Randomly Noted

Add a new player to the smartphone market.

Dell unveiled the Aero earlier today and the key question will be what points of differentiation the new phone offers. It will run on Google’s Android software and that means users of this phone will have access to abut 40,000 applications. And it costs $99 if you sign-up for two years with AT&T. That’s the same price for buying the iPhone 3Gs (the older version) and Apple says its iPhone has more than 200,000 apps.

One big difference seems to be that the Dell phone will suport Adobe flash, which powers a lot of internet video. Apple has no plans to incorporate Adobe flash into its phones or tablets.

Almost everything about the planned IPO by Internet-phone-company Skype is big. Well, almost everything. But we’ll get to that in a minute. When you have a hot company, and this one is right now, everybody and their brother wants a piece of the action. That might explain the reason there are 13 underwriters listed as co-managers for the deal. And while “registered users” doesn’t mean these folks are always using the technology, it does mean a lot of people are at least familiar with the company – it had 560 million registered users as of the end of June.

Average monthly users has more than doubled to 124 million since the end of 2007. Most are using the free, Skype-to-Skype services but more and more people are being upsold to the paid services – like Skype to landline or mobile phone. But still, that number is only 6.5% of average monthly users.

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As many note the passing of  long-time New York Yankees’ owner, George Steinbrenner, and discuss his outsized impact on New York City and on baseball, perhaps his celebrity will prompt the U.S. Congress to finally come to terms with an important tax issue.

It feels unseemly to discuss financial matters right after a person’s death. But it’s a financial news event whenever an American of significant wealth dies because of Congressional inaction. The news is that right now, no matter how wealthy the person who passes away, there is no federal estate tax.

This is not a call for any specific level of estate tax, itself a subject of heated debate in Congress and in the country. It’s a call for Congress to have a consistent level of tax for a reasonable number of years.

As press reports have noted, Steinbrenner’s fortune – Forbes estimated his net worth at about $1.15 billion – wouldn’t be subject to estate tax because in 2010 there is no federal estate tax.

In 2009, the federal estate tax rate was 45%. In 2011, if Congress doesn’t act, the rate will be 55%.

This stunningly irresponsible set of circumstances occurred because of Congress’s inability to act on deadlines it essentially set for itself back in 2001.

At that time, tax-cutting was in vogue, but there was a compromise achieved by essentially making annual reductions in the estate tax temporary. Said another way, Congress kicked the can down the road.

After a declining rate starting from 2001, the rate went to zero for 2010 and then reverts to 55% in 2011. The idea presumably was that no one who voted on the measure would want the zero rate or the 55% rate to ever be put into practice.

Those two opposing-ends-of-a-bell-curve numbers were put there essentially as a warning from Congress to itself. We put off a decision, but we have a whole bunch of years to work things out. They haven’t yet worked things out.

Some have speculated that if Congress finally does get around to stepping up and settling the state tax issue, it will try to apply the rate retroactively, making the heirs of those who pass away in the tax-free year of 2010 pay something.

The idea of retroactivity has raised legal questions. More imporatnt, it assumes Congress will finally do something to settle the estate tax issue.

Pardon our skepticism on that score.

Hugo Chavez will be happy to know that for a price, the following url is available: www.totalitarian.com.

The Venezuelan president announced during his Sunday TV program that he plans to create his own blog so that he can communicate with the world. He plans to respond to questions from both supporters and critics. “I’m going to have my own battle trench on the Internet,” he declared.

So, is this akin to “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?” Chavez recently suggested his government would look for ways to control the Internet after charging that anyone who criticized him by using Twitter, the Internet or even text messaging was engaging in “terrorism.”

No start date was announced for the blog.

Among the aims of Apple’s iPad tablet is to reshape the e-book industry in the way iTunes reshaped the e-music industry. That means taking direct aim at industry leader Amazon and its e-reader, the Kindle. Apple reached its aim two months before selling a single book, as Amazon was forced to accede to higher pricing for Macmillan e-books. Amazon loses out, and so do consumers.

