Another addition is indoor walking directions, allowing users in the US and Japan to use Google Maps to navigate inside malls and airports.
“This will help you get directions not only to a building’s front door, but also through those doors to the places where you want to go inside,” online magazine Stark Insider cited Benjamin Grol, product manager at Google, as saying.
Comments »The iPad is once again the undisputed heavyweight champion of the tablet world. Apple’s “magical” tablet re-asserted its dominance of the market following a period that saw both the launch of the latest model and a drop-off in sales of its chief competitor, the Kindle Fire. As a result, the iPad now accounts for 68% of the tablet market, according to figures from a market-research company.
Comments »This Sunday marks the second anniversary of the May 6th Flash Crash of 2010. As we all trade in this extremely low-volume trading environment, it is fitting that we recap where we stand today.
Read the rest of the article here.
Comments »The head of iPhone and iPad software sold 64,151 shares Friday worth $38.7 million
Read the details of the sale here.
Comments »Just how low is Apple’s actual tax rate?
As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent.
To find out how they achieve such a low rate, go here.
Comments »Read some of the quotes from a recent interview with Wozniak about the new Windows Phone.
Article is here.
Comments »Jamie Sturgeon
Long coveted by consumers, the iPhone has come to be quietly begrudged by some partner wireless operators, who, owing to the device’s overwhelming popularity, pay Apple Inc. far higher prices per unit than they do on other smartphones.
Yet some say a shift is afoot that could restore a degree of power to carriers and in the process deliver to their investors a cut of the windfall now enjoyed by Apple shareholders.
Analysts at BMO Capital Markets said in a note Monday they believe unit costs for Apple devices are coming under pressure as new competitors nip at the iPhone’s heels and changing demographics in the smartphone market start to favour lower-cost handsets.
Read the rest here.
Comments »via Slashdot
Hugh Pickens writes “While Apple generates more than $575 in profit for every iOS device, and according to estimates in 2007 Apple earned more than $800 on every iPhone sold through ATT, Horace Dediu reports that Android generated less than $550m in revenues for Google between 2008 and the end of 2011, earning only $1.70 per year, per Android device — explaining how Apple is sucking up two thirds of the profit in the mobile phone business.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Nick Bilton
Another day, another creepy mobile app. Here is one that allows you to find women in your area. It definitely wins the prize for too creepy.
Girls Around Me uses Foursquare, the location-based mobile service, to determine your location. It then scans for women in the area who have recently checked-in on the service. Once you identify a woman you’d like to talk to, one that inevitably has no idea you’re snooping on her, you can connect to her through Facebook, see her full name, profile photos and send her a message.
When you sign up for the Girls Around Me application, you are asked to log in to Facebook, giving the service your personal information, too. After connecting to Facebook, the app asks for everything, requiring people to share their basic information, profile information, photos, information people share with them and e-mail address. It will also ask permission to access your data when you are not using the app and post status updates, photos and more on your behalf.
“This would be a very different application if it didn’t link back to Facebook, which is the treasure trove of information. With that link, this app could easily be a “let’s stalk women” app,” said Elizabeth Stark, a lecturer in law at Stanford who teaches about privacy on the Internet.
Read the rest here.
Comments »By Paul Taylor in New York
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is to conduct a major review of “strategic opportunities”, including the possibility of outsourcing device manufacturing or a sale of the company.
Thorsten Heins, chief executive of the Canadian smartphone maker, detailed a dramatic fall in sales in the latest quarter but emphasised that a disposal of RIM was “not the main direction we are pursuing”.
Read the rest here.
Comments »By Rob Waugh
PUBLISHED: 11:41 EST, 23 March 2012 | UPDATED: 11:45 EST, 23 March 2012
A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face which has EVER walked past it.
Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second.
The technology raises the spectre of governments – or other organisations – being able to ‘find’ anyone instantly simply using a passport photo or a Facebook profile.
Eric Risberg / AP
Mallory Whitt works at her desk at the offices of the Wikipedia Foundation in San Francisco. The nonprofit is one of the largest websites.
By Douglas A. McIntyre, 24/7 Wall St.
The 10 most-visited websites in America may share a few characteristics, but interestingly enough, none are in the same business, with the exception of two portals. Each has a different business model as well. An analysis of these largest sites shows that no single model has helped one type of Internet property or another to dominate the web in terms of traffic. The collection of media that is the Internet shows how essential web diversity has become to Americans’ lives.
