Tech Pol
How to attract developer talent to your firm
Corporations are crying out for digital talent, but tech startups are sucking up all the new developers – here's how more traditional enterprises can get a slice of the action
This weekend saw Silicon Milkroundabout, an event where the brightest and best in digital had the chance to connect with over 120 tech startups hiring right now. But while these aspiring developers and coders hunted for jobs, large corporations may well have looked on in envy, wondering how they too can attract this kind of developer talent, which is in such short supply.
The latest research doesn't really give them much hope. Firstly, aspiring developers don't really care about a large income as almost three-quarters of tech workers we surveyed no longer "expect" or "care" about earning the big bucks. On top of that, two-thirds said they would be "easily persuaded" to join a startup. So do big businesses stand a chance of getting a slice of London's Silicon Roundabout pie?
A few big tech companies have the upper hand here – who can compete with Google's reputation in this space, not to mention their free beers and pizza? And some are taking matters into their own hands, with Tesco having set up offices in Shoreditch for its own mobile app development team.
But for the many traditional enterprises that can only move forward if they start to pin their hopes on digital, a longer term strategy is needed to engage directly with the young people who represent the future of the UK's tech and digital industry.
Relying on schools and parents to make the case for considering digital careers clearly isn't working. In fact, there was an 80% increase in the number of students taking degrees in humanities, business and creative arts or design between 2002 and 2012.
Over the same period, universities have only witnessed a 20% rise in students taking physical sciences, engineering and technology degrees – this according to Lord Kenneth Baker at a recent Spectator conference on Skilling Britain, where he stated the current priorities of students were "totally out of step with the needs of the economy". So there seems to be a missing link in communications between businesses, universities and schools.
While it's easy to pay lip service to the issue, and shout about small-scale achievements, addressing the area of helping young people into their future careers cannot be a simple tick-the-box CSR job. Genuine action needs to involve multiple parties getting together and creating lasting initiatives. Ones such as long-term strategic partnerships with universities; sending ambassadors to education establishments to make the case for a career in digital; building connections with careers counsellors so they can better help young people; and running well-structured internships and graduate schemes.
Doing so will make a tangible difference to the level of interest and skillsets that companies are starting to expect from their job candidates. These steps will then give businesses a credible platform for campaigning at a higher level on this issue, helping them to earn their space on the media agenda as a relevant voice on the issues they face in hiring digital talent.
Success stories of those who don't fit the traditional picture of a developer doing exciting work in companies outside of the immediate tech space will also help the sector grow and develop. A great example of this is Jenny Griffiths, a computer science graduate who used the skills she gained at university to create a fashion app, Snap Fashion, which lets you take a picture of an item of clothing and find similar items to buy.
She has the winning combination of coding skills, business sense and an interest in retail which is increasingly in demand, but currently like gold dust. Sharing more of these examples will help to inspire more young people who don't yet see the exciting side or career potential of digital skills.
So for major companies crying out for digital talent:
• Uncover your best tech ambassadors, understand their route into the business, and whether there was anything unconventional or different in their story which could help them be seen as a broader role model for the industry
• Find out which universities offer computer sciences and seek out the opportunity to become involved in projects, such as sponsoring competitions, connecting with lecturers, inputting suggestions for their course materials and identifying meaningful partnerships. In publicising these activities, focus on their outcome, rather than the initial arrangement
• Join forces with other organisations who are also in need of digital talent
If more companies start to raise their voice on the code rush, it might one day be feasible for everyone to get a slice of the Silicon Roundabout pie, bringing jobless young people a more optimistic future, while boosting the UK's economy.
Amy Watt is account director at Brands2Life – follow her on Twitter @amywatt100
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Hedge fund manager seeks to break up Sony - video
Puzzle & Dragons made $113m in April as developer GungHo's market cap rivals Nintendo's
Japanese firm's puzzle-RPG is generating $3.8m of daily revenues and putting rivals in the shade
Finnish developer Supercell made waves in the mobile games industry in April when it claimed its Hay Day and Clash of Clans games made $179m of revenues in the first quarter of 2013.
Now even that achievement has been put in the shade by Japanese developer GungHo, whose Puzzle & Dragons mobile game made $113m in the month of April alone.
The figure was announced in the company's latest financial results, translated by games industry consultant Dr Serkan Toto, who has been tracking GungHo's growth closely.
The developer's revenues for Q1 were $303m, while its operating profit was $183m. Puzzle & Dragon's $113m in April – all from in-app purchases – meant that game alone has been making just under $3.8m a day, compared to Supercell's $2.4m of daily revenues. The game isn't yet available in the UK, although it is in the US.
The success has sent GungHo's stock price surging on the Osaka Stock Exchange. In his latest blog post, Toto notes that it has reached $15.1bn, more even than Nintendo, with its market cap of $15bn.
Market caps don't tell the full story about a company's health and how it compares to others in its space, of course.
GungHo's success is based almost entirely on a single game with 13m players, who could move on to another title as swiftly as they arrived at Puzzle & Dragons – which, if you're new to it, blends match-three puzzles and RPG gameplay.
The company's challenge now is to keep those players interested with new features, while planning new games. The same challenge that faces Supercell, Angry Birds maker Rovio and other firms with big mobile hits in the West.
The money rolling in from Puzzle & Dragons will give GungHo a good base to work from, as will a $265m investment from Japanese telecoms firm SoftBank, which bought a 58.5% stake in the company in March 2013.
GungHo's success so far is just one element of a thriving mobile games scene in Japan. Messaging app Line, which runs its own platform for social mobile games, reported Q1 revenues of $58.8m, with half coming from in-app purchases in games.
Meanwhile, social mobile game networks DeNA and GREE have been battling in their home market of Japan and abroad. DeNA posted revenues of $528m and an operating profit of $184m in Q1 2013, while GREE is about to announce its comparable financials.
These companies' success so far puts the performance of Western games publishers into perspective. Electronic Arts' mobile revenues were $109m in the first quarter of 2013, while Zynga's were $264m across web and mobile.
Meanwhile, Rovio's revenues for the whole of 2012 were $197.6m, more than $100m less than GungHo's for Q1 2013 alone even though Angry Birds had 263m active players. For now, dragons trump birds in the app store revenue wars, it seems.
Stuart Dredgeguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Daniel Loeb: hedge funds' Mr Pink guns for Sony
Famed for his acerbic attacks on corporate boards, one of Wall Street's most successful investors has achieved some notable successes
When he starting out as a hedge fund manager in the 1990s, Dan Loeb used the nickname Mr Pink while visiting investor chat rooms. It was a reference to the character in Quentin Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs, who gets away with the diamonds, leaving his co-conspirators dying in a warehouse.
