tablet computer

Going to the Game, to Watch Them All on TV

September 14, 2013 by NewsMaker

“Yeah, baby,” he screamed as tight end Jimmy Graham scored a touchdown. But Graham is not a member of the Jaguars. He was playing for the Saints, about 500 miles away, at the Superdome in New Orleans.

Boria’s cheer was part of the cacophony in the new 7,000-square-foot fantasy football lounge at the Jaguars’ stadium, where fans were primarily following not the game they had bought tickets to attend, but those in other N.F.L. cities involving players on their fantasy teams.

In recent years, sports sites have increasingly been outfitted with high-definition video scoreboards, and high-definition televisions in the concourses, the better to essentially create a broadcast of the game that fans are also watching live. But lounges like the one the Jaguars have unveiled take that one step further. They attempt, in essence, to entice fans to watch not just the game that is being played a few hundred feet away from them but every other one going on around the league as well — and to spend money on food and drinks while doing so.

The lounges function as technology-friendly sports bars, with great locations and, because fans need to enter the stadiums first, expensive cover charges.

“We have to have a very compelling reason for fans to come to the game,” said Shahid R. Khan, the Jaguars’ owner.

Many times, that reason may not be the game on the field. Though the Jaguars limped to a 28-2 defeat last week, Boria, 41, happily tracked the performances of his fantasy players, like Graham, on a Microsoft tablet computer mounted to a table in the lounge, and on the nine large screen TVs nearby.

“That will be my spot from now on,” said Boria, who, as a Jaguars’ season-ticket holder, pays an average of $40 a game for a seat that he plans to rarely visit.

Traditionalists might scoff at a fan who buys a ticket, drives to a stadium and then spends the game in a lounge focusing on out-of-town scores using televisions, computers and smartphones. But N.F.L. teams have been challenged in recent years by the growing number of fans who prefer the game-day experience in the comfort of their own homes, where high-definition TVs and high-speed Internet access — not to mention recliners and cheaper food and beverage options — provide a more suitable place for taking in several contests at the same time.

Enter areas like the Jaguars’ lounge, which is open to any fan in the stadium for no extra charge and offers air-conditioning, fast WiFi connections, video-game stations, comfortable recliners and food and drinks. The field of play is partly visible from the lounge, but that is almost incidental, and last Sunday, the Jaguars’ game was merely one of several on the TVs.

The Jaguars realize that in the fight for fans’ attention and wallets, their competition is not just from college football and other sports, but from fantasy football, social media and the highlights, statistics and online discussion that can sometimes be hard to follow in stadiums but have become an essential part of N.F.L. Sundays.

“The most important thing is to make sure they have a good game-day experience,” said Khan, who, during the game, stopped by the lounge, above the end zone on the stadium’s south side. “Teams like us are looking for every competitive advantage.”

In effect, teams are trying to marry live football with the digital experience. In fantasy football, fans create “teams” with real players and compete to see whose players perform the best statistically in any given week.

“Fans are left in the dark when they go to the stadium because the home experience has improved so dramatically,” said Phil de Picciotto, the president of Octagon, a sports marketing agency. The fantasy lounge in Jacksonville, he said, is “in part life imitating art imitating life and in part, if you can’t beat them, join them.”

It is a far cry from the years when about the only way to see your favorite team was to buy a ticket and the only way to get details of other games while sitting in the stands was to have a transistor radio handy.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/sports/football/jaguars-use-fantasy-football-lounge-to-lure-fans.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: cover charges, large screen tvs, tablet computer

Weak PC Market Catches Up to Microsoft

July 18, 2013 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

On Thursday, the company missed Wall Street forecasts, blaming the declining PC market for the shortfall. Microsoft also acknowledged the disappointing sales of one of its most prominent products, its Surface RT tablet computer, by taking a $900 million charge to reflect unsold inventory of the device.

“It finally caught up to them,” said Colin W. Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “We’ve been in a PC recession for five quarters.”

For the fiscal fourth quarter that ended June 30, Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., reported net income of $4.97 billion, or 59 cents a share, in contrast to a loss of $492 million, or 6 cents a share, in the period a year earlier. Last year, Microsoft took a $6 billion write-down on a soured acquisition, wiping out its overall profit.

