The $21 million iPad
eBay is already flooded with dubious offers of iPads and iPad paraphernalia
Click to enlarge. Source: eBay
It's not too late to bid on the new, sealed-in-box 16GB iPad being offered by egiftscentral_123 — an eBay "top-rated seller" with 99.3% positive feedback — for the Buy It Now price of $21 million (plus $14.42 for shipping).
If that seems like a lot to pay for a tablet computer you can pick up at your nearest Apple Store come April 3 for $499, that's probably because you haven't checked out the other iPad offerings on eBay (EBAY).
On Sunday morning, two days after Apple (AAPL) began taking orders online — and three weeks before the device ships — a search for "iPad" on eBay turned up 2,078 listings, from iPad screen protectors to iPad-ready purses.
Day 1 estimate: 120,000 iPads sold
A snapshot of who's buying what based on a sample of first-day pre-orders
Click to enlarge. Source: AAPL Sanity
The team at Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board have completed their initial analysis of pre-orders for the iPad tablet computer.
Apple (AAPL) began taking orders on Friday for delivery starting April 3.
Based on a sampling of 99 orders (for 110 iPads) over 19.5 hours, and not counting units that were reserved but not ordered, the Sanity team estimates:
- Nearly 120,000 iPads sold. Their math: 124,596 (orders of all Apple products Friday) minus 16,500 (the average number of online orders on a normal day) times 1.11 (the average number of iPads ordered per customer) equals 119,987 iPads.
- Wi-Fi over Wi-Fi+3G. Customers preferred the cheaper (and available April 3) Wi-Fi-only iPad over the Wi-Fi plus 3G model (due out at the end of April) by roughly two to one.
- 16, 32 and 64GB iPads are equally popular. Pre-orders were almost evenly split among the 16, 32 and 64 GB models, with a slight preference for the least-expensive 16 GB model, which starts at $499, and the most-expensive 64GB, which starts at $699 and can run as high as $829 (AT&T charges not included).
Apple's Tim Cook gets his earthly reward
For filling in for Steve Jobs: A $5 million bonus and stock worth nearly $17 million more
Photo: Monica M. Davey/EPA/Corbis
Tim Cook, Apple's (AAPL) chief operating officer and heir apparent, got his today.
For taking the reins when Steve Jobs went on medical leave in Jan. 2009 and heading the company with no visible hitches until his master's return six months later, Cook was awarded a $5 million cash bonus and 75,000 shares of restricted stock, according to Form 8-K filed with the SEC on Friday.
The stock doesn't vest until 2011 and 2012, but at today's close of $226.6, it's worth $16.995 million.
This was Cook's second stint as Apple's acting CEO. He ran the shop for a month in 2004 while Jobs recovered from surgery that removed a malignant tumor from his pancreas (see here). By the time Jobs returned to work, Apple's shares had risen 10.9% to what seems now like an impossibly low $35.86.
The fact is, Cook runs Apple's day-to-day operations even when Jobs is around, making the supply chains run on time and freeing his CEO up to cut high-level deals, rub shoulders with Hollywood moguls, and figure out where the puck is going, to paraphrase Jobs' favorite Wayne Gretzky quote, not where it's been.
Before the latest bonus, Cook was already company's highest-paid executive, thanks in part to Jobs' famous $1 a year salary.
Apple sells 50,000 iPads in two hours
By one estimate, pre-orders were coming in Friday morning at the rate of 25,000 per hour
The folks who hang out at Investor Village's AAPL Sanity Board are too impatient to wait for Apple (AAPL) to announce sales figures; they much prefer to work them out on their own — in real time.
Entering the order numbers associated with their own purchases on a Google spreadsheet, they think they've cracked the code. As of 11:05 a.m. ET — two and a half hours after Apple's online store began taking pre-orders — the group had received 15 confirmations with order numbers as high as 74,000 (the numbers don't necessarily start at zero and include non-iPad purchases).
"51,000 orders in two hours," announced Victor Castroll shortly after noon. He's an analyst with Valcent Financial Group and an AAPL Sanity member who, with the blogger-analyst who calls himself deagol, has been monitoring the spreadsheet.
His estimate — which is adjusted for the roughly 15,000 online orders that come in a typical day — jibes with a 20,000-per-hour figure published earlier by Silicon Alley Insider. That number was based on two sales made within 30 minutes that were 10,000 order numbers apart. Rumors from the supply chain suggest that Apple may have as few as 300,000 units available for sale on April 3.
Which iPads are people buying?
Apple overtakes Wal-Mart
Shares surge on iPad pre-orders, making Apple America's third most valuable company
Ninety minutes after Apple (AAPL) opened its online store for iPad pre-orders Friday morning, a burst of trading — roughly 2 million shares in 30 minutes — pushed its stock price to $227.73 and its market cap to $206.5 billion.
That, and a dip in Wal-Mart's (WMT) share price, made Apple — if only briefly — America's third largest company by market capitalization, after Exxon (XOM) and Microsoft (MSFT) and ahead of Wal-Mart and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A).
Apple shares have been on a tear since the iPad's ship date was announced last Friday, hitting five all-time highs in as many days.
