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Credit: Priceonomics

Priceonomics, which keeps track of the resale value of items like cars, bikes and gadgets, published a report Wednesday that shows how the value of iPhones, Android devices and BlackBerrys hold up over time. Short answer: iPhones, even years-old models, retain their value the longest, which means iPhone owners can recoup the most money when they go to resell their phones.

Here’s the method they  used:

We measure depreciation by comparing a phone’s current used price to its new price (without a contract) the day it was released. We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. We split phones into five different cohorts (newly released, 1, 2, 3, and 4 year-old phones). We then calculated which phones had the best resale by cohort, as well as which platforms in aggregate tended to retain their value the most.

The highest quality phones should have the best resale values over time and crappier phones should depreciate the fastest. The evidence is clear – the winner is the iPhone.

After crunching the data they came up with a series of charts, like one that shows that after owning a smartphone for 18 months, iPhone owners can resell theirs for 53 percent of the original price, Android owners for 42 percent and BlackBerry owners for 41 percent of the original price.

That part won’t be news to people who make a habit of reselling their old iPhone before or right after buying a new one a new one. There are sites like Gazelle.com, eBay and NextWorth.com that regularly buy used iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android phones in order to resell them. The iPhone is always the easiest to resell and will go for a decently high price if you time it right.

But all is not lost for penny-pinching Android owners. One caveat to the data that Priceonomics found is that less expensive Android phones sold by prepaid operators do hold their value much better than their pricier Google-powered brethren, probably because those phones are highly subsidized by the operators. Specifically, the Motorola Triumph, HTC Wildfire and Samsung Exhibit 4G on average keep up to 86 percent of the original value.

Be sure to check out the original post for more interesting data.

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A graphic included in Facebook's S-1 (click to enlarge)

The most highly anticipated initial public offering in today’s tech world is officially happening. Facebook filed S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon to raise a maximum of $ 5 billion.

The company plans to trade under the ticker symbol “FB.” According to the filing, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the lead bookrunners on the IPO; Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclay’s Capital, and Allen & Company are also listed as underwriters.

Here are some of the key numbers revealed in the filing:

• Facebook made $ 3.7 billion in revenue in 2011, an 88 percent boost in year-over-year revenue compared to 2010, when the company made $ 1.97 billion in revenue.

• The company has been solidly profitable for at least three years — its net income for 2011 was a very cool $ 1 billion.

• Facebook has been saving up a nice bit of the cash it’s made: The company had $ 3.9 billion in cash and equivalents on its books as of the end of the 2011 calendar year.

• Facebook now has 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users.

• Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary was $ 500,000 in 2011; COO Sheryl Sandberg’s was $ 300,000.

• Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook’s total revenues in 2011.

According to a letter written by Zuckerberg included in the S-1 filing, the money Facebook gets from an IPO will help it take advantage of the gold rush around increased worldwide connectivity to the Internet and the mobile devices boom.  The letter reads in part:

“Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.”

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

According to a predictive analysis experiment by a Yahoo data scientist, U.S. voters can expect to see either a Mitt Romney-Chris Christie or a Newt Gingrich-Marco Rubio ticket to face off against Obama-Biden in this year’s presidential election. The experiment, which author David Pennock explained on Yahoo’s The Signal blog Monday morning, highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of using web data to predict human behavior.

The point of Pennock’s experiment is to determine likely vice-presidential candidates based on what the web is saying. He found there’s a 25 percent chance Romney would pick Christie, currently the governor of New Jersey, whereas there’s a 30 percent chance Gingrich would choose Florida senator Rubio. Interestingly, although Romney and Rubio are anti-correlated (i.e., Rubio’s chance of being VP go down as Romney’s chances of being president rise, and vice versa), Rubio is so popular there’s still a 22 percent chance Romney would choose him. Christie, on the other hand, sees his chances drop to a mere 5 percent if Gingrich wins the Republican nomination.

Essentially, Pennock is using data from prediction services Intrade and PredictWise on who’s the most-likely VP, and extrapolating from there to determine who might get the nod if any given candidate wins the nomination. Statistically, Pennock’s conclusions are probably accurate, but he does make sure to note they’re just the result of “a statistical correspondence, and an extrapolated one at that, not a proven cause-effect relationship.”

