emsprime.com

Tim Kelly, chief marketing officer, and Mark Angelino, president of sales and distribution, are also stepping down.

In another effort to get the business back on track, Sprint said last week that it will cut 4,000 jobs and close about 8 percent of its retail stores–moves that should help cut costs between $700 million and $800 million a year, according to the company.

This most recent executive shake-up comes a week after the company said it expects big losses in cell phone subscribers for the fourth quarter of 2007 when it reports earnings February 28. It also said that 2008′s outlook isn’t looking so good either.

Sprint has been in the process of reshaping its executive team for the past few months. Chief Executive Officer Gary Forsee was the first top executive to be forced out of the company in October. Dan Hesse, who had been the CEO of Embarq, a Sprint spin-off took over the top position in December.

In particular, critics are skeptical of Sprint’s plans to build a fourth generation using a technology called WiMax. Sprint has already committed to spending $5 billion on the network, which is expected to begin commercial roll-outs in the first half of the year.

On Thursday, the beleaguered wireless carrier said that three of its top execs, including Chief Financial Officer Paul Saleh, are leaving the company effective Friday. The company named Senior Vice President and Controller William Arendt as the interim CFO, while it searches for a permanent replacement.

But job cuts won’t necessarily solve the company’s main problem, which is retaining cell phone subscribers. Last week, Sprint said that for the fourth quarter of 2007 it had lost a total of 683,000 post-paying subscribers and 202,000 pre-paying subscribers, ending 2007 with 53.8 million post-paying subscribers and 4.1 million pre-paying customers.

Much of Sprint’s problems stem from the 2005 acquisition of Nextel Communications. Network integration of the two companies has not gone smoothly, and former Nextel customers have complained of worsening service. Investors have criticized the company’s top brass for not focusing enough attention on the core business.

Meanwhile, AT&T, the largest wireless operator in the country, said Thursday that it added a record 2.68 million new mobile subscribers in the fourth quarter, bringing its total to 70.05 million mobile subscribers at the end of 2007.

Sprint Nextel is looking for replacements at the top of its corporate food chain.

Even though Sprint’s management has said it plans to continue to move forward with its WiMax plans, a new team in the executive suite could change the strategy dramatically.

Richard T. Stuebi is the BP Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement at The Cleveland Foundation, and is also the Founder and President of NextWave Energy, Inc.

No matter how the results of the experiment pan out, and no matter your personal view on the fundmental utility of biofuels, this is yet another example of how a passionate entrepreneur — albeit one with billions of dollars on his personal balance sheet like Richard Branson — is exploring the cleantech frontiers of what is possible, what is economical, what is environmentally-beneficial.

Over the weekend, Virgin Atlantic Airways flew a passenger-less Boeing 747-400 partially fueled by a biofuel mixture of coconut oil and babassu oil from London’s Heathrow Airport to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. (Read CNET blog.)

The test flight, performed to evaluate comparative engine performance and emissions rates with standard jet fuel and biofuel mixtures, was conducted by Virgin along with partners Boeing, the engine-maker General Electric, and the biofuel companyImperium Renewables.

I’ll jump on the iPhone bandwagon, now that the price has dropped, and there’s faster data transfer.

(Credit: Moo-Cow Music)

I immediately thought of all those band rehearsals in which nondrummers attempt to describe a beat they have in mind to the drummer, and end up spitting and clicking like the sound effects guy in the Police Academy movies. Now they can whip out their iPhones and play exactly what they have in mind. Drummers love that!

But exciting as it might have been for
iPhone holdouts like me, today’s keynotes at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference didn’t have much music-related news. Steve Jobs did promise that the audio on the new iPhones would sound better than the current version, and Apple is finally getting rid of the weird recessed earphone jack that caused a lot of angst because it was hard to use with older peripherals. But that was about it–no big iTunes updates, for example.

The 12-Bar Blues feature of the Band app for the iPhone will keep you on the I-IV-V.

One demonstration did catch my ear: Moo-Cow Music’s Band, which was originally developed by a single programmer, Mark Terry, as a sort of fun hack. It is now being rewritten for the iPhone development platform and offered with Apple’s blessing through the iTunes App Store. It allows you to tap out and program simple drum beats, add bass, piano, guitar, and vinyl-scratching noises, then mix them all together in a simple song.

