Mobile TV has analysts excited. ABI Research estimates that mobile TV will have 43 million subscribers by 2013, and research firm TeleAnalytics estimates 50 million mobile TV users in North America by the same year. But so far mobile TV has not nearly lived up to the hype. Qualcomm’s FLO TV, the technology used behind the current market leaders — AT&T’s Mobile TV and Verizon’s V Cast — still isn’t making money. For this holiday… Continue reading

GigaOm’s NewTeeVee Live event, which explores the future of TV, took place in San Francisco today. Though there were a number of interesting demos and presentations, three really stood out as being most likely to shape how we watch TV in the immediate future.

The first… Continue Reading

Rumors surfaced this week that Apple is in the process of putting together a $30-a-month iTunes TV offering. This rumored iTunes TV is supposedly something altogether different from the currently available Apple TV.

Apple TV is a piece of hardware that makes it easy to watch… Continue Reading

Location based social networking keeps getting tremendous hype, but the question is whether it will live up to its potential.

The buzz continued this week when Loopt, one of the earliest location-based social networks, announced the acquisition of GraffitiGEO. Loopt recommends places to go based on… Continue Reading

AT&T announced yesterday that it will enable iPhone VoIP apps on its 3G wireless network. You’d think that’d be great news for VoiP companies, and market leader Skype in particular, and indeed, Skype CEO Josh Silverman rejoiced, asking for even more concessions. Read the full article »

I had quite a bit of backlash on my first part of the series, despite the fact that I gave a high score to Microsoft’s productivity suite. Wait until you read this part!

Mobile:

After Google declared at Mobilebeat conference that app stores are not the future – citing the power of HTML5 as the new platform for web apps, Microsoft also decided to join the HTML5 standard. Soon after, Microsoft announced a native version of Office 2010, the latest version of Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity software on Nokia smart phones, a big diversion from its traditional approach of creating a lock in with its own operating system. Is Microsoft conceding defeat in mobile operating systems race? Read the full article »

In this series, I will evaluate health of various businesses within Microsoft. While it’s easy to bash the biggest software company on the planet, I will be as objective as possible and give Microsoft credit when it’s due.

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Augmented Reality — the ability to superimpose data and information over a view of the real world — is arguably hot these days, and there’s no scarcity of articles and blogs on the space and AR apps. VentureBeat first reviewed AR apps two months ago. Read the full article »

Voice has been transmitted as data for a number of years now, through Skype for example. But the way we use voice hasn’t fundamentally changed: consumers still communicate and leave voicemails in very similar ways as before. Read the full article »

While the iPhone and Android platforms and their ilk have certainly opened up the playing field to a long tail of developers, they are by no means cash machines. In fact, if you had planned on quitting your job to get rich developing apps for these platforms, you might want to reconsider — the chances of your making enough money to build a sustainable business or even survive are slim (see my earlier article on iPhone apps). Read the full article »