For example, Pennock claims the results “are based solely on data unaided–and untainted–by political intuition,” but that’s not necessarily the case. Depending on what data sources he, Intrade and PredictWise are using, political intuition could play a major role in who’s correlated with whom. If my gut, no matter how uninformed, tells me Marco Rubio would be a great vice-presidential candidate and I write it or tweet it, I’ve likely influenced the data set with my intuitions, however data-driven the analysis itself is.

Furthermore, there’s really no accounting for the human brain. Although Intrade had Sarah Palin as John McCain’s likely VP candidate on the day she was announced, its confidence varied greatly throughout the day as rumors swirled, and I’m guessing it didn’t have her rated highly this far out. Who knows what will change between now and August and whose name will start cropping up? Actually, Intrade has the chances of Palin being picked this year at .2 percent as I write this, but perhaps she’ll surge again over the summer.

Predictive models can be very beneficial, and I think Pennock’s analysis (as well as those from Intrade and PredictWise) is very telling about reality as it exists now. But unlike in the world of machine data, where a series of particular events might be highly suggestive of a particular outcome down the road, reality can change in a hurry when fickle humans are involved.

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Intel’s wireless ambitions go beyond smartphones and tablets. It’s set its sights on the guts of the mobile network as well. By embracing a new network design concept called Cloud-RAN, Intel believes it can reshape wireless networks from highly-specialized architectures into more generic computing platforms that run over its off-the-shelf silicon. And in the world’s largest operator, China Mobile, Intel sees the opportunity to make that vision happen.

China Mobile has a massive network of 700,000 GSM and 220,000 3G base stations built into towers throughout China’s vast landscape. The base station is easily the most expensive element of the wireless network, and as China Mobile looks to the next wave of wireless technology, LTE, it doesn’t want to repeat that enormous infrastructure investment by installing pricey hardware at the bottom of every tower. Instead, it’s looking for Intel’s help to move all of that network intelligence into the cloud, leaving only the radios and antennas at the cell site.

The Cloud-Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN) isn’t the public cloud of Amazon Web Services. Rather it’s a private cloud run by each operator in local data centers, but the principle is the same. China Mobile could centralize an enormous number of now-distributed computing resources. That would not only save capital and operating costs, but it would also allow it to webscale the network’s biggest number-crunching requirement – converting the analog fuzz scooped out of the airwaves into digital ones and zeros the network can understand.

Using supercomputing principles to handle baseband processing means no longer having to build networks to meet peak demands at every tower. Cell sites usually see huge upticks in use at a few predictable times each day: during work hours in a business district, for instance, and mornings and evenings out in the suburbs. Outside of those peak times, that capacity just goes to waste. But with Cloud-RAN, operators can allocate capacity where and when needed, following the flow of network congestion from the suburbs to the central city and back again. By putting their base stations in the cloud, operators could drastically cut the processing power necessary to run the network as a whole – by some estimates as much as 40 percent.

Meet the Cloud-RAN players

Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks have developed Cloud-RAN platforms of their own, giving them fancy names like lightRadio and Liquid Radio respectively. Meanwhile, chipmakers Texas Instruments and Freescale have both begun retooling their baseband designs for future cloud implementations. But Intel aims to take the concept one step further. Instead of merely relocating base stations to the cloud, Intel proposes using its multi-purpose Xeon processors to perform the same signal processing tasks that are now the purview of highly-specialized equipment.

In short, Intel wants to replace the big-iron wireless networks of today with what are essentially server farms that can be built and deployed for a fraction of the cost.

At a telecom industry conference last year, the GM of Intel’s Communications Infrastructure Division, Rose Schooler said that the telecom industry has been hobbled by its fixation on proprietary network interfaces, opaque platforms and a morass of complex signaling protocols – that’s code for telecom vendors not wanting to open up any more than wireless standards require. By adopting the more open standards of the computing industry, the wireless industry could innovate at the faster pace of computing, Schooler said.

Not surprisingly, the traditional telecom vendors think Schooler and Intel suffer from a case of wishful thinking. Freescale and TI have also tapped into computing architectures for their next generation of chip designs. Freescale uses IBM’s PowerPC, while TI has begun integrating ARM cores into its latest basebands. But TI hasn’t done away with the key proprietary component of its baseband designs: the digital signal processor (DSP). No matter what Intel claims, wireless networks are highly specialized creatures and therefore require highly specialized silicon, said Tom Flanagan, director of technical strategy for TI’s wireless base station infrastructure team.

