1 of 6. Ben Stephens (R), a Blackberry sales manager demonstrates a new Blackberry Z10 to prospective customer Shevek (C), as store manager Alejandra Escobar watches at a branch of UK retailer Phones 4U in central London, January 31, 2013. Blackberry's new Z10 model went on sale in the UK today. Research In Motion Ltd's glitzy unveiling of the long-delayed line of BlackBerry smartphones on Wednesday and a new corporate name failed to impress Wall Street analysts, with at least three downgrading the company's stock.

NEW YORK | Thu Jan 31, 2013 1:52pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The afterglow of Research In Motion Ltd's BlackBerry 10 unveiling faded on Thursday as a flurry of lukewarm reviews signaled the company's struggle to regain momentum in the hyper-competitive smartphone market was just beginning.

Shares of BlackBerry, RIM's new corporate name, fell almost 10 percent early on Thursday, after a 12 percent decline the previous day, as some tech analysts questioned whether the new BB10 devices the company launched on Wednesday were the sure-fire hit that BlackBerry needs to get back into the game.

While New York Times reviewer David Pogue gushed that BlackBerry's new Z10 model is "lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas," other reviewers were more tentative in their appraisals.

"The problem with the Z10 is that it doesn't necessarily do anything better than any of its competition," said Joshua Topolsky of technology news website the Verge. "No one could argue that there's a 'killer app' here. Something that makes you want or need this phone because it can do what no other phone can do. That's not the case."

Such lukewarm reviews - combined with disappointment around a later-than-expected and still unspecified date for the U.S. sales debut - spooked investors and prompted analysts to cut their price targets and forecasts.

BlackBerry, which is making a big push to win back the all-important U.S. market with a Super Bowl ad this weekend, said the new Z10 touch-screen device would not go on sale in the United States until sometime in mid-March, saying U.S. carriers need more time to test the model.

"The shine from the Super Bowl ad will be a fading memory by the time U.S. customers can buy in March," said TD Securities analyst Scott Penner, who has a "hold" rating on the stock.

Samsung Electronics Co may also steal some of BlackBerry's thunder as buzz around its Galaxy IV device heats up before the Z10 hits U.S. store shelves, Penner pointed out.

Making matters worse for BlackBerry, it has been not been very specific about how soon it will be before many of its most loyal fans across the globe can get their hands on the Q10 - its new qwerty keyboard model. The company has only said that it aims to release this version of the smartphone in April.

"While later-than-expected availability of the Z10 and Q10 devices shouldn't impact the longer-term potential success of the BB10 platform, we believe it does mitigate one of the near-term catalysts for the stock," said Paradigm Capital analyst Gabriel Leung, who trimmed his price target on the stock to $16 from $19.50.

RIM shares were down 5.2 percent at $13.05 at 12:15 EST (1715 GMT) Thursday on the Nasdaq, while its Toronto-listed shares were down 5.8 percent at C$13.06.

HIGH-END TARGET MARKETS

Initially at least, the BlackBerry 10 is aimed squarely at the North American and European markets, where consumers and businesses alike are eager to snap up high-end devices.

In countries like India - the world's second-largest mobile phone market - the premium cost of the new Z10 handset will restrict sales. Even so, the new device, which sources said will likely enter the key Indian market in mid-February, could help the Canadian company compete with premium rivals such as Apple Inc there.

"The Z10 launched yesterday is obviously a high-end product and India is not a market at that price point," said Anshul Gupta, industry analyst at Gartner, a technology advisory firm.

BlackBerry is the third-largest smartphone player in India after Samsung and Nokia, due mainly to its low-cost handsets that allow young people to communicate for free on its BlackBerry Messaging Service.

RIM launched its first BlackBerry more than a decade ago, as a way for busy executives to stay in touch with both clients and their offices.

BlackBerry quickly cornered the market for secure corporate and government emails, but its star has faded in recent years as competition heated up and RIM failed to keep pace.

