How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’

How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’

By Devin Leonard on March 07, 2013

One weekend last October, Robert Iger, chief executive officer of Walt Disney (DIS), sat through all six Star Wars films. He’d seen them before, of course. This time, he took notes. Disney was in secret negotiations to acquire Lucasfilm, the company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, and Iger needed to do some due diligence.

The movies reacquainted Iger with Luke Skywalker, the questing Jedi Knight, and his nemesis Darth Vader, the Sith Lord who turns out to be (three-decade-old spoiler alert) his father. Beyond the movies, Iger needed to know Lucasfilm had a stockpile of similarly rich material—aka intellectual property—for more Star Wars installments. As any serious aficionado knows, there were always supposed to be nine. But how would Disney assess the value of an imaginary galaxy? What, for example, was its population? Read more of this post

Everyone wants to talk about the start-up boom in Berlin. But for every success, there are numerous failures, including the award-winning Aka-Aki

03/07/2013 06:03 PM

Aka-Aki

Left Behind by the Berlin Start-Up Boom

By Max Biederbeck

Everyone wants to talk about the start-up boom in Berlin, particularly with Chancellor Angela Merkel visiting promising new firms on Thursday. But for every success, there are numerous failures, including the award-winning Aka-Aki.

Gabriel Yoran had a brilliant idea, but failed nonetheless. Because the entrepreneur wanted to make money, his product could not survive on the market. Today, he is certain of one thing: “Only one in 10 business ideas makes it. Three plod along. The rest immediately disappear forever.”

For a long time it looked like his tech start-up, Aka-Aki, was going to be one of those to make it. It was based on a great idea, was lauded by the media, received the Lead and Webby awards, and was loved by 700,000 users.

“But you can’t trust the hype,” Yoran says today. Everyone wants to talk about projects they find exciting, he says, but that doesn’t mean the business model will bear fruit. That proved to be the bitter truth for Aka-Aki; it no longer has any users at all. In 2012, Yoran and his co-founders dissolved the business.

Young creative minds market their ideas, invent new Apps, or develop the online market in a new way. It is a process that can be fascinating to watch, and it can also be worth a mint to investors. Private equity and venture capital firms are eager to find those projects with promise, and are buying in at earlier stages than ever before. For the start-ups themselves, the cash infusions that result are vital to having a chance at success. Read more of this post

Ansys Aids Innovation With Its Simulation Software; The company that dominates simulation software expects to earn $900 million this year

Ansys Aids Innovation With Its Simulation Software

By Ashlee Vance on March 07, 2013

Jim Shaikh’s first son, Danial, arrived six weeks early, weighing all of 3 pounds and in need of milk every two hours. In the middle of the night, Shaikh would wake up, retrieve breast milk from the fridge, and begin warming the bottle in a pan of hot water on the stove. “Sometimes I would fall back asleep, and everyone upstairs would be screaming at me,” Shaikh says. “Other times I would overheat the milk. I just wasn’t very good at it.”

Shaikh, an engineer who previously helped design cars for BMW (BMW), decided to invent his way out of any paternal inadequacies. He conceived of a bottle to heat milk instantly to a specified temperature and was able to test it without building prototype after prototype. Instead, Shaikh largely brought his product to life digitally, using software from Ansys (ANSS), a Canonsburg (Pa.)-based company that has quietly cornered the market on manufacturing simulation. Ansys’s models showed Shaikh how different plastics would behave when heated up and how varying nipple designs would affect milk flow. “Everything is simulated these days,” says Shaikh.

Since its founding more than 40 years ago, Ansys has become the largest producer of simulation software, which costs thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the simulation. The company’s staff of more than 2,400, including 600 Ph.D.s, has created algorithms that mirror the laws of physics, allowing Ansys programs to model virtually anything. Ninety-six of the 100 biggest industrial companies, and 40,000 customers in all, use Ansys technology to evaluate product mater-ials and durability. Experienced engineers who once had to produce dozens of mock-ups to arrive at a final product now need a handful at most, saving time and money. Work from computer-aided design (CAD) applications can be fed into the simulation software. Read more of this post

