Bamboo Innovator

Trying to Build the Next Amazon—in Nigeria

Trying to Build the Next Amazon—in Nigeria

By Chris Kay, Chris Spillane, and Janice Kew November 21, 2013

When Gbemiga Omotoso bought a Samsung tablet last year, he handed over his cash to a man in a van. The transaction wasn’t illegal, though. It’s part of online retailer Jumia’s attempt to adapt its operation to the unique challenges of selling in Nigeria. With many of the country’s 160 million residents suspicious of paying online—yes, they get those fraudulent e-mails, too—the Lagos-based retailer wins over skeptical shoppers by accepting payment on delivery and offering free returns. “It’s very important that people know it’s not a scam,” says 29-year-old co-founder Tunde Kehinde. “Even though they want to buy, trust is still a very, very big issue.” Read more of this post

Snapchat CEO Says 70% of Users Are Women

Nov 20, 2013

Snapchat CEO Says 70% of Users Are Women

By Douglas MacMillan

Roughly 70% of Snapchat users are women, the chief executive of the messaging app said at a closed-doorGoldman SachsGS -0.96% conference Wednesday. Co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said Snapchat users are sending 400 million“snaps” a day on the service, where messages disappear after a few seconds, according to a person who was present at the meeting. He said half of Snapchat’s users have tried out “stories,” a feature the company introduced last month to link multiple messages together. The on-stage interview, titled “What Lies Ahead for Snapchat,” covered the two-year-old company’s plans after spurning a roughly $3 billion acquisition offer from FacebookFB +0.15%. Snapchat has not disclosed its number of users. Spiegel was asked about user numbers Wednesday but declined to discuss them. Snapchat has no revenue, and Spiegel said the company is in no hurry to make money from advertisers. “There are a lot of things in our product that make it appealing for advertisers, but we want to do it right,” Spiegel told a packed room at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, according to the person who was present. Mary Ritti, a spokeswoman for Snapchat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spiegel said Snapchat’s biggest competitors are rival messaging apps. WeChat and Line are popular in their home markets of China and Japan, respectively, but “there are no real huge players worldwide,” he said. To expand overseas, Snapchat is relying on users to translate its app into new languages – a low-cost strategy that’s worked for other Internet services such as Facebook and Pinterest. The company plans to add to its current team of 30 employees, Spiegel said.

Say Goodbye to Old-Style Car Salesman; No-Haggle Price, Online Selling Transforms Auto Retailing

Say Goodbye to Old-Style Car Salesman

No-Haggle Price, Online Selling Transforms Auto Retailing

CHRISTINA ROGERS

Nov. 20, 2013 3:35 p.m. ET

At Toyota Sunnyvale in Silicon Valley, about half the store’s sales staff “do nothing but wait on customers digitally.” Here, Stan Wolowski emails customers. Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

A car salesman used to spend long days on his feet. Now he’s becoming like everyone else—stuck most days in a chair in front of a computer screen. The Internet has been upending car sales for more than 15 years. That change is now coming down hard on the people on the front lines—converting them into more into concierges than hand-shaking sales maestros. Read more of this post

Samsung and LG test folding screens in search of flexible future

November 21, 2013 1:00 pm

Samsung and LG test folding screens in search of flexible future

By Song Jung-a in Seoul

Flat screens may have been fine for smartphones but Samsung and LG are betting that curved will be king for wearable devices such as smartwatches. The South Korean companies are racing to bring flexible displays to their mobile devices. Success in doing so could give them a significant advantage over Apple, Googleand other makers of wearable devices in an area that is shaping up to be the next big battleground in consumer electronics. Read more of this post

Competitors are working hard to break up Qualcomm’s dominance, but the company maintains a strong lead. Its latest LTE baseband chips are in their fourth generation, while rivals are launching their first.

