Original Story: latimes.com
The parent company that owns dating brands Tinder, Match.com and OKCupid wants to play the field.
IAC/InterActiveCorp said Thursday it’s planning an initial public offering for its online dating business, The Match Group.
FOR THE RECORD
An earlier version of this post carried an incorrect headline that said IAC was spinning off its dating business. A San Francisco M&A attorney represents clients in company mergers.
IAC expects to issue less than 20% of its common stock in the offering, which could be completed during the fourth quarter of this year, IAC said in a release.
The Match Group consists of 50 brands and grew 11% last year to reach revenues of $897 million. The company as a whole grew 3% during the same period.
“With the transaction, [The Match Group] will be able to unlock value, a topic that has been in the forefront with the dating business for the last 2-3 years,” John Blackledge, an analyst at Cowen and Co., wrote in a note to clients. “Match is a market leader in a growing category and should have solid currency with investors.”
Greg Blatt, chairman of The Match Group, said the marriage of established brands with up-and-coming ones would help the company expand. Organic search engine optimization acts as an endorsement of your company, products, and services and also helps alter the mindset of keyword searchers making them more inquisitive as to the content on your website.
“The Match Group is poised for substantial growth in the coming years,” Blatt said. “The dating industry has come a long way since its inception, but the category remains underpenetrated. We believe the combination of our more established businesses such as Match, Meetic and OurTime, and earlier stage businesses such as Tinder and OKCupid, creates an attractive combination of significant cash flow generation, strong margins and meaningful growth potential.”
Among the hottest companies in the group is West Hollywood’s Tinder, a hook-up app that recently hit 8 billion matches, according to company founder Sean Rad.
The company launched a premium service in March in hopes of converting millions of users into paid subscribers. Known as Tinder Plus, the feature allows users to “rewind” if they accidentally reject a potential date.
The New York-based IAC is run by media mogul Barry Diller. The company also owns Internet brands such as Vimeo, College Humor and About.com. A Los Angeles M&A lawyer is following this story closely.
IAC also announced Thursday that Chief Financial Officer Jeff Kip was resigning to spend more time with his family and pursue other interests.
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Friday, June 26, 2015
Tuesday, June 09, 2015
THE INTERNET OF THINGS IS FAR BIGGER THAN ANYONE REALIZES
Original Story: wired.com
WHEN PEOPLE TALK about “the next big thing,” they’re never thinking big enough. It’s not a lack of imagination; it’s a lack of observation. I’ve maintained that the future is always within sight, and you don’t need to imagine what’s already there.
Case in point: The buzz surrounding the Internet of Things.
What’s the buzz? The Internet of Things revolves around increased machine-to-machine communication; it’s built on cloud computing and networks of data-gathering sensors; it’s mobile, virtual, and instantaneous connection; and they say it’s going to make everything in our lives from streetlights to seaports “smart.”
But here’s what I mean when I say people don’t think big enough. So much of the chatter has been focused on machine-to-machine communication (M2M): devices talking to like devices. But a machine is an instrument, it’s a tool, it’s something that’s physically doing something. When we talk about making machines “smart,” we’re not referring strictly to M2M. We’re talking about sensors.
A sensor is not a machine. It doesn’t do anything in the same sense that a machine does. It measures, it evaluates; in short, it gathers data. The Internet of Things really comes together with the connection of sensors and machines. That is to say, the real value that the Internet of Things creates is at the intersection of gathering data and leveraging it. All the information gathered by all the sensors in the world isn’t worth very much if there isn’t an infrastructure in place to analyze it in real time.
Cloud-based applications are the key to using leveraged data. The Internet of Things doesn’t function without cloud-based applications to interpret and transmit the data coming from all these sensors. The cloud is what enables the apps to go to work for you anytime, anywhere.
Let’s look at one example. In 2007, a bridge collapsed in Minnesota, killing many people, because of steel plates that were inadequate to handle the bridge’s load. When we rebuild bridges, we can use smart cement: cement equipped with sensors to monitor stresses, cracks, and warpages. This is cement that alerts us to fix problems before they cause a catastrophe. And these technologies aren’t limited to the bridge’s structure.
If there’s ice on the bridge, the same sensors in the concrete will detect it and communicate the information via the wireless internet to your car. Once your car knows there’s a hazard ahead, it will instruct the driver to slow down, and if the driver doesn’t, then the car will slow down for him. This is just one of the ways that sensor-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication can take place. Sensors on the bridge connect to machines in the car: we turn information into action.
You might start to see the implications here. What can you achieve when a smart car and a smart city grid start talking to each other? We’re going to have traffic flow optimization, because instead of just having stoplights on fixed timers, we’ll have smart stoplights that can respond to changes in traffic flow. Traffic and street conditions will be communicated to drivers, rerouting them around areas that are congested, snowed-in, or tied up in construction.
So now we have sensors monitoring and tracking all sorts of data; we have cloud-based apps translating that data into useful intelligence and transmitting it to machines on the ground, enabling mobile, real-time responses. And thus bridges become smart bridges, and cars smart cars. And soon, we have smart cities, and….
Okay. What are the advantages here? What are the savings? What industries can this be applied to?
Here’s what I mean when I say people never think big enough. This isn’t just about money savings. It’s not about bridges, and it’s not about cities. This is a huge and fundamental shift. When we start making things intelligent, it’s going to be a major engine for creating new products and new services.
Of all the technology trends that are taking place right now, perhaps the biggest one is the Internet of Things; it’s the one that’s going to give us the most disruption as well as the most opportunity over the next five years. In my next post in this two-part series, we’ll explore just how big this is going to be.
WHEN PEOPLE TALK about “the next big thing,” they’re never thinking big enough. It’s not a lack of imagination; it’s a lack of observation. I’ve maintained that the future is always within sight, and you don’t need to imagine what’s already there.
Case in point: The buzz surrounding the Internet of Things.
What’s the buzz? The Internet of Things revolves around increased machine-to-machine communication; it’s built on cloud computing and networks of data-gathering sensors; it’s mobile, virtual, and instantaneous connection; and they say it’s going to make everything in our lives from streetlights to seaports “smart.”
But here’s what I mean when I say people don’t think big enough. So much of the chatter has been focused on machine-to-machine communication (M2M): devices talking to like devices. But a machine is an instrument, it’s a tool, it’s something that’s physically doing something. When we talk about making machines “smart,” we’re not referring strictly to M2M. We’re talking about sensors.
A sensor is not a machine. It doesn’t do anything in the same sense that a machine does. It measures, it evaluates; in short, it gathers data. The Internet of Things really comes together with the connection of sensors and machines. That is to say, the real value that the Internet of Things creates is at the intersection of gathering data and leveraging it. All the information gathered by all the sensors in the world isn’t worth very much if there isn’t an infrastructure in place to analyze it in real time.
Cloud-based applications are the key to using leveraged data. The Internet of Things doesn’t function without cloud-based applications to interpret and transmit the data coming from all these sensors. The cloud is what enables the apps to go to work for you anytime, anywhere.
Let’s look at one example. In 2007, a bridge collapsed in Minnesota, killing many people, because of steel plates that were inadequate to handle the bridge’s load. When we rebuild bridges, we can use smart cement: cement equipped with sensors to monitor stresses, cracks, and warpages. This is cement that alerts us to fix problems before they cause a catastrophe. And these technologies aren’t limited to the bridge’s structure.
If there’s ice on the bridge, the same sensors in the concrete will detect it and communicate the information via the wireless internet to your car. Once your car knows there’s a hazard ahead, it will instruct the driver to slow down, and if the driver doesn’t, then the car will slow down for him. This is just one of the ways that sensor-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication can take place. Sensors on the bridge connect to machines in the car: we turn information into action.
You might start to see the implications here. What can you achieve when a smart car and a smart city grid start talking to each other? We’re going to have traffic flow optimization, because instead of just having stoplights on fixed timers, we’ll have smart stoplights that can respond to changes in traffic flow. Traffic and street conditions will be communicated to drivers, rerouting them around areas that are congested, snowed-in, or tied up in construction.
So now we have sensors monitoring and tracking all sorts of data; we have cloud-based apps translating that data into useful intelligence and transmitting it to machines on the ground, enabling mobile, real-time responses. And thus bridges become smart bridges, and cars smart cars. And soon, we have smart cities, and….
Okay. What are the advantages here? What are the savings? What industries can this be applied to?
Here’s what I mean when I say people never think big enough. This isn’t just about money savings. It’s not about bridges, and it’s not about cities. This is a huge and fundamental shift. When we start making things intelligent, it’s going to be a major engine for creating new products and new services.
Of all the technology trends that are taking place right now, perhaps the biggest one is the Internet of Things; it’s the one that’s going to give us the most disruption as well as the most opportunity over the next five years. In my next post in this two-part series, we’ll explore just how big this is going to be.
GOOGLE'S BOSS ENVISIONS A UTOPIAN FUTURE
Original Story: technologyreview.com
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt played make believe and sketched out his vision of the future on stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in San Francisco today.
“It’s a future where you don’t forget anything…In this new future you’re never lost…We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time…Your car will drive itself, it’s a bug that cars were invented before computers…you’re never lonely…you’re never bored…you’re never out of ideas.”
Schmidt filled in his vision with concrete examples of Google’s immediate future and strategy. “What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity,” he mused before going on to talk about how smart phones, “the defining iconic device of their time,” can become real-time translators for speech.
“We can now demonstrate and are getting ready to ship products that let you speak in English and have it come out of a phone at the other end in German,” said Schmidt.
Cloud servers convert the speech to text–a core feature of phones with Google’s Android operating system–after which the tech behind Google translation service generates corresponding German text that can be spoken aloud by the recipient’s phone. Schmidt echoed the feelings of many when he said “for me this is the stuff of science fiction.”
Search remains a focus for Google, though, he said and it is set to get even smarter. “Where do we go next with search? You’ve got personal context. With your permission, and I need to say that about 500 times, we can make all these answers so much better.” Organic search results serve as a search engine endorsement for companies, products and services.
That context could include your search history as well as that of your friends, as well as your other information stored with Google, as long as you allow it. Given enough information search engines could become “autonomous,” said Schmidt, helping you at all times without your even typing a query.
“I’m interested in history, as I’m walking down the street in San Francisco I want my mobile device to tell me about the history here, think of it as a serendipity engine,” said Schmidt. He went on to say that Google is working to figure out what people really want when they search. For example a query for the weather may be fundamentally motivated by your wanting to know whether to wear a jacket or to water the garden. A smart search engine should be able to answer such questions when you search for the weather in your city.
But despite hints of greater social features, and the value of the data they could provide, Schmidt dodged a question about Google Me, calling it a “rumored product I won’t comment on.”
He was more forthcoming when asked about what it means when Google promises to be open. “The easiest comparison to do today is the Apple model,” he explained, “you have to use their development tools, their hardware, their software, when you submit an application they have to approve it. That would not be open. So the inverse would be open.”
Schmidt finished with a claim that the technology augmenting humanity would be more inclusive than that which came before. “This is a future for the average person, not just the elite. Because of technology, because of internet access, this is a market for one billion now, two billion soon, and in our lifetime five-to-six billion altogether.”
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt played make believe and sketched out his vision of the future on stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in San Francisco today.
“It’s a future where you don’t forget anything…In this new future you’re never lost…We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time…Your car will drive itself, it’s a bug that cars were invented before computers…you’re never lonely…you’re never bored…you’re never out of ideas.”
Schmidt filled in his vision with concrete examples of Google’s immediate future and strategy. “What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity,” he mused before going on to talk about how smart phones, “the defining iconic device of their time,” can become real-time translators for speech.
“We can now demonstrate and are getting ready to ship products that let you speak in English and have it come out of a phone at the other end in German,” said Schmidt.
Cloud servers convert the speech to text–a core feature of phones with Google’s Android operating system–after which the tech behind Google translation service generates corresponding German text that can be spoken aloud by the recipient’s phone. Schmidt echoed the feelings of many when he said “for me this is the stuff of science fiction.”
