TiVo profits from EchoStar litigation

This post was updated at 3 p.m. PST with information from the earnings call.

EchoStar's loss was TiVo's gain during the third quarter of 2008.
TiVo

Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo on Tuesday announced it recorded profits of $100.6 million for the quarter, or 98 cents per share, compared with a loss of $8 million for the same quarter a year ago.

The staggering change in fortunes for the DVR maker was due to the patent litigation judgment it won against EchoStar. EchoStar paid TiVo $105 million in damages during the quarter--if it hadn't, TiVo would have reported a net loss of $900,000.

The company's core business continues to fall off.

TiVo signed up 44,000 new subscribers during the quarter, but that's 25 percent fewer than the 69,000 signed up during the third quarter last year. Overall, the company's subscriptions total 3.6 million, compared with the 3.7 million counted at the end of the second quarter of this year.

Money made this quarter from its subscription service, technology, and hardware decreased in each category. Total revenue came in at $64.5 million, down from $75.5 million a year ago.

And the company expects to feel the impact of the financial crisis.

"Though we are pleased with our results this quarter, we recognize that no business is immune to the challenges of the current economic climate, which we expect will adversely affect consumer electronics companies, including TiVo, during the holiday season," said TiVo CEO Tom Rogers on a conference call with investors Tuesday.

The company also addressed the impact of Circuit City's bankruptcy. TiVo won't be directly impacted by the bankruptcy filing, according to new CFO Anna Brunell.

"But the bad news is we'll see less contribution this holiday season from our second-largest retail partner," she said. "That makes what will be a difficult selling season even more difficult."

The company plans to look at more ways to decrease costs, including laying off 7 percent of its workforce, as announced last week.

Looking ahead, TiVo said it's expecting fourth-quarter revenue between $47 million and $49 million, and a net loss of between $10 million and $12 million.

TiVo shares rose more than 1.5 percent to reach $4.50 in after-hours trading Tuesday.

Topics:
Corporate & legal

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Home work being closely watched

Hardy
Reporter, BBC Click

Debby Baksh likes to have her hard work monitored

With the global economy slowing down and office space being sold off, workers are facing more pressure to hold on to their jobs.

The latest tracking technology means that even those working from home are equally under the spotlight as their activities are monitored remotely.

Debby Baksh is one of thousands of customer sales agents hired and trained online by US firm Arise to answer calls at home.

In her Brooklyn living room, she supplies phone services to some of the biggest companies in America and around the world.

Close look

She is allowed to answer six calls an hour and must try to make these last six minutes or more.

"So they want to make sure you're doing your job and selling a lot," said Ms Baksh. "Once your calls are over six minutes they know that you're being very productive, that you're selling the items for them."

Her conversations with customers are recorded and analysed by her bosses, and her performance is monitored constantly by software on her computer.

If she steps away for any reason without logging off, the machine will know about it - but Ms Baksh likes it because it shows she is hard at work.

Her 100% track record ensure she has first choice of working hours, while also receiving a steady stream of high-quality customers likely to buy.

Arise spokesman John Riordan said calls were routed to staff based on their skills and earlier performance.

"We also have the ability to match customer demographics with agent demographics, because after all, we all like to buy products and be serviced by people like ourselves," he said.

But telephone tracking technology has its critics. They point out that remote workers should be aware that getting sacked is only one click away, as most systems are set up to ensure they never have legal status as an employee.

Screen shots

To keep an eye on arms-length employees one customer service company claims to have software capable of detecting an angry agent or even a baby crying in the same room - a definite no-no in the home sales world.

Tim Lytle said he gets plenty of work to do at home

Tim Lytle works from home too, but in his line of work, crying babies in the background are not a problem.

He writes computer code from his house in a small town in Pennsylvania, where rent and food are much cheaper than in a big city.

He finds work from listings on oDesk.com where potential projects are plentiful.

"If I wanted to do more work on oDesk I'm sure I could bid the jobs and get them," said Mr Lytle.

The website allows home-based workers, known as providers, to bid on design and technical projects offered by clients.

Mike Katz is a client who owns an e-mail retention business called Messagepartners.com, and through oDesk he can constantly monitor a team of providers.

If there is not a steady stream of mouse movements or keyboard strikes from the machine of a team member, the worker stops accumulating paid minutes.

Plus, six times an hour a screen shot from the providers' computers is sent to the client.

"You waste a lot of time talking, sometimes. Especially for developers, it's a task that requires lots of concentration," explained Mr Katz. "Interrupting someone to ask what they're doing can sometimes take 20 minutes. Here I look at the screen and I see what they're doing and that's it".