The BlackBerry is now an also-ran in the race for market share, with a 3.4 percent global showing in the fourth quarter, down from some 20 percent three years ago.

RIM's new smartphones are considered a make-or-break attempt to save the company and claw back market share that it has lost to the likes of Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy devices.

"BlackBerry has demonstrated truly unique software innovation within BB10," wrote Raymond James analyst Steven Li in a note to clients. "However, convincing the many BlackBerry users who have abandoned the platform for iOS and Android over the last few years to return will be a difficult challenge as Microsoft and Nokia can surely attest to."

(Editing by Frank McGurty; and Peter Galloway)

View the original article here

A Sirius Satellite Radio unit is shown installed in a private vehicle in Washington February 20, 2007.

NEW YORK | Thu Jan 10, 2013 5:41pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sirius XM Radio Inc's grip on drivers is under an increasing threat as the availability of Internet connections in more cars is helping Pandora Media Inc counter some of its rival's big selling points.

In a sign of how important drivers are to the two companies, each of their top executives made the trek to Las Vegas this week to court automakers at the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

Sirius XM, which has its satellite radios in 70 percent of new vehicles, generates the vast majority of its revenue through subscriptions and derives only a fraction from advertising dollars. Streaming service Pandora is just the opposite, collecting most of its revenue from advertising and operating only a nascent subscription business.

Right now, Sirius XM is the much bigger company, with almost 24 million subscribers and more than $3 billion in annual revenue. In the third quarter, it generated average revenue of $12.14 per subscriber.

Pandora, by contrast has 60 million users, about 1 million of whom are paid subscribers, and is on track to generate $424 million in revenue this year.

But the migration of music audiences to mobile devices threatens to upend a market that Sirius current dominates. The key to both companies' futures rests on winning the battle for the listener on the go, particularly people traveling by car.

With its presence in new vehicles, Sirius XM has a first-mover advantage over Pandora. But Pandora is making a huge push to get into the car, a move that dovetails with ubiquitous wireless access that makes it easier to listen to its service.

"Internet-enabled radio in the car has already begun," Pandora Chief Executive Officer Joe Kennedy said in an interview. "It will grow as a snowball, initially small but growing exponentially."

Sirius XM declined to make its executives available for interviews.

Of Pandora's 60 million total listeners, 77 percent have tuned in with a mobile device. The problem is, the revenue per 1,000 listener hours on mobile was only $26.96 in the third quarter, up from $23.60 a year earlier, but still less than half of the $56.40 the company generated from other listeners.

"They do have to continue their mobile monetization," said Cowen and Co analyst John Blackledge, who has a "neutral" rating on the stock.

Kennedy called the third quarter a "key milestone" since the mobile revenue increase outpaced mobile usage growth.

At Sirius XM, executives have said its customers are increasingly listening to its service on mobile devices, but it has never broken out figures on that usage. It costs Sirius XM car subscribers an extra $3.50 a month to stream the service over the Internet on devices.

"They don't really promote it, and it's not really a cornerstone of the product," Gabelli & Co analyst Brett Harriss said.

Sirius XM Chief Financial Officer David Frear said at an investor conference on Wednesday that the strategy was "to capture you in the car and then allow you to extend to other platforms."

DASH FOR THE DASHBOARD

While Sirius XM touts the ability of its satellites to deliver a strong signal and high audio quality, the importance of those attributes is likely to fade because of the widespread availability of faster and better Internet connections in cars.

"From the consumer standpoint, the reception advantages of satellite radio will be marginalized or go away over time," said a former Sirius XM executive familiar with the business models of the company and its competitors.

Indeed, Liberty Media Corp, which ranks as Sirius XM's largest shareholder and is close to gaining operating control of the company, has criticized its former longtime CEO, Mel Karmazin, for not adapting to changing technologies fast enough.

Critics say Sirius XM has relied too heavily on its position in the auto market and perceived programming advantage. About 50 million cars in the United States come equipped with the satellite radios, with just under half of their owners actually subscribing to the service.

