Easy Mobile Payments Are Almost Here

Easy Mobile Payments Are Almost Here

By Brad Stone and Olga Kharif November 14, 2013

It’s noon at the crowded Steins Beer Garden in Mountain View, Calif., and executives from EBay’s(EBAY) PayPal are discussing the future of the massive market for retail and restaurant payments with a reporter who’s paying for lunch. Without ever opening his wallet, the reporter enters a four-digit number printed at the bottom of the check into a PayPal app on his smartphone. An itemized bill for three smoked chicken salads, a tomato bisque, and two Diet Cokes appears on the screen. One click later, without ever needing to flag down a waiter, the check is paid. Read more of this post

Disney Struggles to Make Its Free Gaming Apps Pay

November 17, 2013

Disney Struggles to Make Its Free Gaming Apps Pay

By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Two months ago, Disney released a sequel to Where’s My Water?, a hit smartphone game about a showering alligator. Hopes were high: Disney had pointed to the original game as evidence of overdue traction in mobile gaming. It flopped. For the Walt Disney Company — where theme parks, TV, merchandise and films deliver more than $6 billion in annual profit — the failure of one smartphone game, even an important one, has no financial consequence. But mobile games are a major growth opportunity, and analysts say Where’s My Water? 2 underscores the degree to which Disney is encountering new challenges in a shifting marketplace. Read more of this post

Ears Follow Eyes as Target in $1.84 Billion Wearable Boom

Ears Follow Eyes as Target in $1.84 Billion Wearable Boom

Google Inc. is going after consumers’ eyes with its Glass Internet spectacles, and Samsung Electronics Co. went for the wrist with its Galaxy Gear smartwatch. Iriver Inc. is seeking to connect another body part: the ear. Last month, Iriver released a headset in the U.S. with a Tic-Tac-sized sensor that shines light into the ear to track a user’s heart rate, distance and speed traveled, and calories burned. Startup Looxcie Inc. sells an ear-mounted camera, and other ear-based devices have been patented by the likes of Intel Corp. and Samsung, or developed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Keio University. Read more of this post

Developing a Fax Machine to Copy Life on Mars; DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis are becoming faster and cheaper, and J. Craig Venter wants to use the technology to bring Martian life to Earth

November 17, 2013

Developing a Fax Machine to Copy Life on Mars

By ANDREW POLLACK

MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE, Calif. — J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist, is looking for a new world to conquer — Mars. He wants to detect life on Mars and bring it to Earth using a device called a digital biological converter, or biological teleporter. Although the idea conjures up “Star Trek,” the analogy is not exact. The transporter on that program actually moves Captain Kirk from one location to another. Dr. Venter’s machine would merely create a copy of an organism from a distant location — more like a biological fax machine. Read more of this post

Console Bet Is Played Out at AMD

Console Bet Is Played Out at AMD

DAN GALLAGHER

Nov. 18, 2013 3:49 p.m. ET

Prospects for Advanced Micro Devices AMD -0.86% have become closely tied to new videogame consoles hitting the market this month. But the chip maker remains tethered to the personal-computer market. Sony said it sold one million units of its PlayStation 4 console in the U.S. and Canada in the first 24 hours following its launch late last week. Microsoft‘s MSFT -1.69% Xbox One goes on sale Friday. Both use a customized version of AMD’s Jaguar chip family. Read more of this post

Bundled Cable TV Withstands Consumer Opposition

Bundled Cable TV Withstands Consumer Opposition

By Alex Sherman November 14, 2013

Many Americans don’t understand why they’re paying about $80 a month on average for cable or satellite television when they only watch a few of the networks. But their anger toward their pay-TV operator may be misplaced. Sure, Comcast (CMCSA),DirecTV (DTV), and Time Warner Cable (TWC), who charge their customers nearly double the cost they pay for programming, make a healthy profit margin on their cable bundles. But they’d likely be willing to get that same hefty return on smaller bundles of channels and charge less for the package. The challenge comes in convincing programmers—the companies that crank out must-see shows such as Duck Dynasty orThe Walking Dead—to let them offer some but not all of their channels. Read more of this post

Apple’s Decline in China’s Smartphone Market

Apple’s Decline in China’s Smartphone Market

By John Butler November 14, 2013

Apple’s (AAPL) share of the smartphone business in China is shrinking as a half-dozen local vendors emerge to take a bite out of the market. They’re using social media and tapping into local brand loyalty to build share. Lenovo (992:HK) and Xiaomi have had success selling cheap, feature-loaded smartphones priced well below the iPhone.

