Amazon needs to restructure Amazon Prime. Amazon has announced that its sales of Kindle products this year were the best ever but given last year’s shipments, that is not saying very much. Amazon’s latest move to drive adoption of the Amazon Kindle Fire series is to allow payment by instalments. Users pay 25% up front...
Making Windows Phone and RT free is pointless. The latest notion to come from the re-organisation of Microsoft is the idea that reducing Windows Phone and Windows RT royalties to zero will somehow boost support for the platform. I am sure that this idea has occurred to Microsoft but I think it very unlikely to...
Snapchat is valued at $500m not $2bn-$3bn A look at the regulatory filings strongly suggests that the current valuation of Snapchat is $500m not the $2bn-$3bn that is being thrown around. The event of raising capital at Snapchat has led to an updated certificate of incorporation being filed. Snapchat is affecting a series C round...
A switch to Android from Asha might just work. It looks very much like Nokia has decided to participate in the race to the bottom and will be making low end Android devices. However, where LG, HTC and Motorola will all fail, Nokia might just succeed. This would be forked version of Android that...
The Moto G will be good for units but awful for profits. Motorola is taking a leaf out of Nokia’s book but is taking the strategy one step too far. Shipments of the Moto X have been very disappointing leaving Motorola with little option other than to give the hardware away. With a 4.5”, 329ppi...
The curse of the US market looks to have been broken. Figures for the US smartphone market show that Nokia looks to have finally broken the market share curse that has plagued it since the days of TDMA. Figures from Counterpoint (see here) show that Nokia’s market share has increased massively both YoY and QoQ....
Nokia’s victory over HTC is a sign of what is to come. HTC’s troubles have deepened further with Nokia winning an injunction against it in the UK. This injunction has been granted on the basis of HTC’s infringement of a non-standard essential patent (SEP) related to base station and handset communication. The injunction has been...
Wii U looks like it is dead in the water. Despite a nine month lead and a lower price the Wii U has been decimated by its bigger brothers who have only been in the market for a week or so. The company is stubbornly sticking to its 9m unit shipment forecast (year to March...
Tablet PCs should drive a turnaround in 2014. The predictions for 2014 are beginning to come in and they do not paint a pretty picture. PCs are expected to decline again next year by 3.8% on top of a 10.1% decline this year. (IDC). However, IDC is a little bit more positive than the normal...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
Yahoo! – Eye off the ball
Yahoo needs to stop shopping and get integrating. Yahoo! is in line to make yet another acquisition but I am starting to wonder whether or not it has already shopped enough. The latest target is imgur, a photo sharing site that has 100m users and a small amount of revenue. Imgur is like Instagram in...