Techglean

Apple started breaking out China as a standalone region

subhransu mishra — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:27:04 +0000

According to a report in the China Business News (link via Google Translate), the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce has confirmed that Apple will open an R&D and procurement management facility in the city this summer. Apple has been emailed for comment.

The facility will consist of three buildings in Pudong district that will cost Apple a total of $8 million in rent each year. According to Tech In Asia, Apple posted Shanghai-area job listings on third-party HR sites on January 27. The positions it wants to fill include an AppleCare team manager, SPS business analyst, and an admin assistant for the Apple Online Store.

The new Shanghai R&D center is yet another sign of how important China is to Apple’s growth. Earlier this month, CEO Tim Cook said during a visit to China that the country, now Apple’s second largest market, will soon become its most important. In a data sheet it released with its earnings report last week, Apple started breaking out China as a standalone region after including it for years in a group called “Asia-Pacific.” Apple’s revenue from China jumped 67% year-over-year to $6.8 billion and in the company’s earnings call, chief financial officer Peter Oppeheimer said the company established a new operating segment for China “given the contribution of that region to our business.

Convert your old email inbox into work flow oriented stream

subhransu mishra — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:08:22 +0000

Starting from gmail, hotmail to yahoo mail all we are viewing emails as a row wise messages sorted in time , it hasn’t changed much in 40 years . They are quite often traditional email platform and we are quite familiar with the way they represent emails but they have some sort limitations :

1. When we want to reply to an email we have to enter into that message window and reply , which is quite time taking and not so efficient and they take often time to load the messages .

2. When you get some image files in your inbox as attachments there is no easy way of viewing these photos in their original size (or slide show) in your inbox .In order to view them either you have to download them and view or click on view option to open the images in another tab , which is quite tiresome work .

3. UI of all the email service providers are quite often similar with little bit changes .

Fluent.io is an online email management platform that provides workflow-oriented stream of emails in inbox . You could see the email threads at a glance and reply to them instantly . Biggest part of Fluent is that , it supports multiple email accounts and you can manage your gmail, hotmail or any other mailing service provider in a singe platform . Currently it works with gmail account and this web application is in its close beta stage .

Sergey Brin Give $500,000 to Charity Behind Wikipedia

subhransu mishra — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 07:28:02 +0000

Keep an eye on Sergey Brin’s Wikipedia page. It might just get a more positive spin soon.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, announced Friday that it had received a $500,000 grant from Mr. Brin, the Google co-founder, and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the online genetics firm 23andMe.

The grant was awarded through the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, a charitable foundation started by the couple, whose collective wealth is in the billions of dollars.

In a statement released by the Wikimedia Foundation, Sue Gardner, its executive director, praised Mr. Brin and Ms. Wojcicki, saying that their donation would send a signal to others who might be thinking of giving to the site.

“This is how Wikipedia works: people use it, they like it, and so they help pay for it, to keep it freely available for themselves and for everyone around the world. I am very grateful to Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki for supporting what we do,” Ms. Gardner said.

Google and Wikipedia haven’t always been friends. In 2007 Google introduced a service called Knol, which was seen by many as a Wikipedia competitor. There were concerns at the time that Google would highlight Knol rankings in its search results, pushing Wikipedia aside. But Knol didn’t fare well online and has grown slowly.

The Wikimedia Foundation began its eighth annual fundraising event earlier in the week. The group said it raised $1.2 million during the first day.

The Brin Wojcicki Foundation has previously donated money to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which is researching a cure for Parkinson’s disease, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.

Netflix CEO Apologizes for Price Increase, Announces Qwikster Service to Mail DVDs

subhransu mishra — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:39:27 +0000

You may have received an effusive email from Reed Hastings Sunday night or this morning. If you don’t know who he is, the first line offers a hint: “I messed up. I owe you an explanation.”
Hastings, the co-founder and CEO of Netflix, has now sent an apology to its customers, 600,000 of whom are quitting after the company hiked prices up to 60 percent for people who both stream movies and order them by mail on DVD. Netflix stock has dropped about 50 percent since the July announcement.

