Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, of Facebook infamy, are big Bitcoin supporters who reportedly own 1% of all available Bitcoins.
Their investment firm Winklevoss Capital backs a number of bitcoin-related startups and exchanges, such as BitInstant. On Wednesday the brothers launched an app, WinkDex, that helps users monitor the average price of a bitcoin in real time. Users can also calculate Bitcoins to USD instantly, and see historical charts.
WinkDex uses a formula to calculate the actual price Bitcoin is trading at instead of the mid-point of the bid, Tyler Winklevoss explained on app discovery site, Product Hunt.
The app pulls from multiple data sources, including Bitstamp, Bitfinex, BTCE, CampBX and LocalBTC. The price WinkDex displays is calculated based on volume of only the top three exchanges. The app doesn't currently have price alerts or notifications, although Winklevoss says that's in the pipeline.
Wave is Salesforce’s first business intelligence and data analytics software. It collects and analyzes all the data sitting in the user’s database and provides insights that could lead to better business decisions. It’s also a lot faster and easier to use, compared to previous analytic softwares, allowing users to explore data more easily.
Although news of the product leaked earlier this week, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff officially launched the product during Tuesday’s keynote speech. But just before revealing Wave for the first time, Benioff boiled down his thinking behind launching a new analytics tool to two simple sentences:
“Did you know 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years? There’s going to be 10 times more mobile data by 2020, 19 times more unstructured data, and 50 times more product data by 2020.”
Benioff was referring to the IBM study that said 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, from social media and digital pictures to climate and sales transactions. Calling this a “data revolution,” Benioff added that the abundance of data has in fact created this “data divide” for his customers, where they have no clue about what to do with all the data. He realized there was a clear need for a stronger data analytic software, and thus was born Wave.
With Wave, users can simply click on graphs to get immediate insights over their business. It analyzes data from lots of different angles, like which sales channel performs the best, across different regions or products. It can track each of the sales rep’s performance and customer satisfaction data in real time, giving a complete picture of the team’s performance.
Here’s a video of what the new Wave analytics looks like on Salesforce partner FinancialForce’s analytics platform. You’ll notice the improved speed and visuals:
From fan-favorites to cutting-edge newcomers, it's never been easier to sketch out an idea, take detailed notes, or stay in touch with your team.
There's even an app that acts like your digital butler.
Whatever your day consists of, these apps will help you get more done, faster.
Humin acts like your digital butler.
Humin is an app that remembers all the tiny details about how and where you met someone, so you can focus on the moment instead of remembering. All you need is someone's number, and Humin will do the rest. You'll then be able to search through your contact using familiar phrases like "met last week" or "lives in Brooklyn."
Vesper is a note-taking app that takes a lot of the hassle out of organizing your thoughts. You can easily tag each entry so you can search for a specific thought by keyword later, and all your notes will be synced to your Vesper account, free of charge. Reorganizing your notes is made simple with a hold-and-drag motion, and if you want to prevent a cluttered collection, a simple swipe archives your entry.
Paper by Fifty Three wants to become your virtual sketchbook.
Paper is just as useful as it is beautiful. The app lets you draw out ideas and sketches on your iPad, and you can store them away in various virtual notebooks. It comes packed with a variety of brushes and pens for your ideas, and there's even an official Pencil stylus that responds to the pressure of your input. If you're looking for inspiration, you can check out the Mix ecosystem within the app, which is a creative commons space for remixing ideas.
Renewable energy shows an average price decline over the last 5 years of 78% for utility scale solar and 58% for wind. Lazard, an asset management firm, has a fascinating new analysis of renewable and other energy prices out. There are a huge number of insights in this, from an outside analyst whose primary interest is financial. […]
Apple has a habit of sending technologies off into the sunset—see CDs, Firewire, Adobe Flash, and that’s just for starters.
Running a whole country down, however, is a first.
According to Alexander Stubb, prime minister of Finland, many of the country’s economic woes stem from Apple’s iPhone—the devices that brought about the downfall of Nokia, the country's former cell-phone champion, now a much-diminished part of Microsoft.