The name has stuck and for good reason: billionaire Loeb has made a habit of getting away with the diamonds. One of Wall Street's most successful investors, he even managed to land a $500m (£326m) windfall from the Greek debt buyback deal.
Famed for his acerbic attacks on corporate boards, he has branded spineless board members as country-club-frequenting "socialites" and people that inherit their shareholdings as members of "The Lucky Sperm Club", while slamming chief executives as chief value destroyers, or CVDs.
It is not just empty rhetoric. With large shareholdings in the companies he attacks, Loeb has achieved some notable successes, such as ousting the Yahoo! chief executive Scott Thompson after accusing him of lying on his CV.
But he has softened his tone for his letter to Sony – in which he suggests it spins off its entertainment arm – apparently mindful of Japanese decorum. Instead of a stinging attack on the group's executives, Loeb coupled his proposal of an IPO with praise for the company's turnaround so far.
"Third Point would not have made this substantial investment if we did not believe in a bright future for Sony's global brand, superior technology, and dedicated employees," he wrote. "We are confident that by acting as partners, Sony will grow stronger."
Josephine Mouldsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Guardian guide to running: GPS watches – video review
With such a vast range of GPS running watches on the market these days, it's hard to know which model will best suit your needs as a runner
Kate CarterEkaterina OchagaviaAlex HealeyMichael TaitGuardian guide to running: GPS watches reviewed
There are a huge number of running watches now on the market, so this is just a small selection of some of the most popular brands and models. For in-depth reviews with an awe-inspiring attention to detail, the best place to look up any model you might wish to purchase is the fantastic DC Rainmaker blog. I've included links to his reviews of all these watches below
Low- to mid-range running watchesGarmin Forerunner 10, £99Pros: Good price, simple watch with good basic functionality. Ideal entry-level watch. Easy to use, nice and small, which is also good for women's smaller wrists. Waterproof.
Cons: Not many added extras, but hardly fair to gripe when that's clearly the aim of the watch
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
Nike+ Sportswatch GPSPros: Amazingly quick to find GPS signal – fastest of all watches tried. Stylish design. Waterproof. "Tap to lap" feature. Would suggest this, along with Garmin Forerunner 10, as good entry-level watches.
Cons: Can't change programme on the go, has to be done via computer. Fairly limited "in run" data or ability to change fields.
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
Higher end running watchesGarmin Forerunner 610, £279.99Pros: Easy to use, with a great user interface. Touchscreen. Vibrate alerts (eg on autolap after one-mile intervals). Great features that can be used on the go, such as the ability to create an interval session. Small enough to wear as a normal watch all day. Wireless download. The Garmin Connect software is easy and helpful to use. Definitely my running watch of choice.
Cons: Fairly limited battery life. Apparently not fully waterproof but I have not tested this.
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
Polar RCX3 with GPS armband, £259.50Pros: Great lightweight, thin design which makes it comfortable for all-day wearing. Finds GPS position pretty quickly. Fantastic battery life.
Cons: GPS is not integral, so you have to wear the armband. This would create some very odd tan lines if you ran a lot in summer wearing it – and yes I know that sounds a bit vain, but it would.
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
Timex Run Trainer 2.0, £274.99Pros: Some unique features, eg eat/drink alerts, which no competitors have. Waterproof. Nice design, finds GPS quickly, though I had some problems with accuracy (tracked a half marathon at 10.6 miles, though this could have been my error as it was the first time I had used it). Easy to customise the display.
Cons: Odd interface: slightly old fashioned, and calls things by odd names ("Chrono" and "Blockers" for instance), which can make it a bit baffling at first to use.
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
High-end multisport modelsGarmin Forerunner 910XT, £359.99Pros: Impressive features for a triathlon watch, boasts ability to record distance/speed and stroke while swimming, for instance. For running, has all the usual excellent Garmin features.
Cons: Chunky design makes it hard to wear as a normal watch. Battery life also limited (around 20 hours). Only one profile can be set up on each watch, so you can't share itwith a partner.
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
Suunto AmbitPros: Very nice simple, stylish design. Easy to use. Amazing list of sports it can be used with. (Disclaimer: the Guardian churlishly refused to send me mountain climbing or skiing to test these features. Spoilsports.)
Cons: Quite large and heavy, particularly for small wrists. Limited use for serious urban runners, definitely best for off-roaders, trail and fell runners.
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
Wearable heart-rate monitorMio Alpha, £179.99Pros: First wrist-wearable heart rate monitor. Picks up heart rate quickly and displays it clearly. Easy to view while running. Also very easy to set up initially. Good battery life.
Cons: No other features – the unit doesn't claim to do anything other than display your heart rate. Expensive, therefore, for what it does. Doesn't record data – only displays an average heart rate for your last run/workout. Could do with smaller band for small wrists.
In-depth review from DC Rainmaker can be found here
Kate Carterguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Guacamelee – review
PS3 PS Vita; Drinkbox; £10
Remember Super Metroid? Indie developer Drinkbox certainly does, but with their latest PSN title they've decided that what Nintendo's classic really needed was fewer bounty hunters and space pirates, and a whole lot more sombreros.
Guacamelee follows the adventures of barrel-chested agave farmer Juan as he attempts to rescue the daughter of "El Presidente" from the clutches of evil skeleton bandit Carlos Calaca, a quest that begins quite badly when Juan is immediately killed in his first confrontation.
All is not lost though, as the game takes a quick rummage through the big bag of crazy plot contrivances and pulls out a magical wrestling mask, which instantly resurrects Juan as a superpowered Luchadore. Thus equipped, Juan sets out across a beautifully stylised version of rural Mexico, to rescue the damsel, beat up all the baddies and generally be all heroic and stuff.
Mechanically, Guacamelee plays very similarly to the Metroid and Castlevania titles it's primarily paying homage to. Juan runs and jumps his way through the non-linear 2D stages, battling Calaca's various skeletal minions and locating the necessary upgrades to his powers that will allow him access to new areas (these powers are mainly acquired by locating and smashing "Chozo" statues, in another nod to its inspiration).
