Tech Stocks: Apple's iPhone Coming Soon
By Ann Sosnowski
In this article
Apple Inc. is releasing its new iPhone on June 29, and will make upwards of $2.2 billion on its sales by the end of 2008.
Lala.com has found a proprietary way to send music directly from your computer to your iPod without using a hard drive.
The music portal website has its first deal with Warner Music Group to offer 99 cent downloads on 200,000 songs.
Tech Stocks: Apple's iPhone Coming Soon
Cell phone technology continues to grow. Nowadays, you can order ringtones, wallpaper images and other motley multimedia sounds and images to your cell phone via the computer.
With a few clicks of your mouse, the multimedia content is sent directly to your cell phone. You verify its existence on your mobile technology and you're ready to go.
I've often wondered when this kind of technology would hit Apple Inc's (AAPL:NASDAQ) iPod. Currently, you still have to hook your iPod via a USB port to your laptop or PC. After buying music from iTunes, it is added to your personal synced music list and then you have to transfer it to your mobile player.
AAPL has just verified that its long-awaited iPhone will be available for consumers on June 29. The iPhone will not only be a cell phone and digital music player, but also a Web browser and will retail for $500 per unit.
Estimates are that AAPL will sell 5 million iPhones by the end of 2007 and 15 million by the end of 2008, which comes to a total revenue of $2.2 billion.
On the news that the iPhone would soon be made available, AAPL's stock has hit new 52-week highs and currently trades for $122.56 per share.
Now that the iPhone will be readily available, where's the technology for consumers to download music not only to their iPhone wirelessly but also to their soon-to-be (yet again) outdated iPods?
Tech Stocks: Wireless iPod Downloads?
Lala.com, a Silicon Valley start-up, has the technology but it's keeping mum for now. Lala.com is currently a music-swapping portal, building on the early successes of similar businesses like Napster.com. Funded through customers buying and downloading music from the site, as well as swapping CDs amongst each other for $1 per disc, Lala.com has plans to turn its portal into a direct link where members can automatically send music to their iPods, bypassing the use of the user's hard drive.
Its first partnership is with Warner Music Group Corp. (WMG:NYSE), giving it access to 200,000 songs to sell to members for 99 cents a pop.
Part of the technology for direct download to iPods is a three-megabyte plug-in that runs on most major browsers. As for the rest of the process, Lala.com is silent, although patents have been filed. And the technology is reported to have worked well in tests last week.
While Lala.com is not public, it's an interesting story to keep an eye on. After all, it's part and parcel these days with Web 2.0.
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Ann Sosnowski is a small and mid-cap stock analyst for Taipan Financial News. She is the editor of Diligent Investor, a monthly newsletter that balances conservative and moderately risky investments that pertain to current market trends. She is also the editor of Diligent Investor Micro-Cap Hot Sheet, a monthly newsletter that finds the hottest penny and micro-cap stocks on the market.
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