I can’t wait to get rid of my Verizon Wireless service, which has deteriorated horribly in the last two months (nice timing, guys!), and my contract expires a convenient four days before the iPhone 3G goes on sale.

Apple’s SDK documentation (embedded in the TechCrunch post) points out that the iPhone can only display a single application screen at a time, and urges prospective developers to spend a lot of time designing an application that can handle quick stops and starts. “In other words, users should not feel that leaving your iPhone application and returning to it later is any more difficult than switching among applications on a computer.”

Intel has been pitching its upcoming lineup of x86-based Silverthorne and Moorestown processors as ideal for the next generation of mobile devices, because they can run any type of software that you can currently run on a PC. The chipmaker has a point in that if you’re already familiar with x86 development process, you might find a Silverthorne chip an easier target than an ARM-based chip. But all those
Mac and PC software developers will have to bring a totally different mindset to mobile development anyway. Those developers who have been doing this type of development already could have a substantial edge.

The SDK item drawing the most attention Friday, however, is that third-party applications will not be allowed to run in the background. TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington wrote, “Instant-messaging applications (we saw a demo of an AIM version at the event today), can’t run in the background and collect messages while you are doing something else. Leave the application to take a phone call, and it shows you offline.”

Twenty-four hours after Apple revealed its procedure for getting third-party applications on the
iPhone, developers have a few questions about the software development kit, but seem mostly satisfied.

There could be a number of reasons behind this stance, perhaps chief among them that the iPhone might not be able to support the processing demands required by multitasking, but plenty of other phones seem to be able to juggle more than one application at a time. I wonder whether future Apple-developed iPhone applications–like, say an iPhone version of iChat–will be subject to the same restrictions.

One interesting passage in the iPhone SDK documentation should give Intel something to think about. “If you have an existing computer application, don’t port it to iPhone OS. People use iPhone OS-based devices very differently than they use desktop and laptop computers, and they have very different expectations for the user experience.”

Apple's Scott Forstall explains how application development works on the iPhone.

In the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s presentation at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., reaction was almost universally positive to Apple’s SDK plans. Some developers had feared worse outcomes, such as having to submit their source code to Apple, and seemed willing to let Apple take a piece of their revenue and be the exclusive distributor for iPhone applications in exchange for getting a crack at the technology.

Now that everyone has moved a good mile or so away from the famed “reality-distortion field,” a few tidbits regarding the SDK are coming to light. Thursday, I noted that the devil would be in the details of the SDK, namely in what types of applications Apple chose to allow on the iPhone. A day later, we’re getting a better picture of that.

For example, you’re not going to be able to use anything other than Apple’s official APIs (application programming interfaces), notes Ken Aspeslagh (via Daring Fireball). This isn’t much of a shock, but it means that a lot of techniques learned developing unofficial iPhone apps will probably not work with the official SDK.

Also, Aspelagh notes that a third-party application can’t write data to another application, which is known as “sand-boxing.” This is a security-influenced rule, presumably. The downer is that “the possibility of cool mashups is basically eliminated,” notes Wired’s Scott Gilbertson.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

An ISP in that region is having a caching problem on its servers that is affecting Gmail users there, as well as eBay accounts, Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds acknowledged. Google has contacted the ISP and is supplying a workaround for Gmail, he said. Freidenfelds said he did not know which ISP it was or how widespread the problem was.

Meanwhile, a reader from Sri Lanka reports that he had a similar problem with his Gmail account.

Sharpe said she could not say how many eBay customers were affected and declined to say how long the glitch lasted. PayPal customers were not impacted by the problem, she said.

I’m still waiting for more information from Google and will update the story when I have it.

He said he had inadvertently logged into more than 30 other accounts, and he supplied about two dozen screen shots as proof. Al-Shalabi said the problem was fixed by Wednesday. He said used the same ISP to access his Microsoft Hotmail account during that time and encountered no problems.