No legal status

In return for a 10% cut, oDesk takes care of every aspect of the relationship from invoicing to international payments, and intellectual property rights to taxes.

This makes it easier for companies to hire workers across borders, while providers from almost any country can to sign up, set their own hourly rate and start bidding for work.

Gary Swart, the boss of oDesk, said there were 160 different tests on technology, writing and phone skills that providers can take free of charge.

"We ask you to do that so you can differentiate yourself from the 130,000 other providers in our network. And then apply to jobs as you see fit," he said.

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Market Data

Rumors of an iPhone-style Microsoft phone running on Nvidia silicon add heft, in part, to what Nvidia has been talking about since early this year.

Nvidia prototype phone using Tegra APX 2500 chip

Nvidia prototype phone using Tegra APX chip
(Credit: CNET Networks)

In the spring, Nvidia demonstrated its Tegra chip-based mobile phone prototype to me and pretty much anyone in the media who made a visit to its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters.

(See CNET Reviews video of the phone.)

Nvidia has made it clear that the chip platform was targeted at Windows Mobile--a point that an Nvidia representative reiterated Monday.

Though the prototype phone (actually a development platform) is quite a bit thicker than a real "thin" phone that a handset provider would bring out at some point, the prototype runs on top of Windows Mobile, as it would presumably in a commercial device.

And what does Nvidia bring to the table? The master of faster graphics processors wants to apply its chip know-how to juice up the mobile Internet device market and the Windows Mobile interface. After a decade of pumping up PC performance, Nvidia is betting a big part of its future on boosting graphics performance in fit-in-your-pocket mobile Internet devices, or MIDs.

iPhone-style devices with Nvdia's Tegra APX (or Tegra 600) incorporate most of the functionality of a PC. And Nvidia is building all of the core electronics that will run a mobile Internet device, not just the graphics component. (This Nvidia Mobile Device page shows the Tegra 600 series and Tegra APX.)

Tegra is different from Intel's Atom processor platform--which is offered as a processor and a separate chipset--because Nvidia integrates everything onto one piece of silicon. This makes it more akin to Texas Instruments' OMAP processors or Qualcomm's Snapdragon. (See "Additional Comments" below with corrected statement on Moorestown.)
Images shown on Nvidia's mobile devices Web page.

Images shown on Nvidia Mobile Devices Web page.
(Credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's goal is to pack as much processing punch as possible into a few-hundred-milliwatt power envelope. Notebook PC processors typically operate in power envelopes between 10 and 35 watts.

But to the user, the biggest difference will be Microsoft's Mobile Windows interface and what can happen when there's Nvidia GeForce graphics silicon pushing everything around.

The platform that Nvidia is demonstrating goes far beyond the staid, pin-striped Windows Mobile that is used today. Nvidia has been showing finger-flick-and-roll screens and accelerometer-based reorienting 720p video.

Devices--according to Nvidia's thinking at least--will also be designed to run 720p HDTV video for 10 hours--one of the marquee features that Nvidia will be emphasizing. The company has demonstrated the prototype Tegra APX-based device plugged into a large screen TV--via a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connector--playing high-definition movies with the same fluidity and resolution as you get from a big HDTV box or bigger computer.

Additional comments on two points: One, correction on Moorestown. As a reader pointed out, Intel's upcoming Moorestown is not a single-chip device. It is still at 2-chip solution. Two, about Tegra: another reader commented that Tegra is based on the ARM11 (shipping in products now), which is "older" than the Cortex-A8 class OMAP products from Texas Instruments.

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Economy warning from China leader

China's President Hu Jintao has warned of the effects of the global financial crisis on his country.

Mr Hu gave his warning at a meeting of the Politburo and his words have been made public by the state media.

As growth slows, Mr Hu said that in the coming period China would starkly confront the effects of the international financial crisis.

And he warned that the economic situation was a test of the Communist Party's ability to govern.

Recent figures show that the government has cause to be worried.

Growth has slowed to 9% - and predictions say that it may drop to 7% or 8% next year.

These are dazzling figures for some economies, but there's a widespread belief - even a superstition - in China that growth needs to stay above 7% in order for social stability to be maintained.

China has already taken action.

This past week the central bank carried out the biggest cut in interest rates in more than a decade.

And earlier this month, the government announced a stimulus package of $586bn (£380bn).

This is enough, the Communist Party will hope, to get this country through the next year or two.

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Intel rethinks Netbooks: 'Fine for an hour' but...

The Netbook, take two: When Advanced Micro Devices said it wasn't going to focus on Netbooks, as Intel and its partners defined them, maybe it was on to something.

