October 20, 2011, 9:03 am By CLAIRE CAIN MILLERYour friends and family might not yet be networking on Google+, making it less entertaining to use than, say, Facebook. But they will eventually show up, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Google+.
Tony Avelar/Bloomberg NewsSergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, responded to a memo from a Google engineer trashing Google+.“We’re in an enviable position where people come to Google,” Mr. Gundotra said. “Over time your network will show up.”
He spoke Wednesday at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco along with Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, onstage and later at a press conference. The conversation, which centered on Google+, also covered the latest Android phones, cars that drive themselves and Mr. Brin’s new role at the company.
Though incumbent social networks like Facebook have a clear advantage because users are already there, Mr. Gundotra said, Google has a different advantage: most people visit Google every day, so Google constantly has the chance to lure them to Google+. Read more…
October 19, 2011, 7:51 pm By NICK BILTON
Nick Bilton/The New York Times U Can’t Touch This: M.C. Hammer announced a new start-up at the Web 2.0 Summit.Among the technology entrepreneurs announcing new products at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, there was an unlikely guest: M.C. Hammer, the rapper.
On stage at the conference Mr. Hammer announced a new Web service called WireDoo: a search engine that adds relationship information to search results. For example, if someone searches for the word “car” on WireDoo, they will see results for topics related to a car, including insurance, pricing and consumer safety ratings. Searching a stock symbol will show related investors and mutual funds.
Mr. Hammer said WireDoo, which is currently still being built and not available to the public, is not trying to compete with established search giants like Google, but hopes to offer a “deeper type of search” that can show relationships to queries.
Mr. Hammer noted that he has started building and investing in technology start-ups as he sees the business potential of data-driven companies on the Web. “No one is playing for singles anymore,” he said at the event, noting the huge returns investors can reap from technology start-ups.
Entertainment celebrities, including Mr. Hammer, Ashton Kutcher and Mike Tyson, have increasingly joined the tech start-up scene in recent years.
October 19, 2011, 7:42 pm By NICK BILTON AND CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
A classic map showing Napoleon’s army as it marched to and from Russia is the inspiration for Google’s Flow Visualization.In the early 1900s, John Wanamaker, a political figure and well-known merchant, coined one of the most famous quotes about advertising: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
For the past century that observation has remained true, but that is slowly changing as online companies start delivering real-time analytics about Web surfers and the ads they see. It could be used for social networking advertising — an area that Google is poised to enter with its new social network, Google+.
On Wednesday, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google announced that it is releasing tools that will help narrow the advertising conundrum even further. The company showed off a new analytics tool called “Flow Visualization” that can track the path users take when navigating a Web site.
The new tools are for Google Analytics, the free service for Web site owners and app developers to track what happens on their Web sites, like the number of visits to a site, the percentage of first-time visitors and the amount of time people spend there.
Read more…
October 19, 2011, 5:26 pmGroupon, the daily deal site, is considering an offering valued at close to $12 billion as it prepares for an investor road show next week, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
These people said the current expectation is for a valuation to be more than $10 billion and if markets improve, could be significantly higher.
The offering is expected to be less than 10 percent of the valuation.
Read the entire post on DealBook.
October 19, 2011, 4:19 pm By NICK WINGFIELD
Apple Inc.Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, spoke to employees at a celebration of Steve Jobs’ life.6:25 p.m. | Updated Removing incorrect reference to Randy Newman, whose music was played at the event but who did not appear.
The memorial for Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters on Wednesday was, like so many of the Apple product introductions that Mr. Jobs presided over, a musical affair.
According to multiple Twitter posts from people at the event, the British band Coldplay performed “Fix You,” “Yellow” and other songs in an outdoor amphitheater in an interior courtyard on Apple’s campus. The singer Norah Jones covered the Bob Dylan song “Forever Young.”
Those artists have performed in recent years at Apple product launches. Mr. Jobs often concluded those events by inviting a well-known singer or musical group to take the stage to belt out a few numbers. He died on Oct. 5 after a struggle with cancer. Read more…
October 19, 2011, 1:22 pm By NICK WINGFIELD
Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressCustomers lined up outside a closed Apple store in Washington, DC, while employees watched a tribute to Stephen P. Jobs.3:10 p.m. | Updated Changes to reflect that the store shutdown happened.