“I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices,” Hastings said in the email and a blog post Sunday night. “It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.”
Hastings announced Netflix will give its DVD-by-mail service a new name: “Qwikster.” But for the company, the future lies in streaming video. It is faster, available anywhere — and less expensive for the company — and that’s what you’ll find in the future at the Netflix website.
“For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming,” he said. “Most companies that are great at something — like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores — do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us).”
He closed, “I want to acknowledge and thank you for sticking with us, and to apologize again to those members, both current and former, who felt we treated them thoughtlessly.”
By mid-morning today, close to 10,000 people had replied publicly on Hastings’ blog or the accompanying YouTube video, and most of them were not happy. Many complained that not only were they still stuck with the price hike, but they now had to choose between two different services. All they wanted to do, they said, was watch a movie.
“Are you trying to make it worse?” replied a typical customer. “The only saving grace with the recent price hikes was having an integrated website where you could manage both DVDs and streaming video from the same queue. Now you are splitting that out? This may be the end of it for me.”
There were others, some using profanity in their anger at Netflix, though to the company, few could have been as cutting as messages like this one:
“I can’t wait fir [sic] blockbuster streaming to come online.”

src:[ABCNews]

X.commerce: eBay Builds New Division To Woo Developers

subhransu mishra — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 04:07:54 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO -Ebay Inc is building a new division to woo developers and attract more merchants as the company tries to emulate the success of Apple Inc’s iOS platform in the e-commerce world.

Ebay’s main business is still its giant online marketplaces, which bring shoppers and sellers together. The company’s other big division is the payment business PayPal and it acquired GSI Commerce earlier this year to add a third division.

But a fourth business has emerged in recent months called X.commerce. The website for the division, X.com, revives a name from the early days of PayPal, when it merged a competing online payments business called X.com started by Elon Musk.

X.commerce is trying to persuade outside developers to create applications, or apps, for merchants looking to sell more online.The apps can be designed to work on eBay’s marketplaces. They may also include payment capabilities from PayPal and work with websites built on Magento, an open-source e-commerce company that eBay bought in June.

The more useful apps that developers build through X.commerce, the more likely merchants are to use eBay’s marketplaces, PayPal’s payment technology or GSI’s e-commerce services.

“The idea is to indirectly monetize eBay’s main assets PayPal, GSI and Marketplaces,” said Matthew Mengerink, the eBay veteran who runs the new division. “X.commerce is in a unique position. I don’t have to drive revenue, I have to drive traffic.”

Ebay has about 725,000 developers registered with its various developer programs and there are roughly 4,600 Magento apps active on X.com, up from 3,800 at the start of the year, according to Mengerink.

Omniture, a unit of Adobe Systems, Kenshoo, an online marketing software company, and Outright, which makes a financial-management product for small businesses, are among companies that have signed up to develop apps on X.com.

“They’re pulling an Apple, calling on the collective power of the developer community,” said Bill Smead of Smead Capital Management, which counts eBay as one of its largest holdings.

Apple iOS is the operating system for the iPhone and iPad. The company has a massive following of developers who churn out thousands of apps for those gadgets, making them much more useful for customers.

Mengerink reckons X.commerce can be more attractive for developers than iOS because merchants are willing to spend more money on useful e-commerce apps.

Mengerink said he will measure X.commerce’s success partly on how much money developers make selling apps.

“Apple’s iOS isn’t profitable for most developers,” he said. “On Magento, for every $1 we make, the developer makes $15.”

“If developers are making the money, you can’t shake the platform,” he added. “We believe we can create the largest ecosystem.”

Smaller merchants will not have to hire lots of in-house developers if a wide variety of e-commerce apps are available to buy and plug into their online stores, Mengerink explained.

The success of eBay’s new division will depend on how large and attractive the pool of end-users is to developers, according to Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at Red Monk, a technology industry analyst group that focuses on developer communities.

Other specialty online marketplaces have sprung up in recent years, such as Etsy, cutting into eBay’s dominant position, O’Grady noted.

“But eBay is still a major center of gravity,” he said. “For developers that’s still attractive.”

Another important ingredient for attracting third-party developers to a technology platform is ease of use.

Dan Shahin, a former comic book store owner who has developed an online storefront management system, went with a Google Inc payment system a few years ago, rather than PayPal.

That was because PayPal had several different application programing interfaces, or APIs.

APIs are sets of rules and specifications that help different software programs communicate with each other. PayPal’s APIs were “scattered around,” making it more difficult for Shahin to develop payment features to include in his storefront management system, he said.

Shahin told Mengerink about this and the eBay executive got to work fixing the problem.

“Third-party developers had to register for each API,” Mengerink said. “The X.commerce goal is to have one place to register

