AllThingsD » PC

Lenovo’s Horizon PC Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Touchscreen Game Center

Lauren Goode — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:20 +0000

What kind of computer comes with an explicit warning not to rest your coffee cup on it?

A computer like Lenovo’s new IdeaCentre Horizon PC does -– and with good reason. This 27-inch computer transforms from a standard all-in-one into a giant touchscreen tabletop display.

When the Horizon is upright, it’s running Microsoft’s Windows 8. Slide down the kickstand in the back and lay the thing flat on your coffee table, and it automatically jumps to “Aura” mode, a Lenovo-created interface for playing games with friends and family.

I’ll admit that I was quick to poke fun at the Horizon when I first saw it at the International CES trade show earlier this year. I enjoyed giving the games a test drive at the time, but I was wondering if a computer this size could really have a place in my small Manhattan apartment. I don’t even have a coffee table.

[ See post to watch video ]

After using the Horizon on a dining table for the past week and a half, I’ve been able to fully assess it. I like it, mostly because having a second large display at home is great for media consumption. But I still wouldn’t buy it. At the end of the day, it’s a niche product.

And, it’s pricey: Lenovo is currently selling its top model, which has a third-generation Intel Core i7 processor and eight gigabytes of memory, for $1,849. A slightly less powerful model, with a Core i5 chip, costs $1,699.

On June 23, Best Buy will begin offering the Horizon for slightly less: $1,599 for the Core i7 configuration, and $1,499 for the i5 model with only 6GB of RAM.

That’s still more expensive than the Sony Vaio Tap 20, a hybrid PC/tablet that starts at $880. And Asus’s 18-inch Transformer AiO, a similarly-designed computer that runs both Windows 8 and Google Android operating systems, costs $1,300. So if you’re looking for a PC that can also be used like a large tablet, there are more reasonable options.

And if you just want a tablet for game playing and watching videos, well, you can spend $400 and get a pretty good one.

Lenovo says there are a few reasons why the Horizon is so expensive. First, and most obvious, is the size of the display. Then, there’s the preloaded game software — nine games total, including three from Ubisoft, one from EA and five developed by Lenovo. Some of those games require accessories, like e-dice, joysticks and strikers, which are thrown into the mix. Lastly, it comes with a one terabyte internal hard drive.

Let’s say you’re willing to splurge for all this, and the family-centric games are a big draw for you.

As I mentioned, it’s running on Windows 8, and if you’re not super familiar with Microsoft’s newest operating system, there will be a learning curve as you adjust to all of the new swipes and gestures, designed with touchscreens in mind.

I tested the Core i5 model. It measures 27.2 by 16.9 by 1.17 inches, and weighs 18 pounds. Lenovo envisions that users will want to move this computer around the house, but I lugged it from room to room just once, and “lug” is the appropriate description here. It’s definitely not portable. I am not, for example, going to bring it to a friend’s house, or travel with it on a plane to the D11 Conference next week, as I would a tablet.

On the left side of the Horizon is the power button. The right side is loaded with two USB ports, an HDMI port, a media card reader and jacks for headphones and the power cord.

The 27-inch diagonal display is a full-HD multitouch display. It’s nice but not particularly brilliant. Games looked fluid and bright, but when I watched a couple episodes of ABC’s “Scandal” on Netflix, colors were a little washed out.

On to gaming, the main event: The Horizon has a respectable Nvidia processor and 2GB of processing RAM, enough for all of your needs with this computer, but not the kind of power you’d expect with a hardcore gaming machine.

Preloaded game titles include Lenovo Air Hockey, Lenovo Tycoon (Lenovo’s version of Monopoly), Lenovo Fishing Joy, Lenovo Texas Hold ‘Em, and from other publishers, the original Monopoly and Ubisoft’s Raiding Company. It also comes with BlueStacks, an app interface that lets you play Google Android games.

I laid the PC flat on the table, prompting the Aura desktop overlay to appear, and “convinced” my boyfriend to geek out and play games with me. We played a few intense games of Air Hockey, sliding the strikers along the surface of the PC to score. He got hooked playing Lenovo Fishing Joy. Then we started games of both Lenovo Tycoon and the much-better Monopoly.

Rolling the e-dice was, at first, pretty cool. A set of virtual dice in the game would spin and stop moving when the physical dice did. As we took turns in Monopoly, the game zoomed in to show us different spots along the boardwalk, then zoomed back to the whole game board again when it was the next person’s turn to roll.

But I encountered a glitch with the e-dice: When I rolled the physical dice, the virtual dice on screen kept rolling … and rolling …

After a minute or two of excitable dice, we finally unplugged the Bluetooth dongle to disconnect the dice entirely, then started over again.

Overall, playing the games was fun, and I’m sure I could entertain my young niece and nephew for awhile with this. I’d like to see more brand-name games on the Horizon. On a few occasions I went back to the Windows 8 desktop — which appears when you stand the computer upright again — to load up Angry Birds. Lenovo says that more Horizon-optimized game titles are in the works.

When it comes to non-gaming activities on this machine, the touchscreen on a 27-inch display creates a unique dilemma: Sit close enough to touch it, and you’re really, really close to a giant screen. Sit further back to avoid eye strain, and you might not be close enough to comfortably use the touchscreen.

Fortunately, the Horizon also comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard, which I did end up using for email and productivity apps, allowing me to use tactile keys and sit further back from the screen.

Finally, battery life is less than that of the similar hybrids I mentioned earlier, but this is a bigger machine. In the first test I conducted, I bumped up the display to full brightness, played iTunes and had an email application running, and the battery lasted two hours and 22 minutes. During the second test, I streamed videos and played a couple games, and it lasted two hours and 10 minutes.

Now that I’ve tried the Horizon, I’d like a bigger display in my living room. But I wasn’t blown away by the game experience, and I wouldn’t want to pay $1,700 for it.

Apps Raise the iPad's Aptitude for Real Work

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 15 May 2013 01:08:44 +0000

There’s a popular myth that Apple’s iPad and other tablets are simply media-consumption devices, unsuitable for productivity applications. That’s just not so, and this week I tested a variety of office suites for the iPad for mini-reviews of their capabilities. In fact, I wrote and edited this entire column on an iPad using the most popular paid iPad app, the $10 Pages word processor by Apple.

[ See post to watch video ]

Not every productivity task is optimally done on tablet software, of course. Writing a plain text document like this one isn’t the same as creating a large, nuanced spreadsheet. For complex documents, I still recommend using a PC or Mac.

