In a bid to make a splash in the book industry, Barnes & Noble is hosting its event the same week the annual booksellers’ convention unfolds in New York City. The convention attracts publishers and retailers from around the world. Bertelsmann AG, which owns publisher Random House Inc., recently said that e-books now account for as “much as half” of first-week sales for some U.S. fiction titles.

Barnes & Noble, which once lagged about two years behind Amazon on the digital books and e-reader front, must now try to lure back as many consumers as possible.

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But about a five-mile drive up El Camino, on the third floor of AOL’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., another start-up accelerator is emerging as a clubhouse of choice for some talented young entrepreneurs.

Only about a year-and-a-half old, SSE Labs is drawing the attention of heavy-hitting investors in part because of its direct ties to Stanford University, nesting ground to Cisco Systems Inc., Google Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and other giant Silicon Valley tech companies.

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Barnes & Noble shares were up 20 percent in after-hours trading Thursday on the news, matching the $17-a-share offer price from John Malone’s media empire.

The bookseller has been reviewing strategic alternatives, including a sale, since last summer.

The offer for the country’s largest bookstore chain represents a bold foray for Liberty into a new segment of entertainment products and signifies the growing significance of digital and online business in the book industry.

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At a Senate hearing on mobile privacy issues, lawmakers grilled technology executives on their policies and how they share consumer information with other companies. The hearing comes amid recent revelations that Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones routinely collect information about the location of consumer cellphones. Apple has since limited the data it collects.

“I know you can shut off your location services but that doesn’t do the trick because we want to use them,” said Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), who recently introduced a privacy bill along with Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), which would establish consumer online privacy rights. “We still need a privacy standard. We still need basic rules of the road.”

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The location-based social network, which lets people “check in” to places using their mobile phones, has about 8 million users and is used more than 1.5 million times a day world-wide. But a survey last year showed that fewer than 5 percent of Americans had ever used Foursquare or its rivals, and only about 1 percent used such a location-based service on a daily basis.

To learn about where people go and what they do on Foursquare, Digits collected every check-in on the service for a week earlier this year, via the Foursquare “firehose.” And what did we find?

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Chips based on ARM designs power Apple’s popular iPhone and iPad devices and devices that run Google’s Android software. Intel’s perceived momentum took another blow in January, when Microsoft said the next version of its mainstream Windows operating system will for the first time work on ARM chips as well as the x86 design sold by Intel and AMD.

Renee James, who runs Intel’s sizeable software efforts, took pains Tuesday to counter the perception that the forthcoming Windows 8 product is a problem for Intel.

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AT&T is hoping Silicon Valley will come out in support of the deal—or at least not strenuously oppose it—as the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission get deeper into their review of the transaction.

Regulators likely will be interested in hearing how the acquisition could impact the Valley, a key source of innovation that has a lot at stake in the deal. Many large technology companies and start-ups alike are betting their futures on wireless technology.

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Yahoo added more than 100 people last year to its Beijing research and development center, and plans to continue hiring at a similar rate this year, Mr. Irving told reporters on a visit to the Chinese capital. He said the China R&D operation has “hundreds” of employees–he didn’t specify a figure–and is Yahoo’s third biggest after centers in California and Bangalore, India.

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The bill, by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), would amend a 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which extended restrictions on government wiretaps to data transmissions as well as phone calls.

Critics of the earlier law say it has become outdated and doesn’t adequately address new technology like geolocation and long-term data storage.

“Today, this law is significantly outdated and out-paced by rapid changes in technology and the changing mission of our law enforcement agencies after September 11,” said Sen. Leahy, who also authored the 1986 law.

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Like other computer makers, Dell said consumer demand for personal computers was sluggish, a trend that weighed on low-end “netbook” computers as buyers looked instead to tablet computers, like Apple Inc.’s iPad. To offset the slowdown, the company is focusing on more profitable products, such as data storage and software.

Dell’s results stood in contrast to those of rival Hewlett-Packard Co., which cut its 2011 forecast earlier Tuesday at a hastily scheduled earnings call.