UPDATE: Apple closed at $226.6, up 1.1 points (.49%) for yet another all-time high. It's market cap is now $205.48 billion, $309 million more above Wal-Mart, which closed down .07 points (.13%) for the day.
See also:
- The wild Apple iPad ruckus begins
- Apple hits another record high
- Apple approaches $200 billion
- Apple sets iPad ship date; shares hit record high
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
SXSW's location-tagging smackdown
Foursquare and Gowalla are squaring off for the title of top tagger at Austin's annual tech-fest.
By Caroline Waxler, contributor
The annual South By Southwest Interactive conference kicks off Friday and the advance buzz is all about a fierce competition between two location-tagging social networking companies: Foursquare and Gowalla. (Disclosure: I know the Foursquare co-founders.)
These services help you not only locate where your friends and contacts are at any given moment — perfect for a conference of networking-enthusiasts who all want to connect with the people they know, and the people they only know virtually and want to meet in real life.
Plus, each service offers a competition element. In Foursquare, for example, people can be noteworthy and attain badges within the system for doing such things as being the biggest regular at a certain place (What Norm and Cliff from "Cheers" would do with this…) and going to a venue in which a lot of Foursquare members of the opposite sex are present. Gowalla lets you do such things as get virtual goods, and recognition, when you check in at a particular location, as well as when you reach particular milestones. (Think completing a pub crawl.)
This is so closely watched at South by Southwest not because people feel like they're witnessing magic but more for two reasons: One, everyone loves a good rivalry and two, South By Southwest attendees by definition love to geek out. (It's affectionately known as "spring break for nerds.") And, what better way to do that than to compete over who is the top visitor to the various venues associated with it? Foursquare is even giving out temporary tattoos to commemorate those achievements. (…Hells Angels these are not.)
The wild Apple iPad ruckus begins
Once again, Steve Jobs has stirred his customers into a frenzy
Photos: Apple Inc.
Even before Apple (AAPL) opened its online store for pre-orders Friday morning the company's fanbase — and the press that feeds it — had worked themselves into a lather.
A one-sentence e-mail from Apple PR Thursday afternoon confirming the hour on Friday that buyers in the U.S. can start ordering the company's latest creation — 8:30 a.m. ET, 5:30 a.m. PT — had generated more than 100 pre-dawn headlines Friday morning.
SET YOUR ALARM CLOCKS, screamed 9to5Mac, as if by sleeping in you might miss out.
Thought Equity Motion and the NCAA give old highlights new life on the Web
The NCAA and digital video partner Thought Equity Motion are testing whether March Madness fans will want to watch old highlights on the web.
The NCAA and Thought Equity Motion partnered to create the NCAA Vault, a fan-friendly archive of video highlights from past March Madness tournaments.
Most people are glad to see March arrive. For some it’s the start of spring and warmer weather; for others, it’s the month-long celebration of college basketball called March Madness.
The NCAA has little control over the temperature, but it did turn up the heat for basketball fans last week with the launch of the NCAA Vault, a user-friendly archive of video highlights from March Madness tournaments over the past decade.
Fans can search for plays by teams, players, or games; or scan highlights of dunks, blocks, or shots. They can share their favorite moments via Twitter or Facebook. The site even has an open application programming interface (API) that allows for the clips to be published on other sites or plugged into apps built by third-party developers.
It’s all possible thanks to the NCAA’s partnership with Thought Equity Motion, which specializes in digitizing video footage and helping the rights-owners to cash in on it.
Nukes in my backyard
They're lean, clean, power-generating machines. But would a town really bury a mini nuclear reactor under its streets?
By Brian Dumaine, assistant managing editor
Long left for dead, the U.S. nuclear power industry appears poised for a comeback.
President Barack Obama earlier this year announced an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to help the Georgia utility Southern Co. build two large reactors, and he wants to triple the amount of federal loan guarantees for plant construction to $54 billion. Obama hopes a slew of new plants will create jobs and lots of affordable, clean electricity.
The problem: Even with the help of loan guarantees, full-scale nuclear power plants remain insanely expensive to build (conventional plants start at $5 billion, industry executives say).
Top 5 moments from Eric Schmidt’s talk in Abu Dhabi
Google CEO Eric Schmidt answered questions from attendees at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit. Photo: Jon Fortt
ABU DHABI – Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s speech and Q&A here was probably the most popular event at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit; there was standing room only on Wednesday as he extolled the virtues of the Internet and the goodness of Google (GOOG). His audience, mostly a mix of tech-savvy locals, international media executives and tech insiders, greeted him with wary admiration. Here are his most memorable quotes:
“If you’re a famous television producer, you’ll build a show on the Internet first ….”
Schmidt told the crowd that Google’s top engineers now build services primarily to work on mobile devices; PC browsers are more of an afterthought. Mobile is a huge, exciting category where Google can reach a new audience. Similarly, he suggested that TV producers should soon begin releasing shows online before they appear on TV. Why? Not because the online audience is more lucrative than TV – it’s not – but because the Internet provides a test bed where content creators can find out what will resonate with an audience. More