And then there’s the problem with typing on a tablet’s virtual keyboard. If you’re going to use your iPad for longer documents, I suggest using a Bluetooth keyboard. I used a physical keyboard to write this, though I usually am fine with the on-screen one.

Despite these caveats, iPads and other tablets are being used every day for productivity tasks once reserved for laptops. Every time you reach for your iPad to read, or tap out, a work-related email, that’s productivity. Every time you make or change a business appointment on an iPad calendar, that’s productivity. And there are way too many tailored productivity and business apps to list here, including apps for salespeople, contractors and doctors.

There’s a major gap, though: Microsoft Office. The software giant doesn’t yet offer a tablet-optimized version. So there are iPad apps that attempt to emulate the features of Office and can import and export files in Microsoft’s Office formats. They generally don’t offer all of the features of Office and don’t always offer perfect fidelity with PC and Mac versions of Office. But I have found they are fine for the basic documents most people create or edit. And all can open and edit Office-type files attached to email, using the iPad’s “Open In…” command. You just touch the attachment icon for a bit longer than usual and a grid of compatible apps to use for editing appears.

Here are my impressions of some of these apps, including AstralPad, from a three-person startup that launched a few months ago. I tested these by doing two things with each. First, I created an identical word-processing document, with text in various styles and a photo, and then exported it to Microsoft Word on a PC and Mac. Then I imported a 23-page PowerPoint file to see if it looked as it did on a PC and Mac.

iWork’s Keynote is built for touch.

iWork

Introduced by Apple at the iPad’s launch in 2010, the touch-version of the company’s office suite is now in its seventh revision. It’s the most touch-friendly of the products I tested and the most transparent about cases where it’s incompatible with Office. Apple even maintains a Web page disclosing incompatibilities. The suite consists of Pages, the Numbers spreadsheet and the Keynote presentation app, which are sold for $10 each.

iWork synchronizes documents as you type them with its cloud-based iCloud service, which can be accessed from any Web browser and can export the files in Office formats. You can email documents in Office format. But unlike many other iPad apps, it lacks built-in access to popular online storage sites like Dropbox and Google Drive.

The suite works well offline, as it stores documents locally as well.

Pages was fastest and easiest at creating my test document, but the document had a misaligned line when I viewed it in Word on a Mac and PC. On the other hand, Keynote on the iPad imported the presentation perfectly.

QuickOffice is fine for simple documents on the iPad.

QuickOffice Pro HD

This Office substitute has been around a long time on various platforms and is fine for simple documents on the iPad. It costs $20 for all three modules in one app. It stores files locally and integrates with many popular cloud-storage services.

However, I couldn’t insert the photo into my test document, and the presentation I imported was formatted wrong.

AstralPad

The newest competitor is merely a window into an office app running on a server. Since the server app is meant for PCs, it has many more features and in some cases, better fidelity, than apps that live on the iPad. It’s free for now, but will soon cost a few dollars a month for more than a limited number of documents.

AstralPad is merely a window into an office app running on a server.

However, the cloud-based program Astral uses isn’t even an actual version of Office, but an open-source clone. And because it’s meant for a mouse, I found it difficult to manipulate, even though Astral has added some touch controls and a virtual mouse.

In addition, it converts files in the current Office document formats into older formats before you can work with the files.

AstralPad has some nice features. It allows you to work with multiple documents simultaneously and to cut and paste between them. And it has video and audio calling for collaboration. It works with cloud-based services and local storage. But it can’t work offline.

It created my test file fine after the company fixed a bug that at first wouldn’t allow me to import a photo. But it didn’t display the presentation file correctly, with overlapping text and pictures.

I found AstralPad to be a work in progress.

CloudOn uses a real, remote copy of Microsoft Office.

CloudOn

Like AstralPad, this is just a window into a server and won’t work offline. But it uses a real, remote copy of Microsoft Office and is free. It was able to create my test document fine and to display my test presentation properly. It also integrates with cloud-based storage. But while it was easier to use than AstralPad, I still found it clumsy to use its PC software on a touch tablet.

Bottom line: None of these iPad office suites is perfect, but you can get basic work done on them that will translate to a computer with little or no effort.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

"Bring Your Own Device" Evolving From Trend to Requirement

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:30:27 +0000

Here’s an unexpected twist in the growing trend at companies that support employees who bring their own devices to the office: By 2017, more than half of companies will require their employees to supply their own devices on the job.

The finding comes in a new report from Gartner containing the results of a survey of CIOs around the world. So it’s not for nothing that Gartner calls these BYOD strategies “the most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing” in a decade.

When you think about it, BYOD amounts to a pretty fundamental shift in the way companies handle the knotty questions around supplying employees the tools they need to get the job done. For years, standard operating procedure at pretty much every company was to give a computer and maybe a phone or BlackBerry to every employee who needed them, and for the company to bear the cost. (Gartner, incidentally, includes PCs in its BYOD definition.)

What started with an occasional request for the IT department to support smartphones and tablets with access to work email has blown up into a huge shift in the way that corporate IT services are supplied to employees.

Right now, Gartner said, mid-sized companies of $500 million to $5 billion in sales and 2,500 to 5,000 employees are most likely to be using a BYOD approach. BYOD-friendly companies are twice as common in the U.S. as in Europe, but employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device on the job.

And if you’re looking for some figures to drive the point home, here’s one: 38 percent of companies expect to stop supplying employees with their devices entirely by 2016. But executives aren’t yet completely sold on the idea: Only 22 percent say they’ve made a good business case for adopting a BYOD move. There are, Gartner said, many benefits, not the least of which are lower costs and a happier work force.

My, Look at ARM's Healthy Sales

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:51:08 +0000

As if you needed another indicator about how much the old Wintel world of PCs has flipped in the last couple of years, take a look at the earnings results of the British chip designer ARM, which just reported quarterly earnings this morning.

Sales rose by 29 percent year on year to north of 170 million pounds (or $260 million), which was better than expected. Earnings on a per-share basis were five pence versus the expected four pence, amounting to a beat of a penny per share. Its shares are rising by 9 percent both in the U.K. and on the Nasdaq in the U.S.

ARM, you’ll recall, is the company behind the designs that go into building the chips that land in most smartphones and tablets. Rather than make the chips, ARM licenses its blueprints to companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, which then make their own chips. And since phones and tablets are growing a lot faster than traditional PCs (come to think of it, PCs actually aren’t growing at all), ARM is looking a lot healthier than traditional chip companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Here’s a pretty good indicator: Royalty payments for processors rose in the quarter by 33 percent versus a processor industry that’s up about 2 percent.