For its part, Pandora is available in just 75 vehicle models, although it also has deals with automakers like General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co, BMW and most recently Chrysler Group LLC that allow drivers to plug in their Pandora-enabled mobile devices and use the car's dashboard to control the service.

More than 1 million people have used Pandora's dashboard integration, Pandora said.

Sirius XM also believes it has an edge with its programming from the likes of shock jock Howard Stern, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and major sports leagues. Access to this type of content, Sirius contends, justifies the subscription cost of at least $14.49 per month.

In the first three quarters of the year, Sirius XM's programming and content costs were $205.2 million, while it paid $409.4 million in revenue sharing and royalties, the company has reported. This represents roughly 25 percent of its revenue in the period.

On the other hand, Pandora spends roughly 55 percent its revenue on acquiring music.

"Having music is an important thing, but having the diversity of the content, the music, the news, the talk and the entertainment content is really what sets us apart," Sirius XM CFO Frear said at a December 3 investor conference.

But as Internet access becomes more readily available in cars, people will be able to listen to podcasts and other content.

"The value of commercial-free music on Sirius could decrease," said Gabelli analyst Harriss. "There is no doubt competition from Pandora will increase in the next two or three years."

RIHANNA VS. PANDORA

Still, Sirius XM has an unlikely ally in its battle with streaming music services: the U.S. government.

As it stands, Pandora and other streaming music services pay a much bigger percentage of revenue to license songs than Sirius XM does. Plus, the more popular these services become, the more they have to shell out for music royalties.

Based on rules that U.S. lawmakers set under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Pandora pays more than 50 percent of its revenue to an agency called SoundExchange to license songs on a per-performance basis.

Sirius XM pays 8 percent of its revenue for song licensing, and that will increase to just 11 percent by 2017 under a new deal struck with regulators. Traditional radio pays nothing at all to SoundExchange, although it pays composers to air their music.

Pandora and its brethren are pushing for changes in how royalties for online radio are collected and are backing the Internet Radio Fairness Act, a bill that would change regulation of royalties.

But they are up against big stars like Billy Joel, Rihanna and Missy Elliott, who are opposed to the bill because they believe their royalties would be cut drastically.

"Music is a poisonous area of investment because the royalty structures are so out of whack, it's impossible to be profitable," said David Packman, a veteran of the music industry and partner in venture capital firm Venrock.

"We think innovation is seriously depressed in this sector because of the licensing challenges."

(Editing by Peter Lauria and Lisa Von Ahn)

View the original article here

JERUSALEM | Sun Oct 14, 2012 11:18am EDT

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A collection of yet unseen Franz Kafka writings, stashed for four decades in a Tel Aviv apartment, will be made public and transferred to Israel's national library, according to an Israeli court ruling published on Sunday.

The papers had been held by Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler, two sisters who argued in a more than four-year-long case that they legally inherited the documents from their mother, Esther Hoffe, secretary to Kafka's close friend and executor, Max Brod.

But the court ruled that Brod, had ordered in his will that the majority of the documents he had given to his secretary should go to a public archive.

Leading experts have said they did not expect material to emerge from any of Kafka's writings found in the apartment that would prompt major revisions of the works by the Jewish, German-language author who died in 1924.

But papers in the collection are believed to include manuscripts by Brod that could shed new light on Kafka's life and times in Prague.

"It is a victory for the people of Israel," the National Library's Judaica Collection curator, Aviad Stollman, told Reuters. "These materials have been locked up for more than 40 years and will finally be exposed and made accessible to all," Stollman said.

Kafka's "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika" were published after his death, when Brod, who was also his biographer, ignored the Prague-born writer's dying wish to burn all unpublished work.

In 1939 Brod fled the Nazis, taking the last train out of Prague with a suitcase of Kafka papers under his arm. After Brod's death in Israel in 1968, the archive was passed to Esther Hoffe.