Amazon’s Toys Cheaper Than Wal-Mart Online

Amazon’s Toys Cheaper Than Wal-Mart Online

Amazon.com Inc.’s toy prices were lower than those available online from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. last week as retailers seek to attract shoppers heading into the crucial holiday selling season. Amazon’s prices, excluding those from its third-party sellers, were 3 percent lower on average than Wal-Mart’s on a basket of 87 toys, according to a study conducted by Bloomberg Industries on Nov. 14. Including the Marketplace vendors, which use Amazon’s platform to sell their own products, the pool of comparable goods expanded to 115, and Wal-Mart was cheaper by 1.2 percent, on average. Read more of this post

Amazon and Twitter: #hatchingwinners; Two very different leadership sagas have produced titans of tech

Amazon and Twitter: #hatchingwinners; Two very different leadership sagas have produced titans of tech

Nov 16th 2013 |From the print edition

Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. By Nick Bilton. Penguin Portfolio; 304 pages; $28.95. Sceptre; £14.99. Buy fromAmazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. By Brad Stone. Little Brown; 384 pages; $28. Bantam Press; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk

THESE are heady times in the world of high technology. Twitter’s recent stockmarket debut has been a success, earning it a market capitalisation of about $25 billion after its first day of trading. Ambitious students are shunning Wall Street and joining obscure tech startups. URL strategies—Silicon Valley shorthand for “Ubiquity first, worry about Revenue Later”—are all the rage again. And venture capitalists are bestowing multi-billion-dollar valuations on fledgling firms bleeding red ink. The hope is that these nascent companies will one day become as wildly successful as firms such as Twitter and Amazon. Read more of this post

IAC/InterActiveCorp Chairman Barry Diller’s Media Industry Outlook for 2014

IAC/InterActiveCorp Chairman Barry Diller’s Media Industry Outlook for 2014

By Diane Brady November 14, 2013

What will we be talking about this time next year? 
In the short sweep of time—say, three to five years—this digital revolution we’ve been undergoing for 18 years is becoming the way of our lives. We now have Internet fluency among more people, and you have the kind of innovation that is the mandate of digital life. So the result is an ever-increasing velocity. Read more of this post

Alibaba’s CTO sees chance for non-American internet ecosystem

Alibaba’s CTO sees chance for non-American internet ecosystem

By Li Jizhi, Zhang Xuan

HELSINKI, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) — As the Slush conference, an annual startup event in Helsinki, attracted thousands more participants than last year, a top Chinese IT developer has seen the opportunity of emerging independent internet ecosystem rather than the current one dominated by Americans. Wang Jian, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Alibaba group, made the remarks in an interview with Xinhua, after he briefed the Slush audience about China’s e-commerce businesses. Read more of this post

Alibaba helps make China’s largest fund

Alibaba helps make China’s largest fund

BEIJING, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) — Currency fund Tianhong Zenglibao has become the first fund in China to hit 100 billion yuan (16.30 billion U.S. dollars) of sales thanks to its cooperation with Yu’ebao, Alibaba’s wealth management product. The fund, with more than 29 million buyers so far, saw its asset scale sales exceed 100 billion yuan on Thursday, the Shanghai Securities News reported on Friday, citing data from Tianhong Fund.

Read more of this post

Huawei’s enterprise business booms in Western Europe on innovation

Huawei’s enterprise business booms in Western Europe on innovation

BARCELONA, Spain, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) — Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, is seeing its enterprise business booming in Western Europe, a senior Huawei manager said. “Our enterprise business has been growing very fast in Western Europe since we started such business here in the second half of 2012,” Leon He, president of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group in Western Europe, told Xinhua. Read more of this post

Gold-Laden Brides in India Defying Singh as Culture Wins

Gold-Laden Brides in India Defying Singh as Culture Wins

As the sound of traditional drums, trumpets and cymbals ushers Amrita Mannil into the wedding hall, she’s adorned by four finely crafted necklaces, rings, 16 bangles, a glistening belt, dangling chandelier earrings and a stone-encrusted head piece to match the silk borders of her dress. She’s wearing about 800 grams (1.8 pounds) of gold. Amid the music and the chanted prayers, a gold chain is placed around her neck as the 25-year-old advertising executive marries Vimal Mohan in a traditional Hindu ceremony attended by 500 friends and relatives in Kozhikode, about 180 kilometers (112 miles) from the city of Kochi in Kerala. Read more of this post

Discovery: The Birth of an International TV Star; The producer of offbeat shows is being rewarded for its early pursuit of overseas markets

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2013

The Birth of an International TV Star

By ROBIN GOLDWYN BLUMENTHAL | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

The producer of offbeat shows is being rewarded for its early pursuit of overseas markets. Shares could rise another 20%.

