A UK web pioneer cracks the US; Pete Flint helped build Lastminute.com but surpassed that with property site Trulia

January 14, 2014 3:34 pm

A UK web pioneer cracks the US

By Hannah Kuchler

MBA route: Pete Flint went to Stanford business school after Lastminute.com

Arriving in Silicon Valley 10 years ago with just two suitcases and an admissions letter for Stanford Graduate School of Business, Pete Flint was a relative nobody, despite having helped start the UK’s most famous internet business. Read more of this post

Are Potential Cable Mergers Good for Consumers?

JANUARY 14, 2014, 2:32 PM

Are Potential Cable Mergers Good for Consumers?

By DAVID GELLES

With the specter of consolidation looming over the cable operator industry, eyes are already turning to Washington, where regulators are bound to look closely at the antitrust issues surrounding any potential merger. Read more of this post

Can Dr. Dre Beat Spotify?

Can Dr. Dre Beat Spotify?

Buying music is passe; nowadays it’s all about renting. Billboard reports that sales of “album plus track equivalent albums” fell by 7.6 percent in 2013. (Among subcategories of both digital and physical media, only vinyl sales increased last year.) The new hot trends are monthly subscription services that let people rent unlimited music from large catalogs hosted in the cloud, as well as personalized radio services that make money by selling ads. Read more of this post

Ecommerce in 1984: Innovation is never pretty at first

Ecommerce in 1984: Innovation is never pretty at first

BY ERIN GRIFFITH 
ON JANUARY 14, 2014

In its earliest versions, technology is never the slick, smooth-operating magic it aspires to be. That takes iteration. Sometimes the tools just aren’t yet able to do what some visionary imagines they will one day be able to do. Other times people aren’t yet ready for a new way to do things. Either way, it’s easy to look at a new piece of technology, be it Google Glass, bitcoin, 3D printing, or Smartwigs, and dismiss it as useless, unnecessary, clunky, or not worth it. Read more of this post

German Firms Seed Web Shopping in the Developing World

German Firms Seed Web Shopping in the Developing World

ANTON TROIANOVSKI

Jan. 13, 2014 11:03 p.m. ET

LAGOS, Nigeria—The message from his boss on the phone from Germany was straightforward, recalls Hendrik Harren, a former website manager in Africa: “I want you to build the Amazon of Nigeria for me.” Read more of this post

Google Is Trying Harder Than Ever to Be Facebook; And as a result, its users feel betrayed and manipulated

Google Is Trying Harder Than Ever to Be Facebook

And as a result, its users feel betrayed and manipulated.

By David Auerbach

The Google user who wrote this piece may or may not be a Brony, but in any case, he’d like to keep it to himself.

Once upon a time, there were two sisters, Googalina and Facebookella. Googalina, the elder, was precocious beyond measure and famed for her breadth of knowledge and savvy business acumen, which brought great wealth to her family. Her counsel was widely sought, her skills in endless demand, and she gained the confidences of many. Facebookella lacked the sheer brainpower of her elder sister, but had been gifted instead with unending charm and social prowess. Facebookella became the grand dame of countless salons, bringing people together while discreetly learning their secrets. Read more of this post

How A Curious VC Found Uber Before Anyone Else, Back When It Was Only Worth $4 Million

How A Curious VC Found Uber Before Anyone Else, Back When It Was Only Worth $4 Million

ALYSON SHONTELL

JAN. 14, 2014, 1:21 PM 5,345 1

Rob Hayes led First Round Capital’s early investment in Uber. The company was only worth $4 million then; now it’s worth $3 billion more. Rob Hayes’ family was not happy with him on July 4, 2010. He spent too much of the holiday on his phone, trying to organize an investment in a new, unproven startup. Read more of this post

How Amazon is changing global retail – and other industries

How Amazon is changing global retail – and other industries

Published 13 January 2014 16:28, Updated 14 January 2014 10:19

Katherine Rushton

Jeff Bezos’s 2014 did not begin well. Last week, the Amazon founder, who turned 50 on Sunday, had his cruise of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands interrupted by kidney stones. He had to be whisked home to the United States to recover. Read more of this post

