Rethinking How We Watch TV; Intel, Apple and Others Push New Technologies to Take Control of the Living Room

July 29, 2013, 7:32 p.m. ET

Rethinking How We Watch TV

Intel, Apple and Others Push New Technologies to Take Control of the Living Room

DON CLARK and IAN SHERR

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—To understand how much television could soon change, it helps to visit an Intel Corp. INTC -0.09% division here that runs like a startup.

Erik Huggers, a Dutch-born former British Broadcasting Corp. executive, has assembled a 350-person team with talents beyond computer chips—programmers, industrial designers, artists and experts in fields like video encoding. Working in bright, newsroom-style offices that differ from standard Intel cubicles, they’re creating an Internet-based service that doesn’t only serve up on-demand programs but overhauls live TV as well. Read more of this post

Music streaming expected to decimate iTunes Australia

Music streaming expected to decimate iTunes Australia

PUBLISHED: 29 JUL 2013 00:05:00 | UPDATED: 29 JUL 2013 07:53:30

PAUL MCINTYRE

First it was compact discs. Then downloads. Now music labels are facing another challenge to their business models, with revenue growth from iTunes in Australia expected to halve this year as more consumers take up new streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora. Record company and commercial radio executives say music faces more structural change from a maturing market for download-to-own music services such as iTunes, competition from non-Apple device manufacturers and platforms that allow users to stream music for free through an ad-funded service or by paying a ­­sub­scription fee. Read more of this post

The language of success; Online translator Lingo24 is turning to private equity to fund its £100m expansion.

The language of success

Online translator Lingo24 is turning to private equity to fund its £100m expansion.

We did something awful but we got customers.” That’s how Christian Arno, the founder of online translation company Lingo24, knew he was on to something when he launched a rudimentary translation website while still at university.

By Philip Smith

7:00AM BST 28 Jul 2013

We did something awful but we got customers.” That’s how Christian Arno, the founder of online translation company Lingo24, knew he was on to something when he launched a rudimentary translation website while still at university. His idea was to use the web to entice corporate customers looking for low-cost translation – because he had access to “cheap” language students to do the work. “It was the dotcom boom and I looked at what was happening in the translation space, and the answer was not very much.” His first website, by his own admission, was “shocking”. “It was in Motherwell FC colours, claret and amber. I’ve nothing against Motherwell but they are not my team,” he says. However, the gaudy site didn’t deter customers, and he quickly won clients, including the Liverpool Tourist Board. “I was amazed,” he says. Read more of this post

Apps That Know What You Want, Before You Do

July 29, 2013

Apps That Know What You Want, Before You Do

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Google Now, a search app that tries to anticipate what users want, as seen on a Galaxy Nexus.

SAN FRANCISCO — In Hollywood, there are umbrella holders. Outside corner offices, there are people who know exactly how much cream to pour in the boss’s coffee. In British castles, royals have their valets. And then there is Silicon Valley, where mind-reading personal assistants come in the form of a cellphone app. A range of start-ups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search — new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it. Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting, or where it was. Read more of this post

The E-Commerce Entrepreneurs Who Are Literally Working Themselves To Death

The E-Commerce Entrepreneurs Who Are Literally Working Themselves To Death

ALYSON SHONTELL JUL. 29, 2013, 3:39 PM 8,902 17

Running an online business can be difficult. It can also be life-threatening. In China, there’s been a spike in the number of overworked employees who have dropped dead, particularly in the e-commerce space. One company that’s becoming infamous for its worker death toll is Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce platform that resembles eBay. Merchants can post items on their own Taobao storefronts. They’re in charge of everything from keeping inventory and shipping items to updating the website and communicating with customers. But when their businesses take off, the work load can become too much. In July 2012, 24-year-old “Aijun aj” who was running a store on Taobao died of cardiac failure. She wasn’t the first or the last. Aijun’s death was preceded by a mother who ran a store on Taobao and a 25-year-old who ran another highly-rated online shop. Being overworked doesn’t directly kill you. It leads to a series of poor health decisions, such as irregular diets, chronic stress, lack of exercise, and exhaustion, which can cause heart issues like Aijun’s, blood clots and more. Read more of this post