Search remains a focus for Google, though, he said and it is set to get even smarter. “Where do we go next with search? You’ve got personal context. With your permission, and I need to say that about 500 times, we can make all these answers so much better.” Organic search results serve as a search engine endorsement for companies, products and services.
That context could include your search history as well as that of your friends, as well as your other information stored with Google, as long as you allow it. Given enough information search engines could become “autonomous,” said Schmidt, helping you at all times without your even typing a query.
“I’m interested in history, as I’m walking down the street in San Francisco I want my mobile device to tell me about the history here, think of it as a serendipity engine,” said Schmidt. He went on to say that Google is working to figure out what people really want when they search. For example a query for the weather may be fundamentally motivated by your wanting to know whether to wear a jacket or to water the garden. A smart search engine should be able to answer such questions when you search for the weather in your city.
But despite hints of greater social features, and the value of the data they could provide, Schmidt dodged a question about Google Me, calling it a “rumored product I won’t comment on.”
He was more forthcoming when asked about what it means when Google promises to be open. “The easiest comparison to do today is the Apple model,” he explained, “you have to use their development tools, their hardware, their software, when you submit an application they have to approve it. That would not be open. So the inverse would be open.”
Schmidt finished with a claim that the technology augmenting humanity would be more inclusive than that which came before. “This is a future for the average person, not just the elite. Because of technology, because of internet access, this is a market for one billion now, two billion soon, and in our lifetime five-to-six billion altogether.”
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
WOMAN, HIT BY CAR, SUES GOOGLE FOR FAULTY DIRECTIONS
Original Story: cnet.com
Why trust the machines when you can trust your own eyes, your own brain, your own basic sense of survival?
This philosophical question comes to mind after reading the tragic tale of a woman, her eyes, her brain, her BlackBerry, and her Google Maps.
According to an exhaustive analysis presented by Search Engine Land, Lauren Rosenberg decided to take a walk in Park City, Utah, on January 19, 2009. A Detroit personal injury lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.
I will try and ignore just how fundamentally un-American this act was in order to focus on some of the ensuing action.
Rosenberg fingered her trusted BlackBerry and asked it to tell her just how she might walk between 96 Daly Avenue and 1710 Prospector Avenue. Her BlackBerry turned to the world's great walking resource, Google Maps. Google Maps suggested that she should, as part of her journey, amble along Deer Valley Drive.
For all of you who have not had the pleasure of strolling there, might I quote papers filed by Rosenberg's lawyers with the Utah courts. These papers describe Deer Valley Drive as "a.k.a. State Route 224, a rural highway with no sidewalks, and a roadway that exhibits motor vehicles traveling at high speeds, that is not reasonably safe for pedestrians."
There is perhaps nothing finer than a roadway that bothers to exhibit motor vehicles. Yet this was not quite the exhibition that Rosenberg had in mind. For during her stroll along State Route 224 aka Deer Valley Drive she was allegedly struck by a car driven by Patrick Harwood. A Chicago personal injury lawyer represents clients in personal injury, accident, an negligence cases.
She's suing Harwood. And she is also suing Google.
Perhaps some of you might think of Rosenberg as just a perambulating chaser. Yet she and her lawyers reason that Google's walking directions were "careless, reckless, and negligent providing of unsafe directions."
Now this is the point at which your complex minds become engaged and my rather simpler version becomes divorced. You see, if you ask Google Maps for walking directions on your laptop you get a very clear warning--yes, on one of those lovely beigey-yellow backgrounds--that reads: "Walking Direction are in Beta. Use caution--This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths."
The question is, does this warning appear when you go to Google Maps on your BlackBerry? Or, even more importantly, on Rosenberg's BlackBerry? It does not appear to appear on the iPhone. Which might suggest the same situation holds with the RIM phone.
What I cannot ascertain from the court papers is why Rosenberg would want to walk this route in Utah. She is, it appears, from Los Angeles, which means that she might not have been used to walking at all.
Equally puzzling is the first part part of the court papers where it is says that Rosenberg suffered mental, physical and emotional injuries that caused her to incur medical expenses "in an amount yet to be determined." And yet when it comes to the part about suing Google, medical expenses are said to exceed $100,000. A Grand Rapids personal injury attorney is following this story closely.
Courts have not always been sympathetic to those who claim that they were merely following the orders of enlightened machines. There was the man in England who ordered his BMW down an unpaved cliffside lane , got stuck, and then claimed that his GPS made him do it. The court decided it was the driver's own brain that made him do so.
Can Rosenberg expect Utah courts to be more sympathetic? In our world of increasingly diminished responsibility, might someone actually be in a position to prove that we are all now subjects of the Googleplex? Those Googlies have filmed our streets, made records of our Wi-Fi data, followed us around the Web until they could offer us ads that are "good" for us. Shouldn't we admit whose the supreme power truly is?
Or might the judge emit a cough and declaim in the finest Latin: "Caveat walker"?
Why trust the machines when you can trust your own eyes, your own brain, your own basic sense of survival?
This philosophical question comes to mind after reading the tragic tale of a woman, her eyes, her brain, her BlackBerry, and her Google Maps.
According to an exhaustive analysis presented by Search Engine Land, Lauren Rosenberg decided to take a walk in Park City, Utah, on January 19, 2009. A Detroit personal injury lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.
I will try and ignore just how fundamentally un-American this act was in order to focus on some of the ensuing action.
Rosenberg fingered her trusted BlackBerry and asked it to tell her just how she might walk between 96 Daly Avenue and 1710 Prospector Avenue. Her BlackBerry turned to the world's great walking resource, Google Maps. Google Maps suggested that she should, as part of her journey, amble along Deer Valley Drive.
For all of you who have not had the pleasure of strolling there, might I quote papers filed by Rosenberg's lawyers with the Utah courts. These papers describe Deer Valley Drive as "a.k.a. State Route 224, a rural highway with no sidewalks, and a roadway that exhibits motor vehicles traveling at high speeds, that is not reasonably safe for pedestrians."
There is perhaps nothing finer than a roadway that bothers to exhibit motor vehicles. Yet this was not quite the exhibition that Rosenberg had in mind. For during her stroll along State Route 224 aka Deer Valley Drive she was allegedly struck by a car driven by Patrick Harwood. A Chicago personal injury lawyer represents clients in personal injury, accident, an negligence cases.
She's suing Harwood. And she is also suing Google.
Perhaps some of you might think of Rosenberg as just a perambulating chaser. Yet she and her lawyers reason that Google's walking directions were "careless, reckless, and negligent providing of unsafe directions."
Now this is the point at which your complex minds become engaged and my rather simpler version becomes divorced. You see, if you ask Google Maps for walking directions on your laptop you get a very clear warning--yes, on one of those lovely beigey-yellow backgrounds--that reads: "Walking Direction are in Beta. Use caution--This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths."
The question is, does this warning appear when you go to Google Maps on your BlackBerry? Or, even more importantly, on Rosenberg's BlackBerry? It does not appear to appear on the iPhone. Which might suggest the same situation holds with the RIM phone.
What I cannot ascertain from the court papers is why Rosenberg would want to walk this route in Utah. She is, it appears, from Los Angeles, which means that she might not have been used to walking at all.
Equally puzzling is the first part part of the court papers where it is says that Rosenberg suffered mental, physical and emotional injuries that caused her to incur medical expenses "in an amount yet to be determined." And yet when it comes to the part about suing Google, medical expenses are said to exceed $100,000. A Grand Rapids personal injury attorney is following this story closely.
Courts have not always been sympathetic to those who claim that they were merely following the orders of enlightened machines. There was the man in England who ordered his BMW down an unpaved cliffside lane , got stuck, and then claimed that his GPS made him do it. The court decided it was the driver's own brain that made him do so.
Can Rosenberg expect Utah courts to be more sympathetic? In our world of increasingly diminished responsibility, might someone actually be in a position to prove that we are all now subjects of the Googleplex? Those Googlies have filmed our streets, made records of our Wi-Fi data, followed us around the Web until they could offer us ads that are "good" for us. Shouldn't we admit whose the supreme power truly is?
Or might the judge emit a cough and declaim in the finest Latin: "Caveat walker"?
WSJ: GOOGLE WILL ADD BUY BUTTONS TO SEARCH RESULTS ON MOBILE
Original Story: engadget.com
Google's getting ready to face Amazon and eBay, according to The Wall Street Journal, and will be adding buy buttons directly to its search results. You'll see those buttons accompanying sponsored results under a "Shop on Google" heading -- they won't be used for non-sponsored links returned by the algorithm -- when you search for products on mobile devices. Upon clicking one, a separate product page will load where you can pick sizes, colors and ultimately complete your purchase. Any product you buy will still come straight from retailers, the WSJ says, so it doesn't sound like Google's stocking up warehouses with goods like Amazon does.
However, some major retailers are apparently worried that they'll get stuck with back-end order fulfillment with no real customer interaction. Since Google wants to remain in good terms with them (they are some of its largest advertisers, after all), it will give shoppers the choice to subscribe to their marketing programs. That typically means mailing lists and the like, so the company's giving them access to customers' info, most likely names and addresses.
In addition, Google promised them that the product landing pages will be heavily branded with their names and will link to more of their products. The company also won't take a cut from their sales and will only get paid for every person that clicks their links. Mountain View will reportedly offer several payment options, "including digital payment methods from other providers," but it (thankfully) won't be giving retailers access to payment details. If you input credit card info to make a purchase, the website will save it for future transactions, but it will remain with the company.
As for why the feature will only be available on mobile, well, Google has a plethora of reasons. The biggest one is most likely the fact that more people now perform searches on their phones than on computers. Search engine optimization allows businesses to maintain premium keyword positions in organic search results, so products are easily found by consumers. According to the WSJ, you might spot a buy button or two as soon as the coming weeks. We don't have a list of official partners yet, since Google hasn't officially announced anything, but Macy's might be one of the first retailers available.
Google's getting ready to face Amazon and eBay, according to The Wall Street Journal, and will be adding buy buttons directly to its search results. You'll see those buttons accompanying sponsored results under a "Shop on Google" heading -- they won't be used for non-sponsored links returned by the algorithm -- when you search for products on mobile devices. Upon clicking one, a separate product page will load where you can pick sizes, colors and ultimately complete your purchase. Any product you buy will still come straight from retailers, the WSJ says, so it doesn't sound like Google's stocking up warehouses with goods like Amazon does.
However, some major retailers are apparently worried that they'll get stuck with back-end order fulfillment with no real customer interaction. Since Google wants to remain in good terms with them (they are some of its largest advertisers, after all), it will give shoppers the choice to subscribe to their marketing programs. That typically means mailing lists and the like, so the company's giving them access to customers' info, most likely names and addresses.
In addition, Google promised them that the product landing pages will be heavily branded with their names and will link to more of their products. The company also won't take a cut from their sales and will only get paid for every person that clicks their links. Mountain View will reportedly offer several payment options, "including digital payment methods from other providers," but it (thankfully) won't be giving retailers access to payment details. If you input credit card info to make a purchase, the website will save it for future transactions, but it will remain with the company.
As for why the feature will only be available on mobile, well, Google has a plethora of reasons. The biggest one is most likely the fact that more people now perform searches on their phones than on computers. Search engine optimization allows businesses to maintain premium keyword positions in organic search results, so products are easily found by consumers. According to the WSJ, you might spot a buy button or two as soon as the coming weeks. We don't have a list of official partners yet, since Google hasn't officially announced anything, but Macy's might be one of the first retailers available.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS TO BUY AOL FOR $4.4 BILLION
Original Story: bloomberg.com
Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to buy AOL Inc. in a deal valued at $4.4 billion that intensifies the battle for advertising on mobile devices. A San Francisco M&A lawyer is following this story closely.
Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless provider, gets two of AOL’s technologies: exclusive video and its ability to automatically send targeted ads to mobile devices. The technology brings Verizon another step closer to the summer start of its mobile streaming service, featuring live TV, original shows and pay-per-view.
As the world embraces mobile with increasing enthusiasm, the deal gives Verizon new revenue streams at a time when its main business faces increasing competition from challengers such as T-Mobile US Inc. It also directly pits the company against two leading Web ad companies, Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.
