CSR Plc (CSR), a pioneer of Bluetooth technology, is on a round-the-world shopping trip, looking for small companies that can boost its prowess in mapping, voice recognition and other areas

CSR Chief Scours Globe for Startups in Connected-Devices Push

CSR Plc (CSR), a pioneer of Bluetooth technology, is on a round-the-world shopping trip, looking for small companies that can boost its prowess in mapping, voice recognition and other areas. “We have a small team that’s going literally around the world, here in Israel, in Silicon Valley, in Asia, looking for these types of interesting, usually young technology companies,” Chief Executive Officer Joep van Beurden said yesterday in Tel Aviv. Read more of this post

Venture capital companies are paying close attention to developers of virtual reality games and devices.

OCTOBER 13, 2013, 11:00 AM

Disruptions: Bit by Bit, Virtual Reality Heads for the Holodeck

By NICK BILTON

Palmer Lucky, the creator of the Oculus Rift headset that immerses the wearer in a virtual reality video game.

While sitting in a stuffy Hollywood hotel conference room recently, I plotted my next move outside a snow-covered, ancient castle. I raised an arm to block the falling snow as I peered up. As I looked from side to side, white drifts extended into the distance. Yes, I know Los Angeles hotels and snowy castles are an unusual combination, so here’s the other half of the story: I was wearing Oculus virtual-reality goggles — they look a bit like blacked-out ski goggles with a screen inside. Despite the blandness of my physical surroundings, my eyes told me I was immersed in an icy scene straight out of “Game of Thrones.” And my stomach told me I had been right to pack Dramamine for this virtual trip. Read more of this post

Google to NetApp Sidestep Courts to Combat Patent Claims

Google to NetApp Sidestep Courts to Combat Patent Claims

Rackspace Hosting Inc. (RAX) lawyer Van Lindberg is fed up with what he considers dubious patent-infringement lawsuits — like when licensing company Rotatable Technologies LLC demanded $75,000 to settle a February case. Many companies negotiate to pay the company to go away, since it’s cheaper than what may become a lengthy court battle. Using a procedure called inter partes review created by the 2011 America Invents Act, Lindberg instead petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a new examination of the computer-image display patent. If Rackspace persuades the agency the patent never should have been issued, the suit will be dismissed. Rotatable says in court documents its patent is valid. Its lawyer Austin Hansley in Dallas didn’t return calls. Read more of this post

Emerging markets shoppers turn to web for deals

October 13, 2013 1:42 pm

Emerging markets shoppers turn to web for deals

By Scheherazade Daneshkhu, Consumer Industries Editor

Consumers with internet access in developing countries are just as likely to search for money-saving grocery deals to beat food price inflation as those in the developed world, according to a new report. The online survey* of 29,000 shoppers in 58 countries conducted by Nielsen, the global information company, showed many similarities in behaviour no matter where the consumer lives – but also striking differences. Read more of this post

Google Jousts With Wired South Korea Over Quirky Internet Rules

October 13, 2013

Google Jousts With Wired South Korea Over Quirky Internet Rules

By ERIC PFANNER

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea is one of the world’s most digitally advanced countries. It has ubiquitous broadband, running at speeds that many Americans can only envy. Its Internet is also one of the most quirky in the world. A curfew restricts school-age children from playing online games at night; adults wanting to do so need to provide their resident registration numbers to prove that they are of age. Read more of this post

Billionaires Battle as Bezos-Musk Companies Vie for Control of Launch Pad at Kennedy Space Center.

Billionaires Battle as Bezos-Musk Companies Vie for Launch Pad

In a battle of billionaires, space ventures owned by Internet pioneers Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are relying on prominent former lawmakers as they jockey for control over a historic launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. The Florida launch pad was mothballed after the U.S. retired its shuttle fleet in 2011 and turned to countries such as Russia to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. It’s now coveted by Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, and Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC, which are trying to fill the void for the U.S. Read more of this post

Netflix Pursues Cable-TV Deals to make its online video service available as an app on their set-top boxes

Netflix Pursues Cable-TV Deals

Online Video Service Would Be Available on Set-Top Boxes

SHALINI RAMACHANDRAN

Oct. 13, 2013 5:53 p.m. ET

Netflix Inc. NFLX -1.03% is in talks with several U.S. pay-television providers includingComcast Corp. CMCSA +1.55% and Suddenlink Communications to make its online video service available as an app on their set-top boxes, people familiar with the matter say. A deal would mark the online video service’s first such tie-up with a U.S. cable provider and would come after a similar agreement it recently announced with U.K. cable operator Virgin Media Inc. The talks are in early stages and no deal is imminent, the people cautioned. Read more of this post

At Google, ‘Advertising’ Is the Key Word; Under the new policy, advertisers can no longer bid on keywords for separate devices. Tablet computers are treated the same as desktops.

