- Apple Watch Sold Out Despite Scarce In-Store Crowds: (More here) Few people lined up at Apple Inc. stores from Beijing to New York to get a peek of the company’s new smartwatch, while online pre-orders pushed delivery dates for some versions into July. The Apple Watch, a test of Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook’s ability to innovate, arrived Friday in stores in eight countries and Hong Kong for customers to preview. It officially goes on sale April 24, when delivery begins of devices that have been ordered. Delivery times quickly pushed passed that date, after Apple began taking online pre-orders about 3 a.m. in New York. By about 9 a.m. shipments of high-end versions, which can cost as much as $17,000, were delayed until June. All 10 versions of the entry-level Sport, which starts at $349, were delayed until June, according to the company’s U.S. website. Mid-tier models were being promised for delivery in four to six weeks, with four versions stretching into June or July. “We view this as an indication of solid demand paired with very limited supply, with supply being the most significant limiting factor,” Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos., said Friday in a note to investors.
- Amazon, Google aim to be Home Services Marketplaces: Some of the biggest names in e-commerce, along with a growing pool of start-ups, are vying for a chunk of the fragmented, quotidian, heretofore entirely local market of electricians, plumbers, dog walkers and other manual labor, known broadly as home services. The work may be mundane but the money and stakes are huge. Angie’s List, the 20-year-old subscription service that offers reviews of local service providers to members, estimates the home services industry is $400 billion. Others put it at more than $800 billion. “There are few pots of gold left as big as this on the Internet,” said Marco Zappacosta, chief executive and a co-founder of Thumbtack, a start-up that connects consumers with providers of a multitude of services, who then bid for their business. The idea is to bring the efficiency and capabilities of the web to some of the lowest-tech and least-transparent enterprises by connecting consumers with vetted service providers through online marketplaces. Most companies will then take a cut of each transaction that ensues. Last summer, Thumbtack received a big lift with a $100 million investment from Google Capital. Now, Google is exploring entering the same business itself. How Thumbtack fits into those plans is unclear, Mr. Zappacosta said. Other start-ups, like Pro.com, Porch and Redbeacon, are creating similar online marketplaces. Angie’s List, meanwhile, is elevating its game — last year it introduced a mobile app, called SnapFix, that lets a homeowner take a photo of, say, a broken screen door and receive bids to fix it. The efforts shuddered last month when Amazon announced it was starting Amazon Home Services, which provides consumers with a list of vetted and insured professionals to do things like mount a new television. Price quotes and scheduling are available during the checkout process. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, had already invested in Pro.com, and Amazon is working in partnership with TaskRabbit, another player. Already, said Peter Faricy, vice president of Amazon Marketplace, the company has 2.4 million serve offers covering more 700 types of services. “I can tell you that with 85 million customers purchasing products from Amazon that needed installation or assembly, customers have told us that Amazon Home Services fills an important need,” he said. Of course, this is not just about building your cat tree or mounting your TV. For Amazon it is another step toward becoming the conduit through which we buy everything, not just goods but services and entertainment as well. Amazon also takes a cut of each transaction, 20 percent for a TV mounting job, for example. Meanwhile, the offerings are veering away from the everyday and into the wacky. Amazon’s “other services” section lists goat grazing and “silk aerialist.” “Amazon is always focused on having the widest selection on earth,” Mr. Faricy said, “and we will do the same with services.”
- Twitter - which already makes 10% of its revenue from data licensing - shuts off its firehose to boost its data analytics business: Late on Friday, Twitter announced that it would no longer license the full stream of half a billion daily messages on its service to third-party resellers. Anyone who wants access to the stream, known as the fire hose, will soon have to license the data from Twitter directly. On the surface, the announcement affects just the two remaining buyers of Twitter data, DataSift and NTT, and also suggests that Twitter no longer wants to sell its data wholesale, just retail. But it’s also a deeper sign of the company’s intention to compete with — and perhaps cut out — many middlemen that profit from helping marketers make sense of the flood of tweets to run their businesses more intelligently. In a blog post, Twitter said the decision was a natural outgrowth of its acquisition of Gnip, the leading reseller of Twitter data, about a year ago. “Direct relationships help Twitter develop an understanding of customer needs, get direct feedback for the product road map and work more closely with data customers to enable the best possible solutions for the brands that rely on Twitter data to make better decisions,” wrote Zach Hofer-Shall, head of the company’s ecosystem program. What he didn’t say is that Twitter also thinks direct relationships will make more money. Last year, the company generated $147 million, or roughly 10 percent of its revenue, from data licensing and other services, and Twitter’s leaders see data as an area that they have only begun to mine. Chris Moody, the former chief of Gnip and now Twitter’s vice president for data strategy, sketched out the data vision at a November meeting with Wall Street analysts. “In the future, every significant business decision will have Twitter data as an input, because why wouldn’t you?” he said. “Why wouldn’t you add into your business decision-making, ‘What does the world think about this topic at this particular time or at a previous moment of time, maybe last year when we ran this campaign,’ that type of thing?” As an example, Mr. Moody described how T-Mobile scanned tweets from customers suggesting they were planning to dump the carrier because it didn’t offer the iPhone. T-Mobile later used that data to target those customers and persuade them to stay, cutting its churn by 50 percent. While Twitter primarily works with dozens of data analysis and software companies, such as Adobe, Spredfast and Salesforce.com, as a data supplier, it also wants to move up the value chain and eventually compete with those very same companies. It is already packaging its feed with data from other social sources, such as Yahoo’s Tumblr, and wants to expand that further. That’s a service that DataSift, one of the two resellers that were just cut off, also provides. And Twitter is working with business services companies like IBM to train thousands of consultants and conduct case studies of how Twitter data can transform specific industries. “We see the data licensing business as extremely complementary to the advertising business,” Mr. Moody said in a February interview. Once businesses understand the customer insights they get from tweets, he said, “when I want to advertise something, where would I turn? Twitter.”