This list of the most visited sites includes the world’s largest search engine, web portal, video site, software company, social network, encyclopedia, and e-commerce site. One of the sites on this list, Wikipedia, is a nonprofit that runs on a budget of a few million dollars a year. Another, Google, has revenue that will be well above $50 billion. Revenue is not essential to size online, but size can be essential to revenue.
Internet giants have been in particular focus recently, mostly for three reasons. The first is that large sites collect millions and millions of pieces of information about their visitors. Governments, both inside the U.S. and, especially, in Europe have become concerned with how this information is gathered, to whom it is given, what is done with it, and for what financial consideration. Naturally, sites with the largest number of visitors are at the center of this because their inventories of user data are so vast.
Another reason large Internet properties are of interest lately is the upcoming initial public offering of Facebook. The online social networking site has close to one billion members, many of whom spend hundreds of hours each month on the site. The company’s value is set at about $100 billion ahead of the public offering, which is extraordinary because Facebook’s revenue was less than $4 billion in 2011. There is a great disparity among the value of the most visited websites, causing a debate about why users of an e-commerce site are worth any more or less than users of a search engine or a social network.
Finally, sites with tens of millions of visitors are in focus also because of the mass movement of Internet users from PC to smartphones. Smartphones have browsers that operate nearly identically to those on PCs. Strong processors and high-speed wireless connections allow smartphone users to visit the same sites and use them in the same way as they do on computers. The owners of all sites are in a frenzy to see if they can hold onto their user base in the smartphone environment. What happens to the very largest sites will at least be instructional.
24/7 Wall St.: The 10 Most Hated Companies in America
With each year, the Internet becomes increasingly crowded with websites of various sizes, features and functions. The most-visited sites have been among the largest ones for several years. That tells a great deal about the real interests of Americans, probably as much as any other set of markers.
24/7 Wall St. used data from Quantcast to rank the sites. The rank is based on the number of people in the United States who visit each site in a month. The data are updated daily. Revenue figures are based on SEC filings for the public companies and for those in the process of going public. For others, the information is based on data from third party analysts. Revenue data or estimates are for full year 2011.
10. Microsoft.com
Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) website traffic does not include visits to content sites it controls such as the MSN portal, MSNBC news site or the Bing search engine. The visitors counted are for the online corporate destination of the world’s largest software company. Microsoft’s site primary purposes are to sell, download and support its most widely used software products — Windows and its business suite of tools. Microsoft.com is also the destination for public company information, including financial data and the company’s significant patent and intellectual property legal activity.
24/7 Wall St.: How America’s richest companies invest their cash
9. WordPress.com
WordPress has two large online destination sites. One is WordPress.org, a place where millions of bloggers download basic open source software they can use to create and maintain their own websites. The WordPress.org traffic is not included in WordPress.com’s traffic figure. WordPress.com is the destination for a broad spectrum of users — from small bloggers to large companies — that use the site to post information and design their blogs. WordPress.com is operated by Automattic, which sells custom design, custom domains and upgrades to the basic WordPress open source software. While the WordPress for-profit business has products used by a large number of different media and large companies, Automattic does not charge high enough fees to make the “upgrade” business a large one.
8. Wikipedia.org
Wikipedia is operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. The work of the foundation is to support a collection of open source encyclopedias. This already includes dozens of encyclopedias written in the world’s most common languages. The number of articles created for the sites is huge. The English version alone has 3.9 million articles. The German language edition has 1.4 million articles. The tiny budget of the foundation is being used to drive global traffic to the level of one billion readers and the number of articles to 50 million. All of the capital for these projects is donated to the nonprofit foundation. Wikipedia is most famous for making information on a universe of subjects available for free to anyone with access to the Internet. But with such a large amount of content and small staff to monitor its quality, Wikipedia is also infamous for being inconsistent with mixed quality in different subjects.
7. MSN
MSN.com is one of the three largest Internet content portals, along with Yahoo! and Aol (NYSE: AOL). Its business is supported by display advertising and search revenue. The portal model is based on providing millions of visitors access to a large range of content. This includes a number of areas that used to be exclusively the role of national magazines, newspapers, radio and television. News posted by the portals is among their most visited content, and so is content about sports, entertainment and self-help. The portals have expanded into areas that can get some local advertising revenue, particularly automobiles and real estate. Premium news and entertainment content have recently become a large part of the offerings of these sites as well.