Apple’s retail stores around the world closed on Wednesday for about an hour and a half so store employees could watch a company tribute to its late co-founder and former chief executive, Steven P. Jobs.
The employees were able to watch a webcast of the event, held at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus at 10 a.m. (1 p.m. Eastern time), according to a person familiar with the plans. All of Apple’s more than 300 retail stores worldwide were closed during that time (or at least the ones that would normally be open at that hour).
The event on Apple’s campus, described inside the company as a celebration of Mr. Jobs’ life, was open only to Apple employees. The company’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, encouraged employees to share their thoughts about and memories of Mr. Jobs prior to the event. Mr. Jobs, who suffered from a form of pancreatic cancer, died Oct. 5.
Apple did create a Web page where the public can view submissions about Mr. Jobs from people around the world, including personal friends, colleagues and owners of Apple’s products. Apple said it received more than one million such submissions.
October 19, 2011, 9:19 am By QUENTIN HARDYIntel has a message for its doubters: Time, in terms of a rush to build more big computing centers, is on its side.
Speaking at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Monday, Kirk Skaugen, an Intel vice president, said that the computer server market, which has more than doubled in the last 10 years to include some 16 million chips, will double again in the next five.
Source: IDC WW Server Tracker (1995-2004 systems data) and internal analysis; 2005-2010 Intel shipments; 2011-2015 DCG forecast.A slide from Kirk Skaugen’s presentation shows that the computer server market will double in the next five years.This is a big deal for Intel, not just because of the good demand it represents, but for what it means to the company’s rising competition from low-power, commodity-priced servers. Executives coming out of the mobile business think that the kind of low-power chips they make will eventually end up in servers. Privately, executives at some computer companies say the same.
But if Mr. Skaugen is right, and the big build is upon us this quickly, there simply will not be time for a new model of server, using non-Intel chips, to reach broad acceptance.
Mr. Skaugen displayed a series of eye-popping charts about the growth in data demand, the kind of thing that will justify building all those data centers. Even if you pay attention to the increasing amount of things connected to the Internet, and all the data being loaded aboard it, these were goodies. There were 345 quintillion bytes of data zipping around the Internet in 2010, more than all that has gone before. The average car will soon have 300 microcontrollers and 12 cameras, and will be connected to the Web. There are all the phones, sensors and emerging computing devices that will also be connected. Read more…
October 18, 2011, 7:59 pm By NICK BILTON
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press The BlackBerry PlayBook hopes to entice developers to create apps.Two technology conferences, two blocks away from each other in San Francisco, were two worlds apart.
On Tuesday, the Web 2.0 Summit and Research in Motion’s developer conference explored the future of the Internet and mobile technologies. But everything about the two events felt different.
Web 2.0 attendees — entrepreneurs, I.T. professionals, big company marketers and journalists — gleefully discussed the next wave of the Internet with an optimistic tone similar to what might be found in a group of recent lottery winners. RIM’s show for app developers for the BlackBerry and PlayBook couldn’t have been more different: noiseless and almost depressing, like a group of children who had been left at the mall by their parents, discussing how to get home.
At Web 2.0, the discussion focused on the future of artificial intelligence, managing and analyzing big data sets and smart technologies. At RIM’s event, it was a game of catch-up, with company officials encouraging developers to do what most had been doing for other makers since 2009: build mobile applications. Read more…
October 18, 2011, 2:27 pmDropbox, the online storage company, confirmed on Tuesday that it had raised $250 million in its latest fund-raising round, an investment that values the company at $4 billion, according to people close to the company.
Read the entire post on DealBook.
October 11, 2011, 2:31 pmThe call is growing louder for Research in Motion to explore a sale of all or part of the company.
On Tuesday, the Jaguar Financial Corporation, a Canadian activist investor that is leading a campaign to agitate for change at RIM, the BlackBerry maker, announced on Tuesday that it had the support of shareholders representing 8 percent of the company’s shares.
Read the entire post on DealBook.
October 11, 2011, 1:28 pm By STEVE LOHRIn computing, as in so many fields, the best path to progress is often not a straight line.
The high-performance realm of supercomputing provides an instructive example. The straight path of continuing to lash together ever-increasing numbers of microprocessors has hit a wall, because the energy consumed is not only costly, but would also fry the hardware.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a major scientific computing center run by the Energy Department, took a big step down a different road with an announcement on Tuesday. It said it would deploy a new energy-efficient supercomputer, called Titan, whose design relies heavily on the use of many thousands of graphics processors — the kind of chips originally designed for gaming.