Why Redfin, Zillow, and Trulia Haven’t Killed Off Real Estate Brokers

Why Redfin, Zillow, and Trulia Haven’t Killed Off Real Estate Brokers

By Brad Stone on March 07, 2013

Over the last decade, the Internet has seeped into that bedrock of the U.S. economy: the housing market. A group of growing and mostly profitable websites have sprung up to help guide consumers through what in many cases will be the largest and most nerve-wracking transaction of their lives. Four sites—Redfin and Zillow (Z), based in Seattle, and Trulia (TRLA) and Realtor.com, based in the San Francisco Bay Area—attract 61 million of the 67 million visitors to real estate websites each month in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). They also generate hundreds of millions in revenue and have helped turn buying a house into entertainment—a spectator sport that can be enjoyed without darting surreptitiously into random open houses. Ninety percent of consumers now start their real estate journeys on the Web, according to the National Association of Realtors.

It all looks at first glance like the same kind of electronic marketplace that has eliminated travel agents, decimated classified ads, depressed stock brokers, and taken the swagger out of car dealers, but it hasn’t dented the fortunes of real estate brokers. A majority of buyers and sellers still wind up working with traditional brokers, one on each side of the deal.

Not only have brokers resisted the attack by the Internet’s real estate sites but their fees remain stable. Real Trends, a research firm, reports the average commission paid to the buying and selling brokers was 5.4 percent of the price of a home in 2011, up from 5 percent in 2008. (The seller’s agent collects the commission from the seller and then splits it evenly with the buyer’s agent.) That’s considerably higher than the median rate in markets abroad, where there may only be one agent involved in the transaction, such as the U.K. (a 1 percent to 2 percent fee), Germany (3 percent to 6 percent), Israel (4 percent), and the Netherlands (1.5 percent to 2 percent), according to a 2007 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. “Ten years ago almost no one started their home search online. And yet none of that value has come back to the consumer,” says Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s chief executive officer. Read more of this post

The Japanese art of monetization; An aging games studio called Gungho, which had a hit with Puzzles and Dragons for iOS and Android, and is creeping up on GREE in terms of revenue and market cap, and is actually above Zynga, at $2.3 billion based on only 8 million monthly active users. Gungho did not use social for distribution, the game succeeded just the on power of the app stores and TV ads.

The Japanese art of monetization

BY TOM LIMONGELLO 

ON MARCH 7, 2013

You can learn a lot about your company from usage behavior in Japan. Just like the Japanese language has a system for incorporating foreign words, when Japan latches onto particular Internet services like it did with Yahoo and Twitter, they become so important and widspread that they take on a trajectory all of their own.

In the case of Twitter, for instance, Japan found mass adoption faster than the US did. In fact, it still holds the highest Tweets per second record for New Year’s day. Within a short time of setting up shop at Joi Ito’s Digital Garage, Twitter made Japan its testing ground for new features and monetization strategies.

Japan is not nearly the largest market in Asia, but with 128 million people, 40 million of which live in Tokyo’s metro area, where strong 3G & LTE networks, tons of carrier WiFi & WiMax access and high incomes are pervasive, you can’t find a better place to test the logic of an internet business. Japan, unlike China, does not block the most successful companies from abroad. Rather, Japan’s internet border is porous. As long as the service’s simplicity prevails over the language barrier, usually the best service wins. Read more of this post

Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music; The prospect of online stores that sell used e-books and digital music has heartened consumer advocates, but publishers and artists are worried

March 7, 2013

Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music

By DAVID STREITFELD

The paperback of “Fifty Shades of Grey” is exactly like the digital version except for this: If you hate the paperback, you can give it away or resell it. If you hate the e-book, you’re stuck with it.

The retailer’s button might say “buy now,” but you are in effect only renting an e-book — or an iTunes song — and your rights are severely limited. That has been the bedrock distinction between physical and electronic works since digital goods became widely available a decade ago.

That distinction is now under attack, both in the courts and the marketplace, and it could shake up the already beleaguered book and music industries. Amazon and Apple, the two biggest forces in electronic goods, are once again at the center of the turmoil.

In late January, Amazon received a patent to set up an exchange for all sorts of digital material. The retailer would presumably earn a commission on each transaction, and consumers would surely see lower prices.