24/7 Wall St.: 10 companies profiting most from war
6. Twitter
Twitter is described alternatively as a “microblog” and as a “social network.” Users, which by many estimates exceed 300 million, can post messages of up to 140 characters at a time. This is microblogging to the extent that the “tweets” are available for large numbers of people to read. It is a social network to the extent that it allows users to exchange details about their lives, plans and interests. The problem Twitter faces is that it has not been able to turn what some industry experts believe is 200 million tweets a day into a viable business. Advertisers have shown a reluctance to put marketing messages into these tweets because they are so short and because Twitter users have often rejected using a service that has become partially commercialized. Some of the Twitter users with the largest followings, mostly celebrities connected to millions of fans, use these followings as a way to promote causes, products or even their own careers. So far, this has proved a more successful way to exploit the service than traditional advertising.
5. Yahoo!
Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) has been at the center of a number of controversies over the past several years. It rejected a rich bid by Microsoft in 2008, had three CEOs in four years, and executed a large series of layoffs. Recently, a substantial portion of its board of directors resigned. Yet, the remarkable size of the website’s traffic has not changed, and the parent company continues to be profitable, despite a lack of revenue growth. Some of the sites on this list would welcome Yahoo!’s profits. The Internet portal makes money from a combination of display and search advertising. Yahoo! runs far behind Google in terms of search engine traffic, and it holds only 14 percent of the U.S. market for search activity, according to Comscore. But it still manages to capitalize on that small share.
4. Amazon.com
Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is the primary website for the world’s largest e-commerce company. It is an online superstore with an immensely diverse virtual inventory. It sells nearly anything brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Kroger (NYSE: KR) sell. And that is to list just a few. Amazon has used the traffic and customer base it has established over the years to enter a number of new, lucrative and even revolutionary businesses. This includes electronic books, which barely existed five years ago. It includes the e-reader business, which Amazon pioneered with the 2007 introduction of the Kindle. And it includes the online video-on-demand business. Amazon has recently been transformed from a company that competes with other retailers to one that also competes with the likes of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) in the content delivery business and with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) in the consumer electronics sector.
24/7 Wall St.: The most profitable stores in America
3. Facebook
Facebook, the world’s largest social network with nearly one billion members, plans to raise enough money through an IPO this year to value the company at nearly $100 billion. The site is not even 10 years old. The meteoric rise of the business is largely due to how it altered people’s use the Internet. Before Facebook, Internet use was mostly passive. Visitors went to a portal to get information, to a search engine to get research results, and to video sites to watch content. Facebook helped the Internet evolve into a two-way interpersonal medium on which people voluntarily offer a great deal of their personal information to interact with friends, family and business associates. In the process, Facebook has been at the core of one of the most revolutionary changes in human interaction. Despite this, Facebook has not been able to find a way to make a great deal of money from its huge membership, particularly when compared to Google and Amazon.
2. YouTube
YouTube is the largest video site in the world. To give an idea of its dominance of the U.S. market, 18.6 billion videos were viewed at this division of Google in January against the a total of 40 billion nationwide for all websites. The average number of minutes per viewer for Google’s video content, almost all of it on YouTube, was 448 minutes in January, compared to 57 minutes on Yahoo! and 22 minutes on Facebook. YouTube’s sales are only 5 percent of Google’s total revenue, an extremely small amount given its size. To a great extent, this is because most of the content posted at the site continues to be low-quality, user-created videos, and these videos do not create an environment attractive to major marketers. YouTube has found other ways to pursue revenue. Premium content owners have started to use YouTube to build audiences, and they often pay YouTube for traffic. YouTube also has set up a paid video rental business and joint ventures with several studios. Despite all of this, its revenue was only $1.6 billion in 2011, as based on several estimates. YouTube is the only site on this list that could not have existed before the advent of the broadband technology that allows the transfer of large amounts of data online.
1. Google
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is the largest search engine in the U.S. Its dominance goes beyond that. It is also the largest search engine by market share throughout most of Europe. The only large markets where it has stiff competition happen to be emerging markets with huge populations such as China, India and Russia. Google has two substantial challenges now that will determine whether its business can continue to expand at the extraordinary rate of the past decade. First, there is a great deal of competition to become the primary search engine on new tablet PCs like the Apple iPad and smartphones like the iPhone. As more Americans turn to these portable devices to use the Internet, it is not certain that Google will be able to hold the dominant position it currently has against Microsoft and Yahoo! The second challenge Google faces is expanding its other offerings beyond search. It is unclear whether it can use its Google.com site as a means to help it successfully market these products, including applications that compete with Microsoft’s Windows products or e-commerce products like Google Wallet. Google has yet to demonstrate that it is more than a single legged company — at least so far as sales are concerned.