Titan has the potential to be twice as fast and three times as energy efficient as the fastest supercomputer in the world today, Japan’s K computer. Yet how big and how fast Titan becomes will depend on the energy agency’s budget for research. Supercomputers can cost $200 million or more. Read more…
October 10, 2011, 6:53 pm By NICK WINGFIELDFor people who are curious about how Apple’s new chief executive, Tim Cook, will compare to the company’s previous C.E.O., Steve Jobs, there’s not a lot to go on yet.
AppleTim Cook, chief executive of Apple.Mr. Cook took the helm of Apple from Mr. Jobs only in late August. Even then, Mr. Jobs was still chairman of Apple until his death last week at the age of 56. There was, however, one tantalizing clue about how the two men differ at an Apple event to introduce the new iPhone last Tuesday, the day before Mr. Jobs’s death was announced:
Mr. Cook didn’t demonstrate any new Apple products.
Instead, he left all of the demonstrations of new technologies like the iPhone 4S to his lieutenants. This may seem like a picayune detail, but it could underscore one of the biggest differences between the two men.
Technology, product design and marketing were among Mr. Jobs’s abiding passions. The level of attention he paid to all three areas was unusual for the chief executive of such a large company. While Mr. Jobs sometimes delegated new product demonstrations when he was chief executive, he invariably showed off the most important products for the first time, like the iPad, iPhone and iTunes.
Mr. Cook, in comparison, is a sales and operations guru who whipped Apple’s supply chain into an efficient machine over the past 14 years. At the event, Mr. Cook said he loved Apple and considered his career at the company the “privilege of a lifetime.” He let a trio of Apple senior vice presidents with stronger product credentials — Eddy Cue, Scott Forstall and Philip Schiller — show off Apple’s new toys. Read more…
October 10, 2011, 5:35 pm By NICK WINGFIELDApple is planning what it describes as a public celebration to remember its founder and former chief executive, Steve Jobs, who died Wednesday.
In an e-mail sent to Apple employees, the company’s new chief executive, Tim Cook, told staff members the celebration will occur Oct. 19 at 10 a.m. local time at an outdoor amphitheater on Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus. The event will be for Apple employees only.
The e-mail was first reported by the Apple blog 9to5Mac.
The death of Mr. Jobs appears to be weighing heavily on Apple employees, notably Mr. Cook, who worked at Apple under Mr. Jobs for nearly 14 years. In his e-mail message, Mr. Cook said he had “experienced the saddest days of my lifetime and shed many tears during the past week.” He said that he had found “some comfort in the extraordinary number of tributes and condolences from people all over the world who were touched by Steve and his genius.”
The event for Mr. Jobs will include remembrances of Mr. Jobs by Apple employees. Mr. Cook encouraged staff members to submit their thoughts to an Apple e-mail address.
October 10, 2011, 4:00 pm By NICK BILTON
Facebook The Facebook iPad application takes advantage of the iPad’s multitouch technology.It has been the equivalent of waiting for Bigfoot. Bloggers had seen it. Developers said they had worked on it. Facebook denied its existence. Everyone else just wanted to know if it was real.
It’s the Facebook application for the iPad, which is finally out in the wild for everyone to prod, pinch and interact with.
After months of speculation and false alarms, Facebook said Monday that its official iPad application was available as a free download from the Apple App Store.
The app will likely benefit Apple and Facebook. Although the iPad is the biggest-selling tablet on the market, some consumers are not convinced they need it and opt for less expensive tablets. Seeing a slick Facebook app could convince people to choose an iPad over competitors, as there is no Facebook app specifically tailored for tablets running Google’s Android software. Read more…
October 10, 2011, 2:36 pm By NICK BILTON
Nick Bilton/The New York TimesIt has the repetition of a Hollywood movie script: Apple releases a new product. Some in the media and analysts quickly bemoan the new product, saying it didn’t live up to the hype they created.
Then the new product breaks all previous sales records.
Guess what? Apple announced Monday that orders for the iPhone 4S already broke records for previous iPhone sales. The company said it processed more than one million orders for the iPhone 4S in the first 24 hours it was on sale.
Surprise, surprise. Read more…
