Sales of personal computers are falling, but they’re slipping very, very slowly. PC shipments increased 3.2 percent in 3Q, well below seasonal averages, according to Gartner research. READ MORE
Motorola hopes techy nostalgia can save its slipping market share. It announced its newest smartphone Thursday, the Droid Razr. Of course, the original Razr, a thin, sleek device, was a must-have about eight years ago. “This brand has a lot of recognition,” said Alain Mutricy, Motorola portfolio and product management senior vice president. “Because of what this brand means in the minds of consumers, we decided to relaunch it.” READ MORE
Coming soon: a new BlackBerry operating system, BBX. It’s a combination of the existing smartphone OS and QNX, the system for Research in Motion‘s tablet. The new OS will be optimized for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile goods. “The whole company is aligning behind a single platform,” said RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. READ MORE
Gilt Groupe has added a new website under its fast-growing brand, Gilt Home. Selling high-end home products through flash sales and traditional methods puts it in direct competition with One Kings Lane, a flash-sales site that sells similar goods. READ MORE
Yahoo is predicting lower-than-expected ad revenues for the third quarter, even as the overall industry has experienced a 20-percent increase this year. The company anticipates its display-ad business will be flat or only slightly higher in the third quarter, a marked decrease from the double-digit growth of past quarters. READ MORE
Watch out, Facebook and Twitter. You’ve got some new competition. It’s…Chime.in. The new social-media platform will let users create “Chimes.” These are images, videos, polls, and links that you can cross-post to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. READ MORE
As if the online video space wasn’t crowded enough already, YouTube might soon add 25 channels of all-original content, hoping to compete with the major television networks. READ MORE
After you screw up, you apologize. To sweeten the deal, you might give a gift. That’s how Research in Motion is playing it, after millions of customers lost e-mail and BlackBerry Messenger service last week. RIM will make the apps available for free over the next few weeks in the BlackBerry App World. Worth about $100 together, the apps will be available until the end of the year. READ MORE
2011 saw a surge of web start-ups. Now start-ups are finding capital hard to come by, according to a Wall Street Journal report that has the venture capital and start-up world abuzz. The trend seems to be affecting only early stage ventures. There’s simply not enough investment out there to fund them all. The National Venture Capital Association released a report Monday that confirms this, concluding that venture-fund raising in the third quarter fell to its lowest quarterly level since 2003. READ MORE
Fresh numbers surfaced today that further illustrate Netflix‘s poor customer-management skills. In the month that it announced and then killed Qwikster, Netflix lost 10 points in its “appeal rating,” according to research from E-Poll Market Research, a consumer-sentiment research firm. READ MORE
