US job moves: Mercedes-Benz, Sony, Dow Jones, Apple, Dell
It's Friday and with that comes our coverage of the big moves, hires and fires in the US this week.
We've seen promotions from Mercedes-Benz and Sony, while News Corp. has poached a new CEO for Dow Jones and Apple and Dell are looking to expand their retail and software services with new prominent hires.
iPhone shipments up by 128% in Q4
Apple’s smartphone shipments increased by 128% year-on-year in Q4, meaning that it has now jumped to third overall in worldwide mobile phone shipments.
The report from the International Data Corporation shows that Nokia and Samsung maintained their positions as one and two in the table, with 113.5m and 97.6m units shipped respectively. For now, Apple is still some way behind with 37m units shipped.
Tapjoy opens up mobile ad buying marketplace
Thanks in large part to the popularity of the freemium business model amongst mobile app developers, mobile ad platform Tapjoy has built an advertising network that reaches some 70m active users each month.
Now it's hoping to really cash in on that audience by opening up its ad buying marketplace to all advertisers.
TMNG launches smartphone lease plan in the US
Consulting firm TMNG Global has launched a smartphone leasing scheme in the US as an alternative to a two-year phone contract.
This will allow people to use the latest handset technology without having to pay early termination charges.
Will Apple's new high-street hire change the way we buy Apple products?
Few CEOs have it as good as Apple's Tim Cook. Just look at his company's performance in the first quarter of his tenure.
But as strong as Apple is currently, Cook can't sit back and hope that the company Steve Jobs took to new heights will run itself. He'll have to make tough decisions, and put his mark on the company's operations.
He's doing just that with his first big hire.
Yahoo's five biggest acquisition screw-ups
Q4 financial results have hit us hard this week, from all directions.
Yes it's ridiculous that Apple’s quarterly net profit was larger than Google's Q4 gross revenue ($13bn versus £10.6bn), and yes it's sad to see Nintendo almost triple its estimated losses.
But what of Yahoo? It's still hanging on in there, with control of millions of Yahoo mail accounts and a chunk of display thrown in good measure.
Enterprise iPhone 4S activations surged in Q4
There are a lot of words and phrases that could be used to describe Apple's fiscal first quarter financial results. Amongst them: incredible, unbelievable, record-breaking and earth-shattering.
Strong (to put it modestly) sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs produced over $46bn in revenue and a mind-boggling net profit of more than $13bn.
When it came to the iPhone, the company's latest, the iPhone 4S, proved to be a winner, with more than 37m units sold in the quarter, which covered the all-important holiday shopping season.
Does Apple's textbook success prove that tech bloggers are too gullible?
It's official: Apple's attempt to revolutionise the textbook industry has 'succeeded'.
Just three days in, more than 350,000 textbooks have been downloaded via iBookstore - and iBooks Author has been downloaded 90,000 times.
In fact, over the course of a single weekend Apple has established "a very strong following with authors, publishers, faculty and students and may capture 95% of digital textbook market."
Apple wants to reinvent the textbook, but is it destined to fail?
A few hours ago Apple held its much-anticipated education event in New York City, and as expected, announced a new offering that seeks to reinvent the textbook around the iPad.
Seeking to make textbooks more interactive, more durable, more searchable and more easily refreshable, iBooks 2 offers a "new textbook experience for the iPad." And boy is it pretty.
2011 was a bad year for the PC
Q4, which includes the holiday shopping season, was good to many industries last year - but the PC industry wasn't one of them.
According to IDC, some of the biggest PC manufacturers, including HP, Dell and Acer, recorded declines in sales.
Performance was so bad that IDC described 2011 as "the second-worst year in history" for PCs, as total sales declined 5% from 2010.
