Laughter and applause greet a dig at the iPhone on Saturday Night Live

SNL's Seth Meyers. Image: NBC

You know you've got a public relations problem when you're a punchline on SNL's Weekend Update.

The host, Seth Meyers, doesn't make a lot of Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) jokes, but this one worked.

"It was reported this week that Google would soon launch its own cellphone as a challenge to the iPhone. Also a challenge to the iPhone? Making phone calls."

The audience — presumably the usual mix of tourists and enough reception-challenged New Yorkers to appreciate the humor — laughed and applauded.

Video clip below the fold.

UPDATE: The clip has been removed from YouTube by NBC Universal. But you can watch the whole episode below or on hulu.com. The joke begins at 37:20.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Jason Schwarz's "Seven Reasons the Shorts Love Apple" is an investor's must-read

Source: TheStreet

"If you can keep a good stock down," writes Jason Schwarz, "then you are able to load up for the ride back up. It's like a slingshot — the harder you pull, the more propulsion you generate."

Schwarz, an investment analyst with a knack for self promotion — through a newsletter, an e-book, and a new hardcover — has written an easy-to-follow primer on why Apple (AAPL) has become the hedge funds' favorite punching bag. It was published as a gallery last week in TheStreet by Jim Cramer, a guy who knows a thing or two about manipulating Apple's stock price. (See here.)

For investors who wonder why Apple goes down just when common sense suggests it should go up, it's a must-read.

Below fold, the highlights:

1. Apple is the market leader. This one stock has become so important to the market that its action is contagious. This influence makes Apple a prized possession for both the longs and the shorts. Knocking down an easier target like Research In Motion (RIMM) or Citigroup (C) doesn't generate the same snowball effect.
2. Apple always bounces back. Over the long run, Apple fundamentals will certainly take the stock higher, but hedge funds want to maximize the ride. Keeping a great stock down allows them to profit from quick predetermined trades rather than being fully invested all the time.
3. The predictability of Apple reduces a short's risk. Everyone knows when the next iPod, iPhone,and iMac refreshes will hit. This has turned into a calendar-driven catalyst stock. During the quiet time, the stock is vulnerable.
4. New media have changed the game. Anybody can say anything and the masses will believe it. The topic of Apple currently dominates this new media. There is no accountability or verification of sources like the old days. In such an environment, hidden agendas can be pushed endlessly without disclosure.
5. Apple secrecy. As the unparalleled leader in tech innovation, Apple feels that it is necessary to keep future products veiled to all competitors, consumers and investors … Apple has yet to sell a single Tablet, yet hedge funds already have made millions from rumors surrounding the product. The lack of transparency from Apple creates a perfect storm for short-term traders.
6. Apple innovation. This company is so good that it causes imaginations to run wild. A hedge fund could float a story that Apple is thinking of buying Saturn in order to develop a new brand of Apple cars and people would go nuts … The constant innovation coming out of Apple provides traders with endless material for believable speculation.
7. Steve Jobs is the visionary of the century. This one man is the single greatest asset in corporate America, which causes Apple stock to trade with a Steve Jobs premium, a variable that the shorts can use as well. Apple's stock is always vulnerable to losing Jobs.

You can read the rest of Schwarz's piece at TheStreet. His market timing newsletter is called Economic Weather Station.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Lily Sussman is back from Egypt with the laptop that got "blown up" at the Israeli border

Photo: Lily Sussman

Three weeks ago, an American student working in Cairo was questioned for two hours at the Israeli border before security officials confiscated her Apple (AAPL) MacBook, called in a sapper, and shot it full of holes.

Lily Sussman, 21, told the story on her blog, where it drew more than a thousand comments and a fair amount of coverage in the Mideast press.

Before she flew home for the holidays, she gave The Daily News Egypt the video interview posted below the fold.

UPDATE: By luck or careful aim, Sussman's hard drive emerged unscathed. "I've managed to recover all the data!" she writes. "Yayy…It's a survivor. I have yet to hear back from the man handling my case about when and what I will be compensated."

