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Why This TV Season Will Confirm Mobile’s Unstoppable Rise As A Complementary ‘Second Screen’

Why This TV Season Will Confirm Mobile’s Unstoppable Rise As A Complementary ‘Second Screen’

MARCELO BALLVE SEP. 19, 2013, 8:05 AM 3,218

These days, TV shows and ad campaigns are planned with a smartphone or tablet-toting TV viewer in mind. A wide majority of U.S. audiences now use a second screen while watching TV, and about half of them do so on a daily basis. The second screen industry has grown up around this now-established consumer habit. Social media is a big part of it. Social media helps to determine whether a piece of TV content will go viral, or flop. TV and ad executives spend a lot of time getting their second screen and social TV strategies right.  In a new report from BI Intelligence, we take stock of how far the second screen industry has come and explain why this new TV season will confirm its importance. We look at mobile-social behavior and how it overlaps with the second screen trend, and reveal the data behind consumer shopping on mobile for products they see advertised on TV. Finally, we discuss winning second screen strategies like that of TV series “Duck Dynasty,” and explain why stand-alone second screen apps and show-focused apps probably won’t take off. Read more of this post

Why taxi cab drivers cannot put down their smartphones; Every Silicon Valley buzz-phrase, from the app economy to the internet of things, has converged on the industry

Last updated: September 18, 2013 6:49 pm

Why taxi cab drivers cannot put down their smartphones

By John Gapper

Every Silicon Valley buzz-phrase, from the app economy to the internet of things, has converged on the industry

The New York minicab service I used to favour communicated in code. When you rang and gave your address, the radio dispatcher would reply “five minutes” and hang up. This meant a cab would arrive at any time from one to 10 minutes later. “Seven minutes” meant 20, and “10 minutes” meant that anything, or nothing, could happen. This week, when I wanted a ride to London’s Heathrow airport, I used a computer account with Addison Lee, the biggest London service. The software told me when the car would come, showed me the likely route and deducted the fare from a credit card. A clean Ford Galaxy van arrived early and took me there smoothly – at twice the price of my former, less predictable journey to John F Kennedy International. Read more of this post

Why big IT projects crash; The history of embarrassing failures offers clues to where things tend to go wrong

September 18, 2013 8:13 pm

Why big IT projects crash

By Henry Mance

There are several ways the US Air Force could have wasted $1.1bn. It could have poured tomato ketchup into 250m gallons of jet fuel or bought a sizeable stake in Bear Stearns. Instead it upgraded its IT systems. Work began in 2007 to reconfigure how the force managed its logistics, with the aim of replacing 200 dated networks with a single piece of Oracle software. By the time the project was abandoned last November, it was at least four years behind schedule and would have required an additional $1.1bn to become usable. Yet in making such mistakes, the Air Force is not flying solo. This week a UK parliamentary watchdog described a failed National Health Service patient IT programme – the cost of which has spiralled to £9.8bn – as “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector”. Earlier this month the Department for Work and Pensions admitted that it had written off £34m of IT costs, incurred in an attempt to overhaul how social security benefits are paid. A week earlier Co-operative Bank said it had written off the £148m cost of a new IT system that would no longer be implemented.

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Tesla’s Musk Uses Twitter to Find Engineers for ‘Autopilot’ Car

Tesla’s Musk Uses Twitter to Find Engineers for ‘Autopilot’ Car

Elon Musk, Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA)’s unconventional chief executive officer, has turned to Twitter Inc. to further his goal of developing self-driving cars by posting a “help wanted” ad on the social media site. Musk, who told Bloomberg in May that Tesla would eventually develop its own “autopilot” technology for cars, wrote in a post on Twitter yesterday that the Palo Alto, California-based maker of electric cars is serious about developing such a system. “Intense effort under way at Tesla to develop a practical autopilot system for Model S,” said Musk, 42. “Engineers interested in working on autonomous driving, pls email autopilot@teslamotors.com. Team will report directly to me.” Read more of this post

Stratasys’s millionaires; The 3D printer company’s secondary offering is an opportunity to look at its remarkable stock market performance, and the people who benefit from it

Stratasys’s millionaires

The 3D printer company’s secondary offering is an opportunity to look at its remarkable stock market performance, and the people who benefit from it.

