2012-11-29

3D printer in Staples

3D Printing, the white-hot technology that's promising to transform everything from car repair to bio medicine, is now moving into the most mundane of locations: your local Staples. A European unit of Staples and Ireland-based 3D printing company Mcor have announced plans to bring 3D printing to a handful of European Staples stores in early 2013, and promise to roll it out to other countries shortly after that.

[More from Mashable: Bond’s 3D-Printed Aston Martin Makes ‘Skyfall’ Debut]

Dubbed "Staples Easy 3D," the new service is pretty straightforward. Customers upload CAD or other 3D-printable files to Staples Office Center. Staples prints them on one of Mcor 's Iris 3D color printers. Customers can then either pick up their 3D-printed objects at the store, or have them shipped to them. "Customized parts, prototypes, art objects, architectural models, medical models and 3D maps are items customers need today, in a more affordable and more accessible manner," said Wouter Van Dijk, president of the Staples Printing Systems Division in Europe.

Access to 3D printing services at a local Staples could be a shortcut for consumers anxious to get started in 3D printing. Companies like MakerBot currently sell home 3D printers for roughly $2,300, a price tag likely considered out of the reach of most consumers. Mcor executives acknowledge, though, that 3D printing is following the well-worn path of 2D printing: better equipment, more accessibility and much lower prices. Even so, they don't think consumers will have their own 3D printers in the short term. "Until that time, consumers will look to service bureaus," said Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Conor MacCormack.

[More from Mashable: 3D Printing’s Next Frontier: Guns]

It's also unlikely consumers will have access to an in-home, full-color 3D-printer any time soon. Mcor's Iris reportedly prints in more than 1 million colors.

3D printing service bureaus is not a new idea. U.S.-based Shapeways lets consumers design 3D objects and then have the service print and sent them to their homes. On the other hand, many consumers have probably never heard of Shapeways, but good luck running into anyone who couldn't point you to the nearest Staples.

The announcement, which was made at Euromold in Germany ("World Fair for Moldmaking and Tooling, Design and Application Development") did not include details on how long it will take to print each object or, more importantly, price per print. Our guess it'll cost a fair bit more than a sheaf of bright white paper.

Mashable has reached out to Staples' U.S. division for comment on the announcement and details on service availability outside of Europe and will update this post with their comments.

2012-11-27

ITU International Telecommunication Union

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An unprecedented debate over how the global Internet is governed is set to dominate a meeting of officials in Dubai next week, with many countries pushing to give a United Nations body broad regulatory powers even as the United States and others contend such a move could mean the end of the open Internet.

The 12-day conference of the International Telecommunications Union, a 147-year-old organization that's now an arm of the United Nations, largely pits revenue-seeking developing countries and authoritarian regimes that want more control over Internet content against U.S. policymakers and private Net companies that prefer the status quo.

Many of the proposals have drawn fury from free-speech and human-rights advocates and have prompted resolutions from the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament, calling for the current decentralized system of governance to remain in place.

While specifics of some of the most contentious proposals remain secret, leaked drafts show that Russia is seeking rules giving individual countries broad permission to shape the content and structure of the Internet within their borders, while a group of Arab countries is advocating universal identification of Internet users. Some developing countries and telecom providers, meanwhile, want to make content providers pay for Internet transmission.

Fundamentally, most of the 193 countries in the ITU seem eager to enshrine the idea that the U.N. agency, rather than today's hodgepodge of private companies and nonprofit groups, should govern the Internet. They say that a new regime is needed to deal with the surge in cybercrime and more recent military attacks.

The ITU meeting, which aims to update a longstanding treaty on how telecom companies interact across borders, will also tackle other topics such as extending wireless coverage into rural areas.

If a majority of the ITU countries approve U.N. dominion over the Internet along with onerous rules, a backlash could lead to battles in Western countries over whether to ratify the treaty, with tech companies rallying ordinary Internet users against it and some telecom carriers supporting it.

In fact, dozens of countries including China, Russia and some Arab states, already restrict Internet access within their own borders. Those governments would have greater leverage over Internet content and service providers if the changes were backed up by international agreement.