In the latest quarter, revenue rose 10 percent, to $19.9 billion, from $18.06 billion a year earlier.

Those results fell well short of the average analyst estimates compiled by Thomson Reuters of 75 cents a share in earnings and $20.73 billion in revenue.

Revenue from Microsoft’s Windows business, which includes its Surface tablet computers, rose 6 percent, to $4.41 billion. But without including the favorable impact from an upgrade offer last year, Microsoft’s Windows revenue fell 6 percent in the quarter.

Last week, the research firm Gartner reported that global PC shipments declined 10.9 percent in the second quarter of the year, the fifth consecutive quarter of declining PC shipments, the longest ever.

Mobile devices have sapped much of the gusto out of the PC market. Many people are buying tablet computers, especially Apple’s iPad, instead of PCs to watch movies, surf the Web and write e-mails.

“We know we have to do better, particularly on mobile devices,” Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said in an interview.

Ms. Hood said the company’s Windows business is a “tale of two markets,” one in which PC sales to businesses continue to grow modestly, while consumer demand for the machines is fizzling. She estimated that total industry PC shipments to the consumer market fell more than 20 percent during the quarter.

She said that a companywide reorganization that Microsoft announced last week was part of an effort to better position the business for big changes in technology, including the shift to mobile devices.

Until its most recent quarter, Microsoft showed a remarkable aptitude for finding ways to squeeze money out of its venerable business, despite the problems in the PC market. It did that through lucrative multiyear software contracts with corporate customers that tend to move far more slowly than consumers in adopting newer technologies.

Parts of Microsoft that cater more to businesses helped lessen the sting. Microsoft said revenue in its server and tools group rose 9 percent, to $5.5 billion. Revenue in its business division, dominated by the Office suite of applications, jumped 14 percent, to $7.21 billion. But the division grew only 2 percent without deferred revenue related to an earlier upgrade offer.

Office is under siege from a suite of online applications from Google and others, which has led Microsoft to adapt the software so it can be delivered as a service through cloud computing. Microsoft said that if Office 365, the version of its productivity applications that are offered as a service, were to perform for a full year at current levels, it would generate $1.5 billion in revenue.

“The consumer has voted,” said Barbara Coffey, an analyst at SP Capital IQ. “I don’t know that enterprise has yet. We’ve seen such a big shift to tablets. Microsoft just doesn’t play in tablets at the same level that they do in PCs.”

Investors had become more bullish on Microsoft’s ability to navigate the disruption of the PC market, sending its shares up more than 32 percent this year. But after the release of its financial results, shares of Microsoft dropped more than 6 percent in after-hours trading. They ended regular trading at $35.44, down 30 cents.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/technology/weak-pc-market-catches-up-to-microsoft.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: mobile devices, tablet computer, tablet computers

RIM Profit Falls 58.7%, Raising Doubts

September 16, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

RIM said that its second-quarter net income fell by 58.7 percent to $329 million, or 63 cents a share, from $797 million, or $1.46 a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue fell by 10 percent to $4.2 billion, an amount greater than analysts had expected.

“We question the company’s long-term viability,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst with Edward Jones. “The clock is ticking.”

By every other measure, RIM performed poorly. Its gross profit margins dropped to 38.7 percent from 44.5 percent a year ago. Cash and cash equivalents are down 52 percent from the previous quarter while inventories more than doubled, mostly because of unwanted PlayBook tablets.

RIM shipped 10.9 million BlackBerry phones, about one million fewer than analysts had expected. The company’s newest product, the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer, fared even worse. RIM shipped about 200,000 of the devices to stores, fewer than half of what analysts had expected.

As a result RIM shares lost as much as 19 percent of their value in after-hours trading that followed the company’s announcement on Thursday. Shares closed in regular trading at $29.54, down 0.6 percent.

In a conference call with analysts, Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, blamed sagging sales of RIM’s aging line of smartphones for much of the discouraging financial news. RIM recently introduced seven phones. But they are largely updates of its old product line rather than new devices matching the performance and features of Apple’s iPhone or various handsets that use the Android operating system from Google.