Qualcomm Is Still a Smart Bet

DAN GALLAGHER

Updated Nov. 21, 2013 4:27 p.m. ET

Some may believe the party’s over at Qualcomm, QCOM +0.96% but it is too early for last call. The stock has jumped 18% over the past four months and just hit its highest level since an inflated dot-com run-up back in 2000. Qualcomm also just notched a three-year run averaging 31% annual revenue growth and warned investors in its last earnings call that the current fiscal year would see a notable slowdown from those levels. Read more of this post

Online Courses Fail to Reach Poor Students as Richest Benefit

Online Courses Fail to Reach Poor Students as Richest Benefit

Most people taking free online courses worldwide are among the best-educated and wealthiest of the population, casting doubt on the idea that the classes will benefit the disenfranchised, a survey showed. More than half of those taking massive open online courses, or MOOCs, were men and the majority were already employed, according to Ezekiel Emanuel, vice provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the correspondence piece in today’s journal Nature. Read more of this post

Intel CEO says contract manufacturing business to expand

Intel CEO says contract manufacturing business to expand

4:15pm EST

By Noel Randewich

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said on Thursday he planned to expand his company’s small contract manufacturing business, paving the way for more chipmakers to tap into the world’s most advanced process technology. With Intel far behind rivals in making chips for smartphones and tablets, many on Wall Street have urged the company to expand its contract manufacturing business, which currently contributes little to its overall revenue, and to open its factories to high-volume clients making mobile chips. Read more of this post

Here’s The $8 Billion Ending To Steve Jobs’ Failed Attempt To Kill Dropbox

Here’s The $8 Billion Ending To Steve Jobs’ Failed Attempt To Kill Dropbox

JIM EDWARDS NOV. 20, 2013, 10:33 AM 8,260 14

We now have the full story of how Apple founder Steve Jobs vowed in 2011 to kill Dropbox, the so-simple-it’s-addictive cloud storage company. Jobs failed, of course. Dropbox just raised another round of investment funding which values the company at a staggering $8 billion. And it has $200 million in revenues. Meanwhile, the product that Jobs developed in order to punish Dropbox for not agreeing to be acquired by Apple — iCloud — is a confusing also-ran in the cloud storage wars. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston retold the story of his meeting with Jobs to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff yesterday, at the latter company’s big conference, according to IT Business: “I kind of couldn’t believe it when the meeting was getting set up,” Houston recalls from the Jobs encounter. Typing the address for 1 Infinite Loop, the Apple headquarters, on his iPhone for directions, he realized the address was already pre-stored on the device. Read more of this post

Google’s stores are a lame challenge to the magic of Apple’s retail stores

Google’s stores are a lame challenge to the magic of Apple’s retail stores.

By Dominic Basulto, Updated: November 21 at 9:43 am

When it comes to innovative brick-and-mortar retail concepts, it’s hard to argue with the success of the Apple retail store, which was first launched in 2001. While the Apple store concept may not be as buzzy as when it launched more than a decade ago, the fact remains that not a single tech competitor has been able to come up with a retail concept superior to it. So, when Google announced that it was establishing a series of Winter Wonderlab pop-up stores across the country for the holidays, it was only natural to ask: Had Google finally created a radically new retail concept to challenge Apple’s brick-and-mortar stores? Read more of this post

Gadget start-ups are a neat fit for investors

November 20, 2013 5:36 pm

Gadget start-ups are a neat fit for investors

By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco

New electronics start-ups that aim to demystify how computers and gadgets are created are beginning to emerge from the “maker” movement of tech hobbyists. littleBits, which sells electronics modules such as lights and sensors that can be easily combined to create DIY gadgets, said on Wednesday it had raised $11.1m in new venture capital. The funds will help the New York-based company to expand its kits, which include a modular synthesiser in partnership with music company Korg and $99 “exploration” starter packs that include motors, buzzers and LEDs, all of which can be snapped together using magnets. Read more of this post

