Bosses Learn Not to Be So #Clueless; C-Suite Executives Take Pricey Courses, Learn to Use Social Media

Bosses Learn Not to Be So #Clueless

C-Suite Executives Take Pricey Courses, Learn to Use Social Media

MELISSA KORN

Dec. 17, 2013 8:02 p.m. ET

Companies are sending executives to basic training to learn how the internet works, spending six-figure sums to help c-suite executives understand how people communicate online–and how not to talk about technology, Melissa Korn reports on the News Hub. Photo: bloodytyrants.com.

Boardroom commanders are being assigned to basic training. Read more of this post

A Missing Revenue Stream From Mobile Apps

DECEMBER 14, 2013, 4:35 PM

A Missing Revenue Stream From Mobile Apps

By JENNA WORTHAM

One of my favorite guilty pleasures is Susan Miller, a popular New York astrologer who has a cult following online. I read her horoscopes religiously and enjoy following her on Twitter for the fun mix of quirky updates and planetary advice she dispenses. Read more of this post

“Little Data” Matters, Too; Big data is an invaluable source of insight, but companies with limited access to analytics can still find information to improve their business

Posted: December 16, 2013

David Meer is a partner with Booz & Company’s consumer and retail practice, and is based in New York.

“Little Data” Matters, Too

Back when I was working at the advertising agency JWT, one of our clients—a U.S. Marine Corps colonel—said something that has stuck with me ever since. “Look,” he said, “if I’m on a battlefield trying to defend a hill and I get a piece of intelligence, even if I’m not 100 percent sure that it’s accurate, I will make decisions based on that intelligence.” His point was that it’s better to have some information than none—and that you’d be a fool to disregard it just because it fell short of being definitive. Read more of this post

Tech Firms Push to Control Web’s Pipes; Google, Facebook Raise Tensions With Telecoms in Power Struggle for Internet’s Backbone

Tech Firms Push to Control Web’s Pipes

Google, Facebook Raise Tensions With Telecoms in Power Struggle for Internet’s Backbone

DREW FITZGERALD and SPENCER E. ANTE

Dec. 16, 2013 8:36 p.m. ET

Technology giants like Google Inc. GOOG +1.15% and Facebook Inc. FB +0.92% are expanding efforts to control more of the world’s Internet backbone, raising tensions with telecom companies over who runs the Web. Read more of this post

The flood of new information available to institutions has the potential to make both donors and charities more effective

How Big Data Will Change the Face of Philanthropy

Flood of new information has the potential to make both donors and charities more effective

LUCY BERNHOLZ

Dec. 15, 2013 4:00 p.m. ET

“It is more difficult to give money away intelligently than to earn it in the first place,” observed one of the great philanthropists of the 20th century, Andrew Carnegie. Today, with almost two million nonprofits in the U.S., the challenge of knowing which to support and which to avoid is more challenging than ever. How can individuals and foundations put their money where it’s most needed, and in ways that will be most effective? And how can charities themselves spend the dollars they receive in ways that best fulfill their missions? Read more of this post

The man behind the $37.99 tablet wants to sell one for $19.99 within two years

The man behind the $37.99 tablet wants to sell one for $19.99 within two years

By Matt McFarland, Updated: December 16 at 8:24 am

Datawind began selling three of its 7-inch devices in the United States on Monday. The least expensive model, the UbiSlate 7Ci, a 7-inch, Android-powered tablet, will sell for $37.99. Read more of this post

The most exciting mobile gaming company you’ve never heard of: In four years, Kabam went from San Francisco startup to major global player

The most exciting mobile gaming company you’ve never heard of

By Adam Lashinsky, Sr. Editor at Large December 12, 2013: 6:20 AM ET

In four years, Kabam went from San Francisco startup to major global player. (Must have been something in the dumplings.) FORTUNE — Kabam, the San Francisco mobile gaming company, has all the wrong things going for it. Read more of this post

The Unthinkable Is Happening: Apple’s Dominance In Apps Is Slipping Away To Android

The Unthinkable Is Happening: Apple’s Dominance In Apps Is Slipping Away To Android

JIM EDWARDS

DEC. 18, 2013, 2:05 PM 7,541 31

In the U.S., it sometimes feels as if everyone has an iPhone. And historically, Apple has dominated in terms of offering users the most apps, and offering developers the most lucrative place to sell apps. Read more of this post

Tools Help Investors Wade Through All the Chatter on Twitter; They filter tweets and help investors draw conclusions about where the market is headed