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Ma Bell's wireless network is still standing after Friday's grassroots iPhone attack

The appointed hour — Friday, from 12 noon to 1 p.m. PST — came and went and AT&T's (T) 3G cellular network had not been brought to its knees, despite the best efforts of thousands of Apple (AAPL) iPhone users.

"As far as I can tell, there’s been no impact at all," wrote Dan Lyons in The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs at 12:19 p.m. "My iPhone is working just the same as ever. "

It was Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, who on Monday had encouraged iPhone owners to overwhelm AT&T's network by turning on a data-intensive app and running it for an hour. Operation Chokehold, as he dubbed it, was intended as a protest against AT&T's threatened imposition of data usage fees.

By Wednesday, after the FCC's chief of homeland security issued a stern warning, Lyons began to have second thoughts. But by then the protest had taken on a life of its own. See here.

Although there were scattered reports of slowdowns Friday on the Operation Chokehold Facebook page, AT&T's 3G network seemed to be holding up just fine.

"We don't know of any instances in which AT&T's service was degraded or brought offline," says John Rust, one of the "Three Musketeers" who managed Operation Chokehold's official website. "Yet at the same time, we consider the operation to be successful: we proved to AT&T that we believe that 'unlimited' should be 'unlimited,' and that it's not their job to redefine it."

In Brooklyn, where we were monitoring the network's performance, upload and download speeds actually increased during the first quarter hour. See the chart below.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

See also:

• Can the kids bring AT&T to its knees?

By 35% a month lately, according to the ad requests pouring into AdMob's network

Click to enlarge. Other includes HTC Desire, Samsung Moment, Samsung Galaxy and HTC Tatoo. Source: AdMob.

"Traffic from Android devices has increased dramatically over the last year," according to a report issued Friday morning by AdMob, the world's largest purveyor of mobile ads.

In November alone, Android devices accounted for 27% of the hits on AdMob's U.S. ad network, up from 20% in October — a 35% increase in one month.

Of course, AdMob is counting ad requests, not handset sales, so its numbers cannot be used to measure market share in the traditional sense. But its reports do provide a monthly snapshot of where the rapidly expanding smartphone market is headed. The growth in Android traffic — fueled by the release of new Android-powered devices — is one of the featured themes of AdMob's November report.

Among its Android-related findings:

• Six months ago a single Android device, the HTC Dream (G1), generated 92% of Android traffic, while in November 2009 the G1 accounted for only 37% of requests.
• The Motorola Droid, HTC Magic and HTC Hero generated 22%, 21% and 9% of Android requests worldwide in November 2009, respectively.
• In November, 88% of Android traffic in the AdMob network was generated in the U.S. The U.K. was with second largest market with 4% of requests.
• In the U.S., the Motorola (MOT) Droid quickly became the No. 2 Android handset, thanks in part to heavy marketing by Verizon (VZ). In the U.K., the HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero make up 92% of Android requests.

AdMob was acquired by Google (GOOG) in November for $750 million shortly after Apple (AAPL) had reportedly expressed interest in buying its network. You can download its November report as a pdf from metrics.admob.com.

See also:

• Where in the world are Apple's 78 million handsets?
• The smartphone wars, one year later

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Mostly in the U.S., but Japan, France, Australia and China are coming on fast, says AdMob

Click to enlarge. Source: AdMob

By the end of December, according to Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, Apple's (AAPL) will have sold 78 million iPhones and iPod touches worldwide.

So where, exactly, are those devices?

A report issued Friday by AdMob, the world's leading supplier of mobile ads, tries to map the location of Apple's handsets country by country based on the number of users who requested at least one of its ads in November — a number that increased 150% in 2009.