He also, bizarrely, pinned the decline of Finland's paper industry on Apple's iPad.
“A little bit paradoxically I guess one could say that the iPhone killed Nokia, and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry," he told CNBC on Monday.
Finland’s sovereign debt rating on Standard & Poor slid from AAA to AA+ on Friday. But Apple isn’t solely to blame for that downgrade. Numerous factors went into its lowered economic prospects, including an aging population, lackluster business development and other matters. Stubb acknowledges that broader reforms are necessary, while remaining optimistic about making “a comeback."
As for Nokia, the company’s phone business now operates under the umbrella of Microsoft, which lopped off as many as 12,500 jobs earlier this year. It still makes good phones—the Nokia Lumia 930, is regarded as one of the best on the market—but Windows Phone remains way behind Apple's iOS and Google's Android in popularity.
With activist investors successfully getting two huge tech companies to chop themselves apart, HP and eBay, breakup mania has hit the tech industry. Now, eyes are turning once again to EMC.
Investor Elliott Management, headed by Paul Singer, has made a public call for the computer storage giant to spin off its hot-and-profitable subsidiary, VMware.
EMC owns 90% of VMware, a publically traded enterprise software company valued at about $40 billion. VMware's main product helps computer servers run more efficiently. The company has since expanded into software for cloud computing, networking, and storage.
“Both EMC and VMware have grown and are now competing against one another, confusing customers, employees, Street analysts and shareholders,” Elliott's letter argues.
The letter also expresses concern for EMC's ability to manage its "federation" structure after CEO Joe Tucci retires. EMC owns other business units that run almost independently, including security company RSA and cloud-computing company Pivotal.
And it delves into how poorly EMC's stock has performed when backing out the value of these subsidiaries.
"Investors are getting core EMC ($16B sales, 20% Op margins, $1.35 EPS) for FREE," according to Wall Street Analyst RBC Capital Markets.
EMC published a public statement in response, saying, "Over the past few months, EMC’s leadership has met with representatives of Elliott several times and has listened carefully to their ideas, as we do with all of our shareholders."
EMC was reportedly in advanced mega-merger talks with HP, which may or may not be dead and which CEO Meg Whitman would not confirm or deny. It all adds up to a strong tail wind for an EMC breakup.
Meanwhile, there's been some chatter over whether Cisco, who's stock has languished below $30 for years, could do better by breaking up, too.
RBC Capital laid out a case for splitting Cisco in half, too, with its routing/switching business becoming one company and its cloud computing/Internet of Things and other growth areas making up the other half, reports Barron's.
That's an interesting idea, but doesn't have the weight of a big activist shareholder behind it. And not every Wall Street analyst buys the idea. Citibank analyst Ehud Gelblum issued a report that says Cisco is more valuable whole.
Microsoft used to be evil. Then it was irrelevant. Now it looks like a winner.
How did this happen?
I have competed against Microsoft for most of my career, battling Windows with Linux in the mobile, desktop and server markets, but also taking on SharePoint while at Alfresco and SQL Server in my work now for MongoDB. For much of that time I raged against the Redmond machine for its stranglehold on computing, only to discover in the past few years that its grip is gone; that enterprises aren't building the future on Microsoft.
And yet. Over the past few years Microsoft has established itself as a real competitor again. Though much of Microsoft's playbook remains the same, it has made key changes that make it a much more formidable competitor, while being a more likable one, too.
The Ghosts Of Microsoft's Past
No one needs me to rehearse the "evil years" of Microsoft's dominance. Years of illegally wielding monopoly power made Microsoft the company everyone loved to hate. (That distinction now goes to Oracle.) Consumers and enterprises, however, kept buying into Microsoft's vision, in large part because Microsoft did more than any other company to lower the bar to productively using complex technology.
Microsoft's evil years, however, gave way to a long period of senile, if profitable, dotage. The Redmond giant was dead but didn't realize it, so awash it was in profits from yesterday's businesses fueled by yesterday's business model.