Comments »Peter Pachal
The battery indicator on the iPad is a liar. Research from a display research company says Apple‘s new tablet continues to charge for a long time after the onscreen indicator shows it’s full.
Ray Soneira of DisplayMate– whose research also showed that the new iPad’s retina display drains significantly more power than previous models — conducted a test that showed the iPad kept drawing power at the full recharging rate of about 10 watts for two hours after it initially reported having a 100% charge. Only at 2:10 did the recharging “fully terminate” with a sudden drop in power.
Soneira says he wasn’t setting out to test the battery, and that he only looked at the iPad’s power usage to see how much is going to the screen. However, when he noticed his equipment told him his iPad was charging even though the screen said “100%,” he decided to study the issue further. That’s when he discovered the extended charge time.
Why would the iPad say it has a full charge when it doesn’t? Apple isn’t saying (a spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment), but Soneira has a theory.
“The charge indicator on all mobile devices is based on a mathematical model of the charge rates, discharge rates, and recent discharge history of the battery,” he told Mashable in an email. “It’s actually rather difficult to do because most batteries degrade slowly and then tend to surprise with a precipitous decline near the end. So there is something wrong with the battery charge mathematical model on the iPad.”
Read the rest here.
Comments »Brian Bremner
The spectacularly botched initial public offering of Bats Global Markets on March 23 is so rich in irony that it’s difficult to know where to begin. What’s far less amusing is the prospect that the current era of high-frequency trading, in which powerful computers sift through massive information flows in search of price discrepancies and split-second trades, will bring even more episodes of market mayhem far more costly to investors and the broader economy.
In the annals of business screw-ups, Bats has certainly made its mark. Bats stands for Better Alternative Trading System and the company runs two exchanges that collectively rank third in terms of U.S. share trading, behind New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The Bats exchanges account for 11 percent to 12 percent of daily U.S. equity trading, according to its website. The company came of age with the expansion of high-frequency trading over the last decade and the proliferation of quant-jock-driven electronic firms that dominate the buying and selling of U.S. equities. Bats founder Dave Cummings is chairman and owner of high-frequency trading firm Tradebot Systems.
Today was supposed to be the Lenexa (Kan.)-based company’s moment in the limelight as it tried to sell about 6.3 million shares in the $16 to $18 dollar per share range. Instead, something went terribly wrong. The company’s shares somehow ended up trading for pennies per share early in the trading day on both the Bats bourse and Nasdaq, according to data reviewed in this Bloomberg story. Then tech investors and Apple (AAPL) fanboys the world over were dismayed when a single trade for 100 shares executed on the Bats market sent Apple’s shares to $542 per share, down sharply from recent levels. (The company set a new 52-week high of $609 per share on March 21.) The stock temporarily halted trading and recovered.
It’s far too early to know what went wrong, though Bats took the unusual step of withdrawing its IPO late in the trading day. “In the wake of today’s technical issues, which affected the trading of certain stocks, including that of Bats, we believe withdrawing the IPO is the appropriate action to take for our company and our shareholders,” said Joe Ratterman, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Bats.
Read the rest here.
Comments »By Ben Klayman
DETROIT | Wed Mar 21, 2012 7:08am EDT
(Reuters) – Scott Kluth has a love-hate relationship with his new Fisker Karma luxury electric sedan.
The 34-year-old car lover bought the plug-in hybrid electric Karma in December for $107,850, but five days later the car’s battery died as he was driving in downtown Chicago. While the car he affectionately calls a “head turner” was fixed in a recall, Kluth remains uncertain how much he will drive it.
“I just want a car that works,” Kluth said. “It’s a fun car to drive. It’s just that I’ve lost confidence in it.”
The Karma’s problems — one vehicle died during testing by Consumer Reports this month — follow bad publicity arising from a probe of General Motors Co’s Chevrolet Volt and weak sales of the car, and the closure or bankruptcy of several electric vehicle-related start-ups.
The unrelenting bad news has led to questions about the readiness of electric cars and raises fresh doubts about a technology that has been around since the late 1890s but is still struggling to win over the public.
Whether electric vehicles can find an audience beyond policymakers in Washington and Hollywood celebrities depends on lowering vehicle prices without selling cars at a loss, analysts and industry executives say, while extending driving range to make the cars competitive with their gasoline-powered peers.