16 September 13 14:01, Tali Tsipori

So far as is known, the 3D printers made by Stratasys Inc. (Nasdaq: SSYS) are not used for printing money or coins (not even as toys), but the company and its share’s performance, especially since the merger between Stratasys of the US and Israel’s Objet, have turned the Rehovot-based company into a constantly working printing press (at least so far), and in terms of the capital market, into a major creator of value. Read more of this post

Startup Kiosked links images on the Web to online stores; “We timestamp every single event, how the mouse moves, what is clicked and so on. We know in real time what products sell at which price and in which color where.”

Kiosked Linking Kobe Clips to Nike Store Draws Investors

Kiosked Oy, a startup that links images on the Web to online stores, plans to triple its workforce after attracting a Digital Sky Technologies partner to its board in its second round of multimillion-dollar funding. The Finnish company collected $6.9 million from private investors including John Lindfors, who is joining the board with event producer Kevin Wall. Lindfors has been at Digital Sky, billionaire Yuri Milner’s investment firm that backed Facebook Inc., for three years, and previously ran Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Europe technology investment banking. Read more of this post

Smartphone Cameras at 41-Megapixels Pressure Canon, Nikon

Smartphone Cameras at 41-Megapixels Pressure Canon, Nikon

The global camera business, centered in Japan, is headed for a shakeout. With industry revenue falling to the lowest level in a decade amid surging smartphone sales, Nikon Corp. (7731), the world’s No. 2 camera maker, has cut prices to lure consumers. Market leader Canon Inc. (7751) may follow suit to keep pace, according to UBS AG, putting pressure on smaller producers and possibly leading them to retreat from the business. Read more of this post

San Francisco’s Blighted Market Street Reborn as Tech Hub

San Francisco’s Blighted Market Street Reborn as Tech Hub

An office shortage in San Francisco’s traditional technology district is aiding the revival of a blighted neighborhood known as Central Market, as young companies migrate to a new hub with fast-growing rents. Asking rates on Market Street between Fifth Street and Van Ness Avenue — northwest of the popular technology area called South of Market — jumped 18 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier to an average of $46.48 a square foot, data from brokerage CBRE Group Inc. show. Internet firms have driven gains, with mobile-payment service Square Inc. moving this month to a converted bank data center. Read more of this post

Priceline became the first company listed in the S&P 500 to trade at $1,000 in the index’s 56-year history.

September 18, 2013, 7:24 p.m. ET

Priceline’s Share Price Crosses $1,000 Mark

BEN FOX RUBIN

Priceline.com Inc., PCLN +2.56% the online travel agent, on Wednesday became the first company listed in the S&P 500 to trade at $1,000 in the index’s 56-year history. The company reached a high of $1,001, before settling at $995.09, up 2.6%. It’s up 60% so far this year. Its previous intraday high was $994.98, reached last month after Priceline’s better-than-expected earnings report. Read more of this post

Microsoft to Develop More TV Programs as It Readies Xbox One

Microsoft to Develop More TV Programs as It Readies Xbox One

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said it will expand its TV programming beyond the show based on its best-selling “Halo” game as it tries to position the new Xbox One console as a portal for games, videos and music. Phil Spencer, corporate vice president at Microsoft Studios, declined to elaborate in an interview in Tokyo today before the Tokyo Game Show. Microsoft is returning to the show this year as it competes against Sony Corp. (6758)’s new PlayStation 4 console and online games in a $63 billion industry. Read more of this post

Kevin Spacey’s Scheming Politico Lures Europe TV to Netflix

Kevin Spacey’s Scheming Politico Lures Europe TV to Netflix

Kevin Spacey is poised to scheme his way into more European homes as the politician-star of “House of Cards” should Virgin Media Inc.’s novel deal integrating Netflix Inc. (NFLX) into its cable offerings pay off. Netflix’s subscription-video service has only been available via the Web until last week, when it signed an accord with Liberty Global Plc (LBTYA)’s U.K. pay-TV provider to place its original content, film and TV archive on Virgin Media users’ TiVo Inc. (TIVO) set-top boxes. It’s a new model of collaboration and a talking point as European cable executives gather today in Barcelona for CTAM Europe’s annual cable marketing conference. Read more of this post

