• Apple - not long ago - officially announced that they weren't working on an iPhone. Now it appears though as if this was an official lie. The world's largest contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. leaked that they got an order from Apple for 12 million iPhones. If it is now indeed true then this will be an attack on some of Nokia's and in particular SonyEricsson's music phones. From a product management point of view this makes a lot of sense and could well be the start of a next - even bigger - wave for Apple. Mockup pictures have been out for quite some time of course too.
• Allot Communications - an Israeli QoS data network company - had a successful IPO on the Nasdaq, raising net 78 million USD with a market cap of 300 million USD. Quite interesting to see that QoS has become hot again. It was already supposed to be dead back in 2000 when many Silicon Valley startups were into this. Timing is everything, as we can see here clearly once more.
• Germany's biggest print media company Axel Springer Verlag has changed its business strategy for four of its newspapers (Die Welt, Welt kompakt, Welt am Sonntag, Berliner Morgenpost) to "Online first" which means that all relevant news will go first and immediately onto their websites. So they realize that there is no point in reading 1-2 days later about something in a print edition when before that it has already been spread on many online portals, not to mention the fastest guys covering it even sooner, via blogs. This strategy will become the norm for all newspapers.
• After Silvio Berlusconi had been firmly told that his company Mediaset was not welcome to bid for the German private TV channel ProSiebenSat.1, FTD has now reported that Doğan Holding has moved into the final round of bidders and seems even to be holding the highest currently (not sure how they were able to find that out, but it makes for a good story at least). Doğan Holding is a Turkish conglomerate. Interesting also to see that Doğan today announced the sale of a 25% stake in Doğan TV Radio (DTVR) to Axel Springer, which makes the two partners. The Doğan Group has more than 11'000 employees and is active in the energy, media, industry, trade, tourism and insurance sectors. If you click on their website you might have some funny moments watching the animation that leads to their logo...
• Ever since the private equity company Blackstone took a stake in D-Telekom, things seem to have been moving much faster, and more seems to be happening than in the last 20 years or so combined. Looks like they are now pushing to spin out (to some extent at least) D-Telekom's systems integration arm T-Systems.

Deutsche Telekom has been on a roller coaster ride in the last months:

• Biggest buyer of 3G spectrum licenses in the US
• Announced decision to build a nationwide HSDPA network in the US
• Rumours of layoffs in Germany (some will come for sure)
• Rumours of CEO being laid off (his contract has been extended by just 2 years now)
• Rumours of Russian investors buying a big stake (still open)

Now they have announced that they will not invest into WiMAX spectrum in Germany. That is understandable since they own 3G spectrum licenses and will be able to offer some higher data speeds over this network - of course nothing comparable to WiMAX speeds. But the other reason is most likely that they will not have the money anymore since the investments in the US added up. So this is not against WiMAX but simply follows realities for one operator. I would expect that many other incumbents are in similiar situation and will decide the same way. As a result, WiMAX will be an opportunity for new players to realize real high speed mobile wireless access services and take away the incumbents' business in the next few years.

• What was long expected seems to have happened now. Both Facebook and YouTube might be up for sale. Facebook turned down an offer for 750 million USD in March and seems now worth the 2bln USD that they were asking for at the time. What a difference 6 months can make! Once more, Good Morning Silicon Valley sums it up nicely: "To inflate YouTube, pull cord, stand clear"
• Back in Europe, German's Deutsche Telekom have been found in the headlines quite a lot recently. Either it is about their US spectrum auction activties, pressure from its private equity shareholder Blackstone and others to replace its CEO, or now, as the CEO himself has announced (sounds desperate and not only to me) that he plans to completely restructure the company. In between one can read from other D-Telecom execs that they have everything under full control. To me this sounds more like a "Houston we have a problem" call.
• The news in the tech community yesterday was that early Skype backer Magnus Lund is at it again with its online brokerage startup Zeeco. What's so special about an online stock broker site? They want to offer online trading for FREE! So finance it with ads. What a courageous step. At least they already have the headlines. But I expect it will be much tougher to make this one succeed since they will have to fight many established, deep pocketed competitors. Techcrunch mentions other reasons too.
• At Siemens in Germany a decision for 30% higher board member salaries has received severe backlash but also some comments from people who think this is justified since Siemens is doing fine currently and also needs to match salaries with other companies. Timing is never a good one for increasing salaries of the top management of course, but the idea that this will finally bring in real top management, able to solve big problems instead of simply getting rid of them, is pretty doubtful.
• How to use Digg and Netscape to generate more traffic on your blog site has been shown by this fellow - and he tested it successfully with Guy Kawasaki's blog site.