Secrets, Lies And Startup Leaks: Mitigating Tech Company Paranoia In An Age Of Constant Crisis

Secrets, Lies And Startup Leaks: Mitigating Tech Company Paranoia In An Age Of Constant Crisis

Posted yesterday by Vanessa Camones (@vanessacamones)

Editor’s note: Vanessa Camones is founder and CEO of theMix agency, a full-service marketing and communications boutique. Read more of this post

The next tech revolution: Busting bureaucracy; Over the next few years, we will see a broad-based and long over-due revolution in company’s management models

The next tech revolution: Busting bureaucracy

March 10, 2014: 10:25 AM ET

Over the next few years, we will see a broad-based and long over-due revolution in company’s management models.

By Gary Hamel

(TheMIX) — Over the past 20 years, nothing has transformed business as thoroughly or as frequently as information technology. In the first wave, advances in IT prompted many companies to revamp their operating models. In Wave 2, the growing power of the Web provoked a fundamental rethink of business models. And over the next few years, Wave 3 will yield a broad-based and long overdue revolution in management models. Read more of this post

Out of the Shadows, a Tech Hub in Luxembourg

Out of the Shadows, a Tech Hub in Luxembourg

By CLAIRE BARTHELEMYMARCH 9, 2014

LUXEMBOURG — The towering, rusty blast furnaces of the industrial wasteland in Belval stand in stark contrast with Luxembourg’s fairy-tale image of wealth and stability. But the former industrial area about 20 kilometers south of Luxembourg City is undergoing a radical metamorphosis. Where the country’s largest steel works once spewed smoke into the sky above the French border, the government has been erecting an entire new neighborhood, aiming to position Luxembourg as Europe’s next hub for technological innovation. Read more of this post

VW chief warns carmakers must prevent the connected vehicle of the future turning into a “data monster” that aids snooping on customers

March 10, 2014 8:30 am

VW chief urges carmakers to fight the rise of the ‘data monster’

By Chris Bryant in Frankfurt

Carmakers must prevent the connected vehicle of the future turning into a “data monster” that aids snooping on customers, the chief executive of Volkswagen has warned.  Read more of this post

Gambling machines are controversial-and increasingly unpopular

Gambling machines are controversial—and increasingly unpopular

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

BOOKMAKERS are an easy target for politicians seeking a quick win. On March 2nd Maria Miller, the culture secretary, promised tougher regulation of high-stakes gaming machines, which allow betting-shop punters to wager up to £300 ($500) per minute. Her proposed rules, which include forcing customers to set a cap on the amount they will spend each time they start a gaming session, did not much impress many Labour bigwigs, who would prefer to see big-money machines banned. But, racing to dominate an increasingly heated debate, the three main parties have long left the facts behind. Read more of this post

Tencent to buy 15 pct stake in JD.com in challenge to Alibaba

Tencent to buy 15 pct stake in JD.com in challenge to Alibaba

9:58pm EDT

* Tencent buys 15 pct stake in e-commerce firm JD.com for $215 mln

* Plans to buy additional 5 pct stake on post-IPO basis

* Investment will challenge China’s No. 1 e-commerce firm Alibaba

* JD.com e-commerce business to be integrated with Tencent’s WeChat

By Paul Carsten

BEIJING, March 10 (Reuters) – Tencent Holdings Ltd will buy a 15 percent stake in e-commerce firm JD.com for $214.7 million, as the two seek to challenge Alibaba Group Holding’s dominant position in online shopping in China. Read more of this post

Dell’s CIO on the Company’s Transition; Adriana Karaboutis Talks About Managing Acquisitions and Role of Women in Technology

Dell’s CIO on the Company’s Transition

Adriana Karaboutis Talks About Managing Acquisitions and Role of Women in Technology

CLINT BOULTON

March 9, 2014 7:47 p.m. ET

Adriana “Andi” Karaboutis, chief information officer of Dell Inc., has her hands full.

