Another record quarter

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Apple reports first quarter results:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 first quarter which spanned 14 weeks and ended December 31, 2011. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $26.74 billion and net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 44.7 percent compared to 38.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

tl;dr:
Sales of $46.33 billion, $13 billion in profit, 37 million iPhones, 15.4 million iPads

And some people thought the “hobby analysts” were crazy when they called numbers like the ones below:

Oh, and Samsung with their gazillion variations of different smartphones just got removed from its supposed first place with an estimated number of 35 million phones shipped by a company that’s currently only offering three models and sold 37 million of those.

That iPhone 4S. Remember how nobody was going to buy it?

And for some perspective:

Most Verizon smartphones sold last quarter were iPhones

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Tom Krazit at paidContent about the iPhone share on Verizon:

In the first quarter that Verizon Wireless was on board with Apple for an iPhone launch event, the company sold 4.2 million iPhones, accounting for more than half of the 7.7 million smartphones that its customers purchased in the fourth quarter.

During the last quarter all other smartphones on Verizon combined weren’t able to outsell Apple’s iPhone. That’s how bad the iPhone 4S sold. Apple must be really worried about re-using an old form-factor now.

Who’s taking bets whether or not Apple will post a record quarter later tonight?

The “End” of The Co-CEOs

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Research In Motion Names Thorsten Heins President and CEO:

The Board of Directors of BlackBerry® maker Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today announced that, acting on the recommendation of its Co-Chief Executive Officers to implement the succession plan they previously submitted to the Board, it has unanimously named Thorsten Heins as President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Heins was also appointed to RIM’s Board. The Board acted after conducting its own due diligence. Both appointments are effective immediately.

Let me quote every other website on this rock: “Finally”, but also read on:

Mike Lazaridis, former Co-Chair and Co-CEO, has become Vice Chair of RIM’s Board and Chair of the Board’s new Innovation Committee. As Vice Chair, he will work closely with Mr. Heins to offer strategic counsel, provide a smooth transition and continue to promote the BlackBerry brand worldwide.

Innovation Committee, really? Mr. Murph, take it from here.

MPAA: Here’s your White House petition

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For those who think hope that the White House actually looks at those petitions:

In just a few hours the petition amassed more than 5,000 votes and this number is increasing rapidly. As a former Senator, Chris Dodd has many friends in Washington so it’s unclear whether the petition will accomplish anything, but if the numbers grow big enough the White House won’t be able to ignore it either.

Previously Chris Dodd had an interesting interview with Fox News.

MPAA CEO Chris Dodd vs. Washington

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CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and former Sen. Chris Dodd in an interview with Fox News:

"Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News. "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake."

But don’t worry:

Meanwhile, it’s unclear if Dodd will follow through on the threats —- or whether it will matter. Hollywood has so far ponied up over $4.1 million to the Obama re-election campaign. That’s already higher than the $3.7 million it gave him in the 2008 campaign, according to Opensecrets.org.

Here’s one theory I’ve heard recently: Washington handed MegaUpload to the MPAA on a silver platter to pour oil on the troubled water they created by speaking up against (parts of) SOPA.

iBooks Author EULA

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Dan Wineman on the iBooks Author EULA:

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

This ain’t good. Let’s hope some lawyer has just gone “a bit” too far.

Update: David Smith about this case:

If I create a textbook using iBooks Author and then decide to made it freely available to the world (à la Khan Academy) I can do that without any restriction. Simple click ‘Export’ within iBook Author and the resulting file can be distributed by any means I choose and then loaded in iBooks. The mind boggles at what things may come out of this.

All Apple is doing with this restriction is saying that if you directly profit from this free tool and platform that we have created, then we deserve our cut. Which seems entirely fair to me.

Twitter acquires Summify, plans to shut down the service

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Summify Joins The Flock At Twitter:

Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.

The FAQ following the announcement doesn’t sound so great:

We will be disabling new account registrations immediately and we will also be removing some features. We will keep the email summaries for a few more weeks, but at some point we will shut down the current Summify product. In the meantime, if you’re a user of Summify you’ll still receive your summaries, just like before.

Profile pages will be removed, public summaries will cease to exist, new registrations aren’t accepted anymore.

Farewell Summify.

MPAA: Lost in translation

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MG Siegler at PandoDaily translating MPAA’s letter (PDF) about yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA blackouts:

If there’s a worse kind of statement Dodd could have crafted, it’s hard to think of what that could be. The end alone implies that the MPAA may have the clout to force the President and the broader U.S. government to step in, but the fact that the “blackouts” are going on today as planned shows they do not.

The right move here would have been to keep your mouth shut. The MPAA is fighting a PR battle they can’t win. Their best course of action is the lobby the hell out of this stuff behind the scenes and hope that negates the public backlash in the minds of lawmakers. (You can be sure they’re doing that too.)

Another interesting look at this SOPA/PIPA/OPEN mess is Adam Curry’s piece about SOPA being a Red Herring *cough*thick whois*cough* and suggesting to follow the money instead of just blacking out sites for 24 hours.

Update: For those asking what SOPA and PIPA actually are, here’s a video that might answer your questions.

Don’t Be Evil: OpenStreetMap Edition

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Remember last weeks report of Mocality vs. Google? Looks like Google’s streak is not coming to an end soon. This time it’s OpenStreetMap reporting deletions of their open, wiki-style mapping service:

Preliminary results show users from Google IP address ranges in India deleting, moving and abusing OSM data including subtle edits like reversing one-way streets.

Two OpenStreetMap accounts have been vandalizing OSM in London, New York and elsewhere from Google’s IP address, the same address in India reported by Mocality.

The most obvious vandalism started around last Thursday last week from these particular users however it may take us some time to do a full analysis. In fact over the last year we have had over 102 thousand hits on OSM using at least 17 accounts from this Google IP.

I wonder what Google has to say this time around? Another (the same?) random “team of people working on a Google project”?

It’ll be interesting to watch this thing unravel and find out what else the team behind this Google IP has done. I think this won’t be the last thing we heard about it.

OpenStreetMap is a service like Wikipedia, but instead of text it allows users to create maps.

Don’t Be Evil?

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Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow – The Google-Kenya ripoff:

The conclusion is hard to escape: Google — or people working on its behalf, with its knowledge and cooperation — took the numbers of tens of thousands of Kenyan businesses from Mocality’s database, then fraudulently solicited money from them by claiming to be in a joint venture with Mocality. This seems to me to be outright criminal activity, and Google has a lot of explaining to do.

Complete story from Mocality’s point of view can be found on their blog.

Also an interesting reply by Google’s VP for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets, Nelson Mattos:

We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.

One way to bend “Don’t Be Evil”: it wasn’t Google, it was just “a team of people working on a Google project”.

Looks like Google isn’t able to catch a breath these days.