Intel is re-evaluating the Netbook market as possibly not The Next Big Thing. This from the company that makes the Atom processor and accompanying silicon that go into most of the Netbooks sold today.

HP Mini Netbook 1030NR: the next big thing?

(Credit: Best Buy)

At a recent Raymond James IT Supply Chain Conference (streamed via this Intel page), Stu Pann, vice president in the sales and marketing group at Intel, said his company sees the Netbook differently now.

"We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids, and there is some of that. It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook," Pann said. "We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market," he added.

And the most revealing statement? "If you've ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size--it's fine for an hour. It's not something you're going to use day in and day out."

Though this may simply reaffirm some people's view of the Netbook, it may also be surprising to others who thought the Netbook was potentially a laptop replacement for highly mobile users looking for a lightweight design. Or at least a design that was bearable beyond one hour.

Enter AMD and its take on the market. Though it won't resist if computer makers use its upcoming Huron and Conesus CPUs (one of these is due early next year) for Netbook-like designs, its focus is on ultrathin laptops similar in build to the 13-inch MacBook Air (and even 14-inch designs) but at a much lower price point.

AMD Chief Executive Dirk Meyer said earlier this month that "we're ignoring the Netbook phenomenon--just thinking about PC form factors above that form factor." And Bahr Mahony, director of notebook product marketing at AMD, said at that time that there are "a fair number of people" who are not satisfied with the experience they're having with Netbooks.

Mahony added that the dissatisfaction with Netbooks "has been exhibited by the high return rates that have been seen on these mini notebooks" in Europe. (AMD uses the terms "Netbook" and "mini notebook" interchangeably.)

AMD believes that the Netbook screen size is too small and the performance disappointing.

The coming year should show whether the Netbook has legs or whether it was just another marketing flash-in-the-pan like the UMPC (ultramobile personal computer) before it.

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How Microsoft plans to make its mark in CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM has become a key product for the company, according to CRM division general manager Brad Wilson--and it's an area the software maker plans to invest in further.

According to Wilson, when Microsoft earlier this year committed itself to investing $1 billion annually in the construction of new data centers to support the Microsoft Live portfolio of on-demand software, some of that sum--he declined to specify how much--was earmarked for customer relationship management.

Brad Wilson is CRM division general manager at Microsoft.

(Credit: Microsoft )

Earlier this month, CNET News sister site ZDNet UK spoke to Wilson to find out how he intends to make that CRM investment and whether he thinks it will be sufficient to beat on-demand CRM leader Salesforce.com on its own turf. Wilson made it plain that, despite the SME (small and medium enterprise) bias that Microsoft CRM may have acquired, it is equally aimed at the enterprise.

Q: Microsoft has been in CRM for some time, but just how long?
Wilson: We've been in the CRM market for five and a half years, and have more than 16,000 CRM customers and more than 750,000 users.

Microsoft is investing more annually on data centers than the complete revenue of all the on-demand players--$1 billion annually. As a company, we are investing heavily.

How is that customer base made up?
Wilson: More than half of the business is international--outside the U.S.--and, although we started out as an organization focused mainly on the small and medium-sized businesses, more than half of our revenue now comes from large enterprises.

Salesforce.com is very popular, so how do you compete with it?
Wilson: We do and we have people who switch from Salesforce.com fairly routinely. But there are a number of companies that compete in this space and everyone wins some and everyone loses some.

What I like about our strategy is that Salesforce.com has a single operating model, which is that you rent it from them forever. Our software comes with a choice of either having an on-demand subscription offering or buying the software. If you talk to analysts today, they will tell you that, of all the CRM in use throughout the world, probably about 90 percent is deployed on the premises.

We want to give our customers the choice. Whether you want to go on-premises or to a cloud-based offering, the choice is yours.

Does this mean you don't find the cloud particularly valid?
Wilson: It is not so much that--and this is a somewhat controversial view--but I don't really care. I have an agnostic model: if you want to buy the CRM software, great; if you want to go ahead with on-demand, that's also great.

For us, it is a single codebase. It's literally the same software running.

There is no difference between on-premise or on the network. The only difference is how long your network cable is. I think sometimes people get too caught up in it. The world is not really binary.

What new products are coming up?
Wilson: About 11 months ago, we shipped our CRM 4.0, which is a fully multi-tenanted system that you can deploy from outside the cloud.

What we announced (earlier this month) is a new set of accelerators for CRM 4.0 (on sale December 1). These are extensions to the core system so that, when you add them to CRM 4.0, they offer capabilities such as e-service for handling Web cases. This lets customers submit cases online and check things such as status very easily.

