Disney to buy "Star Wars" producer for $4.05 billion LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Walt Disney Co has agreed to buy filmmaker George Lucas's Lucasfilm Ltd and the "Star Wars" franchise for $4.05 billion in cash and stock, a blockbuster deal that includes the surprise promise of a new film in the series in 2015. Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger, in prepared remarks for analysts, said the plan was to release a new movie in the series every two to three years thereafter. The last "Star Wars" picture was "Revenge of the Sith" in 2005, and Lucas has in past denied any plans for more. ...
2012-10-26
2012-10-25
2012-10-24
A Dutch court has ruled Samsung Electronics does not infringe an Apple Inc patent by using certain multi-touch techniques on some of the Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablet computers.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch court has ruled Samsung Electronics does not infringe an Apple Inc patent by using certain multi-touch techniques on some of the Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablet computers. Samsung and Apple, the world's top two smartphone makers, are locked in patent disputes in at least 10 countries as they vie to dominate the lucrative mobile market and win over customers with their latest gadgets. Apple scored a sweeping legal victory over its South Korean rival in August when a U.S. ...
Microsoft Surface: beautiful design, slow and lack of apps
Tech bloggers and other reviewers praised Microsoft Corp's new Surface RT tablet for beautiful design but said a shortage of applications and a slow operating system meant the result was heartbreak for users.
Microsoft begins selling the Surface on Friday, joining the fight in a tablet market dominated byApple Inc's iPads and devices using Google Inc's Android system.
Reviewers given the product early to play with it said its first version paled in comparison with the iPad.
Matt Burns of TechCrunch said the tablet was great and the Windows RT operating system showed promise, but he still was not keen.
"There are simply more mature options available right now," he wrote. (http://r.reuters.com/tes53t)
Similarly, Sam Biddle of Gizmodo, a technology website, said Surface had fantastic potential but he was sharply critical of the operating system, Windows RT, saying it was underpowered, lacked functionality.
"While potential is worth your attention, it's not worth your paycheck. Surface RT gets so many things right, and pulls so many good things together into one package. But it is undercooked," he wrote. (http://r.reuters.com/xes53t)
Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system, also available on tablets, had the full range of Windows apps but Windows RT does not, and lacks compatibility with older software, Vincent Nguyen at Slashgear said. (http://r.reuters.com/pus53t)
"Microsoft hasn't done the best job explaining the differences, and many consumers are likely to buy RT only to find out they don't have the full functionality of Windows 8," added CNET's Shara Tibken. (http://r.reuters.com/nus53t)
Microsoft has said it expects to have 100,000 apps in place for the tablet by January, whereas Apple has 275,000 iPad apps available now and its tablet also runs many more iPhone apps.
"Microsoft says there will be thousands of apps at launch, with a constant stream of more coming, but its apps offerings pale next to the number Apple has made available for the iPad," Edward Baig at USA Today wrote. (http://r.reuters.com/kus53t)
Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg praised the availability of Microsoft Office apps and optional keyboards.
"If you can live with its tiny number of third-party apps, and somewhat disappointing battery life, it may give you the productivity some miss in other tablets," he said. (http://r.reuters.com/jus53t)
But Wired reviewer Mathew Honan warned that the tablet would not turn heads.
"Nobody asked me about my Surface. I tried flashing it all over the place. But despite my best efforts, no one seemed curious," Honan wrote. (http://r.reuters.com/ses53t)
"The only person to comment on it was a TSA agent at the Seattle airport, who told me I didn't need to take my iPad out of my bag."
Android to beat Windows in 2016: Gartner
- Google's Android operating system will be used on more computing devices thanMicrosoft's Windows within four years, data from research firm Gartner showed on Wednesday, underlining the massive shift in the technology sector.
At the end of 2016, there will be 2.3 billion computers, tablets and smartphones using Android software, compared with 2.28 billion Windows devices, Gartner data showed.
That compares to an expected 1.5 billion Windows devices by the end of this year, against 608 million using Android.
Android, which reached the market only in 2008, has risen fast to be the dominant smartphone platform, controlling two-thirds of that market. It has taken the No. 2 spot in the fast-growing tablet computer market.
The proliferation of the free software gives Google its edge on the search market - its key profit generator.
Worldwide shipments of personal computers fell by over 8 percent in the third quarter, the steepest decline since 2001, as more consumers flock to increasingly powerful tablets and smartphones for more basic computing.
Microsoft's Windows has dominated the personal computer industry for decades, but the company has struggled to keep up with shift to wireless, and in smartphones its market share is around 3 percent.
