Davemichels

Google is adding a new service to its long list of utilities: web domain registration.

The company announced on its Google+ blog on Monday the launch of an invite-only beta for Google Domains. The post says Google's research found as many as 55% of small businesses don't have websites. It's Google Domain's mission to shrink that number.

Among other features, the Internet giant is promising subdomains (like maps.google.com), new domain extensions as they become available, and up to 100 email addresses per domain, the new service's site says.

Google is also offering website building services through partnerships with Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and Shopify to help users build their websites without needing to learn to code.

It seems obvious that a company that makes the majority of its money through search would want to help get more businesses online. But considering Google also has tools for analytics and cloud storage, it seems like a natural fit for a domain registration service, perhaps even more so than a longtime registrar like GoDaddy.

Google could also, in theory, reward Google Domains users with more visible search results, but that would just be evil.

SEE ALSO: It's Google's turn to dominate headlines this week

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Microsoft's new all-in-one tablet, the Surface Pro 3, is near impossible to repair if it breaks, according to the iFixit Teardown review.

iFixit helps consumers fix or upgrade gadgets rather than throw old electronics away. It offers self-help guides and repair manuals and has become famous for "tear down" reviews, where it pulls a gadget apart to see how easy it can be fix.

It gave the Surface Pro 3 the lowest possible "Repairability" score: a 1 out 10.

The main gripe was that the tablet was nearly impossible to open without breaking the screen's glass. Despite using caution, the glass cracked during this review. iFixit explains:

"Microsoft went to great lengths to make the Surface Pro 3 super portable, thinning it down from the Pro 2's 0.53" to a mere 0.36" thick—but it seems the thinner glass does not bode well for ruggedness, or repair. ... The delicate and arduous opening procedure leaves no room for mistakes: one slip-up, and you'll be out a screen."

That's because Microsoft chose glue, not screws, to hold things in place. That makes the machine very difficult to open and even more difficult to close back up again. Plus, other parts were held in place by non-standard connectors which are also hard to work with, iFixit says.

This isn't a total shocker. iFixit also gave a low repairability rating to both earlier versions of the Surface Pro. Apple's Macbook Air only earned a 4 out of 10 when iFixit tore it apart last year.

That said, reviewers have generally loved the hardware on the Surface Pro 3. Our own Steve Kovach said, "It's lighter and thinner than the MacBook Air, all while boasting comparable or better specs. There's a brilliant 12-inch touchscreen. A silent fan. A pen for doodling and taking notes."

Microsoft says that people should only have the device repaired by an authorized service pro. A spokesperson tells Business Insider: "As with all of our Surface products, Surface Pro 3 is engineered with high-quality components to be as thin, light and powerful as possible and is designed to be serviced by professionals."

Microsoft also notes that the device comes with a limited, one-year warrenty on hardware defects, with an option to buy a second-year.

SEE ALSO: Reviewer: Microsoft's New 'Toaster-Fridge' PC Still Has A Few Problems

SEE ALSO: REVIEW: Despite Microsoft's Claims, The Surface Pro 3 Won't Replace Your Laptop

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Cisco has something to say about how Facebook elbowed its way into Cisco's turf, the $23 billion Ethernet switch market.

And it amounts to "we're ready to compete with you and all who follow you!"

To recap: this week a project led by Facebook, the Open Compute Project, introduced a radical new design for a network switch and is giving that design away to everyone for free. A switch is a special computer that connects PCs, servers, and devices to the corporate network. 

Facebook's switch is called "the Wedge" and it will be heavily watched by Cisco's customers and competitors.

That's because it uses a new method for building corporate networks called software-defined networking (SDN). SDN makes it easier to expand a corporate network and move computers, devices, and apps around.

SDN is a threat to Cisco's business model of selling high-performance network equipment with high price tags to match. it takes the fancy features included in expensive equipment and puts them into software. Companies still need switches but they can buy less expensive ones and fewer of them. 

Cisco isn't standing idly by. It recently introduced its own SDN products developed through a spin-in venture called Insieme. It named these products Application Centric Infrastructure. 

But the Wedge has nothing to do with Cisco. It was designed from scratch using open-source software like Linux. Everything from the software to the choice of processor (Intel, AMD, or ARM), can be easily changed, Facebook says.

And the Wedge is being tested in Facebook's demanding data centers. If it does well there, enterprises will start to trust that SDN is a solid technology. They could start to experiment with SDN products from companies other than Cisco. In fact, two of Cisco's competitors are involved with OCP, newly public company Arista Networks and SDN startup Big Switch Networks.

Naturally Cisco has its own thoughts about the Wedge and the other SDN up-and-comers, especially the biggest one, VMware. Namely ... 

• It plans to tell people how other SDN products have hidden costs that make them more expensive than Cisco. 
• It will point out how Cisco is making its own products more flexible.

Here's what Cisco's director of corporate communications, John Earnhardt, told us:

It is our belief that the open source switch market, sometimes called the "white box" market, is largely only attractive to a small, highly-resourced subset of the overall I.T. market.

That's because the approach is loaded with hidden hard and operational costs. For example, networking capital equipment outlays typically constitute only 30% of the cost of running networks. Labor costs constitute 50%, and will increase with the white box approach as IT departments are required to install, integrate and update separate network operating systems and network virtualization software.

The largest hidden cost comes from network virtualization software licenses. VMware NSX, for example, charges a per-virtual-machine licensing fee ranging from $10-$50 per month. ... white box networking costs [can] be 75% higher than for Cisco networks.

While the open source switch approach is definitely not for everyone, I want to be very clear that we know this segment of the market (largest Internet players) very well. We intend to retain and grow these customers by addressing their needs for more programmable infrastructure with our Application Centric Infrastructure strategy. 

For example, 7 of the 10 largest Internet companies in the world are Cisco customers. These include Alibaba Group, China's largest online retailer, OVH, Europe's largest hosting provider, and Microsoft, the operator of Azure and Bing.

Here's a closer look at the Wedge.

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Despite the phenomenal rise of the smartphone in recent years, there is still a significant minority of mobile phone users who could care less or can’t afford data access. They just want to use their phones to make calls or send text messages, and starting Saturday Virgin Mobile is going after that group with new $20 PayLo monthly plans available exclusively at Walmart.

Cheap talk and text plans from a prepaid operator are nothing new, but Sprint-owned Virgin Mobile USA is focusing on the hard-core users on either side of the voice and messaging divide. For $20 a month you can either get an unlimited SMS plan (with 50 minutes of voice) or unlimited voice (with 50 text messages).

The Samsung Montage (source: Samsung)

These plans are available on two feature phones, the Samsung Montage and the very basic Kyocera Kona. Both devices sport limited internet features, but I wouldn’t recommend opening your mobile browser. On these plans, mobile data costs a whopping $1.50 per megabyte. If you thought the industry average of $15 a gigabyte was high, these rates work out to be about $1,500 per 1 GB.

