Can AT&T stop messing up? In this morning news, Gawker appears to have broken the scoop that 114,000 iPads have been victim of a security breach exposing email and iPad IDs.

The security breach has "exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg," writes Gawker.

AT&T confirmed the story this morning (Wall Street Journal). Just another black eye for AT&T, which is still trying to work out connection issues with the iPhone.

In other news:

• Why just focus on bad news from AT&T? They're rolling out 3D coverage of the World Cup with ESPN (Businessweek).
• AllThingsD reports that a Wall Street analyst says T-Mobile will be the next carrier to get the iPhone. InformationWeek's Eric Zeman says that's completely wrong.
• BP tries to reassure investors (New York Times). No, really, we're not a disaster! We know what we're doing! Really!
• Meanwhile, BP's bonds are starting to look like junk (Zero Hedge)
• Global markets rally (Bloomberg). Well, you can't go in the same direction all the time. That wouldn't be very interesting.
• Six strange iPad accessories (Newsweek).
• The HTC EVO is seriously flawed, says TechCrunch.
• Far out news of the day: Is the Obama administration looking at a plan to scrap social security? (Washington Post)

 

 

You know what's fun? When the president threatens to kick some ass.

President Obama's highly visible comments on national TV are garnering many video and Google searches worldwide, as everybody pitches in on exactly how Obama can kick some ass down there in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP has turned an entire ocean into a toxic waste dump.

One version of the ass-kicking threat can be seen below:

Now, can Obama actually kick somebody's ass? Debatable. But certainly this is a historic moment for the president. When we reached deep into our archives (i.e., many Google searches), though, we did find evidence of other presidents kicking ass. For example, George H.W. Bush (Bush I), said he kicked some ass in a vice presidential debate.

Sometimes America can be myopic, self-centered, and oblivious. Today is one of those days when many of the news outlets are focusing on Twitter, the Toyota recalls, and Taylor Swift. With more chaos brewing in the Middle East, it's a good time to remember that there are some major wars underway. I only say this because these are disturbing times, and we have to be reminded of the fact of the dangers of global political conflicts. Keep it in mind. Let me catch you up to date on what's going on "out there," as well as other stuff:

• Violence in Israel is flaring up again, following the reopening of a synagogue in Jerusalem's Old City (The Guardian).
• The Obama adminstration and Benjamin Netanyahu are headed for a showdown (NPR)
• George Mitchell's Israel trip is on hold (Politico)
• What does it mean for Iran? Well, the eminent bombing rumors that have circulated may be put on hold. (Huffington Post)
• Several folks think Biden's trip to Israel was aimed at discussing the bombing of Iran. Instead, it devolved into a critique of Israel's settlement policies. (Politico)
• The US and EU are calling for a "clear response" to Iran. Some believe that bombing isn't yet off the table. (AFP)
• Iran is standing its ground (Tehran Times)
• Zero Hedge technical take predicts a  market crash in April (Zero Hedge)
• U.S. Housing starts declined 5.9% in February (Bloomberg). Do housing start numbers in the dead of winter really matter?
• The Fed wants to "avoid lower inflation" (Bloomberg). Isn't that another euphemism for printing money?
• U.S. lawmakers are going to press China for action on currency (Reuters). Yippee! Trade War with China! Just what we all need!
• Sony has signed a $250M deal with the Michael Jackson estate on forthcoming albums involving both previously unreleased material and famiar ones. (Wall Street Journal). Just beat it!
• Core Strength Training for Men. (Wall Street Journal). I just think it's funny that you can find this stuff on a Wall Street Journal page.
• Is China-Google a lose-lose scenario? (Associated Press)
• Google's biggest blunder: Not letting Microsoft buy Yahoo (Slate). I can go with it.
• Vitamin D linked to lower heart disease risk (L.A. Times)

Greetings, it's Tablet Wednesday! It would be so much better if it were a Tuesday so that we could call it Tablet Tuesday. I find it funny that people are still trying to print sketchy "scoops" in the hours up to the Apple tablet computer launch. Like this grainy puzzle-pieced photo from Engaget. Holy cow, is that some kind of map... on an LCD screen! Well, that's the news business in 2010. Any piece of incremental information, no matter how shady or inconclusive, needs to be published. With that, we travel onto the world of shady Internet journos, toiling overtime to bring you the n0t-so-much-news: McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, who I once worked for, tells you all about the tablet. No word on whether the tablet will have an  feature to buy your own S&P ratings.