Inside The Booming Mobile Video Ecosystem (Infographic)

INFOGRAPHIC: Inside The Booming Mobile Video Ecosystem

BUSINESS INSIDER JUL. 29, 2013, 2:30 PM 765

Mobile video has begun to accumulate scale, and has also turned out to be one of the few types of mobile content — along with games — that monetizes reliably and drives premium ad rates. That’s reflected in the much higher prices that mobile publishers can command for mobile video ads, compared to standard mobile formats like banners. eMarketer estimates mobile video will account for $520 million in ad spending in the U.S. this year, or 13% of the digital video ad market. In a recent report, BI Intelligence breaks down the mobile video ecosystem, analyzing the behavior and devices behind the growth in consumption, and examining the demographics and behavior of mobile video consumers. We specifically detail how mobile video monetization is booming, and look at the new video ecosystem that is taking shape, with mobile devices — rather than television — at the center. Read more of this post

Tencent launches online Karaoke service, Just Wanna Karaoke, a combination of YY Music and Changba

Tencent Taps into Online Music Show Business

By Tracey Xiang on July 29, 2013

Tencent officially launched an online Karaoke service, Just Wanna Karaoke, which began public testing in May. It is developed by 91KGE, a music game development company, and Tencent calls it a social game. It’s, however, no more than a combination of YY Music and Changba. YY Music is an online live music show platform that sells virtual gifts to audiences to buy for performers. Changba is a mobile Karaoke app that recently started selling virtual gifts as well. Two months ago YY Music launched a major update of its mobile app that added live video broadcasting. YY is trying to expand from music to other forms of performance, such as oral storytelling, as well. Changba, starting with audio only, began supporting videos recently. Read more of this post

Why Are Google Employees So Disloyal?

Why Are Google Employees So Disloyal?

The perks Google lays on for its employees are the stuff of legend. Free gourmet food all day, the best health insurance plan anywhere, five months’ paid maternity leave, kindergartens and gyms at the workplace, the freedom to work on one’s own projects 20 percent of the time, even death benefits. No wonder the tech behemoth has topped Fortune Magazine’s list of best companies to work for every year since 2007.

Why, then, aren’t Googlers more loyal to their employer? In one recent ranking of companies with the highest employee turnover rates, the Mountain View, California, company is among the leaders. The median employee tenure at Google is just more than one year, according to the payroll consultancy PayScale. Read more of this post

Hollywood’s Reliance on Sequels Makes for a Pallid Picture

July 26, 2013, 7:06 p.m. ET

Hollywood’s Reliance on Sequels Makes for a Pallid Picture

ERICH SCHWARTZEL

Hollywood is having a problem with numbers. To get lucrative sequels, studios have to score with original hits, but this summer the biggest movies have titles that end in a 2 or 3. Even more than in recent years, audiences haven’t bought into original concepts despite record-setting efforts to offer big-budget features that generate healthy international ticket sales—and, down the road, ready-made sequels. Several weekends of expensive misses have some in the industry talking about “tentpole” fatigue. Moreover, the glut of megabudget flicks meant to hoist Hollywood’s fortunes is shortening the time studios can capture audiences, especially for a poorly reviewed movie. Hollywood’s dependence on sequels and franchises, particularly in the summer, is hardly new, but this season’s numbers put the issue into sharp relief. Read more of this post

The historic merger between Publicis andOmnicom that will create the world’s largest advertising and marketing services group by revenues is a bold bet that size matters in a new media world that is increasingly controlled by technology

Last updated: July 28, 2013 8:14 pm

Leviathan scrambles to connect with audience

By Emily Steel, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Adam Thompson