(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; Editing by Sophie Hares)
2012-10-23
Facebook Q3 mobile revenue jumps from $40 m to $150. Stock price increases 13% to $21.98
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc grew mobile advertising revenue several times in the third quarter, a faster-than-expected pace that helped drive shares in the world's No. 1social network nearly 13 percent higher.
Facebook said on Tuesday that it now gets 14 percent of itsadvertising revenue from mobile ads, helping to reassure investors that the social network is beginning to figure out how to earn money off smartphone and tablet users.
Mobile ad revenues totaled roughly $150 million, up from an estimated $40 million to $50 million in the second quarter and almost nothing in the first.
"This certainly dispels the most bearish view, that Facebook couldn't monetize people on phones or tablets," said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert Baird & Co.
"In about a six-month period they've actually started to generate decent revenues form their mobile applications," Sebastian added, though he said Facebook still needs to show that its mobile ads can command the same rates as its traditional ads and that they can deliver results for marketers.
Mobile advertising has been among the key investor concerns hanging over Facebook, helping slash more than $40 billion off its market value since its May IPO. As its users increasingly access thesocial network with their smartphones, Facebook has struggled to transition its business to mobile devices.
The mobile ads helped reignite Facebook's overall advertising business during the third quarter, following several consecutive quarters of slowing revenue growth that raised questions about Facebook's long-term prospects.
Advertising revenue increased 36 percent to $1.09 billion, up from 28 percent growth in the second quarter. But revenue from its payments and other businesses increased just 13 percent to $176 million.
Mark Zuckerberg, the 28-year-old chief executive who created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, said mobile was the "most misunderstood aspect" of the company and took issue with the "myth" that Facebook could not earn money on mobile.
"Over the long run we're going to see more monetization per time spent on mobile than on desktop," Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts on Tuesday.
The company's shares leapt nearly 13 percent to $21.97 in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Facebook said it had crossed the 1 billion threshold for monthly active users by September 30, of which 604 million were mobile users, a gain of 61 percent from a year earlier.
The shift to mobile has challenged many of the Web industry's top companies. Google Inc is the No.1 provider of smartphone software with its Android operating system. But the company missed Wall Street's revenue targets in the third quarter, with some analysts blaming the shortfall on its increasing reliance on lower-priced mobile ads.
Social game maker Zynga Inc, which announced layoffs of 5 percent of its staff on Tuesday, has suffered as it struggles to translate its hit games to mobile devices and as the use of its games on Facebook's service declines.
NOT PLEASED WITH GAMING
Zynga's woes were visible in Facebook's results, with Facebook's payments revenue from the maker of Farmville down 20 percent year on year.
Zuckerberg said he was not pleased with revenue from gaming, but said that beyond Zynga - which accounts for 7 percent of Facebook's total revenue - the situation was brighter.
"The interesting thing is that the rest of the games ecosystem has actually been growing. Our monthly payments revenue from the rest of the ecosystem increased 40 percent over the past year, since payments has been adopted," he said.
Zuckerberg also said Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Facebook acquired for roughly $750 million this year, now has 100 million users, up from 27 million when Facebook bought the company.
Facebook posted a net loss of $59 million or 2 cents a share in the three months ended September 30 after booking a big provision for income taxes. Excluding share-based compensation and income tax adjustments, it earned 12 cents a share, a penny higher than the average analyst expectation.
Facebook Finance Chief David Ebersman said the company would continue to invest aggressively during the fourth quarter, though the company did not provide a specific financial outlook, in keeping with its previous practice.
Ebersman said that the total number of ads that Facebook delivered in the third quarter increased 27 percent year-on-year and that the average price per ad increased 7 percent.
Facebook's third-quarter mobile revenue marked a big jump from the second quarter, when Facebook said that it was generating more than $1 million a day from a new class of ads that appear in users' newsfeeds. Facebook said that roughly half of that revenue was from mobile ads, suggesting that mobile advertising revenue totaled $45 million in the second quarter.
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan said that Facebook's mobile ad revenue was impressive, but said that Facebook needs to proceed carefully so as not to damage the user experience by overloading its service with too many ads.
And he said that Facebook's desktop PC advertising business appeared to have shrunk by about $40 million from the second quarter. Rohan said he would rather see the desktop ad business remain stable as the mobile ad business grows.
Facebook's third-quarter revenue of $1.26 billion was a hair above the average analyst expectation of $1.23 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Apple unwraps mini-iPad to take on Amazon, Google
 SAN JOSE (Reuters) - Apple Inc will begin to sell an 8-inch version of the iPad on Friday to compete with Amazon.com Inc's Kindle and other smaller tablets, but it set a higher-than-expected price tag of $329 that Wall Street fears could curb demand. The 7.9 inch "iPad mini" marks the iPhone-maker's first foray into the smaller-tablet segment. Apple hopes to beat back incursions onto its home turf of consumer electronics hardware, while safeguarding its lead in a larger tablet space - one that even deep-pocketed rivals like Samsung Electronics have found tough to penetrate. ... |
2012-10-22
Yahoo Inc's new CEO Marissa Mayer sketched out her plan for revamping the mobile and search advertising business on Monday
Yahoo Inc's new CEO Marissa Mayer sketched out her plan for revamping the mobile and search advertising business on Monday, outlining publicly for the first time her vision for getting the ailing Web company back on its feet.