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Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, told analysts at a meeting in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday that the “centerpoint”–or the average power used by Intel’s chips–in the past was around 35 to 40 watts. Intel is now shifting that down to about 15 watts, with the change being implemented over the next several years.

Meanwhile, Mr. Otellini reiterated Intel’s bullish guidance for the second quarter, saying the view is “still right on” and PC growth should be “pretty good” this year despite what other companies–like PC maker Hewlett-Packard Co.–have said.

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The company, which is set to price Wednesday night and begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD on Thursday, had originally set out to sell 7.84 million shares at $32 to $35 apiece. In an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday morning, the company set the range at $42 to $45.

While companies sometimes raise their price ranges by as much as $3 to $4, a $10 increase is very uncommon. It’s a clear sign that investors are jockeying for shares ahead of the offering and are willing to pay far more than the company was originally asking in order to get a piece of the IPO.

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In an age of off-shoring, locationless offices and virtual meetings, there’s an undeniable counter current brewing.

Co-working spaces, where telecommuters can congregate for their work days, are springing up in major cities, and groups of night owls are using Twitter to plan late-night coffee shop power sessions.

That trend, while enabling certain kinds of businesses to succeed, has had an adverse effect on designers–or so says the San Francisco-based Product Design Guild, a stealthy and exclusive working group of product, user experience and graphic designers from the San Francisco Bay Area.

The group operates on the premise that designers’ work is inherently improved by collaboration and high-quality feedback. The current work-where-you-are zeitgeist doesn’t allow for enough of that, especially for designers who work in start-ups.

“Most companies don’t hire a second designer until they have 15 or 20 employees, so designers can spend a long time without good feedback,” said PDG co-founder and leader Xianhang Zhang in a recent interview.

Zhang recognized the need, and has been building the invite-only PDG since September.

Meetings are held monthly, and the group of designers, who have been vetted for their skills, gather to collaborate, share and above all, do work.

“There were lots of meetups for designers, where people get together to network or talk about design, but we wanted a place where people would come to do work,” Zhang said. “From the beginning that was a rule–you had to bring work to do, so it’s really popular with very busy people, who also tend to be in demand.”

It seems surprising, then, that a group of elite designers, attending regular meetings, sponsored by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Startups, Yelp and i/o Ventures, would have stayed so under the radar.

Harder still, now that PDG has opened a New York City chapter and is recruiting in Austin, Texas.

That stealth is a little by design, explained Zhang.

“A lot of these designers come with work from their actual start-ups. We operate under FriendDA and people have to know what they share with the other designers won’t leave the group,” he said. “We are about adding value and making the community better for designers.”

I was allowed to attend several meetings, but only under the title of “journalist in residence,” which meant I had to be available to groups interested in a journalist’s opinion on a design, and I had to respect groups who preferred I not get too near their projects.

The constraints imposed by PDG rules appeared to have their desired effect at the meetings I attended. Most attendees were constantly hard at work, pausing only when others requested an opinion, or help with a specific problem.

That is in contrast to most gatherings of professional groups I’ve attended, which easily degenerate into directionless shop-talk sessions.

“The PDG is only interested in delivering transformative experiences–something that is 10 times better than other meetups. That’s why our members come,” Zhang said. “The best definition I’ve heard for design is, thoughtfulness made visible. We believe that good design is necessary for innovation, and the meetings are the first step.”

Zhang added that the group can then become a platform for innovation.

“Guilds like us can become the API layer for designers and engineers, and help them interact more quickly and productively,” he said. “Now that we know the meetings are valuable we are looking at other ways to accomplish that.”

Zhang wouldn’t elaborate on their next moves, but the speed of growth of PDG, despite trying to stay out of the spotlight, does point to some latent need in the designer community, or, at least, a failing of the modern way we work online.