Upgrades range from the faintly ridiculous, like Juan's morph-ball-esque ability to fit through small spaces by turning himself into a chicken, to the more impressive – a couple of hours in Juan acquires the ability to flip between the land of the living and the land of the dead at will, with platforms and enemies phasing in and out of solidity depending on which realm he's currently in. This sets up the possibility for some fiendish platforming shenanigans, and the game doesn't disappoint – the difficulty ratchets up quickly and you'll soon be expected to make use of a number of Juan's powers in sequence to get through the more complex sections.
This puzzle-platform style could (and in the more difficult areas, occasionally does) get a little frustrating, but there's a satisfaction to be had from working out the correct way to apply Juan's skills to get to the next screen. Even failure generally inspires a bout of just-one-more-go syndrome, especially since the game leniently places Juan back on the starting ledge in the event of a plunge into the abyss.
It's not all wall-jumping and spikes though, there's also plenty of fighting. Being a wrestler, Juan gets up close and personal with his foes, with a basic three-punch combo backed up by a jump kick and uppercut with which to batter his way through. A few quick hits will open up an enemy for a wrestling move, or a directionally controlled throw, which becomes really important later on – throwing enemies into others will skittle over the whole group and buy you a few seconds, and you'll need them.
The combat is fast paced and fun, but the game likes to lock Juan in a room and throw waves of enemies at him, which does get a bit frantic, particularly once enemies start appearing with colour coded shields that can only be broken by a specific attack, or enemies that exist only in one dimension or the other (despite being able to hit you in both). Couple that to a slightly stiff dodge roll and the later fights can feel a bit unfairly overwhelming, unless you're packing a set of fly-meet-chopstick level twitch reflexes.
So far, so old school, but Guacamelee has a few more tricks up its poncho to keep you interested, the first of which is the sumptuous art direction – Bizarro Mexico never looked so pretty. Everything is drawn in a distinctive angular style, swathed in bright colours and bold designs – even switching over to the murkier world of the dead still keeps everything looking great, with menacing purple skies and lurid green slime everywhere.
Enemy designs are variously drawn from Mexican folklore and festivals, from the day of the dead skeletons to the flying Chupacabras, and they all animate nicely as Juan beats them up and throws them around.
Another nice touch is that this is not a game that takes itself too seriously, being liberally sprinkled with goofy references to retro games culture and internet memes all over the place. You'll spot background references and parodies everywhere, such as posters stuck around town advertising the exploits of the familiar looking "Los Super Hermanos" wrestling tag team, or the road into the desert being plastered with what looks suspiciously like rage comics. These little visual gags don't really add anything to the gameplay, but they're fun to spot nonetheless.
Downsides? Well, as mentioned earlier, the difficulty curve is quite steep and at various points both the platforming and the combat can get a little more frustrating than they should do. It's also quite short, clocking in at about five hours, but then that's maybe being unfair since it is after all only a tenner (and that's a cross-buy with the Vita version).
I'm nitpicking though, Guacamelee is a pretty top-drawer product. It's charming, funny and good looking, while offering up a solid take on the timeless Metroidvania template – more than enough to send it suplexing its way into the top tier of PSN titles.
• Game reviewed on PS3
Paul Sartoriguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Sony: the key operations in the breakup battle
Businesses at the centre of a clash between hedge fund boss Daniel Loeb and Japanese giant's board
Sony at a glanceSony, the company behind the Walkman, Django Unchained and Michael Jackson's back catalogue, was established in Tokyo in 1946. Twelve years later it floated as Sony on the Tokyo stock exchange, listing in the US in 1970. Worth about $150 at the height of the dotcom bubble, the shares have since plunged by more than 85% and Sony is worth about $18.5bn today.
Sony ElectronicsApple may have dominated the market for portable music players over the past decade, but Sony was the company that first allowed the mass market to listen to music on the move, with the cassette-playing Walkman in 1979. Sony Electronics was also behind the Trinitron colour TV system, launched in 1966, which was famed for its bright images. More recently, the company has enjoyed huge success with its Bravia flatscreen TVs and the wildly popular Playstation gaming console.
Sony PicturesSony's movie studio is one of Hollywood's largest, dating back to 1919 when brothers Harry and Jack Cohn set up the company that became Columbia Pictures. Columbia, which was already putting out award-winning films such as On The Waterfront in the 50s, was bought by Sony in 1990 and has produced a slew of blockbusters including Men in Black, the latest Bond films and Django Unchained.
Sony Music EntertainmentHome to artists such as Alicia Keys, Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson, Sony is the world's second largest record company after Universal Music. The company that became Sony Music gradually built up since 1929, with the acquisition of several smaller labels and mega-deals with the likes of the German group Bertelsmann.
Josephine Mouldsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Press Start: Bioshock Infinite sells 3.7m, Danny Bilson on the fall of THQ and more
Plus, Cliff Bleszinski on next-gen and the similarity between voting and freedom in games
A selection of links, hand-picked by the Guardian games writers.
Bioshock Infinite hits 3.7 million sales | GamesIndustry.bizIn an investor conference call today, Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick announced that BioShock Infinite shipped 3.7 million units to date, with Borderlands 2 moving more than 6 million copies, and NBA 2K13 surpassing the 5 million-shipped mark. That trio helped push the publisher's full-year sales up 47 percent to $1.21 billion, up from nearly $825.82 million the year before. Those figures were also boosted by Max Payne 3, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and catalog sales of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption.
This is all good news for a publisher that previously relied very heavily on GTA sales and other Rockstar releases. And it shows there's a market for action games that want to be thought of as cerebral.
Danny Bilson: inside the rise and fall of THQ | Eurogamer.netThe ex-head of THQ speaks frankly about the fall of the company and his own sacking:
"We had hope, okay. But it was a very difficult time. I'm not going to lie. Starting in December, after the uDraw disaster, it became very difficult. We were looking for investment. We were looking for any angle to make it work. We also closed off more things. We did narrow our line-up down after December."
Cliff Bleszinski on next-gen gaming, Oculus Rift and the always-on console | EngadgetThe veteran game designer opines on what Sony and Microsoft will have to do to ensure their new machines are successful. According to him, it's all user-generated content and connectivity:
"I think those who get it with the next generation will get the idea of connectivity and sharing and allowing the user to build the content. There was a great article in Wired a while back where they talked about the next generation of consoles, and could Minecraft happen on your console? I have a very good relationship with Microsoft, but [there are] a lot of TCRs you'd have to go through, all the stuff you'd have to go through to get your game on Xbox Live Arcade, or even issue updates on; it was a nightmare."