The secretary placed some of the writings in Tel Aviv and Zurich safe deposit boxes and the rest in her apartment in the Israeli city, fuelling a Kafkaesque mystery about their content.

Esther Hoffe died in 2007. Her gift to her daughters was challenged in court by the State of Israel, which said the writings should be in the public domain in the Jewish state.

Brod had already given much of Kafka's manuscripts to the writer's niece in 1956. They ended up in Oxford after a chance meeting between an English academic and the niece's son -- Kafka's great-nephew.

In Israel, Esther Hoffe frustrated scholars by denying them access to the papers in her possession -- though she sold Kafka's manuscript of his novel "The Trial" for a reported $2 million in the 1980s.

During the trial, the sides bickered about the dubious conditions in which some of the writings were supposedly kept, with the woman's cats cited as a concern.

Harel Ashwal, a lawyer who represented one of Hoffe's daughters, told Army Radio the legal team was likely to appeal.

"It is not the end of the story," he said.

(Writing by Maayan Lubell, editing by Diana Abdallah)

View the original article here

n">Aug 9 (Reuters) - Research in Motion Ltd said a U.S. judge had ruled the company had not infringed on Mformation Technologies Inc's patent and overturned an award of $147.2 million that a jury said the Canadian firm should pay.

The verdict is a minor boost for RIM, whose stock has fallen more than 70 percent in the past year as customers abandon the BlackBerry in favor of Apple's iPhone and a slew of devices using Google Inc's Android software.

Mformation sued RIM in 2008, bringing claims on a patent for a process that remotely manages a wireless device over a wireless network, a court filing says.

In July, a northern California jury directed RIM to pay an $8 royalty for every BlackBerry device connected to RIM's enterprise server software, bringing the total award to $147.2 million.

RIM had argued that Mformation's patent claims were invalid because the processes were already being used when Mformation filed its patent application.

Judge James Ware said Mformation failed to establish that RIM had infringed on the company's patent and subsequently overturned the jury award, according to court papers.

"We appreciate the judge's careful consideration of this case. RIM did not infringe on Mformation's patent and we are pleased with this victory," Steve Zipperstein, RIM's Chief Legal Officer, said in a statement on Thursday.

Mformation has the right to appeal the ruling. However, if Mformation successfully appeals the ruling, the jury verdict would not be reinstated and instead a new trial would be conducted.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Mformation Technologies Inc vs. Research in Motion Ltd et al, 08-04990.

View the original article here

* Rebels use captured tank to attack airbase

* Military airfield could be used to reinforce Aleppo

* Damascus district under government attack

By Hadeel Al Shalchi

ALEPPO, Syria, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Syrian rebels turned the gun of a captured tank against government forces on Thursday, shelling a military airbase expected to be used as a staging post for army reinforcements in the battle for Aleppo.

President Bashar al-Assad's troops meanwhile bombarded the strategic Salaheddine district in Aleppo itself with tank and artillery fire while rebels tried to consolidate their hold on areas they have seized.

In the capital Damascus, troops overran a suburb on Wednesday and killed at least 35 people, mostly unarmed civilians, residents and activist organisations said.

The fighting for Syria's two biggest cities highlights the country's rapid slide into full-scale civil war 17 months on from the peaceful street protests that marked the start of the anti-Assad uprising.

World powers have watched with mounting concern as diplomatic efforts to find a negotiated solution have faltered and violence that has already claimed an estimated 18,000 lives worsens.

More than 180 people were killed in Syria on Wednesday, 133 of them civilians and 45 of them members of Assad's forces, according to the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The rebels' morale was boosted when they turned a government tank's gun on the Menakh airbase 35 km (25 miles) north of Aleppo - a possible staging post for army reinforcements.

"We hit the airport using a tank that we captured from the Assad army. We attacked the airport a few times but we have decided to retreat at this time," a rebel fighter named Abu Ali told Reuters.

The pro-opposition Observatory said government forces at the airbase had used artillery and rocket launchers to bombard the town of Tel Rifaat, which lies between the airbase and Aleppo, Syria's commercial centre.