By

Microsoft CEO sees Windows as key to growth plan

subhransu mishra — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:51:05 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer assured analysts on Wednesday that Windows remains the software maker’s financial foundation, even though slowing personal computer sales are raising worries about the operating system’s ability to adapt to the new ways people and business are using technology.
“Windows is at the center of our ‘go-forward’ strategy,” Ballmer said during a presentation held in Anaheim, near Disneyland. “We feel very comfortable that this is a smart thing to do for our customers and the smart thing to do for our shareholders.”
The Associated Press monitored Microsoft’s analyst meeting via webcast.
Ballmer’s upbeat tone reflected a positive buzz surrounding Windows 8, a version due out next year that Microsoft is touting as the most radical makeover of its lucrative operating system since 1995. Windows 8 is being designed to run on devices that boot up faster and work on touch-screen computer tablets, as well as on PCs that depend on keyboards and mice.
The overhaul is Microsoft’s most aggressive response to the tablet craze that Apple Inc. set off with its release of the iPad in 2009.
Since then, Apple has sold more than 28 million iPads and analysts expect tens of millions more to be sold by the time Windows 8 is ready to be shipped. Microsoft isn’t saying when Windows 8 will go on sale, but analysts expect it to hit the market at some point between July and the 2012 holiday shopping season.
In the meantime, Microsoft is still promoting Windows 7, which has sold nearly 450 million copies since its 2009 release. It just recently surpassed Windows XP — a decade-old operating system — as the most widely used version of Microsoft’s operating systems, according to company estimates.
To build the excitement for what’s coming next, Microsoft provided its most extensive demonstration of Windows 8 so far Tuesday during a packed meeting with applications developers. It gave away 5,000 Samsung tablets running on a preliminary version of Windows 8 and also is allowing anyone to take the software for a test spin if they want to install it on their own machines. By Wednesday morning, Ballmer said more than 500,000 copies of Windows 8 had been downloaded.
“The initial reaction has been all we have been hoping for,” Ballmer told analysts.
That may be so, but Microsoft still appears to have work to do to win back investors who have become increasingly convinced that the company has lost its competitive edge as Google Inc. emerged as the Internet’s most powerful player and Apple Inc. shaped mobile computing trends with the iPhone and iPad tablet.
The Internet and mobile devices are now seen as more compelling franchises with greater future potential than the PC business that Microsoft has milked since the 1980s with Windows and its Office suite of software.
Since Google went public in August 2004, its stock has increased by more than six fold while Microsoft’s shares have dipped 2 percent. And since Apple released the first iPhone in June 2007, its stock has more than tripled while Microsoft’s shares have backtracked 11 percent. That shift enabled Apple to surpass Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technology company.
Microsoft shares closed Wednesday at $26.50, up 46 cents.
The lackluster performance of Microsoft’s stock has intensified the pressure on Ballmer, an exuberant leader who succeeded company co-founder Bill Gates as CEO in 2000. With Microsoft’s revenue growth slowing, Ballmer has curbed spending and even laid off workers to save money. The penny-pinching helped Microsoft boost its revenue to $774,000 per employee in its last fiscal year ending in June compared with $622,000 per worker in fiscal 2006, Microsoft boasted Wednesday.
Ballmer, 55, is betting Windows 8 will help Microsoft catch up in tablets and renew demand for PCs that can be operated with a touch of the finger as well as with the traditional navigation tools.
Microsoft is also scrambling to build a mobile version of Windows that will be more widely embraced in the smartphone market, where it has fallen behind Google’s Android operating system as well as Apple’s iPhone system. “I don’t love where we are now, but I am very optimistic of where we can be,” Ballmer said.
The company’s proposed $8.5 billion acquisition of Internet phone and video service Skype is expected to become a key part of Microsoft’s mobile strategy. Microsoft is hoping to gain regulatory approval to close the Skype deal before January.
After losing billions of dollars investing in Internet search technology during the past five years, Microsoft believes it’s in a better position to gain ground on Google — a name synonymous with looking things up online. Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been steadily picking up market share since its 2009 introduction but the gains have mostly come at the expense of Yahoo Inc.
Deciding to rather save money than fight Google, Yahoo last year began relying on Microsoft’s technology for most of its search results. That alliance has enabled Microsoft to process about 30 percent of the search requests made in the U.S. compared to about 65 percent at Google.
Yahoo has been struggling far more than Microsoft in recent years. The ongoing problems prompted Yahoo’s board to fire Carol Bartz, the CEO who negotiated the Internet search partnership with Microsoft.
Since Bartz’s unceremonious departure last week, there has been mounting speculation that Yahoo might put itself up for sale rather than hire a permanent CEO. Either way, Ballmer said Microsoft’s 10-year contract with Yahoo won’t be affected.

What Can Social Media Tell Us About American Society?

subhransu mishra — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:19:18 +0000

America is obsessed with its social media tools — more than half of all Americans have a social networking profile. But what does social media tell us about American society? Is our use of social tools a reflection of our interests and behaviors?

Social media strategy firm Hasai decided to find out. The result is an infographic that draws several conclusions about the nature of the average American: Apparently we Americans have a lot to say (48% of all bloggers are U.S.-based), love talking about television (77% have used social media to share their love of a show) and love video games (10% of all US-based web activity involves video games).

[More from Mashable: 5 Ways Museums Are Reaching Digital Audiences]

Oh, and apparently North Dakota and New Jersey are among the most social states in the union. Go figure.

Check out the infographic and let us know in the comments what you think social media says about American society.