Mayer, once a rising star at Google Inc who took charge at Yahoo in July, told analysts on a conference call she wanted to focus Yahoo's efforts around the "daily habits" of users such as email, the home page, Internet search and mobile devices.
But her top priority is to fashion a coherent strategy to manage the industry's transition to mobile devices, a fundamental shift that some of the most innovative Silicon Valley companies - from Facebook Inc to Google Inc - are struggling with.
"The mobile wave is a huge wave for us to ride," Mayer said on the conference call.
The 37-year-old CEO talked about working more closely with software provider and Web search partner Microsoft Corp, while employing technology to shore up its display ads business through such features as automated buying.
She added that the company is likely to begin withdrawing from international businesses that fail to grow. This month, executives said the company will pull out of South Korea, a market full of local rivals. And she said that the company would primarily focus on "smaller-scale" acquisitions to bolster Yahoo's products, assuaging some shareholder concerns that the company could embark on an expensive shopping spree.
Yahoo shares were up more than 4 percent at $16.50 in after hours trading on Monday.
"She handled the call very well," said Gabelli & Co analyst Brett Harriss.
"You have the tone of a professional CEO who just wants to block and tackle better and move the company forward," he said, noting that he detected echoes of Google's business approach in Mayer's comments.
Roughly 700 million users visit a Yahoo website every month - putting it in the top ranks globally. But the amount of activity people engage in on many sites is steadily declining and its smartphone offerings are deemed lackluster.
SHIFTING COURSE
Mayer is expected to focus on revamping Yahoo's technology and products, shifting course from the media-centric approach embraced by her immediate predecessor, Ross Levinsohn.
The company's quarterly earnings beat expectations, but Wall Street had been keen to hear Mayer outline her plan for reviving the struggling Web company's revenue growth.
"The fact that the quarterly results didn't show any massive deterioration was a decent sign and gives her probably more time," said Macquarie Research analyst Ben Schachter.
He said the vision outlined by Mayer did not sound radically different from what previous Yahoo executives have espoused, but the company has continually struggled to implement that strategy.
"It's about can Marissa and team execute and that's what it's been about for the past few management teams," Schachter said.
Excluding a $2.8 billion gain related to the sale of Alibaba Group shares, Yahoo said it earned $177 million in income from operations and adjusted net earnings of 35 cents per share in the third quarter.
Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S were looking for adjusted EPS of 25 cents.
Net revenue, which excludes fees paid to partner websites, was $1.09 billion compared with $1.07 billion in the year ago period.
Yahoo ended the quarter with 12,000 employees, down more than 12 percent from 13,700 a year earlier.
(Additional reporting by Gerry Shih. Editing by Andre Grenon)
Watch a Galaxy Form Over 13 Billion Years in Only 2 Minutes
NASA has released a stunning simulation video that shows how a single disk galaxy such as the Milky Way develops over a span of 13.5 billion years, beginning with the Big Bang and leading up to today.
[More from Mashable: Watch Stunning Time-Lapse of Shuttle Endeavour’s L.A. Journey]
A disk galaxy, which is described as a flattened circular volume of stars, is color-coded in this captivating clip to show its history and development process.
[More from Mashable: Video Captures 100,000-Mile Solar Flare]
For example, older stars are highlighted in red, while younger stars are shown in white and bright blue. The pale blue color represents the distribution of gas density.
To put the size of this in perspective, NASA reveals the view is about 300,000 light-years across, which is the distance light can travel in a year.
Although this video may just be a computer-generated model of the real thing, it's worth all 2:17 minutes of your time and reminds you just how small you are in this giant universe.
