core business
AmEx to Offer a Prepaid Debit Card that Rewards Users in FarmVille Cash
allthingsd.com
American Express and Zynga are rolling out a rewards program today that will allow players to earn virtual currency when they spend money in the real world. For FarmVille fans willing to jump through a number of hoops, including signing up for a Zynga-branded prepaid card from American Express, they will...
Amazon Is Thinking About Real-World Stores
www.readwriteweb.com
Good E-Reader reports today that Amazon plans to launch a retail store in its hometown of Seattle "within the next few months." It will be a small boutique emphasizing its Kindle e-readers and physical copies of its Amazon Exclusives book titles. It will also stock accessories for Kindles, such as...
RIM’s tailspin
www.asymco.com
The number of BlackBerry phones sold fell 41% year-on-year in the last RIM fiscal quarter. Sequentially the fall was 30%. Though surprisingly poor, I note that Nokia’s smartphone business fell even more dramatically last quarter (down 50% y/y and 39% sequentially). LG also saw a 44% decline in unit shipments...
Yahoo's New CEO Preps Major Restructuring, Including Significant Layoffs
allthingsd.com
According to multiple sources both inside and outside the Silicon Valley Internet giant, Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson is preparing a massive restructuring of the company, including layoffs that are likely to number in the thousands. Much of the change — which could be announced as soon as the end...
Redbox acquires NCR Corporation and Blockbuster Express DVD rental kiosks in $100 million deal
www.theverge.com
Right on the heels of the announcement that it will be partnering with Verizon for a "streaming-video venture," Redbox has revealed it will be expanding its physical footprint by acquiring all of the entertainment assets of rival NCR Corporation. In the deal, worth up to $100 million, Redbox will...
Torbit’s Insight Measures The Affect Of Site Speed On Your Bounce, Conversion & Revenue
techcrunch.com
Anyone who runs a website, especially those who those who do the majority of their business through a web portal, know how important speedy load times are to keeping their customers engaged, on site, and happy. Of course, maintaining speed can be a tough proposition, especially for sites that serve...
Facebook Could Actually Be A Direct Threat To Google's Core Business (GOOG)
www.businessinsider.com
We published a version of this note in March on Business Insider Intelligence, BI's internet industry research service. If you were a subscriber, you'd already know this! Click here to learn about BI Intelligence and sign up for a free trial → One of Facebook's innovative ad formats, Sponsored...
Read Yahoo CEO’s Letter to Employees About Layoffs
blogs.wsj.com
Yahoo today confirmed this morning it plans to cut 2,000 jobs, or 14% of its 14,000 work force. Here’s CEO Scott Thompson’s letter to employees: Yahoos – Today we are restructuring Yahoo! to give ourselves the opportunity to compete and win in our core business. The changes we’re announcing today...
Facebook's Decision To Pay $1 Billion For Instagram Is A Big Red Flag
www.businessinsider.com
Facebook's decision to pay $1 billion for Instagram, a 13 person photo sharing startup with no revenue, is a bit of a shock. While many people have congratulated Facebook for smartly taking out a budding rival, few have looked at the other side of what that means. Facebook, with...
Big Tech: How Microsoft Will Profit Off Webmail Without Reading Your Inbox
www.wired.com
Microsoft says its new Outlook.com webmail service won’t read your email to target you with ads. So how do they plan to make money? Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired No doubt about it: Outlook.com looks great. The user interface for Microsoft’s just-announced Hotmail overhaul is crisp and clean—I’m a sucker for whitespace....
Big Tech: If Surface Tablets Fail to Post Monster Sales, MSFT May Not Care
www.wired.com
Will crowds storm the Microsoft Store to buy the Surface? Does Microsoft even care? Photo: Michael Kappel There once was a company that sat out the hardware wars. Then, in a flurry of excitement, they entered the fray. The slick new product would showcase their new operating system. It would...
VMware shakeup: Maritz is reportedly out
gigaom.com
Paul Maritz CEO of VMware at Structure 2011. A tech trade publication is reporting that VMware CEO Paul Maritz is being pushed out and will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, the current COO of EMC. EMC owns roughly 80 percent of VMware, the market leader in server virtualization. It’s a...
Google Applies for .Google, .YouTube and .LOL Top-Level Domains
techcrunch.com
Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected,...
Expanding the Internet domain space
googleblog.blogspot.com
In 2016, it’s estimated that almost half of the world’s population will be online, yet nearly 50 percent of the websites we visit are found in the .com top-level domain (TLD), which was among the first TLDs created in 1984. Despite the great opportunities the web has enabled for people...
New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way
paidcontent.org
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic (see disclosure) says that the service is preparing for a significant change of direction — by releasing a much simpler version designed to work on mobile. Speaking at the paidContent 2012 event on Wednesday, Mullenweg said that he had been hard at...
