Alibaba, Samsung making own version of Google Glass: Sources

Alibaba, Samsung making own version of Google Glas: Sources

Thursday, December 12, 2013 – 09:52

Kim Ji-hyun

The Korea Herald/Asia News Network

SEOUL – Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, China’s largest online trading company, on Wednesday met with Samsung Electronics executives including mobile chief Shin Jong-kyun. While Samsung remained tight-lipped on the matter, sources said the two sides had much to talk about, including Alibaba’s ambitions to manufacture its own version of the Google Glass – a wearable computer fitted with an optical head-mounted display that is to serve as a ubiquitous computer. Read more of this post

After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought

December 10, 2013

After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought

By TAMAR LEWIN

Two years after a Stanford professor drew 160,000 students from around the globe to a free online course on artificial intelligence, starting what was widely viewed as a revolution in higher education, early results for such large-scale courses are disappointing, forcing a rethinking of how college instruction can best use the Internet. Read more of this post

Samsung Shifts Plants From China to Protect Margins

Samsung Shifts Plants From China to Protect Margins

Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) built the world’s largest smartphone business by tapping China’s cheap and abundant workforce. Not for much longer: it’s shifting output to Vietnam to secure even lower wages and defend profit margins as growth in sales of high-end handsets slows. By the time a new $2 billion plant reaches full production in 2015, China’s communist neighbor will be making more than 40 percent of the phones that generate the majority of Samsung’s operating profit. The Suwon, South Korea-based company’s second handset factory in Vietnam is due to begin operations in February, according to a Nov. 22 statement on the local government’s website. Read more of this post

How Japan Is Winning in Mobile Games ;Publishers Master the Psychology of Payments in a Country Conditioned to Buy on Phones

How Japan Is Winning in Mobile Games

Publishers Master the Psychology of Payments in a Country Conditioned to Buy on Phones

MAYUMI NEGISHI

Updated Dec. 11, 2013 3:38 a.m. ET

TOKYO—Like many other mobile games, “PokoPang” features cartoonish animals and requires players to defeat monsters. Hironori Tomobe, data scientist at Mobage game platform operator DeNA Co., talks about how big data is used to retain users and to improve long-term profits in an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal. But the puzzle game—little known outside Japan—stands out for its developer’s ability to conquer revenue. Read more of this post

Movie-Theater Chains Take On IMAX; Rival Movie Chains Invest in Oversize Screens, Enhanced Sound, Luxury Seats

Movie-Theater Chains Take On IMAX

Rival Movie Chains Invest in Oversize Screens, Enhanced Sound, Luxury Seats

ERICH SCHWARTZEL

Dec. 12, 2013 7:39 p.m. ET

A battle for the bigger screen is brewing between IMAX Corp. IMX.T -0.46% and U.S. movie-theater chains. Over the past four years, North America’s five major theater companies have been retrofitting their auditoriums or building new ones with oversized screens that add several extra dollars to the ticket price. That is giving IMAX, the dominant player in premium movie-going, fresh competition from the very theater chains it depends on for business. Read more of this post

Clamour for regulation raises doubts over wisdom of crowdfunding

December 12, 2013 10:43 am

Clamour for regulation raises doubts over wisdom of crowdfunding

By Jonathan Moules, Enterprise Correspondent

The use of the web to drum up funding for ventures has caught the popular imagination.Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Seedrs and Indiegogo have helped inventors and campaigners raise billions of pounds for concepts that would not otherwise have been funded. Read more of this post

Alibaba invests in Haier to improve logistics

December 9, 2013 1:30 pm

Alibaba invests in Haier to improve logistics

By Sarah Mishkin in Taipei

Alibaba, China’s leading ecommerce company that is expected to list in the coming months, will invest HK$2.8bn (US$364m) in Haier, the Chinese appliance maker to expand its logistics and distribution network. Read more of this post

Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

DECEMBER 7, 2013, 9:00 AM

Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up

By NICK BILTON

Silicon Valley start-ups can be astoundingly unoriginal. So many start-ups are tiny, fractional variations on something that already exists. Look no further than the types of companies that are trying to raise funding from venture capitalists here. Under one rock there is the daily darkness of news releases that try to cram their way into the inboxes of reporters and bloggers. But if you’re not lucky enough to receive those constant pitches, you can look at some of the companies that are seeking investment on entrepreneurial and venture capital websites. Read more of this post

American and British spies have infiltrated online fantasy games, fearing that militants could use them to communicate, move money or plot attacks

December 9, 2013

Spies’ Dragnet Reaches a Playing Field of Elves and Trolls

World of Spycraft: One of the most extraordinary things revealed in the documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden is the surveillance of video games like World of Warcraft by Western spy agencies.

By MARK MAZZETTI and JUSTIN ELLIOTT

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents. Read more of this post

‘Apple Has A Real Problem’ – Supposedly, It’s Losing Talented Engineers

‘Apple Has A Real Problem’ – Supposedly, It’s Losing Talented Engineers

NICHOLAS CARLSON0DEC 9, 2013, 11.21 PM

AP

In the past few days, Apple spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying two startups – Topsy, a Twitter search engine, and PrimeSense, which the makes motion-sensing tech behind gadgets like Microsoft Kinect. On the most recent episode of Marco Arment’s Accidental Tech Podcast, close Apple watchers Casey Liss, and John Siracusa tried to figure out why Apple bought those startups. Read more of this post

At Your Door in Minutes, Delivered by Robot

DECEMBER 8, 2013, 11:00 AM

Disruptions: At Your Door in Minutes, Delivered by Robot

By NICK BILTON

Raise your hand if you get this whole Amazon drone thing.

By now the next bright idea from Jeff Bezos — that tiny drones will one day be whizzing overhead and dropping Amazon packages at America’s doorsteps — has gone through a few turns of the spin cycle. For many, it sounds like a sci-fi fantasy wrapped in public relations hype, or a total nightmare. Maybe both. Read more of this post

Before Amazon’s Drones Come the Robots; Retailer Begins Integrating Acquisition of Kiva’s Automated Warehouse Systems

Before Amazon’s Drones Come the Robots

Retailer Begins Integrating Acquisition of Kiva’s Automated Warehouse Systems

GREG BENSINGER

Dec. 8, 2013 7:32 p.m. ET

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.64% received a lot of news coverage for its sci-fi drone-delivery idea last week. But an immediate robotics effort under way in the Seattle retailer’s warehouses could save the company more than $900 million a year, according to an analyst. Read more of this post

Getting Too Worked Up by Workday

Getting Too Worked Up by Workday

DAN GALLAGHER

Updated Dec. 8, 2013 8:30 p.m. ET

Workday WDAY -0.46% looks set to be a $1 billion business. Unfortunately, the stock has already priced that in, and then some. Workday is often referred to as “PeopleSoft on the cloud,” as most of its top executives came from the maker of human resource management software that OracleORCL +1.81%  acquired in 2005. Workday has been adding customers at a rapid pace, as more businesses look to shift their software needs to cloud-computing solutions. Read more of this post

How Snapchat’s First Investor Found Snapchat Before Anyone Else

How Snapchat’s First Investor Found Snapchat Before Anyone Else

ALYSON SHONTELL0DEC 9, 2013, 01.49 AM

Jeremy Liew is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners who found hot startups like Snapchat and Whisper before everyone else.

It’s a good thing Jeremy Liew met Barack Obama. In March 2012, Liew’s Facebook profile picture was of himself and the President. He didn’t know it at the time, but that picture would help him land a crucial early stage investment. Read more of this post

Redfin Real-Estate Firm Gets Cold Shoulder in Silicon Valley; How Online Company Is Overcoming Tech VCs ‘People Problem’

Redfin Real-Estate Firm Gets Cold Shoulder in Silicon Valley

How Online Company Is Overcoming Tech VCs ‘People Problem’

FARHAD MANJOO

Updated Dec. 8, 2013 4:47 p.m. ET

“I used to think I was this made man,” says entrepreneur Glenn Kelman. “That’s what they tell you after you take a company public.” In 1996 Mr. Kelman co-founded Plumtree, a business-software firm that went public in 2002. After that, he assumed that his next idea was as good as paid for. Read more of this post

There’s Power in All Those User Reviews; A wealth of online product information is making it harder to influence consumers with traditional marketing methods

December 7, 2013

There’s Power in All Those User Reviews

By MATT RICHTEL

You are no longer the sucker you used to be.