The Voting Problem | Game Design AdvanceThis is an interesting on the 'illusion of choice' in game design and how the problems of providing options to gamer can be compared to voting:
A recent twitter-conversation with Tommy Rousse about "Rawlsian game design" evolved into a broader discussion of the illusion of choice, situations where I think my actions are affecting the system, but they aren't really. Many (most?) gambling games have this problem. Game Designer Michael Brough snarkishly added that another system with an illusion of choice problem is voting. Michael's point is actually a valid and important one, and I think it's worth a closer look.
Road Rash-inspired Road Redemption secures Kickstarter funding | PC GamerGood news about this much-vaunted Road Rash-style racer:
Road Redemption, the Road Rash inspired racer by New Orleans' Darkseas Games, has reached its Kickstarter goal. It hit its base target of $160,000 only two days before deadline and, as is increasingly the case with these campaigns, a series of stretch goals have been announced, including Oculus Rift support.
You can follow Press Start at Pinboard.
Keith Stuartguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Facebook Home limps past 1m downloads
Android app launcher developed by social network receives poor reviews and slow downloads, while US network gets ready to drop dedicated Facebook phone by HTC
Facebook Home, the app intended to turn Android phones into a sort of "Facebook phone", is struggling. Having taken almost a month to hit a million downloads from Google's Play store, more than half of the 16,000-odd reviews on the store give it just one star - the lowest grade possible - against 17% offering a 5-star review.
Separately, AT&T is reported to be preparing to abandon the Android-based HTC First - also known as the "Facebook Phone" - after having last week cut its price from $99 to just 99 cents on the phone which was introduced only at the beginning of April.
Internally, Facebook is understood to be debating how to respond to the poor reception that Home - which was intended to be its foray into the smartphone market without actually having to produce its own phone.
Reports suggest that sales of the HTC First have been comparatively small: BGR.com says that sources at AT&T, the US's largest carrier, indicate that fewer than 15,000 of the phones had been sold by the end of its first month.
By comparison, in the first three months of the year AT&T sold 6m smartphones, of which about 1m were Android phones - an average of more than 300,000 per month.
BGR says that the price cut will be used to try to shift stock, and that any surplus inventory will then be returned to HTC - creating a problem for the Taiwanese company, which in its first quarter barely made a profit but which had promised strong sequential growth in revenues for the April-June period.
The HTC First is the company's second attempt to create a "Facebook phone" after the HTC Chacha in spring 2011, an Android phone with a dedicated button to let people update their Facebook status.
"With that one slash of the knife, AT&T has confirmed what everyone had already gathered; the Facebook phone is proving very unpopular," commented Richard Windsor of the RadioFreeMobile consultancy. ."If this was an isolated incident, then one could put it down to poor hardware, but installations and reviews of the software on other devices have also been poor."
Adam Mosseri, Facebook's product management director, told Mercury News in April said that "This is just the start".
Facebook Home is an app launcher for Android phones which in effect takes over the phone, pushing normal apps to the background; the home screen shows photos from the user's Facebook feed, comments from the user's News Feed, and "Chat Heads" of friends with notifications.
Facebook's challenge is to create a mobile app that is compelling for users: data suggests that it is the most-used application on smartphones, taking up 18% of all usage in its own right.
But in trying to expand its influence beyond social networking so that it can mine the user's entire experience on the phone, Facebook seems to have stumbled.
Facebook Home was initially available only on a limited range of phones - the HTC One X, HTC First, Samsung Galaxy S3 and Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Those are reckoned to be a small proportion of the total Android installed base in the US, which is one of Facebook's largest markets.
Windsor said: "Facebook Home looked to me like the right idea but its execution and design appears to be somewhat clumsy and the users simply do not like it. The failure of Home is not a disaster; it just means that Facebook needs to try another way to engage users outside of social networking. Something less invasive, more intuitive and above all, more fun seems to be the order of the day."
Charles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Hedge fund boss launches bold plan to break up Sony
Daniel Loeb wants Sony to spin off part of its entertainment and life insurance arms, leaving the core electronics divisions
Sony, the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant, is facing an audacious breakup attempt in a battle that could rock the staid Japanese corporate world.
The US hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb has amassed a 6.5% stake in the $18.5bn (£11bn) group and is calling for it to be broken up. Renowned for stirring up huge fights with US companies, Loeb wants Sony to spin off part of its entertainment arm, which owns one of Hollywood's largest film studios, behind the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall, and one of the biggest music labels in the world, behind artists such as Taylor Swift. But Sony said on Tuesday morning that its entertainment businesses were "not for sale".
The New York Times reported that Loeb, who founded the hedge fund Third Point, flew to Tokyo last weekend for three days of meetings with government officials, regulators and senior Sony executives, citing people briefed on the matter. He is said to have hand-delivered a letter to the Sony chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, on Tuesday that praises a turnaround effort but asks for more.
Loeb said that Third Point would put up ¥150bn-¥200bn (£978m-£1.3bn) to support an IPO of the group's entertainment operations. The hedge fund recommends that Sony then sell a 15%-20% stake in that business in an offering to existing shareholders.
Separately, it proposed that the company should consider selling off its 60% stake in Sony Financial, which sells life insurance policies and has real estate holdings. That would leave the core electronics arm, which includes Sony's TV and PlayStation units.
Loeb said that would generate funds to invest in the electronics business and allow the company to reduce its debt pile. Third Point thinks this strategy could drive Sony's share price up by as much as 60%, "if implemented properly".
Sony's share price has plunged by nearly 85% over the past 13 years, as it has been overtaken in electronics by the likes of Apple, Samsung and LG.
The approach represents a bet by Loeb that Japan can recover after a decade of minimal growth. Loeb has come out in support of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who is pushing policies to attract private investment. In his letter to Sony, Loeb wrote: "Under Prime Minister Abe's leadership, Japan can regain its position as one of the world's pre-eminent economic powerhouses and manufacturing engines."
In one of his most famous corporate spats, Loeb successfully ousted Yahoo's former chief executive and poached Marissa Mayer from Google to run the internet company.
Josephine Mouldsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
KakaoTalk takes on Facebook Home with KakaoHome Android launcher
Popular Korean messaging app's spin-off promises to 'make your smartphone special' with 90m registered users to market it to
Facebook may be struggling to win hearts (and installs) with its Facebook Home app, but it's not the only social networking service keen to take over users' Android homescreens.
Korean startup Kakao has launched KakaoHome in its home country: a similar "launcher" app that provides "a customized home screen experience on your smartphone" with widgets, notifications and deeper integration of the main KakaoTalk messaging service.