ARM is quickly turning out to be the company to watch in the chip space. Chips sporting ARM designs are everywhere these days, and there has been a lot of chatter of late about them heading into the data center.

Hewlett-Packard offers ARM processors as an option on its radical new server design, called Project Moonshot. Dell offers ARM-based servers, too, and there are even more plans for ARM chips in servers. I talked with CEO Warren East about this last year. (East is retiring this summer, by the way, and Simon Segars will be ARM’s new CEO, starting in July.)

The basic argument that ARM makes coming in is that its chips are good at managing power consumption, in part because they were designed from the beginning for mobile applications. And power consumption continues to be a huge problem, especially in data centers where thousands of servers are crowded together in one place.

Intel, the king of the chip world, has responded and created its own line of low-power chips called Atom. And as we learned from Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip business at D: Dive Into Mobile last week, it has gotten off to a slow start but is starting to get a little traction in mobile.

Another version of Atom, announced the week before last, will also defend Intel’s interests in the server space. But keep an eye on this, because there’s eventually going to be a rumble.

Lenovo's Really Ridiculously Big-Looking Table PC to Ship in Late June

Lauren Goode — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:06:13 +0000

Remember this guy — the giant “table PC” Lenovo showed off at International CES this year?

It’s now this much closer to your coffee table — or, replacing your coffee table. Lenovo today announced the Horizon is available for preorder and is expected to ship in late June. Prices start around $1,700, right in line with what Lenovo indicated in January.

In case you missed the news around CES time, this is a 27-inch, all-in-one “desktop” that can be propped up or laid flat on the table, and is geared toward game playing in addition to regular old computer activities. And in case its size didn’t give it away, the Horizon is meant to be used in the home, not on, say, an airplane tray, although Lenovo points out that it includes a built-in battery so it can be easily moved around the house.

The multi-finger touchscreen PC is running Windows 8 and comes with an Intel Core i7 chip and Nvidia GeForce graphics capabilities. Lenovo says the customized games include Raiding Company, Draw Race 2 and King of the Opera from Ubisoft, as well as Monopoly from Electronic Arts.

I played a quick game of air hockey on the device back in January, and I’ll admit that it was pretty fun. And it’s easy to see why some families might like a tabletop PC for game playing and picture browsing.

But this is a behemoth of a device, and it’s not alone in the big-screen market. There’s also the Sony Vaio Tap 20 and the Toshiba Excite 13 — a much smaller tablet, but one that is, again, meant for the home.

And as we know, PCs are hurting a bit these days. It’s likely going to take more than giant screens to fill the giant gap in the market.

AppGratis Gets the Boot & WhatsApp Ain't Selling: The AllThingsD Week in Review 4/07/13 — 4/13/13

Eric Johnson — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 01:00:32 +0000

For our readers who are not inclined to constantly hit the refresh button, here’s a quick look back at the Top 10 stories that drove AllThingsD this week:

[note: this article is from February, but resurfaced this week]

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

How Hard Will Weak PC Sales Hit Intel?

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:21:16 +0000

The reports by market research firms Gartner and IDC earlier this week showing what appears to have been one of the worst year-on-year contractions in the personal computer market since records have been kept is having repercussions up and down the supply chain.

As it happens, the report came a week before chipmaker Intel is due to report quarterly earnings on April 16. In a research note today, Stacy Rasgon of Sanford Bernstein sized up its prospects for the quarter and the rest of the year.

There’s a chance that the actual on-the-ground results may yet be worse than what the research firms detected. Relying on data from Taiwanese notebook manufacturers including Compal, Quanta and Wistron, sales were down in the first quarter by more than 18 percent, worse than the 11 percent to 13 percent drop reported by Gartner and IDC.

So what does that mean for Intel, the world’s largest supplier of computer chips and long considered an important bellwether of the overall tech economy? Nothing good, Rasgon argues. He expects Intel to report revenue of $12.43 billion, nearly $200 million below the consensus expectation of $12.6 billion. He expects earnings on a per-share basis to be 41 cents.

“Given the recent atrocious PC numbers, we believe investors may not be hugely surprised by weak outlook at this point (at least, they certainly shouldn’t be now),” he wrote.

Other key questions for Intel: Who will be the next CEO? And will Intel say anything about it on the conference call after earnings are announced? If you haven’t been keeping track, here’s a good rundown on who’s likely to be in the race, both internal and external. (Here’s a hint: It’s going to be an internal contender; Intel has never hired an outside CEO.)

“It is rapidly approaching high time for the company to provide color on a replacement,” Rasgon wrote. “While it appears they are actively vetting both internal and external candidates, we do not expect significant strategic changes regardless of the eventual choice as they have started the ball rolling on several initiatives that would be difficult to stop. … We would hope (but do not necessarily expect) that the company could provide additional information on the succession plan.”

Adventures in Floppy Disk Transfers

Lauren Goode — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:00:54 +0000

Remember that scene from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” in which Ferris says that life moves pretty fast, and if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it? The same might be said for technology. One day I was saving files to floppy disks on a clunky Compaq computer, and 10 years later, I’m using a disk-drive-free laptop that’s so thin it could slice sushi.

Over the past couple of weeks, I explored a variety of options for extracting files from my old floppy disks and getting them onto my current computing system. I shipped disks out across the country, and called around to public libraries with the fervor of a college student looking for a textbook. I even found an 11-year-old in San Francisco who does disk transfers for family and friends for a small fee.

I spent about $100 to get hundreds of files off of more than a dozen disks, and another $25 on an external drive that would let me transfer the files myself. It was worth it to me to recover these files, but there are also cheaper ways to do it.

The first step is to make sure you know what kind of floppy disks you have — whether Mac or Windows PC disks, 5.25-inch floppies or 3.5-inch. I found that 3.5-inch disk drives, while not exactly common, are still more prevalent than older 5.25-inch disk drives or equipment for reading eight-inch floppies.

It’s also important to understand that not all of your floppy disks may be readable. They may have degraded over time, and even if the files can be read, you may no longer have compatible software with which to read them. For example, most of my files were old Microsoft Word documents, but there were also Final Draft screenplays that I couldn’t open without that software.

Using File Transfer Services

As I do when I’m looking up a new restaurant or researching every possible cause for a headache, I turned first to the Internet. Throughout my research, references to the same two websites kept coming up: RetroFloppy.com and FloppyDisk.com (which also operates as DiskDuper).

RetroFloppy, run by a man named David Schmidt, has been online and operating since 2006. It works mostly with 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch disks, though the company does work with older 800k Mac discs (Since the company started, Schmidt has received only three requests for eight-inch disk transfers.)