Intel’s Vietnam Success Begins With Building Paper Towers

Intel’s Vietnam Success Begins With Building Paper Towers

A quiet revolution pushed by Intel Corp. is occurring at a top Ho Chi Minh City engineering school: students clustered in small groups design paper towers while the blackboard goes unused. Read more of this post

Kindle Vending Machine Shows How Amazon Could Take Over the World

Kindle Vending Machine Shows How Amazon Could Take Over the World

BY MARCUS WOHLSEN

01.10.14

Instead of running a big booth on the show floor or unloading a bombastic keynote speech, Amazon made its presence known at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with decidedly more subtlety. It wedged a vending machine in between a Wells Fargo ATM and a scuffed-up door at the Las Vegas airport. Read more of this post

Nest Co-founder Matt Rogers: My Friends Told Me I Was Crazy To Leave Apple To Start Nest; Here’s The ‘Twice-A-Day’ Reason Google Paid $3.2 Billion For Nest; Tony Fadell Q&A: Why I sold Nest to Google; Why Google, not Apple, bought Tony Fadell’s Nest Labs

Nest Co-founder Matt Rogers: My Friends Told Me I Was Crazy To Leave Apple To Start Nest

JULIE BORT

JAN. 13, 2014, 6:28 PM 5,635 10

Matt Rogers just became a very wealthy man with the news that Google bought his company, Nest Labs, for $3.2 billion. Rogers is the co-founder of Nest along with Tony Fadell. Fadell is known for being the guy who designed the iPod. Rogers was also working on the iPod before founding Nest. He designed the software that ran it. Rogers was also one of the first engineers on the original iPhone, and worked on the first iPad, too. Read more of this post

New online map directory makes getting around in Yangon simpler; Developed at a cost of just S$700, Yangon Explorer helps you find the best businesses at the click of a button in Myanmar’s largest city

New online map directory makes getting around in Yangon simpler

By Terence Ng

Developed at a cost of just S$700, Yangon Explorer helps you find the best businesses at the click of a button in Myanmar’s largest city

In many Asian countries, online map- and location-based directories have increasingly eclipsed print counterparts like the Yellow Pages. Services like Google Maps, together with country-specific portals like Streetdirectory in Singapore, have been providing users with up-to-date information about which businesses exist and how to get to them. Read more of this post

Smartphone payments app gets banks’ backing

January 15, 2014 12:01 am

Smartphone payments app gets banks’ backing

By Sally Davies

A smartphone app allowing shoppers to pay for purchases direct from a linked account will be made available to 18m UK bank customers this year – in the latest sign that the banks are gearing up for rapid adoption of mobile payment systems. Read more of this post

Taxi drivers turn violent against Uber in Paris

Taxi drivers turn violent against Uber in Paris

January 13, 2014 7:15 pmby Tim Bradshaw

The taxi industry’s war on app-enabled chauffeur services such as Uber has broken out into physical combat on the streets of Paris. During a strike by French cab driverswho are protesting against the rise of what are locally called “voitures de tourisme avec chauffeurs”, several drivers and limos who crossed the picket line were attacked, with windows smashed and tires slashed. Read more of this post

The CEO of Ciena on Surviving an Industry Collapse

The CEO of Ciena on Surviving an Industry Collapse

by Dan McGinn  |   8:00 AM January 15, 2014

The dot-com bust not only hurt Internet start ups—it pummeled telecom companies, many of which went bankrupt or were forced into mergers. Ciena CEO Gary Smith, the company’s CEO since 2001, describes how his company survived, regrouped, and resumed its growth.

How was Ciena doing when you became its CEO?