As you might imagine, these two variants target entirely separate demographics. The older generation isn’t still fully comfortable with SMS, making the big bucket text message plans included in most plans these days pretty useless. Meanwhile the younger generation often can’t be bother with making a phone call when a text message (or 25) will do.

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Google is finding more and more ways to integrate itself into nearly every aspect of our lives.

Google has the largest search engine in the world, biggest video platform (YouTube), biggest web browser (Chrome), most-used email service (Gmail,) and the largest mobile operating system (Android).

What that all means is that Google essentially knows everything about us — be that what we search for, what ads we click on, what we write about, what we watch, and what apps we like.

Google's moonshot projects — like Google Glass and driverless cars — are merely the next steps in Google's quest to become a total knowledge company. Google's driverless cars mean the company will know your driving habits and where you like to go. With Glass, people can access information in real-time without having to check a phone. 

Google's recent acquisitions hint that it's about to go even further. It's moving toward knowing everything about us — not just in the online world, but also in the offline world.

Google is about to have satellites watching everything in near real-time.

Thanks to Google's $500 million acquisition of Skybox Imaging, Google has an all-seeing eye in the sky. Skybox Imaging has access to loads of high-resolution imagery and video of landscapes throughout the world.

"Their satellites will help keep our maps accurate with up-to-date imagery," Google said at the time of the acquisition. "Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief — areas Google has long been interested in.”

But Google failed to mention that it also now has the intelligence to determine things like when the next iPhone will be released. That's because Skybox measures the density of trucks outside Foxconn. If Google keeps a close eye on Foxconn, it could theoretically use that information to decide the optimal time to start discounting products, or ramping up its marketing campaigns.

In short, Google essentially now has its own surveillance network and inside knowledge of Apple's manufacturing operations.

Or anyone else's operations, for that matter.

Google's drones can monitor anything from oil spills to deforestation. The drones can stay in the air for up to five years.

Google bought Titan Aerospace this year for its high-flying solar powered drones, for a reported $60 million. 

Titan Aerospace, via Google, is developing a solar-powered drone called an "Armostat," which is an atmospheric satellite. 

The idea is to use the drones to beef up Google's Maps and Google Earth products, as well as help bring internet to parts of the world that are not yet connected. 

Google's robots can crawl, jump, climb, and gallop, even over tough terrain.

Google spent an undisclosed amount on Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that specializes in building robots and software for human simulation. 

The company is best known for its robot BigDog, a quadruped robot designed for the U.S. military.

Its robots need to react independently to their environment — and perfecting that type of machine-learning is widely regarded as the key to the next phase of tech.

Assuming that Google successfully deploys internet access to the two-thirds of the world without it, the robots could make it easier for new users to understand the web. 

Soon, Google will know what you do inside your home thanks to its acquisition of smart thermostat Nest.

Google could easily become your next power company, thanks in part to its energy-related investments and its $3.2 billion acquisition of smart thermostat maker Nest. 

Google's energy investments include residential solar power company SunPower, Panhandle 2 wind farm, and Elon Musk's SolarCity. In fact, Google has invested over $1 billion in wind and solar projects. 

Meanwhile, Google's acquisition of Nest "ought to give utility officials a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs," Adrian Tuck, CEO of energy company Tendril Networks, told Bloomberg. Tuck thinks the Nest acquisition could be just the thing that gives Google a back door into the utility industry, given that the consensus is that the battle over the next five years in electricity will be in the home.

With Nest, Google could leverage its smart, energy-saving thermostats and smoke detectors into "massive quantities of salable demand response," Tuck said, even as it starts to directly compete with some of the companies it's invested in.

Before its acquisition of Nest, Google had already been tinkering with an app to control a smart thermostat to help people manage their home energy. 

Google still has some work to do when it comes to privacy.

Google's motto has long been "Don't be evil." By and large, it has kept its word.

But with the number of resources and data it has, envisioning what Google could do with of its army of robots, drones, and satellites can be somewhat terrifying. 

Meanwhile, the National Security Association has access to all of the information we freely give Google, albeit not with Google's permission. In order to make government spying more difficult, Google has since announced that it plans to encrypt all Gmail messages while they're in transit.

Google is doing its best to assure people that their data is secure, but in reality, the U.S. government still has access to your communications on Google's servers.

"The email provider can still see the message," Seth Schoen, a senior technologist with privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Investor's Business Daily. "They're just encrypting it when it's going over the Internet, not when the message is in their own system."

The only way to achieve true security would be for Google to encrypt your email to the extent that only you could decrypt and read it. But because Google needs to see what we're talking about in order to serve up ads, it seems unlikely that Google would offer full encryption. The scary part is that there's only so much Google can do to prevent the government from requesting and accessing its data.

Our choices are diminished

Google has achieved its dominance in our lives fairly. Its products are generally superior to those of its competitors. And they are often free to use. But now Google has access to way more information and data than it did 10 years ago. It's actually difficult to imagine what it would take to not choose Google.

Google has the No.1 smartphone platform, with Android owning 52% market share in the U.S. Worldwide, Android owns more than 80% of the smartphone market. Even on non-Android devices, Google offers its search app, Chrome, maps, and email. It has a massive audience of 187 million unique visitors on desktop alone, making it the most-visited web property in the U.S. Meanwhile, Google owns 67.6% of the search market in the U.S., according to the latest comScore report.

From the consumer side, you could stop using all of Google's products, but living without Google is genuinely hard — there just aren't many better alternatives for search, web browsers, and email.

Even if you were to completely cut out Google from your life, that wouldn't stop Google from taking high-resolution satellite images of your house. It also wouldn't stop Google Glass wearers from filming you.

So it's not just that Google knows a lot about us, it's that we're at a point where our ability to not let Google know about us has serious consequences. It would be very difficult — for some people impossible — to live life without Google.

SEE ALSO: This Amazing New 'Smart Cup' Can Tell What Kind Of Drink Is Inside It

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There is a bit more to Uncarrier 5.0 than the new Test Drive iPhone loaner program T-Mobile announced earlier this evening. CEO John Legere said that T-Mobile is allowing unlimited music streaming on its Simple Choice data plans — regardless of whether you subscribe to an all-you-can-eat plan or one with a monthly data bucket.

T-Mobile is basically giving audio streaming services like Pandora, iTunes Radio and Spotify a free pass on its network as long as you to subscribe to a $50 or higher plan (it’s not available on Simple Starter plans). Any data used won’t count against your monthly allotment. That’s good news if you subscribe to one of T-Mobile’s 1GB, 3GB or 5GB plans, but not that noteworthy if you pay  the $80-a-month plan, which already supports unlimited data of any sort.