Her biggest task right now: integrating technology assets from roughly eight of the 19 acquisitions Dell has made in the past few years. Culling duplicate technologies and figuring out what new technologies might be needed going forward are among her key responsibilities at the Round Rock, Texas, company, which went private last year as it seeks to pivot from PC maker to provider of enterprise hardware, software and services. Read more of this post

Newspaper Consortium Seeks to Sell Cars.com for $3 Billion; Online Marketplace is Jointly Owned by Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy and Other Publishers

Newspaper Consortium Seeks to Sell Cars.com for $3 Billion

Online Marketplace is Jointly Owned by Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy and Other Publishers

WILLIAM LAUNDER, DANA MATTIOLI and MIKE SPECTOR

Updated March 9, 2014 4:48 p.m. ET

A group of newspaper publishers has put the cars.com online marketplace up for sale for as much as $3 billion, hoping to cash in on booming values for e-commerce sites, people familiar with the plans said. Read more of this post

Bioprinting: Building living tissue with a 3D printer is becoming a new business, but making whole organs for transplant remains elusive

Bioprinting: Building living tissue with a 3D printer is becoming a new business, but making whole organs for transplant remains elusive

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

IN A state-of-the-art clean room, a scientist clad in a full-body containment suit, a hair net and blue gloves is preparing some printing cartridges—filled not with ink but a viscous milky liquid. Next to her sits a computer connected to a machine that resembles a large ice-cream dispenser, except that each of its two nozzles is made of a syringe with a long needle. Once the scientist clicks on the “run program” button, the needles extrude not a vanilla or chocolate-flavoured treat, but a paste of living cells. These bioinks are deposited in precise layers on top of each other and interspersed with a gel that forms a temporary mould around the cells. Read more of this post

Stalking trolls: Intellectual property: After being blamed for stymying innovation in America, vague and overly broad patents on software and business processes could get the chop

Stalking trolls: Intellectual property: After being blamed for stymying innovation in America, vague and overly broad patents on software and business processes could get the chop

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

AT LAST, it seems, something is to be done about the dysfunctional way America’s patent system operates. Two recent developments suggest calls for patent reform are finally being heard at the highest levels. First, in 2013, defying expectations, the House of Representatives passed (by an overwhelming majority) the Innovation Act, a bill aimed squarely at neutralising so-called patent trolls. These are individuals or companies who buy up lots of patents and then use them to extract payments from unsuspecting victims. Second, the US Supreme Court agreed to rule on what is the most contentious issue of all: which inventions are actually eligible for patent protection. Read more of this post

Woven electronics: An uncommon thread; Conductive fibres: From lighter aircraft to electric knickers, flexible filaments raise a wide range of interesting possibilities

Woven electronics: An uncommon thread; Conductive fibres: From lighter aircraft to electric knickers, flexible filaments raise a wide range of interesting possibilities

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

LAS VEGAS in January is the place to spot the latest trends in consumer electronics. The one that grabbed the attention of most people at the 2014 CES show were the wearables. These are gadgets that you put on, from all sorts of spectacles with built-in cameras and screens, like Google Glass, to wrist bands and watches that can monitor your heart rate or relay text messages. There is even jewellery that can warn you of too much exposure to the desert sun. Read more of this post

Molecular communications: Researchers are looking at ways to broadcast messages using chemical rather than electrical signals

Molecular communications: Researchers are looking at ways to broadcast messages using chemical rather than electrical signals

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

HUMANS have long experimented with how best to communicate at a distance. Smoke signals and drums date back to prehistoric times. The Romans used carrier pigeons as messengers to support their conquests. Since the early 1830s, however, communication has been dominated by electrical or electromagnetic signals, from the first telegraph to the carrier waves in fibre-optic cables and the wireless networks of cellular telephones. But now a new contender is signalling its presence: molecular communication. Read more of this post

Smart labels: The 40-year-old barcode has a new, more intelligent rival that can store information, display and transmit it

Smart labels: The 40-year-old barcode has a new, more intelligent rival that can store information, display and transmit it

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

IN JUNE 1974 history was made at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, with a ten-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It was the first time a commercial item bearing a Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned by a cashier at the checkout. Forty years on, what became known as a barcode has transformed the world of commerce by providing reliable product identification, tracking and pricing. Nearly everything now comes with a barcode. Read more of this post

Aerial jellyfish: Ornithopters: Flying like a bird has long captured the imagination. The latest way to do so is copied from the ocean, not the atmosphere