At Google, ‘Advertising’ Is the Key Word

New Ad System Could Affect Search Giant’s Coming Results

ROLFE WINKLER

Oct. 13, 2013 5:05 p.m. ET

In July Google Inc. GOOG +0.43% made what Chief Executive Larry Page called “the biggest-ever change” to its cash-cow search-advertising service, completing the transition to “enhanced campaigns.” When Google reports its third-quarter results on Thursday, investors will see whether the new system is enhancing the bottom line. The change altered the rules of Google’s keyword auctions, where advertisers bid to put their ads in Google searches. Under the new policy, advertisers can no longer bid on keywords for separate devices. Tablet computers are treated the same as desktops. Meanwhile, advertisers’ control over smartphone bids is now more limited. Read more of this post

Automated Ad Buying Surges Online; Purchases Made by Computerized Systems Are Expected to Rise 56% This Year

Automated Ad Buying Surges Online

Purchases Made by Computerized Systems Are Expected to Rise 56% This Year

SUZANNE VRANICA

Oct. 13, 2013 5:25 p.m. ET

Machines are taking over more of the process of buying online advertising, according to a new study. Automated ad buying, in which marketers use computerized systems to target users based on consumer data and Web-browsing histories, is expected to increase 56% this year in the U.S. to $7.4 billion, according to a study scheduled for release Monday by Magna Global, the research and ad-buying arm of Interpublic Group IPG +1.50% of Cos. Read more of this post

State Parole Boards Use Software to Decide Which Inmates to Release; Programs look at prisoners’ biographies for patterns that predict future crime

State Parole Boards Use Software to Decide Which Inmates to Release

Programs look at prisoners’ biographies for patterns that predict future crime

JOSEPH WALKER

Oct. 11, 2013 10:31 p.m. ET

At the age of 13, Michael T. Murphy went into the woods near his home in rural New York with the 10-year-old boy who lived next door and stabbed him to death. Last year, having rejected Mr. Murphy’s application 11 times over his more than a quarter-century in prison, the New York State Board of Parole set him free. This time, the parole board deemed Mr. Murphy, then 41, to be a low risk for committing future crimes, according to parole board documents. The board reached its decision using a computer software program called Compas, one of several designed to predict whether individual convicts will return to prison. Read more of this post

BuzzFeed’s Brazen, Nutty, Growth Plan; Crowdsourced Translations to Send ‘Listicles’ Overseas

October 13, 2013, 6:49 p.m. ET

BuzzFeed’s Brazen, Nutty, Growth Plan

Crowdsourced Translations to Send ‘Listicles’ Overseas

FARHAD MANJOO

Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, disclosed in a recent letter to investors that its traffic tripled over the past year, hitting 85 million visitors in August. Soon—thanks to our collective inability to resist such sugary listicles as “36 Things You Never Realized Everyone Else Does Too“—Mr. Peretti says, BuzzFeed will be one of the largest sites on the Web. Until recently, though, BuzzFeed’s towering traffic ambitions were held in check by a simple fact of global demographics. Everything BuzzFeed publishes is in English—and at the rate it’s growing, BuzzFeed may be running out of new English speakers to colonize. Read more of this post

Alibaba to transform China’s ‘e-conomy’ with $500 billion marketplace

Alibaba to transform China’s ‘e-conomy’ with $500 billion marketplace

5:00pm EDT

By Paul Carsten

HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) – Alibaba Group’s plans to revolutionize China’s retail industry, investing $16 billion in logistics and support by 2020, will open up China’s vast interior and bring access to hundreds of millions of potential new customers. With an extra $15 billion or so in its pocket from a likely IPO, Alibaba and partners such as delivery service firms and life insurers will pump cash into revamping China’s fragile supply chains and big new data centers to process reams of consumer information. Read more of this post

Can China produce a game studio like SuperCell?