The historic merger between Publicis andOmnicom that will create the world’s largest advertising and marketing services group by revenues is a bold bet that size matters in a new media world that is increasingly controlled by technology. Gone are the advertising’s Mad Men days when creative shops such as Publicis’ Leo Burnett developed campaigns for the Marlboro Man. Today’s marketers are scrambling to connect with consumers amid the proliferation of media and mobile devices. Read more of this post

Samsung Seeks Growth From Component Business

July 28, 2013, 6:28 a.m. ET

Samsung Seeks Growth From Component Business

South Korean Company Says Pace of Smartphone Growth May Slow in Third Quarter

MIN-JEONG LEE

SEOUL—Samsung Electronics Co.’s 005930.SE -1.15% estimated spending of nearly $12 billion to upgrade and invest in its chip facilities this year underscores the South Korean company’s reliance on its component business to drive earnings at a time when smartphone profits appear to be hitting a plateau. According to IDC, Samsung sold about 72.4 million smartphones in the second quarter. The WSJ’s Min-Jeong Lee tells Yun-Hee Kim how Samsung is positioning itself to compete in the smartphone market. While the South Korean companyreported a 50% increase in second quarter net profit Friday to a record 7.77 trillion won ($7 billion), margins from its smartphone business—its biggest profit generator for the past year—were squeezed due to hefty marketing expenses tied to its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone. Read more of this post

German media company Axel Springer, one of the largest in Europe, announced it is selling a slew of newspapers and magazines in order to focus on its digital business. The move marks a move away from journalism

07/26/2013 01:24 PM

Sell-Off

Newspaper Giant Turns Back on Journalism

By Stefan Schultz, Vanessa Steinmetz and Christian Teevs

Axel Springer is poised for radical change. The German media company, one of the largest in Europe, announced Thursday it is selling a slew of newspapers and magazines in order to focus on its digital business. The move marks a move away from journalism.

On Thursday morning, the mood in the foyer of the Axel Springer building in Hamburg was one of disbelief. Staff were gathered in the same lobby where they celebrated their Christmas party just months ago. But this time, they hadn’t come to celebrate. This is not going to be easy, warned Andreas Wiele, a senior executive at Axel Springer, Europe’s largest newspaper publisher, before breaking the news that the company will be selling a clutch of its regional newspapers and women’s and television magazines to Funke Mediengruppe so that the company can focus on digital media. Bild der Frau, Hörzu and the Hamburger Abendblatt, a major regional daily with circulation of around 200,000, are among the publications included in the deal. Read more of this post

How QR codes are morphing into artificial reality

How QR codes are morphing into artificial reality

BY NEAL APPLEFELD 
ON JULY 26, 2013

There may be no better example of the phrase “hindsight is 20/20” than the QR code. Once touted as the “next big thing,” those funky little squares never quite lived up to the hype, finally coming to rest as a little more than a groan-inducing memory amongst marketers.  In fact, according to a comScore study on QR codes, in 2011 only 6.2 percent of the total mobile audience in the United States had scanned a QR code on their mobile device. This leaves a whopping 93.8 percent of the total mobile audience out of the QR loop. Read more of this post

What Warehouses? Amazon’s Quarterly Message Is All Digital; “This past quarter, our top 10 selling items worldwide were all digital products – Kindles, Kindle Fire HDs, accessories and digital content”

July 25, 2013, 6:44 PM

What Warehouses? Amazon’s Quarterly Message Is All Digital

By Tom Gara

One interesting line from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, announcing quarterly results today:

“We’re so grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle devices and our digital ecosystem. This past quarter, our top 10 selling items worldwide were all digital products – Kindles, Kindle Fire HDs, accessories and digital content,” You would expect something close to this — of the company’s ten best selling electronics items, five are Kindles. In its Movies & TV category, the top three are all streaming items from Amazon’s Instant Video service, as are eight of the top ten. So long, DVDs! Amazon had $15.7 billion in sales in the quarter, and while it didn’t make any money — it lost $7 million — growing sales by 22% is still pretty impressive for a company this size. That was helped along by some of the newer, less conventional parts of the company’s digital business — Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business, was responsible for almost 15% of the growth in U.S. revenues. For another sense of where management’s priorities are — or at least where management wants to say its priorities are — take a look at the “Highlights” section of the earnings announcement. Of the 19 dot-pointed highlights, only one is devoted to the company’s historical business of online retailing — a mention of the launch of its marketplace in India. Four more talk about achievements in the Amazon Web Services business, and the rest — the other 14 — are about the Kindle and its digital content store, or Amazon’s wider digital media business.

Google’s Instant Translators Could Become The Universal Tongue

Google’s Instant Translators Could Become The Universal Tongue

DARRELL ETHERINGTON

posted 2 hours ago

Google likes to create things that gather data, which can be used to determine intent and for all kinds of profitable purposes. There’s no bigger fish in that pond than the Babel fish – that invention of Douglas Adams’ in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series that instantly translates one language to another to make communication seamless. That’s because Google would be processing literally everything a person says to another (at least while travelling), which adds up to a lot of mineable data. Read more of this post

Tile creates tiny, Bluetooth-connected devices you can affix to anything you don’t want to lose–like your keys, laptop, or luggage

DUDE, WHERE’S MY STUFF? HOW TILE APP COULD CREATE A NATIONAL LOST-AND-FOUND

TILE CREATES TINY, BLUETOOTH-CONNECTED DEVICES YOU CAN AFFIX TO ANYTHING YOU DON’T WANT TO LOSE–LIKE YOUR KEYS, LAPTOP, OR LUGGAGE.

BY: CHRISTINA CHAEY

When Fast Company‘s assistant news editor Jessica Hullinger became the victim of a recent bike theft–shortly after she was gifted a brand-new bicycle–she had few options in terms of looking for it. Hullinger hadn’t registered the bike with the New York Police Department, so it had no identification number to track. She halfheartedly called some local bike shops and checked Craigslist for new “For Sale” listings in search of bicycles with descriptions that matched hers. But the bike had vanished. Read more of this post

Alibaba, e-concierge, soon at your service

Alibaba, e-concierge, soon at your service

English.news.cn   2013-07-26

BEIJING, July 26 (Xinhuanet) — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd plans to boost its presence in China’s online market, and is adding services to ease consumers’ daily lives, from ordering food to booking movie tickets. The company expects the new business area to become a major revenue source in the future. Online shopping has become a new way of life for many Chinese consumers, said Zhang Jianfeng, vice-president of Alibaba Group. And the company has realized that customers are not satisfied with merely buying items on Internet. Read more of this post

Why Aren’t Many Going For the Billion-Dollar Ideas in Singapore

Why Aren’t Many Going For the Billion-Dollar Ideas in Singapore

July 25, 2013

by John Fearon

John Fearon is a lifelong serial entrepreneur. His 35 years have taken him from selling sweets as a child, to global digital marketing, to founding Dropmysite.com, one of the fastest growing cloud companies today.

Singapore is starting to look like the Silicon Valley of Asia – startups popping up everywhere, chock full of wealth being invested, and now they’re even drawing talent from MNCs around the world. However, one big difference is that on Sand Hill Road, everyone is looking to be a billion-dollar business but it seems only a few in the Lion City are. You need a ton of capital and sufficient length of time to go after the billion-dollar idea. Next, you need a world-changing idea, like indexing the entire internet in a search engine i.e. Google. Sometimes there just isn’t adequate cash or time or ideas on Singapore’s shores to propel a business into orbit. Read more of this post

Mobile Payments Service iBoxPay is the first company that has passed security accreditation of China UnionPay and Banking Card Test Center; More than 1 million deals have been sealed on iBoxPay platform with a turnover of RMB 1 billion