- China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet: Late last month, China began flooding American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic in an apparent effort to take out services that allow China’s Internet users to view websites otherwise blocked in the country. Initial security reports suggested that China had crippled the services by exploiting its own Internet filter — known as the Great Firewall — to redirect overwhelming amounts of traffic to its targets. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto say China did not use the Great Firewall after all, but rather a powerful new weapon that they are calling the Great Cannon. The Great Cannon, the researchers said in a report published on Friday, allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit. The system was used, they said, to intercept web and advertising traffic intended for Baidu — China’s biggest search engine company — and fire it at GitHub, a popular site for programmers, and GreatFire.org, a nonprofit that runs mirror images of sites that are blocked inside China. The attacks against the services continued on Thursday, the researchers said, even though both sites appeared to be operating normally. But the researchers suggested that the system could have more powerful capabilities. With a few tweaks, the Great Cannon could be used to spy on anyone who happens to fetch content hosted on a Chinese computer, even by visiting a non-Chinese website that contains Chinese advertising content. “The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control,” the researchers said in their report. It is, they said, “the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.” The researchers, who have previously done extensive research into government surveillance tools, found that while the infrastructure and code for the attacks bear similarities to the Great Firewall, the attacks came from a separate device. The device has the ability not only to snoop on Internet traffic but also to alter the traffic and direct it — on a giant scale — to any website, in what is called a “man in the middle attack.” China’s new Internet weapon, the report says, is similar to one developed and used by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, a system outlined in classified documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former United States intelligence contractor. The American system, according to the documents, which were published by The Intercept, can deploy a system of programs that can intercept web traffic on a mass scale and redirect it to a site of their choosing. The N.S.A. and its partners appear to use the programs for targeted surveillance, whereas China appears to use the Great Cannon for an aggressive form of censorship.
- Spotify Said to Seek Financing to Value Music Site at $8 Billion: Spotify Ltd. is in the process of raising new financing that would value the largest subscription music-streaming service at about $8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. That valuation is double what the company was worth when it raised money in November 2013. The latest round totals about $400 million, according to one of the individuals, and comes from a group that includes Goldman Sachs Group and an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Spotify continues to raise money as it tries to build a global subscription music service before Apple Inc. or Google Inc., which are both pursuing the same market. Spotify has more than 60 million users, a quarter of whom pay $9.99 for a monthly, ad-free version. Like Pandora Media Inc., a public company valued at $3.55 billion, Spotify pays a large percentage of its revenue to record labels and publishers for the right to license their music. With sales of both CDs and digital downloads in decline, the three major record labels -- Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony Corp.’s Sony Music Entertainment and Access Industries’ Warner Music Group -- view streaming as the key to future growth. Though the labels own a stake in Spotify, they have complained about the money they receive from the company and pushed for greater restrictions to its free service. Spotify has resisted those overtures, arguing that an appealing free service is the best way to lure customers who will then subscribe. Listeners must have a subscription to access the full offering on a mobile phone.
- Whatever Happened To PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)? Why do people still spin up and set up their own AWS and Compute Engine instances? Why have App Engine and Heroku and Elastic Beanstalk not conquered all? Is fine-grained control really that important? I suspect the reason is three-pronged: cost, lock-in, and culture. App Engine’s prices drop regularly, but they’re voluminous and confusing, and a single instance — a pretty puny virtual machine — costs more than a dollar day, not counting storage or bandwidth. Same for Heroku. You get more bang-per-buck by simply buying and running your own servers. You also get enormously larger headaches, and significantly slower development time; but that tradeoff isn’t worth it for many. Then there’s lock-in. Once you build your app atop App Engine’s custom APIs, you’re committed; there’s no easy way to back away and go to another provider. The lock-in is less for other PaaS providers, but it’s still there. There is no universal PaaS equivalent of de facto IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) standards such as OpenStack or Docker. The third, least valid, and arguably most powerful reason is culture. Companies don’t want to give up perceived control over their systems–even if that control is never worth its associated complexity–and sysadmins, understandably, don’t want to evolve themselves out of a job. The thing about all three of those reasons not to go PaaS, however, is that they’re temporary. Costs keep dropping. Culture keeps changing. And there are signs of slow movement towards interchangeable PaaS services and standards. (You could argue that Docker itself is a stride in that direction.) In the early days of electricity, factories all had their own generators; then, eventually, they moved to the grid. IaaS is the equivalent of every individual company getting their raw electrical power from the grid … but stepping it down with their own transformers and converting from three-phase to one-phase in-house. I suspect we’re still en route towards a largely PaaS world where server code mostly just runs, without developers knowing or caring about the servers in question. It’s just happening a little slower than I’d like.
