Bamboo Innovator

Is It Game Over for Video Game Consoles?

Is It Game Over for Video Game Consoles?

By Cliff Edwards and Takashi Amano November 14, 2013

As a kid, Jared Cate spent long hours playing Nintendo’s (7974:JP) Pokemon and The Legend of Zelda video games. So when the company released its Wii U console before Christmas last year, Cate, 23, rushed to a local GameStop (GME) store in Atlanta to buy one. “I was about to move to San Francisco and figured it’d be a great thing to play with my family in my last few days at home,” he recalls. Read more of this post

Google Fosters South Korean Startups

Google Fosters South Korean Startups

U.S. Search Company Provides Links to Venture Capitalists, Helping Tech Firms Build Global Profiles

JONATHAN CHENG

Updated Nov. 17, 2013 6:04 p.m. ET

Dave Cho co-created Classting, a social-media app for South Korean schools that allows teachers to interact with students and parents. Jonathan Cheng/The Wall Street Journal

SEOUL—Until about nine months ago, Dave Cho woke up every morning to teach fifth-graders math, history and science at a school in the South Korean port city of Incheon. But Mr. Cho’s audience has changed. These days, the 28-year-old Mr. Cho is busy pitching his young technology startup to venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, Asia and the U.K., with assistance from Google Inc. GOOG +0.96% Read more of this post

Facebook, Still Dominant, Strives to Keep Cachet

November 17, 2013

Facebook, Still Dominant, Strives to Keep Cachet

By JENNA WORTHAM, VINDU GOEL and NICOLE PERLROTH

When Evan Spiegel peered into a crystal ball to divine a future for his company, Snapchat, he did not see Facebook. He saw something else, something much bigger — a social network that could exist on its own, outside Facebook. Facebook is still the dominant social media service, and has been an attractive suitor for many start-ups. And Snapchat most likely spurned Facebook partly because it thought it could fetch much more than the billions Facebook was willing to pay. Read more of this post

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