Sunita Williams
Captain Williams is a NASA astronaut who recently completed the first triathlon in space.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
Analysis: Most companies won't be early adopters of Windows 8 (Most of people/companies may not care at all)
| 10/22/2012 Analysis: Most companies won't be early adopters of Windows 8 |
 SEATTLE (Reuters) - There was once a time when the launch of a new Windows operating system was a huge deal for the technology departments in many businesses. Not anymore. Microsoft Corp's release of Windows 8 on Friday is likely to be a non-event for most companies -- and some experts say many may never adopt it. The system may appear to offer something for everyone: touch-screen functionality for tablet enthusiasts, a slick new interface for the younger set, and multiple versions to make it compatible with traditional desktop PC software. ... |
2012-10-21
New Megaload from Kim Dotcom
Wellington, New Zealand: In a move bound to provoke US prosecutors and entertainment executives, indicted Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is planning to launch a replacement of his shuttered website and a new online music service by the end of the year. The file-sharing site that Dotcom started in 2005 was one of the most popular online sites before US prosecutors shut it down and filed racketeering charges against Dotcom and six other Megaupload principals in January. US authorities are now trying to extradite Dotcom from New Zealand, where he's a resident, claiming he facilitated massive copyright piracy through his site. Prosecutors say Dotcom pocketed tens of millions of dollars while movie makers and songwriters lost some $500 million in copyright revenue. Dotcom says he can't be held responsible for users who acted illegally and that Megaupload complied with copyrights by removing links to pirated material when asked. Some legal experts say proving Dotcom's conduct amounted to criminal conspiracy will be difficult, and he has gained some high-profile support, including from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The flamboyant Dotcom confirmed in a brief telephone interview this week that he's almost completed work on "new Mega" and "Megabox" but said he doesn't want to divulge details ahead of a major press launch. However, statements he's made on Twitter and a promotional video paint a picture of what he's planning. In recent tweets, Dotcom says his new version of Megaupload is nearly complete. "Quick update on the new Mega: Code 90% done. Servers on the way. Lawyers, Partners & Investors ready. Be patient. It's coming," he wrote. He said the new version will feature a one-click encryption option for data transfers and that the service would be hosted on servers outside the US.
Re
TCIO - London Silicon Valley
THE TECH CITY INVESTMENT ORGANISATION WAS ESTABLISHED BY UKTI TO SUPPORT THE GROWTH OF THE TECH CLUSTER IN EAST LONDON
Our aim is to help Tech City become Europe’s centre of innovation and the location of choice for tech and digital companies and investors. We bring new companies and investors to East London, and provide support to local companies seeking to expand internationally.
Joanna Shields,the vice president and managing director of Facebook’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, is leaving to become the chief executive of the Tech City Investment Organisation
Another post-IPO executive departure for Facebook, this time on the international front. Joanna Shields,the vice president and managing director of Facebook’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, is leaving to become the chief executive of the Tech City Investment Organisation. And in a (possibly temporary) step up for another exec, Facebook tells us that Shields’ reports will now report to Carolyn Everson, the global VP of marketing for Facebook.
Tech City is a David Cameron/Conservative government initiative to develop a technology hub in the East End of London to rival that of Silicon Valley and other major tech centers.
It looks like for now Carolyn Everson’s assumption of Shields’ reports may just be an interim measure, but it also could be a sign of her growing position at the company. Indeed, as Facebook continues to position itself for more revenue-generating activities, in some respects, the marketing relationships that fall under Everson’s (and formerly Shields’) remit are perhaps the ones that Facebook can least afford to let drop while it weathers churn at the management level.
The news of Shields’ new job was first reported by the Telegraph (a Tory-backing newspaper) earlier tonight.
Shields, an American ex-pat, is coming into a role that has been up for grabs since June, when chief executive Eric van der Kleij said he was stepping down to serve as an advisor to the Canary Wharf Group, a real estate development company that wants to bring more tech companies to the Docklands area of the city, which is currently very heavy on investment banks and other financial industry businesses.
Tech City has had its ups and downs since first being established in 2011. Started with some fanfare by Cameron as a route to revitalizing the East End of London by catalysing some of the tech startup activity that was already happening there, critics asked why the government chose to focus on one part of London when there are tech companies spread out to many other parts of England, such as Cambridge for hardware. Some have accused Tech City of being little more than a PR machine.
Whether Joanna Shields will be able to turn that image around will be the big question. The TCIO has already said that it plans to split the job into two, with the CEO having an external facing role and a deputy CEO acting as more of an event organizer.
Shields is already looking to take the Tech City vision into something beyond just London. “The spotlight has been thrown on the east London cluster,” Shields told the Telegraph in an interview. “We have to give this Government credit for recognising the success of it and then reacting with policies that are absolutely spot on for incubating businesses, not just in the cluster, but all across the UK.”
To be fair, there have been some very notable advances in London-as-tech-hub: among them, Google establishing its multi-story Campus incubator and events space; Amazon and Facebook both building out their operations in the city; General Assembly arriving in town; hundreds of startups in between all of that; and even an exit (the first, apparently).
Some of that is also just a consequence of how the tech world has continued to grow and globalize. We’ve also seen huge developments in Dublin, Berlin, across Israel, in Russia and more. Is London extra-remarkable in that context?