Mr. Balsillie said the new phones, collectively known as BlackBerry 7 for their operating system, have “received an excellent reception.” He called one model, the Bold 9900, “a thing of beauty to behold,” sentiments Mike Lazaridis, the other RIM co-chief executive, repeatedly echoed. Independent reviews have also been largely positive. But only two new BlackBerry models were available in North American and British stores during the final three weeks of the quarter, making it difficult to assess their appeal.

Several analysts said that many BlackBerry users may be waiting until next year to replace their handsets. RIM has said it plans to release radically different phones based on an entirely new operating system known as QNX, which is now only found in the PlayBook.

The company, however, has not made it any clearer when that will happen. Mr. Lazaridis said that prototypes of those phones “will be available in the not too distant future” but neither he nor Mr. Balsillie would offer any information about when shoppers could buy the devices.

While the flaws that plagued the PlayBook at its introduction last spring seem to have been resolved, the device is still hobbled by a relative lack of apps, a shortcoming Mr. Lazaridis acknowledged in the conference call.

While RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, did not disclose how many of the devices were purchased by consumers, Mr. Lazaridis acknowledged that many are sitting on store shelves. RIM says it hopes to sell those devices by offering rebates and software improvements.

He said RIM will display at a trade show next month a revamped version of the operating system that overcomes the greatest shortcoming of the PlayBook, its inability to directly receive BlackBerry e-mail. As he was with the new phones, however, he was vague about when the software would be available.

Mr. Lazaridis said that RIM would also open an online video store for the PlayBook. While the powerful processor in the device makes it adept at playing video, streaming movies and television programs onto it can be frustrating.

Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that even with those changes, the PlayBook is unlikely to be a big seller for RIM.

“These guys can’t sell to consumers,” Mr. Schadler said. He advises corporate clients that the PlayBook is not the best tablet for sales and presentations, he said. The iPad is better, he said.

Analysts’ lack of faith in RIM’s future is also heightened because they see the company falling farther behind the competition until whenever the QNX phones appear. Apple is expected to release the iPhone 5 next month. Google’s recent purchase of Motorola may result in new products, and Nokia will begin offering its first phone that use Windows Phone 7 software well before the QNX-based BlackBerrys appear.

While RIM was forced to lower its forecast shortly after announcing its first-quarter results three months ago, the company is sticking by its financial projection for the rest of the year.

Mr. Balsillie said that he expected strong sales of the BlackBerry 7 phones over the holiday buying season that would get it back on track.

But Mr. Kreher said he expected that the company may have to change its forecast for a second time this year, and several analysts on the conference call did not seem to share Mr. Balsillie’s optimism.

Mike Abramsky, of RBC Captial Markets, challenged the company’s forecast, saying to Mr. Balsillie, “I’m just wondering why you feel that confident.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e3ac561e18dfa9bcb0984d9f72a53925

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: gross profit margins, mike lazaridis, tablet computer

Common Sense: H.P.’s Transition Anything but Seamless

August 27, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Just a year ago, Mark Hurd, H.P.’s chief executive, was forced to resign in the midst of allegations of sexual harassment and expense account irregularities, many details of which remain shrouded in secrecy. (The board concluded the sexual harassment claim was unfounded, but that Mr. Hurd’s lack of candor had cost him its confidence.) The vote to demand his resignation was unanimous, although the board was sharply divided, especially over how to handle his departure and seek a new C.E.O. But H.P. was so big, so dominant in most of its markets, and so profitable that Mr. Hurd was dispensable, according to people familiar with the board’s reasoning. “We don’t need you,” one board member bluntly told Mr. Hurd, or words to that effect.

So how has Hewlett-Packard fared under new leadership?

On Aug. 18, H.P. announced simultaneously that it was exploring “strategic alternatives” and might sell its dominant personal computer business, which accounts for roughly a third of the company’s revenue; that it was scrapping its new, much ballyhooed TouchPad tablet computer; and that it was acquiring a British software concern, Autonomy, for $10.3 billion, a steep 11 times revenue. The stock plunged 20 percent to $23.60 a share. When Mr. Hurd resigned, it was just under $46, so the one-year decline amounted to 49 percent. (The Standard Poor’s 500-stock index gained about 3 percent over the same period.)

