2013-02-19

Sina Corp posted better-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue and profit amid concerns about the slowing growth of Chinese online advertising.

(Reuters) - Sina Corp posted better-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue and profit amid concerns about the slowing growth of Chinese online advertising.

Shares in the company, which runs China's largest online portal and the Twitter-like "Weibo" microblogging platform, climbed 6 percent to $56.50 after-hours. They have fallen 13.4 percent since the start of the fourth quarter, underperforming a 2 percent rise in the Nasdaq.

Net profit fell 74 percent in the fourth quarter to $2.4 million, or 3 cents per share, from $9.3 million, or 14 cents per share, a year earlier. But excluding certain items, non-GAAP earnings were $9 million, or 13 cents a share, versus $14 million or 21 cents a share a year earlier.

That surpassed an average forecast for 5 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

China's online advertising market grew 46.8 percent in 2012, but that was down from 57.6 percent in 2011, according to technology research firm iResearch. The softer advertising market, due to a weaker economic environment, has also hit Sina peers Baidu Inc and Sohu.com Inc.

Analysts say Sina's new "Weibo" advertising products have drawn muted sales.

Sina said it expects first-quarter adjusted net revenue to range between $115 million and $119 million, in line with average predictions on Wall Street for about $117 million. It forecast advertising revenue of $94 million to $96 million this quarter.

Advertising revenue came in at $110.7 million in the fourth quarter, versus a previous company projection for between $110 million and $112 million.

It posted overall fourth-quarter net revenue of $139.1 million, versus an average forecast for $133.9 million according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Non-advertising revenue decreased 4 percent to $28.5 million.

In the fourth quarter, Sina rolled out two Weibo monetization products aimed at increasing sales on its highly popular social media website.

One of the products gives advertisers a chance at promoting their tweet among users who are not following them, while the other is a platform that links popular microbloggers with advertisers.

Sina's push to monetize Weibo comes as Tencent Holdings' mobile social messaging product, WeChat, is beginning to cut into the popularity of Weibo, analysts said.

Bill Gates said he was not satisfied with the company's pace of innovation over the last few years, and that it had mishandled its early mobile strategy

(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates said he was not satisfied with the company's pace of innovation over the last few years, and that it had mishandled its early mobile strategy.

"We didn't miss cellphones, but the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership. It's clearly a mistake," Gates, Microsoft's former CEO, said in a rare interview with CBS.

Gates hedged questions on whether he was happy with Chief Executive Steve Ballmer's performance. He said Ballmer had achieved a lot but that both he and Ballmer were not satisfied.

"(Ballmer) and I are two of the most self-critical people I know," Gates said.

"There are a lot of amazing things that Steve's leadership achieved — Windows 8, the Surface computer, Bing, Xbox. Is it enough? No. He and I are not satisfied that in terms of breakthrough things we are doing everything possible."

Ballmer took over as Microsoft's CEO in February 2000. The company's shares have dropped 45 percent since then.

A former senior Microsoft executive, Joachim Kempin, said in a book he wrote about his time at the company that Ballmer was not the right leader for the world's largest software company but held his grip on it by systematically forcing out any rising manager who challenged his authority.

His criticism echoes that of investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, who called for Ballmer to step down in 2011.

Microsoft has faced criticism for its latest Windows 8 versions for different devices, while its Bing search engine has won only a small market share.

2013-02-18

GaN --- Gallium nitride

Gallium nitride (Ga N) is a binary III/V direct bandgap semiconductor commonly used in bright light-emitting diodes since the 1990s. The compound is a very hard material that has aWurtzite crystal structure. Its wide band gap of 3.4 eV affords it special properties for applications in optoelectronic,^[4]^[5] high-power and high-frequency devices. For example, GaN is the substrate which makes violet (405 nm) laser diodes possible, without use of nonlinear optical frequency-doubling.

Its sensitivity to ionizing radiation is low (like other group III nitrides), making it a suitable material for solar cell arrays for satellites. Military and space applications could also benefit as devices have shown stability in radiation environments.^[6] Because GaN transistors can operate at much hotter temperatures and work at much higher voltages than gallium arsenide (GaAs) transistors, they make ideal power amplifiers at microwave frequencies.

Laytec Upgrades In-Situ GaN LED Monitoring System

Feb 18, 2013

The firm's latest UV pyrometer incorporates real-time UV emissivity correction for enhanced accuracy of gallium nitride surface temperature during the growth of complex LED structures

In an ideal world, LED manufacturers would know the emission wavelength of the final device during MOCVD growth.