Sure, the company dabbled in open source. It sprinkled cloud across its offerings, too. But the heart of the business was still fixated on old businesses done the old way.
But the thing ... what is scarce in all of this abundance is human attention. And whoever does the best job of building the right software experiences to give both organizations and individuals time back so that they can get more out of their time, that’s the core of this company—that’s the soul.
This, more than anything else, made Microsoft great. And it's the ingredient, more than any other, that Microsoft has been missing. Microsoft has been so fixated on its old way of doing business—so addicted to the crack of software licensing—that it couldn't grasp the future.
Under Nadella, that is changing.
Microsoft Rising
Take Azure, for example—Microsoft's "infrastructure as a service" cloud that stands a real chance of giving cloud leader Amazon Web Services a serious run for its money. There are many reasons for this, including Microsoft's ability to move data center workloads to the public cloud seamlessly and painlessly.
Cloud computing is great. Yet anything beyond Dropbox, OneDrive or iCloud can be daunting for those of us who aren’t IT professionals. While Amazon is the market leader at selling cloud services to business, you couldn’t describe setting up a server or a website on Amazon’s AWS EC2 as easy. On the other hand, there’s nothing scary about getting started with Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has created a cloud computing service that makes creating a server as simple as setting up a Word document.
Importantly, Microsoft has managed to build this "cloud for the rest of us" without demanding that customers run Microsoft top to bottom. Instead, Microsoft makes open source a first-class citizen on Azure, which certainly wasn't the case in Microsoft's evil years—and not even in its irrelevant ones.
More of Azure itself, in fact, is going open source. Microsoft being Microsoft, it's also trying to make open source contributions easier—specifically, the process of making changes to an open-source code repository, a process known as a pull request. As Scott Hanselman describes:
[T]he Azure folks made an Azure Pull Request Bot. It will automatically look at a [pull request], figure out if a contributor needs a [contributor license agreement], setup the online form, even accept digital signatures and more! Even better, the way you start the bot's process is that you send a [pull request].
This is a very different Microsoft.
Microsoft makes obscure technologies simple, but it manages to do so without sacrificing things like security. In fact, as one IT executive humorously noted, "Microsoft [cloud] has better security than I can afford."
Finally, Microsoft is innovating again. Microsoft was first to market among its public cloud peers with a document "database as a service" offering. Amazon just got around to adding JSON support to its DynamoDB DBaaS, but there's a significant difference between JSON support and a full document database.
The addition of a document-oriented DBaaS is significant because it's potentially highly disruptive to Microsoft's SQL Server business. Document databases have taken a dominant lead in NoSQL, as 451 Research's analysis of LinkedIn profiles suggests:
Source: 451 Research
That lead is widening all the time, and threatens to displace relational databases in a range of new applications, as document databases are on par with relational databases in terms of breadth of functionality.
Source: 451 Research
And yet Microsoft seems happy to build and deploy a significant addition to the army of NoSQL databases.
Taking Redmond Seriously
To be clear, Microsoft never lost its place as top vendor in CIO's hearts. But with developers making more enterprise technology decisions—Gartner estimates that 38% of technology spend is already outside IT's control, a number that will hit 50% by 2017—Microsoft has to appeal to developers, too.
And not merely its old guard developers to whom Steve Ballmer sang. Microsoft needs to win over a new breed of developer, one that is a cloud native and prefers open source.
The new Microsoft under Nadella seems like it understands this message, and is acting on it. But buried in all this newness is Microsoft's old commitment to make complex technology easy to use.
That's why Microsoft is no longer evil. Or irrelevant. It's a competitor again.
Microsoft continues to back Surface Pro 3 for the workplace, offering a new bundle discount on the hardware and commitments that the current device accessories will work with the next Surface…
There's a lot of new plant meat innovations out there, but this one's created "plant blood," was founded by a Stanford biochemist and has raised $75 million from VCs.
Just a decade ago, the dynamic between company and consumer was relatively fixed. If a consumer was unhappy with a company’s customer service, the rule of thumb was that they would tell maybe 10 friends at most, with little to no impact on a company’s reputation or business.
