How does a company that sells a product make money when they’re made to compete against competing products that are offered for free? Well, they don’t. Companies in this position have two choices – change their business model, or get out of the business. For Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), they’ve made the choice to exit stage left with Wayfinder tucked between its legs. Faced with insurmountable odds from Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s free GPS navigation services, Vodafone has decided to shutter its Wayfinder navigation division altogether.
Rather than swim against a torrential current of free turn-by-turn nav offerings from behemoth companies with unstoppable clout – you know, Google’s Google Maps Navigation and Nokia’s Ovi Maps – Vodafone has reportedly decided that they just can “not charge for something that others gave away for free.” The carrier, who was intent on cashing in on location-based services that it planned to integrate into its Wayfinder maps, is going to write off the acquisition and cut their losses.
The move has got to sting Voda’s bottom line, seeing as how Vodafone bought Wayfinder for a cool $30 million in 2008. Still, with the likes of Nokia and Google giving away their maps for free, Vodafone stood to potentially lose even more money had they decided to continue with this project. Now, the only question is, who else will fall victim to the free navigation services out there?
[Via: MocoNews]
Related News from IntoMobile:
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We've heard from a number of industry executives that serious M&A discussions in the social gaming space have heated up since Electronic Arts' (EA) acquisition of Playfish for about $400 million in late 2009 (including earnouts). The companies seriously looking at social gaming acquisitions are not just big console gaming companies like EA or Activision, they include big media companies like Viacom and Asian companies as well.
We see a few drivers of the increased activity:
Originally posted at Nanotech - The Circuits Blog
A bunch of readers have emailed regarding yesterday’s piece on the Apple-HTC patent suit to ask why I didn’t compare it to Apple’s ill-fated “Look and Feel” lawsuit against Microsoft. I don’t think the comparison is all that interesting or apt, basically.
For one thing, that suit was a copyright case, not a patent case. I think it’s fair to say that’s an entirely different ballgame legally. For another, the personnel are completely different. The entirety of that dispute with Microsoft took place during Steve Jobs’s exile from Apple.
But that actually led me to an interesting thought this morning. Leave aside the legal differences between copyright violations and patent disputes, and the two cases more or less boil down to the same fundamental situation: Apple brings to market a revolutionary next step in personal computers; competitors then use those same ideas in competing products. Microsoft and Windows then; Google and Android now.
I can see that what some people — people who are far more sympathetic to the idea of Apple attacking Android via the courts than I am — are thinking is more or less that Apple got screwed the last time when a competitor was able to shamelessly use the ideas that Apple first created, and so Apple should do whatever it can to keep that from happening again.
Apple’s argument in the Microsoft case was that Windows was a copy of the Mac’s copyrighted “look and feel”: mouse pointer, menu bar with pull-down menus, overlapping rectangular windows with a title bar at the top containing buttons for zooming and closing, scrollbars, icons representing applications and documents, click-and-drag text selection, drag-and-drop, a trash can, undo, a “desktop”, cross-application copy-and-paste — all these aspects from the Mac were also in Windows.
But what if Apple had patented these things in 1984, and had successfully protected these patents from being used by other U.S. companies? (Or at least the features and designs which weren’t derived from earlier work at Xerox.) It’s not just Microsoft that would’ve been blocked from creating Windows as we know it. A company called NeXT would have been blocked from creating NeXTStep. Every single Mac feature I described above was part of the NeXT UI as well.
Good ideas are meant to spread.
A great thought indeed!
- Nicolas DufourA start-up built entirely for the Twitter platform has produced what appears to be a good exit for venture capitalists. ExactTarget acquired CoTweet, which offers software to help businesses send and receive messages from multiple Twitter accounts. CoTweet raised just over $1 million from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital. These investors will get stock in ExactTarget, which, as we reported last month, is doing quite well on its way to becoming a publicly traded company. Of the deal, First Round Managing Partner Chris Fralic told VentureWire: “I think this is a deal where everyone involved could look you in the eye and tell you it was the best outcome for all parties.” Meanwhile, CoTweet CEO Jesse Engle says, “”We had exactly the right product at exactly the right time. We made some good guesses that Twitter would take off and businesses would embrace it.”….
In one of the biggest fund-raisings for a European drug company in years, Archimedes Pharma said it raised GBP65 million ($97.2 million) to back the launch of a nasal spray for cancer pain. Investors include Warburg Pincus and a fund associated with Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk AS. The investors are banking that Archimedes’ treatment will top competing products on the market because its drug supposedly relieves pain faster, within five minutes….
MIT Technology Review released its 2010 list of the Top 50 innovative companies in the world. The list includes about 25 venture-backed companies, including big cheeses like Tesla Motors and Twitter, but also lesser-known ones such as fabless chip design start-up Luxtera and drug developer BIND Biosciences. We did a quick check in Dow Jones VentureSource to see which venture firm had the most companies on this list. Seven venture firms tied with three companies apiece: Bessemer Venture Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Flagship Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates, OVP Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners….
The world of online shopping is finally changing, writes First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman. “I think we’ve seen more innovation in the last 10 months than in the last 10 years,” says Kopelman, whose firm is betting big on the transformation of online shopping….
Sad news for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert fans. No, Jay Leno is not stealing their chairs. But Hulu is dropping “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.” The free online video site couldn’t reach a financial agreement with Viacom who owns those comedy shows. Hulu - which is jointly owned by General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, News Corp. (owner of The Wall Street Journal), Walt Disney, private-equity firm Providence Equity Partners and Hulu employees - has been flirting with introducing a paid subscription model. It’s also reportedly coming to the iPad, for a fee….