RetroFloppy charges $6.95 per standard floppy disk file extraction and conversion — which means he takes the time to locate compatible software and put old files in a format that’s readable on your current system. Specialty disks or ones that require a little surgery may cost more.

Usually, customers will put in an online or phone request, and then Schmidt himself will get in touch to find out more about the disks and see if RetroFloppy can extract the files. If the job can be done, you mail the disks to North Carolina in a protective cardboard box.

The company promises a turnaround time of two business days at most. In my experience, Schmidt was professional and a fast responder to my email inquiries, and a few days after I shipped my eight disks, I had received an email that included a downloadable zip drive with my files. By the next day, my floppy disks had arrived back home. Then I received an email invoice, powered by PayPal.

Unfortunately, RetroFloppy was expensive. The total for my eight disk extractions and file conversions, plus a CD transcription and return shipping, was $70.50.

California-based FloppyDisk.com, on the other hand, offered a more reasonable price for my disks, which were old Windows disks: $1.95 per 3.5-inch disk transfer. Mac-formatted 3.5-inch disks are $4.95 a transfer, as are 5.25-inch Windows or DOS disks.

Again, I filled out an online form, and then spoke with Tom Persky, who runs FloppyDisk, to explain my needs (no automated tellers at these one-man shops). This time I had to pay upfront, through PayPal. Then I headed to the local shipping center to mail seven more floppies.

Less than 48 hours later, I received a downloadable YouSendIt file, through email, that included almost all of my old files. Unfortunately, one of the disks couldn’t be read. But my total for the disk extractions, plus sending the disks back and a USB flash drive (included in the return shipment), was $23.60.

Overall, my experiences with these two services were positive. Afterward, I spent a good chunk of time poring through photos, cringing at old journal entries (in which I devoted entirely too much digital ink to unworthy love interests) and shaking my head at what passed as a college paper.

Buying an External Drive

If you have dozens of disks you want to tap into, it might be more economical to purchase an old external ~~disk~~floppy drive that connects to your computer via USB, and try to transfer the files yourself. These range in price from around $10 to $25, and can be found on online retailers like Amazon and eBay.

This might sound daunting, but in my research I was referred to an 11-year-old in San Francisco who, using his software-engineer-father’s equipment, transfers files off 3.5-inch floppies for a dollar a disk. So I figured if he can do it, many other people probably can, too.

I actually purchased an old Dell drive from FloppyDisk for $24.95, but I unwisely didn’t think about the fact that I now use Macs. When I plugged the external drive into my MacBook Pro, my laptop recognized the drive but couldn’t read the disks. I would have to plug into a Windows-based PC to see and move the files.

Calling Your Local Library

If you really want to transfer your floppy files for no cost, you might want to call your local library. While budget cuts have hit libraries pretty hard in recent years, one tiny silver lining is that some haven’t upgraded to brand-new computers.

The Boston Public Library, for example, has more than 60 computers available to the public, and the majority of them still have 3.5-inch floppy disk drives. The San Francisco Public Library has a limited supply of external drives that people can check out and use in the building.

The New York Public Library and the Washington, D.C., public library, however, no longer have computers with disk drives, so will require some research. But if you want to save a few bucks, the library might help you get the job done.

Slowing China Shipments Push PC Market From Bad to Worse

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:10:11 +0000

Research firm IDC has published its latest take on the state of the personal computer market, and depending on how you look at it — and where you work — it appears to be a case of going from bad to worse.

Slower-than-expected shipments in China brought on in part by the timing of the Chinese New Year holiday, plus government budget reductions, cut into sales in January and February, the firm said. The market is now expected to decline by 7.7 percent, which is 2 percentage points worse than previously expected. And it could get still worse. The firm won’t rule out a further drop into a double-digit percentage decline before a possible recovery mid-year.

The latest assessment comes only a few days after IDC released figures showing unabated growth in the market for tablets, which have been cutting into PC sales for years now.

Also, IDC’s dour outlook on PCs doesn’t mention the sales of Apple’s Macs. As it happens, another research firm, NPD, today put out its latest look at Mac sales, and they’re up by 14 percent year on year for January and February. One reason, said analyst Gene Munster of PiperJaffray in a research note to clients today, is that Apple has firmed up its supply of iMacs. Tight supplies knocked shipments down by about 700,000 units in December, Munster said. Even so, Munster expects Mac sales overall to trend down by about 5 percent in the first quarter.

Why Twitter Killed Tweetdeck for AIR, iPhone and Android

Mike Isaac — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:40:15 +0000

It’s not like we didn’t see it coming.

Twitter announced on Monday that it would soon kill off a few versions of its TweetDeck product in the coming weeks, ending support for the Adobe AIR, iPhone and Android clients.

It’s been the death knell many have expected, considering Twitter’s lack of pushing out updates for the three versions over the past year.

“To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Most of the efforts going forward, as Twitter has made clear, will be on the company’s other existing clients: The TweetDeck found on the Web, the Chrome-based app, the Mac client and the PC client.

Knee-jerk reaction: It’s a bummer for anyone using TweetDeck on the three platforms being killed. And it isn’t immediately clear as to why it’s happening.

But it’s there, in the blog post. Just read between the lines.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices,” the post states.

That means that — in part, at least — perhaps continuing to support the iPhone and Android versions of TweetDeck just wasn’t worth it compared to the number of people using it. Not only that, but Twitter is investing loads of time and effort into its official Twitter app for iOS and Android. It’s been pretty obvious which apps Twitter wants its users to install on their phones.

But then why kill the desktop-based AIR app? Twitter doesn’t say anything about decreased usage in the AIR version of TweetDeck, and there’s no real explanation of this in the blog post.

My best guess: To be frank, the TweetDeck Adobe AIR app just plain sucked. It required updates often and was shaky in how well it functioned even when fully up to date. It also seemed to be a major resource hog on a computer’s operating system, and it wasn’t the most stable app in terms of crashing.

So perhaps Twitter wanted to rip the Band-Aid off a crummy user experience inside another supported app, and shift its users over to the PC and Mac versions if they still want a desktop client. Twitter does, after all, want everyone who uses the company’s products to have a positive experience with them. Probably doesn’t help to have a rogue AIR app act up for some, whatever size the user base is.

Then there’s the advertising display argument, of course. Twitter could be deep-sixing its AIR, Android and iOS apps to better control the way users see Twitter’s promoted suite of ad products. Can’t say for sure either way on that one.

