The car is the next major tech platform: GM’s CEO

The car is the next major tech platform: GM’s CEO

1:04pm EDT

By Tim McLaughlin

Boston (Reuters) – The car is the next great proving ground for communications technology, General Motors Co Chief Executive Dan Akerson said on Thursday.

The automobile will become a major platform for tech “and one with far better battery life than an iPhone,” he said in prepared remarks to the Chief Executives’ Club of Boston.

Developing better in-car technology is critical for automakers like GM to attract younger, tech-savvy buyers. If they can pull it off, the companies will generate new sources of revenue and boost profit margins. One approach may be for GM to sell advertising within the car itself, Akerson said last month. Read more of this post

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said sales of the company’s processors for use in cars will keep doubling every year to reach $1 billion annually as automakers seek to attract consumers with advanced features

Nvidia CEO Sees Automotive Business Growing to $1 Billion

Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) Chief Executive Officer Jen-Hsun Huang said sales of the company’s processors for use in cars will keep doubling every year to reach $1 billion annually as automakers seek to attract consumers with advanced features.

About 30 new models using Nvidia’s Tegra processor will be introduced in the next two to three years, Huang said in an interview yesterday. The company will add U.S. and Japanese automakers to a list of customers that includes Volkswagen AG (VOW)’s Audi and Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), Huang said.

The push into automobiles is part of Huang’s efforts to reduce the company’s reliance on personal-computer graphics cards amid the worst slump in PC sales on record. Customizable instrument screens and high-end navigation and entertainment systems, which until now have been the preserve of more expensive vehicles, are going to start appearing in cheaper cars as consumers demand features that match the look and utility of their smartphones, Huang said.

“Until now, it’s been quite slow,” Huang said. “It’s taken us about seven years to build a $100 million business. Now it’s doubling every year.” Read more of this post

Daily deals are dead, but flash sales live on: Yabblr launches DIY flash sale marketplace

Daily deals are dead, but flash sales live on: Yabblr launches DIY flash sale marketplace

BY ERIN GRIFFITH 
ON JUNE 13, 2013

The first wave of flash sale fever petered out sometime in 2011, just before daily deal fatigue set in and subscription commerce fever started to spread.

As a category, flash sales sites have experienced plenty of growing pains. Gilt Groupe went through some layoffs, belt-tightening, and amajor talent turnover. Rue La La recentlyreplaced its CEO. Totsy went belly-up. Lot18 has gone through a couple of pivots and rounds of layoffs. That hasn’t stopped new companies from trying their hand at the business model. The success of fast-growing companies like Fab, One Kings Lane and Zulilly keeps hope alive, I suppose.

Today a new one launches with a new approach. Yabblr is a flash sales platform that uses elements of a marketplace to give autonomy to independent sellers. Read more of this post

Baidu’s New Business Unit Eyes Consumer-facing Paid Services

Baidu’s New Business Unit Eyes Consumer-facing Paid Services

By Tracey Xiang on June 13, 2013

In an internal e-mail sent to Baidu employees last week, its CEO Robin Li announced a new business unit for consumer-facing paid services thus becoming the fifth of Baidu’s. The other four are focused on search, location-based services, mobile Cloud and international businesses (in Chinese).

Robin Li said at its annual event last month that the gaming-centered paid Internet services make up “a huge market” (in Chinese). Baidu Games started as an online games search engine but changed to become an online games platform in 2008 that shared revenues from users with selected third-party games providers. In 2010 the platform and revenue-sharing program opened up to all third-party providers. Now it has had over a hundred titles on the platform and claimed it had reached 100 million users. But the revenue generated there is unknown. Read more of this post

What Fred Wilson, the Godfather of New York tech, learned from the dotcom bubble

What Fred Wilson, the Godfather of New York tech, learned from the dotcom bubble

BY ERIN GRIFFITH 
ON JUNE 13, 2013

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures lost a lot of money in the dotcom crash. Everyone did. But not everyone spent the next three years trying to earn it back. Ultimately, by scrambling and salvaging with his portfolio companies, he managed to make more money than he lost, he told an audience at PandoMonthly in New York this evening. That, along with his massive advocacy of New York’s tech scene, is why he’s been dubbed the “godfather” of New York’s tech scene.

Many of the people he worked with had stopped returning his phone calls. Others didn’t show up for board meetings anymore. There were plenty of founders who simply walked away from their companies. Several of his biggest deals were huge disasters — he lost $25 million in famous flame-out Kosmo.com, for example. Read more of this post

For Fred Wilson, Twitter is the Beatles and Tumblr a solo act

For Fred Wilson, Twitter is the Beatles and Tumblr a solo act

BY ADAM L. PENENBERG 
ON JUNE 13, 2013

At tonight’s PandoMonthly in New York, Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, compared two of his most successful investments by employing a musical analogy. Tumblr’s founder, David Karp, is a one-man band, while he likes to think of Twitter “as the Beatles.”