We’ve listened to, moderated and participated on a fair of share of panels at venture capital and start-up conferences, and let’s face it, many of the discussions are just plain boring, or they veer wildly off topic. If you plan to participate on a panel and need some advice, check out venture capitalist Mark Suster’s helpful tips for making the most out of sitting on panels. As Suster says, panelists should educate, entertain and have a dialogue (a little debate or controversy never hurts!) Suster, who was a panelist yesterday at America’s Growth Capital conference, also relays a humorous story about a blunder or two he made at the recent LeadsCon conference….
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, better known as ARPA-E, is flush with hundreds of millions of dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to back clean technology projects. While it’s already dished out some of the cash, ARPA-E is holding a conference this week in D.C. with industry leaders to suss out future funding possibilities. One attendee, cleantech VC Rob Day, says ARPA-E will face quite a few challenges, namely with the selection process - not only will the work sponsored by ARPA-E need to demonstrate an economic impact, but it will inevitably draw fire for the companies it picks, especially if they’re venture-backed. “[S]ooner or later, someone is going to ask why a wealthy VCs’ portfolio company just got more “free money” from the government,” Day writes….
Finally, we leave you with some lessons on raising capital, by way of Sanjeev Agrawal, CEO of mobile services start-up Aloqa and former head of Google product marketing, who was interviewed by VatorTV. Aloqa recently raised $1.5 million from Wellington Partners and angel investors:
Neonode's zForce Pad multitouch display panel set to rock the world originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Not too long ago, ASRock was revealed to be preparing for the release of the 890GX Extreme3 motherboard, based on the upcoming 890GX chipset from Advanced Micro Devices. Of course, competing products were bound to come out in order to steal the spotlight away from the device, with a more recent addition to the list of Thuban-supporting motherboards be... (read more)
Still not quite sure how you feel about net neutrality? Not to worry, the Federal Communications Commission announced Tuesday that it will extend the deadline for comments on the issue by more than a month.
The due date for final comments about the commission's proceeding has been extended from March 5 to April 8, according to an FCC filing.
The move comes after groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Directors Guild of America, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and the Screen Actors Guild asked the FCC for an extension in order to factor in the commission's national broadband plan, which is due to Congress by March 17.
Consumer groups like Public Knowledge and Consumers Union also issued their support for the delay.
"It is the policy of the Commission that extensions of time shall not be routinely granted. However, given the large record and the National Broadband Plan's release in March, we find that good cause exists to provide all parties a one-time extension of the reply comment deadline," the FCC said.
The FCC introduced its net neutrality plan on Oct. 22. The first round of comments were due by Jan. 14, and stakeholders now have until April 8 to file responses to those comments.
The draft rules would permit broadband Internet access service providers to engage in reasonable network management. They would not, however, be able to prevent a user from: using a particular application, like BitTorrent; connecting to their network of choice; and accessing competing products. Providers could also not discriminate against lawful apps, and they would be required to disclose their network management practices.
Not too long ago, the e-reader market was composed of only a handful of devices, out of which Amazon's Kindle, the Nook and Sony's e-reader were the ones that saw most of the sales. However, during and after CES 2010, companies such as Samsung and Asus, among various others, revealed their plans to launch their own competing products, with the first having already ma... (read more)
The Windows Phone 7 operating system will have room for game console integration besides Microsoft's own Xbox 360, according to the company's senior product manager for the mobile communications marketing group, Michael Chang. He adds that in its cellphone history, Microsoft has never blocked any competing products or services from its platforms. Short of naming names, Chang said "our mobile ecosystem often includes our competitors," which could mean compatibility with Sony's PS3 console....
What do you do if you really want a Windows Phone 7 handset but prefer PlayStation to Xbox 360? Microsoft may end up catering for you too, with a senior product manager on the mobile division musing on the possibility.
Michael Chang told TechRadar that Microsoft's doesn't intend to be a closed door to other companies.
"If you look at our history in mobiles, we have never blocked anything off this platform because we compete in the same space, at least not in the phone space."
Typically, he couldn't actually pinpoint "a specific scenario" where they've allowed competing products onto their phones, but mentioned they allow Exchange "on other devices." At a hefty license cost, I'm sure.
But going back to allowing users of WP7 to integrate their PlayStation Network stats and games, it's something they're considering.
"We think it's pretty clear - I was slightly worried that when we showed off Xbox Live on the Windows Phone 7 platform people might think it was Microsoft trying to own the [mobile] world.
"But the simplest way to put it is that there's a very obvious reason we called it the Games hub and the Music + Video hub: Zune and Xbox are key parts, but not the only parts, of the overall Windows Phone experience."
But will they let me play Donkey Kong Country? [TechRadar]
Google has spoken out against rumours that it has recently fallen out with long-time partner Apple, calling the Cupertino company “A valuable partner”.
In recent weeks whispers have emerged that Apple may be about to remove the Google default search status from its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and replace them with Microsoft’s Bing.
Meanwhile, a rumoured “Gentlemen’s agreement” between the two companies – whereby Android phones sold in the USA would omit the pinch-to-zoom multitouch present in iPhones to keep Apple happy – appeared to be overturned recently when Google pushed out a multitouch update to its Nexus One.
Google’s Vic Gundotra has today dismissed rumours of a spat between the two companies. Reported by Reuters, Gundotra said “Apple is a very close and valuable partner and we’re very excited about the relationship we have with them today. We have no reason to believe that’s going to change.”
This jars with what Steve Jobs reportedly said at a recent Apple staff meeting. Jobs supposedly accused Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ ethos as being “Bulls**t” in front of his assembled employees.
The gossip-fueled soap opera between Google and Apple is likely to continue as they chase after the same mobile market with competing products and services – a situation that contributed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepping down from the Apple board last year.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Gundotra also refused to comment on rumours that a business-focused “Nexus Two” was on the way.
