VentureBeat

The new BlackBerry Bold smartphone, which is widely seen as manufacturer Research in Motion’s attempt to steal some of the iPhone’s thunder, will be a “big improvement” over previous models, says Citigroup analyst Jim Suva. He and his team reportedly spent 12 hours testing the new phone and came away impressed.

Suva has predicted that the Bold will play a key role in RIM’s fortunes in the coming months. It’s already available in Europe, and will launch in Canada tomorrow, but a U.S. release date hasn’t been announced.

The Bold has done a good job of catching up on one of the iPhone’s biggest advantages, namely its web browser. Suva says the new browser improves on the Curve and Pearl BlackBerry models. The display is better, too; Suva reports using it to watch the Will Ferrell film Talladega Nights. (Not that I imagine many folks would actually want to watch a full movie on their BlackBerries — the thought of shrinking Lawrence of Arabia down to a mobile display makes me want to cry — but it’s a worthwhile test.)

One of the biggest complaints about the new iPhone has been the erratic 3G connection, although that has improved with firmware updates. Suva says the Bold also has some 3G connection issues, particularly on streets with tall buildings, and predicts RIM won’t offer the phone in the United States until those issues are fixed.

Overall, he says the Bold is “a strong product but not a game changer.” The report isn’t online, but Silicon Alley Insider and Reuters both have summaries.

Agito Networks has figured out a way for enterprises to embrace WiFi based mobile phones even though wireless carriers haven’t made it easy to integrate WiFi with the cellular phone system. Thanks to its clever solution, the company is announcing today that it has raised $13 million in a second round of venture capital.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company hopes to make it easier for big businesses to adopt smart phones with WiFi access for employees who have to deal with poor reception inside buildings and high cellular network costs.

Castile Ventures led the round. ITX International Holdings and original investor Battery Ventures also participated. The company also said it has named David Leonard, a former Cisco executive, as its executive chairman.

Leonard has taken over running the company since its previous CEO, Ron Markovich, left recently. Leonard said the company is searching for a new CEO who can scale the business and that he hopes to make that hire within the next three months.

Agito puts its Roam Anywhere Mobility Router into a company’s data center. The router figures out how to instantaneously switch a call from a WiFi network to a cell phone network, depending on which network has better reception and which is more cost effective. The technology is known as “fixed mobile convergence.”

The router lets someone with a WiFi cell phone access the company’s address book or internal phone extensions easily. The aim is to let callers receive phone calls inside buildings where it’s cheaper to use a WiFi network and likely that WiFi reception will be better than cellular network reception. The company said it takes a matter of 100 milliseconds or less to hand off a call from the cell networks to WiFi. Normally, the handoff is rocky with similar devices.

The technology should appeal to workplaces such as hospitals that have mobile workforces and often have trouble getting reception inside buildings or in basements.

ITX’s specialty is international markets, and that’s one reason it participated in the round. Agito plans to use part of the money to expand overseas and it will tap ITX’s contacts. Agito was founded in April, 2006. Pejman Roshan, Agito’s co-founder and vice president of marketing, said that the timing is good for this kind of product because 60 percent to 70 percent of enterprises have now deployed WiFi networks. Also, Nokia, Research in Motion, Apple and others have now deployed handsets that can access WiFi networks for data networking.

But the carriers have been reluctant to let users bypass the cellular networks by using the WiFi networks for calls. By making it easy to switch calls between networks, Agito bridges the gap and saves money for corporations, Roshan said. Rivals include Stoke, which also received a round of $41.8 million in a fourth round of funding recently. We wrote about Stoke earlier this year.

While WiFi is subject to hacking, Roshan said that Agito makes it easy to handle calls securely because the enterprise phones are often centrally managed via enterprise servers. Over time, the company hopes to add new features related to mobile video, instant messages, and push-to-talk (walkie-talkie service).

To date, the company has raised about $20 million. Battery Ventures funded the first round in December, 2006. Agito has about 45 employees. Roshan said the fundraising process wasn’t too difficult and the company received multiple offers.

[Agito is a nominee for best mobile comany at MobileBeat, our mobile conference on July 24. Just a few days left to vote for your favorite mobile application or service company.]