We’re seeing that dynamic get flipped on its head, as Comcast recently found out when a negative customer service call went viral earlier this summer. The power has undisputedly shifted to the consumer.
Through a combination of factors, the consumer’s voice has never been louder or more pervasive. We live in a digital era, where news travels at the speed of real time, and is then amplified to and by the masses. Once upon a time, a complaint would die in the call center — today it is making headlines, and could go viral. We have shifted from an analog world to a digital one, which presents both a great challenge and a tremendous opportunity for companies today.
Comcast learned this the hard way. In mid-July, a customer called Comcast to cancel his service — and recorded the eight-minute call. In this recording, the Comcast rep not only refused to give the customer what he wanted, but aggressively questioned and challenged the customer. Shortly after posting the recording, the conversation went viral. Within days, more than five million people had listened to the recording, and more than 1,000 articles can be found on the topic on Google. A new trend has emerged, with more and more consumers recording their Comcast calls, but this time they’re getting the results they want.
The dangers are real for companies that do not understand the new social contract between company and consumer. While Comcast is scrambling to reexamine their practices to avoid further disaster, the lesson is simple: Treat customers like humans, not as transactions. In fact, the smartest brands are using every consumer interaction as an opportunity to create a relationship.
While digital can lead to “viral” nightmares, it can also be empowering for companies who leverage the right technologies. Leading companies are intently observing consumer behavior, and leveraging innovative digital channels to connect with consumers in the ways that they prefer.
Consumers want to communicate in digital channels — more than one billion consumers today are using mobile messaging apps to instantly text their friends and family. They won’t wait — they want an instant and constant connection with brands. They want to be treated as an individual — they want a conversation with a person, not stock answers or automated voice systems. Call-center agents are tightly scripted because of corporate necessity. The necessity of managing all consumer “transactions” for efficiency has essentially stripped the “human” factor out of these one-on-one conversations.
The very idea of asking customers to call a toll-free number, a technology introduced by AT&T in 1967, is woefully out of touch. Consumers associate 800 numbers with automated phone trees and long wait times; a 2012 Forrester Research report shows that 800 numbers are associated with lower rates of customer satisfaction. Calls to an 800 number are inefficient for both consumer and company from a standpoint of cost, time and happiness.
Companies that are using digital platforms to connect with consumers have several distinct advantages. Through digital, a consumer can engage with a company through any device and any channel they want, including chat, voice, content or video. A consumer is never “on hold” with digital, because of several factors: Agents can manage several concurrent chats at a time, creating more resource availability; and digital behavior enables an agent to know when a consumer might need help, and to engage them even before they even ask for help.
Even more powerful, a digital connection allows for real-time sentiment analysis. When a customer is chatting with a live agent, analytics software can monitor the “mood” of a conversation, and alert a manager with a red flag if it starts to go sour. The ability to proactively avert a negative situation has enormous implications for both a brand’s reputation and their bottom line.
If the consumer still has a bad experience and ends up tweeting about it, a digital platform can detect the complaint and enable a company to reach out and invite the consumer into a real-time conversation to resolve the issue. Companies now have these innovative technologies at their disposal. And just as consumers have shifted away from analog, companies need to follow suit. If Comcast had been digital-minded, the situation may have turned out very differently.
Engagement is now a critical investment, not an expense. Companies who don’t focus on building customer relationships will be quickly exposed, and will lose out to competition. But just as digital has empowered consumers today, it provides a bright future for companies that care.
Robert LoCascio is founder and CEO of LivePerson, a leading cloud-based customer-engagement solution, empowering businesses to drive the greatest possible results from their digital assets. He will be the keynote presenter at LivePerson’s annual Aspire Conference, taking place Wednesday in New York City. Reach him @RobLoCascio.
After rising through the ranks to become the top smartphone seller in the world, Samsung is starting to fall from grace. The company warned of a large profit drop as the…
Only about 33 percent of U.S. households actually use the public switched network anymore, according to USTelecom.
As of June 2013, incumbent local exchange carriers (telcos) served a total of about 78.5 million switched and VoIP access lines. That is just 44 percent of the 178 million telcos served at the end of 2000.