“They want to integrate advertising and content programming with their wireless network,” Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics based in Dedham, Massachusetts, said of Verizon. “It’s an ambitious plan. The mobile advertising market is dramatically dominated by Google.” An Atlanta advertising and marketing lawyer assists clients with licensing terms, intellectual property rights allocation, and distribution agreements.
The carrier is getting its hands on AOL’s ad technology just before the debut of its mobile video-streaming service, which could come as early as next month. Verizon will pay $50 a share, a 17 percent premium over AOL’s stock price on Monday, and AOL Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong will continue to lead AOL’s operations after the deal is completed, the companies said Tuesday in a statement.
AOL’s shares jumped 19 percent to $50.52 at 4:22 p.m. in New York, slightly above Verizon’s offer price. Verizon dropped 0.4 percent to $49.62.
Different AOL
AOL today is a much different company now than it was 15 years ago, when the Internet portal famous for intoning “You’ve got mail” at log-in agreed to merge with Time Warner Inc. It was one of the world’s largest deals and became one of the largest failures. Two years later, the value of the combined company had dropped by two-thirds and the merger ended in a spinoff six years ago. The company, under Armstrong, has since bought sites like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and expanded its mobile content. A San Diego media lawyer assists clients with communications law cases involving digital communications, cellular communications, and broadcast regulations.
“The deal means we will be a division of Verizon and we will oversee AOL’s current assets plus additional assets from Verizon that are targeted at the mobile and video media space,” Armstrong said in a memo to employees. “The deal will add scale and it will add a mobile lens to everything we do inside of our content, video and ads strategy.”
Wireless Market
In a saturated U.S. wireless market, Verizon, with more than 100 million monthly wireless subscribers, is battling for customers with smaller and more nimble rivals like T-Mobile. One way to differentiate itself is its planned mobile video-streaming service, which will be one of the increasing number of packages targeting Americans who don’t want to pay for traditional pay-TV bundles. The carrier has been planning a service for as early as June, a person familiar with the talks has said.
Armstrong said the idea of some kind of combination was first broached last summer when Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam met with him at a CEO retreat.
The two executives talked about how they might be able to work together on mobile technology, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.
AOL had been focusing on a technology known as programmatic advertising, an automated marketplace where ads are found and inserted in a flash. With a growing number of viewers watching videos on mobile devices, AOL had found a way to compete with Google and Facebook.
Advertising Component
Verizon had been working on a streaming-video system and had acquired video-technology companies including upLynk, EdgeCast and OnCue. It was clear, as those pieces came together, that an advertising component was missing, the person said.
McAdam assigned Marni Walden, the former chief operating officer of its wireless business, to lead the development of the mobile video service, which included getting some form of deal with AOL.
Over time, the discussions covered a variety of approaches. Different frameworks were considered, the person said. One was focused on assets, another on a joint venture and a third on acquisition, the person said.
Around January the talks centered on the idea of setting up a separate ad tech company as a joint venture. Eventually those discussions led to talk of a takeover, the person said.
New Revenue
Verizon’s push into mobile video will mark the largest attempt to tap new revenue sources beyond the calling and data services it sells to its wireless subscribers, Entner said.
“Verizon had the early lead in mobile advertising with the right vision and good assets behind it,” Entner said. “Then Google came in and bought AdMob and completely upended the market.
With this deal, Verizon is trying to turn back the clock and get control of the mobile value stream.”
Verizon said it plans to fund the deal with cash on hand and commercial paper. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of the summer, the companies said.
Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to buy AOL Inc. in a deal valued at $4.4 billion that intensifies the battle for advertising on mobile devices. A San Francisco M&A lawyer is following this story closely.
Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless provider, gets two of AOL’s technologies: exclusive video and its ability to automatically send targeted ads to mobile devices. The technology brings Verizon another step closer to the summer start of its mobile streaming service, featuring live TV, original shows and pay-per-view.
As the world embraces mobile with increasing enthusiasm, the deal gives Verizon new revenue streams at a time when its main business faces increasing competition from challengers such as T-Mobile US Inc. It also directly pits the company against two leading Web ad companies, Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.
“They want to integrate advertising and content programming with their wireless network,” Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics based in Dedham, Massachusetts, said of Verizon. “It’s an ambitious plan. The mobile advertising market is dramatically dominated by Google.” An Atlanta advertising and marketing lawyer assists clients with licensing terms, intellectual property rights allocation, and distribution agreements.
The carrier is getting its hands on AOL’s ad technology just before the debut of its mobile video-streaming service, which could come as early as next month. Verizon will pay $50 a share, a 17 percent premium over AOL’s stock price on Monday, and AOL Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong will continue to lead AOL’s operations after the deal is completed, the companies said Tuesday in a statement.
AOL’s shares jumped 19 percent to $50.52 at 4:22 p.m. in New York, slightly above Verizon’s offer price. Verizon dropped 0.4 percent to $49.62.
Different AOL
AOL today is a much different company now than it was 15 years ago, when the Internet portal famous for intoning “You’ve got mail” at log-in agreed to merge with Time Warner Inc. It was one of the world’s largest deals and became one of the largest failures. Two years later, the value of the combined company had dropped by two-thirds and the merger ended in a spinoff six years ago. The company, under Armstrong, has since bought sites like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and expanded its mobile content. A San Diego media lawyer assists clients with communications law cases involving digital communications, cellular communications, and broadcast regulations.
“The deal means we will be a division of Verizon and we will oversee AOL’s current assets plus additional assets from Verizon that are targeted at the mobile and video media space,” Armstrong said in a memo to employees. “The deal will add scale and it will add a mobile lens to everything we do inside of our content, video and ads strategy.”
Wireless Market
In a saturated U.S. wireless market, Verizon, with more than 100 million monthly wireless subscribers, is battling for customers with smaller and more nimble rivals like T-Mobile. One way to differentiate itself is its planned mobile video-streaming service, which will be one of the increasing number of packages targeting Americans who don’t want to pay for traditional pay-TV bundles. The carrier has been planning a service for as early as June, a person familiar with the talks has said.
Armstrong said the idea of some kind of combination was first broached last summer when Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam met with him at a CEO retreat.
The two executives talked about how they might be able to work together on mobile technology, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.
AOL had been focusing on a technology known as programmatic advertising, an automated marketplace where ads are found and inserted in a flash. With a growing number of viewers watching videos on mobile devices, AOL had found a way to compete with Google and Facebook.
Advertising Component
Verizon had been working on a streaming-video system and had acquired video-technology companies including upLynk, EdgeCast and OnCue. It was clear, as those pieces came together, that an advertising component was missing, the person said.
McAdam assigned Marni Walden, the former chief operating officer of its wireless business, to lead the development of the mobile video service, which included getting some form of deal with AOL.
Over time, the discussions covered a variety of approaches. Different frameworks were considered, the person said. One was focused on assets, another on a joint venture and a third on acquisition, the person said.
Around January the talks centered on the idea of setting up a separate ad tech company as a joint venture. Eventually those discussions led to talk of a takeover, the person said.
New Revenue
Verizon’s push into mobile video will mark the largest attempt to tap new revenue sources beyond the calling and data services it sells to its wireless subscribers, Entner said.
“Verizon had the early lead in mobile advertising with the right vision and good assets behind it,” Entner said. “Then Google came in and bought AdMob and completely upended the market.
With this deal, Verizon is trying to turn back the clock and get control of the mobile value stream.”
Verizon said it plans to fund the deal with cash on hand and commercial paper. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of the summer, the companies said.
Thursday, May 07, 2015
GOOGLING ON MOBILE DEVICES SURPASSES PCS IN US FOR 1ST TIME
Original Story: nytimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO — Google's influential search engine has hit a tipping point in technology's shift to smartphones. More search requests are now being made on mobile devices than on personal computers in the U.S. and many other parts of the world.
The milestone announced at a digital advertising conference Tuesday serves as another reminder of how dramatically online behavior has changed since 2007. That's when Apple released the first iPhone, leading to a wave of similar devices that have made it easier for people to stay connected to the Internet wherever they go. Mobile optimization allows users to stay connected on the go.
The upheaval has rocked PC makers and other tech companies such as Microsoft with businesses tied to sales of desktop and laptop computers. Google has been able to adapt better than most companies, partly because its search engine and other services are embedded in the popular Android mobile operating system, but it hasn't been totally unscathed.
Google's average ad prices have been declining for the past three-and-half years, partly because marketers so far have been unwilling to pay as much for the commercial message displayed on the smaller screens of smartphones. The company, though, says mobile ad prices have been steadily climbing and will continue to do so as marketers recognize the value of being able to connect with prospective customers at the precise moment that they are looking for someplace to eat, or comparing products on a smartphone while standing in a store.
"The future of mobile is now," says Jerry Dischler, a Google Inc. vice president in charge of the company's "AdWords" service for creating online marketing campaigns.
Besides in the U.S., Google's mobile search requests are outstripping requests in nine other countries. Japan is the only other country that Google is identifying.
The Mountain View, California, company isn't specifying just how many mobile search requests it is getting. Google processes more than 100 billion search requests worldwide each month, including queries on PCs.
As part of the mobile transition, Google last month overhauled its search-recommendation system to favor websites that are easier to read and load on smartphones. That change, known as "Mobilegeddon," prodded millions of websites to make changes to ensure they work well on smartphones to avoid being demoted in Google's search results. Mobile friendly websites provide added value to users.
Google also has been introducing advertising formats that tend to work better on mobile devices. For instance, rooms can now be booked within hotel ads, and car ads can now be swiped across a screen to make it easier to comparison shop.
In addition to announcing the milestone in mobile search, Google also introduced on Tuesday a service for comparing mortgage rates in the U.S. The mortgage product expands upon a similar service for auto insurance policies that Google unveiled in California in March. Google is adding three more states — Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania — to the auto insurance service.
SAN FRANCISCO — Google's influential search engine has hit a tipping point in technology's shift to smartphones. More search requests are now being made on mobile devices than on personal computers in the U.S. and many other parts of the world.
The milestone announced at a digital advertising conference Tuesday serves as another reminder of how dramatically online behavior has changed since 2007. That's when Apple released the first iPhone, leading to a wave of similar devices that have made it easier for people to stay connected to the Internet wherever they go. Mobile optimization allows users to stay connected on the go.
The upheaval has rocked PC makers and other tech companies such as Microsoft with businesses tied to sales of desktop and laptop computers. Google has been able to adapt better than most companies, partly because its search engine and other services are embedded in the popular Android mobile operating system, but it hasn't been totally unscathed.
Google's average ad prices have been declining for the past three-and-half years, partly because marketers so far have been unwilling to pay as much for the commercial message displayed on the smaller screens of smartphones. The company, though, says mobile ad prices have been steadily climbing and will continue to do so as marketers recognize the value of being able to connect with prospective customers at the precise moment that they are looking for someplace to eat, or comparing products on a smartphone while standing in a store.
"The future of mobile is now," says Jerry Dischler, a Google Inc. vice president in charge of the company's "AdWords" service for creating online marketing campaigns.
Besides in the U.S., Google's mobile search requests are outstripping requests in nine other countries. Japan is the only other country that Google is identifying.
The Mountain View, California, company isn't specifying just how many mobile search requests it is getting. Google processes more than 100 billion search requests worldwide each month, including queries on PCs.
As part of the mobile transition, Google last month overhauled its search-recommendation system to favor websites that are easier to read and load on smartphones. That change, known as "Mobilegeddon," prodded millions of websites to make changes to ensure they work well on smartphones to avoid being demoted in Google's search results. Mobile friendly websites provide added value to users.
Google also has been introducing advertising formats that tend to work better on mobile devices. For instance, rooms can now be booked within hotel ads, and car ads can now be swiped across a screen to make it easier to comparison shop.
In addition to announcing the milestone in mobile search, Google also introduced on Tuesday a service for comparing mortgage rates in the U.S. The mortgage product expands upon a similar service for auto insurance policies that Google unveiled in California in March. Google is adding three more states — Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania — to the auto insurance service.