Amid the escalating rhetoric, search king Google last week asked users to "pledge your support for the free and open Internet" on social media, raising the specter of a grassroots outpouring of the sort that blocked American copyright legislation and a global anti-piracy treaty earlier this year.

Google's Vint Cerf, the ordinarily diplomatic co-author of the basic protocol for Internet data, denounced the proposed new rules as hopeless efforts by some governments and state-controlled telecom authorities to assert their power.

"These persistent attempts are just evidence that this breed of dinosaurs, with their pea-sized brains, hasn't figured out that they are dead yet, because the signal hasn't traveled up their long necks," Cerf told Reuters.

The ITU's top official, Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré, sought to downplay the concerns in a separate interview, stressing to Reuters that even though updates to the treaty could be approved by a simple majority, in practice nothing will be adopted without near-unanimity.

"Voting means winners and losers. We can't afford that in the ITU," said Touré, a former satellite engineer from Mali who was educated in Russia.

Touré predicted that only "light-touch" regulation on cyber-security will emerge by "consensus", using a deliberately vague term that implies something between a majority and unanimity.

He rejected criticism that the ITU's historic role in coordinating phone carriers leaves it unfit to corral the unruly Internet, comparing the Web to a transportation system.

"Because you own the roads, you don't own the cars and especially not the goods they are transporting. But when you buy a car you don't buy the road," Touré said. "You need to know the number of cars and their size and weight so you can build the bridges and set the right number of lanes. You need light-touch regulation to set down a few traffic lights."

Because the proposals from Russia, China and others are more extreme, Touré has been able to cast mild regulation as a compromise accommodating nearly everyone.

Two leaked Russian proposals say nations should have the sovereign right "to regulate the national Internet segment". An August draft proposal from a group of 17 Arab countries called for transmission recipients to receive "identity information" about the senders, potentially endangering the anonymity of political dissidents, among others.

A U.S. State Department envoy to the gathering and Cerf agreed with Touré that there is unlikely to be any drastic change emerging from Dubai.

"The decisions are going to be by consensus," said U.S. delegation chief Terry Kramer. He said anti-anonymity measures such as mandatory Internet address tracing won't be adopted because of opposition by the United States and others.

"We're a strong voice, given a lot of the heritage," Kramer said, referring to the United States' role in the development of the Internet. "A lot of European markets are very similar, and a lot of Asian counties are supportive, except China."

Despite the reassuring words, a fresh leak over the weekend showed that the ITU's top managers viewed a badly split conference as a realistic prospect less than three months ago.

The leaked program for a "senior management retreat" for the ITU in early September included a summary discussion of the most probable outcomes from Dubai, concluding that the two likeliest scenarios involved major reworkings of the treaty that the United States would then refuse to sign. The only difference between the scenarios lay in how many other developed countries sided with the Americans.

An ITU spokesman said Tuesday that "the management team has never doubted that consensus will be found" and that the scenarios were meant to aid efforts at facilitating the process.

Touré said that because the disagreements are so vast, the conference probably will end up with something resembling the ITU's earlier formula for trying to protect children online — an agreement to cooperate more and share laws and best practices, perhaps with hotlines to head off misunderstandings.

"From Dubai, what I personally expect is to see some kind of principles saying cyberspace is a global phenomenon and it can only have global responses," Touré said. "I just intend to put down some key principles there that will lay the seeds for something in the future."

Even vague terms could be used as a pretext for more oppressive policies in various countries, though, and activists and industry leaders fear those countries might also band together by region to offer very different Internet experiences.

In some ways, the U.N. involvement reflects a reversal that has already begun.

The United States has steadily diminished its official role in Internet governance, and many nations have stepped up their filtering and surveillance. More than 40 countries now filter the Net that their citizens see, said Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto political science professor and authority on international conflicts in cyberspace.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said this month that the Net is already on the road to Balkanization, with people in different countries getting very different experiences from the services provided by Google, Skype and others.

This month, a new law in Russia took effect that allows the federal government to order a Website offline without a court hearing. Iran recently rolled out a version of the Internet that replaced the real thing within its borders. A growing number of countries, including China and India, order sites to censor themselves for political, religious and other content.