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is,” a former H.P. director, the venture capitalist Tom Perkins, told me this week. “It’s just astonishing.”

“H.P. was the epicenter of Silicon Valley, geographically, culturally and historically,” an executive at another technology concern said. “Is there any analogy for an institution so respected that has fallen so far so fast? I can’t think of one.”

No one claims that Mr. Hurd, now president of Oracle, is another Steve Jobs. His critics have portrayed him as a glorified chief operating officer who ruthlessly cut costs and starved innovation. Still, there’s no denying the results during the six years he led H.P.: pro forma earnings leaped 242 percent on a 57 percent gain in revenue (to $120.4 billion); H.P.’s stock price rose 130 percent, to over $45 a share; free cash flow surged 138 percent and operating margins doubled. Forbes magazine put him on its cover in April 2010 with the headline: “He Wants It All.”

To replace Mr. Hurd, H.P.’s board hired Léo Apotheker, the former chief executive of the German software giant SAP, even though SAP had declined to renew Mr. Apotheker’s contract after just seven months in the top position and he was linked to a software theft scandal that cost SAP a $1.3 billion damages award (he has denied any direct involvement). Nor, as a software executive, did he have much experience with hardware, especially the printers and servers at the core of H.P.’s franchise.

On Jan. 20 this year, H.P. announced the resignations of four directors, two of whom had initially supported Mr. Hurd during board deliberations and resisted his immediate ouster, according to people with knowledge of the decision. Mr. Apotheker served on a committee that proposed the five new directors to replace them, prompting sharp criticism from the shareholder watchdog Institutional Shareholder Services, which said H.P. had violated its own rules in allowing its chief executive to play a role in choosing board members who are supposed to be independent. (H.P.’s chairman, Ray Lane, denied any violation of rules, and told Bloomberg News that the new board members “aren’t buddies of Apotheker,” adding that “because Léo and I know the industry, it would be hard to pick any name we don’t know.” An H.P. spokeswoman said that the company drew praise from many corporate governance experts for shaking up the board.)

After taking time to study H.P.’s operations, Mr. Apotheker hosted a three-day conference, “HP Summit 2011,” beginning March 14 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a venue long associated with dazzling new product announcements from Apple. His presentation emphasized cloud computing and software, including WebOS, the highly regarded operating system H.P. gained when it acquired Palm Inc. under Mr. Hurd. Mr. Apotheker revealed that WebOS would be the future operating system in all the company’s computers and said that H.P. would be shipping 100 million devices using it. He said curiously little about H.P.’s vaunted printer or server divisions, which accounted for the bulk of the company’s profits.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8f46f50701765635389e2f210aa18211

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: analogy, software concern, tablet computer

In Deal With NBC, Amazon Seeks to Widen Its Video Streaming Service

July 29, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The attention around its content acquisitions suggests a budding rivalry with Netflix and a strategy of stocking up on films and TV shows for the tablet computer that the company is developing. Much like Apple, Amazon wants to have an assortment of content available for owners of the forthcoming device.

The NBC deal gives Amazon nonexclusive access to films like “Elizabeth,” “Babe” and “Billy Elliott.”

Last week, Amazon and CBS announced a similar deal that lets Amazon stream about 2,000 episodes of older TV shows like “The Tudors” and “Medium.”

In both cases the content is available through Amazon Prime, a $79-a-year membership service that gives buyers free two-day shipping. The five-month-old streaming service is available at no additional cost for members.

Amazon is just one of the Internet companies that is seeking to compete more directly with Netflix, which has about 25 million subscribers, many of whom stream films and TV shows, but which may look vulnerable this summer and fall as it imposes a price increase for some subscribers.

Netflix acknowledged in its earnings letter to shareholders this week that both Amazon and Hulu Plus, the subscription arm of Hulu, are in the marketplace, but noted that it has “vastly more streaming content” than Amazon and has many more customers than either service.

“So far, we haven’t detected an impact on our business from Amazon Prime,” the letter from Netflix stated.