Traditional switched lines had fallen to 70.5 million by June 2013, or only 40 percent of lines served at the end of 2000.
In eight states, suppliers other than the telco had more wired telephone lines (switched access or VoIP) than the telco, and most of those were provided by the cable TV company.
In an additional 10 states, providers other than the telco had 45 percent to 50 percent of the wired voice connections.
And then there is mobile. The FCC reports that there were 305.7 million mobile voice connections in the United States as of mid-2013, about double the number of all fixed network voice lines.
Looking at the total voice market (including mobile, telco and cable TV or other fixed voice connections), telco market share fell from 60.5 percent to 18.5 percent from 2000 to 2012.
Total telco retail switched access lines have fallen by 60 percent since the year 2000, from 178 million to 71 million.
From the end of 2007 to mid-2013, there were almost 60 million retail switched access lines lost, and the rate of decline was still around 9.5 million per year as of mid-2013.
At the same time, and in large part because of legacy regulations, the majority of capital investments made by U.S. telephone companies from 2006 to 2011 went toward maintaining the declining telephone network (legacy voice), not the high speed access network that represents the future.
One might note that U.S. cable TV companies, that are not so regulated, now account for the “overwhelming percentage” of high speed access lines. The issue is not that cable TV suppliers have more than 50 percent market share in the high speed access market.
The issue is the percentage of market share at the top end of the market. Cable TV suppliers of high speed access have about 58 percent market share, but are getting 80 percent of the net new additions.
“Today, a majority of American homes have access to 100 Mbps,” said Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.
In fact, cable modem services broke decisively from asymmetrical digital subscriber line services in 2006. Since then, digital subscriber line services have fallen far behind, and only telco fiber-to-home services have kept pace with cable modem potential speeds.
So it is no surprise that telcos want legacy regulations removed. It comes as no surprise that competitors to the telcos want the legacy rules maintained.
But a reasonable person might well conclude it is foolish to maintain rules that funnel investment capital into a network offering services consumers do not want. That capital is badly needed elsewhere, to create faster access networks supporting Internet Protocol services and apps.
Best Buy is close to offering televisions for as cheap as Amazon.
The brick-and-mortar tech giant's televisions are just 0.7% more expensive than Amazon's, according to Deutsche Bank.
And the gap could continue to shrink.
Best Buy's television prices are up 6% from a year ago — less than Amazon's gains of 9.2%.
Executives at Best Buy have made it clear that 4K Ultra High Definition televisions are the future of the business.
CFO Sharon McCollam recently told Goldman Sachs that the TVs would "be a decisive product for the franchise."
The TV's picture is four times more detailed than standard high definition, according to Best Buy's website.
The TVs also include internet access for easy television, movie, and music streaming.
Best Buy is working with the manufacturers Sony and Samsung to showcase all the TVs' features in stores, McCollam said.
Because the televisions currently cost $4,000 to $10,000, they are not popular enough to affect business, McCollam said. Prices are expected to decline in the next couple of years.
Best Buy's store traffic has been declining as more people buy online.
In a report last week, Goldman Sachs said that people prefer to buy large, heavy objects online because they are difficult to ship.
Here's a pretty funny speech from Jerry Seinfeld about advertising, delivered while getting an award from the ad industry.
He playfully shreds his audience saying, "I love advertising because I love lying."
He continues, saying, "I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy."
And the crowd goes nuts.
It's a little bit weird hear people in the ad business go wild, cheering on their own duplicity, but there it is. It's all in fun, but still weird.
Google already lets people chat via its Hangouts app, but Times' sources say the new app won't require users to enter their Google login information. It will reportedly be free to download and use, and will likely be tested in India and other emerging markets. Google+ product manager Nikhyl Singhal apparently toured India last month to get a better idea of the messaging app ecosystem there.
It's a crowded space: Besides WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, and Viber are all apps with millions of users around the world. However, Google's efforts could pair well with Android One, its efforts to make super-cheap smartphones for emerging markets.