John Legere at T-Mobile’s Uncarrier 5.0 launch event (Source: Kevin Fitchard / Gigaom)

But T-Mobile had something to offer unlimited subscribers as well. It’s partnered with Rhapsody to provide an programmable internet radio service called unRadio. The service is a streaming radio like Pandora, not an on-demand music subscription like Spotify, but T-Mobile is also removing ads and setting no limits on how many songs can be skipped. UnRadio will be free for unlimited plan subscribers and $4 a month for other customers.

Music is becoming a popular ad-on service with the mobile carriers. AT&T and Sprint are both offering discounted and family plan subscriptions to Beats Music and Spotify respectively. And next month, we’re going to see the launch of a music-centric virtual operator called ROK Mobile that bundles an on-demand music subscription and radio service with unlimited voice and data plans.

But Legere said many of those carrier music deals are really just Trojan horses. They offer discounts on the music service, but then “gouge you” for the data necessary to consume those services, Legere said. That kind of model benefits the carrier much more than the consumer, Legere concluded.

How T-Mobile enforces the new streaming policy will be interesting to observe. For now, T-Mobile plans to create a list of the top six third-party music streaming services, as well as partner platforms like Samsung’s Milk and Rhapsody, and not count data usage against them. But it could start sniffing out audio streaming packets on its network. The latter approach would mean a much more versatile service that exempts streaming audio from any source, not just from the popular music and radio services.

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If you're worried about the NSA listening in on your smartphone, Silent Circle's "Blackphone" may be the last best hope.

First announced in January, the Android-based phone goes on sale before the start of July for $629, according to NBC News.

While the price is a bit hefty, it comes with impressive features, including fully encrypted voice, text, and video calls, and a virtual private network that anonymizes web surfing — all built on a custom version of Android.

Demand for such a device certainly ramped up after Edward Snowden began leaking top-secret documents detailing NSA surveillance programs, but Silent Circle had been working on the device long before.

"We did this because there was a problem that was not being solved: secure communications," CEO Mike Janke, a former Navy SEAL, told AFP in January.

With Janke leading the company, Silent Circle's team includes a number of cryptographic experts. including Phil Zimmermann, the creator of the widely-used PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) standard.

The company has taken great pains to ensure it could not give up user data, even if compelled to by a government. While many U.S. companies receive controversial national security letters forcing them to share customer info, Silent Circle is incorporated in Switzerland and has Swiss data centers.

But the main thing that sets the security of the phone apart is that the encryption itself resides only on the handset. While encrypted data passes through the company's servers, the individual keys necessary to unlock and read the data are only on the phones.

Basically, if Silent Circle was forced to hand over data, all they could give up is a bunch of encrypted gibberish.

"There is no such thing as a completely secure phone," Janke told AFP. "Nothing is going to protect you from your own behavior. But out of the box, this phone does a lot of things to protect your privacy."

Silent Circle isn't the only company to come up with such a device. Boeing unveiled their own version of a "black" phone in February that had a "self-destruct" feature.

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Watson, a cognitive computing system that can learn and process natural human language, has been one of IBM's most exciting projects of the last decade. Over the past few years, Watson has learned a variety of tasks, from defeating contestants on "Jeopardy" to diagnosing life-threatening diseases. Now the cloud-based system is making its first foray into an industry we can all enjoy: food. 

IBM calls it "cognitive cooking," a collaboration with New York's Institute of Culinary Education that uses data to create the best-tasting food possible. 

IBM engineers carefully examined flavor compounds in thousands of ingredients, going down to the molecular level to measure the pleasantness of each. Then, using nutritional data from the FDA, they had the chefs at ICE try out the combinations Watson had determined would make for a delicious meal. 

When you consider how many ingredients there are out there, all of which can be prepared in a variety of ways, it's obvious why a computer like Watson is best suited for the job. According to IBM, the possibilities for combinations of flavors and ingredients number in the quintillions, far more than a human could possibly try out for themselves. 

"We wanted to see how we could push the boundaries of cognitive computing and if computers could be creative. We created an application that allows users to create a new recipe that’s never been seen before and hopefully tastes good,"  IBM engineer Florian Pinel said to Business Insider. "We wanted to focus on food because it's easy to gather data on and it's something everyone cares about."

Using the flavor combinations generated by Watson, IBM's cognitive cooking team created a database of 30,000 recipes with ingredient combinations they say are scientifically determined to have a pleasant taste. 

"Part of it is that subjectivity — if you don’t like Brussels sprouts maybe we can’t make you like them no matter how much we try with the computer," Pinel said. "But there is that common pleasantness measurement that was identified by some studies and that was universal. Watson focuses on the side behind the universal component." 

Here's a look at what that recipe-generating software looks like. Users can select from a list of cuisines and dishes that contain ingredients selected by Watson. 

IBM premiered Watson's cooking skills with a food truck at SXSW back in March. Chefs from ICE prepared dishes, like Portuguese lobster rolls and Peruvian potato poutine, that contained Watson-generated ingredient combinations and were chosen by tweeted votes from the public. 

The cognitive cooking team then sent some lucky journalists the Bengali Butternut BBQ Sauce, a golden, syrupy sauce created by Watson and the ICE chefs. It's a versatile sauce that can be enjoyed hot or cold, but the chefs recommend serving it on pork ribs or grilled chicken. 

We tried it as a dipping sauce with chicken tenders and were surprised by how delicious it really was. It has a tangy, spicy flavor that's most likely a result of the white wine and vinegar used. Interestingly enough, the recipe generated by Watson's software uses only natural ingredients, and the sauce lacks that overpowering smoky taste that more traditional BBQ sauces have. 

Pinel says that the BBQ sauce is just the beginning of what's in store from IBM's cognitive cooking team. 

"This is just a teaser to give people a taste of cognitive computing," he said. "I don’t think that IBM is going to start selling BBQ sauce, but this is an active project, and there’s development happening."

Those developments could be really useful for chefs in the future. 

"We can see, for example, what further compounds are shared by what ingredients, which is an insight chefs don’t have from their own ingredients. You know, they didn’t necessarily take a chemistry class before they started cooking, so that's a new insight for them that they really like," Pinel said. "A future insight could be what those flavor compounds smell like, so we could predict the smell of the whole dish."

IBM only made a few batches of the BBQ sauce, but they posted the complete recipe on their blog. If you want to try whipping up a batch of the BBQ sauce, here's the recipe: 

Bengali Butternut BBQ Sauce
Approximate Yield: 550g

300g butternut squash, diced

200g white wine

100g rice vinegar

50g butter, unsalted

5g tamarind concentrate

40g water

10g chili paste (Sriracha)

4g soy sauce

50g dates, pitted and chopped

2g Thai chili

3g mustard seed

3g turmeric, fresh, thinly sliced

0.4g cardamom, ground

5g coriander leaves

2g Meyer lemon zest, grated

5g salt, to taste

10g Meyer lemon juice

6g molasses

1. Gently sweat the squash in the butter over medium low heat until softened, approximately 5-10 minutes.

2. Add the vinegar, tamarind, water, wine, chili paste, and soy; bring to a simmer and reduce heat to low. Add the dates, chili, mustard seed, turmeric, and cardamom. Continue to simmer and reduce to roughly 250g, for about 20 minutes.