China, which has the world's largest number of Internet users, also blocks access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter among other sites within its borders.

The loose governance of the Net currently depends on the non-profit ICANN, which oversees the Web's address system, along with voluntary standard-setting bodies and a patchwork of national laws and regional agreements. Many countries see it as a U.S.-dominated system.

The U.S. isolation within the ITU is exacerbated by it being home to many of the biggest technology companies - and by the fact that it could have military reasons for wanting to preserve online anonymity. The Internet emerged as a critical military domain with the 2010 discovery of Stuxnet, a computer worm developed at least in part by the United States that attacked Iran's nuclear program.

Whatever the outcome in Dubai, the conference stands a good chance of becoming a historic turning point for the Internet.

"I see this as a constitutional moment for global cyberspace, where we can stand back and say, `Who should be in charge?' said Deibert. "What are the rules of the road?"

2012-11-25

Black Friday retail sales online this year topped $1 billion for the first time ever as more consumers used the Internet do their early holiday shopping, comScore Inc said on Sunday.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Black Friday retail sales online this year topped $1 billion for the first time ever as more consumers used the Internet do their early holiday shopping, comScore Inc said on Sunday.

Online sales jumped 26 percent on Black Friday to $1.04 billion from sales of $816 million on the corresponding day last year, according to comScore data.

Amazon.com was the most-visited retail website on Black Friday, and it also posted the highest year-over-year visitor growth rate among the top five retailers. Wal-Mart Stores Inc's website was second, followed by sites run by Best Buy Co., Target Corp. and Apple Inc, comScore noted.

Digital content and subscriptions, including e-books, digital music and video, was the fastest-growing retail category online, with sales up 29 percent versus Black Friday last year, according to comScore data.

E-commerce accounts for less than 10 percent of consumer spending in the United States. However, it is growing much faster than bricks-and-mortar retail as shoppers are lured by low prices, convenience, faster shipping and wide selection.

ShopperTrak, which counts foot traffic in physical retail stores, estimated Black Friday sales of $11.2 billion, down 1.8 percent from the same day last year.

"Online has been around 9 percent of total holiday sales, but it could breach 10 percent for the first time this season," said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, which helps merchants sell more on websites, including Amazon.com and eBay.com.

ComScore expects online retail spending to rise 17 percent to $43.4 billion through the whole holiday season. That is above the 15 percent increase last season and ahead of the retail industry's expectation for a 4.1 percent increase in overall spending this holiday.

It's not clear yet whether strong Black Friday sales online will weaken growth on Cyber Monday, which has been the biggest e-commerce day in the United States in recent years.

"Cyber Monday will be a big day, but not as much of a big day as it has been in the past," said Mia Shernoff, executive vice president for Chase Paymentech, a payment processing unit of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.. "Faster broadband Internet connections in the office used to drive this. But now many consumers have faster connections at home and smart phones and tablets - they don't have to wait."

MOBILE SHOPPING GROWTH

A big source of online shopping growth this holiday season has come from increased use of smart phones, which let people buy online even when they are in physical stores, and by tablet computers, which have spurred more online shopping in the evenings, Wingo and others said.

Mobile devices accounted for 26 percent of visits to retail websites and 16 percent of purchases on Black Friday. That was up from 18.1 percent and 10.3 percent, respectively, on the same day last year, according to International Business Machines, which analyzes online traffic and transactions from 500 U.S. retailers.

Amazon and eBay benefit from increased use of mobile devices for shopping because they are consistently the top two online retail destinations for mobile users, ChannelAdvisor's Wingo said.

Amazon.com was the most visited retail website on Black Friday, with more than 28 million visits, according to Hitwise.

Worth noting: eBay runs one of the largest online marketplaces, rather than being a retailer, so its online traffic was not reported by Hitwise. However, eBay said the volume of mobile transactions on its marketplace jumped 153 percent on Black Friday from a year earlier.

ChannelAdvisor clients' same-store sales on Amazon.com shot up 38 percent on Black Friday, compared with a year earlier. Last year's year-over-year growth was 50 percent.