A Gmail user in Kuwait reported to CNET News.com over the weekend that he had been having trouble for most of the day logging into his account. More troubling, though, was the fact that he was able to see other people’s private information, including scores of personal e-mail messages, “keycodes for some embassy gate,” as well as usernames and passwords, Abdulaziz Al-Shalabi wrote to CNET News.com. “Most likely, other strangers are taking a look at my own personal stuff as I type this.”

(Credit:
Google)

A glitch with an Internet service provider in Kuwait has enabled at least one Gmail user to access others’ Gmail accounts, Google said Wednesday.

Updated February 21 with further comments from the Gmail customer in Kuwait, plus comments from eBay and a reader from Sri Lanka.

eBay worked with the ISP to resolve the problem at least a month ago, spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe said Friday morning. “It wasn’t a major problem…not anything on a large scale,” in terms of duration, she said.

More fascinating, however, is Trent’s account of how he wrestled with the temptation to sell the band’s allotment of tickets–10 percent, in NIN’s case–for more than face value. As he rightly points out, as long as there are people willing to pay $1,000 for front-row seats, either the band has to charge that amount and be criticized for looking greedy, or a second market is going to thrive.

Eventually, concert tickets will be sold through a dynamic pricing model, just like items in a bazaar.

If you’re sick of paying exorbitant prices for big-concert arena tickets, I promise you that there are plenty of small bands playing in your town tonight that you’d enjoy, that would love to have you there, and that won’t charge you more than $30 for the privilege. You might not get to hear your favorite song, but you’ll actually see and hear the band up close, and you won’t have to deal with that “down in front” guy who always seems to sit behind you.

(Credit: Photo by Babak Gholizadeh, via Wikipedia)

A lot has happened in the intervening time–Live Nation emerged as a competitor to Ticketmaster, then agreed to merge with Ticketmaster, and The Wall Street Journal has published a couple
of articles exposing the fact that artists and managers often team up with ticket sellers (like Ticketmaster) and brokers (like Ticketmaster subsidiary TicketExchange) to sell their own allotments of tickets for several times their face value.

I agree with his prediction of the future: eventually, the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merged company will move to dynamic pricing for all tickets, similar to how airlines price tickets today. If it’s a hot ticket, prices could skyrocket even higher than scalpers’ prices today. Then again, if tickets aren’t selling, there might be a last-minute fire sale–good for fans.

A year and a half after I first blogged about ticket brokers and the free market, the rest of the world is finally catching on to the fact that scalping isn’t going away.

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor on Sunday posted a fascinating take on the whole practice of scalping. As he points out, Ticketmaster or Live Nation could have stopped the practice of scalping eons ago–all they’d had to do is print the purchaser’s name on the ticket and require a photo ID matching the ticket to get in, as they do with airline tickets. (And hey, some concerts–like the Police tour–have seats that cost more than the average airline ticket.) The reason they don’t is because Ticketmaster benefits from the scalper’s market through its TicketExchange subsidiary.

In the end, NIN decided to charge only face value for its allotment of presale fan club seats and to put antiscalping provisions in place: buyers’ names will be printed on the ticket, and buyers will have to go through a special entrance where IDs will be checked. He believes that forgoing short-term gain in the interest of long-term fan relationships is the right thing to do.

I’m not sure what to do with this information, but I think Seth Godin is probably right in his estimation of the Long Tail theory:

The problem, of course, is that you don’t have a choice. You can give the hit a shot, but it’s awfully crowded at that end of the curve.

If you have a choice between being on page 30 of the Google results for “Bolivian sushi” or the number one match for “buy life insurance”, go for the latter. No brainer.

My question? Is the Long Tail where losers go to die? If so, is there a way to turn losing in the Short Tail into a strategy? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s a viable way to be “the lame alternative for those who don’t want the hit.” It’s probably true that we have no choice but to be part of the Long Tail, but I can’t see a way to decide to be second-best from the beginning.

A lot of people don’t seem to understand a key implication of the long tail: Given the choice, it’s better to make a hit. If you have a choice of cutting a top 10 record or making a track of Jamaican polka music for iTunes, go for the hit.

commentary

In short, the Long Tail is a great theory, but seems to provide no concrete, strategic direction. At least it made Chris Anderson rich. It probably won’t make you rich.