Features include the ability to check notifications for the KakaoTalk, KakaoStory and KakaoGame apps; reply to KakaoTalk messages without launching the standalone app; free themes; and widgets including weather forecasts, a clock and a task killer.
Although seemingly not available in the West yet, KakaoHome's launch is big news in South Korea. KakaoTalk has signed up 90m registered users across iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry since its launch in 2010. The main KakaoTalk app has been installed more than 50m times on Android alone.
It's one of a cluster of similar apps from the Asia-Pacific region – WeChat and Line are the other key ones – that are hugely popular at home, and hoping to expand their success in the West. WeChat has 300m registered users, and Line 150m.
Industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media has predicted that such "over-the-top" (OTT) messaging apps will be generating 41bn messages a day between their users by the end of 2013: more than double the 19.5bn daily text messages sent using SMS. The OTT category also includes Western apps like WhatsApp, Kik Messenger and Viber.
The Asian apps combine instant messaging with social games and sales of virtual items – digital stickers and emoticons in particular – making their money from in-app purchases (IAP).
Line reported $58.8m of revenues for the first quarter of 2013, with 50% coming from IAP in games, and 30% from sales of virtual stickers. However, its iOS app caused a clash with Apple, which forced Line to remove the ability for users to send purchased stickers as gifts to friends earlier in May.
KakaoTalk, meanwhile, generated $42m of revenues for Kakao in 2012 according to e27, ending that year with 29m daily active users sending 4.8bn messages a day.
KakaoTalk's social games platform has been proving lucrative for developers, though. In March, the chief executive of Korean publisher Com2Us told VentureBeat that "On Kakao, it takes only two weeks to one month to get to a million users. The market is really changing", claiming that the top games on KakaoTalk were generating $1m-$2m a day.
Kakao is also trying to boost the developer ecosystem around its apps, partnering with the South Korean government in April 2013 for a $27m investment fund aimed at startups.
With 1.1bn monthly active users and 665m daily active users at the end of March 2013, Facebook still dwarfs the size of KakaoTalk and its rivals on a global basis.
But with mobile an increasingly important focus for the social network – "Today there's no argument: Facebook is a mobile company," said chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in January 2013 – it can't afford to underestimate the threat posed by the messaging apps.
With Facebook Home's momentum under scrutiny, the launch of KakaoHome reinforces that threat.
Stuart Dredgeguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Boot up: AT&T kills HTC First, Apple's maps mystery, another Google shutdown, and more
Plus Wikipedia's Middle Earth bias, more on Windows Blue, caption glasses for deaf cinemagoers, graphene gets magnetic, and more
Note: the daily launch time for this post will in future be 0730 UK time.
A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
HTC First discontinued by AT&T: first 'Facebook phone' a flop >> BGRZach Epstein:
The HTC First, or "Facebook phone" as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn't a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC's First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook's little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone.
The first phone to ship with Facebook Home preinstalled. Unsold inventory is going back to HTC. Bad news for both companies.
You can do too much due diligence >> A VCFred Wilson on what he found when looking into Feedburner in 2004:
As part of our investment process, we do a bunch of fact gathering/checking work that is called Due Diligence in the vernacular of the VC business. So my partner Brad Burnham and I put together a list of leading blogs and online publishers who had popular RSS feeds at the time. I think there were a dozen or so publications on that list. It included Weblogs (Engadget), Gawker (Gawker), NY Times, and a bunch more. We know most everyone who ran those operations so we called them.
What we heard was surprising. Not one of them was willing to hand over their RSS feed to a third party for analytics and monetization. We were very surprised to hear that and thought a bit about it. But, we decided, we could not invest in something that the big publishers would not support.
And then...
New magnetic graphene may revolutionise electronics >> PhysordThe technique involves growing an ultra perfect grapheme film over a ruthenium single crystal inside an ultra high vacuum chamber whereorganic molecules of tetracyano-p-quinodimethane (TCNQ) are evaporated on the grapheme surface. TCNQ is a molecule that acts as a semiconductor at very low temperatures in certain compounds.
Don't worry, Cody Wilson's working on the downloadable make-it-at-home version right now. (Thanks @Sputnikkers for the link.)
New closed-captioning glasses help deaf go out to the movies >> NPRRachel Rood:
There will be a special attraction for deaf people in theaters nationwide soon. By the end of this month, Regal Cinemas plans to have distributed closed-captioning glasses to more than 6,000 theaters across the [US].
Sony Entertainment Access Glasses are sort of like 3-D glasses, but for captioning. The captions are projected onto the glasses and appear to float about 10 feet in front of the user. They also come with audio tracks that describe the action on the screen for blind people, or they can boost the audio levels of the movie for those who are hard of hearing.
This is a big moment for the deaf, many of whom haven't been to the movies in a long time. Captioned screenings are few and far between, and current personal captioning devices that fit inside a cup holder with a screen attached are bulky, display the text out of their line of vision to the screen, and distract the other patrons.
Excellent application of technology. (Thanks @HotSoup for the link.)
Google axed SMS Search thinking people wouldn't notice >> GizmodoGoogle created SMS Search as a way for users with limited or no data on their phones to access search information. You could text a search query to 466453 and receive an SMS reply containing only text, no links. It was useful to a lot of people back in the day, but it's not surprising that the service has been losing popularity.
Wouldn't it still be useful in Africa and other places where data access is limited? For those who are counting - it was killed after 1,409 days. Of 96 Google services that have been killed off, the mean lifetime is 1,459 days. Mean lifetime of 93 Google services still operating: 1,776 days. (Thanks @HotSoup for the link.)
New Coke? >> SuperSite for WindowsPaul Thurrott:
Full disclosure: I like [Microsoft head of PR] Frank Shaw quite a bit. He's got a tough job and to be fair he's doing the right thing in defending his company.
But in a recent post to the Official Microsoft Blog, Mr. Shaw called out The Financial Times and The Economist, two staid publications that made the mistake of correctly identifying the core problem with Windows these days. I can only imagine what he thinks of me right now.
In the wake of a mini-publicity tour in which Microsoft executives tried to paint its about-face with Windows 8.1 "Blue" as an example of it "listening to customer feedback," these publications have correctly suggested that this never would have happened had the Windows team simply listened to customer feedback during the six-year buildup to Windows 8 instead.