Zhang sat with me for a few minutes to discuss what it means to do design well for start-ups, and how he, er, designed the design guild. If you can keep up, there are some good nuggets in the video.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110517/early-adopter-slightly-stealthy-product-design-guild-surfaces-in-san-francisco/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110517/sap-focuses-on-mobile-apps-for-growth/ http://allthingsd.com/20110517/sap-focuses-on-mobile-apps-for-growth/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 13:00:18 +0000 Christopher Lawton http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41174 Germany’s SAP AG sees the business-software industry’s future in a decidedly consumer-oriented tool–the app.

For decades, business software has been focused around specialized users tied to large computers. Now, SAP is attempting to stretch those boundaries, betting that a broader set of workers will want access to business information via their mobile devices.

The push is at the center of SAP’s new growth strategy. Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, who took over as co-chief executives in February 2010 following revenue and profit shortfalls, have sold investors on a plan to make SAP a growth company again in part by bringing the consumer mobile-app craze to the enterprise.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110517/sap-focuses-on-mobile-apps-for-growth/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110517/engineers-try-to-solve-ultrathin-tvs/ http://allthingsd.com/20110517/engineers-try-to-solve-ultrathin-tvs/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 07:00:07 +0000 Evan Ramstad http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41146 Ro Jae-song, a materials science professor here, has spent the past eight years researching a display technology called OLED, which is now used for some high-end cellphone screens.

Mr. Ro does contract research for South Korea’s two big electronics makers, Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Co., on a difficult problem: How to build OLED screens big enough for large televisions.

It’s one of the hot topics among display researchers and manufacturers who are meeting in Los Angeles for the annual conference of the Society for Information Display, or SID. More academic gabfest than trade show, engineers will trot out their latest ideas for displays as small as sheet-like films that roll up in a pen to as large as roadside billboards.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110517/engineers-try-to-solve-ultrathin-tvs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/zuckerberg-explains-facebooks-secret-smear-campaign/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/zuckerberg-explains-facebooks-secret-smear-campaign/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 21:36:02 +0000 Nitrozac and Snaggy http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41140

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/zuckerberg-explains-facebooks-secret-smear-campaign/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/russia-to-invest-in-u-s-memory-chip-firm/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/russia-to-invest-in-u-s-memory-chip-firm/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 20:21:06 +0000 Don Clark http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41136 A Silicon Valley chip start-up is teaming up with a Russian government investment fund on a $300 million manufacturing venture, a boost for a novel memory technology and the country’s efforts to become a center of electronics production.

Crocus Technology, a closely held company founded in 2006, is among a number of companies hoping to commercialize chips based on a technology called MRAM, for magnetoresistive random-access memory. The start-up and a state-owned entity known as Rusnano on Tuesday are expected to discuss plans to set up a company to build a factory in Russia that would make advanced versions of the MRAM chips.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company, which had previously raised about $60 million, said its existing venture-capital investors will put up an additional $55 million as part of the project. Rusnano will provide most of the remaining $245 million.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/russia-to-invest-in-u-s-memory-chip-firm/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/google-to-sell-its-first-bond/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/google-to-sell-its-first-bond/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 17:29:08 +0000 Kellie Geressy-Nilsen http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41129 Google Inc. has launched its first-ever bond offering, seizing on near-record-low rates and insatiable appetite for corporate debt.

The world’s largest Internet search company said the $3 billion offering will include three-, five- and 10-year portions. It is expected to be sold later today via joint bookrunners Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The deal, which will be split evenly across three pieces of $1 billion each, was launched with a risk premium of 0.33 percentage point above Treasurys on the three-year piece; 0.43 percentage point on the five-year piece; and 0.58 percentage point on the 10-year piece. All three pieces were launched narrower than preliminary pricing guidance had suggested, indicating good demand from investors.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/google-to-sell-its-first-bond/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/autonomy-buys-secure-cloud-assets/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/autonomy-buys-secure-cloud-assets/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 15:36:29 +0000 Lilly Vitorovich http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41119 U.K. software group Autonomy Corp. said Monday it has agreed to buy selected assets of U.S. information management company Iron Mountain Inc.’s digital division for $380 million in cash, in a move aimed at strengthening its cloud offering.