Can China produce a game studio like SuperCell?

October 11, 2013

by Francisco Yu

When the DreamWorks animated movie Kung Fu Panda released worldwide, many in the Chinese movie and animation industry asked themselves why couldn’t a Chinese studio have created Kung Fu Pandafirst. After years of soul-searching and introspection, the Chinese animation industry has been trying (and failing) to meet that bar of creating an equal or greater animated film. The creative and decision making mechanisms of the industry just aren’t conducive to making a global animation hit yet. Read more of this post

Building the Cloud: Who Wins, Who Loses; Traditional IT suppliers, including EMC, Cisco, and NetApp, are under siege from cloud operators like Amazon and Google. Pricey start-ups abound. A second chance for VMware

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2013

Building the Cloud: Who Wins, Who Loses

By TIERNAN RAY | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Traditional IT suppliers, including EMC, Cisco, and NetApp, are under siege from cloud operators like Amazon and Google. Pricey start-ups abound. A second chance for VMware.

The cloud changes everything. The technology leaders of the past, including Hewlett-Packard , Cisco Systems , and EMC ,face unprecedented threats as computing moves out of corporate data centers and onto the cloud that companies like Google ,Amazon.com , and others have created. Over the past decade, these large Web companies have figured out how to build more-efficient computing facilities than the information-technology teams within large companies could ever imagine. Now these firms are renting their vast computing firepower to companies large and small. Amazon has multiple customers who run SAP(ticker: SAP) enterprise resource planning software, among the heaviest of traditional enterprise applications, for their critical planning. Social networking application SnapChat runs on Google’s App Engine. Read more of this post

APAC has more mobile shoppers than any other region (INFOGRAPHIC)

APAC has more mobile shoppers than any other region (INFOGRAPHIC)

October 11, 2013

by Paul Bischoff

Asian consumers are leading demand for mobile commerce, according to a survey just released by SAP. The almost 3,300 interviewees were spread across China, India, Japan, and Australia. SAP’s findings suggests APAC is far ahead of other regions as far as m-commerce goes. 84 percent want more interactions, 67 percent want more payment methods (e.g. a mobile wallet), and 42 percent have actually purchased something through their mobile phones. Higher confidence in mobile security is driving the shift. Check out more of SAP’s stats in the infographic below.

In a Mood? Call Center Agents Can Tell; New techniques in computational voice analysis are promising to help machines identify the emotions behind a person’s voice

October 12, 2013

In a Mood? Call Center Agents Can Tell

By NATASHA SINGER

IN a YouTube clip from one of Steve Jobs’s last interviews, he appears to be enjoying reminiscing about how he first hit upon the idea for the keyboardless tablet that eventually became the iPad. “I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display and I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display that I could type on, I could rest my hands on and actually type on,” Mr. Jobs says, smiling slightly as he recounts his enthusiasm at seeing the first prototype. “It was amazing.” Read more of this post

The Grocery Store May Be on Its Death Bed; So-called ‘click and collect’ may be the future of shopping for groceries

The Grocery Store May Be on Its Death Bed

So-called ‘click and collect’ may be the future of shopping for groceries

By Brad Tuttle @bradrtuttleOct. 08, 20133 Comments

The need for the weekly 30-minute expedition browsing up and down the aisles of the supermarket is being eliminated. Instead, many shoppers are taking advantage of new services, in which they place an order online and hit a convenient pickup location to retrieve their groceries—often without ever having to leave the car. Despite the spread of options offering online groceries shipped to customers’ homes, consumers have largely been reluctant to jump on board. While the service sounds remarkably convenient, many are uncomfortable letting someone else pick out the meat and produce that’ll wind up on their table. Others worry about food freshness or tomatoes being bruised in such an arrangement, plus the need to block off time to wait for orders to arrive. Cost is a factor as well in grocery delivery (especially for same-day shipping), and since groceries are typically needed at least on a weekly basis, these are costs that can quickly add up. Read more of this post

PayPal Has A New Retail Trick Up Its Sleeve; PayPal Beacon is a small proximity-based USB device that enables customers to buy things from retail locations hands-free