Aerial jellyfish: Ornithopters: Flying like a bird has long captured the imagination. The latest way to do so is copied from the ocean, not the atmosphere

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

ENGINEERS often look to the natural world for inspiration—and flight engineers, doubly so. Mankind’s desire to soar like the birds directly inspired the Wright brothers’ solution to the problem of controlling a heavier-than-air flying machine, by suggesting the way to do so was to warp the shape of the craft’s wings. More recently, designers of ornithopters (tiny, robotic flying machines lifted by flapping wings) have looked to insects for inspiration, and built systems of sensory feedback that can keep aloft designs which are essentially unstable. Read more of this post

Truffle farming: How mapping technology is being used to discover new places to grow savoury and expensive fungi

Truffle farming: How mapping technology is being used to discover new places to grow savoury and expensive fungi

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

PIGS, dogs and rakes can all be useful in the quest to discover wild truffles, but each has its drawbacks. Pigs like to gobble up the fancy fungi as much as their owners do. Dogs are costly to train. Rakes wreak havoc on the duff (leaf litter) that often covers truffle-rich soil, thus damaging the fungi’s environment. Truffles are, nevertheless, successfully being unearthed in areas not traditionally associated with their growth. Read more of this post

Can parallel lines meet: Power transmission: How to build a real supergrid by making existing electricity lines more efficient at transmitting power

Can parallel lines meet: Power transmission: How to build a real supergrid by making existing electricity lines more efficient at transmitting power

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

GERMANY has a problem. The decision, taken in 2011, to close down the country’s nuclear-power stations risks leaving parts of the country with insufficient supplies of electricity. This means power will have to be brought in from elsewhere. But to do that seems, on the face of things, to require the building of new transmission lines, which will be unpopular with those they pass by. Read more of this post

Giant batteries: The missing piece of the renewable-power jigsaw may now have been found in the form of a new type of flow battery

Going with the flow

Giant batteries: The missing piece of the renewable-power jigsaw may now have been found in the form of a new type of flow battery

Mar 8th 2014 | From the print edition

THERE is nothing so expensive, some cynics suspect, as free fuel. It is not that turning wind and sunlight into electricity is itself that costly, provided you pick the right places to do it. But it is not reliable. The wind does not always blow, and even in the most cloud-free desert night falls with monotonous regularity. Political commitments to use large quantities of renewables, such as several European countries have made (see article), thus risk the lights going out. The search therefore has been on for a cheap way to store energy transduced from sun and wind when it is plentiful, so that it can be used when it is not. Read more of this post

French telecoms wars: Gloves off; Since the beginning of 2012, when a new competitor, Iliad Group’s Free, crashed in with super-low prices and soon snatched more than 10% of the market, revenues of the three incumbent operators tumbled

French telecoms wars: Gloves off

Mar 8th 2014, 11:38 by M.S. | PARIS

ANY ordinary person who has spent some time in France will have been puzzled by the unpredictable internet and mobile connections in a country where services are by and large among the world’s best. It is not only in remote rural regions that you have to run up a hill waving your mobile to send a text. The Left Bank in Paris can also feel like the Pyrenees. This may now change, thanks to a gloves-off battle for the country’s second-biggest telecoms operator. Read more of this post

Like the world fairs of old, Silicon Valley runs on booms, busts, and showboating impresarios. That’s a good thing

Like the world fairs of old, Silicon Valley runs on booms, busts, and showboating impresarios. That’s a good thing

by Venkatesh Rao 3,500 words

Venkatesh Rao is a Seattle-based writer and consultant. He is the author of Tempo (2011), a book on decision-making, and blogs at ribbonfarm.

A few times a month, I walk from my apartment in the rapidly gentrifying Lower Queen Anne part of Seattle towards one of the cafés in the booming South Lake Union neighbourhood. A good deal of the real estate along my route is controlled by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen, and much of the demand is driven by Amazon’s inexorable rise. Read more of this post

Evan Williams, the billionaire co-founder of Twitter, is trying to rethink online writing at his new start-up, Medium

MARCH 8, 2014, 2:00 PM  Comment

With Medium, Evan Williams Is Tackling the Future of Writing Online

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesEvan Williams, the billionaire co-founder of Twitter, is trying to rethink online writing at his new start-up, Medium.