Whatever the case, personally I’m a bit bummed. For its many faults (and believe me, there were many), I’ve used the TweetDeck AIR app as a power user for years. It’s been the best way to keep me abreast of what’s happening on Twitter in a given moment.

But now, I’m curious to see how my transition to the desktop version of TweetDeck will be. And perhaps more importantly, how other power users will take the news.

Bump Aims to Ease Sharing Files Between Phones and PCs

Ina Fried — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:26:18 +0000

Bump, the program best known for letting people share photos and contacts from one phone to another, is expanding further onto the desktop.

With a new software update, photos, contacts and other types of files can now be shared between phones and computers (both Mac and Windows). Bump tiptoed onto the PC nine months ago by allowing phones to bump photos to their computer.

“No one ever says ‘I sure look forward to syncing my phone with my computer!’” Bump said in a blog post. “We want to change that. Because really, it’s the year 2013 — we have self-driving cars, private space exploration, 3D printers — but most folks have a hard time getting a video taken on their phone over to their laptop.”

Bump has been downloaded more than 125 million times, but is still missing advertising or anything else that might generate revenue for the company.

“We’re still not focused on monetization,” CEO Dave Lieb said in an interview.

That said, the PC feature, as well as a companion cloud-sync service, could help change that down the road. With the latest update, users can store files in the cloud, a sort of virtual USB stick. For now, Bump is limiting the size of any one file to 30 megabytes, but offering an unlimited number of files.

Over time, this could migrate into a paid premium service of some sort.

“We are going to measure and see [if there are] a lot of people that want to do much bigger files,” Lieb said.

On the phone side, Lieb said, Bump remains focused on iOS and Android, though he is keeping his eye on BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

“We’re in the wait-and-see camp,” Lieb said. “A year ago, when we asked that question, I was thinking ‘absolutely not’ when I said ‘wait and see.’ Now it is a more honest ‘wait and see.’ There are a lot of interesting things happening.”

Top Exec Says Windows 8 Off to "Solid Start" Despite Challenges

Ina Fried — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:00:02 +0000

While some people have been quick to write off Windows 8, the head of the Windows business insists that the three-month-old operating system is off to a solid start.

“We are really only just getting started,” said Tami Reller, who now runs the business side of Windows, following the departure last year of Windows division President Steven Sinofsky. “It’s a solid start.”

Microsoft has said it sold 60 million licenses as of last month, and Reller notes that many of the most anticipated tablet and convertible models are only now coming to market. In particular, Reller says that there were fewer touchscreen models than the company had hoped to see at launch.

“It’s built for a generation of new devices,” Reller said in an interview. “They didn’t all come for holiday.”

Several of Microsoft’s PC-making partners have said that Windows 8 got a slower-than-hoped-for start, despite Microsoft’s huge marketing push.

For her part, Reller says Windows 8 was designed to be an operating system that could run on tablets and computers for years to come.

While she declined to forecast whether the overall Windows business would grow this year, Reller said that Windows 8 is designed to allow the company to compete in both tablets and computers, an overall market that is growing, as opposed to just the PC market.

“Clearly, we think that presents opportunities for growth,” Reller said.

Nintendo's Wii U Outperforming the Original Wii, Only Because It Costs More

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 01:42:30 +0000

Nintendo’s Wii U has managed to outperform the launch of its original Wii, at least in terms of revenue, but only because it costs more.

In the U.S., Nintendo sold 460,000 Wii U devices in December and more than 890,000 since it launched in mid-November, according to NPD, which tracks monthly sales figures for the videogame industry.

As a result, Nintendo said it recorded $300 million in revenue, which is more than the $270 million that the original Wii made at the same point in its life cycle.

But the original Wii, which launched in 2006, cost only $250, and today’s Wii U is setting players back between $300 and $350 apiece. So, the only reason it was able to exceed prior sales is because it upped the price — not because it sold more units.

That didn’t stop Nintendo of America’s EVP of Sales & Marketing Scott Moffitt from singing the company’s praises: “While the Wii launch established new benchmarks in the United States, Wii U has surpassed its predecessor in perhaps the most important category: revenue generation.”

Moffitt, however, did not comment on profits.

The Wii U has two editions: The deluxe offering that costs $350 and the basic offering for $300. The deluxe edition sold out at retail this holiday, and both editions were difficult to find after the Nov. 18 launch. But it was nothing like the launch of the Wii, which experienced shortages for months. Nintendo did run into a few hiccups at launch with customers experiencing long waits for mandatory software updates. Additionally, some of the device’s most notable features, like its TVii service, did not launch until later in the month.

Microsoft also reported strong revenue for the Xbox. The company holds the envious position of having the top-selling piece of hardware for the past 17 months straight. It sold 1.4 million units in December, or three times the number of Wii U’s sold. (When you add up all the hardware Nintendo sold, it totals more than 2.65 million units).

In all, Microsoft said, consumers spent more than $1.27 billion on the Xbox 360, including games, consoles and accessories.

Following the release of the NPD data, Sony did not immediately break out the PlayStation’s performance for the month of December.

Even so, the numbers are staggering, especially given the amount of pressure that smartphones and tablets are putting on the game console industry. But some impact can be seen. The amount of money being generated by mobile games and online gaming still has not been enough to offset the declines that the traditional console gaming market is seeing — at least that’s NPD Group’s position.

Historically, the research firm has monitored sales through purchases made at physical retail locations. In recent years, it has expanded its methodologies as more content is sold digitally over services like Valve’s Steam on the PC or as expansion packs inside of console games.

Overall, it reported for December that new physical retail sales of hardware, software and accessories totaled $3.2 billion, falling 22 percent year over year. It calculates that the physical channel accounts for nearly 50 percent of the total consumer spend on games.

When NPD considers revenue from other channels, such as used and rentals, and digital formats, like full games, micro-transactions, mobile apps and social gaming, its preliminary estimate is that consumer spending in December hit $4.1 billion in all. A final analysis of non-physical spending however, is expected to be released in February.

Windows 8: Not for Old-at-Heart PCs

Walter S. Mossberg — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:01:49 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

If you’re thinking of upgrading your PC to the new Windows 8, be prepared for hassles and disappointment, especially if the computer is more than a year or two old — even if it technically meets the basic requirements to run the new version.

I know this, because I’ve spent big chunks of the past week trying to upgrade to Windows 8 two big-name, well-regarded PCs — a 2008 Lenovo laptop and a 2009 Hewlett-Packard touchscreen desktop. The process was painful, and it resulted in lost capabilities, even though both PCs ran Windows 7 quite well and met the minimum requirements for running Windows 8.