• The Business Insider rounds up all the rumors. No word on whether Henry Blodget thinks the stock is going to $800.
• Can we link to ourselves? Here's what I think about the notion that the tablet will save the content industry (Rayno Report).
• Apple gets a slew of new patents related to the tablet (Patently Apple).
• Apple Tablet Portends Rewrite for Publishers (Wall Street Journal).

Oh, and in case you thought anything else was going on in the world:

• Treasury Secretary Geithner is getting grilled on AIG (BusinessWeek). He's crispy. Fried. Done.
• Geithner denies role in AIG payment disclosures (Reuters).
• Bernanke says he didn't negotiate with the AIG lenders. (Reuters) Also, rumor has it he's not really sure what "money" is.
• Superbowl ad stokes abortion controversy (Reuters). Not going to touch this one!
• Toyota halts sales on millions of vehicles, stock slammed (Associated Press).
• Roku wants to create a 100-channel Internet TV box (Bloomberg). Memo to Roku: The Internet has infinite channels.
• AT&T to launch Yelp competitor (Forbes). Isn't this kind of like your grandma launching an Internet startup?
• Oracle plans to hire people (InfoWorld). Yes, you too can wash Larry Ellison's car.
• Send inmates to Mexico, says Shcwarzenegger (Agence France Press).
• Five things Obama could learn from Reagan (Time). Somehow, I just don't see Obama reading this article. Or behaving like the Gipper. Or looking like him. Or moving to Santa Barbara. Yep, it's completely confirmed: They're totally different people.
• My vote for the best headline of the day, even though I'm not sure what it means: "Facebook and Twitter? Why not just put a gun to your head?" (Network World).
• The FCC is probing mobile phone termination fees (Digital Trends).
• The Mars rover is dead (National Geographic). Long live the Mars rover!
• Leading space scientist claims Earth becoming invisible to aliens (Telegraph).

Repeat after me: Apple, China, Apple, China, Apple, China. Apparently, if you are in the news business, that's all you need to remember, because this company and that country appear to dominate everything going on in the business world. Apple announced blowout numbers, which we correctly hunched yesterday. Now it will be interesting to see how the stock trades in light of a more general market malaise. The stock chopped around quite violently in the after-hours market but was only up 1% in the premarket. With the massive numbers they announced, that's got to be a bit disappointing to Apple bulls. Meanwhile, China is slashing loan growth again. This seems prudent to me, a little bit like weeding the garden (or weeding the bubble?), but it has commodities and equities markets minorly spooked this AM. That's the beauty of a centrally-planned economy, eh? When you want banks to lend less, you say: you shall lend less. It makes you wonder, why didn't we think of that?

• What's up with this Apple accounting change? (Barrons). I am always suspicious of moves by the bean-counters. It appears to me that they are recognizing more revenues as a result of jettisoning subscription accounting, but it doesn't change their cash flows, so who really cares? Remember, cash flow is king.
• The New York Times hopes Apple will save them. That's funny. I mean, really funny. Did the iPod save the music industry?
• TechCrunch was hacked (TechCrunch).
• Coraid raises $10M for storage virtualization (VentureBeat).
• I've always wondered how much beer you can fit in a Mazda. Apparently, a lot. Like, 696 beers (The Press -- New Zealand).
• This is interesting -- even though Obama's been experiencing some sinking political support and poll numbers, a Fox poll says he would still beat any GOP candidate in 2012 (Fox News). Goodbye Sarah Palin?
• A tortoise that's been extinct for 300 years is being resurrected via genetic data (Mother Nature Network).
• Google's looking to end-around Apple with its new Google Voice (Reuters).
• The UK has ended its recession with a raging gain of .1% in GDP (Telegraph).
• Goldman Sachs economist and Manchester United fan Jim O'Neill criticizes his own bank's underwriting of Man U's new bond issue (Telegraph). "His comments could prove deeply embarrassing for the Wall street giant." I hope you enjoyed your career, Jim.
• How much Haiti aid will be sucked away by corruption ? (Reuters)
• Chinese media are stepping up the rhetoric in the war with Google. (Reuters)
• The pope is asking his priests to become more hip to the Internet. (CNET). I have a word of advice to men of the cloth: Be very, very careful, it's too easy to sin on the Internet.