"Google would agree that it missed social and missed social on mobile. But then Facebook had to buy WhatsApp and Instagram for the same reason," Benedict Evans, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told The Times.
Business Insider reached out to Google for comment.
While some websites were forced offline as a result of Xen hypervisor updates affecting multiple cloud providers, Netflix once again remained up entirely. The biggest fear last weekend was for the…
VMware just made two huge hires in its quest to disrupt Cisco's $23 billion network equipment kingdom.
It just hired Guido Appenzeller away from the network startup he co-founded, Big Switch Networks. And it nabbed Dom Delfino, who was formerly running the Cisco's sales engineer team for Cisco's all important "Application Centric Infrastructure." That's the product that Cisco hopes will stem off VMware's invasion.
To recap: Cisco and VMware are in an epic battle right now that promises to upend the way companies build corporate networks. Cisco currently dominates this $50 billion-a-year market, owning about half of it.
But some years ago, a Stanford grad student named Martin Casado developed a new way to build networks that took all of the fancy controls out of the network hardware and put them into software. This makes networks easier to build and cheaper to operate. Companies still need to buy network hardware, but they need less of it, and less expensive varieties.
The concept is called software-defined networking (SDN). And the software Casado developed was called OpenFlow. Casado, along with his two legendary Stanford professors, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, co-founded a company called Nicira. In 2012, VMware shocked the network world (and particularly shocked its close partner Cisco) by buying the tiny startup Nicira for $1.26 billion, it's largest acquisition to date.
By nabbing 14-year Cisco veteran Delfino, VMware has hired away the guy helping to ramp up Cisco's enormous sales force to sell the ACI product. He's now Vice President, WW Systems Engineering, for VMware.
Appenzeller is an arguably an even more impressive hire.
If Casado is SDN's Coke than Appenzeller is its Pepsi. Appenzeller took Casado's original work on OpenFlow and took it to a new level. Both of them are famous in their world.
Appenzeller is taking over the CTO role as VMware has promoted Casado to become general manager of its network business unit.
Meanwhile, the unit is on track to generate $100 million this year, the company says with more than 150 paying customers, and growing.
Casado told Business Insider that he believes this unit will be generating more than $1 billion for VMware in the not-too-distant future.
This PC spreadsheet had a great run in the late 1980s, but it's been under the radar for years -- succumbing to the Microsoft-Excel-and-Office onslaught. Now, IBM is officially ending support.
“At Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy,” Apple CEO Tim Cook says on his company’s new page dedicated to privacy.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt checked out the new website, and he fired back against Apple’s chief in an interview with CNN Money.
“Someone didn’t brief him correctly on Google’s policies,” Schmidt said. “It’s unfortunate for him.”
Schmidt insists Google works tirelessly to protect user data — from the government, hackers, and of course, companies and advertisers.
“We have always been the leader in security and encryption,” Schmidt said. “Our systems are far more secure and encrypted than anyone else, including Apple. They’re catching up, which is great.”
Earlier this summer, Google introduced end-to-end encryption for its email service Gmail, and the next version of Android, codenamed “L,” will be encrypted by default when it releases later this year. This makes life difficult for law enforcement officials hoping to look at customers’ data from their email and smartphones.
Schmidt may have plenty of security measures across all of its services, but as CNN Money points out, the company has a less than stellar privacy record.
Google says it is "studying their order to determine next steps." Based on precedent, those next steps will involve Google sticking up two fingers at the privacy regulators and doing nothing…
Aside from a handful of novels, they're mostly nonfiction books covering his and his foundation's broad range of interests. A lot of them are about transforming systems: how nations can intelligently develop, how to lead an organization, and how social change can fruitfully happen.
We went through the past four years of his book criticism to find the ones that he gave glowing reviews and that changed his perspective.
'Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012' by Carol Loomis
So it's no surprise that Gates enjoyed "Tap Dancing To Work," a collection of articles and essays about and by Buffett, compiled by Fortune magazine journalist Carol Loomis.