PayPal Has A New Retail Trick Up Its Sleeve

DYLAN LOVE OCT. 12, 2013, 9:23 AM 3,789 6

PayPal is one of the dominant names when you’re talking about mobile payments. They recently introduced a brand-new system that’s going to change how you interact with the retail environment. It’s a small USB device (pictured right) called Beacon, and it enables customers to buy things from retail locations hands-free. If you’re one such customer, you don’t have to touch a wallet, a credit card, or any physical money at all to pay for your items. By checking in to a store à la Foursquare (you can even configure the app check you into places automatically), that retailer has access to the funds in your PayPal account and you can pay for your items directly with that money. It’s proximity-based, so you do have to be physically present at the store. The security check happens when the retailer is shown a picture of your face to make sure that you’re who you say you are. With that confirmed, your total purchase is deducted from your PayPal account. Read more of this post

Science: Beyond the God particle; The Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics show how computing is changing every field of research

October 11, 2013 7:31 pm

Science: Beyond the God particle

By Clive Cookson

The Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics show how computing is changing every field of research

Computers, born out of science, are transforming every aspect of the scientific process, as this year’s Nobel physics and chemistry prizes show. Fifty years ago the physics laureates Peter Higgs and François Englert applied their brains through pencil and paper, blackboard and chalk, to come up with proposals for a new fundamental energy field and subatomic particle, which would explain why matter has mass. Last year one of the most computer-intensive scientific experiments ever undertaken confirmed their theory by making the Higgs boson – the so-called “God particle” – in an $8bn atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern outside Geneva. Read more of this post

Traders tap Twitter for top stock tips

Last updated: October 11, 2013 11:31 pm

Traders tap Twitter for top stock tips

By James Mackintosh, Investment Editor

As Twitter’s flotation approaches, Wall Street analysts are building models to calculate what it might be worth – with a figure of up to $15bn doing the rounds. But while the IPO is sure to be one of the biggest financial media events of the year, traders are starting to look at Twitter not as a buy or sell in itself but as a way to generate hot tips on other stocks. The idea is a simple one: the 500m daily messages on Twitter put online the sort of gossip usually only available in snippets by eavesdropping in bars or the office lift. Apply some moderately sophisticated computer filtering, and out should pop market-moving news and views investors can use. Read more of this post

The Worst Acquisitions Apple Ever Made

The Worst Acquisitions Apple Ever Made

KYLE RUSSELL OCT. 11, 2013, 9:34 PM 12,091

Under Steve Jobs, Apple bought the company that was undercutting them with Mac clones. Over the years, some of Apple’s biggest successes have been the end result of the company acquiring another with promise and integrating their technologies with its own in a way that provides real value to users. Mac OS X and iOS are the result of the purchase of NeXT in 1997. iTunes, which truly set the iPod apart from its competitors, came from the purchase of SoundJam MP in 2000. Of course, not all of Apple’s purchases have worked out so well. Some of the technologies Apple has bought never made it to market and others just didn’t seem to fit in with Apple’s other products. Read more of this post

Mobile Karaoke App Changba Announced 100 million Users,Will Launch A Version for TV

Mobile Karaoke App Changba Announced 100 million Users,Will Launch A Version for TV

By Tracey Xiang on October 11, 2013

Mobile Karaoke App Changba has had 100 million registered users and 30 million monthly active accounts, Chen Hua, founder and CEO of it, disclosed at the company’s annual event today. It’s been no more than one and a half years since its launch. As I called it the startup star of 2012 in China, the mobile Karaoke gained traction immediately after being released in May last year. The second climax occurred after the app was featured by one of the most popular TV shows in China. That helped Changba expand to second-tier cities, according to Mr. Chen. Read more of this post

Voice Recognition Service Yunzhisheng Reportedly Received Tens of Millions Dollars In Series A Financing, Released Z Watch

Voice Recognition Service Yunzhisheng Reportedly Received Tens of Millions Dollars In Series A Financing, Released Z Watch

By Emma Lee on October 12, 2013

Yunzhisheng, a Chinese voice recognition startup, secured tens of millions of dollars from a domestic venture capital, citing people familiar with the matter (report in Chinese). The company kicked off voice recognition public cloud last September, becoming the second domestic company to open up this technology to the public after USTC iFlytek. Baidu followed the suit this August. Yunzhisheng now cooperates with Leshi Super TV, smartwatch inWatch, Smartisan ROM, Sougou Voice Aid and NetEase’s EasyChat. It also developed voice plug-ins for WeChat. Additionally, Yunzhisheng have already rolled out three independent apps, namely Voice Aid, Yunzhisheng Voice and Yunzhisheng Input method. Read more of this post

