Tech wrap: Wikipedia, Google protest anti-piracy bill
The English homepage of Wikipedia went dark and Google’s search page ran the logo “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” in protest of legislation designed to stop copyright piracy but the free online encyclopedia says “could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” Big tech names including Facebook and Twitter declined to participate in protests of the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s PROTECT Intellectual Property Act, despite their opposition to the legislation, unwilling to sacrifice a day’s worth of revenue and risk the ire of users.
European regulators will decide around the end of March whether to file a formal complaint against Google for misuse of its market position, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told Reuters. Until this point officials had been playing down expectations of an early conclusion to the informal investigation stage, although there still could be a long way to go. Antitrust investigations typically take several years.
EBay’s fourth-quarter profit jumped as the e-commerce company saw solid growth in its online marketplaces and an increase in transactions processed through its PayPal electronic payments business. The operator of the world’s largest online marketplace reported fourth-quarter net income of $2 billion, or $1.51 a share, compared with $559 million, or 42 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 35 percent to $3.38 billion.
Suspicion is growing that operatives in China, rather than India, were behind the hacking of emails of an official U.S. commission that monitors relations between the United States and China, U.S. officials said. U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said the roundabout way the commission’s emails were obtained strongly suggests the intrusion originated in China, possibly by amateurs, and not from India’s spy service, as previously thought.
Cellphone makers are set to struggle with slow sales growth this year as a weaker global economy discourages consumers from replacing older handsets. Fourth-quarter results are likely to show the slowdown under way. Apple’s long-awaited iPhone 4S and Samsung’s new, broad offering were likely the exceptions in an otherwise lackluster Christmas holiday season. Vendors are expected to report sales of around 142 million smartphones in the October-December quarter, up 42 percent from a year ago, according to a Reuters poll. But analysts said not everyone benefited. “We expect smartphone demand to have remained robust in the fourth quarter, but price erosion is intensifying. Profitability remains the crucial yardstick and it’s likely Apple and Samsung extended their lead,” said CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber.
Zynga said it bought four small mobile game companies for an undisclosed sum as the top maker of Facebook games seeks to expand its lineup on smartphones and tablets. The company’s top mobile executive David Ko told Reuters it had acquired German company Gamedoctors in December. Gamedoctors, based in Bielefeld near Hanover, makes the game ZombieSmash. The company also bought Page44 Studios, which is based in San Francisco, in September. That studio created the “World of Goo” game for Apple’s iOS platform. Zynga also acquired HipLogic, another San Francisco-based games company, in August. And Ko also confirmed Zynga purchased New York based Astro Ape Studios in August to develop new titles.
Is Scott Thompson the ‘back to basics’ guy Yahoo’s needed all along?
Yahoo has once again gone outside the company to breathe new life into the once-mighty Internet titan: Scott Thompson, most recently the president of eBay’s PayPal division, takes the helm on Monday, January 9th.
The four-month search ends the latest period of uncertainty for Yahoo, which has been struggling to regain its rightful place in the hearts and minds of the digerati — to say nothing of an indifferent Wall Street.
Investors have been sour on Yahoo for a while. The news of Thompson’s hiring was met with boos on NASDAQ, where Yahoo closed Wednesday at $15.78, down 51 cents. With a “fool me twice” attitude, potential will be no substitute for results. And given the spectacular flame out of former CEO Carol Bartz, investor patience must be wearing thin (if, that is, it still exists at all).
Thompson seems to be arriving with a clean slate and marching orders that give him a fairly free hand — “he will work closely with the Board as we continue the strategic review process to identify the best approaches for the Company and its shareholders.” Indeed, Thompson hadn’t even met with the top Yahoo executives, which I would take as a sign that his allegiance is entirely to the board.
That’s a good thing, because Thompson has his work cut out for him. Consider this reaction from Lawrence Haverty, a fund manager with GAMCO investors, which owns Yahoo shares.
“It’s a positive outcome,” Haverty told Reuters, “but not as positive as a sale of the company.”
Ouch.
Tech wrap: Will switch to QNX save RIM?
Research In Motion has already doled out a big helping of bad news ahead of its financial results on Thursday, but surprises could still await investors hungry for details about what many see as a new, make-or-break BlackBerry.
Investors are desperate to know whether RIM will stand by its current timetable to switch its smartphones to the new QNX operating system by early next year. The transition is considered the Canadian company’s last, best chance to reverse its declining fortunes.
T-Mobile USA plans to market the Lumia 710 phone from Nokia to first-time smartphone buyers as the two companies push to recoup market share losses of recent years.
CNET’s Roger Cheng doesn’t hold any punches about the move.
Bloomberg reports that eBay’s PayPal business, aiming to challenge Groupon and LivingSocial.com in the market for online daily deals, plans to start offering coupons tailored to users’ buying habits and mobile-phone locations.