Before coming to Facebook, Shields had already established her tech credentials at the executive level: she had previously been the CEO of social network Bebo and also worked as a senior executive for Google in Europe, among other roles. This is her first foray into public policy.
Shields’ departure from Facebook follows a string of other executives leaving after Facebook’s IPO. Among them have been CTO Bret Taylor, Platform head Carl Sjogreen,and Ari Steinberg (influential engineer who had most recently been leading FB’s Seattle office). Three other recent business exec departures include head of partnerships Ethan Beard, director of platform marketing Katie Mitic, and platform marketing manager Jonathan Matus.
We have reached out to Facebook to find out who will replace Shields and will update this post as we learn more.
Update: Facebook has sent us the following statement:
Joanna has been a tremendous contributor to our EMEA organization and her leadership and passion will be missed. Facebook supports the UK Government’s vision for building a stronger technology-based economy and start-up ecosystem, and we wish Joanna every success as she moves into her new role at the Tech City Investment Organisation and as the Business Ambassador for Digital Industries.
Cyperspace battlefield
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cyberspace is the battlefield of the future, with attackers already going after banks and other financial institutions and developing the ability to strike U.S. power grids and government systems, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Friday.
"We confront a whole new threat of warfare in (cyberspace). ... This is an area we've got to pay close attention to. This is the battlefront of the future," he told a business group in Norfolk, Virginia, a city at the center of one of the largest concentrations of military power in the United States.
Panetta's remarks came a week after he delivered a major policy speech on cyber security to a New York business group, saying the U.S. military could act pre-emptively if it detects an imminent threat of cyber attack.
U.S. banks and financial institutions have been under sustained attack in recent weeks by suspected Iranian hackers thought to be responding to economic sanctions aimed at forcing Tehran to negotiate over its nuclear program.
A group calling itself the Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Al Qassam has claimed credit for the disruptions, calling them a protest against an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube that has provoked violent protests across the Muslim world.
"As I speak, there are attacks going on in this country, cyber attacks, on financial institutions, on banks," Panetta told the business group on Friday, adding that Washington faces hundreds of thousands of attacks per day. He did not specify the country from which the attacks were originating.
"Now they are developing the capability to be able to go after our grid, our power grid, our financial systems, our government systems, and virtually paralyze this country," he said.
William Robertson, an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston who testified on cyber security legislation in Congress earlier this year, said in an interview the government is "quite understandably worried" about the threat.
"I don't think it's hyperbole," he added. "These kinds of attacks that he's talking about have actually been going on for quite some time. And they've been increasing in intensity lately."
Panetta said last week the United States has made significant investments in cyber forensics to deal with the problem of identifying the source of a cyber attack. He warned potential attackers that the United States has "the capacity to locate them and hold them accountable."
Robertson said identifying the source of a cyber attack remains difficult.
"Identity and attribution on the Internet are not very robust. If you look at kind of the underlying protocols that kind of power the Internet ... there's no real strong mechanism for identifying where something is coming from," he said.
Panetta also said that more pressure on Congress is needed to push it to act to avoid a round of automatic budget cuts due to go into effect in January.
The cuts would take another $500 billion from defense spending over the next decade, following a $487 billion cut in projected defense spending approved last year.
Panetta called the automatic cuts a "goofy mechanism" put into place by Congress to force lawmakers "to do what they are supposed to do" and deal with the U.S. budget deficits.
"So they put a gun to their heads and said if we don't do what's right we'll blow our heads off," Panetta said. "And they didn't do what is right and now the damn gun is cocked to go off in January
Yahoo backs to technology instead of contents under new CEO
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Marissa Mayer, who earned a reputation for decisive action and intensity during her 13-year stint at Google Inc, has spent her first months as Yahoo Inc CEO quietly moving the Internet pioneer back to its roots in technology.
Long torn between whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies, Yahoo under Mayer is being positioned firmly in the latter camp, according to sources inside and outside the company.
Her hires, acquisition musings, and other early moves hint at an ambitious, technology-driven comeback plan designed to revitalize aging but well-trafficked properties such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports.
Yahoo has been criticized for allowing these sites to stagnate - they look very much like they did five years ago, and do not have many bells and whistles to encourage users to spend more time on them.
Mayer, 37, wants to make Yahoo's properties much more interactive, on PCs and on mobile devices, using social media tools to personalize the user experience and new technology to boost advertising sales. Her well-known focus on user design is expected to result in a simpler, less-cluttered email and home page, one source said.
Yahoo declined to comment for this article. Mayer, who gave birth to her first child weeks ago, will unveil details of her comeback plan when Yahoo reports quarterly results on Monday.