Among the highlights of its findings:

• In November, 50% of unique Apple visitors were located in the United States. The next four biggest markets were the U.K., France, Canada and Germany.
• In total, 23 countries had more than 100,000 unique Apple visitors.
• 50% of unique Apple users were located outside of the US, up from 39% in January 2009.
• The iPhone accounted for 71% and the iPod touch 29% of the total unique Apple users in November. In raw numbers: 18.0 million iPhones; 7.3 million iPod touches; 25.2 million total.
• The fastest growing countries between January 2009 and November 2009 were Japan, France, Australia and China. See the bar graph below.

Source: AdMob

AdMob describes itself as the world's largest mobile advertising platform, serving banner and text link ads on 15,000 mobile Web sites and iPhone and Android applications. Its reports are based on  handset and operator data on nearly 138 billion impressions. They do not, however, measure mobile markets in the traditional sense of number of handsets sold. And they have a bias toward devices like the iPhone and Droid that visit ad-supported websites and also run ad-supported apps.

You can download their November report as a pdf from metrics.admob.com.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Apple's U.S. smartphone installed base has surpassed Microsoft's for the first time

Click to enlarge. Source: comScore

Given that the iPhone has been outselling Windows Mobile devices in the U.S. for nearly two years, it comes as something of a surprise that Apple (AAPL) has only now caught up to Microsoft (MSFT) in terms of active smartphone users.

But that's what the latest data from comScore show. The bar graph at right, drawn from numbers obtained by FierceDeveloper, shows that the installed base of iPhone users in the U.S. overtook Windows Mobile's sometime between July and October 2009.

Microsoft had a big head start, of course, but its market share has been stagnating lately. Research in Motion (RIMM), by contrast, enjoys both a head start and a growing market share. According to comScore, about 40% of the smartphones still in use in America are BlackBerries, while less than 25% are iPhones.

A copy of comScore's report can be purchased at the compay's site for $4,995.

Below the fold: A full-size version of the chart.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Source: comScore

A smartphone protest begun as blogger's joke catches fire in the high schools of America

Image: Facebook

The most interesting thing about Operation Chokehold — a grassroots denial of service attack against AT&T's (T) data network scheduled for Friday at 12 noon PST (3 p.m. EST) — may be who has signed on to take part.

You can see their shining faces on Facebook's official Operation Chokehold page, which by Friday morning had attracted more than 4,000 fans.

Scroll down the members list for affiliations and you'll see a few companies, a bunch of colleges and a whole lot of high schools: Carlmont High, Las Lomas High, Casa Grande High, Galileo High, Triton High, Roseburg High, Rancho Buena Vista High, Shadow Mountain High, Henry M. Gunn High, West Allegheny Senior High, Connellsville Area Senior High and so on.

That a satirical call to action has turned into a cellular children's crusade may say more about the sorry state of activism in the U.S. than the true level of consumer rage. But if AT&T's network crashes on Friday, it will be kids with Apple (AAPL) iPhones who have done it.

The whole thing started as a publicity stunt.

Last Friday Dan Lyons, a Newsweek writer better known as the pseudonymous Fake Steve Jobs, posted a blistering 1,900 word rant — framed as a  "not-so-brief chat" with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson — that may be the best thing he's written since his identity was revealed two years ago. The post was Lyons' response to hints that AT&T might impose "incentives" to encourage iPhone users to stop overtaxing its network, and in the days that followed it was picked up by dozens of bloggers, twitterers and mainstream media outlets.

Encouraged by the attention, Lyons followed up Monday with a second Fake Steve Jobs post, this one built around what he claimed was a memo being circulated among the engineers at Apple:

Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power! (link)

The idea was dismissed as a silly stunt when it seemed that only a few hundred people might take up the cause. But when it became clear that thousands had signed on, things got serious.

On Tuesday, an AT&T spokesman told the Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney that "there is nothing amusing about advocating that customers attempt to deliberately degrade service on a network that provides critical communications services for more than 80 million customers."

Network World's John Cox went further, asking Lyons what he planned to tell the parents of toddlers who die on Friday because a call to 911 couldn't get through.