How Etsy crafts an artsy, homegrown culture

How Etsy crafts an artsy, homegrown culture

By Jessi Hempel, senior writer   @FortuneMagazine September 19, 2013: 7:13 AM ET

Each Friday two Etsy employees outfitted in full-body jumpsuits load roughly 150 pounds of paper towels, banana peels, eggshells, and other organic waste into an orange wagon welded to the front of a bike. They peddle their trash across the cobblestones of Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood to nearby Red Hook to unload it at a community farm. “I was looking for a way to minimize our wasteful ways, lower the carbon footprint, and curb our modern decadence,” says Jakob von Eichel, a former employee who founded the program. Read more of this post

Chinese Consumers Shrug at Apple; Chinese reaction to the new iPhones show that Apple could learn a thing or two from its competitors

September 18, 2013, 12:29 p.m. ET

Chinese Consumers Shrug at Apple

Chinese reaction to the new iPhones show that Apple could learn a thing or two from its competitors.

PAUL FRENCH

Apple‘s AAPL +2.06% China journey has been a rather rocky one. Sure, the tech giant has sold a lot of kit, but it has never been without problems in the background. Start with the 2011 n-hexane scandal, in which a manufacturer of iPhone screens poisoned workers. Apple incited widespread ire by responding slowly and ignoring journalists. This was followed by more employee rights and health and safety issues at the Foxconn assembly lines, as well as problems with the highly vocal China Consumers’ Association over warranties that appeared to disadvantage Chinese customers. Read more of this post

Apple’s Memory Markup Puts Margins Ahead of Market Share

Apple’s Memory Markup Puts Margins Ahead of Market Share

Buying memory to store more photos, videos and applications on a smartphone costs most consumers about $50. For Apple Inc. (AAPL) customers, it costs four times more than that. The discrepancy is what consumers will find again in stores starting Sept. 20, when the world’s most-valuable company begins selling its new iPhone 5s and 5c. While a 5s with 16 gigabytes of memory will cost $199 with a wireless contract, that jumps to $399 for 64 gigabytes of memory. The 5c also ranges in price depending on the amount of memory. Read more of this post

A 90-year-old helium reservoir in Texas could shut down next month causing disruptions and raising costs for makers of high-tech products from MRI scanners to semiconductors and threaten medical treatments and research

Tech firms, medical research threatened by helium shortage

5:52am EDT

By Nina Chestney

LONDON (Reuters) – A 90-year-old helium reservoir in Texas could shut down next month causing disruptions and raising costs for makers of high-tech products from MRI scanners to semiconductors and threaten medical treatments and research. More than 100 organisations, universities and companies, including Siemens, Philips, Samsung, and General Electric, wrote to the U.S. Congress last week urging it to keep the reservoir open or risk a disruption to the U.S. economy, putting millions of jobs at risk. Read more of this post

Content Creators Use Piracy to Gauge Consumer Interest

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013, 4:18 PM

Content Creators Use Piracy to Gauge Consumer Interest

By NICK BILTON

You would think that Netflix, HBO and the like don’t think too highly of video piracy Web sites. After all, two of the biggest hits on Netflix — Orange Is the New Black, a show about a women locked up in prison, andHouse of Cards, about a conniving politician — are among the most pirated content online. HBO’s Game of Thrones was the most pirated show of 2012. But last week, a senior Netflix executive said the company itself used pirating Web sites  — to determine the genre of new shows viewers might be interested in, and the type of content Netflix produces or licenses. Read more of this post

As TV world shifts, HBO retains its Emmy swagger

As TV world shifts, HBO retains its Emmy swagger

6:45pm EDT

By Piya Sinha-Roy and Lisa Richwine

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When fictional columnist Carrie Bradshaw helped HBO grab its first series Emmy award in 2001 for comedy “Sex and the City,” the premium cable network’s main competition came from broadcast networks CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. Today, the field fighting for Emmy glory includes contenders from the past few years like basic cable channels AMC and FX, but also the much talked-about rookie, the video streaming service Netflix. And then there’s a resurgent PBS, the U.S. public television channel. Read more of this post

Tencent’s worth: A Chinese internet firm finds a better way to make money

Tencent’s worth: A Chinese internet firm finds a better way to make money

Sep 21st 2013 | SHANGHAI |From the print edition

IS TENCENT one of the world’s greatest internet firms? There are grounds for scepticism. The Chinese gaming and social-media firm started in the same way many local internet firms have: by copying Western success. QQ, its instant-messaging service, was a clone of ICQ, an Israeli invention acquired by AOL of America. And unlike global internet giants such as Google and Twitter, Tencent still makes its money in its protected home market. Read more of this post