Icahn

For the Friday SquawkBox we did a roundup of a few of the stories from this past week.

AT&T’s release yesterday of their NetReach bundle. Starting at $79.95 per month it gives you residential DSL, WiFi access at 17,000 US hotspots, and 3G data access. Competitively priced, apparently, but a game changer? Maybe not.
Paul McGuiness, manager of U2, blames ISPs, handset manufacturers, and pretty much the whole world for the destruction of the music industry… this in a year when U2 made $355 million touring. We agree that he lives in an irony free zone.
Verizons acquisition of Alltel for $27 billion!
Jerry Yang and Carl ICahn? ICahn has been railing against Yahoo’s board, and publicly said that Yang is done if ICahn gets his way. We’re not very sympathetic to Yang’s plight.
Windows XP gets rescued again… for some classes of device. Is the mantle of “cockroach OS” passing from DOS finally? Most on the call are still running XP, and many see themselves switching to a Mac when it comes time to upgrade. Ouch!
Time Warner’s metered internet use trial. Om Malik says it’s the thin edge of the wedge. Calculations showed that the metered bandwidth was just enough to provide a non-compelling video experience. The call was full of Canadians who observed that we already have metered bandwidth usage in this country.
And for grins, we did a roundup of the latest iPhone rumours including the infamous box shot from Australia…

On the call: Don Eidse, Jim Courtney, Misha Nossik, Adam Somer, Brian Sharwood, Bill Volk, Jonathan Jensen, and Todd Spraggins

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This morning we wrapped up some of the big stories of the week. We talked about traffic shaping, as new data has emerged showing that Comcast has lied to the US FCC. We also talked about Jerry Yang’s new nightmare – Carl Icahn, and Icahn’s hostile slate of Yahoo directors. And how about the story that Vodafone has bought Danish social network Zyb. Comcast bought Plaxo earlier in the week. That’s two carriers buying two social networks in one week. Is it a trend? Some of our participants expressed condolensces to Vodafone customers now stuck using Zyb.

We also touched on RIM’s about face on touch screens. Blackberry “Thunder” is coming this fall apparently. The Blackberry tech I am chatting with on the phone right now swears he knows nothing…

How about Facebook’s decision to ban Google Friend Connect? Claiming that Friend Connect violates the Facebook TOS, they’ve disallowed it. Is Facebook doing right by their users, or are they hiding out behind their terms of service in order to disadvantage a competitor?

And what about Twitter? After breaking the china news this week, the service has returned to it’s old deadbeat dad unreliable ways. Sometimes it’s there for ya, sometimes it’s not, and ya just can’t count on it when ya need it. European participants on the call report no problems, but we in North America are having a devil of a time.

On the call: Jeb Brilliant, Jim Courtney, Andy Abramson, David Brown, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Eric Fisher, James Body, Jonathan Jensen, Mike Pruyn, Henry Lewkowicz

Enjoy the recording. No SquawkBox for Monday, as it’s a holiday here in Canada.

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