Autonomy–which makes software that helps companies keep track of their mass of e-mails, phone calls and documents–said the acquisition consists of the digital archiving, e-discovery and online backup and recovery solutions of Iron Mountain Digital.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/autonomy-buys-secure-cloud-assets/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/autonomy-buys-secure-cloud-assets-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/autonomy-buys-secure-cloud-assets-2/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 15:36:29 +0000 Lilly Vitorovich http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41119 U.K. software group Autonomy Corp. said Monday it has agreed to buy selected assets of U.S. information management company Iron Mountain Inc.’s digital division for $380 million in cash, in a move aimed at strengthening its cloud offering.

Autonomy–which makes software that helps companies keep track of their mass of e-mails, phone calls and documents–said the acquisition consists of the digital archiving, e-discovery and online backup and recovery solutions of Iron Mountain Digital.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/autonomy-buys-secure-cloud-assets-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/target-customers-on-the-go/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/target-customers-on-the-go/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 12:30:15 +0000 Emily Glazer http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41095 With cafes on nearly every corner in Vancouver, British Columbia, Ethical Bean Coffee Co. needed a way to stand out. The answer was an odd bar code with a maze of black boxes instead of the usual straight lines.

About eight months ago, the three-store chain started putting these “quick response” codes in its train ads. When customers scan the little squares with their smartphone cameras, a coffee menu pops up on their screens. Then they can order a cup of coffee on the train–and have it waiting when they arrive at one of Ethical Bean’s shops.

Business has doubled since then, says Chief Executive Lloyd Bernhardt. “We catch people who are on the go and don’t have a lot of time,” he says.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/target-customers-on-the-go/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110516/many-formats-one-price/ http://allthingsd.com/20110516/many-formats-one-price/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 07:00:18 +0000 Russell Adams http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41093 Magazine and newspaper publishers are reorienting themselves around a business model that has taken hold in other media: the bundle.

The result is a new ecosystem of pricing that turns aspects of the old model upside down. For many years, publications charged for print and gave away their digital content free.

Increasingly, publishers are charging premium prices for digital content, betting on a new breed of media consumer willing to pay for content on devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad, and throwing in print at little or no additional cost.

Last week, for example, the New Yorker introduced a subscription that includes the magazine online and on the iPad for about $60 a year. For just $1 more a month, subscribers can get the magazine in print, too.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110516/many-formats-one-price/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110513/artists-experiment-with-interactive-music-videos/ http://allthingsd.com/20110513/artists-experiment-with-interactive-music-videos/#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 21:56:11 +0000 John Jurgensen http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41082 Director Chris Milk’s new music video, released yesterday, introduces a young woman roaming a postapocalyptic landscape, and features a song from the coming album “Rome” by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. But for some viewers the video’s main attraction will be the technology used to create it.

In “3 Dreams of Black,” which Milk prefers to call an interactive film, the viewer takes control in certain sequences, using the computer mouse to steer a stampede of morphing wildlife, or build structures in a vast desert. Five months in the making, the video shows off a burgeoning technology called WebGL, which allows an Internet browser to render 3-D graphics in real time.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110513/artists-experiment-with-interactive-music-videos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110513/rambus-is-dealt-patent-setback/ http://allthingsd.com/20110513/rambus-is-dealt-patent-setback/#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 19:10:00 +0000 Shara Tibken http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=41077 A U.S. appeals court dealt a blow to Rambus Inc.–and its share price–as it vacated the chip technology company’s win in a patent case against Hynix Semiconductor Inc.

In addition, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ordered the trial court to again look at whether Rambus wrongly destroyed documents in the Hynix case.

In a separate case involving Micron Inc., the appeals court determined Rambus had wrongly destroyed documents and ordered the trial court to examine again whether that destruction justifies dismissing Rambus’s patent claims against Micron. Micron initially won a dismissal because the trial court said Rambus’s claims were unenforceable because of the document destruction.

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