Respect the crowd >> Bitsplitting.orgFormer Apple staffer Daniel Jalkut on Apple's non-updating Maps:
I used to sing the praises of my iPhone above all competitors. Now, when I am jarred from my fanboy-hypnosis, staring down at an alleged life-changer that doesn't know how to get me from point A to point B, I'm not so convinced I can defend it.
In order for Apple's customers to continue "reporting a problem" with Maps, they need to feel that their reports are having some impact. They need to feel respected. Ideally, good reports would lead to timely corrections on a mass level that would benefit all other iOS users. Anecdotally, this is not happening. So at a minimum a user's own report should be respected by the device they hold in their hands. Let the customer know their voice was heard by improving the usability of their device immediately. Customers demand confidence in map data, whether it be from Apple or fine-tuned by their own hand. If we can't count on map data, we won't use the app, we won't report problems, and we won't help Apple one iota in shoring up this massive shortcoming.
Whoever talks about Maps on stage at Apple's WWDC in June will have to have a really persuasive offering.
The problem with Wikipedia >> cartesian productAdrian McMenamin:
Wikipedia has a real blind spot when it comes to covering to Africa – there are more articles on "Middle Earth" than many African states and there are perhaps 10 times as many wikipedia edits (in any language) originated in the United Kingdom than in all of Africa.
And that's not the only problem – 91% of Wikipedia editors are male and, of course, that is contributing to Wikipedia's growing reputation as the home of the same sort of maladjusted and poor socialised individuals who inhabit various parts of the "open source" software world.
That's not the rudest thing he says, either.
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Charles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Chatterbox: Tuesday
The place to talk about games and other things that matter
It's Tuesday.
Keith Stuartguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Mark Zuckerberg: activist backlash mounts against political advocacy group
Facebook founder's group, Fwd.us, attracts ire of high-profile Silicon Valley backers displeased with anti-environment links
The backlash against Mark Zuckerberg's political advocacy group is gathering steam with a campaign to pick off many of its high-profile Silicon Valley backers.
Activists on Monday identified the next batch of figures they hope will defect following the departure of Elon Musk and David Sacks, adding fresh pressure to Zuckerberg's nascent Fwd.us organisation.
Musk and Sacks quit last week after accusations the Facebook founder's political lobby group, set up to push for immigration reform, had made an unholy alliance with anti-environmental politicians.
"It's time for other tech industry luminaries to make it clear where they stand. Follow Elon Musk's example and resign from Fwd.us," said Credo, the advocacy arm of Credo Mobile, in a petition which by Monday afternoon had 32,000 signatures.
It singled out LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, eBay's John Donahoe, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr for pressure from critics of Zuckerberg's initiative.
The billionaire launched his boldest foray into politics in March, vowing to mobilise grassroots activists and tech moguls into a force to overhaul US immigration laws. Current restrictions curb Silicon Valley's ability to recruit and nurture foreign talent.
Fwd.us said it would help re-elect conservative and liberal politicians alike as long as they supported immigration reform.
The group triggered an outcry, however, by funding television advertisements touting the pro-oil views of Lindsay Graham, who champions the Keystone XL pipeline, and Mark Begich, who wants drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Preserve.
A liberal coalition including the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org announced last week it would temporarily suspend buying advertisements on Facebook, a largely symbolic protest.
Musk, who as chief executive of Tesla Motors has staked his reputation on green technology, quit Zuckerberg's group on Friday, saying immigration reform should not be pursued at the expense of other important causes.
"I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC, and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause," he said. "This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and the staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do."
Sacks, who founded the social network Yammer, was widely reported to also have quit the organisation but has yet to make a public statement.
Credo Action, the advocacy arm of the cellphone networker Credo Mobile, urged Zuckerberg's critics to keep up the momentum with direct appeals to his remaining prominent tech allies, such as Hoffman, Donahoe, Mayer and Doerr.
"Silicon Valley stars … are sensitive to public backlash from the people who power their social networks or use their products or services. If enough of us push back and keep this issue in the public eye, they will be under immense pressure, not just from us but from their staff and shareholders, to stop supporting Fwd.us," it said.
A spokesperson for the lobby group, speaking to the New York Times last week before Musk's announcement, brushed off criticism. "We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy. Fwd.us remains totally committed to support a bipartisan policy agenda that will boost the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform."
Supporters point out that Bill Gates and other heavyweights remain on board and that the lobbying reflects Silicon Valley's can-do, goal-oriented ethos.
The Fwd.us site has ignored the controversy, and Zuckerberg has declined to comment.
TechCrunch fuelled the perception of a beleaguered enterprise with an article analysing why it had become reviled even by some of its own members.
"There's a reason most lobbies don't bother with grassroots activism: communities don't get excited about the kinds of soul-crushing moral compromise necessary in DC politics. So, when Fwd.us rolled up with millions in hand claiming to be the voice of the technologists, those who felt misrepresented freaked out. Even more confusing, when confronted, Fwd.us chose to do something no other major organization in technology has done: it remained silent."
The article noted that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams tweeted a link to a scathing blog post from Branch CEO Josh Miller.
"In service of noble causes, Fwd.us is employing questionable lobbying techniques, misleading supporters, and not being transparent about the underlying values and long-term intentions of the organization. More discouragingly, the leaders of the technology industry (and of Fwd.us) have built their careers on bringing meaningful change to the world. They should be doing the same in Washington."
- Mark Zuckerberg
- US domestic policy
- United States
- US immigration
- US political lobbying
- US politics
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How can social media change how development is done?
From journalism to business, social media is changing how institutions engage citizens. But what effect will this have on development? Join the debate Thursday, 16 May
28 January 2011, in response to growing public protests – and fearing mass uprising as had just happened in Tunisia – the government of then president, Hosni Mubarak, followed in the example of Burma, and a few others before it, and disabled internet and mobile phone networks. Why? To prevent people from accessing social media.
Jillian York at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society said in an interview at the time: "Clearly, what's rattled the government is the major role that social media has played in the protests rocking the country's cities, including Cairo. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Google Docs have been used in unprecedented ways this time around – both for coordination, and for disseminating news". By 11 February 2011, Hosni Mubarak resigned and observers began to speak of a "Twitter revolution."
While many disagree about the exact role social media played in what has become known as 'the Arab Spring', there is no denying that the internet has changed the way networks form and how those networks then challenge established structures.
In a Ted talk on 'How social media can make history', New York University academic, Clay Shirky argues that "the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible – with deep social and political implications". His biography on the site describes his work as follows: "Clay Shirky's work focuses on the rising usefulness of networks ... New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere as an alternative to centralised and institutional structures".
