Motorola May Spin Off Mobile Devices Unit: iPhone’s First Casualty?
Motorola is exploring spinning off its mobile devices unit “to recapture global market leadership and to enhance shareholder value.”
The move comes in an ever increasingly tight market which has seen Apple capture 19.5% of the smartphone market in its first twelve months, a new iPhone style device announced by GPS provider Garmin, and a slew of Android powered phones coming later this year, including at least one mobile phone from computer maker Dell.
Motorola’s mobile phone market share has continued to slide in the face of existing competition with the handset unit recording a $1.2 billion loss in the 4th quarter of 2007.
Although mobile phones are still perhaps the public face of Motorola, the company is also an enterprise provider of communications tools to business, Government and the military.
We’re placing Motorola’s handset unit on Deadpool watch. Motorola has had a mixed track record of spinning off companies, having success with Freescale Semiconductor, however Iridium saw what was once the worlds leading commercial satellite network file for bankruptcy in 1999. A new company based around a business unit with a $1.2 billion loss is going to take some serious work in turning around under normal circumstances, but in a market that will see a slew of new competitors and where a new comer such as Apple can take such a big slice of the market in such a short time, it will be harder again, if not near on impossible.
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Cornerworld Acquires Sway For $30 Million
Cornerworld has acquired social media marketing company Sway Inc for $30 million.
The OTC listed Cornerworld is a relatively unknown social service provider that “combines social networking, content-sharing and business management tools to enable independent people to profit from their original digital works;” a full profile from DemoFall 07 can be found here.
Sway offers a central control platform for administering marketing campaigns across social media and “multiple web 2.0 platforms.” Their key products offer customers real-time results tracking across HTML e-mail, podcasts, video syndication, RSS and SMS mobile phone text messaging.
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Creative Innovation
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Twitter and Joyent Split Amidst Downtime Travails
According to Joyent’s corporate blog, the company stopped hosting Twitter late last night:
Twitter has been officially off Joyent since 10PM last night. This may come as a surprise to some after yesterday’s posts here and here regarding the two companies working together. Those of us at Joyent appreciate the opportunity we had to work with the talented folks at Twitter. It is a great service. We wish Twitter every continued success.
As I mentioned yesterday, Joyent is standing ready with excess free infrastructure to support Twitter through this transition in the event that they need it.
The news comes amidst frequent outage problems that have plagued Twitter. Just last night, Twitter went down again, this time for a “planned maintenance project” that went “far beyond [their] planned time window”. The service has also recently suffered downtime during the State of the Union and Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld.
Despite all of these problems, just yesterday both companies were showing strong support for each other on their respective blogs. Both wrote posts (here and here) describing how they were working together to prepare for the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.
When reached over the phone, Joyent’s CEO David Young preferred not to comment on Twitter’s stability issues in particular. He did emphasize that Joyent has free infrastructure on standby should Twitter want to use it again. He also wished Twitter the best of luck, saying the team is amazed at their “great service”.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, responded to an email inquiry about the situation as such:
We’re still very much engaged in our efforts to bring solid reliability to Twitter. Achieving our goals is a sustained effort, not an overnight fix. Performance is our most important measure of success and we appreciate both the patience and frustration folks are sharing with us.
With regard to discussing technical specifics about last night’s efforts, we’ll be more keen to do that once we have a chance to come up for air and cover it with some perspective.
Given that both companies are reluctant to go into details about the break-up, we’ll just have to see whether more information comes out in time.
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