Client same-store sales on eBay's marketplace rose 31 percent on Black Friday, compared with a year earlier. Last year's year-over-year growth was 15 percent, according to ChannelAdvisor.

PRICE PRESSURE

While mobile devices may be good for sales, they may not be so good for retail profit margins. Smart phones give shoppers real-time access to product prices online, potentially exacerbating the usual holiday discounting and price wars.

Black Friday online transactions jumped almost 30 percent, but the average ticket price was down more than 11 percent, according to Chase Paymentech, which reports data from its 50 largest e-commerce merchant clients.

"It's driving prices down," Shernoff said. "Consumers are checking prices in stores and showing the retailer, and the retailer will succumb to the lowest price online so they don't lose the consumer."

2012-11-19

Cisco will buy Meraki - cloud networking company for $1.2 B

(Reuters) - Networking equipment company Cisco Systems Inc said it will buy privately held cloud networking company Meraki for $1.2 billion in cash as part of its cloud and networking strategy.

Cisco said the acquisition of Meraki, which was founded in 2006 by members of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco's 2013 fiscal year and is subject to regulatory approval.

Cisco's second quarter runs until the end of January.

Meraki - funded by Sequoia Capital and Google Inc - offers Wi-Fi technology, switching, security and mobile device management from the cloud with a focus on mid-sized businesses.

"This is a very logical move for Cisco," said ZK research analyst Zeus Kerravala.

He said the deal will allow Cisco to offer alternative solutions to traditional Wi-Fi deployment models like smaller competitors, such as Aruba Networks and Ruckus Wireless, which debuted on Friday.

"Cisco didn't really have anything to counter that before," Kerravala noted.

Meraki's Chief Executive Sanjit Biswas said in a letter to employees posted on the company website that Cisco had approached the company several weeks ago.

The company's founders had at first rejected the offer in favor of continuing Meraki's strategy aimed at an initial public listing.

"After several weeks of consideration, we decided late last week that joining Cisco was the right path for Meraki," Biswas said.

He also said that Meraki had achieved a $100 million bookings run rate, grown to 330 employees and had a positive cash flow.

Windows 8 May Not Be Selling Well

11/19/2012 Windows 8 May Not Be Selling Well [REPORTS] Windows 8 may not be off to a strong start. Sales aren't meeting Microsoft's own expectations, a longtime company observer says. At the same time, a major online PC retailer says sales of the new OS are "slow going."

Yahoo shares reach 18 month high 18.36 +0.50 (2.80%)

11/19/2012 Yahoo shares reach 18-month high as investors warm to new CEO SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc shares reached their highest level in a year and a half, as investor confidence grows that new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer can pull off a comeback that eluded three of her predecessors. The Internet pioneer has yet to actually provide Wall Street with any hard evidence that its business is turning a corner - and she has warned that it will be a lengthy job - but investor faith in the ex-Google executive is running high.


2012-11-15

Xi is the new leader of China

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's ruling Communist Party unveiled an older, conservative leadership line-up on Thursday that appears unlikely to take the drastic action needed to tackle pressing issues like social unrest, environmental degradation and corruption.

New party chief Xi Jinping, premier-in-waiting Li Keqiang and vice-premier in charge of economic affairs Wang Qishan, all named as expected to the elite decision-making Politburo Standing Committee, are considered cautious reformers. The other four members have the reputation of being conservative.

The line-up belied any hopes that Xi would usher in a leadership that would take bold steps to deal with slowing growth in the world's second-biggest economy, or begin to ease the Communist Party's iron grip on the most populous nation.

"We're not going to see any political reform because too many people in the system see it as a slippery slope to extinction," said David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.

"They see it entirely through the prism of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring and the Colour Revolutions in Central Asia, so they're not going to go there."

Vice-Premier Wang, the most reform-minded in the line-up, has been given the role of fighting widespread graft, identified by both Xi and outgoing President Hu Jintao as the biggest danger faced by the party and the state.

The run-up to the handover has been overshadowed by the party's biggest scandal in decades, with former high-flyer Bo Xilai sacked as party boss of southwestern Chongqing city after his wife was accused of murdering a British businessman.

