Wearable devices years away from mainstream: Microsoft exec

Wearable devices years away from mainstream: Microsoft exec

2013-10-30

Consumers and businesses will have to wait a few more years before wearable computing devices become widely available, a senior executive of the software giant Microsoft said on Tuesday at the 11th annual Global Views Business Forum in Taipei. “I think wearable devices require more time, maybe three to five years in development, before they can become mainstream,” said Zhang Ya-qin, Microsoft corporate vice president and chairman of the company’s Asia-Pacific research group. Read more of this post

Twitter Helps Revive a Seedy San Francisco Neighborhood

November 1, 2013

Twitter Helps Revive a Seedy San Francisco Neighborhood

By KRISTINA SHEVORY

SAN FRANCISCO — The middle stretch of Market Street here has befuddled mayors, investors and entrepreneurs for decades. Studded with check-cashing joints, strip clubs and dollar stores, the seven-block strip known as the Mid-Market had resisted cleanup efforts and resolutely remained the same: a seedy place to visit day or night. Even the area’s community groups said they were fearful. Read more of this post

Seeing is believing: IMAX to launch $250,000 home theatres in China

Seeing is believing: IMAX to launch $250,000 home theatres in China

6:49am EDT

By Matthew Miller

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s newly minted rich can now get up close and personal to the movies after mega-screen maker IMAX Corp signed a deal to produce luxury home theaters in the company’s second largest market. The fifty-fifty joint venture with Shenzhen-based TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings Ltd will give Chinese the chance to watch IMAX-enhanced Hollywood blockbusters in the comfort of their homes, maybe even on the day of their world premieres. Read more of this post

Reddit is becoming its own worst enemy

Reddit is becoming its own worst enemy

BY CALE GUTHRIE WEISSMAN 
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2013

This week, the moderators of the subreddit r/Politics announced they would blacklist certain news organizations “to reduce the number of blogspam submissions and sensationalist titles.” The list includes Gawker (which has been banned on Reddit for more than a year), Salon, the Huffington Post, Policy Mic, Fox News, Mother Jones, Media Matters, The Onion, the Borowitz Report, and, amazingly, Reddit (yes, Reddit banned itself). Read more of this post

Qihoo CEO: Chinese Smartwatch Makers Do It Wrong

Qihoo CEO: Chinese Smartwatch Makers Do It Wrong

By Tracey Xiang on November 1, 2013 

Zhou Hongyi, the CEO of Qihoo and an angel investor, wrote a blog post  titled Why I Don’t Think Smartwatches Will Work Out. He doesn’t blame all the smartwatch makers around the world but those Chinese ones. Smartwatch in general is at an early stage that better ones or services must come out later. I believe some Chinese industry people are reflecting on it and working on better solutions. The problems Mr.Zhou pointed out, most of which I agree on, may be temporary. Hopefully so. Read more of this post

Paul Allen: Microsoft’s next chief executive should consider spinning off consumer businesses including search advertising and the Xbox games console

October 31, 2013 6:40 pm

Microsoft urged to spin consumer business

By Stephen Foley in New York and Richard Waters in San Francisco

Microsoft’s next chief executive should consider spinning off consumer businesses including search advertising and the Xbox games console, according to the private investment vehicle of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Mr Allen, who started the company with Bill Gates in 1975 and still holds a $2bn stake, is “intrigued and interested” by forthcoming changes, said Paul Ghaffari, who managesthe tech investor’s $15bn fortune. Read more of this post

Most qualified data scientists don’t want to work for a company where they are the only one doing this sort of thing. “If they’re the only data scientist, they don’t see a lot of career growth”

Will the Next Nate Silver Please Stand Up?

BY KLINT FINLEY

Ever since Nate Silver made a splash with his freakishly accurate election predictions, all sorts of companies have been looking for their own rock-star data scientists. The trouble is that these people are hard to come by — few can blend computer science with applied mathematics in a way that produces truly effective data science — and for many companies, it’s not even clear that they really need this kind of expertise. Shashi Upadhyay, CEO of analytics outfit Lattice Engines, which helps companies tackle data science, has seen this issue firsthand. “Customers ask us: do we need to hire data scientists?” he says. “It’s a question that’s been debated a lot: should the chief marketing officer of the future be a data scientist?” Lattice Engines certainly has a stake in the game. If companies hire their own data scientists, they might not need the company’s cloud-based marketing and sales analytics tools. So Upadhyay and company decided to do some research to answer questions like, “Which industries are hiring data scientists?” and “Where are they located?” Read more of this post

How Frothy Is the Nasdaq? The Nasdaq Index is Up 39% in Less Than a year. Are Things Heating Up Too Fast?

How Frothy Is the Nasdaq?

The Nasdaq Index is Up 39% in Less Than a year. Are Things Heating Up Too Fast?