But a shudder went through publishers and media companies. Those who produce content might see their work devalued, just as they did when Amazon began selling secondhand books 13 years ago. The price on the Internet for many used books these days is a penny. Read more of this post

Once-proud Time Inc seen struggling as independent firm; “You don’t have revenue that is stable,”

Published: Friday March 8, 2013 MYT 11:35:00 AM

Once-proud Time Inc seen struggling as independent firm

NEW YORK: In giving up on its magazine business, Time Warner Inc is set to hand its shareholders an operation that has shrinking sales and profits – and will be looking for a new chief executive.

While the details of the spinoff of Time Inc are still to be announced, the media conglomerate has indicated that it will be structured as a tax-free transaction for its shareholders. It has already previously spun off other businesses to investors, including AOL and Time Warner Cable.

Time Inc faces the same challenges as print publishers everywhere, mainly that people are choosing to read on smartphones and tablets and advertisers are spending the bulk of their budgets elsewhere. As a separate public company, it won’t be able to hide behind its media conglomerate parent, and will face scrutiny from investors expecting it to generate free cash flow and stem revenue declines.

“This once proud and profitable division is being punted as its business prospects look structurally challenged,” wrote Nomura Equity Research analyst Michael Nathanson in a note about the spin-off on Thursday. Time Inc publishes more than 100 magazines worldwide, including the eponymous newsweekly Time, Sports Illustrated, and People.

Over the past decade, Time Inc’s revenue dropped almost 40 percent to $3.4 billion while its operating profit fell in half to $420 million.

Advertising revenue for the entire U.S. magazine industry fell 3 percent in 2012 to $21.07 billion while ad pages declined 8 percent compared to 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

“You don’t have revenue that is stable,” said Nathanson in an interview. Read more of this post

China Mobile says it now has 50 million users of a system called Internet of Things (IOT), in which objects can be identified and linked to the Net

03.06.2013 18:23

New Net Technology Has 50 Mln Users, China Mobile Says

Telecoms firm’s service connects objects to the Net and is being used in auto industry, health care and surveillance

By staff reporter Qin Min

(Beijing) – China Mobile says it now has 50 million users of a system called Internet of Things (IOT), in which objects can be identified and linked to the Net.

IOT refers to the identification of ordinary objects through means such as radio-frequency identification, bar codes or other methods. This allows for information about the objects to be exchanged, shared and managed on the Web. Read more of this post

The Dirty Secret of Apps: Many Go Bust; “There are so many startups that die with a whimper. That’s the worst type of death….You walk into the office one day, you look at each other, and kind of realize it has to come to an end.”

Updated March 7, 2013, 7:45 p.m. ET

The Dirty Secret of Apps: Many Go Bust

While many independent developers have made money creating mobile apps, many more have struggled or failed along the way, Ben Fox Rubin explains.

By BEN FOX RUBIN

Pocket Gems Inc. is the classic Silicon Valley success story, a startup whose mobile games have been downloaded more than 100 million times since it was founded in 2009 in a Stanford University dorm room.

More commonplace is the tale of Spork, a little-used food-rating app that lived for just a year before giving up the ghost in a small San Francisco office.

Plenty of independent developers have made fortunes off the boom in mobile apps. But many more have failed after learning the hard way that computer skills, a little money and a good idea often aren’t enough in the competitive market.

With hundreds of thousands of games, productivity tools and other apps already on the market, and thousands more launched every week, many startups are finding that their ideas aren’t so unique after all. In this environment, well-heeled companies with big marketing budgets hold sway.

“There are so many startups that die with a whimper,” said Dan Cheung, the 37-year-old software engineer who quit his job to build Spork. “That’s the worst type of death….You walk into the office one day, you look at each other, and kind of realize it has to come to an end.” Read more of this post

China’s Top E-Commerce Site to Launch Product Searches Inside WeChat App

China’s Top E-Commerce Site to Launch Product Searches Inside WeChat App

Mar 7, 2013 at 12:20 PM by Steven Millward, in E-commerce, Mobile, Social Media

The new ‘Taobao Search’ account inside WeChat app.

The 300-plus million users of China-made messaging app WeChat can already use it for video calls, finding dates, or following brands and celebrities – and soon it will gain another aspect. China’s biggest e-commerce site, Taobao, is testing out a sort of e-commerce search engine insideWeChat. Once up and running, it’ll allow WeChat users to directly message Taobao on their phones by typing a kind of product that they’re looking for; then the app will respond with a link to the desired items. Read more of this post