Bo, who has not been seen in public since early this year, faces possible charges of corruption and abuse of power.

One source said an informal poll was held by over 200 voting members in the party's central committee to choose the seven members of the standing committee from among 10 candidates. Two of them who had strong reform credentials - Guangdong party boss Wang Yang and party organization head Li Yuanchao - failed to make it, along with the lone woman candidate Liu Yandong.

The source, who has ties to the leadership, told Reuters on condition of anonymity that Wang and Li Yuanchao, both allies of Hu, did not make it to the standing committee because party elders felt they were too liberal.

However, all three are in the 25-member Politburo, a group that ranks below the standing committee. It was earlier believed the voting was confined to the Politburo.

OLDER

In the end, the seven-member leadership has an average age of 63.4 years compared with 62.1 five years ago. Xi led the others out in a parade at the Great Hall of the People, with all seven dressed in identical dark blue suits, all but one set off by red or maroon ties.

The final line-up of the team and even the number was speculated on for weeks. The committee was cut to seven members from nine, which should ease consensus building and decision making.

Except for Xi and his deputy Li Keqiang, all the others in the standing committee - the innermost circle of power in China's authoritarian government - are 64 or above and will have to retire within five years, when the next party congress is held.

That means the party may just tread water on the most vital reforms until then, although after that, Xi would probably have more independence in choosing his team. The current line-up has been finalized by Xi and Hu, and by former president Jiang Zemin, who has wielded considerable influence in the party after the tumult over the Bo Xilai scandal.

Wang and Li Yuanchao could make it to the standing committee at the next party congress in 2017, perhaps along with so-called "sixth generation" leaders like Inner Mongolia party chief Hu Chunhua.

"The leadership is divided," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, adding however that the new leadership would find it easier to make progress on economic reform rather than political change.

"It's easier for them to move to a new growth model. I think they agree upon that and that won't be the hardest task. But I see a lot of political paralysis."

Tony Saich, a China politics expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said: "To me it smacks of a holding pattern. I think the understanding is that Wang Yang has a good shot in five years' time."

"SEVERE CHALLENGES"

Besides party chief, Xi was also appointed head of the party's top military body, which gives him two of the three most important posts in the country. He will take over from Hu as president in March.

Jiang, who was Hu's predecessor, did not give up the military post until two years after giving up the party leadership.

Xi said in an address that he understood the people's desire for a better life but warned of severe challenges going forward.

"We are not complacent, and we will never rest on our laurels," he said after introducing the standing committee at the Great Hall of the People in a carefully choreographed ceremony carried live on state television.

"Under the new conditions, our party faces many severe challenges, and there are also many pressing problems within the party that need to be resolved, particularly corruption, being divorced from the people, going through formalities and bureaucracy caused by some party officials."

North Korean-trained economist Zhang Dejiang is expected to head the largely rubber-stamp parliament, while Shanghai party boss Yu Zhengsheng is likely to head parliament's advisory body, according to the order in which their names were announced.

Tianjin party chief Zhang Gaoli and Liu Yunshan, a conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash, make up the rest of the group. Zhang should become executive vice premier.

"Words from the new leadership will be reform-minded, but deeds would be very cautious at least in economic and financial restructuring," said Alberto Forchielli, managing partner at Mandarin Capital Partners in Shanghai.

Advocates of reform are pressing Xi to cut back the privileges of state-owned firms, make it easier for rural migrants to settle in cities, fix a fiscal system that encourages local governments to live off land expropriations and, above all, tether the powers of a state that they say risks suffocating growth and fanning discontent.

With growing public anger and unrest over everything from corruption to environmental degradation, there may also be cautious efforts to answer calls for more political reform, though nobody seriously expects a move towards full democracy.

The party could introduce experimental measures to broaden inner-party democracy - in other words, encouraging greater debate within the party -but stability remains a top concern and one-party rule will be safeguarded.

In contrast to the mounting excitement until the announcement of the standing committee at the Great Hall of the People, the unveiling barely caused a ripple in China's vast countryside.

"We're not really that interested," said Chen Yongjiang, a fruit and vegetable farmer in Chenjiapu, a snow-covered village in Hebei province.