In the weeks leading up to the iPad unveiling last week, Apple made agreements with six major publishers to sell e-books at prices between $12.99 and $14.99. (Remember, the iPad doesn’t even go on sale until the end of March.) That was a shot across Amazon’s bow. The nation’s biggest retailer of books – print and electronic – had established a price of $9.99 for most e-books, which was lower than the industry wanted its wares priced. Because Amazon had first-mover advantage with the Kindle, the publishers went along with $9.99 pre-iPad, even after Barnes & Noble, Sony and other outfits rolled out well-regarded e-readers.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in a speech in Houston today, compared China’s censorship of the internet to Europe’s Nazi hate crime laws and the U.S.’s anti-child porn laws. This comes a week after rival Google stood up to China, putting at risk its business future in that country. Needless to say, what Beijing does to stifle the free flow of information (and much else) cannot be compared with European post-WWII anti-hate laws and American prohibitions on child pornography. Colleague Angel Gonzalez covered Ballmer’s appearance before an audience of Texas oil and gas executives. Angel writes that Ballmer told the group “most countries exert some sort of control over information; in France, it’s illegal to trade Nazi paraphernalia, for example, and the U.S. has strict laws to curb child pornography. ‘We have to take our cue here from the U.S. government,’ he said.” Granted, many Western companies find ways to comply with distasteful Chinese laws without (completely) compromising their morals and standards. But simply put, Ballmer might have found a way to describe the nature of this quandary without so blatantly appeasing Chinese officialdom.

(This is a guest post from Michelle LaRoche, Americas recruiting and training editor of Dow Jones Newswires, and the concerned mother of a 15-year-old son.)

Today I’m awfully glad that I commute by train.  At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, auto and tech companies have teamed up to bring the Internet and other flashy devices to the front seat.  

Preparing to sit behind the wheel is a generation of kids who can’t spend five minutes without an iPod, iPhone, Wii, backseat video player, computer or TV – my 15-year-old son included.  

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DJN colleague Nat Worden’s story about the media industry’s renewed affection for content is worth a look. The piece, “Big Media Renew Love For Content,” notes that “the industry’s titans are coalescing around a risky gamble on the old adage, ‘content is king.’” He notes News Corp., our parent company, along with Time Warner and Walt Disney share a strategy “to produce premium media content in a bet that consumers are ready to pay for it online.” It’s risky, sure, but it’s the only way forward for content producers – and, frankly, for readers who cherish the type of news and non-news content which costs money to produce. I also think it’s not as risky as some may think. As the economy recovers, and as CEOs such as Rupert Murdoch speak out publicly and often about the perils of giving away valuable content, customers will increasingly accept that it comes with a price.

Today’s WSJ piece about Apple considering launching an internet TV service underscores just how fast the television landscape is changing. Apple is almost certainly on the right track – in fact, it’s a bit late. Hulu (owned by three media firms including our own News Corp.) is already in that space, as is Netflix. In our home, we have a flat-screen TV but no cable television subscription. Instead, our television is hooked up to our computer as a second monitor, and we watch programs from Hulu and others, or borrow DVDs from the public library. We don’t miss real-time TV at all – mainly because we’re not sports aficionados. That said, the upcoming kick-off of American Idol’s new season will be the true test of our family’s TV-less experiment, which began when we moved back to the U.S. last June. While abroad, we always had cable TV and spent too many hours slumped on a couch flipping from one junky show to another. Viewers’ ability to buy the precise programs they want, whenever they want, is the way of the future. Apple, Hulu and Netflix have it right.

Being Internet cutting edge doesn’t equate to caring overly much about shareholder rights.  

So just a short while ago, Jessica E. Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal reported Facebook Inc. is establishing two classes of stock. Class B shares will be the favored class, going to all current holders of the still-private company. The B shares will have 10 times the voting power of Class A shares.

This follows the pattern of the other Internet icon, Google Inc., when it went public five or so years ago. The dual class reserves the controlling interest of the principals, in Google’s case its two founders. In Facebook’s case, this “will vastly enhance the voting power” of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, the Journal reported. He’s already the company’s largest holder.

But just like the case of Google, it is unlikely potential shareholders are going to fuss too much about arcane subjects such as corporate governance when it comes to the right to buy a piece of the equity of Facebook Inc.

These companies don’t have to be shareholder friendly, since their share price is likely to be.

Facebook did warn that the change in the stock structure “should not be construed as a signal the company is planning to go public,” the Journal reported. “Facebook has no plans to go public at this time.”