Google is making $11.5 million in grants to fight modern slavery and its hold on 27 million people worldwide, the technology company said on Wednesday.
A more controlled stumbling with StumbleUpon channels
It’s been two-and-half years since online social media service StumbleUpon hit the eject button from eBay, its one-time corporate parent.
Since then, the company has grown its users and its staff. The San Francisco-based company now has 100 employees (25 percent of whom are former Googlers, the company says), up from 30 employees at the time of the eBay spin-off.
And the service, which lets users discover interesting Web content that has been flagged by friends and people with similar interests, now counts 20 million registered users, compared to 10 million about one year ago.
Now StumbleUpon is rolling out what it claims is its biggest post-eBay change yet, with the launch of a revamped website design and the introduction “channels.”
By offering specialized channels, StumbleUpon will allow users to fine-tune the stream of Web content that they see on the service. A user’s StumbleUpon stream should become a little more relevant, founder and CEO Garrett Camp explained during a recent visit to the company’s SF headquarters.
For example, if someone is interested in a particular celebrity – such as actor Tom Hanks – rather than information about celebrities in general, they can follow the Tom Hanks channel. Result: Tom Hanks-related content is sure to be included in that person’s stream of Web content.
There will initially be about 250 channels, representing various celebrities and brands such as the History Channel, Funny or Die and ESPN Sports Center, said Camp, with more to come.
Tech wrap: EBay acts on Hunch
EBay said it acquired the data analysis firm Hunch to help it develop more recommendation technology for its online marketplace. Hunch analyzes data from social networks like Facebook and from questionnaires to make personal recommendations. EBay said Hunch will help it suggest relevant products for shoppers on its online marketplace. Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis, who founded Hunch in 2009, will stay on at eBay and remain based in New York. The purchase price was not disclosed, although tech blog Uncrunched pegged it at around $80 million.
Hewlett-Packard reported quarterly revenue slightly better than Wall Street estimates, after the bell. The world’s largest technology company by sales said non-GAAP net revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter inched up 1 percent to $32.3 billion. Analysts had predicted revenue of $32.05 billion on average, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Retailers are saving some of their deepest discounts on Black Friday for video game products, with large chains Wal-Mart and Best Buy putting some rock-bottom prices tags on hot games to lure shoppers into stores. To accommodate pressured buyers, retailers are heavily discounting top games, from Electronic Arts’ “Battlefield 3,” to Warner Brothers’ “Batman: Arkham City,” and Microsoft’s “Gears of War 3.”
Olympus said that a third-party panel appointed by the company to look into an accounting scandal has, so far, found no evidence that funds from its M&A deals went to organized crime syndicates or that “yakuza” gangsters were involved. A unit from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s organized crime division has joined the investigation, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. But the source added it was premature to say if gangsters were involved.
Hard drive maker Western Digital said it was asked to pay $525 million in an arbitration brought by competitor Seagate. The award involves claims brought against Western Digital and one employee — who was earlier with Seagate — alleging misappropriation of confidential information and trade secrets, Western Digital said in a statement.
Nvidia will again be the supplier of graphic processor units to Apple after rival AMD botched efforts to create a GPU for Apple’s MacBook Air laptop, tech blog SemiAccurate writes. The decision was made about three years after Apple replaced Nvidia GPUs with by those made by ATI/AMD and two years after the first ATI/AMD Macs in recent memory hit the shelves.
UPDATE-PayPal tries to lure retailers to mobile app
(Updates to explain “secure element” issue. Changes in bold in paragraphs 10, 11)
Online payments firm PayPal is so keen to get mobile payments off the ground it has taken the unusual step of opening a Manhattan dummy store that demos how the app can be used (pictured at right).
It’s idea is to demonstrate the application to merchants at the “store” between now and February.
PayPal’s head of mobile payments, Laura Chambers, said merchants have given a “very enthusiastic” response to PayPal’s plans for the wallet launch next year. The eBay unit promises to reveal a pilot merchant partner by year end. But Chambers was not ready to name any merchants or even any retail sectors that are interested in supporting the app in an interview at the downtown showcase.
In the meantime it will finally launch a PayPal app for Android phones that lets users tap their phones together to exchange money. The app, which the company already showed off as early as June this year, uses a peer-to-peer version of Near Field Communication, a short range wireless technology.
Other U.S. companies such as Google and the four top U.S. mobile network operators are throwing their weight behind NFC – a technology they plan to use to allow consumers to pay for shopping by simply waving their phones at a check-out terminal in stores.
PayPal (which is owned by eBay) is for fools that don’t mind getting the shaft!!!