SMITH: I’d joined in 1997, around the time it went public, and became CEO in 2001. The company was doing very well. I remember driving to work one day, listening to NPR. They were talking about technology stocks, and they singled out Ciena. They pointed out that we were a very young company, but our market value was $45 billion—more than the entire U.S. automobile industry. I remember listening to that and thinking: “We’re a great company with a great future, but this doesn’t make any sense.” Read more of this post

Weather Channel’s Highly Successful Mobile App Is Destroying Its Highly Successful Cable Channel

Weather Channel’s Highly Successful Mobile App Is Destroying Its Highly Successful Cable Channel

JIM EDWARDS

JAN. 14, 2014, 9:32 AM 379

The Weather Channel is in a contract dispute with DirecTV that underlines just how vulnerable some cable TV channels are to mobile apps that provide similar need-to-know content. Read more of this post

What Secrets Your Phone Is Sharing About You

What Secrets Your Phone Is Sharing About You

Businesses Use Sensors to Track Customers, Build Shopper Profiles

ELIZABETH DWOSKIN

Jan. 13, 2014 8:47 p.m. ET

Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood. Read more of this post

Why Does New York Hate the Sharing Economy?

Why Does New York Hate the Sharing Economy?

Ask a bunch of New Yorkers where they spend their money: apartments, cars, vacation lodgings, maybe designer handbags. In the new American “sharing economy,” these can all be enjoyed at a fraction of their normal cost. Just not if you’re a New Yorker. Read more of this post

Zapping through the mobile payments maze

January 15, 2014 12:01 am

Zapping through the mobile payments maze

By Sally Davies

Mobile payments is a hot topic in technology circles – but there are as many definitions of what the term means as there are companies vying for the dollars of finger-swiping, screen-staring shoppers. Read more of this post

In just 9 days, WeChat brings in over 100,000 taxi rides for Chinese passengers looking for a lift

In just 9 days, WeChat brings in over 100,000 taxi rides for Chinese passengers looking for a lift

January 13, 2014

by Josh Horwitz

It’s been about a week and a half since WeChat, the messaging app that’s dominating smartphones in China, added taxi booking and payments to its range of services. The maker of WeChat, Chinese web giant Tencent, added support for the Didi Dache service after investing nearly $100 million into it. Today the fine folks at 36kr say that the total number of completed transactions – meaning taxis hailed and paid for inside of WeChat – have surpassed 100,000. Read more of this post

Tencent, Alibaba Have their Eyes on Mobile Payment Prize

01.10.2014 17:51

Tencent, Alibaba Have their Eyes on Mobile Payment Prize

The two internet giants are using their apps to get into people’s wallets, and that’s just the begging of their plans to revolutionize the way we pay

By staff reporter Zhu Yishi

(Hangzhou) – It can be tricky to get a taxi at the Hangzhou airport. But recently Beijinger Zhang Rui, who was on business trip to the bustling eastern city, walked out of the airport, past a long line of people and hopped right in a cab. Read more of this post

The Man Behind Alibaba’s Eventual I.P.O.

JANUARY 13, 2014, 9:28 PM

The Man Behind Alibaba’s Eventual I.P.O.

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

JPMorgan Chase has called. So has Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Joe Tsai’s phone is ringing off the hook these days, and you would be forgiven if you have never heard of him. Read more of this post

Indian kids e-store FirstCry gets $15 million in fresh funding

Indian kids e-store FirstCry gets $15 million in fresh funding

January 14, 2014

by Steven Millward

Indian e-shoppers spent $16 billion in 2013, and that number’s set to rise in 2014. There are certainly plenty of e-commerce options out there. For baby and child-related products, there’s FirstCry, which was founded in 2010. Read more of this post

Valued at about $50 million, Japanese startup Coiney aims for IPO

Valued at about $50 million, Japanese startup Coiney aims for IPO

January 14, 2014

by Willis Wee

When CEO and founder of Coiney Naoko Samata first joined Paypal Japan in 2009, she didn’t imagine that she would one day become an entrepreneur. Three years down the road, Samata felt the need to do something cool and challenging in her life. And Coiney, a startup that produces a credit card payment device, fits Samata’s bill. Pairing Coiney with a smartphone, merchants can now start collecting credit card payments from customers. Fast forward to today, Coiney has so far raised a total of $14 million and is competing with other established services like Square and Rakuten Smartpay in Japan. Read more of this post