LIAM PLEVEN

Updated Nov. 1, 2013 9:57 p.m. ET

When it comes to the Nasdaq NDAQ -0.38% rally, this time really is different. The Nasdaq Composite Index is up 38% since last November. The jump—and the buzz around technology stocks, many of which are listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market—could remind investors of the late 1990s, just before the Internet bubble burst. The concern is understandable. The Nasdaq index hit an all-time high in March 2000, but fell 51% from that peak by the end of that year. Companies in the index lost $2.67 trillion in stock-market value in the last nine months of 2000, according to data from the World Federation of Exchanges. Read more of this post

How Different Is Chinese Classified Service 58 from Craigslist

How Different Is Chinese Classified Service 58 from Craigslist

By Tracey Xiang on November 1, 2013

58.com, the Chinese classified service, went public on the NYSE yesterday. The IPO price finally is $17 per ADS, higher than the price range set before and jumped 42% on the first trading day. It seems China’s XXX works again. Renren, referred to as China’s Facebook, raised $743 million in its debut on the NYSE in 2011. Now investors know it’s no more than a Facebook clone that hasn’t evolved much these years that failed to compete with big players like Tencent or latecomers like Sina Weibo. Today Renren shares are traded at less than one quarter of the IPO price. And it is rumored that Renren is looking to sell all businesses excluding online gaming. I’m not saying 58.com will become another Renren in terms of future market share and profitability. But it is different from Craigslist in a lot of ways, or say, with Chinese characteristics. Read more of this post

How America’s Web 1.0 Companies Survived

How America’s Web 1.0 Companies Survived

“If we hadn’t pivoted, we’d be out of business today”: Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold

by Natalie Robehmed | Nov 2, 2013

Some dinosaurs from Web 1.0 that you probably thought were long dead have surged back onto our annual list of America’s Best Small Companies. Here’s how they survived—and thrived Two weeks into his new job, Stamps.com’s CFO Ken McBride started slashing the first of 485 workers—87 percent of the staff. It was October 2000, six months after the initial popping sounds of the dotcom implosion, and the electronic-postage company was spurting gobs of red ink. Just a year earlier Stamps.com had gone public, raising a staggering $450 million in two offerings. Read more of this post

Google is becoming every Apple fanatic’s dream company

Google is becoming every Apple fanatic’s dream company

BY NATHANIEL MOTT 
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2013

Google is doing everything that many investors and pundits want Apple to do. As I wrote yesterday, many refuse to understand Apple’s attempts to build its business by releasing luxury goods instead of commodity products. They argue that the company should release a cheap smartphone, or operate its own data network, or improve its software to a point at which it would seem foolish to use anything besides Apple products. Google has done all that and more. Read more of this post

Fab has lost its special sauce

Fab has lost its special sauce

BY ERIN GRIFFITH 
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2013

Fab CEO Jason Goldberg has always said that no other site could compete with his because “This is a taste business,” and “They don’t have a Bradford.” Guess what? Now, neither does Fab. The news that Fab’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer is leaving the company does not bode well. Bradford Shellhammer has been touted as the secret ingredient to the biggest, most well-funded, fastest-growing e-commerce company of the last few years. Goldberg has said many times: He built the company around Bradford’s taste. (That taste, for the unfamiliar, is a sort of a cross between the MoMA store and Spencer’s Gifts.) Bradford Shellhammer is Fab. Or was. Read more of this post

Bezos, Amazon And Refusing To Act Your Age

Bezos, Amazon And Refusing To Act Your Age

Posted 19 hours ago by Matthew Panzarino

In early 1998, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CFO Joy Covey co-authored a letter to shareholders discussing the previous year’s accomplishments. That letter has become holy writ inside the company, and is republished every year in its annual report. The letter and its contents struck me as incredibly prescient, or perhaps simply potent, as I read through Brad Stone’s excellent The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon. It’s no surprise that the letter has continued to be viewed as a touchstone for the company and its employees. The tenets set out in it are clearly represented by the way that the company develops and releases products, and the approach that it takes to everyday business. Read more of this post

Being A CIO At Tesla Motors, A Startup That Builds Cars And Its Own IT

Being A CIO At Tesla Motors, A Startup That Builds Cars And Its Own IT

Posted yesterday by Alex Williams

Tesla Motors has proven that it can build the most modern cars in the world. And apparently Elon Musk insisted they build their own IT systems and e-commerce platform, too. Most all of Tesla’s IT is homegrown, said CIO Jay Vijayan, appearing onstage at the Constellation Research Connected Enterpriseevent today. The reason: the traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems did not cut it, and the company has a vertically integrated operation that required a custom environment. Read more of this post

Apps for Pampering on Demand; iPhone and Android apps for scheduling last-minute massages, skincare treatments and salon services

Apps for Pampering on Demand

iPhone and Android apps for scheduling last-minute massages, skincare treatments and salon services

Nov. 1, 2013 1:58 p.m. ET

Massage Therapy: Zeel

With Zeel, summoning a massage therapist to your home or, if you prefer, office in the New York metro area takes less time than it does to find your car keys. After entering a few preferences—type of massage (Swedish or deep-tissue are offered), treatment length (60 or 90 minutes), male or female practitioner—the app will dispatch a massage therapist to your doorstep in as little as in hour in most cases. Zeel plans on expanding coverage to Miami later this year; San Francisco and Los Angeles are to follow in early 2014. Free, available for Android and iOS, zeel.com Read more of this post