"For those of us in the farmlands and the mountains, as long as they make life better for us, we're happy."

(Additional reporting by Benjamin K

2012-11-08

Super computer


The sound of 20 quadrillion calculations happening every second is dangerously loud. Anyone spending more than 15 minutes in the same room with the Titan supercomputer must wear earplugs or risk permanent hearing damage. The din in the room will not come from the computer's 40,000 whirring processors, but from the fans and water pipes cooling them. If the dull roar surrounding Titan were to fall silent, those tens of thousands of processors doing those thousands of trillions of calculations would melt right down into their racks.
Titan is expected to become the world's most powerful supercomputer when it comes fully online at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Tennessee, in late 2012 or early 2013. But on this afternoon in mid-October, Titan isn't technically Titan yet. It's still a less-powerful supercomputer called Jaguar, which the US Department of Energy (DoE) has operated and continuously upgraded since 2005. Supercomputing power is measured in Flops (floating point operations per second), and Jaguar was the first civilian supercomputer to break the "petaflop barrier" of one quadrillion operations per second (a quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeroes). In June 2010 it was the fastest supercomputer on Earth.
But high-performance computing records don't last long: a Chinese machine pushed Jaguar into second place just six months later. Then in October 2011, the supercomputer design firm Cray announced that it would transform Jaguar into a new machine that could retake the number-one spot, with an estimated peak performance of 20 petaflops.
Cray's blue-jacketed technicians have been pacing up and down Jaguar's catacomb-like aisles for months, opening its 200 monolithic black cabinets and sliding out its processor blades like enormous safe-deposit boxes. Jaguar's brain surgery takes place on spartan worktables that wouldn't look out of place in a hobbyist's garage. A technician fits a paperback-sized ingot of metal and silicon into an empty space in the blade and fastens it into place with a battery-powered screwdriver. The ingot contains a graphics processing unit, or GPU. Cray has installed one of these GPUs alongside every one of Jaguar's 18,688 CPU chips. It's this "hybrid architecture" that will turn Jaguar into Titan, packing an order of magnitude more computing horsepower into the same amount of physical space.
‘Turbo-charged’
GPU-accelerated supercomputers burst onto the world stage in 2010, when China's Tianhe-1A machine overtook Jaguar as the fastest supercomputer on earth. "It came out of nowhere," says Wu-chun Feng, a high-performance computing expert at Virginia Tech. "China didn't even have a high-performance computing program." Instead of relying solely on expensive, highly customized, multicore microprocessors, Tianhe-1A got a speed bump by using "off the shelf" GPUs made by Nvidia, whose chips power the displays of video-game consoles and consumer laptops. Titan takes the same approach using the same chip design that powers the ultra-high resolution Retina display on Apple’s Macbook Pro. These intricate squares of silicon will provide 90% of Titan's peak supercomputing performance.
So, what do video-game graphics have in common with high-end scientific computing? Simulation. "About ten years ago, we observed that the chips we designed for gaming were starting to look more like general purpose processors for simulating physics," says Sumit Gupta, Nvidia's senior director of high performance GPU computing. "When you'd shoot a tree in a video game and it would fall, you'd want it to look natural, so the simulations became more and more complex."
At the same time, redrawing every pixel on an HD laptop screen 60 times per second also requires so-called parallel computation. "This is why GPUs are designed to run hundreds of calculations at the same time very efficiently," says Steve Scott, Tesla chief technology officer at Nvidia. "It turns out that this is very similar to the way high performance scientific computing is done, where you're simulating the climate, or the interactions between drug molecules, or the airflow over a wing."