Damn, January is almost over and I am nowhere near accomplishing one-twelfth of what I wanted to get done in 2010. Are you? That's okay, our world leaders aren't there yet, either. They are set to gather in Davos this week for that annual junket known as the "World Economic Forum." Primary objective? To tell us how smart and rich they are. What is the World Economic Forum you ask? It's a gathering of really, really rich people, who do their best to massively screw up a tiny resort town in Switzerland. For one week, we'll get to hear breathless reports of how fast leading business executives and investment bankers are destroying the global economy. It's also an excuse for pundits and TV personalities to brag incessantly about how they got this cherry assignment. Personally, I see it as yet another sign that the global power infrastructure is approaching a modern version of the Roman Empire. But I will watching, and listen, to key figures. One person I always pay attention to is George Soros, who has now apparently been bounced from the Davos headlines by partying, Playboy doomsday ecnonomist Nouriel Roubini. How these two got on the same page I'm not sure. Let's get this straight: Soros is a billionaire, with four decades of successful investment under his belt. Roubini predicted a fairly obvious investment banking meltdown in 2008 and then partied like crazy with hotties for awhile.Who's the bigger brain? At any rate, before I ramble on, here are some more links and newsbits:

• Existing home sales shocked everybody by falling (Bloomberg). Gee, what a shock.
• Ed Whitacre will become the permanent CEO of GM (Wall Street Journal). Hey, I met this guy once! He was running a telephone company at the time. Isn't that funny! I bet he puts telephones in cars.
• Nice Joe Queenan piece on why NBC is making a Leno mistake (Wall Street Journal). "Jay Leno, much like Adolf Hitler, is a master of making secret demands for foreign territory and then acting like the wronged party." LOL! Now that is a good line.
• Wal-Mart Stores to eliminate 11,000 Sam's Club jobs (Bizjournals.com). For this, they gain 10 points in their bid to top the mega-hated companies list.
• The man who lives without money (The Guardian). Better to do it voluntarily, I say.
• Great soundbite alert: British P.M. has been accused of "moral cowardice" (The Telegraph).
• Jim Rogers is calling for a sizable market correction (The Telegraph).
• TechCrunch reports that Steve Jobs has been overheard saying the tablet will be the most important thing Apple's ever done. This coming from the person who thinks he's the most important person.
• An outfit called Flurry says the Apple tablet will be really, really good for video games. Oh great, just what we need -- more brain-dead teenagers zoning out on on shoot-em-ups in the local Starbucks.
• China said it didn't have anything to do with attacking Google's servers (Agence France Presse). Righhtttt... and I'm Brett Favre's sports psychologist.
• Speaking of Brett Favre, what exactly is he going to do for an encore? Las Vegas is posting odds on an over/under on retirement reversal annoucements. The over is at 8 and I'm taking it.
• Brett Favre does Pants on the Ground (HuffPost). Did the reporter really ask him about slapping guys on the butt?
• Woman falls, rips Picasso painting (Agence France Press via Yahoo). I can't tell you how many times I feared my kids doing this.
• Map of the interactinos between the genes in a yeast cell (BBC). Just testing how geeky y'all are. Please, no comparisons to social networking.
• Obama unveils new intitatives for the middle class (Reuters). He's got a problem. First he's got to re-create the middle class.

A big focus at CES in Las Vegas this week is on the growing smartphone wars, as a number of mobile manufacturers gear up to battle the dominance of RIMM and Apple. One of their new weapons: Android, the new open mobile OS from Google which gained attention in the last few weeks with the launch of Google's own phone, the Nexus One. Is it possible to break down the new mobile smartphone warfare in a short roundup that takes you less than 30 minutes to read? I've spent much of the week brushing up on my reading about the Nexus One, reading up on smartphones, talking to some smart mobile guys, and looking at research in this market. So let me try to wrap it up for you in 800 words and 12 links or less. Reviews First up, the Nexus One is probably one of the most important developments in the smartphone market since the launch of the iPhone. Let's look at some of the reviews of the Google's Nexus One, to set the stage of the competition: Techcrunch: Nexus One is the "best And roid phone to date". It looks more like an iPhone "than any other phone on the market. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is also hot and bothered about the Nexus One's integration with Google voice. Good touch screen. Noise cancellation features. Possible microphone issues. Good camera. Overall, an "important milestone in the smartphone market." Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal): Walt also likes the Nexus One, calling it a "beautiful, sleek new" phone. He points out that the fact that it operates on the Verizon 3G network, which is superior to AT&Ts (and subject to a lot of controversy for iPhone users), this could help draw iPhone users away. "Packed with tricks." He likes the social networking features. He points out that the iPhone still has better multimedia features, appears to have more reliable battery life, and likely will have a better apps platform for a while. Engadget: This review is somewhat wordy and lukewarm (are there editors over at Engadget?) As a phone, "not dramatically different." They've "succeeded" with the sleek design. A highlight is the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. This makes it fast, a bit faster than Motorola's Droid. Display is nice but has some "issues." Camera is good. Not sure about an Android phone without a physical keyborad. Bottom line: "it's not in any way the Earth-shattering, paradigm-skewing device.." Hmm. It took 1000s of words to say that? Breakdown of features Nexus One vs. Apple iPhone 3GS:

Feature	Google Nexus One	Apple iPhone 3GS
U.S. carrier	T-Mobile at launch, Verizon later.	AT&T
Price	$529 unlocked; $179 with T-Mobile contract	$199 or $299 with AT&T contract, depending on memory
User-accessible memory	4 gigabytes, expandable to 32 gigabytes	16 or 32 gigabytes, fixed
Minimum monthly service fee*	$79.99	$69.95
Available 3rd-party apps	Around 18,000	Over 100,000
Memory for application storage	190 megabytes	Nearly the full capacity of phone
Syncs media files with PC or Mac	No, manual copying only	Yes, iTunes
Multitasking of apps	Yes	Only Apple apps
Screen size	3.7 inches	3.5 inches
Screen resolution	480 x 800	480 x 320
Removable battery	Yes	No
Camera	5 megapixel, flash	3 megapixel, no flash
Length	4.68 inches	4.5 inches
Width	2.35 inches	2.4 inches
Thickness	.45 inches	.48 inches
Weight	4.58 ounces	4.8 ounces
Claimed voice-calling battery life on 3G	7 hours	5 hours
Claimed Internet battery life on Wi-Fi	6.5 hours	9 hours
Claimed music-playback battery life	20 hours	30 hours
Claimed video-playback battery life	7 hours	10 hours

Sources: Google, Apple, T-Mobile, AT&T Smartphone Trends Okay, so what does this all mean? The introduction of Android, and the fact that Google is pushing its own phone in this market, means the market is going to accelerate with this new competitive juice. It also means that Google is going to work very hard on building up the apps platform for Android, whichmeans that mobile smartphones are going to become the most powerful and fastest growing devices on the planet. And smartphones currently only have 17% share of the mobile phone market! This sucks if you are Nokia or Motorola. Let's face it, Google and Apple have the mojo, and they have key competitive advantages over the niche players who came to life primarily as "phone manufacaturers." What are those advantages? Huge, growing software platforms. And software is the key to these new phones. I think these new developments also call into question the future of Microsoft's mobile strategy, since there appears to be nary a chatter about Windows Mobile-powered devices. How will this affect market share? Below are some useful charts from an outfit called ChangeWave Research which show how the new smartphone market and mobile operating systems markets may evolve with the introduction of Nexus One and the growth of the iPhone platform: Clearly, the Nexus One has a lot of people nervous, because it is showing the viability of Android as a major-league mobile OS. The fact that is open and is likely to spawn a new generation of app developers must be leaving a lot of people tossing and turning in bed. Clearly the trend is to go "off deck," or into open, Web-based mobile platforms. Ilja CEO, the founder and CEO Getjar, a mobile phone apps supermarket, sees apps and Android "Taking off" in 2011 (Source: Go to a very interesting slideshow here.) Conclusion What does this all tell me? It reaffirms my view, which is that a massive warn is brewing between Google, Apple, and RIMM in the smartphone market! Microsoft has already lost the war.  Microsoft is a value stock, so that doesn't really affect my view of whether you can buy Microsoft -- mobile is a small pie of their pie (Disclosure: I own Microsoft shares), but I think this has more implications for Google and Apple's stock. Most to lose: RIMM, Motorola, Nokia. Static: Apple (but slowing growth could damage the stock) Most to win: Google, Getjar, mobile apps developers I do not think the market has signficantly priced in the potential gains for Google, so I think Google has the most to win in the mobile wars. RIMM has the most to lose because it is so concentrated in this market.I can't see how Motrola comes out of this doing well, because the Nexus One is likely to signficantly cannibalize Droid sales.