3. Remove from heat; add the coriander leaves and lemon zest. Blend to a very smooth consistency and cool.

4. Season the mixture with salt, lemon juice, and molasses. Chill. 

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It’s not often you write “Microsoft” and”open” in the same sentence but, well, these are special times. The company is straining to make its Azure cloud service a bona fide rival to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, and believes that offering customers openness and options are one way it can stand out.

“It’s a change from the historical Microsoft by embracing openness in a new way,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of the company’s cloud and enterprise group, speaking Wednesday at Gigaom Structure in San Francisco.

Guthrie pointed out that Azure offers tools for clients to run Linux and a wide variety of SDK’s, and touted its drag-and-drop machine tools for machine learning as a “democratic” way for companies to get more analytics.

Despite this pledge to play well with others, Microsoft still faces a challenge in getting non-Windows shops to give Azure a try rather than turning to the more familiar Amazon or Google.

Guthrie said Microsoft’s advantage may lie in its ability to offer a continuum of services, from bare bones storage to managed queues to high level, hands-on support. He explained that the business solution for Microsoft is not “raw atoms” but moving up the stack.

Elite service and flexibility, combined with enterprise customers’ opportunity to use a hybrid cloud — by combining information in the public Azure cloud with onsite sensitive data — will help entrench Microsoft as a big-time cloud player, he said.

As for the ever-plummeting cost of cloud computing, in which Amazon and Google are dropping prices lower and lower, Microsoft is glad to be part of this game, Guthrie said.

“Every time one of the commodity prices goes down, we match in 48 hours,” he said, adding that this phenomenon of a deflationary platform is good for everyone — except, perhaps, other software vendors.

This story was updated at 730PM ET 

Photo by Jakub Mosur

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Parents could watch their baby’s heart rate from another room without using any kind of wearable device or special sleeping pad with a new development out of MIT that uses Wi-Fi signals to track the rise and fall of peoples’ chests.

Researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory transmitted a low-power wireless signal through a wall and measured how long it took the signals to bounce back. Changes in the reflected signals allowed the team to measure movement, or even minute chest movements.

Based on a person’s chest rising and falling, the CSAIL group can determine their heart rate with 99 percent accuracy. The system can track up to four people at a time.

“It has traditionally been very difficult to capture such minute motions that occur at the rate of mere millimeters per second,” paper co-author Dina Katabi said in a release. “Being able to do so with a low-cost, accessible technology opens up the possibilities for people to be able to track their vital signs on their own.”

The CSAIL team has been perfecting its Wi-Fi tracking for a while now. It has also used radio signals for 3D tracking.

Along with baby monitoring, the system could also be used in search and rescue scenarios or to track your own health statistics.. The MIT team is now interested in expanding it so it can be used to track emotion, which is also linked to heart rate and breathing.

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Remember that looming IPv4 address exhaustion issue? Well, Microsoft Azure has already hit its limit in the U.S. and is deploying some user-requested VMs using IPv4 addresses from far, far away.

That is not to say the VMs are actually running in, say, Brazil rather than the U.S., according to a blog post by Ganesh Srinivasan, Microsoft senior program manager. The problem is that IPv4 addresses — scarce everywhere — are running out in some regions faster than others but you cannot transfer the addresses themselves from one regional authority to another.

But, as Srinivasan said, the IP address registration authority does not equal the physical location of that IP address — so an IP address registered in Brazil can be “allocated to a device or service physically located in Virginia,” he wrote.

That may be, but this address shortage is no small issue and those Brazilian addresses aren’t going to last long as billions more devices come online. In  this day and age, many businesses and government agencies must be assured that their data or their customer data remains in a given geography.

Don’t forget, this question of the IP address shortage will be addressed during the infrastructure-of-the-future panels at Structure next week.

As Gigaom reported Thursday, adoption of IPv6, which allows longer address names, will accommodate billions more mobile devices. But, so far that adoption has been slight. Amazon Web Services only supports IPv6 in its Elastic Load Balance (ELB) service, not in EC2 or other services. Google Compute Engine also remains in the IPv4 world.

But it’s clear with all those new devices — not to mention all those millions of VMs spun up by cloud services —  the status quo cannot hold. As we see, the IPv4 tank is almost on empty.

So time’s a wasting.

This story was updated at 7:27 a.m. PST with additional information on Amazon and Google cloud IPv6 status.

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Travel-deal giant Priceline wants to do more than book your hotel and airfare. It wants to arrange your meals as well. The Priceline Group said on Friday it has agreed to buy restaurant reservations portal OpenTable for $2.6 billion.

“They provide us with a natural extension into restaurant marketing services and a wonderful and highly-valued booking experience for our global customers,” Priceline CEO Darren Huston said in a statement.

Priceline’s longtime spokesman William Shatner (Source: Priceline Group)

Priceline not only owns Priceline.com, but also booking sites Booking.com, Kayak, and Agoda. All of its properties, however, focus on the core logistics of travel: airfare, car rentals, hotel rooms and even cruises and vacation packages. Buying OpenTable adds an key entertainment component to its aresenal. OpenTable manages reservations for 31,000 restaurants and seats 15 million diners per month. It owns foodie social app Foodspotting as well.

There’s a big opportunity for Priceline to apply its discount bookings model to OpenTable. Just as Priceline takes excess hotel room and flight inventory and sells it at reduced prices to travelers, it could “buy” empty tables from its restaurant partners and sell them at discount to its customers. OpenTable explored a daily deal service in the vein of Groupon (see disclosure) a few years ago, but it wound up canceling the program. It still offers occasional discount promotions for restaurants meals.

Priceline said OpenTable would continue to operate as independent subsidiary based in San Francisco. The companies expect the deal to close in the third quarter, but it’s already facing opposition. Law firm  Powers Taylor put out a statement immediately after the deal was announced saying it is investigating potential claims that Priceline’s offer is as being far too low.

The author’s spouse is employed at Groupon

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Guest author Alex Salkever is head of product marketing and business development at Silk.co. An earlier version of this piece first appeared on his Tumblr.

Until the Nest, the thermostat had no sex appeal. Then Tony Fadell and his team built something beautiful and functional that also happened to save money and make a house more livable. It was so sexy that Google bought it for $3 billion. The pull of the Nest was such that a significant chunk of buyers came from design-conscious European countries—well before Nest sold or marketed in the EU.