So suggests continuing research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business into the challenges marketers face in reaching consumers in the digital age. As you might suspect, the research shows that a wealth of online product information and user reviews is causing a fundamental shift in how consumers make decisions. Read more of this post

Tracking Technology Sheds Light on Shopper Habits; Mall Operators, Retailers Monitor Patterns and Actions

Tracking Technology Sheds Light on Shopper Habits

Mall Operators, Retailers Monitor Patterns and Actions

ELIZABETH DWOSKIN And GREG BENSINGER

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

At San Francisco’s Sunhee Moon shop, a heat map places red and orange hues where shoppers gravitated. Prism Skylabs (2)

This holiday season, Santa will have extra helpers at the mall: devices that track shoppers. Read more of this post

“People are looking for things that are very specific. Cotton isn’t just cotton anymore.” High-Tech Commodity Testing Advances; Anxiety about supply-chain lapses is prompting some retailers to step up their use of technologies such as DNA testing and bar-code scanning

High-Tech Commodity Testing Advances

LESLIE JOSEPHS

Updated Dec. 8, 2013 7:41 p.m. ET

Jesse Curlee is on a mission to stamp out textile trickery, one strand of DNA at a time. As president of Supima, the three-decade veteran of the textile industry is tasked with ensuring that the brand of premium U.S.-grown cotton touted on labels, such as those on Brooks Brothers and L.L. Bean shirts, is legit. Read more of this post

Want To Build An App And Strike It Rich? Don’t Use Any Of These Terrible Ideas

Want To Build An App And Strike It Rich? Don’t Use Any Of These Terrible Ideas

RYAN BUSHEY0DEC 7, 2013, 07.16 PM

“There’s an app for that” was a statement that Apple trademarked in 2009 as they began the rollout for the iPhone 3G. Today, that declaration is very true. Weather trackers, travel planners anddating apps are just a small selection of the applications available. They cover every possible demographic and audience in order to cater to their various needs. Read more of this post

Why Twitter Is A Huge Threat To YouTube

Why Twitter Is A Huge Threat To YouTube

JIM EDWARDS0DEC 6, 2013, 07.39 PM

Google ought to be very afraid of the threat Twitter presents to YouTube, I was told recently over lunch with James Borow, CEO of SHIFT, a social media marketing company. (SHIFT is one of Twitter’s early advertising partners, and its clients include American Express, Toyota and Walmart.) Read more of this post

Silicon Valley hatched from a unique mix of historical and cultural forces. Could it happen again?

Silicon Valley hatched from a unique mix of historical and cultural forces. Could it happen again?

By David Auerbach

UCLA’s Interface Message Processor (IMP), seen here in storage. UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock and his team used the IMP to send the first message over a proto-Internet to Stanford on Oct. 29, 1969.

This is the first article in a special Slate series, “The Next Silicon Valley.”

Tech pundits love to place bets on where the “next Silicon Valley” might be. But to make a decent wager, first you have to consider the origins of the original. Given that life is chaotic and chance always plays a big role, I don’t think one can identify asufficient cause for Silicon Valley. But I can cautiously discuss four necessary factors that might make another fount of innovation possible. Read more of this post

Disney, Shanghai’s BesTV agree on joint venture

Disney, Shanghai’s BesTV agree on joint venture

Xinhua

2013-12-06

The Walt Disney Company and a Shanghai media business announced on Wednesday they will set up a joint venture in China to tap into the country’s fast-developing digital industry and market. Read more of this post

Why we may be seeing more of Chinese Web products

Why we may be seeing more of Chinese Web products

The size of the Chinese Internet is staggering. There are almost 600 million Internet users in China, more than in any other country in the world (the next highest is the United States, with 254 million).

