Articles by Rob Spiegel

HP reported its fiscal first quarter results for 2011 on Tuesday, revealing a strong performance in earnings and income. Its net income was US$2.6 billion for its first fiscal quarter, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier. Overall revenue was $32.2 billion, up from $31.2 during last year's first quarter The company's projections, however, jarred som...

Amazon on Tuesday announced the launch of video streaming. The service gives Amazon Prime members unlimited, commercial-free instant streaming of more than 5,000 movies and TV shows. In the Past, Amazon's Prime membership program has mostly been about free shipping -- members get free two-days shipping regardless of the purchase price for US$79 pe...

Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha provided more details about his company's new tablet, the Xoom, in a speech Thursday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Jha confirmed the Xoom's price will be US$799 when it launches on Verizon Wireless, and the WiFi version will be $600, according to press reports Jha also reportedly let it slip that...

Google just couldn't leave the bone alone. When Apple announced its digital content subscription service on Tuesday, Google came back with its own on Wednesday, complete with a lower margin for publishers On Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced a new subscription service, Google One Pass, at Humboldt University in Berlin. One Pass is a way ...

Apple has announced a new subscription service that will be available to all content-based apps on the App Store. This includes magazines, newspapers, videos, music and more. Apple will process payments and keep a 30 percent share as it does with current App Store sales. However, if a publisher should sell a subscription on its own site and then route it to the App Store, Apple would not collect the 30 percent commission...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered a keynote speech focused on Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, just days after announcing a major partnership with handset maker Nokia. Ballmer introduced new features to the mobile operating system, including deeper Twitter integration, multitasking, and the incorpora...

Nokia and Microsoft have banded together to fight Apple and Android. On Friday morning, Nokia announced it will partner with Microsoft, adopting the Windows Phone 7 operating system for its smartphones. In the past, Nokia has equipped its phones with its own software platform, Symbian, and a new one, MeeGo, was in development Earlier in the week, i...

Back in the mid-2000s, "Guitar Hero" was a smash, and imitators such as "Rock Band" soon joined it in the gaming stratosphere. However, in a fourth-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, Activision Blizzard pulled the plug on its once-innovative game, "due to continued declines in the music genre." The company is also dropped plans for a pl...

A leaked internal memo written by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, circulating in press reports, indicates major changes are in the works for the company; an official announcement is expected Friday. Elop's memo lays out Nokia's major problems, comparing its current situation to that of a man standing on a burning oil platform.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason released a statement on Monday regarding his company's Super Bowl ads, in response to a lot of flak from critics and the general public regarding Sunday's commercials. The ads start out appearing to be seeking support for humanitarian causes, but then switch up, revealing a tongue-in-cheek plug for deal-a-day website Group...

On midnight Monday, AOL announced it will buy The Huffington Post for US$315 million -- $300 million in cash and $15 million in AOL stock. The price is about 10 times the Post's revenue of $31 million. The cofounder and public face of The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, will become president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, which will handle all Huffington Post and AOL content.

Google's Android is now the global leader of the smartphone operating system pack. In the fourth quarter of 2010, shipments of Android-powered smartphones outnumbered all competitors, including the longstanding leader Nokia, according to a report from Canalys released Monday Shipments of Android-powered smartphones reached 32.9 million last qu...

The classic newspaper may finally gets its 21st-century update. News Corp.'s iPad-exclusive newspaper, The Daily, is set to launch on Feb. 2. A weekly subscription will reportedly cost 99 US cents. Issues of The Daily will be delivered automatically through Apple once users sign up. News Corp. told the E-Commerce Times the company cannot offer mor...

Video-on-demand website Hulu is embroiled in internal struggles over its business model. The site is a pioneer in Internet video when it was launched by TV networks in 2008, streaming recent episodes of popular TV shows, along with a limited number of commercials, to computers and other devices.

Facebook is tracking your comments for ad opportunities. On Tuesday, Facebook announced its new advertising platform, called "Sponsored Stories." The new ads will be integrated near the user's news feed. Advertisements can be prompted by words that appear in apps, statuses, check-ins and "likes."

Verizon's earnings report released Tuesday shows the company still outpacing competitors. Verizon Communications reported its fourth-quarter profit was US$2.64 billion, up from $617 million in 2009. That's a rise from 22 cents per share to 93 cents per share. Although Q4 sales were up 5.7 percent from last year to $16.15 billion, overall revenue fell 2.6 percent to $26.39 billion.

Facebook is ready to flex its advertising muscles. On Monday, Facebook's business director, Dan Rose, addressed attendees of the DLD media conference in Munich, speaking of the success of social games on Facebook from developers like Zynga and opportunities to expand its advertising to its 500 million-plus users, according to media reports Touting ...

Not long ago, Groupon said "no" to Google's buy offer. So Google has decided to create its own coupon program and is moving forward with Google Offers. Google almost always gets its way. Google Video was the company's response to YouTube, which Google eventually purchased in 2006. The company's philosophy seems to be "if you can't buy it -- create...

HP's board of directors has launched an internal investigation into the circumstances of former CEO Mark Hurd's departure from the company. The investigation was disclosed in a filing to the San Jose, Calif., federal court on Jan. 14. Hurd resigned from the company in August 2010 following allegations of misreported expenses and an alleged affair ...

Amazon wants to make your cloud computing simple. The company announced Elastic Beanstalk on Wednesday. The application makes it easier to use Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new application lets developers quickly deploy and manage Web services such as storage, computing clusters, application health monitoring, l...