Today, according to the Solid State Lighting road map, the wavelength variation across a wafer should be less than 1 nm. This means a less than 1 K (1⁰C) variation of the GaN surface temperature during InGaN MQW growth.

LayTec’s Pyro 400 is widely used for enabling fab-wide GaN surface temperature uniformity in many LED manufacturers production lines.

Meanwhile, more complex LED structures and tighter cost reduction targets need even more advanced in-situ metrology. Figure 1, below, shows such an example; ternary InGaN and AlGaN layers cause emissivity changes that lead to 0.7 K error of the UV pyrometry reading.

Figure 1: Effect of changing emissivity to UV pyrometer temperature reading: up to 0.7 K errors show up without emissivity correction during growth of a GaN/AlGaN-GaN-SL/InGaNMQW/ GaN structure

LayTec‘s answer to this challenge is the Pyro 400 Gen 2. Along with in-situ UV pyrometry the new generation tool includes real-time UV emissivity correction for enhanced accuracy of GaN surface temperature during growth of more complex LED structures.

A further challenge to reliable GaN temperature control in HB-LED production is the view-port coating.

Figure 2 shows its effect just before maintenance; the UV transmission of the view-port is significantly reduced and an uncorrected UV pyrometer would give a -10 K temperature artefact. Pyro 400 Gen 2 solves this problem,too. Laytec claims the tool automatically senses and corrects these coatings and enables a long-lasting 24/7 accuracy in HB-LED emission wavelength.

Figure 2: GaN MOCVD view-port before (red) and after maintenance (blue): the transmission at the 400nm detection wavelength of a UV pyrometer is suffering from the window coating (red). The resulting -10K artifact is avoided by Pyro 400 Gen2

Last, but not least, an assisting infrared pyrometer has been integrated into Pyro 400 Gen 2 for simultaneous monitoring of wafer pocket temperature throughout the full LED growth run.

Chinese telecommunications company Huawei said on Monday it had not worked with an institute in Singapore on any projects in the specialist field of an American engineer who died mysteriously last year shortly after leaving the institute.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Chinese telecommunications company Huawei said on Monday it had not worked with an institute in Singapore on any projects in the specialist field of an American engineer who died mysteriously last year shortly after leaving the institute.

Britain's Financial Times said on Saturday that Shane Todd had been working on "what was apparently a joint project" between Singapore's Institute of Microelectronics, or IME, and Huawei shortly before he died last June.

His parents have said he was murdered because of his involvement in the project, which they say involved exporting sensitive military technology to China.

IME declined immediate comment.

Singapore police said they were still investigating the death of Todd, 31, and would submit their evidence to a coroner. Singaporean pathologists concluded in an autopsy last June that he died by hanging in his Singapore flat.

"IME approached Huawei on one occasion to cooperate with them in the GaN field, but we decided not to accept, and consequently do not have any cooperation with IME related to GaN," Huawei said in a statement.

Todd's area of expertise was Gallium Nitride (GaN), an advanced semiconductor material which has both commercial and military purposes. It is used in things from blue-ray disc players to military radars.

Huawei said that the development of GaN technology was commonplace across the telecommunications industry.

Reuters reviewed evidence the family presented supporting its theory a few weeks after his death, including emails, other documents and photographs.

Interviews with the family, colleagues and friends revealed conflicting views on Todd's state of mind before his death, the nature of his work and how he died.

Colleagues said that he was increasingly depressed in his last few months, but said that his concerns appeared to centre on a sense of failure about his work, and an ambivalence about returning to the United States.

Researchers in unrelated fields have also questioned how, if his work was so sensitive, he was able to take home computer files from his office. His family retrieved a hard drive which included work files in his flat.

IME is part of a network of research institutes managed by government-run Agency for Science, Technology and Research, or A*Star.

A former A*Star researcher now working in the United States pointed out that IME and other A*Star institutes were not military research organizations.

"AFRAID"

At the heart of the family's theory is that Todd was concerned for his safety because of a project with a Chinese company. They believed, through information from his colleagues and from his computer files, that the company was Huawei.

Reuters can't independently corroborate their views about the role of Huawei or the circumstances of Todd's death.

Huawei is one of the world's largest telecommunication equipment companies, but has been blocked from some projects in Australia and deemed a security risk by the U.S. congress on the grounds that its equipment could be used for spying.

Huawei has routinely denied such accusations and has said it is not linked to the Chinese government.