Mayer's focus on technology in many ways reverses a course set by her predecessors, who had concentrated on media content deals, such as those that gave prime billing to Walt Disney Co's ABC News or CNBC, or to bring an original program starring actor Tom Hanks to its website.
The new strategy is not without risks: it positions Yahoo squarely against Facebook Inc and Google. It also risks alienating a large, media-focused contingent that is already weakened by the departure of Ross Levinsohn, who had championed a media-centric approach when he was interim CEO before Mayer's arrival in July.
Mayer has been meeting with Internet gurus including AOL Inc CEO Tim Armstrong, another ex-Googler; Silicon Valley lawyer Larry Sonsini; and Wall Street investment bankers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bankers have pitched Mayer and her team on a slew of potential acquisitions, and they appeared to show interest in restaurant reservation site OpenTable Inc and advertising technology companies PubMatic, Turn and Millennial Media, one of the people said.
Caterva, a small start-up whose technology analyzes social media activity, has also been in low-level talks with Yahoo, said another source familiar with the situation.
OpenTable and PubMatic declined comment. Millennial Media and Caterva did not respond to requests for comment.
With more than $2 billion in cash and short-term securities, Yahoo has the money to acquire engineering talent or bolt-on services. Two types of deals are under consideration: companies that will increase user engagement, including on mobile, and those that will boost advertising returns, source said.
"What they've signaled so far is that the deals will be more niche in nature, smaller deals that maybe have a lot of promise," said Ken Allen, a director at Blackstone Advisory Partners.
TALENT HUNT
Many industry insiders believe Mayer is Yahoo's final hope for reversing a years-long decline from the pinnacle it once attained as the leading gateway to the Internet. Four of her predecessors have tried in vain to right the ship - Yahoo's market value of $19 billion, is less than half its $44 billion value in 2005.
Mayer, who earned a masters degree in computer science from Stanford University specializing in artificial intelligence, has moved quickly on the personnel front, shelling out rich pay packages to attract ex-colleagues from Google and elsewhere.
She brought in ad technology systems guru Henrique de Castro as chief operating officer; a new finance chief in Ken Goldman, who also has tech chops, to replace Tim Morse; and Jacqueline Reese to assume the dual role of hiring and acquisitions, suggesting the start of a train of "acqui-hires" or buying small companies for their engineering talent.
"She's spending almost all her time with the product folks. She's spending it on technology. She's talking about engineering hires," a person close to Yahoo said about Mayer's early days.
Yahoo's advertising technology products, headed for the auction block before Mayer's arrival, are back in favor. De Castro, her highest-profile hire, is known for a deep-understanding of the complex advertising landscape, where dozens of businesses and technology providers are interlinked.
Mayer has also shown an interest in the company's ad tech platform, including Right Media, an automated exchange that allows marketers to blast ads across a network of websites.
The group has been a long-standing source of division among Yahoo's management, including with Levinsohn, who was keen on divesting the unit, according to two sources close to the matter. But shortly after Mayer's arrival, Yahoo told AdAge that it had no intention of selling Right Media.
Yahoo's advertising salesforce, responsible for signing splashy home-page ad deals and premium marketing campaigns, has received scant attention from the new CEO, say people close to the company. Michael Barrett, Yahoo's chief revenue officer hired by Levinsohn shortly before Mayer's arrival, recently announced his resignation, according to a source familiar with t
2012-10-20
Planet Hunter project: amaturers found planet with 4 suns
Planet With 4 Suns Discovered
Let’s hope those aliens have some strong SPF. Astronomers have discovered a planet that has four different suns, the first known example of such a phenomenon. The planet is named PH1 because it was discovered in part by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website. PH1 circles a pair of stars, but is remarkable for having another pair of stars revolving around it. “All four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment,” Dr. Chris Lintott of the University of Oxford says. “Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit.” But maybe it needs all those light sources—the planet is about six times the size of Earth.
Amateur astronomers have helped discover an alien planet with two suns and a twinkling twist: The entire twin-sun setup, a real-life version of Tatooine from "Star Wars," is orbited by two more stars —a solar system that is the first of its kind known.
The alien planet , called PH1, is a gas giant planet slightly bigger than Neptune. Its discovery in the midst of a strange, four-star planetary system is the first confirmed world discovered as part of the Yale University-led Planet Hunters project, in which armchair astronomers work with professional scientists to find evidence of new worlds in the bountiful data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope.
"Planet Hunters is a symbiotic project, pairing the discovery power of the people with follow-up by a team of astronomers," said Debra Fischer, a professor of astronomy at Yale and planet expert who helped launch Planet Hunters in 2010, in a statement. "This unique system might have been entirely missed if not for the sharp eyes of the public."