To be sure, people upgrading newer PCs, whose makers anticipated Windows 8 or have software patches ready to accommodate it, will likely have a much better experience. I learned — too late — that neither of the computers I was upgrading was on the list of models for which their manufacturers provided such patches. This may be because, in both cases, aspects of their hardware weren’t up to snuff for Windows 8’s more demanding requirements.

For instance, the touch pad on my Lenovo ThinkPad X301 laptop can’t be used to scroll in the new tabletlike Start Screen environment in Windows 8, or to perform certain Windows 8 gestures. And, on the HP TouchSmart 300, the touchscreen isn’t precise or sensitive enough to reliably perform Windows 8’s touch gestures every time. Plus, the microphone doesn’t work. Oh, and to get the HP to stop freezing, I had to perform a procedure that wiped out most of my installed software, including HP and Microsoft programs.

It isn’t unusual for somewhat older PCs to be unable to take full advantage of a new version of an operating system. And Windows 8 is a big change. But I was surprised by how hard it was to discover that my two PCs weren’t going to be able to fully work with the new system. I assumed Microsoft’s installer would let me know, but it didn’t.

Part of this problem was my fault, I guess. If I had thought to burrow through the Lenovo or HP websites, I might have found that my models weren’t considered by their own makers to be fit for upgrading.

For instance, HP’s information page, at http://bit.ly/SdTCVp, said this about my TouchSmart, after I located and entered its obscure, official product number: “HP has not tested this PC. For this reason, HP is unable to provide upgrade instructions or Windows 8 drivers. You may lose basic functionality & stability if you try to upgrade.” Alas, I learned this only after I had upgraded.

A spokeswoman for HP explained: “With any PC, it’s critical that the hardware and software work well together and some older PCs in our portfolio, including the TouchSmart 300 which was introduced in 2009, are simply not able to take advantage of the extensive new features Windows 8 has to offer.”

And a Lenovo spokesman said: “The X301 is five years old and Lenovo decided not to support it for Windows 8 upgrades. The touch pad hardware really can’t support all the features of Windows 8.”

Microsoft does offer Upgrade Assistant software that might have warned me of the problems, available at http://bit.ly/SdUxFo. But the box for the Windows 8 Pro DVD I was using only suggested running this utility and checking with the manufacturer’s website, in tiny type at the bottom of its back cover.

My problem was that I had too much confidence in Microsoft’s Windows 8 installer software. I had expected the installer, which also checks a PC to see if it can handle the new operating system, to tell me if there were key incompatibilities. It found exactly one: the Bluetooth utility in each machine. It told me to uninstall these before proceeding, and I dutifully did so.

I asked Microsoft why the installer didn’t warn me of the other incompatibilities I ran into, and an official said it simply doesn’t know how every model might perform and that’s why it recommends users look for the manufacturer’s instructions and warnings.

Also, I had problems with the installer itself. On the HP, it wouldn’t work with either the DVDs or a downloaded version of Windows 8. So I had to transfer the downloaded version to a 4 gigabyte USB flash drive to get it to work. (It requires at least a 3 gigabyte drive.)

For a limited time, until the end of this month, you can buy an upgrade to Windows 8 for $40 via download or $70 via DVD. This gets you only the high-end Pro version, with added features that let users tap into certain corporate networks. Microsoft hasn’t announced the eventual regular pricing, but I expect it to be at least $100 for standard Windows 8, and around $200 for Pro.

The basic requirements for running Windows 8 are a processor running at one gigahertz or faster, and at least one or two gigabytes of memory, depending on whether your PC is a less demanding 32-bit or more demanding 64-bit system (the installer tells you). You’ll also need at least 16 or 20 gigabytes of free storage, again depending on whether the PC is 32-bit or 64-bit, and a graphics system that can handle a Microsoft graphics standard called “DirectX 9 with WDDM driver.”

In my tests on both machines, the actual installation took about two hours, but a full workday or more was spent tweaking each machine, and getting updates to Windows 8 and its built-in apps. For instance, after the installation seemed done, I discovered I had lost the Wi-Fi Internet connection on both machines and had to temporarily turn off the firewall to restore it and then upgrade my antivirus software.

The problems were worse on the HP, which I had thought would be easier because it’s newer and has a touchscreen. On the HP, Windows 8 proved so buggy at first that I couldn’t even get back to the Start Screen — home base for the system — after opening apps and the computer froze up frequently. I was forced to perform a “Refresh,” a process that reinstalls Windows 8 without erasing your data files, but wipes out all third-party traditional Windows programs except the new-style apps you’ve bought from Microsoft’s online store. This Refresh got my HP running much better — except for the lost microphone and the inability of the older-style touchscreen to work as well as new ones do.

However, I lost dozens of programs, such as HP’s touch software suite, the Google Chrome browser, iTunes, Windows Live Essentials, Firefox and more. So I had to spend more time reinstalling some of these.

In the end, both machines ran Windows 8 pretty quickly, but clumsily. And both started up faster than before.

But there was a penalty: Each machine wound up with 12 to 13 gigabytes less free storage than before. This is mainly because the installer gathers up incompatible files into a special folder called Windows.old. You can delete this folder to recover space, or Windows will delete much of it automatically after 28 days.

The industry really wants you to get Windows 8 via an all-new PC, and most people who adopt it will go that route. But, if you don’t, or can’t, and have even a three-year-old PC, you may want to just stick with the Windows you’ve got.

Email Walt at at mossberg@wsj.com.

Google Brings Free Wi-Fi to Its Section of Manhattan

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:26:54 +0000

Internet giant Google says it’s bringing free Wi-Fi access to an area of New York City close to its offices. In a press conference today in Manhattan, with Google CIO Ben Fried, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Sen. Chuck Schumer in attendance, the Internet giant revealed plans to turn on free Wi-Fi access for the western portion of the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Chelsea is the site of Google’s second-largest office in the world, sometimes referred to as Googleplex East.

The network, which will be available for use by anyone with a PC, smartphone or tablet, is primarily an outdoor network, but will be extended indoors at a local senior citizen center, and also at a local public housing complex. But it’s a pretty sure bet that its heaviest users will be Google employees.

This is Google’s second go at providing free Wi-Fi in the city. Last summer, it announced plans to add Wi-Fi to a handful of subway stations, essentially the ones most likely to be frequented by Google employees going to and coming from work.

