It’s Time for Amazon to Open Its Black Box; Amazon.com’s Kindle business is big and growing bigger. How big, and how fast? No one knows. A risk for investors

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2013

It’s Time for Amazon to Open Its Black Box

By ALEXANDER EULE | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Amazon.com’s Kindle business is big and growing bigger. How big, and how fast? No one knows. A risk for investors.

In the coming days, Amazon.com will turn up its marketing muscle to promote its latest tablet, known as the Kindle Fire HDX. The device went on sale last Friday, and it has received hefty praise from gadget reviewers. At $229, the tablet undercuts Apple‘siPad mini by $100. If recent history is any guide, the new Fire will jump to the top of sales charts at Amazon, and the company will tout its success with a rather vague set of pronouncements. And then the news flow will come to a halt. Read more of this post

Longboard Asset Management: In Five Years Microsoft Will Be The Market’s Most Valuable Company

ASSET MANAGER: In Five Years Microsoft Will Be The Market’s Most Valuable Company

LINETTE LOPEZ OCT. 18, 2013, 2:49 PM 111,311 26

The last time we saw a slide deck from Cole Wilcox, of Longboard Asset Management, the firm was  arguing that Tesla is the new Apple, and that the stock was headed up to $200 a share. Now the Longboard is out with a new “next Apple” to share with the market. It’s the old Apple, actually — Microsoft. In its presentation, Longboard says that the current perception that Microsoft is, well, soft, is ignoring the success of Office 365, their #1 cloud business, and the potential earning power of Windows + Android hybrid devices.

Read more of this post

Meet the Hairblade: Dyson working on ‘silent’ hairdryer

Meet the Hairblade: Dyson working on ‘silent’ hairdryer

Dyson, the British engineering firm, is developing a new type of hairdryer that is much quieter than current appliances

Drawings of the hairdryer contained within Dyson’s patent application Photo: IPO/Dyson

By Richard Gray, Science correspondent

10:09AM BST 18 Oct 2013

35 Comments

They have already revolutionised the vacuum cleaner, now Dyson is attempting to reinvent another household item – by creating a quiet hairdryer. As most households will know, traditional hairdryers can be loud – creating noise in excess of 70 decibels – due to the powerful fans they use to blow air onto hair. However, new patent applications lodged by engineering company Dyson reveal plans for a new type of hairdryer that is far quieter than current models. Read more of this post

Google’s mobile strategy starts to pay off

Last updated: October 18, 2013 5:02 pm

Google’s mobile strategy starts to pay off

By Richard Waters in San Francisco

Google’s advertising business is firing on all cylinders as the internet search company waits for all the pieces of its mobile strategy to fall into place. That was the message from third-quarter results on Thursday that comfortably topped expectations and produced one of the surges in investor enthusiasm that occasionally punctuate Google’s earnings announcements. This time, the surge sent Google shares up more than 13 per cent on Friday to top $1,000 for the first time. Read more of this post

Tencent shows Facebook how to reinvent itself for a mobile era

Tencent shows Facebook how to reinvent itself for a mobile era

BY HAMISH MCKENZIE 
ON OCTOBER 18, 2013

One of Facebook’s vulnerabilities is its ongoing attempt to reconfigure itself for the mobile era. The social network was built for the desktop-first era and is saddled with the legacy of that time’s way of thinking. It’s not just that Facebook hasn’t been able to build strong mobile products – Home and Poke are both failures, and its flagship mobile app is a difficult rendering of its native desktop experience – but it’s also that it hasn’t enjoyed the advantage of starting from the ground up with mobile. Read more of this post

Zhaozhao Bets on People/Pet Tracking Market in China

Zhaozhao Bets on People/Pet Tracking Market in China

By Tracey Xiang on October 18, 2013

An average of 200 thousand Chinese kids from 0 to 14 years old that got lost every year. More than 4 million messages on Sina Weibo, the most popular micro-blogging platform in China, are for searching for lost pets. Zhu Liqiang mentioned those numbers to justify Zhaozhao, a gadget his company is working on. The accompanying iOS/Android app can track down whoever carrying the smaller-than-palm gadget, kids, seniors or pets, locating where they are and saving all the data onto the cloud platform which is powered by Baidu Cloud. You can see the surroundings of it at any given time, which is powered by Soso Streeview. Read more of this post

Supercell finds success but questions remain over sustainability

Last updated: October 18, 2013 3:29 pm

Supercell finds success but questions remain over sustainability

By Robert Cookson in London and Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco

For a sense of how fast the video games industry is changing, look no further than Supercell, the three-year-old Finnish development studio that was this week valued at $3bn. Like its peers King and Rovio, makers of Candy Crush Saga and Angry Birdsrespectively, Supercell is at the forefront of a new breed of games developers that have grown at an astonishing pace by producing “freemium” games for mobiles and tablets.  Read more of this post

October 18, 2013

Google Stock Tops $1,000, Highlighting a Tech Divide

By QUENTIN HARDY

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has done something few companies ever do in the stock market: it has joined the $1,000 club. On Friday, Google’s share price jumped above that price for the first time, another milestone in its remarkable ascent from $85 in its public offering in 2004. On one level, $1,000 is just a number. But on another, it is a reminder of the new order that has taken hold in the technology world in just a few short years — and how far apart the winners are from the losers. Read more of this post

WhatsApp compromised by major design flaw: Reports

WhatsApp compromised by major design flaw: Reports

LONDON – Messaging service WhatsApp has a major design flaw which may allow attackers to decrypt intercepted messengers, according to reports.

12 OCTOBER

LONDON – Messaging service WhatsApp has a major design flaw which may allow attackers to decrypt intercepted messengers, according to reports. A Dutch developer claims to have discovered a hole in the popular app’s security because it uses the same key to encrypt outgoing and incoming messages, the Daily Telegraph reported. Read more of this post

How Amazon Could Undercut the iPhone

How Amazon Could Undercut the iPhone

Bloomberg News reports that Amazon.com Inc., the Internet retailer, has been talking with HTC Corp., the mobile-device manufacturer, about the possibility of collaborating on developing a line of smartphones. These would be optimized for Amazon Prime customers to download music and videos, as well as shop at Amazon and Zappos. According to the Financial Times, HTC would make at least three distinct handsets, the first of which may be released as early as next year. This is great news for consumers. For two decades Amazon has ruthlessly undercut its competitors on price without skimping on quality, sacrificing profits to gain market share. (I highly recommend reading the excerpt from Brad Stone’s forthcoming book about Amazon that was recently published in Bloomberg Businessweek for more details about the strategy.) Investors have rewarded this unusual behavior by giving Amazon a market value of $150 billion. Read more of this post

Lenovo Hesitates on Deals to Avoid Overpaying for Expansion

Lenovo Hesitates on Deals to Avoid Overpaying for Expansion

Lenovo Group Ltd. (992), seen as a suitor for everything from BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY) to International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)’s server business, said it’s hesitant to make deals because it wants to avoid overpaying. “We will not buy for the sake of buying,” Wong Wai Ming, chief financial officer of the world’s largest personal-computer maker, said in an interview at the company’s Beijing headquarters yesterday. “Even when an opportunity, on the face of it, makes perfect sense for us to do it, it may not happen.” Read more of this post

Shanghai Fudan University develops new Li-Fi technology in which a one watt LED light bulb can help connect four computers to the internet simultaneously

Shanghai Fudan University develops new Li-Fi technology

Staff Reporter

2013-10-18

Shanghai’s Fudan University has made a breakthrough with the development of “Li-Fi” technology, in which a one watt LED light bulb can help connect four computers to the internet simultaneously, reports the local Xinmin Evening News. Compared with an average internet connection speed of 150 megabytes per second (Mbps), the new technology — which uses light as a carrier instead of traditional radio frequencies used for Wi-Fi — can also generate speeds as fast as 3.25 gigabytes per second (Gbps), the university said. Read more of this post

Morris Chang has reiterated plans to step down as TSMC’s CEO by mid-2014, but remain a “hands-on” chairman

Morris Chang to relinquish role as TSMC CEO by June 2014

Josephine Lien, Taipei; Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES [Thursday 17 October 2013]

Morris Chang has reiterated plans to step down as TSMC’s CEO by mid-2014, but remain a “hands-on” chairman. Chang added that a new CEO or co-CEOs will succeed him by June, without elaborating further. Market watchers generally identify the current TSMC COOs – Mark Liu and CC Wei – as potential CEO candidates. TSMC in March 2012 appointed three co-COOs. The appointment is “to nurture future ‘co-CEOs’,” Chang said previously. Two candidates are left in the CEO race after the retirement of Shang-yi Chiang. Chang’s most-recent remarks about TSMC’s CEO succession plans were made during the company’s investors meeting on October 17. TSMC reported record net profits and revenues for the third quarter of 2013, but warned of weaker sales in the fourth quarter. Nonetheless, TSMC forecast its sales for all of 2013 will register 17-18% growth, and sales for 2014 will log another double-digit increase. In addition, TSMC’s capex for 2014 will stay high at about US$10 billion, according to Chang. TSMC’s 2013 capex is estimated at US$9.7 billion.