Todd's parents said in interviews in July that Singapore police and IME had failed to properly investigate his death after his body was found hanging from a door in his Singapore apartment on the evening of June 24, two days after he quit IME.

Singapore police say they have handled the case as they have handled other cases, and their procedures follow high international standards. They said in such cases of unnatural death, "no prior assumptions" were made about the cause.

The parents did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment on the Financial Times report but Todd's mother, Mary, said in a telephone interview with Reuters last July that he had been scared.

"I had been talking to him for months for at least an hour every week and he told us he was afraid of being murdered because of his contacts with the Chinese government," she said.

"He quit his job because of it."

Huawei declined to say whether they had been working on other projects with IME. Colleagues said shortly after Todd's death that he had told them at one point he had been working on a project with Huawei but that it was not sensitive or high-level in nature.

One described it as carrying out "measurement test reports" of semiconductors.

The Financial Times said that Todd had been involved in proposing a joint project with Huawei. While it did not say whether the project was approved, it quoted his parents as saying that subsequently he complained to them of being asked to do things with a Chinese company he did not identify that made him uncomfortable.

2013-02-17

meteor in russian injured 1000

CHELYABINSK, Russia (Reuters) - Thousands of Russian emergency workers went out on Saturday to clear up the damage from a meteor that exploded over the Ural mountains, damaging buildings, shattering windows and showering people with broken glass.

Divers searched a lake near the city of Chelyabinsk, where a hole several feet wide had opened in the ice, but had so far failed to find any large fragments, officials said.

The scarcity of evidence on the ground fuelled scores of conspiracy theories over what caused the fireball and its huge shockwave on Friday in the area which plays host to many defense industry plants.

Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told reporters in Moscow it could have been "war-mongers" in the United States. "It's not meteors falling. It's a new weapon being tested by the Americans," he said.

A priest from near the explosion site called it an act of God. Social media sites were flooded with speculation about what might have caused the explosion, if not a meteorite.

"Honestly, I would be more inclined to believe that this was some military thing," said Oksana Trufanova, a local human rights activist.

Asked about the speculation, an official at the local branch of Russia's Emergencies Ministry simply replied: "Rubbish".

Residents of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow, heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the wall and roof of a zinc plant.

A fireball traveling at a speed of 30 km (19 miles) per second according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 200 km (125 miles) away.

NASA estimated the meteor was 55 feet across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.

It exploded miles above Earth, releasing nearly 500 kilotons of energy -about 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two, NASA added.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."

DIVERS SEARCH LAKE

Search teams said they had found small objects up to about 1 cm (half-an-inch) wide that might be fragments of a meteorite, but no larger pieces.

The Chelyabinsk regional governor said the strike caused about 1 billion roubles ($33 million) worth of damage.

Life in the city had largely returned to normal by Saturday although 50 people were still in hospital. Officials said more than 1,200 people were injured, mostly by flying glass.

Repair work had to be done quickly because of the freezing temperatures, which sank close to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) at night.

Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov inspected the damage after President Vladimir Putin sent him to the region.

His ministry is under pressure to clean up fast following criticism over the failure to issue warnings in time before fatal flooding in southern Russia last summer and over its handling of forest fires in 2010.

Putin will also want to avoid a repeat of the criticism that he faced over his slow reaction to incidents early in his first term as president, such as the sinking of the Kursk submarine in 2000 which killed all 118 people on board.

($1 = 30.1365 Russian rouble

2013-02-16

2013-02-13

Join Google + with President Obama

State of the Union: Fireside Hangout with President Obama

Tomorrow, February 14, 4:50 PM On Thursday, February 14th, President Obama will join the latest in a series of "Fireside Hangouts" – a 21st century take on FDR’s famous radio addresses – to talk about his State of the Union Address.

During the +Google+ hangout, the President will answer questions from Americans across the country about the issues and policies laid out in the speech.

How you can join: Right now, you can submit a question for the President and vote on your favorites on the White House +YouTube Channel: http://at.wh.gov/hC22N

On Tuesday, February 12th at 9:00 p.m. ET, watch President Obama's State of the Union Address on the +The White House Google+ page and at http://youtube.com/whitehouse

Then, be sure to watch the hangout live on Thursday, February 14th at 4:50 p.m. ET on the +The White House Google+ page and at http://youtube.com/whitehouse

Learn more about the State of the Union Address and how you can get involved at http://wh.gov/SOTU

#firesidehangout #sotu

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