There have been numerous efforts to get this city blanketed in Wi-Fi. Courtesy of AT&T, there’s free Wi-Fi in several city parks in all five boroughs, including a few parts of Central Park. The city also launched a pilot program to turn some of the city’s remaining pay phones into Wi-Fi hotspots. (Verizon had tried that several years ago, and found that no one used them.)

Schumer said that he and Bloomberg have been talking about extending the network all over the city. Bloomberg then piped in to say that it would be great, though it would take federal money to pay for it. “It would be a sliver of what we’re paying for Sandy,” Schumer said, referring to the damage done to the city by Hurricane Sandy two months ago.

Basically, the area covered amounts to a few blocks north and west of Google’s massive complex, which occupies most of the block bordered by 15th and 16th streets and Eighth and Ninth avenues. Here’s a rough outline (click to make bigger):

And, for reference, here’s the whole neighborhood of Chelsea, courtesy of Google Maps (click to make bigger):

There had been some buzz that Google might be bringing its Google Fiber superfast Internet-plus-TV — which it launched last year in Kansas City — to the Big Apple. Given the peculiar rules of how cable-TV franchises operate in New York, there was little chance of that. In Manhattan, we had to wait years for Verizon to get its act together with FiOs, its fiber-optic Internet and TV service, and even now not all apartment buildings have granted access.

You can see video of the press conference here.

Cisco Teams With AT&T on Home Security

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:26:44 +0000

If you thought that the ongoing flirtation that networking giant Cisco Systems has had over the years with consumer products was over, following its killing of the Flip video camera unit and the Umi in-home video conference system, think again.

At the International CES in Las Vegas, Cisco just announced its collaboration with AT&T in a new home-security product. Dubbed AT&T Digital Life, it’s essentially an in-home security and control service that will give its customers control of in-home security cameras, window and door sensors, locks, thermostats, lighting and other things, from a smartphone, tablet or PC. It also sort of fits with that “Internet of Everything” marketing message Cisco uncorked late last year.

Cisco’s role is building the hardware and providing some back-office provisioning for the applications. AT&T plans to roll out the service in eight markets in the U.S. by March, with as many as 50 more markets to follow this year.

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Mobile Thursday? Smartphone Shopping Is Still Tiny, But It's This Year's Big Online Buzzword.

Kara Swisher — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:13:19 +0000

In what has become an annual holiday tradition, those who keep track of these things have started in on touting just how digital the holiday shopper has become, whipping out all manner of buzzwords to do so.

Last year, it was Cyber Monday — this year, it’s turned out to be Mobile Thursday. What’s next? Social Network Saturday? Self-Driving Car Sunday? (We still have Black Friday, by the way, which is today.)

And, indeed, the Mobile Thursday phrase got some big laps around the track, with numerous online shopping surveys — coming out faster than you can buy that new tablet — using it in their flash reports yesterday and today.

This year’s anecdotal meme: Apple iPads go well with pumpkin pie.

What isn’t said so much is that it is still a very small number — though fast-growing — over the last few years, with overall sales reaching $500 million for Thursday, compared to about $1.2 billion on Monday, according to comScore.

Still, for now, no one seems to break out actual mobile sales figures, which are clearly still a fraction of the totals. But they are more than happy to tell you that people are certainly browsing on their mobile devices, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is tired of talking to the relatives about three hours into the day.

According to IBM’s Benchmark report, for example, online sales were up 17.4 percent over 2011 on Thanksgiving Day, noting that “big winners were retailers who connected customers with personalized deals across multiple screens including PCs, smartphones and tablets.”

Some stats from IBM about Thursday:

Mobile Traffic: The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site reached 25.3 percent, up from 66.2 percent over 2011.

Mobile Shopping: The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase increased to 18.3 percent, up 65.3 percent from 2011.

Mobile Email: Smartphone and tablet shoppers responded to email deals from retailers, with emails opened on mobile devices jumping 23 percent on Thanksgiving Day over 2011.

Couch Commerce: In the evening hours, consumers shifted from shopping through their smartphones at the dinner table to buying through their iPad on the couch. At the end of the day the iPad drove more retail traffic than any other device with traffic reaching 10.7 percent versus the iPhone at 9.1 percent and Android at 5.8 percent.

Social Shopping: Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook and Twitter increased in evening hours generating .63 percent of all online sales on Thanksgiving.

And today, Black Friday, IBM slightly upped those figures, noting that the iPhone was the preferred device to bring into a store to shop with — presumably irritating sales clerks everywhere.

Over at Fab, CEO Jason Goldberg was touting in a Betashop blog post that his mobile app sales were 40 percent of the retail site’s total for the day. It’s usually 33 percent, so it’s a small jump, which Goldberg attributed to a tweet by Apple promoting it. But how much did he sell? He’s not saying.

And eBay said it launched 20 mobile-only e-commerce promotions over its app, as did many other retailers.

Also, no surprise, the New York Times weighed in with the classic trend piece: “The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone.” Um, everyone carries a smartphone now, but it apparently gets more magical when you take it to Macy’s.

We’ll see if Mobile Thursday becomes Mobile Holiday Season, which would be a big deal — but it’s winning so far in the pundit stakes.

Until we get actual numbers, here’s a chart about the whole thing from eBay:

Dell Results Fall Short of Expectations, but Shares Rally Anyway

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:14:23 +0000

Dell’s quarterly results just crossed the wires, and, as was expected, sales were light.

The results compare with a consensus view of analysts, which called for a per-share profit of 40 cents on sales of $13.9 billion.

Dell’s biggest challenge is that it has been seeking to de-emphasize its older PC-centric business and pivot toward higher-margin enterprise services, hardware and software. Even so, about half its business is still tied to PCs, both in the consumer and business segments.

Dell shares are trading up more than 1 percent in after-hours trading. The way I’m reading it is that the miss, under the circumstances, could have been a lot worse.

The outlook also wasn’t so bad. Dell said it expects the “challenging global macro-economic environment” to continue, but even so it still expects to hold the line and deliver per-share earnings of at least $1.70 for the fiscal year when it reports again in January. It also said it expects sales to improve by 2 percent to 5 percent, which implies sales of between $14 billion and $14.4 billion, give or take.

Update: Okay, about that rally. Dell shares have settled down. After going up by as much as 1.5 percent after hours, they’re now trading down by more than 1 percent. The latest price I’m seeing is $9.45, down 11 cents as of 4:26 pm ET.

Here’s Dell’s original announcement.

The consensus view of analysts calls for the company to report a per-share profit of 40 cents on sales of $13.9 billion.

