recession

Worldwide cell phone sales fell in the first quarter of this year, but smartphones continued to grow, despite a deepening recession, according to a report published by Gartner Wednesday.

The news shouldn't come as a big shock. Cell phone manufacturers, such as Nokia, had reported disastrous earnings for the first quarter. But the growth in smartphone sales, which were up 12.7 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008, provides some hope for the industry.

Touchscreen devices seem to be leading the pack in terms of device growth, with Apple's iPhone 3G doubling its market share in … Read more

Correction: Virgin Mobile began selling its $50 unlimited plan in April after the first quarter had ended.

Competition in the prepaid cell phone market is heating up, making it more difficult for companies, like Virgin Mobile USA, to hold onto subscribers in an increasingly crowded market.

Virgin Mobile USA, a longtime player in the prepaid cell phone market, reported Monday it had lost a total of 133,292 net customers during the quarter to end the period with 5.2 million subscribers. Even though subscribers were up 2.8 percent compared with last year, the company's losses during the … Read more

Virgin Mobile USA is offering laidoff consumers a little relief in this tough economy.

The cell phone operator is offering a "Pink Slip Protection" program that essentially picks up the tab for three months of service for customers who have lost their jobs. To qualify for the three free months of service, users must subscribe to one of the company's monthly service plans, which cost $29.99, $39.99, and $49.99. New subscribers will be automatically enrolled in the program and existing customers can also enroll for the program.

Virgin said it will pay bills up … Read more

Like begets like, and in the software world, open-source purchasing begets even more open-source purchases.

At least, that's the lesson I take from a recent Piper Jaffray report that suggests JBoss customers plan to invest heavily in Red Hat technology.

Not only are JBoss customers more likely to buy deeply into Red Hat, which is not surprising (though for Red Hat, it must be gratifying), but they're also more likely to buy MySQL and less likely to buy from Microsoft.

This can't be good news for Microsoft, and it probably is one reason the company has become so aggressive with its intellectual-property portfolio. … Read more

Google is eliminating about 200 sales and marketing jobs, the company said in a blog post Thursday, blaming the move on overlapping areas and overhiring during a more optimistic time.

"Today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, in the blog post. "We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A bad economy is good for open source, declared Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in his keynote at Open Source Business Conference 2009, but open source's value proposition should play well in any economy.

At OSBC 2008, Whitehurst suggested that enterprise IT needs to join the open-source conversation, contributing code back to derive greater benefit than mere consumption of open source can offer.

This year, Whitehurst moved beyond this meme to focus on why enterprises should buy open source in the first place, never mind contribute open-source code.

Whitehurst pilloried the traditional proprietary sales model, a theme the Red Hat team has raised before, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In case you weren't able to attend the Open Source Business Conference today, or simply arrived too late to hear my opening remarks, I shared this video to illustrate how open source is rising...even as the economy falls.

Enjoy.

In the process of pillorying the intelligence of buying Macs in the recession, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have admitted defeat in fighting Linux-based Netbooks. Ballmer said:

Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment--same piece of hardware--paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.

But if this reasoning is sound against the Mac, doesn't the same apply to Microsoft in its competition with Linux? Glyn Moody thinks so:

This is a very frank analysis of the problem for … Read more

Times are tough in Detroit. Many citizens of the city are struggling to find ways to keep their homes and find steady work. It couldn't get much worse.

But thanks to Jay Leno and eBay joining forces, it actually has gotten worse.

Jay Leno is planning a free stand-up comedy show for struggling Detroit residents. The tickets were made available Monday morning. By Monday night, Leno noticed that some of the tickets he gave away were on sale on eBay for "eight hundred something dollars," he said.

During his television monologue Monday night, Leno told viewers about the situation and explained that "you're out of your mind to pay $800 to see me." And then he asked eBay to cease all ticket sales for his live show. "I would like to ask the people at eBay to take the tickets down," he said. "There's nothing for sale here. It's just totally free."

By Tuesday, all instances of the sale were down from eBay. According to the company, Leno's request to have the tickets removed falls under its "Authorized Resellers Only" policy, so all would-be sellers were banned from selling tickets to the events.… Read more