Video streaming services from Amazon


SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is testing a new monthly option for its popular Prime video-streaming service as the world's largest Internet retailer steps up competition with Netflix Inc.
Prime typically costs $79 a year in the United States for free two-day shipping, free video streaming and access to Amazon's Kindle e-book lending library. The company is now offering the service for $7.99 a month on its website, which works out to $95.88 a year, but at that rate it can be purchased strictly on a month-to-month basis.
The monthly option is more comparable to Netflix's streaming video subscription, which also costs $7.99 a month but does not come with free shipping and an e-book library. Another streaming rival, Hulu, also charges $7.99 a month.
An Amazon spokesman said the monthly Prime option was a test and declined to comment further.
Netflix and Hulu offer greater video selection than Amazon, though Amazon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying more content from Hollywood and TV studios.
"As Amazon continues to add movie and TV content to Prime, we see it likely adding more competitive pressure to the legacy online video services," Colin Sebastian, an analyst at R.W. Baird, wrote in a note to investors on Tuesday.
Netflix shares fell 2.5 percent to $76.27 in afternoon trading on Tuesday. Amazon shares climbed 1.1 percent to $237.01.
Amazon's new monthly Prime option coincides with the holiday shopping season, giving shoppers a way to use the two-day shipping service for gifts without the annual obligation, Sebastian noted.
"While one risk for Amazon is that consumers use Prime for just one month to take advantage of free shipping on large purchases, the test could also reveal that a ready market for alternative pricing and serve as a new customer acquisition tool," the analyst wrote.

2012-11-07

Obama re-elected

Foxconn's Gou says tough to cope with iPhone demand


TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group said on Wednesday the company's flagshipHon Hai unit is finding it difficult to cope with the massive demand for Apple Inc's iPhones.
"It's not easy to make the iPhones. We are falling short of meeting the huge demand," Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou told reporters after a business forum.
However, he declined to comment on brokerage reports saying that the group's other unit, Foxconn International Holdings (FIH), had taken on some production.
Hon Hai Precision Industry, the main listed entity of the parent Foxconn Technology Group, is the key assembler of Apple's iPhones.
The group also owns FIH, which traditionally assembles non-Apple products, such as phones from Nokia Oyj and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.
Shares of Foxconn International Holdings Ltd (FIH), the world's biggest contract maker of cellphones, surged as much as 35 percent on Monday after Citigroup upgraded the stock to a 'buy' and said it expected the firm to start assembling iPhones this year.
Shares of FIH fell 5.7 percent in Hong Kong on Wednesday, while Hon Hai was up 0.6 percent in Taipei. (Reporting by Clare Jim and Lee Chyen yee; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree)

Obama and Twitter had a big night


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama called it - in less than 140 characters.
Around 11:15 pm EST, just as the networks were beginning to call the race in his favor, Obama took to Twitter to proclaim himself the winner over Republican candidate Mitt Romney.
"This happened because of you. Thank you," Obama tweeted.
That the president would take his message to Twitter before taking the stage in Chicago underscored the tremendous role social media platforms like Twitter played in the 2012 election.
Minutes later, with the race called in his favor, Obama tweeted again.
"We're all in this together. That's how we campaigned, and that's who we are. Thank you. -bo."
Through the course of a long and bitter presidential campaign, Twitter often served as the new first rough draft of history.
Top campaign aides used the Internet tool to snipe at each other, the candidates used it to get out their messages and political reporters used it to inform and entertain.
On Election Night, the tweets were flowing.
By 10 p.m. EST, with the race still up for grabs, Twitter announced it had broken records.
There were more than 31 million election-related tweets on Tuesday night, making Election Night "the most tweeted about event in U.S. political history," said Twitter spokeswoman Rachael Horwitz. Between 6 p.m. and midnight EST, there were more than 23 million tweets.
Horwitz noted the previous record was 10 million, during the first presidential debate on October 3.
"Twitter brought people closer to almost every aspect of the election this year," Horwitz said. "From breaking news, to sharing the experience of watching the debates, to interacting directly with the candidates, Twitter became a kind of nationwide caucus."
In the moments following Obama's win, Twitter was in a frenzy, with a peak of 327,000 tweets a minute.
Another tweet from Obama, one that read: "Four more years" and showed a picture of him hugging his wife, became the most retweeted tweet in the history of the site.
'FIRST TWITTER ELECTION'
Love it or hate it, Twitter and its role in politics appears to be here to stay.
For Rob Johnson, campaign manager for Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry's failed presidential run, Twitter "changed the dynamic this cycle and will continue to play a bigger role in years to come."
"We no longer click refresh on websites or wait for the paper boy to throw the news on our porch," Johnson said. "We go to Twitter and learn the facts before others read it."
The 2012 race was the first where Twitter played such an important role. Top campaign advisers like Romney's Eric Fehrnstrom and Obama's David Axelrod engaged in Twitter battles through the year.
With many political reporters and campaign staff on Twitter and Facebook, social media websites were often the first place news broke. Some top news stories were kept alive or thrust into the headlines after becoming hot topics on Twitter.
"It was one heckuva echo chamber," Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email.
Johnson said Twitter was the driving force behind some of the year's biggest political news stories.
"The twitterverse shapes the news and public opinion," Johnson said. "The Internet is truly a real and powerful tool in politics."
In future elections, candidates and their campaign staffs will have to include social media as another battleground, Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said.
"This was the first Twitter election and social media is now fully a part of our election mechanics," Simmons said. "Going forward candidates must have an aggressive social media strategy if they want to win."
(Editing by Mary Milliken and Peter Cooney)

