There are two ways to make an inexpensive laptop. One way is to take cheap components, cheap labor, cheap design and make a cheap laptop," says Negroponte. "We decided to do the opposite: Cool design and very advanced manufacturing techniques where you pour raw materials in one end, and out come iPods out the other end. That approach is normally not the one taken in the developing world." Typically in poor rural areas, he says, "you see very inexpensive 'white boxes' that are near garbage, both in terms of design and manufacturing."

Negroponte says sending our used PCs to poor countries is the computing equivalent of sending old polluting, gas-hungry cars. Needless to say, computer companies and automakers alike don't generally spend money to design an intentionally cheap product geared for third-world deployment that makes use of the latest engineering breakthroughs and consists of green, easily recycled materials.

The Display's the Thing
The display is the costliest element in a laptop, especially one targeted at $100, so Negroponte knew it needed to be the priority. One of his earliest confidantes (and OLPC board members) was Joseph Jacobson, the man behind E-Ink, so it's no surprise that the highly efficient display tech was an early contender. It failed on three orders, however: Its price never came down—one early target was apparently $12 per screen, eventually revised up to $35—its refresh rate was, and is, too slow for a graphic user interface and color, a user requirement for this dare-to-be-creative contraption, just didn't look right.Another alternative display option quickly failed as well. In 2004, microdisplay chips like TI's DLP were heralded as the Next Big Thing in rear-projection TV technology, a low-cost, lightweight competitor to plasma and LCD. Intel had just invested a lot of money in a DLP competitor called liquid crystal on silicon, and Negroponte wanted to use that for a cheap pop-up rear-projection screen (shown above). Almost as soon as it was announced, however, the LCOS initiative crashed and burned in a spectacular failure, though not before the LCOS-based $100-laptop prototype was mocked up. (CE companies have discontinued most microdisplay TV lines, though they still use LCOS in many high-performance home-theater projectors.)

Team Up
The best thing to come out of the failed Intel mindmeld was Mary Lou Jepsen. She had spent a lot of time working on screens, but had never before designed a laptop. In 2005, Negroponte named her CTO and charged her with developing the screen—a new kind of LCD—around which the processor, keyboard, memory and network would wrap.

At that same time, Negroponte hunted for other ninjas of computer engineering to complete his dream team.

Walter Bender, one of Negroponte's closest MIT collaborators, signed on as president of OLPC, concentrating on the software side and its innovative Sugar user interface. (Owing mainly to its own all-too-dramatic arc, we do not delve into the software history at length in this story.) Mark Foster, a former VP of Apple's notebook division, co-captained the hardware initiative; Bletsas managed the innovative wireless network; and others—Mitch Bradley, John Watlington, Richard Smith and Ivan Krstic to name just a few more—all joined in to work countless hours on this radical, ambitious project.

As the technical plan was being hashed out, Negroponte hired industrial designers—first, a firm called Design Continuum, and then, a bit later, Yves Behar—in order to shape both the brand and the aesthetic of the XO itself.

The US team was set; now all Negroponte had to do was find a company willing to manufacture the sucker. It seems it's one thing to persuade a bunch of wild-eyed technologists that it's time for them to try to change the world, but another thing altogether to get corporations, especially ones with stockholders, to drop everything for a charity.

Though the number of advanced degrees gathered together could fill a phonebook, the amount of ego pressure building up in OLPC HQ proved, eventually, enough to blow the roof off.

One Factory, Many Brands
"Early on," Jepsen recalls, "I tried to get one of the largest laptop brands to sponsor the program. They said no. They looked at my design and said, 'This design would require at least 15 miracles and we have this rule around here, one miracle per product. We're going to pass, but keep in touch!' It was a very nice sort of rejection." She adds, "They were dead right, one miracle per product was a pretty good rule for a product. But this wasn't a product, it was a global humanitarian effort."

Today, a handful of companies in China and Taiwan make pretty much everything. One of the names that frequently pops is Quanta, attributed (often unofficially) with building flagship products for Apple, Dell and others. It makes around 40 million laptops per year, at profits of around $20 per machine.

On one hand, this promotes a sort of malaise. Cookie-cutter manufacturing makes sense to Quanta, since less retooling and larger manufacturing lines spell more profit. But these contract manufacturers increasingly design the products they make for others, at least as far as the engineering goes. As one of the world's hottest melting pots for new ideas, Quanta's design center was the perfect place to take a radical new idea for a laptop. Negroponte knew they might be a little booked, but he had a plan.