Tech wrap: Samsung, Google scream for Ice Cream Sandwich
Samsung and Google unveiled the first smartphone running on Google’s latest version of the Android operating system, dubbed “Ice Cream Sandwich”, which combines software used in tablets and smartphones, as they step up competition against Apple. The high-end model Galaxy Nexus was unveiled at an event in Hong Kong, after being delayed last week as a tribute to the late Steve Jobs. “This will be our strategic product for year-end holiday season, as (Apple’s) iPhone 4S just came into the market,” Samsung’s JK Shin said.
The Galaxy Nexus features a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, super AMOLED HD 4.65-inch display, face recognition to unlock its screen,the ability to share content by tapping another phones equipped with a Near Field Communication chip, a camera boasting no shutter lag, and even a barometer. The global launch kicks off in November.
Twitter is looking for a director to bolster its board’s business credentials and diversity, and candidates include a former Google executive, a person familiar with the matter said. The search is in its early stages. But some names that have come up include Mariam Naficy, chief executive officer of paper goods company Minted.com, and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, chief executive officer at fashion retail site Joyus and the former president of Google’s Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations, the person told Reuters.
EBay reported quarterly revenue that rose 32 percent and profit that matched analysts’ expectations. The operator of the largest online marketplace reported third-quarter net income of $490.5 million, or 37 cents a share, compared to $432 million, or 33 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding stock-based compensation expenses and other items, profit was $628.2 million, or 48 cents a share, in the latest period, the company said. Revenue climbed to $2.97 billion.
The Kindle Fire tablet may be the hottest selling gadget this holiday, pressuring Amazon.com’s profit margins but giving the world’s largest Internet retailer potentially millions of new high-spending customers. Since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the tablet at a lower-than-expected price of $199 on September 28, some analysts have increased their sales estimates for the device. John Paczkowski at AllThingsD reported on October 6 that Amazon is selling over 25,000 Fires a day, citing unidentified sources close to the company.
The U.S. is pressing China to explain why its “national firewall” blocks so many U.S. companies from providing their services, according to a letter obtained Wednesday that is another sign of growing trade tension between the world’s two largest economies.”Having a presence on the Internet that is visible in China is increasingly a critical element for service suppliers aiming to reach Chinese consumers and business,” Ambassador to the World Trade Organization Michael Punke said in a letter on Monday to his Chinese counterpart.
Tech wrap: Apple’s iOS 5 debuts
Apple rolled out its iOS 5 mobile operating system, one week after pancreatic cancer claimed the life of its former CEO and visionary Steve Jobs. The update adds voice recognition software called “Siri”, instant messaging and support for Apple’s iCloud service, although the inclusion of Siri is limited to the iPhone 4S. MacWorld’s Dan Moren says the free update is “ambitious” and that “there’s hardly a part of Apple’s mobile operating system that isn’t altered in some way”. Engadget’s Dante Cesa says that “other than turn-by-turn navigation, more multitasking APIs and some delectable widgets, there isn’t much, headline-wise, left on Apple’s hit list for iOS 6“.
Despite Jobs’s death, investors still like what they see at Apple and want the company to start giving up some cash, according to a Reuters Poll. Apple has a cash hoard of $75 billion and record demand for the iPhone 4S has pushed its stock price near an all-time high. Six of the 11 money managers polled by Reuters called for a dividend payout as a reward for their loyalty.
A three-day disruption of BlackBerry services spread to North America, frustrating millions of users of RIM smartphones and putting more pressure on the company for sweeping changes. RIM advised clients of an outage in the Americas and said it was working to restore services as customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India continued to experience patchy email delivery and no access to browsing and messaging. RIM said the root cause of the failure was the malfunction of a core router switch and the subsequent failure of a back-up system to kick in. It then experienced a severe backlog of unrouted messages that is taking time to deliver.
South Korea’s Samsung said it will soon release upgraded versions of three Galaxy smartphones in Europe to get around temporary sales bans on earlier versions of products that violated an Apple patent.
Samsung ambushed the launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S in Sydney, Australia, offering $2 smartphones to the first 10 customers per day in a temporary store, a stone’s throw from the official Sydney Apple store. Accustomed to long lineups leading up to and even after the release of its products, at one point Apple took second place to those waiting for their chance to snap-up a Galaxy S2 phone.
Facebook executive and eBay board member Katie Mitic unveiled a partnership between the two companies designed to create a new crop of e-commerce applications with social networking features. Mitic said that Facebook’s Open Graph — the map of connections that Facebook users create with friends and online content — will be integrated “seamlessly” into applications developed with certain eBay services and technologies. EBay is trying to encourage outside developers to create applications for its e-commerce platforms and is making a particularly strong push in mobile commerce.
Sony said that a third party had tried to sign in to 93,000 active accounts on its PlayStation and other networks this month. The company said it had frozen the accounts and informed affected customers by e-mail, adding that it believed only a few of the accounts were actually accessed.