Obama re-elected


Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Wikipedia
Born: August 4, 1961 (age 51), Honolulu
Full name: Barack Hussein Obama II
Education: Harvard Law School (1988–1991),More

2012-11-01

Shares of LinkedIn gained nearly 8 percent to $115.15 in after-hours trading on Thursday, as the company extended its streak of beating analyst expectations every quarter since its May 2011 initial public offering.

LinkedIn beats expectations, raises full-year revenue view Reuters - 3 hrs ago

(Reuters) - Professional social network LinkedIn Corp topped Wall Street's third-quarter profit and revenue targets, as advertising rates increased and sales from its hiring services nearly doubled.

Shares of LinkedIn gained nearly 8 percent to $115.15 in after-hours trading on Thursday, as the company extended its streak of beating analyst expectations every quarter since its May 2011 initial public offering.

"They seem to be firing on all cylinders," said Macquarie Research analyst Tom White.

"They continue to penetrate enterprises with their talent solutions business and continue to have plenty of upside opportunity there," he said.

LinkedIn connects professionals seeking jobs and companies looking for employees. The company makes money from selling ads and premium subscriptions, as well as from offering specialized services to recruiters, setting it apart from its ad-dependent social networking rivals such as Facebook Inc and Twitter.

The company raised its full-year revenue forecast on Thursday, projecting total revenue to range between $939 million and $944 million, compared with its prior range of $915 million to $925 million.

Chief Executive Jeff Weiner said on a conference call on Thursday that the online service now had 187 million members and that members are spending more time on the website.

"Member page views grew 44 percent, well in excess of unique visitor growth, indicating that members are becoming increasingly active on LinkedIn," said Weiner.

LinkedIn has rolled out a number of new features and enhancements to its website in recent months as it tries to entice its members to spend more time on its website. Traffic to LinkedIn's home page increased 60 percent since a website redesign that it rolled out during the third quarter.

Analysts say that the so-called user engagement levels on LinkedIn remain well below websites such as Facebook and Google, limiting the amount of advertising revenue that LinkedIn can reap.

LinkedIn Finance Chief Steve Sordello acknowledged during the call on Thursday that advertiser demand was greater than the advertising inventory available on its website.

Still, marketing revenue increased 60 percent year-on-year to $64 million in the third quarter, helped by a rise in advertising rates.

"The company is deploying its field sales where it's signing on bigger deals," said Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Herman Leung.

LinkedIn said it posted net income of $2.3 million, or 2 cents a share, during the three months ended September 30, compared with a net loss of $1.6 million, or 2 cents a share, in the year-ago period.

Excluding certain items, LinkedIn said it earned 22 cents a share in the third quarter, above the 11 cents expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Revenue in the third quarter was $252 million, up 81 percent year-over-year and ahead of the average analyst expectation of $244.2 million.

The Mountain View, California-based company said that revenue from its talent solutions services increased 95 percent year-on-year in the third quarter to $138.4 million and that the business added 1,700 new customers.

Shares of LinkedIn, which closed Thursday's regular session at $106.85, have fallen 15 percent since mid-September but are up roughly 70 percent in 2012.

Apple shares fall after mgmt shake up.