Now we have the Lyric from Honeywell, and it looks pretty good. What's most interesting about the Lyric isn't its Wi-Fi connectivity and remote control via smartphone, but geo-fencing. While the Nest “learns” user behavior, the Lyric will change your home's temperature as you approach, based on your smartphone's location. This is smart, because while people’s behavior may be generally consistent, it isn't always so.

Boring Got Cool—And Fast

The most important thing about all this to me is the impact of competition and innovation. For the most part, the innovation around the Nest and the Lyric is industrial design, user interface and smartphone integration. These devices don’t boast breakthrough new materials or hyper-fast chips.

But they both use existing technology to tackle boring markets previously deemed unaddressable. (Sexy thermostat? Pass the oatmeal, please). What’s more, Nest drove Honeywell to answer with a comparable product.

I don't doubt Honeywell has had Nest-like devices in testing labs or even on store shelves for ages. But they obviously couldn’t have been that Nest-like because, well, we never heard of them. So with Apple-like marketing genius and gorgeous design, Nest cracked the code on how to get people excited about thermostats. Seeing this success, Honeywell had to respond and has now done so forcefully.

The company also aspires to great things in the Internet of Things. And unlike Nest, Honeywell has decades of experience putting thermostats and other home-management devices into the hands of contractors, construction firms, and home improvement retails who will ultimately drive the nascent Sexy Thermostat Market.

I love this story because it has a huge upstart winner (Nest), a challenged incumbent with some fight in it (Honeywell), a happy customer (you and me) and a great societal benefit (more efficient energy usage). In fact, one guy—Tony Fadell—could end up single-handedly instigating a massive shift in an enormous but previously stagnant multi-billion-dollar industry.

The other key lesson I take from this, and something I see everywhere? The solutions to most great social challenges lie well within reach.

Maybe it’s rockstar marketing of the Nest. Maybe it’s better distribution of water treatment technologies. Maybe its special financing to help alternative energy technologies with long payback cycles get over the hump. Maybe it’s ways of leveraging lightweight distribution technologies like Uber or social sharing apps like Relay Rides to better utilize existing transportation capacity.

And just maybe it’s something so boring that we can’t imagine it will be sexy. Like the thermostat. Which no one will ever look at the same way again.

It happens to everyone who owns an iPhone: You reach into your bag or pocket to listen to some music or take a call, and your earbuds have conspired against you. They've tangled themselves into a knot so vicious that you risk snapping the wire to get them undone (especially the little thin wires that go to each earpiece).

It happens to all earbuds, not just Apple's, but iPhone tangles seem more visibly conspicuous because their wires are white as part of Apple's branding.

Strangely, the knots even occur when you coil them carefully before putting them away. Unless they're on that plastic spindle that came with the box — and no one ever keeps that — those headphone wires will knot themselves on a daily basis.

It turns out that there is a reason this happens, and it has been the subject of scientific research. iPhone earbud tangles are a function of the length of the wire and the amount of "agitation" the wire is subjected to. When the two are plotted against each other — length versus agitation — the rate of knots and tangles obeys a statistical pattern that describes a curve.

A paper titled "Spontaneous knotting of an agitated string" by Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith of the University of California at San Diego Department of Physics demonstrated this phenomenon: It revealed that a cord of less than 46 centimeters in length (about 1 foot six inches) will almost never tangle itself when sealed inside a rotating box for a period. But between 46 centimeters and 150 centimeters (about five feet), the probability of a knot forming rises dramatically. With a cord longer than that, the probability of a knot forming reaches a plateau of 50%. It turns out that the odds of getting a knot do not go higher because the cord wedges itself inside the shape of the box and that prevents further tangles from forming. Raymer and Smith performed 3,415 trials to demonstrate this.

Here is what that curve looks like:

Apple's iPhone earbuds are 139 cm (55 inches) long and thus right at the 50% tangle-rate-sweet-spot at the top of the curve.

In other words, if you place your earbuds in a bag the odds of them tangling into a knot as you carry them around are 50%, at least. "At least" because earbuds are, of course, a Y-shaped string, and thus the knotting frequency is confounded further. (Raymer and Smith didn't look at strings with more than one branch, but anecdotally I can confirm that the tangle-rate is pretty high.)

Finally, here is a schematic showing how a cord that starts off neatly coiled — you don't just stuff them in there, do you? — quickly becomes tangled inside a rotating box, even though there is no gremlin inside tying them into reef knots. It shows that one end of a wire only has to cross another part of the wire twice in order to start spontaneously knotting itself:

That last part is perhaps the most magical of all: The research shows that your earphones are indeed spontaneously knotting themselves. Sure, it's because of their length and the agitation of the container they're in. But the knots really do form as a matter of physics, not because of your personal lack of neatness.

Though Apple has shipped its white in-ear headphones with every iDevice since the iPod in 2001, Apple most recently updated its earbuds — now called "EarPods" — in late 2012. Hopefully Apple will pay attention to the science of tangling — and its own patent application filed in 2011, which proposed thicker wires to prevent bending and looping — when it decides to release new earbuds at some point in the future.

SEE ALSO: Here's How Much Money Apple Avoids Paying In Taxes By Pretending It's Based In Ireland

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Two Lowe's Home Improvement stores in Toronto will soon host an installation that is straight out of science-fiction — sort of.

Ad Age reports that the hardware store employs a team of science-fiction writers to help it envision the future of retail.

As such, the company has created something it calls a "Holoroom" to allow customers to envision what their home improvement plans will look like in real life. The Holoroom appears to imitate the Holodeck, a fictitious room from the show "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that creates fictitious but real-looking environments suitable for experiments.

Here's the Holoroom that Lowe's has built:

It looks promising! Here, for comparison, is the Star Trek Holodeck:

Once the Holodeck is programmed, it creates the illusion of an entire environment seen in 3D:

However, the Lowe's Holoroom's similarities end there. Lowe's 20-by-20-foot rooms will be equipped with iPads that have apps allowing customers to create virtual models of rooms in their homes, which can then be furnished with virtual Lowe's products.

Customers can see how the planned room will look through the iPad screen as they move the screen around the room like a viewfinder. Here's how it looks:

So ... maybe not so much a "Holoroom" as a "Holotablet." At best. Hmm.

Here's a video Lowe's made explaining how its room works. Skip to the 2:30 mark for a demonstration:

Ad Age reports that the project came out of Lowe's Innovation Labs, a department of the company that works with startups to develop new technologies.

The Holorooms will be installed at the two Toronto stores later this year.

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Scandal has already taken hold of the World Cup on the tournament's first day of matches.

After spotting a drone hovering over its practice yesterday, France's team manager Didier Deschamps has called for an investigation into the possibility that the team was spied on, according to Yahoo Sports.

Deschamps told Football Italia the drone's operator was likely one of France's potential opponents, or a French news agency. France is in Group E with Switzerland, Honduras, and Ecuador. 

