Mark Bridge writes:
At the beginning of last week, Facebook and Instagram were the talk of the mobile industry. Was this billion-dollar deal the sign of another tech bubble? Facebook’s fast track into mobile? Facebook moving to cement its dominance of online photography? You, the jury, decide.
A second billion dollar shopping trip also made the headlines as Microsoft picked up hundreds of AOL patents. And here in the UK, the Daisy Group made a £28 million acquisition of audio-conferencing specialist Worldwide Group Holdings.
Were things just going to keep getting better and better?
No. Bringing us down to earth with a bump was Nokia, which – along with announcing its first NFC-equipped Windows Phone device – admitted that its forthcoming quarterly results were going to be both “difficult” and “disappointing”. Expect discussions about the future of Nokia to continue well beyond Thursday this week, when full details are released.
Also with bad news for many people (despite an upbeat ‘transformation’ message) was Sony, which is likely to lose around 10,000 jobs this year as it makes big changes to its electronics business.
Google’s news was pretty cheery, with quarterly results showing revenue up 24% from the same period last year. Meanwhile Barclays was pleased to roll out its Pingit person-to-person mobile payment service to customers from all UK banks and building societies. And crime-fighters in the USA received a boost with news that trade organisation CTIA was working with its members to set up a nationwide stolen mobile phone database (rather like Immobilise in the UK).
Finally to research, where three separate studies told us that tablet sales, machine-to-machine connections and mobile ticket usage were all on the rise. Expect to see a robot with an iPad on the bus very soon.
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