Twitter Pre-IPO Patent Paucity Seen Posing Investor Risk: Tech

Twitter Pre-IPO Patent Paucity Seen Posing Investor Risk: Tech

Profits aren’t the only thing lacking at Twitter Inc. ahead of its planned initial public offering. It’s got a dearth of patents, too. The microblogging service said in its prospectus this week that it has nine issued U.S. patents. That compares with 774 cited by Facebook Inc. before its initial public offering in May 2012 and International Business Machine Corp.’s 6,478 patents accrued last year alone. Twitter’s smaller patent trove reflects its philosophy of letting engineers and designers own their inventions. Read more of this post

Windows 8.1 released after a year of soul-searching

Windows 8.1 released after a year of soul-searching

Microsoft revises radical interface after getting blasted by users

AP

OCT 17, 2013

LOS ANGELES – Microsoft is releasing its long-awaited Windows 8.1 upgrade as a free download starting Thursday. It addresses some of the gripes people have had with Windows 8, the dramatically different operating system that attempts to bridge the divide between tablet and other personal computers. Windows 8.1 still features the dual worlds that Windows 8 created when it came out last October. On one hand, it features a touch-enabled tile interface resembling what is found in tablet computers. Read more of this post

Was Veeva a better VC deal than Twitter? Emergence Capital stands to generate 266x on its investment in Veeva

Was Veeva a better VC deal than Twitter?

By Dan Primack October 17, 2013: 4:42 PM ET

Emergence Capital stands to generate 266x on its investment in Veeva.

FORTUNE — Yesterday I wrote about how Twitter’s earliest investors would more than double their entire funds on that one deal, assuming that the company goes public at a valuation similar to where it’s been trading on the private markets. But a company with much less sex appeal may actually have been the better venture capital investment. That would be Veeva Systems (VEEV), a provider of cloud-based CRM and content management solutions for the life sciences industry. It went public yesterday at $20 per share, and has since doubled to close trading today at $41.60 per share. Read more of this post

The Smart TV App Revolution Is Coming: Here’s What You Need To Know

The Smart TV App Revolution Is Coming: Here’s What You Need To Know

DAN FROMMER OCT. 17, 2013, 5:05 PM 12,168 5

The app store phenomenon, centered on smartphones and tablets, has been the biggest story in software for the past five years. Its next logical destination: the living room, via smart TVs and set-top boxes connected to the Internet. Smart TV apps would represent yet another threat to the struggling pay TV industry. In a new report, BI Intelligence looks at the data and trends behind the TV app market, explains why it’s still nascent and messy, and why significant growth seems inevitable. A successful TV app platform could significantly shift the balance of power in entertainment, and allow for much greater probabilities of success among newcomers versus incumbents. Why is an apps-enabled living room so exciting? Read more of this post

The future of facial recognition: 7 fascinating facts

The future of facial recognition: 7 fascinating facts

Posted by: Kate Torgovnick
October 17, 2013 at 3:12 pm EDT that can be gleaned just from an image of someone’s face. Alessandro Acquisti speaks at TEDGlobal 2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Alessandro Acquisti thinks we are about to have an Adam and Eve moment, where all of a sudden we realize that we aren’t wearing any clothes. Up until now, we have — for the most part — willingly offered up our personal information online without thinking too much about it. But as Acquisti puts it in today’s talk, “any personal information can become sensitive information.” Read more of this post

Taxis and technology: In ever more cities, smartphone apps are reshaping the taxi market

Taxis and technology: In ever more cities, smartphone apps are reshaping the taxi market

Oct 19th 2013 | LONDON AND NEW YORK |From the print edition

SINCE last month the citizens of Johannesburg have been able to hail and pay for taxis through SnappCab, a local start-up. A tap on SnappCab’s smartphone app summons a cab; a driver accepts on his own phone; and the passenger sees the driver’s name and photo, so he knows whom to expect and when. At journey’s end, he can pay with another tap through a pre-loaded credit card, or in cash. The idea is simple: the app makes it easier to bring together drivers, whose cabs are often empty, and passengers. Time and fuel are saved. Money is made. Read more of this post

Supercell’s acquistion signals the Asian buying spree to come

Supercell’s acquistion signals the Asian buying spree to come

October 16, 2013

by Francisco Yu

The Mobile gaming world has been buzzing lately by the news that Supercell of Finland was acquired by Softbank and GungHo of Japan for $1.5 billion. This would value the Supercell at roughly $3 billion, not bad for a game company with only two games. As I wrote in a previous column, Supercell is an exceptional studio so news of the investment was not as surprising as the fact that it took this long for anyone to acquire the studio. Read more of this post