Wilson cited a well-read blog post by Marco Arment, the well-known developer who helped David Karp build Tumblr, which he published on the day of Yahoo’s billion-dollar acquisition, calling Tumblr “the one-person product.”

“Even though Tumblr was never a one-person company, it usually felt like a one-person product,” Arment wrote. “David always had a vision for where he wanted to go next. Karp would come in with concepts for product features and Arment would tell him what was feasible and what wasn’t. “The ideas were usually David’s, and the product roadmap was always David’s.” Read more of this post

IRobot’s latest product Ava 500 is designed to navigate corporate offices autonomously and facilitate videoconference calls

Meet the Ava 500, the Roomba’s Corporate Cousin

By Brad Stone on June 10, 2013

Since the founding of iRobot more than 20 years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinout has produced robots that vacuum and mop floors, clean gutters, and patrol war zones. The Bedford (Mass.)-based company has sold more than 9 million home robots and, in the process, has done more than anyone to move the machines out of science fiction and into the real world of affordable devices.

Today, iRobot (IRBT) adds another product to its league of extraordinarily practical machines, the Ava 500. It’s a far cry from the Roomba vacuum, its corporate cousin. The Ava—short for Avatar—is a pricey, wheeled robot designed to navigate corporate offices autonomously and facilitate videoconference calls between workers and their remote colleagues. It comes with a high-definition video screen, some onboard mapping smarts, and Cisco’s TelePresence, a high-quality videoconferencing system meant to create the illusion that far-flung collaborators are sitting across a table from one another. The idea is to “turn an entire office into a high-quality videoconferencing room,” says Colin Angle, iRobot’s chief executive. Read more of this post

Innovation: Phil Dumas’s Kevo, a Tap-to-Unlock Door System

Innovation: Phil Dumas’s Kevo, a Tap-to-Unlock Door System

By John Tozzi on June 13, 2013

Innovator Phil Dumas
Age 31
Title CEO of UniKey Technologies, an 11-employee startup founded in 2010 in Winter Park, Fla.
Form and Function
Kevo, a motorized deadbolt lock linked to your iPhone or a dedicated remote control, lets you open your door with the tap of a finger.

Amazon’s Kindle Worlds is looking to cash in on fan fiction by licensing popular brands. They’re paying authors 35 percent royalties

Amazon Wants to Sell Your Fan Fiction Through Kindle Worlds

By Olga Kharif on June 13, 2013

For those who can’t get enough of The Vampire Diaries or dream of further installments of Gossip Girl, Amazon.com (AMZN)may have the answer: fan fiction. The company’s Kindle Worlds e-book venture has licensed the rights to these two soapy teen drama series, as well as another called Pretty Little Liars, and is inviting amateur writers to develop novels and short stories inspired by the characters and back stories of the original works.

Amazon is trying to tap into one of publishing’s hottest trends. Fanfic websites, as they’re known, include millions of aficionado-penned stories, many dating back well over a decade. One site, FanFiction.net, offers nearly 650,000 stories about Harry Potter alone. Once a niche genre, such sites have gained commercial legitimacy since the Fifty Shades of Greyseries, which sold more than 70 million copies in print, audio, and digitally from March to December 2012. The bondage-romance series, which began as Twilight fan fiction, was a bright spot for the publishing industry last year amid slowing growth of trade e-book sales. (Sales grew 44 percent in 2012 but more than doubled in 2011, according to BookStats, which tracks U.S. publishers.) “The hope is that it could be very big,” says Les Morgenstein, president of the Warner Bros. Television Group division Alloy Entertainment, which owns rights to The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, and Pretty Little Liars. Read more of this post

Thumbtack: A Local Services Hub to Rival Angie’s List? Companies from Angie’s List to Yelp to HomeAdvisor have tried over the past decade to crack the U.S. market for plumbing, gardening, and other local services by developing an online database for homeowners looking for reliable referrals

Thumbtack: A Local Services Hub to Rival Angie’s List?

By Brad Stone on June 13, 2013

Companies from Angie’s List (ANGI) to Yelp (YELP) to HomeAdvisor have tried over the past decade to crack the U.S. market for plumbing, gardening, and other local services by developing an online database for homeowners looking for reliable referrals. There have been limited successes but no breakout leader, partly because many of the nation’s tens of millions of local small business owners spend relatively little time on the Web and run their businesses the old-fashioned way, with a pen and pocket calendar.

