5 O’Clock Roundup: Yahoo’s communication engine, Motorola’s idea factory, and more
Motorola turned to employees for new phone ideas — “Why should we trust you?” one employee blurted to co-CEO Sanjay Jha a few minutes into his first meeting with employees to gather new ideas for the company’s mobile phone handsets. Motorola corporate culture had stalled, and Jha wanted to jump-start it. He pressed forward, bringing employees not experienced at product design or product management into the brainstorming process for this year’s lineup of handsets.
Moto’s most radical idea was to drop several handset operating systems, such as the Symbian system found on Nokias, and to move forward with the open-source Android operating system backed by Google.
[Photo: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times]
Yahoo Investor Day Liveblog – Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan reports that Carol Bartz is now calling Yahoo a “communications engine.” Sometimes, when he can’t hear every word, it gets better: “We wake up every morning with passion to beat every one of them … and we usually do … We’re not a search company. We’re not a display company. We’re a broadbased internet [something, communication?] company … that is awesome.”
Disney.com launches cheery, family-friendly, all-conquering iPhone app — The company has created a free single entry point to all its content and connectedness features. I spent half this afternoon talking to Disney.com VP Jason Davis. He talks enthusiastically about going “beyond the browser” with iPhone apps, video content, etc, that let Disney movie fans, for example, continue to have a relationship with the characters from Up after they’ve seen the movie. I think Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra would disagree with Davis, because in VicWorld we’ll run all our software in little browsers that don’t seem like browsers.
Intel helps Joyent become the first cloud computing service in China — ReadWriteWeb reports that Joyent, which offers instant-deployment, scalable cloud systems for businesses, is working with Intel and the Qinhuangdao Economic and Technology Development Zone (QETDZ) to bring its infrastructure cloud computing service to the Chinese market.
BusinessWeek goes hunting for the money in apps — “Look past the beer-drinking apps and flatulence programs and you’ll see something significant taking shape: a bustling app economy that’s creating new fortunes for entrepreneurs and changing the way business gets done.” They say that every week, I know, but there really is an app market hiding beneath the hype.
Bing, your vampire decision engine – My Bing obsession has been fed, for now, by these new TV ads.
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.