Amazon tries free, on-time delivery to lure India online

Amazon tries free, on-time delivery to lure India online

5:20am EDT

By Nandita Bose

BANGALORE (Reuters) – Free shipping on a 100 rupee ($1.60) book. Delivery times guaranteed to the minute. These are some of the incentives the world’s biggest online retailer Amazon.com Inc is using to entice Indians to shop on the web, a sector where growth has been stifled by payment problems, low Internet usage and a challenging logistics environment. Amazon’s investors are counting on its international business and expansion to help drive growth and support its $165 billion market value, one of the highest among U.S. firms. Read more of this post

Amazon Mines Its Data Trove to Bet on TV’s Next Hit; Company Banks on Collecting Viewer Feedback in Unprecedented Ways to Improve Traditional TV Development Process

Amazon Mines Its Data Trove to Bet on TV’s Next Hit

Company Banks on Collecting Viewer Feedback in Unprecedented Ways to Improve Traditional TV Development Process

AMOL SHARMA

Nov. 1, 2013 11:02 p.m. ET

In May, a dozen Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -1.38% executives, including Chief ExecutiveJeff Bezos, gathered in a Seattle conference room to select the first original TV shows the company would produce for its streaming video service. A group of 14 “pilot” episodes had been posted on the company’s website a month earlier, where they were viewed by more than one million people. After monitoring viewing patterns and comments on the site, Amazon produced about 20 pages of data detailing, among other things, how much a pilot was viewed, how many users gave it a 5-star rating and how many shared it with friends. Read more of this post

Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy

Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy

October 26, 2013, Eugene Wei

[DISCLOSURE: As always when I write about Amazon, I’ll note I worked there from 1997-2004 and that I still own some shares in the company. I still have many friends who work there, though I have no more idea what Amazon is working on now than any of you in the public.]

With every quarterly earnings call, my Twitter feed lights up with jokes about how Amazon continues to grow its revenue and make no profits and how trusting investors continue to rewards the company for it. The apotheosis of that line of thoughts is a quote from Slate’s Matthew Yglesias earlier this year: “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” Read more of this post

Hon Hai announces entry into mobile game industry

Hon Hai announces entry into mobile game industry

Kang Wenrou and Staff Reporter

2013-11-02

Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer by revenue, will introduce its first mobile phone games within six months, entering the field of digital content to forge a new business territory for itself, our sister paper the Taipei-based China Times reports, citing Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou. Whether it’s easier to enter the hardware industry from the software industry, or vice versa, Gou believes that transitioning either way has its strengths and weaknesses. Read more of this post

Hong Kong media and Giordano fashion magnate Jimmy Lai acquires 2% of HTC

Hong Kong media magnate acquires 2% of HTC: report

By Ted Chen ,The China Post
November 2, 2013, 12:15 am TWN

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A Hong Kong-based media magnate has reportedly acquired a 2-percent stake in HTC, a beleaguered Taiwanese handset maker whose share price has tumbled over 50 percent this year. Jimmy Lai (黎智英), founder and chairman of NextMedia (壹傳媒) group, acquired about a 2-percent stake in HTC through the open market, according to a statement by a NextMedia spokesperson which appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Read more of this post

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu on how mobile ‘super apps’ are taking over the globe

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu on how mobile ‘super apps’ are taking over the globe

By Josh Ong, Yesterday

With over 400 million users around the globe, UCWeb is ready to make the jump from a mobile browser to a platform that supports its own app ecosystem.  During last week’s GMIC event, we met up with UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu to discuss the company’s rise as a “super app” and its plans for continued international growth. UCWeb defines a super app as “an app that has a large user base, high usage rate, and the ability to support extended services by acting as a platform for third party apps and services.” For instance, Asian messaging services like WeChat, Line and Kakao have achieved super status. Over in the west, services like Facebook, Twitter and Evernote have earned the title. Read more of this post

Messaging apps are not just for chatting: WeChat is disrupting mobile games in China

Messaging apps are not just for chatting: WeChat is disrupting mobile games in China

By Kaylene Hong, Yesterday

Messaging and gaming seem like two entirely different platforms. You would never have thought it possible — but a messaging service is disrupting the mobile gaming scene in China. In a report released by Chinese Android app store Wandoujia – which monitors trends in China’s mobile market based on its downloads — two out of the top three games on its app store this month are integrated with popular Chinese messaging service WeChat. It appears that playing games in a social setting helps spread the games faster and keeps people hooked to the games — a major advantage over standalone games. Read more of this post

Alibaba restructures Alipay’s parent, Jack Ma’s share reduced

Alibaba restructures Alipay’s parent, Jack Ma’s share reduced

3:42am EDT

By Matthew Miller

BEIJING (Reuters) – The online payment affiliate of China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba Group Ltd will be restructured to attract new strategic investors, in a move that will reduce the shareholding of Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma in the affiliate. Zhejiang Alibaba E-Commerce Co Ltd will be restructured as a new company in which 60 percent of its shares will be offered to new strategic investors, Lucy Peng, head of the restructured entity, said in a letter published on its official Weibo microblog account on Friday. Read more of this post