Wearable Gadgets Transform How Companies Do Business; Companies are decking employees out with devices that help them do their jobs better

Wearable Gadgets Transform How Companies Do Business

Companies are decking employees out with devices that help them do their jobs better

H. JAMES WILSON

Updated Oct. 20, 2013 7:52 p.m. ET

The Hitachi Business Microscope tracks employees’ interactions with colleagues, to encourage effective oollaboration. Data collected by Hitachi Business Microscopes shows interactions among two groups of employees. Smart glasses from Vuzix provide voice and visual information to help warehouse employees work more efficiently and safely. Disney is testing a wristband for visitors to its parks to use as a ticket, hotel-room key, charge card and more.

Data from Catapult Sports motion sensors embedded in players’ undershirts help the Buffalo Bills avoid fatigue that can lead to injury. Data from the motion sensors can be displayed to allow comparisons among players on a team. 

Big companies are putting wearables to work. We’ve all seen gadgets that can measure our heart rates, how many calories we’re burning or how many steps we take. Then there are devices that go even further, like Google Glass, which displays text messages and news feeds right up near our eyeballs. Read more of this post

Tech Wealth and Ideas Are Heading Into News; The technology industry and its various power brokers are suddenly investing significant sums of money in preserving news capacity and quality

October 20, 2013

Tech Wealth and Ideas Are Heading Into News

By DAVID CARR

Producing serious news is an expensive enterprise with a beleaguered business model, one that remains tied to the tracks as a locomotive of splintered audiences and declining advertising hurtles toward it. But just when it looked as if all were lost, an unlikely cavalry has come roaring over the hill with serious money, fresh ideas and no small amount of enthusiasm. Silicon Valley and its various power brokers — some who had roles in putting the news business in harm’s way to begin with — are suddenly investing significant sums of money in preserving news capacity and quality. Read more of this post

Twitter is “strongly considering” shuttering #Music App, after its download and usage numbers have dropped precipitously following a respectable launch

Twitter’s #Music App Could Be On The Way Out, Says New Report

Posted 19 hours ago by Darrell Etherington

Twitter’s #Music app, which offered social music discovery culled from activity on the 140-character sharing service, is reportedly nearing the end of its brief life, according to a newreport from AllThingsD. Twitter is “strongly considering” shuttering the mobile app, after its download and usage numbers have dropped precipitously following a respectable launch. Read more of this post

Tools to Help Employees Work Together; Web-based apps focus on teams instead of organizations

Tools to Help Employees Work Together

Web-based apps focus on teams instead of organizations

TERRI GRIFFITH

Oct. 20, 2013 4:59 p.m. ET

For years, organizations have installed powerful software designed to get employees to collaborate. But at most companies, the software has just sat there, unused. The problem: Too often, the software proved a poor fit with how people actually work. Now, several Web-based applications are taking a different, more focused approach. They aim to make it easy for an individual team member to recruit co-workers and other potential partners to solve specific work problems, whether or not the rest of the organization comes along for the ride. Here are three tools that can help overcome the inertia that has blocked use of other applications. Each highlights the power a single person can have in getting co-workers to work together. Read more of this post

The Risks of Big Data for Companies; Yes, all that information is great. But are companies prepared for it?

The Risks of Big Data for Companies

Yes, all that information is great. But are companies prepared for it?

JOHN JORDAN

Updated Oct. 20, 2013 6:47 p.m. ET

Big data. It’s the latest IT buzzword, and it isn’t hard to see why. The ability to parse more information, faster and deeper, is allowing companies, governments, researchers and others to understand the world in a way they could only dream about before. All that is true. And yet…It’s also true that in our rush to embrace the possibilities of big data, we may be overlooking the challenges that big data poses—including the way companies interpret the information, manage the politics of data and find the necessary talent to make sense of the flood of new information. Read more of this post

IT Reuse Helps Companies Thrive

IT Reuse Helps Companies Thrive

Organizations should encourage technology sharing among business units and departments