What do you mean exactly by "cases"?
Wilson: Well, if you have a broken fridge and you want to contact the retailer or manufacturer, then you can go to the Web site and that will submit information that will flow into the CRM system and then trigger a workflow.

So e-service is really that Web interface to customer services, as opposed to the call center. What we provide is the data and the workflow to support e-service scenarios.

Another one is extended sales forecasting, which is a way to lock and manage forecasts that goes deeper than the usual sales-automation facilities.

There are new analytics in business intelligence; sales methodologies. And then there is enterprise search integration through SharePoint.

But are these new?
Wilson: We talked about them at our partner conference back in July in Houston but...we haven't had a customer launch before (this month).

So presumably these are intended to deal with the view that Microsoft has not been in the CRM market very long and that, to understand and execute sophisticated CRM, you need a specialist supplier?
Wilson: The wildly less popular ones? The ones that have had staggering adoption problems over the past 10 years? I think there is really a philosophical difference (between Microsoft and those suppliers). We are not going to give you a gigantic list of features. You know how you want to run your business.

So, for us, user adoption is key. If they (the users) are not going to use the system, you are pretty much guaranteed a failed deployment.

We give you enough flexibility so that you can run the system how you want to. So I find we will beat a classic offering from your CRM vendors on end-user adoption and platform flexibility. Those factors will far outweigh the fact that other people have more prebuilt stuff.

We went into a sales opportunity against a classic CRM vendor and measured its software. Out of the box, its software had only a 7 percent fit (only 7 percent of the software could be run without modification).

When you think about it, it is very difficult to sit in Palo Alto...and design something that is going to fit any business--a system that will work with every business in the world, whether it is in Turkey or South Africa. So the key now is flexibility. How easy is it to add the stuff we need?

I think the old model of 10 years ago, where you built a system that had a big slab of stuff that you had to adopt, has gone.

At the same time, we will still bring out our accelerators with pre-packaged software, and more and more of them. But we release them as open source. The idea is that we just put this stuff out there and let people use it. And, if our partners use it, all the better.

So are these products free?
Wilson: Yes.

But you are charging people for the software.
Wilson: You have to buy the core license but, once you have bought it, we are not going to try and nickel and dime people for bits of process and functionality. We don't believe in that.

We are taking the approach of wanting to make CRM much more affordable. Affordable in terms of TCO (total cost of ownership).

Part of that is in the core. We think we've done a pretty good job there and we keep adding pieces of incremental value through the accelerators. Even in the on-demand space, we want to go in and make it more affordable. CRM in on-demand tends to be relatively overpriced. So we want to make that price come down.

How do you charge? It is on a license basis?
Wilson: We have a server price and a user price--what we call a server license and a client-access license. The server price is nominal, relatively low and doesn't tend to go up. The primary driver of price is how many people use it.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Topics:

Enterprise software

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Eximbank cancels 2009 listing on financial turmoil

Vietnam Export-Import Commercial Joint-Stock Bank, partly owned by Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., has canceled its plan to list shares next year due to the global financial crisis.

“It is not a good time to list next year given both the domestic and world financial situations,” Le Thi Hoa, vice chairwoman of the lender known as Eximbank, said in an interview in Ho Chi Minh City Sunday. “We will consider better timing and seek approval from our shareholders later.” The benchmark VN-Index has plunged 67 percent this year as foreign investors retreat from emerging markets amid a global recession. The government on November 6 lowered its growth target for next year to 6.5 percent from an earlier 7 percent. The HCMC-based lender also reduced its registered capital target this year to VND7.2 trillion (US$425.5 million) from VND7.38 trillion ($436.1 million) planned in March, according to general director Truong Van Phuoc. The bank would sell 297 million shares worth VND2.97 trillion next month to existing shareholders, Phuoc said. As of the end of October, Eximbank had total assets of VND49.6 trillion ($2.9 billion) and its registered capital was VND4.2 trillion ($248.2 million), a 50 percent jump since the beginning of the year, according to a report released at a shareholders’ meeting Sunday. Pretax profit was VND1.2 trillion ($71 million) in the first 10 months, an increase of 116 percent from a year earlier, the report said. Eximbank has outstanding property loans of VND4 trillion ($236 million), or 18.2 percent of its outstanding debts, at the end of November, according to Phuoc. It has sold a 15 percent stake to Sumitomo Mitsui, Japan’s third-largest bank by revenue, 5 percent to VOF Investment Ltd. of Virgin Islands, 4.5 percent to Mirae Asset Exim Investment Ltd. of South Korea, and 0.5 percent to Mirae Asset Maps Opportunity Vietnam Equity Balanced Fund 1, according to the report. Source: Bloomberg

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