The story is gaining traction in the French media. Sports website Infosport+ tweeted this yesterday:

Un drone survole les Bleus lors de l'entraînement, enquête du service de sécurité. Image captée par @nicopaillard pic.twitter.com/UwEzCdrHrJ

— infosport+ (@infosportplus) June 10, 2014

The tweet translates to: "A drone flies over the Blues during training," referring to a colloquial name for the French soccer team. It also alludes to an investigation.

BFMTV has reported that the drone wasn't Honduran. The article says the drone's pilot, who was apprehended by local police "wanted to have fun watching training since he could not be at the stadium." The article doesn't give the nationality of the pilot, though if BFMTV is right, it was probably a fan using it rather than a journalist or sports operative.

Regardless, the presence of a drone at the World Cup says a lot about how popular and relatively affordable drones have become.

SEE ALSO: Drone captures awesome footage of 30 dolphins surfing at the same time

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What's the scarcest resource for any company? 

There are classically one of three answers:

A) Capital

B) Chairs

C) Time

According to Michael Mankins and his colleagues at Bain, the answer is time. 

Digging into a "decade's worth of data" about the S&P 500 for HBR, they found that the companies who brought in the most revenue per employee did "30% better than their peers in return on invested capital, 40% better in operating margin, and 80% better in revenue growth." 

The key to revenue per employee? How they use their time. 

The takeaway: The best companies are those that get the most out of their employees' time. 

Yet many don't. 

In a startling example, Mankins found that a single weekly executive committee meeting cost one large company 300,000 hours per year. 

Here's how: 

One status meeting costs 7,000 hours of time per year, just for the executives present.

But to prep for that meeting, 11 unit heads need to meet with the execs. That's another 20,000 hours a year. 

To prep for those, there's 21 team meetings. That requires another 63,000 hours. 

To prep for the 21 team meetings, there are 130 preparatory meetings. That's another 210,00 hours. 

When you take every person in the network's time into account, you end up with just one meeting, costing the whole company 300,000 hours a year. 

Not going to create lots of revenue per employee, eh? 

No wonder an estimated $37 billion is lost every year to unproductive meetings. 

So what can we do about it? 

• Cut away the unproductive meetings. 
• Stop listening to the loudest person in the room. 
• Stop counting the time, start counting the tasks. 
• Stop inviting so many people. 

For explanations of the points above, plus more on escaping from the shackles of meeting madness, check out our handy guide. 

SEE ALSO: $37 Billion Is Lost Every Year On These 9 Meeting Mistakes

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Amazon Prime customer George McBay was surprised the other day when he noticed two replacement orders on his account history for an Xbox One he'd purchased back in April.

He had never asked Amazon for a replacement, and the new consoles were being shipped to a different address and a person he'd never heard of. So basically, Amazon was sending out two new Xbox units to someone in Portland — for free. 

Neither McBay's Amazon account nor his email had been hacked into. There were no suspicious charges on his credit card. He reached out to Amazon to to tell the company he hadn't ordered a replacement, and definitely not to a random name at an address never associated with his account.  

McBay's Amazon incident, described as "replacement fraud," wasn't the first of its kind. As McBay notes in a blog post, the exact same thing was well-documented by Amazon user Chris Cardinal a few years ago. In fact, the address where McBay's "replacement" Xbox units were sent was the same address that Cardinal's "replacement" camera equipment was sent in 2012. When Cardinal Googled the address in 2012, he found a cached post on an Amazon forum complaining about the same problem.

The address belongs to ReShip.com, a company that offers international residents a physical U.S. address to have products shipped before being forwarded to them overseas. 

The scam revolves around Amazon's customer service policy and the fact that a customer service representative will dish out certain nuggets of account information without much authentication.

In the case of Cardinal, and likely McBay as well, the scammer just needed the name, email and billing address associated with their accounts — which, at least in Cardinal's case, could be easily found in the Whois directory for a website domain that he owned — in order to convince a customer service rep to give out the order history from their accounts.

Once the scammer had the order numbers for products purchased by Cardinal and McBay, they could terminate the session with the customer service rep, start another chat session with a new representative and say they had never received the items for the order numbers they just attained.

The fact that the scammer could convince an Amazon rep to ship those products to a different name at a different address — an address that's been used in similar frauds in the past — is what McBay finds most troubling. 

"I appreciate their consumer friendly no-hassle returns and replacements, but why would they send a replacement to an address that has never been associated with me, and is in a wholly different state than the one the original item was sent to?" he writes. "At the end of the day I'm not out any money here but Amazon is out quite a bit of product and a *lot* of trust from me."

Business Insider has reached out to Amazon about this re-occurring replacement fraud. 

You can read McBay's full blog post here.

SEE ALSO: A String Of Disasters At PayPal Has Capped eBay's Toughest Year Ever

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Tesla

In a corporate blog post on Thursday, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk effectively opened up the company’s patents in an effort to accelerate the development of the electric vehicle sector.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based maker of the popular Model S sedan said it will “not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.”

It’s an admirable policy that might also make a lot of business sense.

In addition to potentially luring more players into the field, the move could advance common standards for electric vehicles. Both should accelerate the capital-intensive task of building out the necessary infrastructure to support the nascent sector and its customers, notably including service centers and charging stations.

“Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport,” Musk said. “If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal.”

The commitment does seem to leave room for Tesla to use its patents defensively, should others attempt to sue the company or demand license fees over intellectual property claims.

Other companies fed up with the ceaseless rounds of IP lawsuits and patent trolls have made similar pledges. In 2012, Twitter introduced an “innovator’s patent agreement,” promising it wouldn’t use patents on employees’ inventions in “offensive litigation without their permission.”

“Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day,” Musk said. “We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.”

With the flip of a switch, normal WiFi routers owned by more than 50,000 customers in Houston joined a massive public WiFi hotspot network late Tuesday afternoon, thanks to a new initiative from Comcast.

On Wednesday, Comcast activated another 3 million residential hotspots nationwide, in cities like Indianapolis and Philadelphia.

Comcast’s goal, according to the company’s VP of Xfinity Internet Product Amalia O’Sullivan, is to make it easier for people to use each other’s home Wi-Fi networks.

“Instead of coming over to your house and saying, ‘Hey, what’s your Wi-Fi password?’ your friends can just connect to the Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspot,” O’Sullivan told the Houston Chronicle.

That’s Comcast’s official logic for the hotspot rollout, but the company’s real goal might have to do more with competition.

In its bid to buy Time Warner Cable for $32 billion, Comcast wrote in an SEC filing to federal regulators that a massive WiFi network enabled by residential hotspots — like the one that just launched in Houston — “could make a ‘WiFi first’ service, which combines commercial mobile radio service with Wi-Fi.”

Comcast is already battling other wireless carriers like AT&T, which currently own large networks of WiFi hotspots for businesses and major chains like Starbucks. Comcast also has some WiFi beachheads in some public places like Houston’s Minute Maid Park, but this is the first time the company is rolling out an initiative for residents.