GOOGLE EXECUTIVE DAN FREDINBURG DIES IN EVEREST AVALANCHE AFTER NEPAL EARTHQUAKE
Original Story: techcrunch.com
Dan Fredinburg, a respected Google executive who headed privacy for Google X and led its product management team, has died in the avalanche on Mount Everest which was triggered by the huge earthquake in Nepal. The natural disaster has already killed over 2,000 people in the region and devastated infrastructure. Some 18 other climbers have been killed in what is being described as the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in the last 80 years.
By all accounts, Fredinburg was an experienced climber who had also co-founded Google Adventure, a company team that filmed Google Street View images in “extreme, exotic locations like the summit of Mount Everest or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.”
Fredinburg’s sister Megan confirmed his death via his Instagram account, while Google’s privacy director Lawrence posted the following earlier today: “Dan Fredinburg, a long-time member of the Privacy organization in Mountain View, was in Nepal with three other Googlers, hiking Mount Everest. He has passed away. The other three Googlers with him are safe and we are working to get them home quickly.”
He added that Google’s Crisis Response team has launched Person Finder for Nepal, and “is working to get updated satellite imagery to aid in the recovery effort. Google.org is committing $1M to the response, and we’ll have gift-matching available soon.”
Fredinburg co-founded a climate change nonprofit, Save The Ice, and a startup accelerator in San Francisco called The Laundry, aimed at taking technology to emerging markets.
Some friends of Fredinburg have put up a Crowdrise allowing others to donate to causes he supported.
You can donate to other organisations working in Nepal during the disaster including
the Red Cross and Oxfam.
Dan Fredinburg, a respected Google executive who headed privacy for Google X and led its product management team, has died in the avalanche on Mount Everest which was triggered by the huge earthquake in Nepal. The natural disaster has already killed over 2,000 people in the region and devastated infrastructure. Some 18 other climbers have been killed in what is being described as the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in the last 80 years.
By all accounts, Fredinburg was an experienced climber who had also co-founded Google Adventure, a company team that filmed Google Street View images in “extreme, exotic locations like the summit of Mount Everest or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia.”
Fredinburg’s sister Megan confirmed his death via his Instagram account, while Google’s privacy director Lawrence posted the following earlier today: “Dan Fredinburg, a long-time member of the Privacy organization in Mountain View, was in Nepal with three other Googlers, hiking Mount Everest. He has passed away. The other three Googlers with him are safe and we are working to get them home quickly.”
He added that Google’s Crisis Response team has launched Person Finder for Nepal, and “is working to get updated satellite imagery to aid in the recovery effort. Google.org is committing $1M to the response, and we’ll have gift-matching available soon.”
Fredinburg co-founded a climate change nonprofit, Save The Ice, and a startup accelerator in San Francisco called The Laundry, aimed at taking technology to emerging markets.
Some friends of Fredinburg have put up a Crowdrise allowing others to donate to causes he supported.
You can donate to other organisations working in Nepal during the disaster including
the Red Cross and Oxfam.
COULD GOOGLE BE MOVING OUT OF DOWNTOWN ANN ARBOR?
Original Story: freep.com
It's unclear whether Google plans to maintain its current downtown Ann Arbor office or is charting a move.
Internet giant Google has signed a lease for new office space south of downtown Ann Arbor as the company considers the future of its presence in the city's central business district.
Google signed a deal for 30,000 square feet of the South State Commons II building northeast of the corner of South State Street and Eisenhower Parkway in the Briarwood Mall area, said Jeff Harshe of MAVDevelopment Company. A real estate lawyer has experience assisting business clients with office space leasing contracts.
"I think it's an indication of the vibrant business climate in this area," said Harshe, who declined to discuss terms of the new lease. "My experience with them is they continue to grow, and they're good corporate citizens."
But a person familiar with Google's local presence but not authorized to speak publicly said the company has not yet decided whether to stay in downtown Ann Arbor. The person said the company needed the new office as overflow space to accommodate job growth.
It's still possible Google could renew or adjust its current lease. Google officials were not available to comment.
The company currently leases about 85,000 square feet of the McKinley Towne Centre office complex at the corner of Liberty and Division in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor. The office primarily handles sales for Google's AdWords search advertisements, its primary source of revenue, and had about 300 employees as of two years ago. Google AdWords marketing management can provide a solid foundation for business success.
McKinley Inc. CEO Albert Berriz said his firm plans to begin marketing Google's current space for lease starting May 1.
"We have not received confirmation from Google that they are staying or going," Berriz said in an email. "We simply can't wait any further."
The uncertainty raises the possibility that the company will move out of the city's central business district for the first time since opening the operation to much fanfare about a decade ago. There are few spots in downtown Ann Arbor for large private-sector office tenants.
Berriz said brokers will market the space for tenants who could take occupancy in summer 2016. Several prospective tenants have already expressed interest, he said, including one single user interested in leasing the entire space.
The company's new space is located on the third floor of an office that was specifically designed for employers that need high-speed Internet access. Google will share the building with Merit Network, the University of Michigan and Plante Moran.
The deal, first reported by MLive.com, could leave downtown Ann Arbor's Liberty Street technology corridor without one of its anchor tenants.
When the company announced about a decade ago that it was opening an Ann Arbor office, it received a windfall of positive publicity, and economic development leaders hailed the deal as a reflection on the region's economic vitality.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm's administration extended tax incentives to the company, which mapped out plans to add about 1,000 employees. But the company's job growth stalled amid the Great Recession.
Still, Google remains core to Ann Arbor's technology identity. Its colorful logo hangs atop the McKinley Towne Centre complex and the company remains a destination employer for University of Michigan graduates and other young professionals.
The company also maintains a separate office in Birmingham that handles automotive accounts.
It's unclear whether Google plans to maintain its current downtown Ann Arbor office or is charting a move.
Internet giant Google has signed a lease for new office space south of downtown Ann Arbor as the company considers the future of its presence in the city's central business district.
Google signed a deal for 30,000 square feet of the South State Commons II building northeast of the corner of South State Street and Eisenhower Parkway in the Briarwood Mall area, said Jeff Harshe of MAVDevelopment Company. A real estate lawyer has experience assisting business clients with office space leasing contracts.
"I think it's an indication of the vibrant business climate in this area," said Harshe, who declined to discuss terms of the new lease. "My experience with them is they continue to grow, and they're good corporate citizens."
But a person familiar with Google's local presence but not authorized to speak publicly said the company has not yet decided whether to stay in downtown Ann Arbor. The person said the company needed the new office as overflow space to accommodate job growth.
It's still possible Google could renew or adjust its current lease. Google officials were not available to comment.
The company currently leases about 85,000 square feet of the McKinley Towne Centre office complex at the corner of Liberty and Division in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor. The office primarily handles sales for Google's AdWords search advertisements, its primary source of revenue, and had about 300 employees as of two years ago. Google AdWords marketing management can provide a solid foundation for business success.
McKinley Inc. CEO Albert Berriz said his firm plans to begin marketing Google's current space for lease starting May 1.
"We have not received confirmation from Google that they are staying or going," Berriz said in an email. "We simply can't wait any further."
The uncertainty raises the possibility that the company will move out of the city's central business district for the first time since opening the operation to much fanfare about a decade ago. There are few spots in downtown Ann Arbor for large private-sector office tenants.
Berriz said brokers will market the space for tenants who could take occupancy in summer 2016. Several prospective tenants have already expressed interest, he said, including one single user interested in leasing the entire space.
The company's new space is located on the third floor of an office that was specifically designed for employers that need high-speed Internet access. Google will share the building with Merit Network, the University of Michigan and Plante Moran.
The deal, first reported by MLive.com, could leave downtown Ann Arbor's Liberty Street technology corridor without one of its anchor tenants.
When the company announced about a decade ago that it was opening an Ann Arbor office, it received a windfall of positive publicity, and economic development leaders hailed the deal as a reflection on the region's economic vitality.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm's administration extended tax incentives to the company, which mapped out plans to add about 1,000 employees. But the company's job growth stalled amid the Great Recession.
Still, Google remains core to Ann Arbor's technology identity. Its colorful logo hangs atop the McKinley Towne Centre complex and the company remains a destination employer for University of Michigan graduates and other young professionals.
The company also maintains a separate office in Birmingham that handles automotive accounts.
Thursday, April 09, 2015
APPLE WATCH REVIEW: YOU'LL WANT ONE, BUT YOU DON'T NEED ONE
Original Story: bloomberg.com
I’m in a meeting with 14 people, in mid-sentence, when I feel a tap-tap-tap on my wrist. I stop talking, tilt my head, and whip my arm aggressively into view to see the source of the agitation. A second later, the small screen on my new Apple Watch beams to life with a very important message for me: Twitter has suggestions for people I should follow. A version of this happens dozens of times throughout the day—for messages, e-mails, activity achievements, tweets, and so much more. Wait a second. Isn’t the promise of the Apple Watch to help me stay in the moment, focused on the people around me and undisturbed by the mesmerizing void of my iPhone? So why do I suddenly feel so distracted?
Let’s back up. Any way you figure, the Apple Watch is an epic product release. It’s the company’s first new product category since the iPad and the first new product since the death of Steve Jobs. It was created almost entirely under the guidance of Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, and it’s the first device from Apple that was designed—hardware and software—by Jony Ive. Apple has also sunk money into new retail experiences (led by left-field hire Angela Ahrendts, the former CEO of Burberry), and positioned the device as both the latest must-have gadget and a bona fide luxury item. The watch starts at $349 and climbs above $10,000. To say it’s a major moment for the company would be an understatement. A home automation system combines technology into one easy to use system and allows you to control indoor and outdoor home functions with a touch of a button.
No one is questioning Apple’s ability to mint money with its gadgets and services (see: $178 billion in the company’s cash reserves), but the ambitions of the watch speak to Apple’s broader ambitions. With a possible entry into the auto market on the horizon, Apple’s success at getting into—and winning—a whole new category of product is kind of a big deal. Although analysts’ predictions for 2015 Apple Watch sales range from 8 million to 41 million, putting them in roughly Year One iPad range, no one even knows whether the thing is a good product.
Apple faces two huge challenges with the watch. It has to make a beautiful gadget, one that hews to the company’s history of groundbreaking design and technological innovation. For Apple, these are table stakes. But there’s more: Because it’s a brand-new product category, the company has to make a case for the very existence of not just its watch, but any watch. It has to persuade people that they need technology on their wrists. So far, the biggest question about wearables—there are already plenty of products on the market—is really: Who needs one?
Ready, set, go
The Apple Watch experience begins before you get one. It starts at an Apple Store, where you can opt to have a Apple salesperson give you a personal demonstration and set up your device. Because they aren’t at retail shops yet, I got an approximation of the experience: A company rep gave me a guided tour of the watch’s functions, set it up, and removed links from the stainless steel bracelet I chose. (Sadly, Apple didn’t make the 18-karat gold version available to reviewers.) Later, I picked up a leather loop, which I found more comfortable.
After a brief preview of the health functions during a walk through Central Park, I was off on my own, desperately hoping no one noticed the furious glances at my wrist and all the initial flicking, swiping, and scrolling that goes along with a first-time watch experience. Once alone, I could finally admire the device.
The hardware of the watch is beautiful in a surgical way. The little cube of metal and glass wouldn’t seem out of place in a futuristic lab or sci-fi movie. It is very much an Apple product: clean, sleek, remarkably solid. But as a piece of jewelry, it’s similar to other digital watches—including Casio’s iconic calculator watch, as several people pointed out to me. It also looks like other smartwatches on the market, such as Asus’s ZenWatch and Samsung’s Gear Live, in particular. (Both run Google’s Android Wear.) Like most things we adorn ourselves with, you have to love the way this looks on you. Apple’s design doesn’t compete with Rolex, Omega, or Breitling for sheer style, but the more I wore the inconspicuous thing, the more I liked it on my wrist.