Motorola Is Just Burning Cash For Google; Motorola has lost $1 billion since Google officially acquired it. That’s in addition to the $12.5 billion Google spent to get Motorola in the first place

Motorola Is Just Burning Cash For Google

JAY YAROW OCT. 17, 2013, 5:12 PM 2,532 2

Google’s smartphone company Motorola is just burning cash. According to Google’s earnings report, Motorola lost $248 million last quarter, which is up from $49 million loss when Google first took over the smartphone maker. In total, Motorola has lost $1 billion since Google officially acquired it. That’s in addition to the $12.5 billion Google spent to get Motorola in the first place. These loses remind us a little bit of Microsoft’s online division, which just burns cash. It’s unclear how Motorola is going to fix this problem. The Moto X is a very good phone, but sales seem to be light. To crank up sales, Google will have to invest in marketing, which means more loses. And there’s no guarantee that more marketing means more sales.

Firm wants your smartphone to smell

Firm wants your smartphone to smell

BY KAZUAKI NAGATA

STAFF WRITER

OCT 16, 2013

When operating a smartphone, three of the five senses are used: touch (manipulating the screen), hearing (listening to music or a show — or just participating in that old-fashioned activity known as a phone call) and sight (viewing photos or video on the high-resolution display). The other two senses — taste and smell — may not come into play, but Tokyo-based Scentee Inc. wants to change that. It is releasing a gadget to the market next month that will make smell a part of the smartphone experience. Read more of this post

Mobile shopping gaining popularity in Korea

2013-10-17 18:15

Mobile shopping gaining popularity

By Rachel Lee

Along with growing smartphone and tablet ownership, the fashion retail landscape has changed over the past few years. Smartphones are now empowering millions of shoppers to make purchases whenever and wherever they want. According to Korea On-Line Shopping Association, the size of the country’s mobile market has increased to around 1.7 trillion won in 2012 from around 10 billion won in 2009. The figure is expected to reach about 3.97 trillion won this year and 7.6 trillion won next year. Read more of this post

Tencent’s WeCommerce comes of age

WeCommerce comes of age

By Zhang Wen (Global Times)    13:55, October 18, 2013 Read more of this post

Alibaba is building its Alipay payments service into the PayPal of the East

Alibaba is building its Alipay payments service into the PayPal of the East

By Kaylene Hong, Yesterday

It seems like Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is going all out to be the PayPal of the East, mobile-style. The company is taking steps to prep for the overseas expansion of Alipay, the mobile payments company it spun off in 2011, as it also beefs up its existing service in China at the same time. Alibaba says that Alipay already has about a 50 percent market share in China’s e-payment market, and claims that about 25,000 Alipay mobile transactions take place every minute, resulting in a daily transaction value of more than CNY20 billion ($3.3 billion) on Alipay. Read more of this post

Intel allies with Chinese white-box handset makers

Intel allies with Chinese white-box handset makers

Staff Reporter

2013-10-18

US chipmaker Intel has upped its stake in the Chinese “white-box” or unbranded handset sector, establishing support teams in China to assist related companies to design, define and market their products, reports the technology news website of Chinese web portal Sina. Although the chipmaker failed to grab a leading position in the rapidly-growing portable handset market, it has pledged to catch up by working with the firms in Shenzhen in southern China’s Guangdong province. Read more of this post

Alibaba Isn’t the Amazon of China

October 17, 2013, 11:23 AM

Alibaba Isn’t the Amazon of China

This post was originally published on Digits:

A comparison between the latest earnings from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and those from U.S. Internet companies offers some clues to understanding the Chinese e-commerce giant. Calling Alibaba China’s Amazon.com Inc.AMZN +0.09% is for the most part misleading, as the Chinese company’s business model is different from Amazon, eBay Inc.EBAY -4.00% or any other U.S. e-commerce competitors. In some ways, the Chinese company, which serves as an advertising platform for numerous entrepreneurs that rely heavily on Alibaba to generate traffic for their online retail operations, bears some similarities to Google Inc.GOOG -1.03% Read more of this post

Greenwald’s new venture shows brands still matter. But they can be personal brands.

Greenwald’s new venture shows brands still matter. But they can be personal brands.

By Andrea Peterson, Updated: October 17 at 10:36 am

The latest hot trend among wealthy technology entrepreneurs is investing in news organizations. From Facebook’s Chris Hughes buying the New Republic and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos buying this very paper, to eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar investing in a start-up news organization with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, it seems like everywhere you look there’s another tech billionaire deciding to move into the news business. But I’m not going to try to parse the motivations that drove these men into the journalism realm. Instead, I want to talk about brands. Read more of this post