For media companies, the suitors are welcome. At the time of the Amazon-CBS deal, Anthony DiClemente of Barclays Capital said that he believed CBS was in talks with other online distributors for similar deals, citing Microsoft, Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, as potential partners.

Given that multiple online distributors are bidding for such content, “we remain of the belief that digital media distribution is an incremental boon to core film/TV studio economics, as media content owners like CBS continue to benefit from the simple laws of supply and demand,” Mr. DiClemente wrote in an analyst note.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fe4bb36b17e05c4392016b0edb1e47ac

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: google, nbc deal, tablet computer

E-Books Outsell Print Books at Amazon

May 20, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Since April 1, Amazon sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, including books without Kindle versions and excluding free e-books.

“We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, in a statement. “We’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.”

But people should not exile their bookshelves to storage quite yet, many analysts warned. Over all, e-books account for only about 14 percent of all general consumer fiction and nonfiction books sold, according to Forrester Research.

“E-book reading is a big deal and it’s going to continue to be even bigger,” said James L. McQuivey, a digital media analyst at Forrester. “But we are not to the point where e-books are a majority of unit sales and certainly not a majority of revenue.”

Amazon’s latest milestone was unsurprising to industry observers. The company said last July that sales of e-books outnumbered hardcover books and it said in January that the same was true for paperbacks. For Amazon, though, the milestone is proof that it has successfully leapt from a print business to a digital one, a transition that has challenged most companies that sell media.

It also sets the stage for Amazon to introduce an Android tablet computer, which is expected this year. E-book reading would most likely be a centerpiece of the device, which would have significantly more functionality than a Kindle to compete against the iPad.

“Just as music helped the iPod to increase the relevancy of the iPad and the iPhone, books can do the same for Amazon’s tablet,” said Jordan Rohan, an Internet analyst at Stifel Nicolaus.

Amazon declined to comment on the reports that it is making a tablet.

Amazon credited the surge in e-book sales in part to its newest, lowest-priced Kindle with ads, which was introduced in April for $114 and is now Amazon’s best-selling Kindle.

Even if e-books overall do not outsell print books outside of Amazon, the online bookstore is certainly a strong indicator of a trend. E-book sales in March were $69 million, an increase of 146 percent from the year before, the Association of American Publishers said Thursday. Sales of adult hardcover books grew 6 percent while paperback sales decreased nearly 8 percent.

E-books have become vastly more accessible to consumers in the last year. Across the industry, publishers have been rapidly digitizing their catalog of books, making older titles available in e-book form for the first time. Even smaller independent houses that had resisted selling e-books have changed their position and discovered a new way to sell their older books — traditionally a large part of many publishers’ revenues.

Still, David Shanks, the chief executive of Penguin Group USA, cautioned that the Amazon announcement could be misleading. “There are many, many places around the country that sell all physical and no e-books,” Mr. Shanks said, adding that there is still “tremendous” demand for print books in bookstores, and at Wal-Mart, Target, airport stores and supermarkets, among other retailers.

Russ Grandinetti, vice president for Kindle content at Amazon, said that e-book sales had helped the publishing industry overall. “Even though some digital sales may be substitutions from print, one of the great impacts that the digital business has is people spend more minutes a day reading. They make reading more of a habit, and that’s good for the total book business,” he said.

Though Amazon has dominated e-book sales so far, the market is still evolving. Publishers said that Amazon’s share of the e-book market has decreased significantly in the last two years as Barnes Noble has made gains with its Nook devices and new competitors have entered the e-book market, like Apple and Google.

Amazon did not disclose the number of books sold or how its revenue and profit break out for print books and e-books.

In addition to standard-price e-books, from $12.99 to $14.99, Amazon sells the majority of its 950,000 Kindle books for less than $9.99 and some cost as little as 99 cents. Thursday’s announcement includes Kindle Singles, which are shorter pieces of writing, like a Fortune magazine article, and “no doubt helped them reach that ratio,” said Michael Norris, a senior analyst for Simba Information.

“They’re taking print sales away from others while their own devices are taking print sales away from them,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “That’s the real import of those numbers. It’s one more nail in the coffin of brick and mortar stores.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=feb366b82922935e28060e50dc16a0e7

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: e reader, hardcover books, tablet computer