Watch This Blind Man Take A Trip In One Of Google's Self-Driving Cars (GOOG)
www.businessinsider.com
Google's self-driving cars have absolutely nothing to do with Google's core business, and Google has never even tried to explain how they're going to make money. But so what? They're really cool. They push technology forward. And as this video shows, they could make people's lives better in real,...
Nokia's extreme dieting continues as it kills off Nokia Money
www.engadget.com
If you thought Nokia had finished its program of slimming down, think again. The axe is being wielded on Nokia Money as the company seeks to reinvent itself as a lean'n'mean mobile player. The mobile payments and cash management service was launched in India late last year, but both...
Sony to now think as “One Sony,” with a focus on digital imaging, gaming, and mobile
venturebeat.com
In an effort to be more nimble with its decision-making (and less of a lumbering corporate giant), Sony today has announced a new business structure, which it’s calling “Sony One.” The initiative is Spearheaded by the company’s new CEO Kazuo Hirai, who has been vocal about his plans to...
Blurb, The Custom Book Printing Startup, Is Tossing Its Hat Into The E-Book Ring
techcrunch.com
Blurb has had a good amount of success as a disruptive player in the “traditional” publishing space. The San Francisco-based company, which lets anyone write and publish a physical book at relatively affordable prices, has built a profitable business with more than 100 staff and more than a million...
Microsoft Paid $1.2B for Yammer, But You Can Have It for Free
www.wired.com
David Sacks, CEO of Yammer, the company that’s bringing a new breed of social network to Microsoft. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com Microsoft just paid $1.2 billion for Yammer. But it still plans on giving away the company’s social-networking service for free. At least, that’s the word from David Sacks, the CEO...
Torbit Insight: A free tool that lets you see load times for every user on your website
thenextweb.com
If you run a website then chances are that you are familiar with how important the loading times are to keeping visitors on your pages. But there aren’t very reliable ways to see exactly what load times mean as far as conversions go, and that’s where Torbit Insight is about...
Ixia acquires cybersecurity firm BreakingPoint for $160m in cash
thenextweb.com
NASDAQ-listed Ixia, which offers IP and wireless network testing and visibility solutions, has agreed to acquire security testing company BreakingPoint Systems for roughly $160 million in cash. BreakingPoint had raised at least $28 million in funding from firms like Austin Ventures and Genesis Inventions. In May 2012, Ixia picked up...
You might start seeing .google .docs and .youtube domain names soon
thenextweb.com
According to an announcement from Google today, the company will start exploring ways to expand the domain space. ICANN recently held an open submission for new top-level domains (like .com and .net), and Google apparently participated by submitting some of its own. The gTLD submission process closed on March 29th...
It's Official: Yahoo Reorgs Itself Just Like We Said (Memo Time!)
allthingsd.com
Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson just sent this note to Yahoo employees, about a new organization for the company. I’d go into the deets, but it is all below and tracks on previous reports I have done, including this morning. Please enjoy the memo: Yahoos – It’s time for Yahoo! to...
Starbucks Is Buying This San Francisco Bakery For $100 Million (SBUX)
www.businessinsider.com
Starbucks is laying down $100 million to buy San Francisco bakery chain La Boulange owner Bay Bread Group reports Lisa Baertlein at Reuters. Food has always been a problem for the world's biggest coffee chain, so it's trying to find ways to patch that up. This marks its biggest non-coffee acquisition...
How cloud computing can improve your charity's efficiency
www.guardian.co.uk
Cloud computing allows staff to access IT systems from remote locations and be more confident about data securityThe budget did little to alter the economic outlook and the sector is still facing very tough times. In NCVO's latest Charity Forecast survey, 90% of respondents claimed they expected the voluntary sector's...
10 Things You Need To Know This Morning (AAPL, FB, GOOG, BBY, IBM, AOL)
www.businessinsider.com
Good morning! Here's the news: Apple might get sued for price-fixing today. Here's what it will take for Best Buy to recover. Facebook could actually be a direct threat to Google's core business. IBM fires back at Cisco with a $2 billion smart server project. Nokia is giving Lumia...
Hollywood Has Ruined Relationship With ISP It Sued Over Piracy
torrentfreak.com
In November 2008 and after three years of voluntary discussions that went nowhere, the Hollywood movie studios under the banner of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) decided to would be a good business decision to sue ISP iiNet. Their aim was to hold the ISP responsible for the...
Yahoo CEO: We're "Only Doing a Few Things Really Well"
www.readwriteweb.com
Yahoo Chief Executive Scott Thompson plans to bring the Web portal to its former glory by doing away with everything that does not contribute to its core business of profit-driving ads and e-commerce. On Tuesday, Thompson, who left eBay's division of PayPal to become CEO and president in January,...
Hillcrest Labs open sources Kylo TV browser
gigaom.com
Hillcrest Labs, the company that’s behind the magic motion technology used in remote controls from LG and others, has open sourced its Kylo connected TV browser under the the Mozilla Public License. This makes it possible for others to use the software for their own commercial products. However, the move...
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