“It’s going to be a slow slog,” said John O’Dell, senior green car editor at industry research firm Edmunds.com. “Maybe there’s too much expectation of more and quicker success than might realistically be expected of a brand new technology.”
He also questioned whether priorities will simply change for whomever is U.S. president after the November election. Electric vehicles could lose tax breaks — currently worth $7,500 a vehicle for buyers — particularly if a Republican ends up in the White House.
Edmunds expects pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids to make up only 1.5 percent of the U.S. market in 2017, compared with 0.1 percent last year, and O’Dell said that may be optimistic. Consumers charge all-electric cars by plugging into an outlet, while hybrid versions include a gasoline engine.
President Barack Obama’s administration has been a strong proponent of electric vehicles like the Volt and set a goal of getting 1 million battery-powered vehicles on the road by 2015. Lux Research estimates that number will actually be fewer than 200,000. Both the Volt and Karma’s development were supported by low-interest federal loans.
That has not dissuaded automakers, many of which plan to launch electric vehicles to join the Volt and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf in a bid to meet rising fuel efficiency standards. Toyota has begun selling a plug-in Prius, and EVs from Ford, Honda, BMW and Fiat will join the fray this year, along with cars from start-ups Tesla and Coda Automotive.
HENRY FORD’S WIFE
Electric cars aren’t a new concept. Henry Ford bought his wife, Clara, at least two electric cars in the early 1900s offering at best 50 miles driving range and top speeds of about 35 miles per hour, according to the Henry Ford Museum.
But analysts said automakers have not done a good enough job getting the costs down and explaining the technology to win over anyone beyond early adopters like actor Leonardo DiCaprio, pop idol Justin Bieber, comedian Jay Leno and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
“You can do all the advertising and promotion you want, but if people don’t buy into the message the needle’s not going to move,” said George Cook, a marketing professor at the University of Rochester’s business school and a former Ford executive.
The Volt, at almost $40,000 before federal subsidies, is seen as too expensive by many critics. Fiat-Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne, a long-time EV skeptic, has said Chrysler will lose more than $10,000 on every battery-powered Fiat 500 it sells.
And even with rising gasoline prices — topping $4 a gallon in parts of the country — EVs are just not competitive, according to the Lundberg Survey. Gasoline prices would have to rise to $8.53 a gallon to make the Leaf competitive and hit $12.50 for a Volt to be worth it, based on the cost of gasoline versus electricity, fuel efficiency and depreciation, the survey said.
Obama’s vision, which he laid out at a Daimler truck plant in North Carolina this month, includes a car battery that costs half the price of today’s versions and can go up to 300 miles on a single charge. The industry is far from achieving that.
Since last fall, there has been a run of bad news for EVs, starting with the late November news that U.S. safety regulators were investigating the Volt for possible battery fires.
While the federal investigation was closed with the conclusion there was no defect and the car did not pose a greater risk of fire than gas-powered vehicles, weak demand led GM to halt production for five weeks and temporarily lay off 1,300 workers at the plant that builds the car. GM, which strengthened the structural protection of the Volt battery, has repeatedly said the car is safe, and some said the safety probe should have never occurred.
The Karma that died during testing by Consumer Reports magazine was another blow following a recall of more than 200 of the cars last year and the halting of sales in January for a software issue. Fisker, which builds the Karma in Finland, also suspended work last month at its U.S. plant scheduled to make another car, the Nina sedan, while it works to renegotiate a $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher said problems can arise with new technologies and a new company but added Fisker had gone “beyond the call of duty” in instituting a system to respond to customer issues and had plenty of satisfied owners. CEO Tom LaSorda in a letter to Karma owners last week said Fisker was committed to giving customers “complete peace of mind” and he had created a “SWAT team” of 50 engineers and consultants to identify issues with the car.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Comments »Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) will finish work on Windows 8 this summer, setting the stage for personal computers and tablets with the operating system to go on sale around October, according to people with knowledge of the schedule.
The initial rollout will include devices running Intel Corp. (INTC) and ARM Holdings Plc (ARM) chips, making good on Microsoft’s promise to support both standards, said the people, who declined to be named because the plans are confidential. In embracing ARM technology, Microsoft is using the same kind of processors as Apple Inc.’s iPad. Still, there will be fewer than five ARM devices in the debut, compared with more than 40 Intel machines.
The Microsoft booth at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show on Jan. 7, 2010 in Las Vegas. Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The timing would let Microsoft target Christmas shoppers with the new software, which works with touch-screen devices as well as laptops and desktop PCs.