Wow, yeah I sort of like the new firmware but it didn’d make a WHOLE lot of difference. What do you think?
Marc Isaac
Check out MY blog at http://www.thetechnoperson.blogblogspot. com
Thanks!
Tech wrap: Apple’s valuation flirts with Exxon’s
Apple shares neared a record $400, a day after the world’s most valuable technology company posted blockbuster results and triggered a spate of brokerage upgrades. Apple’s climb brought the maker of the iPhone and iPad within shouting distance of Exxon Mobil’s market value of more than $400 billion despite the oil and gas producer raking in more than four times Apple’s annual revenue.
“We expect Apple will become the largest market cap company on the planet when the stock hits approximately $445, which is only about 13 percent away from aftermarket levels,” said Gleacher & Co analyst Brian Marshall, based on the assumption that Exxon shares remain flat. Apple shares rose to a high of $405 in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Intel posted second-quarter revenue above expectations, defying investors’ concerns about slowing personal computer sales. Intel’s revenue in the June quarter was $13.1 billion, up 22 percent over the year-ago period and above the $12.83 billion expected by analysts, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
EBay reported better-than-expected quarterly results as the company’s main online Marketplace business showed signs of a turnaround and its PayPal unit continued to grow quickly. EBay said second-quarter net income was $283.4 million, or 22 cents per share. That compares to net income of $412 million, or 31 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier.
Apple updated its MacBook Air and Mac mini with next-generation processors and operating systems. The new MacBook Air went on sale starting at $999, with the latest generation of Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, the operating system Lion, and a backlit keyboard. The Mac mini was priced at $599, delivering up to twice the processor and graphics performance of the previous generation, the company said.
Samsung launched a thinner and lighter version of its Galaxy tablet. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 inch is an upgraded version of the 7-inch introduced in October. Priced from $500 onwards in the U.S. market, the same as Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad, it faces tough me-too competition from more than 100 devices, mostly running Google’s Android operating system.
Samsung poached a second employee from Research In Motion in a month, setting back the BlackBerry maker as it struggles to regain its stride. Ryan Bidan, senior product manager for RIM’s PlayBook tablet computer, left for a job as director of product marketing for Samsung Telecommunications America, according to his profile on professional networking site LinkedIn.
Tech wrap: Apple “spaceship” to tackle “weed” problem
Apple plans to build a circular “spaceship” building in hometown Cupertino — and be the best office building in the world, CEO Steve Jobs said. The ailing Jobs, formally on leave from the company, made his second public appearance in two days late on Tuesday to show off plans to the Cupertino city council. Apple has grown “like a weed” Jobs said, and needs a place to put roughly 12,000 people. The massive new structure would be in addition to the main campus at 1 Infinite Loop.
Facebook is providing European regulators with information about its use of facial recognition technology, in response to concerns about the company’s roll-out of the technology’s availability outside of the U.S.. Facebook said there was no “formal investigation” under way. The move comes after comments by Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, who said the group would study Facebook’s use of facial recognition technology for possible rules violations, according to a report in Bloomberg earlier on Wednesday.
EBay is hunting for acquisitions to speed up its development of image recognition and augmented reality features as the online retailer and auctioneer seeks to capitalize on the potential of mobile phones to help consumers make impulse purchases. Steve Yankovich, head of eBay mobile, told Reuters his division had the company’s full support to spend money on innovative technology, as the fastest growing part of eBay which is helping to renew the 15-year-old company’s image.
Research firm Gartner lowered its view on global PC market growth for 2011 to 9.3 percent this year, down from the 10.5 percent it previously forecast, due to economic uncertainties as well as a lack of compelling PC products.
For 24 hours on Wednesday, websites with more than 1 billion combined visits a day joined distribution companies to enable IPv6 — a new Internet protocol with 4 billion times as many addresses as the nearly exhausted pool of Internet addresses used today — on their main services. Google, Facebook, Akamai, Yahoo, Limelight Networks and Verisign were some of those taking part.
“IPv6 is fundamentally about allowing the Internet to scale to meet the expectations and demands of a global population of 7 billion, coupled with increased expectations of how many devices are expected to be able to connect to the Internet,” said Matthew Ford of the Internet Society, a non-profit group dedicated to the open development of the Internet, which organized World IPv6 Day.
Prompted by the soaring cost of developing and marketing their medicines, drug companies are embracing the Internet in a bid to drive down costs. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugmaker, is pushing the envelope on clinical trials by conducting the first ever “virtual” study of a medicine, in which patients will be able to participate by using home computers and smartphones. At the same time, several large companies are changing the way they communicate and market their medicines to doctors by establishing new online services to answer product queries and let physicians order free samples.
2DBOY created World of Goo in 2008, not Page44. Page44 simply helped port the game, but did not create it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Go o