The looks are just the beginning. It’s loaded with cutting-edge technology. The tiny Retina display has a new form of pressure sensitivity Apple calls Force Touch, which responds not only to where you touch the screen, but how hard you press. The watch notifies you with extremely nuanced vibrations via its Taptic Engine, which can produce strikingly realistic sensations, almost like a bell tapping on your wrist. Perhaps most important, the watch’s “digital crown” helps you navigate long menus, set options, and zoom in and out of maps and photos. And all the speedy software and motion tracking is controlled by the company’s new S1 processor, which packs in multiple components on a single chip. It’s an impressive package. After using it, I had no question that the Apple Watch is the most advanced piece of wearable technology you can buy today. You can combine smart technologies with a Control4 home automation system to help you manage energy consumption while providing entertainment.
The Apple Watch as a watch
For starters, the Apple Watch does function as a watch, one which has literally millions of different dial combinations. The timekeeping that Apple is using is so precise, it’s within 50 milliseconds of the global time standard known as Coordinated Universal Time. Apple has had some fun with this: Because every Apple Watch is perfectly in sync with the others, if you’re in a room full of Mickey Mouse faces, Mickey will tap his foot in perfect sync on every watch. It’s incredibly cool.
Apple allows you to customize the face of the watch, not only with tapping Mickey and other unique designs, but with little widgets it’s calling “Complications” (in a nod to classic horological terms). These items that dot the edges of the display can tell the temperature outside, signal your next calendar appointment, show the phases of the moon, and so on. In spite of the name, these Complications are one of the most useful parts of the watch, offering the kind of information that really does elevate the device beyond a simple timepiece.
(Actually, seeing these highly useful bits of information on the tiny screen of the watch made me realize we should have had them on the iPhone for a long time. I asked Steve Jobs in 2010 why the company hadn’t included more “glanceable” information on the iPhone and iPad, such as the widgets Apple had pioneered for the desktop. He told me they were just getting started and that “anything” was possible. Is this watch the thing I was waiting for?)
But what about the watch as a timepiece? I’ve found the experience somewhat inferior to that with a conventional wristwatch, due to one small issue. The Apple Watch activates its screen only when it thinks you’re looking at it. Sometimes a subtle twist of your wrist will do, but sometimes it takes … more. Many times while using the watch, I had to swing my wrist in an exaggerated upward motion to bring the display to life. Think about the way people normally look at their watches, then make it twice as aggressive. As a normal watch-wearer, the idea that I might look down at my wrist and not see the time was annoying.
Sometimes, even if you do the arm-swing motion, the screen doesn’t turn on. Sometimes it turns on, then off. Sometimes you tap it and nothing happens.
For all the noise Apple has made about what a remarkable time-telling device its watch is, I found it lacking for this reason alone. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep excellent time—it just doesn’t offer the consistency of a traditional timepiece.
In usePerhaps one of the most difficult things to wrap your head around is the way the watch extends—and often replicates—the functions of your phone. You can receive and send text messages on the device, for instance, but doing so on the small screen with your hand cocked in the appropriate position isn’t ideal if you’re working on something longer than a one-line reply. And although it connects deeply with the phone, the watch also has a completely new way of doing things. Because navigation is split between swipes of your finger, scrolling with the crown, and taps of varying pressure, it takes a while to get oriented. One of the crucial pain points I experienced was this constant, subtle battle with myself over whether to engage a notification on my watch or handle it on my phone.
The notification scheme is a little maddening at first. Apple sends a push notification every time you get a corporate e-mail, personal e-mail, direct message on Twitter, message on Facebook, and for interactions in countless other services. Each of these notifications pings the watch. For every message, there is a sound, a vibration, or both. (You can mute them.) If you’re a busy person who communicates constantly on your phone, this gets overwhelming fast. I found myself turning off notifications from entire apps, which seems to defeat the purpose of the watch in the first place. Mercifully, Apple has included a way to clear all those notifications: Just Force Touch on the list.
Eventually, I figured out that getting the watch to really work for you requires work. I pruned a list of VIP contacts in my mail app to make e-mail notifications more tolerable, I killed several app notifications that I found to be consistently interruptive, and I streamlined my list of applications to those that seemed truly vital to my day.
What’s odd is that in many ways, the watch functions a lot like a small iPhone. Though there are new ways of getting to your apps and interacting with them, much of the phone's model interface has carried over. So you end up in a lot of situations where you not only have to take action, you have to decide where to take action.
Still, as the days wore on, I did find some balance between the two devices. Checking text messages and e-mails by quickly glancing at the watch saved me some time, and it was certainly helpful when I was deeply engaged in an important activity. My 14-month-old daughter, who is completely obsessed with the iPhones in our house, didn’t seem to notice that I was getting an update on my wrist. Score!
As I mentioned, the watch also has a few fresh tricks. Within Apple’s new suite of functions, I found both hits and misses.
On the plus side is Apple’s new Activity app, which presents you with three basic sets of achievements to hit every day—and makes hitting those goals almost frictionless. One metric it watches is how many calories you’re burning every day by moving, a number that can be changed, depending on your skill level. A second is exercise, which is any period in which you’re engaged in strenuous activity that keeps your heart rate up. The third is a notification for standing, to make sure you get up on your feet at least once every hour.
Setup for the health features was completely painless, and I immediately started seeing the results of being made so aware of my activity levels. I wanted to walk more, was excited when I got a brisk jog through a train station, and yes, I felt better because I was standing up during the day on a regular basis. I have no idea if this will have any lasting impact on my health, but I think Apple’s beautiful and frictionless approach to teaching people about exercise habits is a leap in the right direction.
There are rough spots, too. Apple is hoping to reinvent how we communicate with friends and family by adding three new methods of messaging, not all of which work. The first allows you to essentially “sample” your heartbeat and send it off. This seems to have limited use; once you’ve gotten your first heartbeat, the novelty wears off pretty quickly. Also, I don’t know who, besides my wife, I would use this for. It’s weirdly intimate. The second is called Sketch, which allows you to draw or tap some symbols on your watch and send them to another Apple Watch user. This seems like a great idea until you realize how little space you have to work with. I sent a lot of weird-looking faces with no deeper meaning during my testing period. I did find hyper-discreet ways of using Digital Touch, however, such as a lone question mark when there was an unanswered question between me and the sender. Was it better than a texted question mark? Well, it wiggled more.
The third new message concept is 3D, animated emojis. At first glance, that sounds pretty great, until you realize that the emojis are really more like neutered, animated GIFs from the late '90s internet. What really struck me here was deep deja vu over an earlier Apple attempt to change the way we communicate with people: Ping. Ping was a “social network for music” that the company imagined would be the way that people wanted to share what they were listening to. In fact, people wanted to use other services, in thousands of different ways, to do that—ways that were much more natural and personal than the sterile option Apple provided. That’s how I feel about these animated icons you can send. We already have emojis, and Snapchat, and Instagram, and Periscope, and GroupMe, and Twitter, and Facebook, and WeChat, and on and on. There’s something forced and inauthentic about Apple in this space; it feels like a throwaway, a “Hey, we do that, too” move.
I’m split on one feature Apple includes on the watch, something called Glances. Glances act like little cards hiding underneath your watch that can give you a glimpse of information from first- and third-party apps. Twitter will display the latest tweet in your timeline, there’s a controller for your music app, or you can see a detailed description of your next calendar appointment. In theory, these screens should be wildly useful for quick access to information. In practice, I found them to be clunky and overwhelmingly useless. What hinders many of the experiences is that the watch must pull information from the phone, leaving you with a spinning wheel that indicates data loading, rather than a quick hit of info.
Distractions
Yes, all these new functions, notifications, and tapping do make the Apple Watch very distracting. In some ways, it can be more distracting than your iPhone, and checking it can feel more offensive to people around you than pulling out your phone. The watch wants and needs you now, as its insistent taps make painfully clear. And to see what the Apple Watch wants and needs, you must physically move it into view. If while you’re talking to someone, you check your regular watch, it can feel as if you’re sending a not-so-subtle “let’s wrap this up” message. With the Apple Watch, factoring in the animated wrist-whip and the length of some of the notifications you receive, it’s downright rude.
Eventually I realized that this problem wasn’t about fixing the iPhone or fixing the watch. It’s not about making notifications more subtle or less frequent, or located in a place that doesn’t require a shift in your gaze. The thing that needs fixing is our sense of when—and when not—to move ourselves out of a moment so we can look at our devices. Strangely, it comes down to common courtesy and patience, more than a magical piece of jewelry from Jony Ive and Co.
The Apple Watch can certainly make you a worse dinner guest. But it can also make you a slightly better one. The difference is whether or not you’re willing to think about what really matters vs. what seems to matter.
The watch is not life-changing. It is, however, excellent. Apple will sell millions of these devices, and many people will love and obsess over them. It is a wonderful component of a big ecosystem that the company has carefully built over many years. It is more seamless and simple than any of its counterparts in the marketplace. It is, without question, the best smartwatch in the world.
So Apple has succeeded in its first big task with its watch. It made something that lives up to the company’s reputation as an innovator and raised the bar for a whole new class of devices. Its second task—making me feel that I need this thing on my wrist every day—well, I’m not quite sure it’s there yet. It’s still another screen, another distraction, another way to disconnect, as much as it is the opposite. The Apple Watch is cool, it’s beautiful, it’s powerful, and it’s easy to use. But it’s not essential. Not yet.
I’m in a meeting with 14 people, in mid-sentence, when I feel a tap-tap-tap on my wrist. I stop talking, tilt my head, and whip my arm aggressively into view to see the source of the agitation. A second later, the small screen on my new Apple Watch beams to life with a very important message for me: Twitter has suggestions for people I should follow. A version of this happens dozens of times throughout the day—for messages, e-mails, activity achievements, tweets, and so much more. Wait a second. Isn’t the promise of the Apple Watch to help me stay in the moment, focused on the people around me and undisturbed by the mesmerizing void of my iPhone? So why do I suddenly feel so distracted?
Let’s back up. Any way you figure, the Apple Watch is an epic product release. It’s the company’s first new product category since the iPad and the first new product since the death of Steve Jobs. It was created almost entirely under the guidance of Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, and it’s the first device from Apple that was designed—hardware and software—by Jony Ive. Apple has also sunk money into new retail experiences (led by left-field hire Angela Ahrendts, the former CEO of Burberry), and positioned the device as both the latest must-have gadget and a bona fide luxury item. The watch starts at $349 and climbs above $10,000. To say it’s a major moment for the company would be an understatement. A home automation system combines technology into one easy to use system and allows you to control indoor and outdoor home functions with a touch of a button.
No one is questioning Apple’s ability to mint money with its gadgets and services (see: $178 billion in the company’s cash reserves), but the ambitions of the watch speak to Apple’s broader ambitions. With a possible entry into the auto market on the horizon, Apple’s success at getting into—and winning—a whole new category of product is kind of a big deal. Although analysts’ predictions for 2015 Apple Watch sales range from 8 million to 41 million, putting them in roughly Year One iPad range, no one even knows whether the thing is a good product.
Apple faces two huge challenges with the watch. It has to make a beautiful gadget, one that hews to the company’s history of groundbreaking design and technological innovation. For Apple, these are table stakes. But there’s more: Because it’s a brand-new product category, the company has to make a case for the very existence of not just its watch, but any watch. It has to persuade people that they need technology on their wrists. So far, the biggest question about wearables—there are already plenty of products on the market—is really: Who needs one?
Ready, set, go
The Apple Watch experience begins before you get one. It starts at an Apple Store, where you can opt to have a Apple salesperson give you a personal demonstration and set up your device. Because they aren’t at retail shops yet, I got an approximation of the experience: A company rep gave me a guided tour of the watch’s functions, set it up, and removed links from the stainless steel bracelet I chose. (Sadly, Apple didn’t make the 18-karat gold version available to reviewers.) Later, I picked up a leather loop, which I found more comfortable.
After a brief preview of the health functions during a walk through Central Park, I was off on my own, desperately hoping no one noticed the furious glances at my wrist and all the initial flicking, swiping, and scrolling that goes along with a first-time watch experience. Once alone, I could finally admire the device.