Mobile Payments Service iBoxPay Secured $10 Million Series B Financing

By Emma Lee on July 25, 2013

iBoxPay, a Square-like mobile payment solution and platform provider, announced $10 million of Series B financing from SMIT, GSR Ventures and Atomic (announcement in Chinese). The company received 14 million yuan financing (about $2.3 mn) from GSR Ventures in 2011. iBoxPay features RFID reader, barcode scanner, the Square-function, USBKey for secure, e-signature etc, as described on the company’s official website. It stands out in the competitive domestic market as the first company that has passed security accreditation of China UnionPay and Banking Card Test Center. Acquiring accreditation from China UnionPay means that the POS devices of iBoxPay have reached the national financial security standards. It is so far the only company that won a China UnionPay accreditation for handset POS machines. More than 1 million deals have been sealed on iBoxPay platform with a turnover of 1 billion yuan.

Tech firms and their founders: Monarchs versus managers; The battle over Dell raises the question of whether tech firms’ founders make the best long-term leaders of their creations

Tech firms and their founders: Monarchs versus managers; The battle over Dell raises the question of whether tech firms’ founders make the best long-term leaders of their creations

Jul 27th 2013 | SAN FRANCISCO |From the print edition

THE epic struggle between two billionaires over the future of Dell has gone to another round. Michael Dell, the ailing computer-maker’s founder and biggest shareholder, has now been forced twice to postpone a vote on his proposal to buy out the firm and take it off the stockmarket, for fear that the deal’s critics, led by Carl Icahn, a veteran shareholder activist, may have enough support to scupper the plan. Read more of this post

Warby-As-A-Service? Backed By Reddit, Posterous Founders, Eponym Helps Brands Build And Distribute Their Own Eyewear

Warby-As-A-Service? Backed By Reddit, Posterous Founders, Eponym Helps Brands Build And Distribute Their Own Eyewear

RIP EMPSON

posted 4 hours ago

Over the last few years, a new wave of startups has emerged to tackle a range of inefficient, ignored or offline segments within the massive world of fashion and retail. The maturation of the Web and digital commerce has allowed these startups to not only target specific niche groups of consumers and build communities and intimate relationships around these verticals, but to bypass brick-and-mortar gatekeepers and connect with customers directly through digital storefronts. Read more of this post

Facebook offers the dummy’s guide to mobile advertising? What advertisers like about news feed are the ads, with colorful photos, are hard to miss, right in the middle of the scroll of updates

July 25, 2013, 8:19 p.m. ET

Why Advertisers Are Warming to Facebook

Shares Soar 30% After Social Network Posts Better-Than-Expected Results

SUZANNE VRANICA and EVELYN RUSLI

Facebook Inc. is winning more friends on Madison Avenue. The social-media giant’s better-than-expected second-quarter results, driven in part by a big increase in mobile advertising revenue, signaled that after a rough start, the company has made marketers feel more comfortable with spending money on the social network. “The service has improved and the company is a more attentive to advertisers now,” said Adam Shlachter, senior vice president of media for DigitasLBI, a digital ad agency owned by Publicis Groupe  SA. “A year or two ago, the company was a little difficult to work with because they were growing so fast and there was inconsistencies with its service.” Read more of this post

OnStar, Garmin Try to Keep Pace With Waze, Other Free Navigation Apps

OnStar, Garmin Try to Keep Pace With Waze, Other Free Navigation Apps

By Keith Naughton on July 25, 2013

When Tim Nixon’s sons want to figure out how to get somewhere in their cars, they turn their iPhones sideways, attach them to their windshields with a suction cup, and turn on a free downloadable mapping app. For their father, that’s a sign that he has a problem. As chief technology officer of General Motors’ (GM) OnStar service, he sells dashboard navigational systems for $1,500 or more. “We’ve historically had these onboard, embedded nav systems,” he says. “That’s just not going to cut it anymore.” Read more of this post