On Discovery Communications‘ popular TV reality show Gold Rush, guest prospectors endure harsh conditions in remote parts of the world to try to strike it rich. The cable-TV network’s experience could serve as a guide: It’s carefully picked channels all over the globe, assuring many years of good returns. Read more of this post

PS4 and Xbox One take on mobiles in battle for future of gaming

November 15, 2013 12:15 pm

PS4 and Xbox One take on mobiles in battle for future of gaming

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco

Over the next five years, analysts predict that Sony’s new PlayStation 4 will sell 49m consoles, beating 38m for Microsoft’s Xbox One. These numbers from researcher IHS look impressive for heavyweight gaming machines that cost upwards of $400 a piece. Until, that is, they are compared to Apple, which sold 48m iPhones and iPads in the past quarter alone – and have become many people’s preferred way to play games. The new home consoles from Sony and Microsoft, which arrive this month on a wave of hype, face a very different gaming market to their predecessors in the mid-2000s. Back then, the Nintendo Wii and its motion controller stole the show, and the iPhone was still hidden away in Apple’s labs. The success of the Wii awoke the rest of the gaming industry to the importance of reaching casual gamers as well as the trained killers of Call of Duty and speed demons racing Gran Turismo. Read more of this post

The future of wearable devices depends on an industry standard: expert

The future of wearable devices depends on an industry standard: expert

Monday, November 18, 2013
CNA

TAIPEI — Wearable computing devices, such as Google Glass, would not have a bright future in the consumer market unless an industry standard for the devices’ specifications is created, according to a local analyst. Technology companies such as Google Inc., Sony Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. have introduced their own wearable devices in the forms of eyeglasses and watches, but various issues, such as privacy, remain a concern prior to the wider adoption of the devices by the public. Read more of this post

Still on Facebook, but Finding Less to Like; Facebook’s very popularity may be a force that is driving some users, especially teenagers, to other social platforms.

NOVEMBER 16, 2013, 1:43 PM

Still on Facebook, but Finding Less to Like

By JENNA WORTHAM

Just a few years ago, most of my online social activity revolved around Facebook. I was an active member of several Facebook groups, including one that helped me and others find apartments and sell used items. Another group was wonderful for organizing midnight movie screenings. And I used Facebook to stay up-to-date on the latest achievements of my sisters and their children, and the many members of my extended family. Read more of this post

Snapchat, How Quickly You Have Grown

NOVEMBER 15, 2013, 6:38 PM

Snapchat, How Quickly You Have Grown

By NICK BILTON

While some might have been shocked this week by the multi-billion dollar offers the start-up Snapchat turned down, I found something else entirely perplexing about the valuation of this little company: just how quickly it grew. When I first wrote about Snapchat in a column in May 2012, it was a largely unknown product and still being run by a few undergraduates at Stanford who had originally presented the app idea in a mechanical engineering class called “Design and Business Factors.” Read more of this post

PS4 and Xbox vie to dominate living room

November 15, 2013 12:12 pm

PS4 and Xbox vie to dominate living room

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco

Earlier this year, executives from Sony and Microsoft drew a clear battle line between their two new games consoles: the Xbox One was pitched as an all-in-one entertainment hub while the PlayStation 4 was – in the words of Sony chief Kaz Hirai – “all about the gamers”. That stance marked a reversal from the launch of the two companies’ previous consoles in the mid-2000s, when the PlayStation 3’s Blu-ray drive was almost as big a selling point as its gaming capabilities. Microsoft added support for other video services such as the BBC iPlayer only later in the Xbox 360’s life. Both consoles have subsequently become among the most popular ways to view video streaming services such as Netflix. Read more of this post

‘Poor but sexy’ Berlin woos start-ups to create jobs

‘Poor but sexy’ Berlin woos start-ups to create jobs
Monday, November 18, 2013
By Marie Julien, AFP