So how does that play out in development? How can social media change how development research is shared and used? How too can social media change the way activists and NGOs campaign? And if NGOs are themselves "institutional structures", how do they stand to be changed by social media and online networks?
On Thursday 16 May, we will bring together a panel to discuss these and other questions. Join us in the comment threads below from 1pm to 3pm BST.
The live chat is not video or audio-enabled but will take place in the comments section (below). To join the panel or simply give your views ahead of the chat, email globaldevpros@guardian.co.uk. Follow our tweets using the hashtag #globaldevlive
Eliza Anyangweguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Investigation into mysterious death of Shane Todd begins in Singapore
Parents suggest that 31-year-old software engineer's apparent suicide was faked as court hears evidence from girlfriend of 'depression'
Evidence presented Monday in a Singapore investigation revealed a US software engineer was unhappy at work and had written suicide notes before he died last year in what his parents insist was a murder.
Software engineer Shane Truman Todd, 31, was found hanging from a black strap secured to a door and had no visible signs of injury on his body except redness on his forearms and legs, the state counsel's opening statement said. The strap was fashioned into a noose, and a white towel also was around his neck.
Police found no signs of forced entry into the apartment, but they did find links to suicide websites on his laptop and suicide letters written to Todd's family members and loved ones.
Parents Rick and Mary Todd, who attended the inquest, told The Associated Press in March they consider the evidence fake. They believe he may have been murdered over his research in the U.S. into material used to make heat-resistant semiconductors, a technology with both civilian and military applications.
Rick Todd said his son in early 2012 had expressed concerns to his parents that he was being asked to compromise U.S. security. But he said Shane Todd wasn't specific.
His parents traveled from their home in the U.S. state of Montana to Singapore days after his death last June and found his belongings packed as if he intended to leave for good and saw no signs of a hanging, such as marks on the door. Mary Todd also said the alleged suicide note was obviously fake because it thanked the Institute of Microelectronics, the former employer he had grown to hate, and had other false details.
Todd's parents had sought for the FBI to lead the investigation into the scientist's death, though the status of any assistance it has provided is classified.
The first witness at the coroner's inquest was Todd's girlfriend, a Filipino nurse working in Singapore who discovered his body. Shirly Sarmiento testified Shane had often confided in her about his suspected depression and that he had mounting unhappiness with the "dishonest environment" in his workplace. She also mentioned he feared "heavy hands coming after him."
Todd's parents were somber throughout the proceedings, occasionally getting up to speak with their lawyers.
At least 36 witnesses will be called to testify during the coroner's inquest, including personal friends, IME colleagues and forensic doctors.
The inquest is expected to last 12 days, and its conclusions cannot be appealed.
While his parents were in Singapore, they found a hard drive missed by investigators that contained thousands of documents Todd had backed up from his work computer. After having it analyzed by a computer forensics expert, they found a draft of a project outline between IME and the Chinese telecom giant Huawei on the development of an amplifier device that utilized gallium nitride.
The heat-resistant material has civilian uses in products like LED screens and cellphone towers and military applications in things like radar and satellite systems. Todd had been trained in the U.S. on proprietary equipment that produces the material but is restricted for export because of the potential military applications.
Huawei has said it had no cooperation with IME related to gallium nitride.
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Howard Kurtz isn't the problem at The Daily Beast, it's Tina Brown | Michael Wolff
The Daily Beast/Newsweek has floundered in the digital space. Some blame needs to be pointed at editor Tina Brown
When the media writer Howard Kurtz lost his job at the Daily Beast earlier this month, the details of how he screwed up managed to obscure the greater particulars of his boss, Daily Beast editor Tina Brown, and her lacklustre performance. Kurtz and Brown are really joined at the hip.
The Daily Beast was founded in 2008. As other web entrants in the news, politics, and personality field built viable businesses, the Huffington Post, Business Insider, Politico, Buzzfeed, Gawker, among them, Brown's Daily Beast foundered.
Its ever-constant staff turnover has been bloody and operatic (Wikipedia can't keep up with its management changes); it sorely lagged behind in the race to build traffic; it Quixotically acquired the Newsweek corpse and then, humiliatingly, had to rebury it; and it has invested as much or more than any of its rivals. I can't imagine there is anyone who would bet on the Daily Beast's long-term future, or, at least, on Brown's.
In other ways, however, The Daily Beast offers a markedly higher-quality product than other digitally native journalism sites. Or, anyway, a more ambitious one. It has tried to be an orchestration of diverse comment and opinion writing; it has sought out the best writers it could afford (and a number it probably could not afford); it has a design which puts aesthetic considerations ahead of click tricks; and its advertising strategy has been to encourage big buys, with innovative visual approaches, rather than everybody else's underhanded sponsored content tactic.
Arguably, the Daily Beast has been hopelessly handicapped by Brown's famously mercurial and attention-deficit management style. Still, it has had the benefit of being lead by someone with vast and sophisticated editorial experience. Neither Arianna Huffington at the Huffington Post, nor Henry Blodgett at Business Insider, or Jim VandeHei and John Harris at Politico, or Jonah Peretti at Buzzfeed, or Nick Denton at Gawker, had run a publication before launching their businesses.
On the other hand, Brown's professional bias is, likely, among the Daily Beast's problems.
The Kurtz incident is instructive. While the Daily Beast's competitors have mostly staffed up with neophytes and nobodies, whose primary, and often only, professional experience is in low-resourced digital journalism (all of these sites now regularly exchanged their personnel), Brown went out of her way to hire established figures.
Kurtz, reportedly paid more than $250,000 (in one report $600,000) by Brown, and allowed various outside activities, had been at the Washington Post for many years, and has his own show at CNN. The Daily Beast's talent pool has also included writers from the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, and Vanity Fair.
Brown made a quintessential chattering class mistake of thinking that the business of journalism was about expertise, talent, or prestige instead of about scale.
While Brown was having to shepherd divergent styles, egos, and salary demands, her competitors were creating extremely precise models that could be easily mimicked by inexperienced and low paid employees.
It is the obvious accomplishment of the Huffington Post, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, and Gawker: enormous amounts of copy produced with a consistent voice and style, interchangeable short takes that can be written by anybody in the stable. Henry Blodget might be more identifiable than his writers, but all his writers sound like Henry.
Doing it one way is much more efficient than multiple individual approaches. (Gawker occasionally lets its young reporters write a longer, personal piece, often with hilarious results).
