Why 2014 could be a breakout year for mobile commerce in Southeast Asia

Why 2014 could be a breakout year for mobile commerce in Southeast Asia

December 24, 2013

by Terence Lee

At a Christmas gathering among friends in Singapore, I was surprised to learn that a couple of them have begun selling second-hand stuff on Carousell, a consumer-to-consumer mobile marketplace app. Neither are in the internet industry, and only got to know about the service through word-of-mouth. Read more of this post

Rampant Returns Plague E-Retailers; Sellers Suggest Sizes and Redirect Discounts to Break Bad Habits

Rampant Returns Plague E-Retailers

Sellers Suggest Sizes and Redirect Discounts to Break Bad Habits

SHELLY BANJO

Dec. 22, 2013 6:23 p.m. ET

Free shipping and lenient return policies have given online retailing a huge boost. Now, chains are mining their order data to get shoppers to keep more purchases. Behind the uptick in e-commerce is a little known secret: As much as a third of all Internet sales gets returned, according to retail consultancy Kurt Salmon. And the tide of goods flowing back to retailers is rising. Shipper United Parcel Service Inc. UPS +0.15% expects returns to jump 15% this season from last year, making them a significant and growing cost for retailers. Read more of this post

Data brokers outpace regulators as they mine new technologies

December 22, 2013 5:01 pm

Data brokers outpace regulators as they mine new technologies

By Emily Steel in New York

Companies that create data dossiers on consumers are tapping new technologies to unearth ever more intimate information despite intensifying regulatory scrutiny of the multibillion-dollar data broker industry. Read more of this post

Twitter’s Dorsey Vies With SoftBank’s Son for Japan Shops: Tech

Twitter’s Dorsey Vies With SoftBank’s Son for Japan Shops: Tech

Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey sparked a price war over Japanese credit-card transactions with SoftBank Corp. (9984)’s Masayoshi Son. Entrepreneurs like Yukiko Kurano are the biggest winners so far. Read more of this post

This Insane Chinese Concept Train Doesn’t Need To Stop At Stations To Pick Up Passengers

This Insane Chinese Concept Train Doesn’t Need To Stop At Stations To Pick Up Passengers

DYLAN LOVE

DEC. 22, 2013, 11:45 AM 34,025 20

A train in motion is a train carrying out its purpose. So why bother stopping at stations?! That’s the idea behind this concept train from China. Check out the video below which demonstrates how it works: Passengers step onto a compartment platform above an incoming train, which is then snagged by the train as it moves through the platform. At the next station, anyone wanting to get off moves up into the compartment, which is then snagged by the station. The train itself never stops, it simply trades embarkation capsules as its moves through a station, giving passengers a window of time to board without the train needing to stop.

More Chinese enterprises jump on e-commerce bandwagon

More Chinese enterprises jump on e-commerce bandwagon

Staff Reporter

2013-12-22

In line with the growing integration of virtual and physical commerce, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group announced on Dec. 9 a strategic partnership with consumer electronics and appliance producer Haier, under which Alibaba will inject 2.822 billion yuan (US$465 million) into Haier in exchange for a 34% stake in the latter’s subsidiary Ririshun Logistics. Read more of this post

Alibaba’s online investment account is becoming a serious threat to Chinese banks

Alibaba’s online investment account is becoming a serious threat to Chinese banks

By Gwynn Guilford @sinoceros

6 hours ago

If you work at a Chinese bank these days, the thing you’re probably sweating the most is vanishing deposits. Banks are only allowed to lend a certain percentage of their deposit bases. Artificially low government-set deposit rates have driven households and companies to hold their savings instead in higher-yielding products, such as wealth management products (WMPs). Fewer deposits means fewer loans—which means less interest income for banks. (Banks earn commissions off WMPs, so it’s not all bad.) Read more of this post

Statistically, Who’s the Greatest Person in History?Why quants can’t measure historic significance

DECEMBER 3, 2013

Statistically, Who’s the Greatest Person in History?Why quants can’t measure historic significance

BY CASS R. SUNSTEIN

Who was the greatest baseball player of all time? Some people say Willie Mays. They emphasize that he had all of baseball’s “five tools”: he could run, hit, field, throw, and hit with power. Other people insist on Ty Cobb, who had the highest career batting average in baseball history. Still others say Cy Young, on the ground that good pitchers are more important than good hitters, and Young won more games than any pitcher who ever lived. Joe DiMaggio has his advocates, who note that he had the longest hitting streak in baseball history, and who emphasize that hitters, unlike pitchers, play every day. Still others say Hank Aaron, who had the most career home runs (except for Barry Bonds, whose all-time record was marred by steroid use). Read more of this post

Korean TV gets real

Korean TV gets real

Saturday, December 21, 2013 – 07:45

The Straits Times

KOREA – The leads are unusual, but South Korea’s reality shows are gaining fans for their feel-good vibe First, it was pretty boys. Now, it is the grandfathers’ turn. Whereas once the South Korean pop culture wave swept away fans with the likes of idol dramas filled with pretty faces, such as the 2009 hit series Boys Over Flowers, it is now cresting on the strength of reality series featuring faces that are not necessarily pretty – or even young. Read more of this post

Why do Germans shun Twitter? “I don’t want people to know what I do in my spare time”

Why do Germans shun Twitter?