BERLIN–Penniless and without major domestic industry to call its own, Berlin is nevertheless bursting with energy and setting its sights on start-ups to generate the jobs it so painfully needs. “The aim must be to become the number one place in Europe for start-ups,” said Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit, who coined the city’s slogan “Poor but sexy.” But “there’s still some work to do,” he conceded. Read more of this post

New media investing in favor but hazards lurk

New media investing in favor but hazards lurk

Sun, Nov 17 2013

By Jennifer Saba

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New media websites from BuzzFeed to Business Insider are on a roll lately, showered with dollars from venture capitalists betting that they will crack an advertising market that has stymied traditional media companies. With their mix of top-ten lists, slide shows that highlight the indignities of air travel, eye-catching headlines and thoughtful news, such media start-ups think their fresh approach to working with brands will coax more money from advertisers. Read more of this post

How India, Rwanda, and El Salvador are solving the biggest problem in online education

How India, Rwanda, and El Salvador are solving the biggest problem in online education

By Lauren Alix Brown @laurenalixb November 15, 2013

Massive open online courses have quickly fallen out of favor—initially thought to be the savior of higher education, the huge classes are now its punching bag. Critics of the free online courses point to low completion rates, a devaluation of degrees, the displacement of professors, and an absence of necessary classroom time. But a more effective application of the standalone courses is taking root, notably outside of the US. Read more of this post

Georgia Tech longed to build a start-up culture, but it says a professor took it too far. Three years later, he is battling the university in court

November 16, 2013

Reaching for Silicon Valley

By NICK WINGFIELD

Joy Laskar was not what you’d typically think of as a threat to public safety. At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where he was a professor of electrical engineering, Dr. Laskar did research on chip design. He mentored dozens of Ph.D. students and, over the years, started and sold a number of tech companies. The last one, called Sayana, created a promising wireless chip and was being courted by the likes of Samsung and Qualcomm. Read more of this post

Tesla Is Planning To Make A Pickup Truck

EXCLUSIVE: Tesla Is Planning To Make A Pickup Truck

HENRY BLODGET NOV. 13, 2013, 9:06 AM 84,683 31

Electric car company Tesla is planning to make a pickup truck, CEO Elon Musk said yesterday.

The truck will likely be the same type of vehicle as Ford’s F-Series pickup trucks. The Ford F-150 is the best-selling vehicle of any kind in the United States. Musk said Tesla might make the truck in 5 years. Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke at Business Insider’s IGNITION event in New York yesterday. He made his remarks about the pickup truck during a post-interview Q&A session at the side of the stage. After he descended the stage, Musk was surrounded by a crowd of conference attendees, and he answered questions about Tesla and his rocket company, SpaceX, for about half an hour. Read more of this post

Bubble Trouble? Social media and cloud-related stocks seem stretched to bursting

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2013

Bubble Trouble?

By ANDREW BARY | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Social media and cloud-related stocks seem stretched to bursting, but big blue chips still look attractive. Our 13 picks.

Going into the final six weeks of the year, the major U.S. stock markets have already registered 20%-plus gains, and most are at or near record levels. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 is up 26% to 1798, finishing the week at a new high. This is the best year for the S&P since 2003. Small stocks have soared even higher, with the Russell 2000 index up 31%. And the workhorse Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the week at a record 15,961, having moved up almost 22%. Read more of this post

Apple reportedly buys PrimeSense, Israeli company behind Xbox’s Kinect, for $345M

Apple reportedly buys Israeli company behind Xbox’s Kinect

The appeal for Apple is the company’s advanced body-movement tracking technology that was originally used for the Xbox 360, a popular gaming device.

By Haaretz and Reuters | Nov. 17, 2013 | 2:04 PM

Israeli news and financial newspaper Calcalist reported Sunday that Apple has acquired PrimeSense, a motion-tracking company based in Tel Aviv, in a $345 million deal. PrimeSense is best known for licensing the hardware design and chip used in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360 from 2010. Read more of this post

Amazon Constantly Audits its Business Model

Amazon Constantly Audits its Business Model

by Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine  |   2:00 PM November 15, 2013

Amazon.com is in the headlines again because it started Sunday package deliveries in several large cities.  This offering follows the company’s recent strategic decision to offer same day delivery to most US addresses.  As a part of this strategy, the company is drastically increasing the number of warehouses all around the US. Read more of this post