Since its March 2009 launch, Kepler has found evidence of more than 2,300 candidate alien worlds. [Gallery: More Alien Planets with Twin Suns ]
Finding a strange, new world
Since its initial discovery via Planet Hunters, the existence of PH1 has been confirmed by a team of professional astronomers, who will present their work today (Oct. 15) at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nev.
With a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth's, PH1 is a smidge bigger
. The gassy planet spends 138 days completing a
than Neptune
single orbit around its two parent stars, which have masses about 1.5 and 0.41 times that of the sun. The stars circle each other once every 20 days.
The two other stars orbiting the PH1's twin suns are about 1,000 astronomical units (AU) from the parent stars. (One AU is about the distance between the Earth and sun, about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.)
If you're hoping to catch the quadruple sunset, this may not be your best bet. The researchers estimate PH1's temperature would range from a minimum of about 484 degrees Fahrenheit (524 Kelvin, or 251 degrees Celsius) and a maximum of 644 degrees F (613 Kelvin, or 340 degrees C), too hot to be in the habitable zone.
"Although PH1 is a gas giant planet, even if there is a possibility of rocky moons orbiting the body, their surfaces would be too hot for liquid water to exist," researcher Meg Schwamb of Yale University and colleagues write in a draft of their research article.
A planet with two suns
Until now, scientists had identified just six planets orbiting two parent stars, called circumbinary planets, and none of these have stellar companions orbiting them. Until their discovery, circumbinary planets were once the realm of science fiction with Tatooine, the fictional homeworld of Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars," among the most famous.
"Circumbinary planets are the extremes of planet formation," Schwamb said in a statement. "The discovery of these systems is forcing us to go back to the drawing board to understand how such planets can assemble and evolve in these dynamically challenging environments."
The Planet Hunter volunteers, Kian Jek of San Francisco, Calif., and Robert Gagliano of Cottonwood, Ariz., spotted PH1 using the transit method, noticing faint dips in light as the plant passed in front of, or transited, its parent stars.
Gagliano said he was "absolutely ecstatic" about the finding. "It's a great honor to be a Planet Hunter, citizen scientist, and work hand in hand with professional astronomers, making a real contribution to science," he said.
Jek, too, expressed his amazement.
"It still continues to astonish me how we can detect, let alone glean so much information, about another planet thousands of light-years away just by studying the light from its parent star," he said in a statement.
Schwamb led the team of professional astronomers who confirmed the discovery and characterized the planet, following observations from the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The research was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship.
For more information on the Planet Hunters project, visit: http://
.
www.planethunters.org
ALSO O
2012-10-19
Yahoo quit South Korea
Yahoo Inc's South Korean operation said on Friday it will quit the country, underscoring its struggle against Google Inc and local competitors expanding aggressively into mobile advertising and online services.
South Korea is the first Asian country Yahoo is leaving, the firm said. An industry pioneer and household Internet brand, it has been overshadowed by global rivals including Facebook Inc and Google in recent years.
"Yahoo has faced several challenges in the past couple of years and decided to pull out of the (Korean) business to put more resources on global business and become more powerful and successful," Yahoo said in a statement.
Yahoo Korea, which started business in 1997 and is wholly owned by the U.S. search company, has around 200-250 employees in South Korea. It will terminate Korean online portal services in December, the company said.
In the South Korean market, it has failed to beat local rivals such as NHN Corp, Daum Communications Corp and SK Communications Co.
Yahoo appointed Google veteran Marissa Mayer as its chief executive in July, its third CEO in less than a year.
Former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than 6 months in the job over a controversy over his academic credentials.
Before that, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang had stepped down as CEO, and an internal reorganization cut thousands of jobs.
Yahoo remains one of the world's most powerful websites, with more than 700 million monthly visitors who use products like its email service and read its news pages.
Dr. Blinky serves as a physical, blinking extension of your smartphone's notification bar. In other words, it's a beeper for a mobile world.
Dr. Blinky helps keep you connected... to your own phone.
(Credit: Dr. Blinky )
Industrial designer Kotaro Shimogori has taken to crowdfunding site Indiegogo to raise funds for a Bluetooth-powered appliance that functions as a physical extension of your smartphone's notifications bar. But if you lived through the 1990s with me, you probably recognize Dr. Blinky for what it really is -- the resurrection of the pager with a 21st century spin.
In a nutshell, Dr. Blinky connects to an app on yourAndroid phone (the iOS app is in progress) that you can configure to blink whenever you want to be notified of a new call, text, e-mail, or whatever. Dr. Blinky can also be set to blink in different patterns for different types of notifications.
So if being separated from your phone by the few layers of fabric that make up your purse or your pocket just seems unbearable, perhaps you'll want to chip in a few bucks to the campaign.