Now there’s a new entrant in this crowded field, Thumbtack. The San Francisco startup has operated quietly for four years, building a database of more than 250,000 service professionals who can pay the company fees for referrals. They include home maintenance workers and a wider range of occupations, from wedding officiants to yoga instructors. Thumbtack planned to announce on June 13 that it has raised $12.5 million from a group of investors, led by Sequoia Capital, that are chasing the chance to build the next great online e-commerce hub. “The long-term vision is to build the Amazon (AMZN)for services,” says Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack’s 27-year-old chief executive officer. “We want to build the kind of brand that the Yellow Pages had for decades.” Read more of this post

Pay for the Bus With a Phone: Mobile Wallet System Coming to China Mobile

Pay for the Bus With a Phone: Mobile Wallet System Coming to China Mobile

June 14, 2013

by C. Custer

Taking the bus in China isn’t that difficult if you have a transit card you can swipe to pay your fare. But soon, even the transit card may be unnecessary. The Beijing News reported yesterday that China Mobile has partnered with a number of banks (eight so far) and with China UnionPay to create a mobile payment system, and the first part of that system is coming very soon.

Right now, Beijing China Mobile customers who’d like to can visit any of six designated China Mobile shops to switch their SIM cards out for new ones that will allow them to connect their phones to their bank accounts. Soon, Beijing’s public transportation system will let them swipe those phones to pay for bus fares around the city. No transit cards required. Read more of this post

Google now takes one of every three dollars spent on digital advertising—and one of every two on mobile

Google now takes one of every three dollars spent on digital advertising—and one of every two on mobile

By Leo Mirani @lmirani 11 hours ago

Figures out today from eMarketer, a digital marketing research firm, show that Google gobbled up 31.5% of the $116.82 billion companies took in digital advertising last year. (The numbers from eMarketer are based on the total advertising revenue companies like Google earned minus the cost they have to pay affiliates for “traffic acquisition,” which is a fee paid to referrers or through programs such as Google’s AdSense.) That’s down a little from 32% in 2011. But this year Google’s share should reach one-third of expected total advertising revenues of $116.82 billion. The next biggest winner of digital ad revenue is Facebook. Its share for 2012 was a fraction of Google’s: 4.1%. Google is even more dominant in mobile advertising. Of the $8.8 billion companies pulled from mobile advertising, Google accounted for $4.6 billion, or 52.4%. Facebook went from a standing start—zero in 2011—to 5.4% ($470 million) in 2012. It is forecast to more than double its share to 13% ($2 billion) of this year’s $15.82 billion total. Not taking affiliate fees into account, advertising accounted for 95% of Google’s revenues last year.

Companies are using social media to combat online payment fraud, which cost an estimated $3.5 billion last year

Using Social Media to Stop Online Payment Fraud

By Danielle Kucera on June 13, 2013

Users of Facebook (FB), Pinterest, and Twitter share personal details every day. Now credit bureaus and payment companies Equifax (EFX), EBay’s (EBAY) PayPal, WePay, and Intuit (INTU) have begun trials to see whether social posts can help prove identities or detect whether customers are lying about their finances. “We are investing a lot in how can we use unstructured data that is sitting out there in social media that can help us understand a little more about identity,” says Rajib Roy, president of Equifax Identity and Fraud Solutions. Fraud cost U.S. online retailers $3.5 billion last year, according to payment processor CyberSource. Read more of this post

Early Waze backer maps out investment thesis

Early Waze backer maps out investment thesis

By Dan Primack June 13, 2013: 3:18 PM ET

When venture capitalist John Malloy first invested in Waze, the company was worth just a few million dollars. Now Google is paying more than $1 billion for it. Malloy explains what he saw back in 2008, and why his bet paid off. FORTUNE — Google (GOOG) this week announced that it will buy social mapping company Waze for a reported $1.1 billion, beating out earlier suitors like Apple (AAPL) and Facebook (FB). So I spent some time on the phone with John Malloy, a general partner with BlueRun Ventures, who led the original $14 million investment in Waze. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Read more of this post

Stockholm-based Wrapp raises $15 million as social gifting matures

Wrapp raises $15 million as social gifting matures

June 13, 2013: 7:30 AM ET

Stockholm-based Wrapp is locking up more funding and moving headquarters to San Francisco.

By Kurt Wagner, reporter

FORTUNE — Stockholm-based Wrapp, the company known for giving away gifts, is on the receiving end of a present from Sand Hill Road this morning — $15 million in funding. Wrapp, whose app enables users to send free and paid gift cards to friends or family using a smartphone or Facebook, today announced a Series B funding round that increases the company’s total fundraising to more than $25 million. Three Series A investors, including Greylock Partners and Atomico, were joined by three new investors, including American Express (AXP), in the new round. Read more of this post