As a founder of both Blogger and Twitter, Evan Williams helped change the way people write online. Now, with his latest start-up,Medium, he is trying to figure out how we will write in the future. Read more of this post

Google’s Project Loon: The gamble that’s so crazy it might work

Google’s Project Loon: The gamble that’s so crazy it might work

BY DOMINIC BASULTO

March 6 at 7:43 am

Google’s Project Loon, in which high-altitude balloons circle the globe using wind currents and solar power to provide WiFi connectivity to remote locations in developing markets, officially launched this past week, with balloons headed out around the world from a remote location in New Zealand. If you’re so inclined, there’s even a way to follow along online in real-time as winds blow these balloons at 25 mph along the 40^th parallel in the Southern Hemisphere. Read more of this post

Imagining the potential of a Google AdWords for the physical world

Imagining the potential of a Google AdWords for the physical world

BY MATT MCFARLAND

February 26 at 9:27 am

Advertisements in public places come in one variety: one-size fits all. Signs, posters and billboards are generally the same no matter who you are. This is an inherently wasteful model. It brings to mind the John Wanamaker quote, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Read more of this post

“Social Media Doesn’t Sleep”: How This Local Shop Cranked Sales from $63K to $7 Million

 “SOCIAL MEDIA DOESN’T SLEEP”: HOW THIS LOCAL SHOP CRANKED SALES FROM $63K TO $7 MILLION

FROM TWEETING TO PHOTOGRAPHING MODELS HERSELF TO CUSTOMER SERVICE, DIANA HARBOUR IS RE-DEFINING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HANDS-ON. HERE ARE THE SECRETS TO SOCIAL SELLING SHE’S LEARNED WITH THE RED DRESS BOUTIQUE. Read more of this post

Carphone comeback: How tech giants are racing to win the smart car battle

Carphone comeback: How tech giants are racing to win the smart car battle

Matt Hartley | March 8, 2014 7:30 AM ET
Welcome to the Second Coming of the carphone.

Anyone of a certain age can remember the first time they used a phone from inside a car. And more often than not, they were excited to tell the person on the other end of the line that they were, in fact, talking to them on a carphone. Read more of this post

This Is Why It Feels Like Apple Stopped Innovating Three Years Ago

This Is Why It Feels Like Apple Stopped Innovating Three Years Ago

NICHOLAS CARLSON TECH  MAR. 8, 2014, 10:07 PM

Steve Jobs used to call the computer a bicycle for the mind. Apple’s always been best at the pedals and handle bars. Read more of this post

Beware 3-D Printing! The new technology may hold great promise, but the stocks do not. Why the industry darling could tumble 80%.

SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2014

Beware 3-D Printing!

By ALEXANDER EULE | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

The new technology may hold great promise, but the stocks do not. Why the industry darling could tumble 80%.

It was meant to be the moment science fiction finally met reality. This past January, makers of 3-D printers reserved 7,000 square feet worth of space at the Consumer Electronics Show. At their introductory press briefing, CES organizers described how 3-D printing was driving a new industrial revolution. The Las Vegas show floor was littered with small boxes spitting out plastic figurines and minimalist jewelry. Not exactly the stuff of a new world order in manufacturing, perhaps, but the tech world nevertheless declared 2014 the year of the 3-D printer. Read more of this post

boohoo.com valued at 560 million pounds in London listing

boohoo.com valued at 560 million pounds in London listing

4:17am EST

LONDON (Reuters) – British online fashion retailer boohoo.com will list on London’s AIM market next week with a market capitalization of 560 million pounds ($936 million) after tapping into current investor appetite for internet retail stocks. Read more of this post

In twist, Mexico says non-telecom Slim firms dominate telecoms

In twist, Mexico says non-telecom Slim firms dominate telecoms

6:12pm EST

By Alexandra Alper and Tomas Sarmiento

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s telecoms regulator on Friday declared two of billionaire Carlos Slim’s major financial and industrial companies “dominant” in telecommunications, but has yet to slap the tag on Slim’s flagship telecom company. Read more of this post