The hardware of the watch is beautiful in a surgical way. The little cube of metal and glass wouldn’t seem out of place in a futuristic lab or sci-fi movie. It is very much an Apple product: clean, sleek, remarkably solid. But as a piece of jewelry, it’s similar to other digital watches—including Casio’s iconic calculator watch, as several people pointed out to me. It also looks like other smartwatches on the market, such as Asus’s ZenWatch and Samsung’s Gear Live, in particular. (Both run Google’s Android Wear.) Like most things we adorn ourselves with, you have to love the way this looks on you. Apple’s design doesn’t compete with Rolex, Omega, or Breitling for sheer style, but the more I wore the inconspicuous thing, the more I liked it on my wrist.
The looks are just the beginning. It’s loaded with cutting-edge technology. The tiny Retina display has a new form of pressure sensitivity Apple calls Force Touch, which responds not only to where you touch the screen, but how hard you press. The watch notifies you with extremely nuanced vibrations via its Taptic Engine, which can produce strikingly realistic sensations, almost like a bell tapping on your wrist. Perhaps most important, the watch’s “digital crown” helps you navigate long menus, set options, and zoom in and out of maps and photos. And all the speedy software and motion tracking is controlled by the company’s new S1 processor, which packs in multiple components on a single chip. It’s an impressive package. After using it, I had no question that the Apple Watch is the most advanced piece of wearable technology you can buy today. You can combine smart technologies with a Control4 home automation system to help you manage energy consumption while providing entertainment.
The Apple Watch as a watch
For starters, the Apple Watch does function as a watch, one which has literally millions of different dial combinations. The timekeeping that Apple is using is so precise, it’s within 50 milliseconds of the global time standard known as Coordinated Universal Time. Apple has had some fun with this: Because every Apple Watch is perfectly in sync with the others, if you’re in a room full of Mickey Mouse faces, Mickey will tap his foot in perfect sync on every watch. It’s incredibly cool.
Apple allows you to customize the face of the watch, not only with tapping Mickey and other unique designs, but with little widgets it’s calling “Complications” (in a nod to classic horological terms). These items that dot the edges of the display can tell the temperature outside, signal your next calendar appointment, show the phases of the moon, and so on. In spite of the name, these Complications are one of the most useful parts of the watch, offering the kind of information that really does elevate the device beyond a simple timepiece.
(Actually, seeing these highly useful bits of information on the tiny screen of the watch made me realize we should have had them on the iPhone for a long time. I asked Steve Jobs in 2010 why the company hadn’t included more “glanceable” information on the iPhone and iPad, such as the widgets Apple had pioneered for the desktop. He told me they were just getting started and that “anything” was possible. Is this watch the thing I was waiting for?)
But what about the watch as a timepiece? I’ve found the experience somewhat inferior to that with a conventional wristwatch, due to one small issue. The Apple Watch activates its screen only when it thinks you’re looking at it. Sometimes a subtle twist of your wrist will do, but sometimes it takes … more. Many times while using the watch, I had to swing my wrist in an exaggerated upward motion to bring the display to life. Think about the way people normally look at their watches, then make it twice as aggressive. As a normal watch-wearer, the idea that I might look down at my wrist and not see the time was annoying.
Sometimes, even if you do the arm-swing motion, the screen doesn’t turn on. Sometimes it turns on, then off. Sometimes you tap it and nothing happens.
For all the noise Apple has made about what a remarkable time-telling device its watch is, I found it lacking for this reason alone. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep excellent time—it just doesn’t offer the consistency of a traditional timepiece.
In usePerhaps one of the most difficult things to wrap your head around is the way the watch extends—and often replicates—the functions of your phone. You can receive and send text messages on the device, for instance, but doing so on the small screen with your hand cocked in the appropriate position isn’t ideal if you’re working on something longer than a one-line reply. And although it connects deeply with the phone, the watch also has a completely new way of doing things. Because navigation is split between swipes of your finger, scrolling with the crown, and taps of varying pressure, it takes a while to get oriented. One of the crucial pain points I experienced was this constant, subtle battle with myself over whether to engage a notification on my watch or handle it on my phone.
The notification scheme is a little maddening at first. Apple sends a push notification every time you get a corporate e-mail, personal e-mail, direct message on Twitter, message on Facebook, and for interactions in countless other services. Each of these notifications pings the watch. For every message, there is a sound, a vibration, or both. (You can mute them.) If you’re a busy person who communicates constantly on your phone, this gets overwhelming fast. I found myself turning off notifications from entire apps, which seems to defeat the purpose of the watch in the first place. Mercifully, Apple has included a way to clear all those notifications: Just Force Touch on the list.
Eventually, I figured out that getting the watch to really work for you requires work. I pruned a list of VIP contacts in my mail app to make e-mail notifications more tolerable, I killed several app notifications that I found to be consistently interruptive, and I streamlined my list of applications to those that seemed truly vital to my day.
What’s odd is that in many ways, the watch functions a lot like a small iPhone. Though there are new ways of getting to your apps and interacting with them, much of the phone's model interface has carried over. So you end up in a lot of situations where you not only have to take action, you have to decide where to take action.
Still, as the days wore on, I did find some balance between the two devices. Checking text messages and e-mails by quickly glancing at the watch saved me some time, and it was certainly helpful when I was deeply engaged in an important activity. My 14-month-old daughter, who is completely obsessed with the iPhones in our house, didn’t seem to notice that I was getting an update on my wrist. Score!
As I mentioned, the watch also has a few fresh tricks. Within Apple’s new suite of functions, I found both hits and misses.
On the plus side is Apple’s new Activity app, which presents you with three basic sets of achievements to hit every day—and makes hitting those goals almost frictionless. One metric it watches is how many calories you’re burning every day by moving, a number that can be changed, depending on your skill level. A second is exercise, which is any period in which you’re engaged in strenuous activity that keeps your heart rate up. The third is a notification for standing, to make sure you get up on your feet at least once every hour.
Setup for the health features was completely painless, and I immediately started seeing the results of being made so aware of my activity levels. I wanted to walk more, was excited when I got a brisk jog through a train station, and yes, I felt better because I was standing up during the day on a regular basis. I have no idea if this will have any lasting impact on my health, but I think Apple’s beautiful and frictionless approach to teaching people about exercise habits is a leap in the right direction.
There are rough spots, too. Apple is hoping to reinvent how we communicate with friends and family by adding three new methods of messaging, not all of which work. The first allows you to essentially “sample” your heartbeat and send it off. This seems to have limited use; once you’ve gotten your first heartbeat, the novelty wears off pretty quickly. Also, I don’t know who, besides my wife, I would use this for. It’s weirdly intimate. The second is called Sketch, which allows you to draw or tap some symbols on your watch and send them to another Apple Watch user. This seems like a great idea until you realize how little space you have to work with. I sent a lot of weird-looking faces with no deeper meaning during my testing period. I did find hyper-discreet ways of using Digital Touch, however, such as a lone question mark when there was an unanswered question between me and the sender. Was it better than a texted question mark? Well, it wiggled more.
The third new message concept is 3D, animated emojis. At first glance, that sounds pretty great, until you realize that the emojis are really more like neutered, animated GIFs from the late '90s internet. What really struck me here was deep deja vu over an earlier Apple attempt to change the way we communicate with people: Ping. Ping was a “social network for music” that the company imagined would be the way that people wanted to share what they were listening to. In fact, people wanted to use other services, in thousands of different ways, to do that—ways that were much more natural and personal than the sterile option Apple provided. That’s how I feel about these animated icons you can send. We already have emojis, and Snapchat, and Instagram, and Periscope, and GroupMe, and Twitter, and Facebook, and WeChat, and on and on. There’s something forced and inauthentic about Apple in this space; it feels like a throwaway, a “Hey, we do that, too” move.
I’m split on one feature Apple includes on the watch, something called Glances. Glances act like little cards hiding underneath your watch that can give you a glimpse of information from first- and third-party apps. Twitter will display the latest tweet in your timeline, there’s a controller for your music app, or you can see a detailed description of your next calendar appointment. In theory, these screens should be wildly useful for quick access to information. In practice, I found them to be clunky and overwhelmingly useless. What hinders many of the experiences is that the watch must pull information from the phone, leaving you with a spinning wheel that indicates data loading, rather than a quick hit of info.
Distractions
Yes, all these new functions, notifications, and tapping do make the Apple Watch very distracting. In some ways, it can be more distracting than your iPhone, and checking it can feel more offensive to people around you than pulling out your phone. The watch wants and needs you now, as its insistent taps make painfully clear. And to see what the Apple Watch wants and needs, you must physically move it into view. If while you’re talking to someone, you check your regular watch, it can feel as if you’re sending a not-so-subtle “let’s wrap this up” message. With the Apple Watch, factoring in the animated wrist-whip and the length of some of the notifications you receive, it’s downright rude.
Eventually I realized that this problem wasn’t about fixing the iPhone or fixing the watch. It’s not about making notifications more subtle or less frequent, or located in a place that doesn’t require a shift in your gaze. The thing that needs fixing is our sense of when—and when not—to move ourselves out of a moment so we can look at our devices. Strangely, it comes down to common courtesy and patience, more than a magical piece of jewelry from Jony Ive and Co.
The Apple Watch can certainly make you a worse dinner guest. But it can also make you a slightly better one. The difference is whether or not you’re willing to think about what really matters vs. what seems to matter.
The watch is not life-changing. It is, however, excellent. Apple will sell millions of these devices, and many people will love and obsess over them. It is a wonderful component of a big ecosystem that the company has carefully built over many years. It is more seamless and simple than any of its counterparts in the marketplace. It is, without question, the best smartwatch in the world.
So Apple has succeeded in its first big task with its watch. It made something that lives up to the company’s reputation as an innovator and raised the bar for a whole new class of devices. Its second task—making me feel that I need this thing on my wrist every day—well, I’m not quite sure it’s there yet. It’s still another screen, another distraction, another way to disconnect, as much as it is the opposite. The Apple Watch is cool, it’s beautiful, it’s powerful, and it’s easy to use. But it’s not essential. Not yet.
Wednesday, April 08, 2015
WSJ: EU IS GEARING UP TO FILE ANTITRUST LAWSUIT AGAINST GOOGLE
Original Story: engadget.com
Google might have avoided going to court over antitrust charges in the US, but it could still face a lawsuit in Europe. According to the Wall Street Journal, the European Commission has started asking companies that filed complaints against Google's practices for permission to publish the details in those documents. A Brussels lawyer representing one of Mountain View's competitors said: "The fact that the commission has been seeking fuller [information] from complainants, against short deadlines [of] a couple of days, shows it is in the final stages of getting a statement of objections together. It's part of the choreography you always see."
Most of the companies involved in the case run shopping, travel and local websites. If that sounds like deja vu, that's because the complaints Google is facing in the EU are similar in nature to the ones filed against it stateside. European companies also accuse the tech giant of gaming search results, placing its own products such as Google Shopping or Local in more prominent positions in the list, as well as burying competitors' websites. The commission is also investigating whether Mountain View really scrapes content from its rivals' websites to use as its own.
The European Union's antitrust authority has been looking into these supposed unfair practices since 2010. Google and EC's previous chief made numerous attempts to settle over the years, but they all ended up in failure. The new boss, Margrethe Vestager, isn't one for settlements, though, and has been very vocal about her preference for court proceedings. Mountain View, by the bye, continues to deny any wrongdoing. Just last week, general counsel Kent Walker listed a number of failed products (including Google+) during an event in Berlin, which he said serves as proof that his company plays by the book.
If the commission does file charges, Google will only have three months to convince the court that it didn't do anything to violate laws in the region. It could also try to come up with settlement terms politicians and corporations in the EU will finally agree to. If it fails to do so, it might have to pay an exceptionally hefty sum, seeing as Microsoft was fined $1.35 billion for antitrust charges a few years ago.
Google might have avoided going to court over antitrust charges in the US, but it could still face a lawsuit in Europe. According to the Wall Street Journal, the European Commission has started asking companies that filed complaints against Google's practices for permission to publish the details in those documents. A Brussels lawyer representing one of Mountain View's competitors said: "The fact that the commission has been seeking fuller [information] from complainants, against short deadlines [of] a couple of days, shows it is in the final stages of getting a statement of objections together. It's part of the choreography you always see."