PETER WEILL, STEPHANIE L. WOERNER AND MARK MCDONALDPeter Weill

Oct. 20, 2013 4:59 p.m. ET

Everyone knows that reinventing the wheel is a bad idea, but apparently many large organizations haven’t gotten the memo. When faced with a new business issue or challenge, these companies typically rush to build something new, instead of exploring whether technology, data or business processes deployed elsewhere in the firm could be part of the solution. “We are different,” they say, to justify starting from scratch. Read more of this post

IBM Is Not A Cloud King with its confused cloud services strategy; SEC is investigating how IBM is counting its revenues for how it recognizes cloud computing

IBM Is Not A Cloud King

Posted 20 minutes ago by Alex Williams

IBM reported its third quarter financials this past week that showed a company struggling with its legacy hardware business and the problems that come with a confused cloud services strategy. Revenues were down $1 billion with hardware sales declining 17 percent. Overall revenues for the nine-month period totaled $72.1 billion, a decrease of 4 percent, compared with $75.2 billion for the nine months of 2012. The software division is not having tremendous success, either. This last quarter software sales were up just one percent. Read more of this post

Foldable boats – what will they think of next?

Foldable boats – what will they think of next?

October 4, 2013

Adam Courtenay

This entrepreneur liked the idea so much he bought the company.

When Perth entrepreneur Deryck Graham first saw the original prototype for his Quickboat, he liked it so much he bought the company. It was not the first foldable boat ever made – but Graham saw the potential to make it work without the use of clips or latches, nuts and bolts. He planned to make it into the ultimate DIY-friendly boat, capable of being stored under a bed or in a garage, transported on roof racks and constructed in less than a minute.

Read more of this post

Flipboard hopes to be the savior of the publishing business

Flipboard hopes to be the savior of the publishing business

By Dan Mitchell, contributor October 18, 2013: 2:40 PM ET

Some publishers have pulled out from mobile news-aggregators like Flipboard because they don’t see any real payoff. But the company says it’s creating a program to help such smaller publishers earn more. FORTUNE — In July of last year, the political news and opinion site Talking Points Memo proudly declared that it was “excited to announce that tablet and smartphone users can now read TPM on Flipboard,” a popular, magazine-style news-reading app for mobile devices. Read more of this post

Design Revolution Sweeps the Auto Industry; New technology and computing power allow vehicle makers to conceive and test designs much more quickly—and cheaply

Design Revolution Sweeps the Auto Industry

New technology and computing power allow vehicle makers to conceive and test designs much more quickly—and cheaply

MIKE RAMSEY

Oct. 20, 2013 4:59 p.m. ET

Altair design software produces ideal shapes for vehicle parts like this motorcyle frame… which designers then modify to account for manufacturing constraints. 

Ford Motor Co. F +0.40% engineer Kevin Tallio holds up a twisty series of loops made of hardened sand and declares that the object—a mold for a new engine part, a cylinder head—was an impossibility not long ago. Mr. Tallio, a senior engine developer at Ford, is taking part in a revolution in vehicle design that has swept the auto industry. Advances in computer-aided engineering and big investments in computing power have given manufacturers new tools to create designs and the ability to test their ideas in a fraction of the time and at far less cost than they could before.

Read more of this post

Demand Media’s eHow Learns Hard Lessons; Strategy Began to Fall Apart as Google Changed Search Algorithms

Demand Media’s eHow Learns Hard Lessons

Strategy Began to Fall Apart as Google Changed Search Algorithms

WILLIAM LAUNDER

Oct. 20, 2013 8:13 p.m. ET

When Demand Media Inc. DMD +2.97% went public in early 2011, rising to an early valuation of over $2 billion, traffic to its “how-to” website eHow was soaring. Demand’s business model of creating content to answer search queries posed by Web surfers seemed to have legs. But the strategy began to fall apart within months of the IPO as Google introduced changes to its search algorithms to weed out content its computers showed wasn’t what searchers sought. EHow, a major source of ad revenue, saw its traffic plunge from a high of 70.5 million unique U.S. visitors in March 2011 to 46.3 million last month, according to comScore. Along the way, Demand’s stock price dropped 79% from an early peak, cutting its market capitalization below $500 million. Read more of this post

Can Osborne’s British technology firms crack China?