BY MISIEK PISKORSKI –

5 HOURS 17 MIN AGO

The size of the Chinese Internet is staggering. There are almost 600 million Internet users in China, more than in any other country in the world (the next highest is the United States, with 254 million). Read more of this post

A Sneak Attack on Big Data Center Makers

A Sneak Attack on Big Data Center Makers

By Olga Kharif December 05, 2013

To add new medical software at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, a network of 23 health-care facilities in California, Chief Technology Officer Joseph Wolfgram used to go shopping for a long list of pricey new servers, storage equipment, and networking gear. “For every new application, it was another investment,” Wolfgram says. “That’s what’s wrong with the traditional data center.” In November he bought one all-purpose box from startup Nutanix, which uses software to shift between processing, storage, networking, and other tasks that can require as many as a dozen devices. The Nutanix package costs about $144,000, and Wolfgram says it saved Hoag 40 percent over the health-care network’s older hardware. Read more of this post

BBVA CEO: Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die

December 2, 2013 5:00 pm

Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die

By Francisco González

We should use our data to give customers exactly what they want, writes Francisco González

Some bankers and analysts think that Google, Facebook, Amazon or the like will not fully enter a highly regulated, low-margin business such as banking. I disagree. What is more, I think banks that are not prepared for such new competitors face certain death. Read more of this post

How IBM bypasses bureaucratic purgatory; An in-house crowdfunding platform lets employees evaluate each other’s ideas — and fund them with IBM’s money

How IBM bypasses bureaucratic purgatory

By Anne Fisher, contributor December 4, 2013: 2:45 PM ET

An in-house crowdfunding platform lets employees evaluate each other’s ideas — and fund them with IBM’s money.

FORTUNE — Late last year, Ryan Hutton had what he thought was a bright idea. The IBM project manager thought it would be great to build a cloud-based web application that would give any IBM (IBM) employee access to real-time data about how his or her apps were being used within the company. Read more of this post

How Thoma Bravo made $600 million in 3 months from Digital Insights; In August, Thoma Bravo bought Digital Insight for around $1 billion. Yesterday, it agreed to sell it for $1.65 billion.

How Thoma Bravo made $600 million in 3 months

By Dan Primack December 3, 2013: 11:27 AM ET

In August, Thoma Bravo bought Digital Insight for around $1 billion. Yesterday, it agreed to sell it for $1.65 billion.

FORTUNE — NCR Corp. yesterday announced agreed to acquire Digital Insight Corp., a Silicon Valley provider of online and mobile banking solutions, from private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $1.65 billion. Yes, the same Digital Insight that Thoma Bravo acquired a scant three months ago from Intuit for $1.065 billion (including more than $400 million in equity). Read more of this post

Mobile Banks Gaining Popularity With Young Consumers

December 6, 2013

Mobile Banks Gaining Popularity With Young Consumers

By ANN CARRNS

TURIYA GOETZE, a 23-year-old teaching assistant in Kansas City, Kan., found herself looking for a new bank this summer. Her student checking account at a large national bank had expired, and she was worried about paying lots of fees on a traditional account. Read more of this post

The one move that might put Uber in the fast lane; The on-demand, mobile app-based transportation service has enjoyed tremendous growth. Its new financing platform promises to press the pedal even closer to the metal

The one move that might put Uber in the fast lane

December 5, 2013: 9:02 AM ET

The on-demand, mobile app-based transportation service has enjoyed tremendous growth. Its new financing platform promises to press the pedal even closer to the metal.

By Chanelle Bessette, reporter

FORTUNE — Uber, the company behind the eponymous mobile application that promises to hail a personal driver with a tap of one’s finger, announced last week a new program intended to help would-be Uber drivers afford vehicles. It might just kick the startup company’s growth into high gear. Read more of this post