Dec 18th 2013, 14:51 by S.W.

WHEN the official Twitter feed announced the microblog’s IPO in November, around 8,000 followers retweeted the news the following week. Barely 50 of them were German. According to Semiocast, an analyst, Germany ranks 31st worldwide in terms of public tweets, with 59m per year. Germany’s 82m people have just 4m Twitter accounts. That puts it 22nd in the world, behind not only European neighbours like Britain (population 63m, 45m accounts) or Spain (population 47m, 16m accounts) but also Turkey (population 75m, 11m accounts) and the Philippines (population 98m, 8.6m accounts). Read more of this post

Welcome to the Internet of Thingies: 61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human

Welcome to the Internet of Thingies: 61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human

By Alexis C. Madrigal

It happened last year for the first time: bot traffic eclipsed human traffic, according to the bot-trackers at Incapsula. This year, Incapsula says 61.5 percent of traffic on the web is non-human.  Read more of this post

Uber Might Be More Valuable Than Facebook Someday. Here’s Why

12/7/2013 at 2:49 AM

Uber Might Be More Valuable Than Facebook Someday. Here’s Why

By Kevin Roose

One of the odd things about traveling between the Bay Area and New York a lot is the asynchronicity of mass culture between coasts: That is, the things that get popular in the Bay Area (PostMates, Burning Man) don’t always get popular in New York right away, and things New Yorkers think are a big deal (cronuts, Banksy) are greeted with shrugs in San Francisco. Read more of this post

The Day Google Had to ‘Start Over’ on Android

The Day Google Had to ‘Start Over’ on Android

By Fred Vogelstein

When Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone in 2007, he derailed Google’s two year-old Android project—Google’s bid to change the world of cellular software. (Reuters)

In 2005, on Google’s sprawling, college-like campus, the most secret and ambitious of many, many teams was Google’s own smartphone effort—the Android project. Tucked in a first-floor corner of Google’s Building 44, surrounded by Google ad reps, its four dozen engineers thought that they were on track to deliver a revolutionary device that would change the mobile phone industry forever. Read more of this post

Tan Sri Andrew Sheng: The year of Internet innovation

Updated: Saturday December 21, 2013 MYT 12:40:21 PM

The year of Internet innovation

BY ANDREW SHENG

Online business is here to stay

As the year comes to a close, we need to reflect on what are the most important things that have affected our lives in the recent past. In my view, the Internet continues to change our world. The most significant Internet event in 2013 was not the listing of Facebook, which priced the company at US$104bil, but the revelation by Edward Snowden of the surveillance of the Internet in July 2013, which showed that Big Brother, friend or foe, is really watching. Since my smartphone is smart enough to track me to the toilet, there really is no privacy left in this world. Read more of this post

Robinhood App Will Offer Zero-Commission Stock Trades Thanks To $3M Seed From Index And A16Z

Robinhood App Will Offer Zero-Commission Stock Trades Thanks To $3M Seed From Index And A16Z

Posted Dec 18, 2013 by Josh Constine (@joshconstine)

Why pay E*Trade or Scottrade $7 to trade a stock when you could do it for free? That premise helped mobile investment app startup Robinhood raise the $3 million seed round led by Index Ventures it announced today. With the zero-commission trading it will launch next month, Robinhood is out to prove that young people do care about trading stocks — it’s just been too expensive for them to invest small sums. Read more of this post

Intel Seen Threatened as Google Mulls Own Server Chips

Intel Seen Threatened as Google Mulls Own Server Chips

By Tim Culpan, Ian King and Brian Womack – Dec 13, 2013

Intel Corp. (INTC)’s dominance in semiconductors is already threatened by the market’s shift to mobile devices. Google Inc. is poised to make matters worse. Read more of this post

Netflix’s War on Mass CultureBinge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture

DECEMBER 4, 2013

Netflix’s War on Mass CultureBinge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture

BY TIM WU

Given all the faces you see glued to computers, tablets, and cell phones, you might think that people watch much less television than they used to. You would be wrong. According to Nielsen, Americans on average consume nearly five hours of TV every day, a number that has actually gone up since the 1990s. That works out to about 34 hours a week and almost 1,800 hours per year, more than the average French person spends working. The vast majority of that time is still spent in front of a standard television, watching live or prescheduled programming. Two decades into the Internet revolution, despite economic challenges and cosmetic upgrades, the ancient regime survives, remaining both the nation’s dominant medium and one of its most immutable. Read more of this post

How A Promising Electric Car Battery Startup Completely Self-Destructed

How A Promising Electric Car Battery Startup Completely Self-Destructed

ANTONY INGRAM, GREEN CAR REPORTS
DEC. 20, 2013, 5:16 PM 1,360 3

The race to find battery technologies of the future is not one without casualties. The trail left behind Envia, one of the most promising battery startups in recent years, has left something more akin to a warzone–and even huge companies like General Motors have taken shrapnel during their contribution.