Here’s the latest action:

Dow Jones has its worst June since Depression: U.S. stocks tumbled on Friday and sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its worst June performance since the Great Depression. Record oil prices, credit-market write downs and the the economic slump spooked everybody. Goldman Sachs told investors to sell GM stock, sparking a sell-off as crude prices rose again. The broader S&P 500 index fell 2.9 percent on Friday. The Dow is at its lowest since September 2006. It has fallen 9.4 percent so far this month, its worst June since an 18 percent drop in 1930.

Rupert ready for another bite: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Permira Advisors made a $970 million bid to buy NDS Group, a provider of digital technology for pay-TV services. NDS Group said it would evaluate the $60 a share offer, which is 21 percent above Friday’s closing price of $49.70.

Take that, VMware: Microsoft unveiled its long-awaited virtualization technology to compete against VMware. Its Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V product has been in the works since 2003, when Microsoft acquired Connectix, which made software to run both Windows and the Mac OS on the same computer.

Palm stock heads to bottom: Palm’s stock fell eight percent Friday a day after the company reported a worse-than-expected loss for its fourth fiscal quarter. The company dropped $43.4 million, compared with a profit a year earlier. Revenue was down 26 percent to $296.2 million. It also expects to lose money in the current quarter. Plam’s Treo continues to lose ground to Research In Motion’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone.

Attention, K-Mart shoppers: Microsoft may have something up its sleeve for the E3 trade show starting July 14. The company is rumored to be cutting the price of its Xbox 360 Premium unit from $349 to $299. The latest rumor comes from a purported K-Mart ad. It’s been a long time since Microsoft last cut its game console prices by $50 in August, 2007. The price cuts say a lot. It shows Microsoft is the aggressor in driving down prices, putting pressure on both Sony and Nintendo to do the same. It also says that Microsoft sees a need to cut prices, perhaps because of slowing sales of its consoles. And the fact that it isn’t cutting $100 shows that the company isn’t crazy and doesn’t want to lose lots of money on each console sold.

Sony promises a big overhaul, new PlayStation 3 video downloading: Sony has been restructuring for three years but now CEO Howard Stringer is proposing an aggressive strategy built around video downloading and products that can talk to each other across the Internet. Video downloading will be part of products ranging from TVs to the PlayStation 3.

iPhone will debut in Canada with underwhelming prices: Rogers unveiled some not-so-popular prices for Apple’s Jesus phone for its scheduled debut in a couple of weeks.

Google speeds Blackberry search results: Google said that it has improved the speed of its mobile search results pages for Blackberry web browsers.

Updated with more info about the BlackBerry Bold

Microsoft and Research in Motion are partnering to bring Windows Live services to RIM’s BlackBerry smartphone. In addition to coming right after RIM’s announcement of the new BlackBerry Bold (implying, I guess, that the old BlackBerry was meek; it’s pictured to the left), this news seems to be RIM’s latest move to keep the BlackBerry competitive with Apple’s iPhone.

Basically, the deal means that BlackBerry customers will be able to user Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger to send emails and instant messages, respectively, on their smartphones. Users will just need to enter their Windows Live email addresses and passwords once, and can then access their accounts with just the push of a button.

Microsoft says the services will be available on BlackBerrys sometime this summer, and will support multiple languages.

In pretty much any context, this would seem like a smart move, allowing both companies to offer more services (in RIM’s case) on more platforms (in Microsoft’s case). But RIM’s addition of htese applications is particularly worth noting since RIM is rumored to be worried about the iPhone’s business-friendly functionality, including the iPhone’s compatibility with Microsoft Exchange, as announced in March. That compatibility will include features like “push” email, which is also a big feature in the Windows Live/BlackBerry partnership.

RIM also just announced a $150 million fund for developers creating applications for the BlackBerry, following on the heels of Kleiner Perkins’ $100 million iFund for the iPhone. Rick Segal, a partner at JLA Ventures (an investor in the BlackBerry fund), told us that talks about the fund took place over the past year and that the fund’s emphasis will be on maximizing profits rather than boosting BlackBerry’s developer ecosystem.