The Daily Beast acquired Newsweek, but it was actually its rivals that adapted a newsweekly, one-tone, one-sentence-structure, style. What's more, largely anonymous bylines don't call that much attention to themselves. Kurtz's minor fact-check mistake (his final and fatal mistake was the last of a number of them) was of the kind made on a pretty much daily basis by everybody else, but without drama or even note.
The Beast's competitors often seem to specialize, in fact, in compounding mistakes, because the overwhelming source of their information is aggregation, that online form, adapted from television news, of merely rewriting, in house style, stories from other news outlets. The Daily Beast, but for one specifically designated section, has eschewed aggregation and emphasized actual opinion writing, which, in Brown's former professional life, had the benefit of editors and fact checkers.
Curiously, the Daily Beast has largely stayed the course since its inception. It tries to be an op-ed page or an opinion magazine in the manner of Britain's Spectator. Its competitors, on the other hand, have followed user traffic patterns and each transformed themselves multiple times with an abject fealty to the market.
Newly minted editors like Huffington, Blodget, Denton, and Peretti, seemed to more easily grasp that the real job of journalism is to find a form that fits the financial limitation of the medium, however low. Brown, often with those limitations slapping her in the face, nevertheless keeps trying to transcend the medium.
Now, the problem may be that Howard Kurtz was just the wrong person to turn to for transcendence. Or, it may be that people who are hired precisely because they are thought to be superior to the form, end up inevitably condescending to it.
Brown projects a sense that the new world is not only lesser but unfair in its insistence that she adapt. Now, Kurtz has failed her too, as all her well-paid associates seem to do. But, taking advantage of Kurtz's blunder to get out from under his ill-advised salary, it seems she will, with martyred fortitude and clear distaste, once again try to meet the market where it is.
Michael Wolffguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Tim Cook charity auction passes $600,000
Anonymous bidder stands to pay around $20,000 a minute for half hour meeting with tech giant's chief executive
At more than $20,000 per minute, it's going to be a hell of a coffee break. A charity auction offering the highest bidder half an hour with Apple chief executive Tim Cook stood at $605,000 (£395,000) on Monday night.
Even before an expected last-minute flurry of interest when the auction on the Charitybuzz website closes at 9pm UK time on Tuesday, the current highest bid means the 30 minutes or so the meeting is expected to last will generate two and a half times as much as when the site auctioned an entire day with former president Bill Clinton, which went for $255,000.
The bid for Cook almost reaches the site's previous record, when in March it auctioned off a Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Roadster for $610,000.
The highest bidder for Cook at the time of writing declined to give a name – leaving it just as "J********n". Previous bidders have included companies that make accessories and covers for Apple devices.
But there isn't necessarily any expectation that Cook will spill the beans at the meeting on whatever Apple might be planning, explained Rakesh Kumar, founder of the five-strong startup Drbluetooth.com, which put forward $580,000 a week ago but was quickly outbid.
"It would give us a chance to showcase the whole concept of what we're doing to him," Kumar said. "What we can show on our website is very limited in comparison."
Winning the auction will require a $610,000 bid at least, and require Kumar to call on a 14-strong group of family and friends who have pledged to help pay if he wins. But he hopes that doing so could also bring the company, set up in Sunnyvale, California just nine months ago, to the attention of high-profile investors – even if Cook himself doesn't want to put Apple's money into it.
"I'm sure he would give us some frank opinions," Kumar said.
The money from the auction is being donated to the Robert Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights. It marks a huge success for Charitybuzz, which has auctioned time with celebrities ranging from U2's Bono ($211,000) to Paul McCartney ($130,000 for a meeting), as well as cars, autographed instruments, and even a walk-on part in Scary Movie 5 ($100,000).
Having crashed through the $500,000 mark just two days after beginning, the auction is now restricted to bidders who have proved the financial bona fides to a bank, so that the bids are certain to be paid.
"Charitybuzz is blown away by the incredible support we've seen for the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights through our coffee with Tim Cook online auction. It looks like this could break Charitybuzz's record for the top-grossing auction item since the company's launch in 2005. With 140 experiences on the auction block closing this Tuesday to benefit the RFK Center, including exclusive access to Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin, Peyton Manning and more, we expect to raise well over one million dollars for human rights," said Coppy Holzman, Charitybuzz CEO and founder.
Sadly, Charitybuzz isn't able to generate as much excitement around every celebrity whose time it is auctioning.
An auction to "Get up close and personal with Piers Morgan on the set of CNN's Piers Morgan Live", which closes at 11pm BST on Tuesday, has attracted just four bids at the time of writing since bidding began on 23 April, the day before Cook's. And the current top bid of $2,250 is less than half the estimated value.
Charles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
François Hollande considers tax on smartphones and laptops
French president mulls tax on iPhones and other internet devices as way of protecting France's 'cultural exception'
The French president, François Hollande, is considering a tax on smartphones, laptops and tablets to finance the country's celebrated "cultural exception".
The money raised from a 1% tax on all devices that connect to the internet, estimated at around €86m (£73m) a year, would be spent on supporting French music, images and film.
This latest proposed tax rise was among 75 suggested measures presented to Hollande on Monday by a special culture committee that has spent nine months examining ways to "protect the cultural exception … in the face of digital innovation".
Curiously, the committee's 719-page report also proposes relaxing penalties for pirating videos and music from €1,500 to €60.
"The cultural exception is a battle for France and defending and adapting also contributes to growth and employment," Aurélie Filippetti, the culture minister, said after the report was presented to Hollande.
She said phone and tablet manufacturers should pay in an "absolutely minimal way … part of the proceeds of their sales in favour of the creators".
"Today we have tablets, extremely sophisticated technological equipment that is extremely expensive to buy but which contributes nothing to the financing of the works that circulate on that same equipment," she said.
In 2012, almost one-quarter of all new televisions sold were internet-compatible. French consumers also bought 13.5m smartphones, 3.6m tablets and 4.5m laptop computers last year.
"Tax, always tax. The left is addicted to taxes and, despite the [economic] crisis, has not decided to kick the habit," Camille Bedin, the deputy general secretary of the opposition UMP party said.
France's "exception culturelle" is a precious concept that means anything considered to be of cultural value to French society must be protected from market forces in general and the pernicious spread of American films and the English language in particular.
The principle is enshrined in French law, which requires a strict limit to discount on books, a minimum 40% quota of French music on radio stations, state aid for all French films, reduced VAT on cinema tickets and mandatory subsidies paid by national television channels to finance French films.
Kim Willsherguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
