Friday afternoon noteworthy tidbits

• Apple - not long ago - officially announced that they weren’t working on an iPhone. Now it appears though as if this was an official lie. The world’s largest contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. leaked that they got an order from Apple for 12 million iPhones. If it is now indeed true then this will be an attack on some of Nokia’s and in particular SonyEricsson’s music phones. From a product management point of view this makes a lot of sense and could well be the start of a next - even bigger - wave for Apple. Mockup pictures have been out for quite some time of course too.
• Allot Communications - an Israeli QoS data network company - had a successful IPO on the Nasdaq, raising net 78 million USD with a market cap of 300 million USD. Quite interesting to see that QoS has become hot again. It was already supposed to be dead back in 2000 when many Silicon Valley startups were into this. Timing is everything, as we can see here clearly once more.
• Germany’s biggest print media company Axel Springer Verlag has changed its business strategy for four of its newspapers (Die Welt, Welt kompakt, Welt am Sonntag, Berliner Morgenpost) to “Online first” which means that all relevant news will go first and immediately onto their websites. So they realize that there is no point in reading 1-2 days later about something in a print edition when before that it has already been spread on many online portals, not to mention the fastest guys covering it even sooner, via blogs. This strategy will become the norm for all newspapers.
• After Silvio Berlusconi had been firmly told that his company Mediaset was not welcome to bid for the German private TV channel ProSiebenSat.1, FTD has now reported that Do?an Holding has moved into the final round of bidders and seems even to be holding the highest currently (not sure how they were able to find that out, but it makes for a good story at least). Do?an Holding is a Turkish conglomerate. Interesting also to see that Do?an today announced the sale of a 25% stake in Do?an TV Radio (DTVR) to Axel Springer, which makes the two partners. The Do?an Group has more than 11′000 employees and is active in the energy, media, industry, trade, tourism and insurance sectors. If you click on their website you might have some funny moments watching the animation that leads to their logo…
• Ever since the private equity company Blackstone took a stake in D-Telekom, things seem to have been moving much faster, and more seems to be happening than in the last 20 years or so combined. Looks like they are now pushing to spin out (to some extent at least) D-Telekom’s systems integration arm T-Systems.

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