Gates says that anyone who reads the book cover-to-cover will walk away with two main impressions:
First, how Warren's been incredibly consistent in applying his vision and investment principles over the duration of his career;
... [S]econdly, that his analysis and understanding of business and markets remains unparalleled. I wrote in 1996 that I'd never met anyone who thought about business in such a clear way. That is certainly still the case.
Getting into the mind of Buffett is "an extremely worthwhile use of time," Gates concludes.
'Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization' by Vaclav Smil
Gates says his favorite author is Vaclav Smil, an environmental sciences professor who writes big histories of things like energy and innovation.
His latest is "Making the Modern World." It got Gates thinking.
"It might seem mundane, but the issue of materials — how much we use and how much we need — is key to helping the world’s poorest people improve their lives," he writes. "Think of the amazing increase in quality of life that we saw in the United States and other rich countries in the past 100 years. We want most of that miracle to take place for all of humanity over the next 50 years."
To know where we're going, Gates says, we need to know where we've been — and Smil is one of his favorite sources for learning that.
'The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History' by Elizabeth Kolbert
It can be easy to forget that our present day is a part of world history. Gates says that New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert's new book "The Sixth Extinction" helps correct that.
"Humans are putting down massive amounts of pavement, moving species around the planet, over-fishing and acidifying the oceans, changing the chemical composition of rivers, and more," Gates writes, echoing a concern that he voices in many of his reviews.
"Natural scientists posit that there have been five extinction events in the Earth’s history (think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs)," he continues, "and Kolbert makes a compelling case that human activity is leading to the sixth."
To get a hint of Kolbert's reporting, check out the series of stories that preceded the book's publication.
With its iPhone 6 and iOS 8, Apple has introduced a few features that have been available on Android smartphones for quite some time.
For example, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will be the company's first smartphones to come with near field communication (NFC) — a technology that lets phones talk to one another via a short-range radio.
This means you can exchange data and make payments by simply tapping your iPhone against another compatible device.
Still, you can still do a lot of things with Android phones that you can't with the iPhone.
You can add a bigger battery to most Android phones. The iPhone's back isn't removable.
Many Android phones, like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and LG G3, come with a removeable back — which means you can take out the battery. This is especially helpful if you find your phone dying quicker than expected. With some Android phones, you can simply pop off the back, take out the battery, and put a new one in when your phone is dead. The iPhone relies on a single rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which can be removed or replaced only by Apple technicians.
With some Android phones, you can open multiple apps at once.
Several Android manufacturers layer their software over the plain version of Android, often adding their own features. On Samsung and LG phones, for example, you can open more than one app at a time and run them alongside one another. On LG phones, you can even move these apps around in separate windows, change the transparency of those windows, and resize them, as shown in the screenshot to the right.
You can charge your Android phone with any micro USB cable.
You can charge most Android phones with any micro USB cable — you don't need the specific cable from that particular phone manufacturer. That's not the case with Apple; you need the company's proprietary iPhone or iPad charger, called Lightning.
Cisco CEO John Chambers didn't get hit his sales and profit targets so the board trimmed his pay.
Chambers earned about $16.5 million for fiscal 2014, compared to the $21 million he earned for fiscal 2013.
The board dinged his stock awards to $12.9 million from $15.2 million last year. His bonus fell to $2.5 million from $4.7 million, according to documents filed with the SEC.
The board trimmed the pay of other top execs, too.
"Based on Cisco’s performance at 95% of target during fiscal 2014, the incentive cash awards paid for fiscal 2014 to the named executive officers were on average 40% less than fiscal 2013," the company said in its documents.
Cisco had $47.1 billion in sales in fiscal 2014, missing the company’s target of $49.5 billion. Its operating income was $13.4 billion, not the $14 billion target, reports Bloomberg's Peter Burrows.
Although Cisco slashed Chambers' pay compared to last year, he's still up from his paycheck two years ago, when Cisco paid him $11.6 million.
The company, which helps businesses manage their employees’ mobile devices, filed initial paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in May. Its last amended prospectus documents were filed with the SEC in June.
In an interview, CEO Christy Wyatt said the company is not rethinking its plan to go public.
