Folks, I am traveling today to the D Conference down in Carlsbad, Calif., and won’t have much time to blog. Nevertheless, these are some of the stories that are worth your time today.
- Vodafone is changing CEOs. Arun Sarin, after handling the company for five tough years, is leaving Vodafone. The company has turned profitable again and has expanded quickly into fast growing wireless markets including India and Eastern Europe. Now, Vittorio Colao is going to take over. Sarin should move to Bharti Telecom and help that company become a global telecom.
- Deutsche Telekom has admitted it tracked phone calls to find out who was leaking company information to the media. Sort of like HP, except more sophisticated. What a bunch of morons and betrayers of their customers’ faith in the company.
- Pealgo, a location-based social look-up service has raised about $15 million from Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, T-Mobile’s venture arm and Reliance Communications, reports Business Week.
- Apple has gone green and filed a patent that could someday give iPods and iPhones the ability charge themselves using solar energy, reports Earth2Tech.
- The Canadian auction for 2Ghz spectrum for Advanced Wireless Services has run into problems. Today a consortium of U.S. equity houses, M/C Venture Partners and Columbia Capital dropped out, joining Primus Canada. Manitoba Telecom scaled back its plans. Rogers Telecom and cable company Shaw Communications are still in the running and looking to spend.
Combine this Apple story with the ones from TUAW (below) about the Atom processor running at low power, and you have an interesting device. Smaller battery, with essentially a solar tickle charger, and you could have an interesting tablet (large solar array) or e-reader type device. The iPod name is intentionally ambiguous enough it could be the “iPod Reader” and not strictly a tablet, since Jobs has decried them as useless.
http://feeds.tuaw.com/~r/weblogsinc/tuaw/~3/299144690/
“The Atom Processor would certainly make a good candidate for a mini-tablet. It’s small enough to fit any form factor, and low power enough to run for long periods in small devices. According to netkas, you can even run one of these on solar power. Here are the results of an Xbench test, courtesy of netkas:”
Sarin did a good job apart from tieing up with Apple at the right time.