“Its kind of naïve to think that you can replace this highly optimized technology with something general purpose and not lose anything,” Flanagan said in a recent interview. “We build that expertise into the hardware because hardware is exactly where it needs to be.”

For Intel to replicate base station with generic Xeon processors would require it to build many of its functions into software, and doing baseband processing through software is a highly inefficient way to run a network, Flanagan said.

What are Intel’s chances?

To build a wireless network business, Intel doesn’t just need to battle the established telecom vendors, it has to make the case for Cloud-RAN to the wireless carriers. Last year at CTIA, Verizon CTO Tony Melone was dismissive of the new cloud architectures emerging at the show, saying that they were neat design concepts, but hardly ready for prime time. Verizon Wireless is the world’s most aggressive carrier when it comes to LTE and implementing new network technologies, so Melone’s lack of endorsement is telling.

Another obstacle is the enormous backhaul capacity that a Cloud-RAN architecture would require. Sending raw unprocessed radio frequency data over the network to a cloud data center would require much more bandwidth than a copper or microwave backhaul link could provide. That means fiber is the only way to support Cloud-RAN, and no operator has fiber links to all of its cell towers.

But if Intel lands a contract with China Mobile it may not have to worry about other customers. An LTE deployment from China Mobile could eventually scale to more than a million cells, translating into a heck of a lot of high-end chip sales. Intel, however, faces competition from the incumbents on that front as well. Intel has been working with on China Mobile’s Cloud-RAN project since its inception, but recently the carrier began testing Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio technology as well.

Given the decline of its core PC business, Intel needs to find new markets for its X86 processors and figures that the wireless industry is ripe for the picking. But its attempts to break into other aspects of that industry have flopped. Intel has tried for years to challenge ARM’s dominance in the mobile computing market with its Atom processors, but the X86 architecture’s notorious power problems have kept handset makers disinterested. Only earlier this month did Atom start showing life. Most recently Intel has been trying to position its processors as a means of making dumb femtocells and picocells smart.

I’ll give Intel one thing. It’s tenacious. With every wireless initiative fail – note WiMAX – it immediately launches another. And where it can’t develop a wireless technology on its own, it buys a company that can. Cloud-RAN could be a key turning point for Intel or another flop, but we’ll probably have to wait several years to find out. While China Mobile is trialing LTE now, its commercial rollout could be as far away as 2014.

Dice image courtesy of Flickr user alancleaver_2000

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may have been shelved by Congress, but the Senate’s PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) still looms and Jason Hoffman can’t stop wondering how we got to this place.

“It’s all just so dumb,” said Hoffman, CTO and founder of Joyent, a hosting provider that also offers IaaS and PaaS services. “The Senate bill is just as bad if not worse than SOPA. These are both dumb bills and [are] a classic example of industry-specific lobbyists creating stupid laws.”

Does that mean that the motion picture and recording industry has better lobbyists than SOPA opponents like Facebook, Twitter et al? Not really, it just shows that it’s easier to lobby when someone is supposedly a thief or a suspected terrorist, he said. “How do you lobby for freedom? That’s harder.” To be clear, Joyent has no plans to black out any sites and Hoffman has not been proactively front-and-center with his concerns. But when asked, he is eager to share them.

What really grates on Hoffman, is that the industries seeking protection — movie studios, record companies, publishing houses, broadcast networks — brought this mess on themselves. “Look at the list of companies supporting these bills. It could be a list of railroad companies a hundred years ago fighting the auto industry,” he said.

Had these SOPA supporters made their content available easily and affordably, they’d have no problem selling it, he said. ”If you ask someone why they ‘Bit Torrented’ a movie, it’s because they couldn’t buy it or rent it.” He added: It’s not the consumer’s fault that the content they want has not been made available to them. In short, these issues have nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with product distribution and pricing.

“If you look at how [the record companies] handled Napster well over a decade ago, you can’t tell me that EMI couldn’t have figured out how to do something with that model in all this time,” Hoffman said. But instead of building a viable, affordable electronic distribution system for their content ,these companies now want laws to protect their businesses.

Many people are actually willing to pay multiple times for the same content if it comes in a more convenient format. People like me (an admitted oldster) have vinyl album collections that they duplicated with CDs and now have re-purchased from iTunes. There are a ton of such “triple dippers” out there, Hoffman said. “People are willing to pay for convenience.”