Perhaps Shimogori should join forces with the team behind another Indiegogo campaignwe've reported on lately to see if Dr. Blinky might also clip to your license plate to help outsmart red light camerasThe crowdfunding project has just gotten started, and early birds who pledge $25 or more can be first in line for one of the 21st century beepers. The site claims the devices will eventually have a retail price of $70.
2012-10-18
Youtube was down for 30 min.
Servers at YouTube failed Thursday afternoon, making the website and its videos across the web temporarily unavailable. The downtime sent people into a panic between 4 p.m. ET and 4:30 p.m. ET. The site is now back up, but "YouTube Goes Down" is still a worldwide trending topic on Twitter.
[More from Mashable: 12 YouTube Recipes for a Cozy Autumn Meal]
"A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation," said the error message.
The "500 Internal Server Error" came after a filing error leaked Google's earnings four hours too early.
[More from Mashable: Interscope’s New Website Relies on Artists’ Social Media Activity]
YouTube is down. Does this mean worker productivity is up?
— Digg (@digg) October 18, 2012
YouTube is down. This is it, my friends. The end of the world.
— Claw'b GraveRobber (@RobDenBleyker) October 18, 2012
youtube is down. i think its a good reason to jump in a ditch. #whyyoutubewhy
— Madison Beer (@MadisonElleBeer) October 18, 2012
YOUTUBE IS DOWN?!?! THIS IS WHY ONLINE MEDIA WILL NEVER TAKE OVER TELE...*your skybox is not responding*
— Stephen Byrne (@3sixty5days) October 18, 2012
BONUS: 33 More Entertaining 404 Error Pages 8bitpeoples True to its name, 8bitpeoples's 404 error page features a conversation
2012-10-17
Dr. Blinky
Never miss a call with DrBlinky!
DrBlinky is an autonomous, super compact & super light weight Bluetooth 4.0 enabled visual notification device for your smartphone.
Kindle for school
Amazon.com Inc announced an initiative on Wednesday to get its Kindle e-readers and tablet computers into schools, entering a market that has been particularly successful for rival Apple Inc and its iPad device.
Amazon said it has been testing Kindles in recent years with hundreds of kindergarten through 12th grade schools in the United States, selling the devices at bulk discounts and helping them purchase and distribute e-books to students.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled Whispercast, a service that lets schools manage fleets of Kindle devices from one online location.
Administrators and teachers can set up user accounts for each student and arrange them into one or more groups, such as a specific class or grade level. They can also set limits on what students can do with the devices, such as blocking Facebook and web browsing and disabling purchasing, Amazon said.
Amazon's education push is part of a broader effort by the world's largest Internet retailer to get Kindles into as many hands as possible. The company sells Kindles at cost and hopes to make money selling e-books and other content such as apps, games, music and video through the devices.
"We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to own a Kindle device. Any time we can make that easier, we do that," said Jay Marine, vice president of Kindle product management. "And we have a particular mission to increase reading, especially among kids."
Education is a potentially huge market for tablets and e-readers, partly because they are easier for administrators to manage than personal computers and laptops, according to Carl Howe of consulting firm Yankee Group.
Apple's iPad has been a big hit with educational institutions in the United States. In the second quarter of 2012, the company said sales of iPads in the U.S. education market almost doubled year-over-year to just under 1 million units.
Amazon's Marine said Kindles are easier to carry for students than lots of physical books. Students who are learning to read may also be less intimidated by big books, because the content is housed in small, thin devices, he added.
Amazon has been offering discounts on the hardware for bulk purchases by schools. The company does not currently offer bulk discounts on e-books, but Marine said that may come in the future.
Whispercast will also work in coming months with apps that run on Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets, he added.
Clearwater High School in Florida and St Rose of Lima School in Texas are among schools that have been testing Kindles with students.
Clearwater High has been using about 2,000 Kindles for more than two years and recently the test was expanded to more than 122 schools in the same district, according to Principal Keith Mastroides.
The devices make students more enthusiastic about reading and studying in general, he said.
Still, Yankee Group's Howe said there are limitations on how useful e-books can be in education. Physical books can be re-sold easily, unlike digital versions, he noted.
It is also more difficult for a student to study from multiple e-books at the same time, Howe explained.
"Imagine a student in a library with 10 books with book marks in each one," he said. "Try doing that with an e-reader. It's pretty hard and kind of a mess."
Whispercast is also designed to make it easier for businesses and non-profit organizations to use Kindle devices.
Companies can use the service to centrally distribute documents and other items such as conference agendas or training materials to employees or customers, Amazon said.
(Reporting By Alistair Barr; Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta; Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Bernard Orr)
2012-10-16
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