Most of the companies involved in the case run shopping, travel and local websites. If that sounds like deja vu, that's because the complaints Google is facing in the EU are similar in nature to the ones filed against it stateside. European companies also accuse the tech giant of gaming search results, placing its own products such as Google Shopping or Local in more prominent positions in the list, as well as burying competitors' websites. The commission is also investigating whether Mountain View really scrapes content from its rivals' websites to use as its own.
The European Union's antitrust authority has been looking into these supposed unfair practices since 2010. Google and EC's previous chief made numerous attempts to settle over the years, but they all ended up in failure. The new boss, Margrethe Vestager, isn't one for settlements, though, and has been very vocal about her preference for court proceedings. Mountain View, by the bye, continues to deny any wrongdoing. Just last week, general counsel Kent Walker listed a number of failed products (including Google+) during an event in Berlin, which he said serves as proof that his company plays by the book.
If the commission does file charges, Google will only have three months to convince the court that it didn't do anything to violate laws in the region. It could also try to come up with settlement terms politicians and corporations in the EU will finally agree to. If it fails to do so, it might have to pay an exceptionally hefty sum, seeing as Microsoft was fined $1.35 billion for antitrust charges a few years ago.
IBM BETS $3 BILLION ON INTERNET OF THINGS OPPORTUNITY
Original Story: forbes.com
IBM +0.03% has altered course many times since its foundation over one hundred years ago. Today, IBM announced a $3 Billion investment in a new business unit that the company hopes will position it to succeed in the emerging – and much hyped – area of technology known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The investment sounds bold – and the company already has many of the pieces it needs – but it’s pushing into an increasingly crowded area, where giants of both industry and technology are already scrabbling for dominance.
The company still associated in the minds of many with room-filling mainframes and a blue-suited salesforce has also dabbled – successfully – in everything from typewriters, printers, desktop computers, and hard drives to guns, point of sale devices and machines built to thrash human opponents at chess and Jeopardy. And, although the suits are less all-pervasively blue, it still builds those mainframes.
In recent years, the company has focused far more attention on selling services than servers, building a global professional services operation and divesting itself of low margin and increasingly commoditized businesses such as those responsible for desktops, printers, laptops and – most recently – mid-sized computer servers. IBM struggled, like its equally entrenched peers, to adapt to the promise (or threat) of cloud computing, but the acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013 finally gave the company a reasonably compelling cloud story. A much-hyped investment of $1 Billion in cloud (IBM, it seems, cannot do anything without first moving people and resources around so that it can announce the investment of a billion or three) has seen IBM SoftLayer aggressively opening new data centers around the world, and the big global enterprises that tend to buy IBM’s professional services now have a good fit for at least some of their tentative cloud adoption strategies. The company could really help itself here, by clarifying its position with respect to the big cloud software solutions like OpenStack and CloudStack. IBM – and SoftLayer – pronouncements in this area have been lukewarm at best, and often downright evasive.
This latest investment, by some ways of counting, is even larger. $3 Billion, over four years, to:
harmonize existing strategic activities from the Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities brands, which have had an Internet of Things element for a decade or more; put all those SoftLayer data centers to work in crunching huge volumes of data streaming in from billions of connected devices (wind turbines, jet engines, building climate monitoring systems, pacemakers, smartphones and – of course – refrigerators); promote IBM’s existing take on Platform as a Service (PaaS), Bluemix, to encourage application developers to build their applications on IBM hardware, using IBM software and IBM services; ultimately (we must, surely, assume) exploit IBM’s ongoing investment in Watson. A home automation system allows you to combine smart home technologies into one system for convenience. No longer a toy designed to show off on Jeopardy, Watson is evolving into a powerful, compelling and accessible analytics tool. It’s still too complex to deploy without significant investment of IBM’s own time and know-how, but that’s less true than it was.
What’s far from clear is the extent to which this is new money. Most of these activities were already underway, in other IBM business units. Is the new money just for printing some ‘Internet of Things Business Unit’ business cards, or is there really something substantive happening here? IBM itself has been nudging these pieces together for a while. Back in October 2014, for example, I moderated a workshop at an event in California. The workshop (for which I was not paid) was sponsored by SoftLayer, and explored the issues and opportunities associated with delivering Internet of Things-type solutions at scale. SoftLayer covered the cloud side of things, and fellow IBM acquisition Cloudant was on hand to illustrate the ways in which all these connected devices can challenge more traditional database solutions. Internet of Things was what they wanted to talk about.
More significantly, IBM faces stiff competition as it tries to stake a claim to the Internet of Things. Other technology companies also recognize the opportunity. Google GOOGL +1.19% spent more in a day to buy Nest than IBM is spending in four years on its new unit. Google then spent more, throwing half a billion dollars at Dropcam to add connected cameras to Nest’s bevy of connected thermostats and smoke detectors. Chip maker Intel INTC +0.32% sees the Internet of Things (unsurprisingly) as a way to sell an awful lot more chips, both to go into all those new devices but also to power the servers they are pretty dumb without. Intel’s developer event last year (disclaimer: Intel covered my costs to attend) pushed the Internet of Things at every turn, with Intel chips under the hood and Intel – increasingly – explicitly and prominently associated with co-developing fashionable connected devices of various kinds. And then there’s Apple AAPL -0.14%. We would be unwise to forget the waves that next month’s Apple Watch will unleash, almost regardless of whether this first generation device takes the world by storm or not.
But the biggest opportunity – and the biggest threat to IBM’s ambition – doesn’t lie in the traditional technology sector at all. Industrial behemoths from America’s General Electric GE -0.08% (GE), to Europe’s Siemens , to Japan’s Hitachi (disclaimer: Hitachi covered my costs for a recent visit to Japan, to learn more about their take on this market) all see this opportunity too. All are scrambling to make their industrial equipment smarter, and their management processes better able to ingest, analyze and act upon the data that machines, parts, production lines and even entire supply chains are able to report at or near real-time.
The Internet of Things offers a compelling raison d’être for all of the investment in cloudy data centers, global networks, big data analytics, and power-sipping chips. It lets us join the pieces together, and moves us beyond rather esoteric and isolated debates about the ‘best’ cloud or the fastest analytics engine. As real use cases become embedded, we might even escape the pointless industry press releases about incremental updates to platforms no one was really that interested in. There’s an awful lot of hype around the Internet of Things, and still little acceptance that anyone really needs an Internet-connected fridge.
Today’s announcement makes IBM’s inter-connected bets in this space a little more explicit. The real challenge is to deliver on the press releases, and to offer a set of solutions compelling enough to lure customers away from the growing range of powerful alternatives.
IBM +0.03% has altered course many times since its foundation over one hundred years ago. Today, IBM announced a $3 Billion investment in a new business unit that the company hopes will position it to succeed in the emerging – and much hyped – area of technology known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The investment sounds bold – and the company already has many of the pieces it needs – but it’s pushing into an increasingly crowded area, where giants of both industry and technology are already scrabbling for dominance.
The company still associated in the minds of many with room-filling mainframes and a blue-suited salesforce has also dabbled – successfully – in everything from typewriters, printers, desktop computers, and hard drives to guns, point of sale devices and machines built to thrash human opponents at chess and Jeopardy. And, although the suits are less all-pervasively blue, it still builds those mainframes.
In recent years, the company has focused far more attention on selling services than servers, building a global professional services operation and divesting itself of low margin and increasingly commoditized businesses such as those responsible for desktops, printers, laptops and – most recently – mid-sized computer servers. IBM struggled, like its equally entrenched peers, to adapt to the promise (or threat) of cloud computing, but the acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013 finally gave the company a reasonably compelling cloud story. A much-hyped investment of $1 Billion in cloud (IBM, it seems, cannot do anything without first moving people and resources around so that it can announce the investment of a billion or three) has seen IBM SoftLayer aggressively opening new data centers around the world, and the big global enterprises that tend to buy IBM’s professional services now have a good fit for at least some of their tentative cloud adoption strategies. The company could really help itself here, by clarifying its position with respect to the big cloud software solutions like OpenStack and CloudStack. IBM – and SoftLayer – pronouncements in this area have been lukewarm at best, and often downright evasive.
This latest investment, by some ways of counting, is even larger. $3 Billion, over four years, to:
harmonize existing strategic activities from the Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities brands, which have had an Internet of Things element for a decade or more; put all those SoftLayer data centers to work in crunching huge volumes of data streaming in from billions of connected devices (wind turbines, jet engines, building climate monitoring systems, pacemakers, smartphones and – of course – refrigerators); promote IBM’s existing take on Platform as a Service (PaaS), Bluemix, to encourage application developers to build their applications on IBM hardware, using IBM software and IBM services; ultimately (we must, surely, assume) exploit IBM’s ongoing investment in Watson. A home automation system allows you to combine smart home technologies into one system for convenience. No longer a toy designed to show off on Jeopardy, Watson is evolving into a powerful, compelling and accessible analytics tool. It’s still too complex to deploy without significant investment of IBM’s own time and know-how, but that’s less true than it was.
What’s far from clear is the extent to which this is new money. Most of these activities were already underway, in other IBM business units. Is the new money just for printing some ‘Internet of Things Business Unit’ business cards, or is there really something substantive happening here? IBM itself has been nudging these pieces together for a while. Back in October 2014, for example, I moderated a workshop at an event in California. The workshop (for which I was not paid) was sponsored by SoftLayer, and explored the issues and opportunities associated with delivering Internet of Things-type solutions at scale. SoftLayer covered the cloud side of things, and fellow IBM acquisition Cloudant was on hand to illustrate the ways in which all these connected devices can challenge more traditional database solutions. Internet of Things was what they wanted to talk about.
More significantly, IBM faces stiff competition as it tries to stake a claim to the Internet of Things. Other technology companies also recognize the opportunity. Google GOOGL +1.19% spent more in a day to buy Nest than IBM is spending in four years on its new unit. Google then spent more, throwing half a billion dollars at Dropcam to add connected cameras to Nest’s bevy of connected thermostats and smoke detectors. Chip maker Intel INTC +0.32% sees the Internet of Things (unsurprisingly) as a way to sell an awful lot more chips, both to go into all those new devices but also to power the servers they are pretty dumb without. Intel’s developer event last year (disclaimer: Intel covered my costs to attend) pushed the Internet of Things at every turn, with Intel chips under the hood and Intel – increasingly – explicitly and prominently associated with co-developing fashionable connected devices of various kinds. And then there’s Apple AAPL -0.14%. We would be unwise to forget the waves that next month’s Apple Watch will unleash, almost regardless of whether this first generation device takes the world by storm or not.
But the biggest opportunity – and the biggest threat to IBM’s ambition – doesn’t lie in the traditional technology sector at all. Industrial behemoths from America’s General Electric GE -0.08% (GE), to Europe’s Siemens , to Japan’s Hitachi (disclaimer: Hitachi covered my costs for a recent visit to Japan, to learn more about their take on this market) all see this opportunity too. All are scrambling to make their industrial equipment smarter, and their management processes better able to ingest, analyze and act upon the data that machines, parts, production lines and even entire supply chains are able to report at or near real-time.
The Internet of Things offers a compelling raison d’être for all of the investment in cloudy data centers, global networks, big data analytics, and power-sipping chips. It lets us join the pieces together, and moves us beyond rather esoteric and isolated debates about the ‘best’ cloud or the fastest analytics engine. As real use cases become embedded, we might even escape the pointless industry press releases about incremental updates to platforms no one was really that interested in. There’s an awful lot of hype around the Internet of Things, and still little acceptance that anyone really needs an Internet-connected fridge.
Today’s announcement makes IBM’s inter-connected bets in this space a little more explicit. The real challenge is to deliver on the press releases, and to offer a set of solutions compelling enough to lure customers away from the growing range of powerful alternatives.
Monday, April 06, 2015
GOOGLE WORKING ON PROJECT TO LET YOU RECEIVE AND PAY BILLS DIRECTLY INSIDE GMAIL
Original Story: recode.net
Google’s mission to organize the world’s information is now targeting your physical mailbox.
The company is currently working on a project that will allow Gmail users to more easily receive bills in their email inbox instead of their mailbox. Called Pony Express, the service also is designed to let people pay their bills within Gmail, rather than having to go to a telecom or utility company’s website to complete a payment.