Made in Taiwan
Barry Lam is as successful a soothsayer as you can be in modern times. In the late 1980s, he parlayed a small fortune he made from the personal-calculator boom for a venture in the burgeoning industry of laptop computers. Today, he is easily among the 500 richest people in the world, and Quanta, his baby, is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world.

When Quanta announced in fall 2005 that it had won the contract to build Negroponte's $100 laptop, the phrasing seemed a little strange. Quanta had, according to some reports, turned down the project twice before agreeing. Yet the Taipei Times reported that it was OLPC who said "yes" to Quanta: "The decision was made yesterday after the OLPC's board of directors reviewed bids from several possible manufacturing companies," naming contract manufacturers Compal, Inventec and Wistron. How could a total charity case have been at the center of a corporate bidding war?

The company went on to reassure stockholders that this wasn't a money-losing endeavor. The company said it would benefit by "reinventing cost-saving production" through R&D collaboration with AMD and other companies—a clear indicator of losses in the immediate future.

Back at OLPC headquarters, the story makes a little more sense. Though Lam has yet to turn 60—a mere child by Asian business-mogul standards—he was apparently seeking something more spiritually rewarding than just being best laptop maker ten years running, and something about the proposal finally sunk in. "Lam was concerned with his legacy," says Bletsas. "He liked the product, and he didn't care about the financial aspects as much as he cared about the humanitarian cause."

Negroponte visited him in Taipei; they probably met up in the art gallery Lam set up on the top floor of his corporate headquarters, surrounded by magnificent works of Asian art. After a polite discussion, the billionaire-to-visionary tete-a-tete apparently concluded as follows: "He said, 'I don't care if I'm gonna get my money's worth out of it.' It took a strong founder"—that is, someone who could make an unpopular decision and not catch flak for it—"but he bought on the idea, and said, 'Let's work out the details.'"

It turned out to be a shrewd business decision by Lam. The question—one that may never get a straight answer—is whether or not he knew it at the time.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the OLPC Untold Story...

Concentrating photovoltaics

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:05:00 +0000

The PS10 project, is an 11 MW Solar Thermal Power Plant 15 km west of the city of Seville in Southern Spain.

The plant is the first Solar Central Receiver System of its kind and generates 11 Megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power up to 6,000 homes although it is expected that when the entire project is completed it should generate enough electricity to cover the needs of the 600,000 population of Seville.

It works by concentrating the reflected rays from each of the 624 mirrors with a mobile curved reflective surface measuring 120 square meters to the top of a 115 meter where a solar receiver turns water into steam. The turbine drives a generator, producing electricity.

Compared to conventional flat panel solar cells, concentrating photovoltaics is more cost efficient because the solar collector is less expensive than an equivalent area of solar cells.
Concentrating photovoltaics operates most effectively in sunny weather, since clouds and overcast conditions create diffuse light which essentially can not be concentrated.

The PS10 solar power plant is promoted by Solúcar Energía, an Abengoa Group company.
This project has counted with the co-funding from the 5th European Union Framework Program. Activities of Solgate Technology are still continuing today, with the presence of Solúcar R&D in the Solhyco Project which intent to obtain the hybridization of the system developed on the Solgate stage with gasified biomass. The Solhyco Project counts with the collaboration of renowned research centers such as DLR and Ciemat, and which has been co-funded under the 6th European Union Framework Program.

Because concentrating photovoltaics perform better in environments with clear skies, Europe is also looking across the Mediterranean to the Sahara desert, where solar farms could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on an scheme to build a €4.500.000 European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources.
In addition, because the sunlight in this area is more intense, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in northern Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.
Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy, speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts to provide all of Europe's energy needs.

Jaeger-Walden explained how electricity produced in solar farms in Africa, each containing power plants generating around 50-200MW of power, could be fed thousands of miles across European countries by using high-voltage direct current transmission lines instead of the traditional alternating current lines. Energy losses on DC lines are far lower than AC ones where transmission of energy over long distances is uneconomic.