Even the FCC weighed in. ""Threats of this nature are serious," Jamie Barnett, chief of the agency's public safety and homeland security bureau, said in a statement. "To purposely try to disrupt or negatively impact a network with ill-intent is irresponsible and presents a significant public safety concern."

By Wednesday afternoon, Lyons seemed to be getting cold feet. "For the record," he wrote, "this is all just a joke that has spun out of control and gained a life of its own." Now Fake Steve is talking about cutting the protest back from one hour to 15 minutes. Or shutting off iPhones rather than using them to flood the network. Or asking the kids to duct tape their mouths and gather in flash mobs outside AT&T stores.

But judging from the comments on Facebook and elsewhere, it's too late for that. "This is no time to go wobbly, Fake Steve," wrote one poster. Added another: "The momentum this has created is beyond your control, and be prepared to accept the repercussions — good or bad."

UPDATE: Not content with commentary from AT&T and the FCC, Lyons spent Thursday knocking out fake messages of support (or opposition) from Osama Bin Laden, Hugo Chavez, Rachel Uchitel, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. See here.

See also:

• Operation Chokehold countdown clock
• Local TV News coverage on CBS-5

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

That's her "bull" case. In her "bear" scenario, Apple falls to $150 per share in 2010.

Click to enlarge. Source: Morgan Stanley

Katy Huberty's three scenarios for Apple (AAPL) — bear, base and bull — is the lead item in Morgan Stanley's "Key Surprises for 2010," a 15-company forecast issued to clients Wednesday.

Huberty is leaning heavily toward the bull, offering three paths by which Apple hits somewhere between $325 and $435 per share within the next 12 months:

1. Apple broadens distribution for global market coverage, reaching 10% global handset market share — roughly one-third of the smartphone market — by the September 2012 fiscal year.
2. In addition to greater high-end smartphone penetration, Apple introduces products with more affordable hardware/service plans, increasing its handset market share further to 15% (roughly 50% of the smartphone market) in F2012.
3. Apple drives for handset market leadership by forgoing carrier subsidies and shifting the iPhone profit pool to content, services, accessories.

The Street, she believes, is only giving Apple a 5% chance of surpassing that $325-plus target. She puts the odds at one in four.

Her other two scenarios are not so rosy:

• Base Case Scenario: $230/share. iPhone success limited to high-end (F2012 market share 4%).
• Bear Case Scenario: $150/share. iPhone loses its luster, open ecosystems win (F2012 market share 2-3%).

Apple closed Wednesday at $195.03, up 0.86 points (0.44%) for the day.

See also:

• Morgan Stanley drinks the Apple Kool-Aid

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Apple's CEO didn't stand a chance against Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke

Jobs' first Time cover. Image: Time Inc.

He may have made the editors' supposed short list, alongside President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, General Stanley McChrystal, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, a gang of  Somali pirates and a mob of Iranian protesters.

The readers may have given him 86,729 votes, behind only the Iranian protesters and President Obama in the magazine's online poll.

But when managing editor Rick Stengel did his "reveal" on NBC's Today Show Wednesday morning, it was Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke who had been named Time Magazine's 2009 Person of the Year, not Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs.

"Extraordinary guy," said Stengel, "influences our lives in all sorts of ways, but not person of the year."

In the end, Jobs wasn't even among the runners-up. (Those honors went to McChrystal and two candidates not on the short list: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and a sweatshop of Chinese workers.)

Anybody who watched Stengel's Today Show teaser two days earlier knew the fix was in. Jobs may have made the short list, but if Stengel had been serious about choosing the Apple guy, he would have worked Jobs into Monday's show. As you can see in the video below the fold, his name never came up.

Image: Time Inc.

Jobs was very nearly Time's 1982 Man of the Year. Michael Moritz, then a reporter in the magazine's San Francisco bureau (and now a partner at Sequoia Capital) wrote the story. But in end the editors made a broader and more surprising choice: They named the computer the Machine of the Year.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]