Update: Because I focused on the Windows Live announcement, my initial post gave the BlackBerry Bold short shrift. Despite my kneejerk skepticism due to the grandiose name, it looks like the Bold will indeed be a step forward, if not exactly an iPhone-killer. The BlackBerry traditionally been marketed and used as a business device, but with the iPhone’s popularity, RIM seems to have realized it needs to offer consumer features too. The most important additions are greater multimedia support and connection to the faster 3G network. The first addition helps bring the BlackBerry up-to-speed with the iPhone, while the later actually moves the RIM device ahead, since there are plenty of rumors but no official launch date for the 3G iPhone.

Updated

Apple has not let us down.

Chief executive Steve Jobs said the company will launch its own phone, dubbed the iPhone, and that Cingular Wireless will provide the phone service, ending weeks of speculation.

It will do much more than make calls and play music. It aims to be a full-fledged smart phone, and is underpinned with some elements of Apple software, such as its Safari browser, which could expose mainstream users to Apple’s eco-system in more varied ways. This may radically rewrite the digital balance of power, what with Apple simultaneous unveiling of its iTV device — which lets you transfer to your TV content from multiple PCs, outside sources, or Websites such as Apple.com. It contains a 40 gigabyte hard drive, and will cost $299 and ship in February.

From the WSJ, which first broke the news:

The iPhone, which is less than a half-inch thick, has no keyboard or dial pad. Instead, it uses a 3.5-inch wide touch-sensitive screen to make calls, watch videos or listen to music. It comes with a two-megapixel digital camera built into the back and can connect to the Internet using Wi-Fi wireless technology.

The iPhone, which will be available in the U.S. in June and later this year in Europe, will come in two versions. A model with four gigabytes of storage space will cost $499, while a version with eight gigabytes of storage will cost $599.

The phone will automatically synch a user’s media — movies, music, photos — through Apple’s iTunes digital content store. The device also synchs email content, Web bookmarks and nearly any type of digital content stored on a computer. “It’s just like an iPod,” Mr. Jobs said, “charge and synch.”

It will detect location, and Yahoo will provide Web-based email, while Google will provide maps — thus ensuring the buy-in of those two companies as supporters of the phone. Jobs says he wants 1 percent of the phone market by 2008. The company is negotiating with Cisco to be able to use the name “iPhone.” Cisco owns rights to the name, and recently introduced its own WiFi phone under the same name.

Here’s more, from the NYT:

iPhone rests heavily on a high-resolution touch screen that makes it possible to use a finger to control the phone. It also has several more subtle features, including sensors that track light and movement to prompt the phone to control screen brightness and physical orientation and other aspects of its operation. For example, when the phone is placed next to the user’s face, the keyboard is automatically turned off.

One of the immediate questions that analysts and industry executives posed about Apple’s new product was why the designers eschewed the higher-speed Cingular digital cellular 3-G network. Mr. Jobs said later models would support additional networking standards.

Apple’s shares soared more than six percent after the announcement. And in a sign that the market sees Apple likely to take market share away from others, shares of smart phone leader Research in Motion, which makes the Blackberry, plunged by about seven percent.

(Updated with confirmation that Kleiner and others made money)

Motorola will buy Santa Clara wireless messaging company Good Technology for an undisclosed amount, in an effort to compete for big business clients.

Research In Motion’s Blackberry has dominated the corporate mobile email market, and Motorola’s Q device has failed to make significant traction. Moreover, Motorola’s rival, Nokia, bought mobile email provider Intellisync in February.

The market for wireless email has been brutal, with players like Visto, of Redwood City and NTP, the Virginia-based patent-holding company, filing suit against others and extracting large licensing fees. NTP forced RIM to pay a $612.5 million settlement. While Good has licensed technology from NTP, it is still the subject of a lawsuit from Visto, which itself has raised fresh cash even while losing money.

That competition and costly legal battles most likely pressured Good to sell, though it’s unknown whether all investors made money from the deal. Investors Kleiner Perkins, BA Ventures, Crosslink Capital and several other firms collectively invested more than $200 million into the company. (Update: We since confirmed that Kleiner, at least, made money from the deal.)

Here’s the Mercury News story about the deal, which shows there is disagreement about how well Good is doing. Here is Good’s annoucement on the deal.