Read more of this post

BlackBerry’s Foxconn Deal Spurs Evolution Into Services Company

BlackBerry’s Foxconn Deal Spurs Evolution Into Services Company

BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY)’s five-year deal to outsource smartphone production to Foxconn Group is jump-starting its transformation into a services provider, pleasing investors who were looking for a smaller, nimbler company BlackBerry announced plans yesterday for Foxconn to make its phones at plants in Indonesia and Mexico, sending the shares up 16 percent, the biggest one-day gain in more than four years. The move will help the struggling company cut production spending and avoid the kind of inventory gluts that contributed to a $4.6 billion writedown last quarter. Read more of this post

Google’s Road Map to Global Domination

December 11, 2013

Google’s Road Map to Global Domination

By ADAM FISHER

Luc Vincent, the man in charge of all the imagery in Google’s online maps, next to a Trekker.

Fifty-five miles and three days down the Colorado River from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry, near the Utah-Arizona border, the two rafts in our little flotilla suddenly encountered a storm. It sneaked up from behind, preceded by only a cool breeze. With the canyon walls squeezing the sky to a ribbon of blue, we didn’t see the thunderhead until it was nearly on top of us. Read more of this post

E-commerce firms have a hard core of costly, impossible-to-please customers

E-commerce firms have a hard core of costly, impossible-to-please customers

Dec 21st 2013 | BERLIN | From the print edition

“SCHREI vor Glück oder schick’s zurück!” went the slogan for Zalando, a big German online retailer: “Scream for joy or send it back!” But so many people took up the second half of the slogan that Zalando now uses just “Schrei vor Glück!” in its marketing. Read more of this post

Deal With It: Mobile Ads Are Here to Stay

Deal With It: Mobile Ads Are Here to Stay

FARHAD MANJOO

Dec. 18, 2013 4:47 p.m. ET

A year ago, fresh off the rocky Facebook FB +0.13% IPO, much of the tech industry worried about the future of online advertising. At the time, the Web was undergoing a profound shift, with all of us spending more time browsing on our phones, and less on our rickety old desktops. It remained an open question, though, whether Web companies would be able to make money in a mobile world. Read more of this post

Cloud Wars: Amazon and Google Win; Everyone Else Loses

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2013

Cloud Wars: Amazon and Google Win; Everyone Else Loses

By TIERNAN RAY | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

PC stocks staged a dramatic comeback in 2013, but the big story—the cloud—is not likely to be kind to them in the year ahead.

When so little is expected of you, there are so many ways to come up smelling like a rose. Read more of this post

Bingeing on Beyoncé: The Ripple Effect; Beyoncé’s new album and videos are innately sharable, generating a sort of ripple effect that is keeping the album front and center in the Web’s ephemeral consciousness

DECEMBER 20, 2013, 2:27 PM

Bingeing on Beyoncé: The Ripple Effect

By JENNA WORTHAM

Early in the morning of Dec. 13, Beyoncé turned the Internet upside down with the surprise release of a new music and video album, announced with a simple Instagram post. She did no traditional promotion for the album, no advance marketing. Read more of this post

Hollywood has always been a “caste-system town”; Working in TV used to be considered less desirable than unemployment; today it is where most of the money is, so writers, producers and the studios themselves are focusing more on TV

Business in Tinseltown is as unpredictable as it was 30 years ago

Dec 21st 2013 | LOS ANGELES | From the print edition

IN 1983, when William Goldman, a star screenwriter, revealed the inner workings of the film-making business in “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, Hollywood was in turmoil. The studios were reeling from a string of flops, most notably “Heaven’s Gate”, a Western released the previous year that had cost $44m (a huge sum in those days), ruining United Artists, the studio that made it. Mr Goldman’s book is best remembered for coining the rule that in his industry, “nobody knows anything”: it is anyone’s guess whether a film will be a hit or a miss. Read more of this post

Comcast’s future: Thinking outside the set-top box; America’s largest cable company is becoming more like the firms it is battling against for the attention of couch potatoes

Comcast’s future: Thinking outside the set-top box; America’s largest cable company is becoming more like the firms it is battling against for the attention of couch potatoes

Dec 14th 2013 | NEW YORK | From the print edition

WHEN Comcast, America’s largest cable operator, took a stake in NBCUniversal (NBCU) in 2009, “30 Rock”, a popular NBCU comedy, wove the deal into its plot. The programme’s characters came under the thumb of a new corporate parent, “Kabletown”, which introduced innovations like moving customer services to a part of India with no phones in order to “provide the same level of service at zero cost”. Comcast employees can take a joke. Last month, at a gathering to celebrate Comcast’s 50th anniversary, they showed a clip of the show, to the amusement of the firm’s real employees. Read more of this post

China’s ecommerce giants battle for dominance

December 20, 2013 4:49 am

China’s ecommerce giants battle for dominance

By Simon Rabinovitch

With Alibaba making waves in China’s staid financial sector, banks have every reason to be worried. But there are signs that Alibaba itself is also worried – about Tencent, the company behind the popular WeChat messaging app that is now muscling into the financial space. Read more of this post