What Twitter knows that Blackberry didn’t: Successful firms connect with customers via social platforms

Oct. 10, 2013, 6:01 a.m. EDT

What Twitter knows that Blackberry didn’t

Commentary: Successful firms connect with customers via social platforms

By Sangeet Paul Choudary , Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne

Google’s Android grows stronger and is moving beyond smartphones to power cars, home electronics and wearable accessories. A thriving Amazon.com and Kindle are transforming publishing. In the hotel industry, AirBnB is disrupting the market.

Now Twitter (PRE-IPO:TWTR)  , with an ecosystem of more than one million apps, has filed its IPO to raise $1 billion. We used to live in a world where commerce flowed linearly. Firms added value to products, shipped them out and sold them to consumers. Producers and consumers held distinct roles. Value was created upstream and flowed downstream. Read more of this post

Alibaba’s takeover of Tianhong to reshape online finance

Alibaba’s takeover of Tianhong to reshape online finance

Xinhua

2013-10-12

Alibaba’s latest takeover of Chinese fund management firm Tianhong will inject new vitality into China’s online finance market, analysts believe. Zhejiang Alibaba E-commerce, the parent company of Alipay, China’s biggest online payment platform, will buy 51% of Tianhong Asset Management Company, according to a statement released on Wednesday by Tianhong’s shareholder, Inner Mongolia Junzheng Energy & Chemical Industry. Read more of this post

Korean Insurers Go Social to Keep Up With Customers

October 11, 2013, 5:39 PM

Insurers Go Social to Keep Up With Customers

By Kanga Kong

Insurers in South Korea are increasingly looking to sell auto insurance on mobile platforms such as social network services or SNS amid falling margins and rising demand for quick and easy access. While selling insurance through smartphone apps is not new, insurers like France’s Axa Direct are looking to widen their sales channels to SNS, Xavier Veyry, the CEO of Axa Direct in Korea and Japan told The Wall Street Journal. Read more of this post

Tweet recalling Yom Kippur war, 40 years on, jolts oil traders

Tweet recalling Yom Kippur war, 40 years on, jolts oil traders

Thu, Oct 10 2013

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil traders razor-focused on signs of escalating violence in the Middle East were jolted on Thursday by a Twitter posting from the Israeli military that, at first glance, suggested they had just bombed Syrian airports. Oil prices jumped $1 as the talk raced through oil markets, which frequently react quickly to rumors of geopolitical events and where traders have increasingly turned to the Internet and social media for advance warning of escalating risks, from the Arab Spring to the Iranian nuclear standoff. Read more of this post

Google’s New Ad Star: You; Search Giant Soon Will Have Names, Photos Pitching Products Across Its Sites

Google’s New Ad Star: You

Search Giant Soon Will Have Names, Photos Pitching Products Across Its Sites

ROLFE WINKLER, GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and EVELYN M. RUSLI

Oct. 11, 2013 7:25 p.m. ET

Google Inc. GOOG +0.43% plans to make its users the stars of advertisements—without first asking for permission. The move encourages word-of-mouth marketing but is bound to raise privacy alarms. The search giant on Friday alerted users in a bright blue warning across its home page that, beginning Nov. 11, it may display their names, profile photos, ratings and reviews in ads as part of what it is calling “shared endorsements.” Read more of this post

Snackmaker Mondelez Modernizes the Impulse Buy with Sensors, Analytics

October 11, 2013, 3:13 PM ET

Snackmaker Modernizes the Impulse Buy with Sensors, Analytics

By Clint Boulton

Snacks are the ultimate impulse buy. Mondelēz International Inc., maker of Cadbury chocolates, Trident gum and other items found next to the cashier or in the cookies aisle, is hoping to crack that impulse wide open with new displays pairing sensors with analytics. The company is building “smart shelves,” new display units located by checkout counters, that will use sensor technology to identify the age and sex of the would-be snacker, analytics to determine what type of guilty pleasure best appeals and a video display to deliver custom advertisements. “Knowing that a consumer is showing interest in the product gives us the opportunity to engage with them in real-time,” said Mondelēz CIO Mark Dajani said. Read more of this post