Guy At Casino Runs Out Of Money, Tries To Bet Weed, Cards Being Dealt Does Not Ensue

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:30:53 +0000

Some guy, who may or may not have just set a world record for gravity bong hits, ran out of money while gambling in a Fresno casino, and, instead of cutting his losses and leaving, tried to bet a bag of weed. But Captain Beasters quickly realized his mistake, and, removing the bag from the table, opted for a smaller bet -- you know, just a couple buds. Long story short, he got arrested -- despite showing the cops a pretty convincing Cannabis Club Card he scored off the internet. Now listen folks -- when you run out of money at the casino, it's time to leave. It is NOT time to throw weed or blow down on the table. You go back to your hotel, retrieve the $40 you stashed for return busfare, and treat yourself to the nicest hooker two Jacksons can buy. Seriously, you ever rolled a blunt on a prostitute's ass? You have? Jesus, I haven't lived. Blow too? Wow. Tell me -- did you lose any in her actual a-hole? Youtube Thanks to Kris, who once bet me I wouldn't follow through with the ugliest hooker I could find. Haha, pay up Kris! Seriously, I want to get this rash checked out.

US mobile phone sales increase 5.3% in Q2 2008, Motorola still top in US, BlackBerry strong as ever

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:12:25 +0000

Time and time again we’re seeing the mobile phone sector brushing off the harsh economic pressures that are affecting just about every other business in the world. And, following on previous reports that worldwide smartphone sales were seeing a bit of an uptick in sales volume, a new report from Strategy Analytics shows that cellphone sales in the US were up 5.3% in Q2 2008, compared to the same period last year.

With 41.9 million handsets sold in the US in the most recent quarter, Strategy Analytics points to the preponderance of all-you-can-eat unlimited calling plans and a healthy supply of new handsets coming to market as key reasons for growing US cellphone sales.

The US is one of the worst-hit economies, and boasts mobile phone saturation of about 80% - two factors that led analysts to expect a dip in handset sales. But, the market surprised with healthy growth figures.

And, with a recent financial report that included a small profit, Motorola saw it’s US marketshare manage to hold on to the top spot. With 26% of the US market sporting its wares, Motorola is surprisingly still the leading cellphone manufacturer in the US. Elsewhere in the world, Moto is the third-leading mobile phone vendor. Interestingly, Motorola’s overall profit was overshadowed by fiscal losses in its mobile phone business. Motorola posted $346 million in losses for its cellphone division during the second quarter.

The outlook for Motorola is by no means solidified by the company’s still-strong presence in the US, but these latest figures show “early signs of stabilization.”

Meanwhile, LG managed to hold on to the No. 2 spot in the US with 16.7 million mobile phones sold in Q2 2008. The South Korean handset manufacturer clinched an impressive 22% of the US wireless market.

Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the heralded BlackBerry lineup of mobile phones known for their push-email prowess, saw the most impressive market-share gains. RIM saw market-share growth that secured the Canadian company 11% of the US cellphone market in Q2 2008 - representing the first time that the BlackBerry maker has seen double-digit market share numbers in the US.

RIM’s growth underlines expectations that the company is ready to fight back against enterprise-class encroachment by the iPhone 3G.

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Sprint posts $344 million in losses while slowing customer defections

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:40:03 +0000

Sprint’s road to recovery will be a long and drawn out process, mostly dependent on CEO Dan Hesse’s ability to get the wireless carrier’s high-speed, WIMAX-based XOHM data network up and running in a timely manner. Sprint desperately needs to redefine itself as something more than just the No. 3 wireless voice carrier, and an advanced data service is just what the doctor ordered.

Unfortunately, the road to recovery has to start at the bottom - customer service. Sprint has announced that they’ll be concentrating on improving customer service in a bid to stem massive customer hemorrhaging. On that front, Sprint has done well for itself. Sprint lost a total of 901,000 customers in Q1 2008, which is an improvement from the 1.09 million customer that defected in the same period a year ago.

But, the improved customer retention numbers came at the cost of profits. Sprint posted a modest $19 million in profits for Q1 of 2007. For Q1 2008, things are looking decidedly worse. Sprint posted Q1 revenues of $9.05 billion (which missed analysts’ projection of $9.17 billion), but couldn’t manage to stay out of the red - $344 million in red ink translates in to loss of 12 cents a share.

“Our company-wide retention efforts, which include Simply Everything plans, our Now Network campaign and the launch of the [Samsung] Instinct handset are proving to be effective retention tools, particularly for high-value customers, and this is beginning to have positive impacts on churn and ARPU,” according to Sprint CEO Dan Hesse.

Sprint clearly has along way to go before they can consider their comeback from decline anything close to a success, but with vigilance, focus on customer service, and wireless broadband data services, we can see Sprint emerging from the depths reborn as the premier data provider in the US. What’s $344 million in losses anyway?

[Via: MocoNews]

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