This could mean Comcast and Time Warner Cable want to compete with Verizon and AT&T in the phone business. O’Sullivan said Comcast has no current plans to enter the wireless phone business, but it is possible “in the longer term.”

Spencer Kurn, a partner with New York-based New Street Research, said Comcast is indeed setting itself up for a phone network that would allow its users to switch seamlessly between traditional cellular connections and WiFi. Since Verizon purchased some of Comcast’s wireless spectrum last year, Comcast in return is able to access Verizon’s wireless network. 

In other words, a Comcast-owned wireless phone service could leverage Verizon’s cellular network and its own Wi-Fi networks.

“We think it’s not a matter of if, but when,” Kurn said.

Comcast is hoping its Wi-Fi initiative will help the company gain favor with cellular customers. The public hotspot network is available to any Comcast subscribers for free, and after a customer signs into any Xfinity WiFi hotspot once, they will be connected to any available hotspot after that automatically. Non-Comcast customers will also be able to access the hotspots, but only for a limited time; they’ll need to pay a fee to Comcast after that.

Comcast’s free network will only be broadcast on Wi-Fi routers issued by the company. Customers with their own routers won’t be able to broadcast the hotspot.

By the end of the month, Comcast hopes to have 150,000 of these hotspots populating the greater Houston area. By the end of the year, Comcast hopes to have 8 million WiFi hotspots available for its customers.

O’Sullivan said Comcast’s public WiFi network is separate from private home networks so others can’t access each others’ devices. But for those still concerned about their privacy, the hotspot can be disabled — customers can call Comcast’s customer service or disable it themselves on Comcast’s website. So far, however, customers don’t seem to mind: Comcast spokesman Michael Bybee said “less than 1 percent of customers have opted to turn it off.”

SEE ALSO: Netflix will take down messages blaming Verizon for slow streams

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You might be familiar with the terms used today to describe how much data a computer can store: megabytes, or gigabytes, or terabytes.

But computers are storing so much data these days, thanks to the big data trend, that the computer industry has had to invent new words to describe the amounts.

On Wednesday, HP will talk about a brand new new type of computer that can process "brontobytes."

We believe this is the first time a company has ever talked about a machine that can crunch through "brontobytes" of data. (The word reminds us of brontosaurus, the largest dinosaur.)

And just how big is that?

It's 1,000 Yottabytes, of course.

Here's what that really means, according to the site "What's A Byte?"

1 Bit = Binary Digit
8 Bits = 1 Byte
1,000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
1,000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1,000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1,000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1,000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1,000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1,000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1,000 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
1,000 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
1,000 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte

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Cisco CEO John Chambers is 64, and for years people have been speculating as to when he's going to announce his retirement. A new round of scuttlebutt, sparked by journalist Scott Raynovich at the Rayno Report, is that he may do so in the fall, perhaps in September.

That would be interesting timing for such an announcement. If Cisco were gearing up to announce the exit of its longtime CEO, it seems likely that it would come as part of Cisco's year-end financial report. Its fiscal year ends in July and it typically announces earnings in August. August is also when Chambers turns 65.

Timing aside, Cisco naturally won't comment on this, except to tell us, "Next time we comment on succession is when we announce succession."

Chambers has been running the company since 1995. The last time Chambers talked retirement was two years ago, in which he promised to stay on until 2014 to 2016. So, the fact that it's 2014 is part of the reason people are talking about it again now.

At that time, the company even floated a list of potential candidates of internal executives. Since then the two top candidates — Robert Lloyd, president, development and sales, and COO Gary Moore — have been making more public appearances, auditioning for the role.

A year ago, Chambers even publicly slapped both of them on the back and joked that maybe he would one day be playing golf and "watch these guys run the company."

Last August, when Cisco stunned the industry by announcing it a solid fourth quarter and that it would lay off 4,000 people, some industry watchers called for Chambers' head.

Others lobbied him to stay put.

Many employees at Cisco like and admire their CEO. And there is growing precedent for long-term CEOs not to retire. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is 69 and he doesn't talk about retirement at all.

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Huawei

China’s Huawei has settled on a new way to crack the U.S. smartphone market. It will sell its new Ascend Mate2 directly to consumers through its GetHuawei.com website.

Not likely to work. Just ask Sony.

Though a major player globally, Huawei has been trying — and struggling — to move beyond the low end of the U.S. market.

After struggling for a long time to get U.S. carriers to promote its high-end devices, Sony opted to sell them direct and unsubsidized. The company found the approach challenging even with its far-better-known brand name, so it seems unlikely to be an easy sell for Huawei, a brand that is virtually unknown to U.S. consumers.

Another challenge of Huawei’s new direct-sales approach: There’s nowhere for consumers to get any hands-on time with the Ascend Mate2. It’s buy-before-you-try, though the company is offering a 30-day return policy on the device (minus a $25 restocking fee). Said Huawei executive VP Michael Chuang, “People will just have to read up on the materials.”

Chuang said that Huawei knows that direct sales won’t give Ascend Mate2 the same exposure it might have gained had it been distributed through carrier stores.

“Unfortunately, [carriers] are not listening to the consumers,” Chuang said.

Selling directly through carriers will remain a key part of the company’s U.S. plans, particularly at the middle and low-end range of the market.

The Ascend Mate2 itself packs a massive 6.1-inch display, a hefty 3,900-milliamp-hour battery and a 5-megapixel front camera. But its screen resolution is modest for its size, and it uses the older 4.3 (Jelly Bean) version of Android.

Huawei says it will offer other incentives. Those who preorder the Ascend Mate2 before June 22 will get a case, a SIM card with a free month of service and 20 gigabytes of online storage from Bitcasa.

The $299 phablet is available for preorder today. It will work on either T-Mobile or AT&T’s 4G LTE network.

HP CEO Meg Whitman showed more than a little chutzpah on Thursday during her company's annual customer conference.

Moments after HP announced its grand new plans to compete with the Microsoft Windows operating system,  Whitman was thanking Microsoft for being a major sponsor of the conference and inviting the company's new CEO, Satya Nadella, on stage.

Nadella joined Whitman and Intel's new CEO Brian Krzanich for a fireside chat-style interview conducted by New York Times columnist and author, Tom Friedman.

But just before Nadella joined via video conferencing, during Whitman's keynote speech, CTO Martin Fink, head of HP Labs, showed off what HP hopes will be a game-changing new data center computer. It's internally calling that computer "The Machine."

HP is creating a lot of new technology to build The Machine, especially a new form of memory known as "memristors" which won't lose data if the power turns off (also known as "non-volatile memory").

The Machine's claim to fame is that it can process loads of information instantly while using hardly any power. HP wants this computer to replace the servers being used in today's data centers. But it also hopes the tech will become the basis for the next generation of PCs.