“Nothing has changed in terms of our plans,” Wyatt told Re/code. “There’s a whole bunch of [factors], a lot of them external. … We continue to watch the market.”
Good, which was once owned by Motorola, is currently privately held. The $80 million came from new investors, Wyatt said, though Good did not name its new backers.
Previous investors include Blueprint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Capital, GKM Newport, Meritech Capital Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Rustic Canyon Partners.
Microsoft has finally shown the world its plans for its next major Windows release, the one that will succeed the much-maligned Windows 8. It's not Windows 9 or Windows Threshold—not even Windows One, as Microsoft executive VP of operating systems Terry Myerson briefly teased at one point during a presentation in San Francisco.
Meet Windows 10. Why is Microsoft skipping Windows 9? Your guess is as good as mine. More on that below.
The Big 10
The new operating system, which Microsoft is targeting for release by mid-2015, aims to correct many of the most criticized features of the Windows 8 desktop mode—the one most business users are familiar with. The colorful touch-oriented interface, which Microsoft calls the Modern UI, still exists, but didn't get much attention today. Microsoft promises more events at which it will talk about other Windows 10 features.
In general, one of Microsoft's big goals is to make it easy for users to move to Windows 10. That was a big problem for Windows 8, whose new and unfamiliar interface threw a lot of users.
"Windows 10 will be familiar to end users, whether they're coming from Windows 7 or Windows 8," Myerson said.
Here are four big takeaways from today's event.
The Start Menu Returns
In probably the biggest change from Windows 8, Windows 10 will bring back the Start Menu. That feature, a popup panel that gave access to installed programs and common features like the control panel, went missing in action in Windows 8. As long rumored, the new Start Menu will incorporate Modern-like tiles (see the above picture), some of which will display real-time information a la the current Modern interface.
Microsoft says the Start menu will be fully customizable. Users can change its shape and size, swap programs and other elements in and out, search for apps and even type in commands for which the operating system will then offer autocomplete options.
Desktops Go Virtual
Microsoft operating-system VP Joe Belfiore introduces virtual desktops
Windows 10 will also feature "virtual desktops," which are collections of apps that users can rearrange for better multitasking. It's a reasonably easy concept to learn by messing around, although it's more difficult to describe.
In the photo above, Microsoft operating-system VP Joe Belfiore is pointing to four separate "desktops"—those little icons at the bottom of the screen. Each one features a distinct arrangement of different program windows, making it possible to group, say, various social-media apps in one, open files related to a particular project in another. Users will create, delete and switch between these desktops using a "task switcher" button next to the Start button.
Touch For Tablets, Keyboards For Desktops
Finally, Windows 10 is designed to switch between the desktop and the Modern touch interface depending on whether it detects an attached keyboard. This feature is apparently still under development, as Microsoft operating-system VP Joe Belfiore had to rely on a video instead of an actual product demo. He had previously warned that Windows 10 code is still early in development: "There will be rough spots, and things may go wrong," he said.
No One Can Explain The Name "Windows 10"
So, why name the new OS Windows 10? Myerson stumbled a bit as he tried to explain it during a Q&A with reporters:
Really, y'know, this is a, this product, when you see the product in its fullness, it's a more appropriate name for the breadth of the product family that's coming.... We have tested it with many people, and it was a name that resonated best for what we'll deliver.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley offered this translation: "It's going to be the last major version of Windows and Microsoft wanted to signify it will be a big and cross-platform release." In other words, 10 was a nice big round number, so why not skip the inferior "9" and move on?
That bit about the "last major version" of Windows, by the way, refers to the rumor that Microsoft is moving away from big "tentpole" releases toward a steady flow of smaller updates that have the effect of updating the OS in a more continuous fashion. Near as I can tell, Microsoft hasn't officially announced this plan yet, which might explain why Myerson was having trouble explaining the name.
Microsoft plans to release a technical preview build of Windows 10 to the public on Wednesday. You can start trying to download it at 9am PT at this link. I'll be grabbing it as soon as I can get through and will let you know more once I get my hands on it.
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