Can Osborne’s British technology firms crack China?

Matt Warman travelled with the Chancellor on his trip to China this week. The business delegation on the same trip tell him it was invaluable.

George Osborne visited Huawei and met their founder while in China Photo: Rex

By Matt Warman, Head of Technology

7:00AM BST 20 Oct 2013

As George Osborne recovers from the jet lag following his whistlestop tour around China, the select band of businesses that joined the Chancellor’s trade delegation have a more complicated headache: how do they turn the new relationships and the kind Chinese words into real business deals? Or is trading in China simply so complex as to not be worthwhile? Read more of this post

As Downloads Dip, Music Executives Cast a Wary Eye on Streaming Services

October 20, 2013

As Downloads Dip, Music Executives Cast a Wary Eye on Streaming Services

By BEN SISARIO

As sales of CDs plunged over the last decade, the music industry clung to one comfort: downloads continued to sell briskly as people filled their computers and iPods with songs by the billions. Now even that certainty seems to have disappeared, as downloads head toward their first yearly decline. So far this year, 1.01 billion track downloads have been sold in the United States, down 4 percent from the same time last year, according to the tracking service Nielsen SoundScan. Album downloads are up 2 percent, to 91.9 million; combining these results using the industry’s standard yardstick of 10 tracks to an album, total digital sales are down almost 1 percent. Read more of this post

Amazon Bets on ‘Betas’ to Turn Web Viewers Into Shoppers

Amazon Bets on ‘Betas’ to Turn Web Viewers Into Shoppers

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s new comedy show “Betas” depicts a motley band of twenty-something Silicon Valley entrepreneurs coding around the clock to develop a social-media site to rival Facebook Inc. (FB) Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive officer, is using “Betas” to do some disrupting of his own. Amazon, which is spending an estimated $10 million to $50 million on “Betas” and other shows like it, joins Netflix Inc. (NFLX) and Hulu LLC in delivering original programming directly to viewers that serve as an alternative to cable and network television. The growing list of Web series is helping to fragment an already-splintering audience for pay-television providers such as Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) and DirecTV. Read more of this post

“We will become the world’s top electronic materials manufacturer like Germany-based BASF”; Cheil Ind acquires Novaled to be global leader in electronic materials

Cheil Ind acquires Novaled to be global leader in electronic materials

Sohn Jae-gwon

2013.10.21 14:45:20

“We will become the world’s top electronic materials manufacturer like Germany-based BASF and Merck.” Cheil Industries recently sold its fashion unit to Samsung Everland, aiming to grow into a company specializing in producing electronic materials. Park Jong-woo, CEO of Cheil Industries, and Gildas Sorin, CEO of Novaled, as well as other 100 members of both companies attended a ceremony for Cheil Industries’ acquisition of Novaled, Cheil Industries said Sunday. CEO Park said “Novaled’s technological competence in OLED will take on a major role in the Cheil Industries’ cutting-edge material business” at the ceremony. “I will spare no investment and support to develop products that will set global trends.” The acquisition was valued at 345.5 billion won ($325.2 million), the largest among all merger and acquisition deals reached by Samsung Group’s subsidiaries. The South Korea-based company went out of its way to acquire Novaled with cash by issuing commercial paper for short-term financing. Novaled is a global top-notch provider of OLED materials and over 60 percent of its employees have diplomas of Master’s degrees or higher and work at the research and development (R&D) department. Novaled has made no secret of its expectation about Samsung’s investment. Cheil Industries, Samsung Electronics, and Samsung Venture Investment own a combined 100 percent stake in Novaled, yet Mr Sorin and the company’s other current management will retain their titles and R&D personnel will stay as well.