And The Machine will not use Windows.

In fact Fink announced on Thursday that the company is working on a brand new free and open-source operating system and is inviting universities to help research and build it.

He threw an little dig at Microsoft when announcing the news, saying:

"We want to reignite in all of our universities around the world operating system research which we think has been dormant or stagnant for decades."

On top of that, HP is working on a brand new operating system for The Machine based on Linux. And another one based on Android, Fink continued:

"We are, as part of The Machine, announcing our intent to build a new operating system all open source from the ground up, optimized for non-volatile memory systems.

...

We also have a team that's starting from a Linux environment and stripping out all the bits we don't need. So that way you maintain ... compatibility for apps.

What if we build a version of Android? ... We have a team that's doing that, too."

Notice any operating systems not mentioned? Microsoft Windows.

You might argue that it would be difficult for HP to build an operating system based on Windows since Microsoft doesn't freely share that code. Windows is not free and open source as Linux and Android is.

You would be right.

However, when Nadella and Krzanich were on stage, Whitman pointed out how all three companies have been doing joint R&D for 30 years.

In other words, HP could be doing a joint development project with Microsoft if it wanted to.

As Whitman said about the HP, Intel, Microsoft combo, "Our partnership, the three companies, it was the defining partnership of the last industry of the last 30 years ... but sometimes 30-year marriages, they need a little rejuvenation."

That rejuvenation will obviously come in the form of Linux and Android.

It's not wholly surprising that HP is building a new computer that will extricate itself from Microsoft, and potentially from Intel, too, depending on who HP chooses to fabricate its new chip.

Last year, Whitman called out Microsoft and Intel as competitors.  After a disappointing quarter for the company's PC business she told Wall Street analysts:

"HP’s traditional highly profitable markets face significant disruption. Wintel devices are being challenged by ARM-based devices. ...  We are seeing profound changes in the competitive landscape. ... Current partners like Intel and Microsoft are turning from partners to outright competitors."

Since then, HP has introduced new Windows 8 PCs. But it's also introduced new Google Chromebook laptops and an experimental new desktop aimed at businesses that runs Android.

SEE ALSO: PHOTOS: HP Just Showed Off An Ambitious New Kind Of Computer

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Uber is seeing a massive uptick in sign-ups following thousands of black cab drivers staging protests in the streets of London.

An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 black cabs participated in the protest today, according to London's transportation agency. That's because they're convinced Uber is operating illegally in the city. 

But despite their efforts, people are actually flocking to Uber. The car company says it's seen an 850% increase in new riders. 

“Londoners are voting with their fingers, tapping the app in support of new and innovative services as we see our biggest day of sign-ups in London today since launch two years ago,” Uber UK & Ireland General Manager Jo Bertram told The Next Web.

SEE ALSO: PHOTOS: Taxi Drivers Are Causing Chaos On The Streets Of London In Protest Of Uber

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The European Union began investigating the way Apple avoids taxes by using corporate entities in Ireland and other countries to lower its tax rate.

In the U.S., the corporate tax rate can be as high as 35% of income. Ireland's tax rate is 12.5%, and by using various complicated international accounting maneuvers — some of which have cute names like "the Dutch Sandwich" and "the Double Irish," which Apple is credited with pioneering — Apple has lowered its tax rate on some of its income to as little as 3.7% last year, according to Reuters.

Apple says it has not received any selective tax treatment from Ireland.

Nonetheless, it uses Ireland's tax laws to its advantage: Apple places certain corporate assets in Ireland and uses them as a pivot for international transfers that lower its taxes. In one example, a U.S. Senate subcommittee found that an Irish Apple entity named "ASI" was, in fact, the company that actually sold iPhones internationally:

In the case of Apple, ASI purchased finished Apple goods manufactured in China and immediately resold them to ADI or Apple Singapore which, in turn, sold the goods around the world. ASI did not conduct any of the manufacturing – and added nothing – in Ireland to the finished Apple products it bought, yet booked a substantial profit in Ireland when it resold those products to related parties such as ADI or Apple Singapore

But how much tax does Apple actually avoid when it does this? A lot, it turns out.

In 2012, Apple's "foreign base sales income" was about $25 billion, according to the Senate report, and it avoided paying $9 billion in taxes on that income:

Apple wasn't even reporting its U.S. taxes accurately, either, the Senate subcommittee found. Its annual report disclosed it paid much higher U.S. taxes than it actually paid to the IRS (see page 39). To investors, Apple said it paid $6.9 billion in U.S. taxes in 2011. But it actually only paid the IRS $2.5 billion, according to its tax return.

SEE ALSO: Apple Just Warned Facebook To Stay The Heck Out Of The App Store Business

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HP's layoff plan, that was supposed to cut 27,000 jobs and end in October, will drag on, the company confirmed in its quarterly SEC disclosures on Monday.

Since first announcing the plan in 2012, HP has nearly doubled the number of jobs it is cutting – as of last month aiming to trim a total 45,000-50,000 people.  That means cutting another 11,000-16,000 in the coming months.

HP told Wall Street analysts about the new layoff targets and date in May. On Monday, it confirmed this info in its official quarterly report filed with the SEC, saying.

"HP expects a total of 41,000 positions to be eliminated by the end of fiscal 2014, with the remainder to be eliminated in fiscal 2015."

As of April, HP had cut 31,400 positions, it said.

HP CEO Meg Whitman has repeatedly promised that HP will not do another big layoff once this one is complete. But it's not exactly clear exactly when HP will end the process.

On the quarterly conference call, analysts pushed Whitman to tell them if these numbers and dates were firm. Her answer was ambiguous:

I don’t anticipate an additional program ... We went after the ones [job cuts] that were immediately obvious, but the longer I am here and this management team, is here the more opportunities we see.

If Whitman does end HP's layoffs in 2015, that will be a huge change for the company. It has been in a constant state of restructuring since 2008 after acquiring EDS for $13.9 billion, then-CEO Mark Hurd's signature deal. That deal doubled the employee count to over 400,000 people. HP trimmed 25,000 people from the EDS unit, renamed it HP Enterprise Services (HP ES), between 2008 and 2011, it said. 

But the company is still huge. It employs about 331,800 employees worldwide.

Since 2008, HP has spent $8 billion on layoffs and other restructuring charges. The current round has cost it $4 billion, and it expects to pay out another $500 million if layoffs end at 45,000 people. The other $4 billion were on cuts associated with EDS, Palm and 3Com and other acquisitions, it said.

And HP ES remains a problem. Last quarter, HP reported that the unit had shrinking revenues and razor-thin margins. It brought in nearly $5.7 billion in revenue (down 7%, year-over-year) and $144 million in profits.

So, if in the coming months HP announces yet another expansion of its layoffs, no one should be shocked.

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