For Intel, Hollywood dreams prove a leap too far

For Intel, Hollywood dreams prove a leap too far

3:54pm EST

By Noel Randewich, Ronald Grover and Liana B. Baker

(Reuters) – Earlier this year, Intel Corp rented temporary retail space in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago for a splashy launch of Intel TV, a new Internet entertainment service that the chipmaker promised could revolutionize the television industry. But when customers walk into those stores this holiday season, they will not find any set-top TV boxes or programming services for sale. Instead, they will see ultra thin laptops and new tablets from a variety of vendors that Intel hopes will help boost its massive but flagging computer chip business. Read more of this post

EXCLUSIVE: How Snapchat Plans To Make Money; Already, more photos are shared on Snapchat than on Facebook

EXCLUSIVE: How Snapchat Plans To Make Money

HENRY BLODGET NOV. 20, 2013, 10:02 AM 20,847 28

Last week, news broke that a ~2.5 year old company called Snapchat had rejected an all-cash $3 billion takeover offer from Facebook. Predictably, the cat-calls and howls of indignation began. Snapchat and its investors were obviously delusional idiots, Twitter pundits agreed. And arrogant! How else could they pass on a crazy offer from a “desperate” Facebook? Snapchat doesn’t even have revenue. Even a one billion dollar offer for a company like that was “insane,” let alone a three billion-dollar offer. If anyone needed confirmation that we’re right back in a “tech bubble,” this was it. Read more of this post

Dropbox has the sort of subscription-based business model that many investors prefer to reliance on advertising. Users who want more than a free 2GB of storage pay $99 a year. Few people choose to pay, though

November 20, 2013 12:33 pm

Value of cloud in spotlight as Dropbox seeks funding

By Richard Waters

Dropbox has more to do to convince Wall Street to pay a premium

Even amid the current mania for investing in internet companies, there are few more intriguing cases than the cloud storage providers. Saving your pictures or other files, synching them across devices and creating back-up copies sound like the kind of tedious tasks that few people would want to spend much time thinking about, let alone actually pay for. Should not this kind of thing just, well, happen? Read more of this post

Bill Gates Should Return to Lead Microsoft, Charles Schwab Says

Bill Gates Should Return to Lead Microsoft, Schwab Says

Bill Gates should serve as Microsoft Corp.’s chief executive officer for a year as the software company he co-founded seeks a replacement for Steve Ballmer, according to Charles Schwab. The world’s largest software maker is seeking a new leader after Ballmer said in August that he would retire within a year. The management change is happening as Microsoft adopts a new corporate structure focused on devices and services. Read more of this post

Amazon tests techie comedy ‘Betas’ in original programming push

Amazon tests techie comedy ‘Betas’ in original programming push

5:58pm EST

By Piya Sinha-Roy

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When online retail giant Amazon decided to join Netflix and Hulu in the online original programming race, it didn’t have to look further than its own tech backyard to find a world ripe for comedy. “Betas,” starring newcomers Joe Dinicol, Karan Soni and Charlie Saxton as dating app entrepreneurs, explores the hyper- ambition that vibrates among the inhabitants of Northern California’s tech-savvy Bay Area. Read more of this post

Acer Founder Returns to Lead Computer Maker After Record Loss

Acer Founder Returns to Lead Computer Maker After Record Loss

Acer Inc. (2353) founder Stan Shih returned to the company he started in 1976 after a record loss and the resignation of leaders he’d entrusted with its management. Shih returns as chairman without a salary while Jim Wong, president since 2011, resigned his post and will not take up the role of chief executive officer vacated by J.T. Wang, Acer said in a statement yesterday. The company said Nov. 5 Wong would become CEO while Wang would remain chairman until June. Read more of this post

Sony says to make fewer films as it shifts to television

Updated: Friday November 22, 2013 MYT 11:00:48 AM

Sony says to make fewer films as it shifts to television

LOS ANGELES:  Sony Pictures Entertainment will produce fewer films as it makes a “significant” shift from motion pictures to higher-margin television production and to operating TV channels, Sony Corp executives told investors gathered at the company’s Culver City, California, studio lot. The declaration came as Sony battles to win investor support after a letter from hedge fund investor Daniel Loeb in May called on Sony to spin off to investors a portion of its entertainment business and take steps to improve the studio’s profitability. Read more of this post