Tools Help Investors Wade Through All the Chatter on Twitter

They filter tweets and help investors draw conclusions about where the market is headed

GEORGIA WELLS

Dec. 15, 2013 4:00 p.m. ET

Most investors would love it if they could see into the future. Now, some of them are convinced they can—by monitoring Twitter. TWTR -1.67% A growing number of individual investors believe the microblogging service—which has already proved to be a good source for breaking news, insights from Wall Street’s top minds and major corporate announcements—holds a treasure trove of information that can lead them to the next hot stock. Read more of this post

Top Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews; Walt Mossberg on the products that changed the digital industry

Top Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews

Walt Mossberg on the products that changed the digital industry

WALTER S. MOSSBERG

Dec. 17, 2013 9:00 p.m. ET

Newton MessagePad foreshadowed some of today’s most cutting-edge technology. SSPL via Getty Images

Remember the Apple Newton? How about Netscape? Even if these products did not last until the present, they left their mark in the evolution of personal technology. For his final WSJ video column, Walt Mossberg takes us through the last 20 years. Read more of this post

Video analytics startup Vidyard could list within two years

Video analytics startup Vidyard could list within two years

3:16pm EST

By Ashutosh Pandey and Sayantani Ghosh

(Reuters) – When InContact Inc, a provider of internet-based call center services, wanted to gauge the success of its video marketing campaign, it turned to Canadian video analytics startup Vidyard. Read more of this post

Tech Companies Press for a Better Retail Experience

December 15, 2013

Tech Companies Press for a Better Retail Experience

By NICK WINGFIELD

SEATTLE — Looking for a holiday gift? Come on in. Relax. Take a seat in the leather chair. Welcome to today’s electronics store, a place that is now a little like entering a playground crossed with a cocktail lounge, where playing with the goodies is paramount and staff members are trained to act like laid-back tour guides. Read more of this post

How an impressionable media industry fell in love with fraud

How an impressionable media industry fell in love with fraud

December 17, 2013: 5:00 AM ET

In order to keep the market for the main currency of advertising liquid, the digital industry has created a system that relies on advertising fraud.

By Joe Marchese

FORTUNE — Ask someone who doesn’t work in advertising what it means to “make an impression,” you will likely get a reasonable response like “to do something that someone remembers.” However, inside the advertising industry, the definition of “impression” is not nearly as simple. Why? Because if you run an advertisement on TV, radio, or print, you have never been able to tell exactly how many people those advertisements really made an “impression” on. How many people looked up at a particular billboard? How many people paid attention to the TV during the commercial? So what media companies have historically measured — and sold — is really the potential to make an impression. This system worked because marketers could make estimations on how many people might actually see their advertisements and over decades figured out the real value of these “potential impressions.” From this history came the cost per thousand (potential) impressions, better known as CPM in media industry. The CPM market was astonishingly effective, and large, to the tune of trillions of dollars. It drove the creation of major brands and subsidized the creation of the news and entertainment content people love. Read more of this post

Byron Allen, Former Stand-Up Comic, Runs the ‘Walmart of Television’

Byron Allen, Former Stand-Up Comic, Runs the ‘Walmart of Television’

By Caroline Winter December 12, 2013

Jon Lovitz is in a duck costume. “I am the duck!” the former Saturday Night Live star announces. “Stand back, or I will quack you upside the head.” Bill Bellamy, a comedian best known for his days as an MTV VJ, looks on in bemused dismay. The puns progress: “You know how I’m holding my suit together? With duct tape!” Lovitz shouts. “What’s wrong, you don’t like a wise quacker?” Read more of this post

Intel Seen Threatened as Google Mulls Own Server Chips

Intel Seen Threatened as Google Mulls Own Server Chips

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. Google is considering designing its own server processors using technology from ARM Holdings Plc (ARM), said a person with knowledge of the matter. That potentially signifies at least a partial move away from Intel, which controls more than 95 percent of the market for chips in servers that use personal-computer processors. Read more of this post

DirecTV CEO Says Intel TV Service Isn’t ‘Very Good Idea’

DirecTV CEO Says Intel TV Service Isn’t ‘Very Good Idea’

DirecTV Chief Executive Officer Mike White, who runs the largest U.S. satellite-television provider, criticized Intel Corp. (INTC)’s attempt to create an Internet-based alternative to pay-TV services. Read more of this post

Big data can blind us to the long term

December 9, 2013 4:52 pm

Big data can blind us to the long term

By Andrew Hill

The numbers look good but without technical expertise and intuition do not add up to much