Those details are outlined in a lengthy document viewed by Re/code. The new service is scheduled to start in the fourth quarter, according to the document. It’s not clear whether Pony Express is a code name or one that’ll be used if it comes to market. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
Such a service fits Google’s ongoing desire to bring all of the world’s information online, most notably its Google Books project, which has so far digitized well over 30 million volumes.
With Pony Express, Google could suck in the type of financial data that would allow it to expand into new businesses. Credit card bills and payment history would be a gateway into industries such as personal finance or lending. And the data could be used to refine how advertisements are targeted to individuals on Google, YouTube and partnering sites, though such a move would likely stoke privacy concerns. It’s not clear whether Google would generate any revenue directly from the Pony Express service.
The document features a step-by-step walk-through of how people can sign up. A Gmail user provides personal information such as their name, address and partial and full Social Security number to a third-party company that vets their identity. Users might also have to provide information such as a full credit card number or telephone service account number to get started, too.
According to the documents, it appears Google is partnering with third-party vendors that print and mail out bills on behalf of service providers such as insurance companies, telecom companies and utilities. It’s not clear whether Google is also working directly with the service providers, too.
Once a user is authenticated, he or she can start receiving bills or other mail in Gmail or the Inbox app (Google’s new email app). E-billing is not a new thing as pretty much all major financial, telecom and utility companies allow for paperless billing. But Google could play up the fact it can organize a Gmail user’s bills automatically in a special Pony Express folder.
The most useful part of the service could be the payments feature. The service appears to let people choose to pay a bill right from within Pony Express, using a link with a bank account or a debit card.
Pony Express also allows users to share a bill with another Gmail user, with the added option of automating the process, a feature that appears to be catered to roommates who typically split utilities. Another feature pulls up customer service contact information for a given service provider. Then there’s one that appears to show the capability to take a photo of a piece of mail to have it archived in digital form in Pony Express.
Google would not be the first company to attempt to help people organize and pay bills from a centralized location. A startup called Manilla, backed by Hearst, offered a service like this for several years before shutting down last year. An app called Check also allows people to view and pay for their bills through the app. Intuit bought Check last year for $360 million. Google’s potential advantage? The millions of people who already use its email services.
Google’s mission to organize the world’s information is now targeting your physical mailbox.
The company is currently working on a project that will allow Gmail users to more easily receive bills in their email inbox instead of their mailbox. Called Pony Express, the service also is designed to let people pay their bills within Gmail, rather than having to go to a telecom or utility company’s website to complete a payment.
Those details are outlined in a lengthy document viewed by Re/code. The new service is scheduled to start in the fourth quarter, according to the document. It’s not clear whether Pony Express is a code name or one that’ll be used if it comes to market. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
Such a service fits Google’s ongoing desire to bring all of the world’s information online, most notably its Google Books project, which has so far digitized well over 30 million volumes.
With Pony Express, Google could suck in the type of financial data that would allow it to expand into new businesses. Credit card bills and payment history would be a gateway into industries such as personal finance or lending. And the data could be used to refine how advertisements are targeted to individuals on Google, YouTube and partnering sites, though such a move would likely stoke privacy concerns. It’s not clear whether Google would generate any revenue directly from the Pony Express service.
The document features a step-by-step walk-through of how people can sign up. A Gmail user provides personal information such as their name, address and partial and full Social Security number to a third-party company that vets their identity. Users might also have to provide information such as a full credit card number or telephone service account number to get started, too.
According to the documents, it appears Google is partnering with third-party vendors that print and mail out bills on behalf of service providers such as insurance companies, telecom companies and utilities. It’s not clear whether Google is also working directly with the service providers, too.
Once a user is authenticated, he or she can start receiving bills or other mail in Gmail or the Inbox app (Google’s new email app). E-billing is not a new thing as pretty much all major financial, telecom and utility companies allow for paperless billing. But Google could play up the fact it can organize a Gmail user’s bills automatically in a special Pony Express folder.
The most useful part of the service could be the payments feature. The service appears to let people choose to pay a bill right from within Pony Express, using a link with a bank account or a debit card.
Pony Express also allows users to share a bill with another Gmail user, with the added option of automating the process, a feature that appears to be catered to roommates who typically split utilities. Another feature pulls up customer service contact information for a given service provider. Then there’s one that appears to show the capability to take a photo of a piece of mail to have it archived in digital form in Pony Express.
Google would not be the first company to attempt to help people organize and pay bills from a centralized location. A startup called Manilla, backed by Hearst, offered a service like this for several years before shutting down last year. An app called Check also allows people to view and pay for their bills through the app. Intuit bought Check last year for $360 million. Google’s potential advantage? The millions of people who already use its email services.
Thursday, April 02, 2015
GOOGLE HIRES WALL STREET'S RUTH PORAT AS NEW CFO
Original Story: mercurynews.com
MOUNTAIN VIEW -- One of Wall Street's most powerful women will become one of Silicon Valley's most powerful women when Ruth Porat joins Google this spring as its chief financial officer.
The Internet search giant on Tuesday announced the hiring of the 57-year-old Porat, a longtime Morgan Stanley banker who became its chief financial officer in 2010. She will become Google's highest-ranking female executive when she starts her new job on May 26.
Porat described the post as a kind of Silicon Valley homecoming. She grew up in Palo Alto, studied economics at Stanford University and was later a top banker dealing with technology firms.
"I'm delighted to be returning to my California roots and joining Google," she said in a statement.
Porat has been the public face of Morgan Stanley and been referred to in reports as the most senior woman -- or most powerful -- on Wall Street. Key positions she has held at the firm include vice chairman of investment banking and co-head of technology investment banking. She was the lead banker on financing rounds for tech companies including Amazon, eBay, Netscape and Priceline. An employment lawyer regularly negotiates employment agreements and severance packages for high level managers and executives.
"We're tremendously fortunate to have found such a creative, experienced and operationally strong executive," said Google CEO Larry Page in a written statement. "I look forward to learning from Ruth as we continue to innovate in our core -- from search and ads, to Android, Chrome and YouTube -- as well as invest in a thoughtful, disciplined way in our next generation of big bets."
Porat will be the only woman among Google's five top executives, though the company also has three women in senior leadership roles: Susan Wojcicki, who heads YouTube; Lorraine Twohill, the marketing chief; and Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president of communications and policy. Other women who were part of Google's senior leadership team have gone on to high-profile executive positions elsewhere, such as Marissa Mayer, now Yahoo's CEO; and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook.
Google announced just two weeks ago in a regulatory filing that its current CFO, Patrick Pichette would be retiring. Pichette, who joined Google in 2008, wrote a widely shared post on Google+ explaining his decision to step down to spend more time with his family.
Google shareholders are likely to welcome Porat's experience in "dealing with complex global operating environments and regulatory challenges," said Peter Stabler, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, in a written note Tuesday, but whether she signals any big changes in Google's philosophy remains unclear. An employment lawyer is following this story closely.
Pichette had arrived seven years ago during a recession and became known for trimming costs, from unsuccessful business ventures to the hours at the campus cafeterias. In more recent boom years, however, he's been a staunch defender of the company's cutting-edge risks on a wide assortment of research that reflect Google's experimental approach but can make investors nervous.
Other tech companies have lured executives from Wall Street, including Twitter, which appointed Anthony Noto as its CFO last year. Noto hails from Goldman Sachs.
Porat declined interviews Tuesday but her rise through the Wall Street ranks was profiled in a 2010 book, "How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life," written by authors Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston and Geoffrey Lewis, who work for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
The book described her working parents as an inspiration.
Her father, Dan Porat, 93, was an electronic engineer at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1962 to 1988. Her mother, Frieda Porat, was a psychologist and teacher who wrote books about organizational management. She died in 2012.
Ruth Porat describes herself on her Twitter profile as a breast cancer survivor and proud Stanford alumnus.
She is also vice chairwoman of the Board of Trustees at Stanford. She has advanced degrees from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics.
After studying economics at Stanford, she took a job at the U.S. Department of Justice in the early 1980s. But she was also fascinated with mergers and acquisitions, which drew her to Morgan Stanley in 1987, according to the book.
Revealing her challenges, and successes, as a woman on Wall Street, Porat told the authors that "biases are deep" and it's important to find the right boss.
"One of the biggest problems women have is they work really hard and put their heads down and assume hard work gets noticed," she said. "And hard work for the wrong boss does not get noticed. Hard work for the wrong boss results in one thing -- that boss looks terrific and you get stuck."
MOUNTAIN VIEW -- One of Wall Street's most powerful women will become one of Silicon Valley's most powerful women when Ruth Porat joins Google this spring as its chief financial officer.
The Internet search giant on Tuesday announced the hiring of the 57-year-old Porat, a longtime Morgan Stanley banker who became its chief financial officer in 2010. She will become Google's highest-ranking female executive when she starts her new job on May 26.
Porat described the post as a kind of Silicon Valley homecoming. She grew up in Palo Alto, studied economics at Stanford University and was later a top banker dealing with technology firms.
"I'm delighted to be returning to my California roots and joining Google," she said in a statement.
Porat has been the public face of Morgan Stanley and been referred to in reports as the most senior woman -- or most powerful -- on Wall Street. Key positions she has held at the firm include vice chairman of investment banking and co-head of technology investment banking. She was the lead banker on financing rounds for tech companies including Amazon, eBay, Netscape and Priceline. An employment lawyer regularly negotiates employment agreements and severance packages for high level managers and executives.
"We're tremendously fortunate to have found such a creative, experienced and operationally strong executive," said Google CEO Larry Page in a written statement. "I look forward to learning from Ruth as we continue to innovate in our core -- from search and ads, to Android, Chrome and YouTube -- as well as invest in a thoughtful, disciplined way in our next generation of big bets."
Porat will be the only woman among Google's five top executives, though the company also has three women in senior leadership roles: Susan Wojcicki, who heads YouTube; Lorraine Twohill, the marketing chief; and Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president of communications and policy. Other women who were part of Google's senior leadership team have gone on to high-profile executive positions elsewhere, such as Marissa Mayer, now Yahoo's CEO; and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook.
Google announced just two weeks ago in a regulatory filing that its current CFO, Patrick Pichette would be retiring. Pichette, who joined Google in 2008, wrote a widely shared post on Google+ explaining his decision to step down to spend more time with his family.
Google shareholders are likely to welcome Porat's experience in "dealing with complex global operating environments and regulatory challenges," said Peter Stabler, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, in a written note Tuesday, but whether she signals any big changes in Google's philosophy remains unclear. An employment lawyer is following this story closely.
Pichette had arrived seven years ago during a recession and became known for trimming costs, from unsuccessful business ventures to the hours at the campus cafeterias. In more recent boom years, however, he's been a staunch defender of the company's cutting-edge risks on a wide assortment of research that reflect Google's experimental approach but can make investors nervous.
Other tech companies have lured executives from Wall Street, including Twitter, which appointed Anthony Noto as its CFO last year. Noto hails from Goldman Sachs.
Porat declined interviews Tuesday but her rise through the Wall Street ranks was profiled in a 2010 book, "How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life," written by authors Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston and Geoffrey Lewis, who work for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
The book described her working parents as an inspiration.
Her father, Dan Porat, 93, was an electronic engineer at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1962 to 1988. Her mother, Frieda Porat, was a psychologist and teacher who wrote books about organizational management. She died in 2012.
Ruth Porat describes herself on her Twitter profile as a breast cancer survivor and proud Stanford alumnus.
She is also vice chairwoman of the Board of Trustees at Stanford. She has advanced degrees from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics.
After studying economics at Stanford, she took a job at the U.S. Department of Justice in the early 1980s. But she was also fascinated with mergers and acquisitions, which drew her to Morgan Stanley in 1987, according to the book.
Revealing her challenges, and successes, as a woman on Wall Street, Porat told the authors that "biases are deep" and it's important to find the right boss.
"One of the biggest problems women have is they work really hard and put their heads down and assume hard work gets noticed," she said. "And hard work for the wrong boss does not get noticed. Hard work for the wrong boss results in one thing -- that boss looks terrific and you get stuck."
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