Then there are the nuts-and-bolts issues of how web companies are supposed to comply with these laws if passed. Initially SOPA would have mandated that web companies block or re-route DNS (Domain Name Service) requests for sites deemed to be illegally hosting copyrighted content.

“My general frustration is that there’s no messing around with the DNS. You can’t just grab domain names, [it] creates a tremendous amount of work and doesn’t remotely touch the core problem. I’m not convinced there is a core problem”

SOPA hypocrisy

But what seems to get Hoffman’s goat more than anything is the double standard he sees. In early December, a minor furor arose when the “Great Firewall of China” blocked access to Joyent’s latest Node.js framework because the version number coincided with the date of the Tiananmen Square upheaval.

At the time Hoffman shrugged off the Chinese blocking issue and recommended that those in this country who made a federal case out of it pay closer attention to the restrictions  SOPA would put on even the most popular web sites.

Thinking back on it now, he reaffirmed that stance: “Twitter and Facebook are awesome when they’re bringing down a dictator in the Middle East. They’re not awesome when someone is tweeting about some governor here.”

In other words, everyone should take a deep breath before enacting any legislation.

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Intel promised 2012 would be the year its Atom processors would make it into smartphones, and at CES this week it delivered on the letter of that promise. Motorola Mobility and Lenovo have agreed to embed Intel’s Medfield applications chips into forthcoming phones. But for Intel to call Atom a success it needs to make headway with the big handset makers, which may be an impossibility considering how closely the major players in mobile devices are tied to the competing ARM platform.

Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said his company has a multi-year, multi-device deal with Intel, which could mean its moving away from the Texas Instruments and Nvidia ARM-based chips. Jha said its first Intel-based Android phones will launch in the second half of 2012, but it will eventually have embedded Atom chips in tablets as well. Meanwhile, Lenovo’s initial commitment to Atom is more limited. It revealed it would launch a single Android phone, the K800, in China in the second quarter.

While Intel is looking to score wins for Atom wherever it can, Motorola and Lenovo aren’t exactly the top tier. Motorola’s fortunes have plummeted in recent years knocking it into the bottom rungs of the handset ladder. Google may attempt to revive Moto after its acquisition closes, but it’s just as likely that it will merely harvest the once-great phone innovator’s trove of patents. Meanwhile, Lenovo’s troubles in the wireless space are too numerous to count. After selling off and then repurchasing its mobile business in 2009, Lenovo has refocused its efforts on smartphones and tablets, but it’s hardly a household name in mobile devices.

Apple and Samsung have become the dominant players in smartphones, their iPhone and Galaxy brands battling it out for global dominance. Both produce their own ARM applications processor silicon and would have little use for Intel. Apple did move away from ARM for the Mac, adopting Intel CPUs. The difference is Intel was and still is the dominant player in PC processing, while ARM bears that title in mobile.

Intel's mobile phone reference design.

Below Samsung and Apple lies a second tier of other smartphone makers that could be candidates for Intel chips, with Nokia, LG and HTC among them. But as Om pointed out on Tuesday, all of those handset makers could soon become non-factors. In fact, Om predicts that if anyone is going to challenge Samsung and Apple’s dominance, it will be Lenovo’s fellow Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, which could become giants in the low-end of the smartphone price spectrum.

To land any of those guys, Intel needs to overcome the negative perceptions of Atom’s X86 architecture that it gulps down battery power, though Intel claims that with the latest Atom release, the Z2460, those problems are solved. In addition, any vendor switching from an ARM-based architecture would need to deal with a massive fragmentation problem in Android. The two architectures’ differing instruction sets would require Android apps built exclusively for ARM to be recompiled for an X86 device. In an interview with the Verge, however, Intel’s Dave Whalen tried to assuage some of those concerns, saying almost all apps in the Android market will run on Atom-powered phones will run as is, with no recompiling necessary.

Still, there’s a big difference between “almost” and “all.” Not many device makers are going to take a big chance on Intel if the resulting handsets and tablets won’t have the full Android Market available to them. There’s already enough fragmentation with Android, and if forced to choose, developers will optimize their apps for ARM-based devices considering the huge numbers already available. As has always been the case in mobile, the cards are very much stacked against Intel.

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