Before long, “everything that computes will connect, and everything that connects will compute”, Abhi Ingle, who spearheads innovation at AT&T, told last week’sFT Innovate America conference in Silicon Valley. Read more of this post

What Yahoo Didn’t Want Investors to Know

What Yahoo Didn’t Want Investors to Know

There have been two developments of note at Yahoo! Inc. this week. One was the news that Yahoo was forced to make an unflattering disclosure against its wishes, although investors don’t seem terribly unnerved by the information that came out. The other was an analyst’s report reminding investors that Yahoo’s value doesn’t have much to do with its core business anymore. Read more of this post

The spectre of flawed IT ought to scare us all; It is only when a system suffers a failure that the techies come into their own; One of the few CIOs to end up running a large corporate is Phil Clarke, the boss of Tesco

December 10, 2013 4:37 pm

The spectre of flawed IT ought to scare us all

By Luke Johnson

It is only when a system suffers a failure that the techies come into their own

Iam worried that most of my companies are not tech-savvy enough. Despite our bias towards sectors such as hospitality, technology needs to be front and centre in our thinking. From mobile meal ordering to digital menus to social media wizardry, the eating experience is being reinvented by technology. In the years ahead, any business that fails in its IT strategy will surely go broke. Read more of this post

Some Cisco investors urge an exit from set-top box unit

Some Cisco investors urge an exit from set-top box unit

7:04am EST

By Sinead Carew

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Cisco Systems Inc Chief Executive John Chambers is facing growing pressure from investors to exit its television set-top box business, where revenue has been plummeting and profit margins trail the rest of the company. The problem is that there are few obvious buyers for the unit – the former Scientific Atlanta that Cisco bought for $6.9 billion in 2005 – so Chambers might have no choice but to close the business, analysts said. Read more of this post

Netflix Says Binge Viewing is No ‘House of Cards’; Half the users it studied watch an entire season in one week.

Netflix Says Binge Viewing is No ‘House of Cards’

Half the users it studied watch an entire season in one week.

JOHN JURGENSEN

Dec. 12, 2013 8:26 p.m. ET

Netflix NFLX -0.91% is trying to better understand your binge-viewing habits. The company Friday will reveal a snapshot of a phenomenon that is reshaping TV culture—viewers devouring shows in lengthy chunks, episode after episode. Executives say they found a strikingly consistent pattern in the pace at which people binge: In general, about half the viewers studied finished a season (up to 22 episodes) within one week Read more of this post

Microsoft’s Xbox One Sales Hit 2 Million Amid Race to Catch Sony

Microsoft’s Xbox One Sales Hit 2 Million Amid Race to Catch Sony

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said sales of the new Xbox One video-game console reached more than 2 million in its first 18 days on the market, as the company vies to keep pace with Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 4 during the holiday season. Sony said on Dec. 3 that it had sold 2.1 million of its machines since they went on sale Nov. 15 in North America. Microsoft, which introduced Xbox One on Nov. 22 in 13 countries, is selling pretty much every console it can get into stores and has “aggressive” plans to restock, said David Dennis, a spokesman for Xbox, in an interview yesterday. Read more of this post

How LinkedIn Manages Hyper-growth over the Long-term

How LinkedIn Manages Hyper-growth over the Long-term

Dec 10, 2013

The last few years have seen the emergence of a number of successful public technology companies. The social networking site LinkedIn would likely be at the top of many of those rankings. Read more of this post

Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android

December 4, 2013

Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android

By JOHN MARKOFF

PALO ALTO, Calif. — In an out-of-the-way Google office, two life-size humanoid robots hang suspended in a corner. If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package? Read more of this post

Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots; Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot named WildCat can gallop at high speeds.

December 14, 2013

Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots

By JOHN MARKOFF

Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot named WildCat can gallop at high speeds.

SAN FRANCISCO — BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google’s growing robot menagerie. Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that walk with an uncanny sense of balance and even — cheetahlike — run faster than the fastest humans. Read more of this post

Future technology is bright, says Intel guru Steve Brown

Future technology is bright, says Intel guru Steve Brown

December 12, 2013

Katie Cincotta

I can see clearly now: Intel futurist Steve Brown says our evolving computers are on the brink of some big advances. here is something evocative, almost spiritual, about someone who gets to have the title ”chief evangelist and futurist” on their business card. Steve Brown is that person, the professional crystal-ball gazer for Intel. He has been a researcher at the computer giant’s semi-conductor super-site in Oregon, in the US Pacific north-west, for more than 28 years, looking ahead as many as 10 or 15 years to see what’s in store for consumer and business technology. Read more of this post