Reuters correspondents heard heavy weapons fire on Thursday morning from Salaheddine in southwest Aleppo, a gateway to the city of 2.5 million people that has been fought over for the past week.

Heavily armed government troops are trying to drive a force of a few thousand rebel fighters from the city in battle whose outcome could be a turning point in the conflict.

Although government forces have made concerted efforts to take Salaheddine, a full-out assault on the city as a whole has yet to take place.

Mobile phone connections have been cut since Wednesday evening, leading to speculation among residents that an increase in military action might be imminent.

The rebels are consolidating areas they control in Aleppo, attacking police posts and minor military installations with some success. They claim to have seized three police stations this week.

NEW ATROCITIES ALLEGED

In Damascus, still a government stronghold but a scene of combat in the past two weeks, government troops faced new accusations of atrocities after they overran a suburb on Wednesday.

"When the streets were clear we found the bodies of at least 35 men," a resident, who gave his name as Fares, said by phone from Jdeidet Artouz, southwest of Damascus.

"Almost all of them were executed with bullets to their face, head and neck in homes, gardens and basements."

Syrian state television said "dozens of terrorists and mercenaries surrendered or were killed" when the army raided Jdeidet Artouz and its surrounding farmlands.

In a rallying cry to his troops on Wednesday, Assad said their battle against rebels would decide Syria's fate.

But his call-to-arms, in a written statement, gave no clues to his whereabouts two weeks after a bomb attack on his inner circle.

Assad, who succeeded his late father Hafez 11 years ago to perpetuate the family's rule of Syria, has not spoken in public since the bombing in Damascus killed four of his close security aides, although he has appeared in recorded clips on television.

His low public profile has fuelled speculation about his grip on power since the attack in which his brother-in-law died.

FOOD RUNNING SHORT

The fighting in Salaheddine district, part of a rebel-held arc stretching to the northeast of Aleppo, has left neither side in full control.

On Al-Sharqeya Street, residents and shop owners looked in awe at the damage. Some searched through what was left of their buildings - huge piles of concrete and twisted metal.

"I saw death before my eyes," said Abu Ahmed as he abandoned his home. "I was hiding in the alleyway of my building when I heard the whiz of the artillery. Look at my street now."

They said the damage was caused by helicopter fire targeting a rebel brigade based in a school. It missed the school and hit the residential buildings instead.

"This dog Assad and his men are so blind they can't even target a brigade properly," said Abu Ahmed, waving a plastic bag with his meagre belongings inside.

State television said on Wednesday the army was pursuing remaining "terrorists" in one Aleppo district and had killed several, including foreign Arab fighters.

Some foreign fighters, including militant Islamists, have joined the battle against Assad, who accuses outside powers of financing and arming the insurgents.

Aleppo had long stayed aloof from the uprising but many of its 2.5 million residents are now caught up in battle zones, facing shortages of food, fuel, water and cooking gas. Thousands have fled and hospitals and makeshift clinics can barely cope with casualties after more than a week of combat.

"The humanitarian situation is deteriorating in Aleppo and food needs are growing rapidly," said the World Food Programme, announcing plans to send emergency food supplies for up 28,000 people.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation said up to three million Syrians are likely to need food and other aid in the next 12 months because the conflict has prevented farmers from harvesting their crops.

U.S. SUPPORT

In a shift toward increased foreign involvement in the war, U.S. President Barack Obama signed a secret order authorizing American support for the rebels, according to U.S. sources familiar with the matter.

The order, approved earlier this year, broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

The lightly armed insurgents are battling a well-equipped army that has overwhelming superiority on paper. But the rebels have managed to capture some tanks and heavy weapons and their ranks are swelled by army defectors.

The rebels, however, are united mostly by loathing of Assad, and have failed to come together despite pressure from the West, Turkey and Sunni-ruled Arab states who back their cause.

View the original article here