It sounds like the worst nightmare of a 21st-century parent. Not only are the kids addicted to video games, they aren’t even playing the games themselves. Instead, they’re sitting in front of the computer watching other people play. Where, oh where, did we go wrong?
Your marriage may last forever, but the website you register to announce it to the world won’t. A new top-level domain (TLD)—the last bit of a web address, like the .com in qz.com—is bringing a Snapchat mentality to the fusty world of domain names. By making it very expensive for users to hold on to their websites after a certain period of time, these sites are effectively built to self-destruct—or at least move on.
This post was updated with comment from Walmart on May 3 at 8:30am ET, and with further comment from Cloudmark on May 5 at 12:45pm ET.
On May 5th, LinkedIn will celebrate its 11th birthday. It announced last month that 300 million people had signed up for the professional social network. This evening, LinkedIn will report earnings for first quarter of this year, which analysts expect to surpass the company’s own guidance.
Facebook announced a shedload of new features today at F8, a conference for its developers. The new features include a “Like” button for mobile apps, the ability for apps to “deep-link” to things inside other apps—cross-functionality that today usually requires people to exit one app and navigate through another—and the ability to log in to third-party apps “anonymously,” which in reality is the ability only to decide what specific information you share with other apps (thanks a lot, Facebook). As expected, the company also announced a mobile ad network.
Soccer will save the day. Samsung’s first-quarter revenues may be up 1.5% on the same period last year, but operating profits dropped 3.3% (pdf), the company reported this morning in Seoul. But there is no cause for concern; profits will pick up ”in the second quarter and beyond, on the back of improved sales of display panels and home appliances,” Samsung says:
Facebook is falling apart. On purpose.
Apple had a fantastic first quarter. So good, in fact, that the company surprised itself—in January it forecast revenues of between $42 billion and $44 billion. Instead, it raked in $45.6 billion, blowing away its own and analysts’ projections. And it sold 43.7 million iPhones, up 17% from the same quarter last year. Analysts had expected a meagre 39 million.
The $7.2 billion sale of Nokia to Microsoft is expected to close tomorrow, bringing the phone-making chapter of a remarkably versatile, adaptive and admired company to a close—almost. Nokia will still make phones, under contract, at its manufacturing plant in the southern Indian city of Chennai (formerly Madras) thanks to a long-running tax dispute between Nokia and Indian tax authorities.
Uber, the wildly successful taxi-service app that garners both good and virulently hateful feeling, just released maps of how its services are used in the 100 cities in which it now operates.
Quartz has reported before on the global ambitions of Asian smartphone manufacturers, especially Xiaomi. Yesterday, the company made another move to help it expand: It changed its web address from xiaomi.com to mi.com. That may seem pretty shallow, but Xiaomi thinks the move has real value—$3.6 million of value, according to a number being reported by China Daily.
When the first Harry Potter movie came out in 2001 the idea of the Daily Prophet, a newspaper that contains moving pictures, qualified as magic. A Kickstarter campaign by Ynvisible, a Lisbon-based technology firm, is bringing that magic to life with its displays, held together with paper-thin circuitry.
Verizon just released its authoritative annual report on data breaches (registration required) and information security. It’s a jaunty, colorful document, packed full of interesting charts and information, if you’re into that sort of thing. (As well as plenty of gags that offer a glimpse into the life of a data-cruncher, such as endnote 11: “Note to self: stop leaving laptop in conference room when walking down to the cafeteria.”)
Somalia’s first terrestrial fiber optic cables have connected the country to the modern internet. The BBC reported that Somalis have been in ”culture shock” ever since. ”They’re very excited about the speed,” a spokesman from Somalia Wireless, an internet service provider (ISP), told the BBC, which reports that:
The map below should concern you. This visualization, made by James Siddle, shows a single commuter’s journeys using London’s public bicycles in a six-month period between 2012 and 2013. Purple lines indicate round trips while orange lines represent one-way journeys.
Twitter just bought Gnip, a company that repackages and resells Twitter’s ”firehose”—the full stream of every public tweet on the site. Gnip is one of only a handful of companies to which Twitter gives access to the firehose, and was the first to get it, back in 2010. For big companies wanting to learn what people are saying about them or their industry on social media, researchers investigating large data sets, or financial firms looking for market sentiment, it makes sense to get structured data from a company like Gnip or its rival Datasift, rather than trying to monitor and analyze all of Twitter themselves.
For the past several years, a Canadian company called D-Wave Systems has been selling what it says is the largest quantum computer ever built. D-Wave’s clients include Lockheed Martin, NASA, the US National Security Agency, and Google, each of which paid somewhere between $10 million and $15 million for the thing. As a result, D-Wave has won itself millions in funding and vast amounts of press coverage—including, two months ago, the cover of Time (paywall).
Micromax, an Indian company that emerged from nowhere to become the second-largest smartphone maker (after Samsung) by market share in India’s growing market, has a problem: It doesn’t make smartphones. Like most homegrown brand-name sellers of smartphones in Asia, it outsources production to manufacturers in China. Xiaomi, Micromax’s counterpart in China, has built a reputation for well-designed phones at prices few others can match. But it finds itself in the same boat.
Facebook is ”only weeks away” from getting regulatory approval to become a payment and remittance processor, reports the Financial Times (paywall). Once the central bank of Ireland—where Facebook’s non-US business is registered and headquartered—approves Facebook as “electronic money institution,” its users will be able to send money to each other, or to online sellers. It’s unclear whether the service will be available only in Europe or everywhere outside the United States. (Facebook declined to comment and declined to offer reasons why.)
If you live in North America or Europe and are paid over $85,000 a year, you are three times more likely to be defrauded than those who earn less, according to Trustev, an online anti-fraud company. A salary of $85,000 is hardly enough to qualify someone as rich in those countries, but in the United States it would put you in the top quartile of earners (top 6% if you’re single) and far above the national average or median wage.
Back in 2010, six months after David Cameron became prime minister of the United Kingdom, he gave a speech in London’s start-up district. He said was laying out policies to make Britain “the most attractive place in the world to start and invest in innovative technology companies”:
If you lived in New Delhi and went out to vote today, you could have used Uber’s recently launched India service to get there and back for free. All you’d need to do is enter a promo code into the Uber app to get two rides worth up to Rs 1,000 ($16.60) between 7am and 7pm. You wouldn’t even need to vote. And the thing is, it actually wouldn’t make much sense to use the codes to vote—the maximum distance a voter needs to travel to get to a polling booth in Delhi is 2 km (1.25 miles), a much smaller fare. The California-based transportation network’s promotional deal may end up having the perverse effect of encouraging voters to skip voting and go see friends instead—specially since election day is a holiday in Delhi.
Samsung is going where few multinationals have gone before. In India, the South Korean giant will open between 3,000 and 4,000 shops in cities with fewer than 100,000 people, according to the Economic Times.
Every month, some 260 million people go to TripAdvisor for advice from—or to give advice to—others about where to stay while on holiday, what to eat and what to do. Recommendations secured, they might find themselves at Expedia or Priceline’s booking.com to buy flight tickets and hotel bookings. And when they get back home, they return to TripAdvisor to warn future travelers about the flea-pit hotel they stayed in or the excellent pomme-frites kiosk they discovered.