ROUND ROCK, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Dell announced fiscal 2013 third-quarter results today with revenue of $13.7 billion, GAAP operating income of $589 million, and GAAP earnings of $0.27 per share. Dell’s enterprise solution strategy continued to show positive results with server and networking revenue increasing 11 percent year over year.
“We are consistently executing our end-to-end solutions strategy for the benefit of our customers,” said Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO. “In the quarter, we completed the acquisition of Quest Software which – along with other recent acquisitions like SonicWALL and Wyse – adds leading management, security, virtualization and cloud capabilities to our expanding portfolio of powerful solutions.”
“In a difficult global IT spending environment we saw solid proof points that demonstrate progress in our strategy,” said Brian Gladden, Dell CFO. “A highlight has been the strong progress of our newly introduced servers, with our server and networking business up 11 percent. We’re also encouraged by early interest in our new Windows 8 touch portfolio and the opportunities it creates for our commercial and consumer businesses.”
Mr. Gladden added that strong cash flow from operations generated over the past two years continued with $1.3 billion in the quarter and, combined with a strong cash position this fiscal year, helped enable Dell to invest in new capabilities and return almost $900 million year to date to shareholders through the company’s recently adopted dividend and share repurchases.
Results
Revenue in the quarter was $13.7 billion, an 11 percent decrease from the previous year as desktop and mobility revenue contracted.
GAAP operating income for the quarter was $589 million, or 4.3 percent of revenue. Non-GAAP operating income was $886 million, or 6.5 percent of revenue.
GAAP earnings per share in the quarter was 27 cents, down 45 percent from the previous year; non-GAAP EPS was 39 cents, down 28 percent.
Cash flow from operations in the quarter was $1.3 billion. Dell ended the quarter with $14.2 billion in cash and investments.

Strategic Highlights:
Dell Enterprise Solutions and Services revenue grew 3 percent year over year to $4.8 billion. The company year to date is 4 percent ahead of last year’s ES&S revenue at $14.2 billion, accounting for greater than 50 percent of the company’s gross margin thus far this year. The ES&S business is on an annual run-rate approaching $20 billion.
Server and networking revenue for the quarter grew 11 percent. Dell was the only top-3 server provider to have positive unit growth in the quarter. Dell’s server growth was driven by its new, 12th-Generation line, leadership in hyper-scale infrastructure solutions and an increase in customer adoption of cloud solutions for their IT requirements. Dell’s differentiated intellectual property and solutions have resulted in solid growth in this business.
Dell’s Services business continues to execute well, with gross margin percentages improving sequentially for the sixth consecutive quarter, as the company focuses on the most profitable areas of the business. Growth in support, deployment and security services highlighted the quarter.
Business Units and Regions:
Large Enterprise revenue was $4.2 billion in the quarter, an 8 percent decline. Operating income was $325 million, or 7.8 percent of revenue.
Public revenue was $3.8 billion, an 11 percent decrease. Operating income for the quarter was $352 million, or 9.2 percent of revenue.
Small and Medium Business revenue was $3.3 billion, a 1 percent decline. Operating income was $349 million, or 10.6 percent of revenue.
Consumer revenue was $2.5 billion, a 23 percent decline. Operating loss was $65 million or minus 2.7 percent of revenue.
Revenue in Americas was down 9 percent; Asia-Pacific and Japan was down 11 percent; and EMEA was down 15 percent.
Company Outlook:
Dell sees the challenging global macro-economic environment continuing in the fourth quarter, which will continue to impact the company’s results. The company expects sequential revenue growth of 2 to 5 percent. For the full year, Dell maintains its expectation for at least $1.70 in earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis. Going forward, the company is committed to its end-to-end solutions strategy and creating value over the long term.

Anti-Virus?

Voices — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 07:59:28 +0000

The more pictures I see of this gun-toting, tatted-up, McAfee guy, the more I understand why PCs have so many viruses.

– Nick Bilton, via Twitter

As Fantasy Football Servers Fumble on Game Day, Yahoo Rolls Out More Homepage Tests Ahead of December Launch

Kara Swisher — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 01:35:24 +0000

Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer is continuing her tweaking of the critical homepage of the Silicon Valley Internet giant. “Bucket tests” of new iterations are rolling out today to small sets of users across the service, as the company zeros in on launching it widely in the first week of December.

This is a massive move and also a risky one. Yahoo’s homepage sees about 170 million daily users who click in to do a variety of things. That huge traffic means that advertising placements earn big bucks from marketers — which inside sources said is typically upwards of $350,000 for a prime placement for a day, rising in price depending on complexity.

Thus, making any dramatic change to the powerful homepage is a big deal for Yahoo’s bottom line, especially in the important fourth quarter, when big advertisers spend a lot of money online and expect big results.

And the latest versions are certainly a major shift from Yahoo’s older look, with the latest using an interactive tiled approach at the very top that suggests the design spawn of Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Flipboard’s elegant social reading app.

As I noted last week, along with experiments in infinite scrolling, a simplified logo and giving search more prominence, Yahoo’s homepage change seems to be aimed at being consumed on touch-responsive, non-PC devices.

That’s no surprise, since Mayer declared in a recent earnings call that Yahoo was going to veer toward a “mobile first” sensibility. “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said.

She also has to aim at being a reliable digital company, it seems. In a bit of unlucky timing — even as Yahoo prepped the home page redo, as well as major overhauls of other products — its hugely popular Fantasy Football offering went down right as eight games were about to start at 10 am PT.

Yahoo acknowledged the slowness in its servers on Twitter, noting: “We’re still working to fix fantasy server issue & will update ASAP. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience & appreciate your patience.”

Fantasy Football fans were livid, although this has happened before, especially to those who waited to do their lineup. But some were also funny about the screw-up, as you can see below:

Yahoo Fantasy Football site is down. The Republicans were right; America has officially collapsed. The apocalypse is upon us.

— Steve Fuller (@fullsteve) November 11, 2012

Dear Google, please develop a fantasy football platform. That will end Yahoo! as we know it. Love, Long Suffering Yahoo! Fantasy users.

— WFAN Audio Clips (@WFANAudio) November 11, 2012

As of two hours ago, Yahoo said it was still working on the problem. Presumably, it will be the first fix-it challenge for new COO Henrique De Castro, who starts this week.

Hopefully, Yahoo will not have such problems with the homepage rollout, once the final version is selected.

Until then, please check out two images of yet another version, which is similar — although not the same — as the one I posted last week. In the latest design, for example, the swooshy scroll at the top is smaller and a 300 by 250-sized ad unit is back in place at the top. Overall, it is a little bit more conservative, although still streamlined.

Here they are, along with a more dramatic one from last week and also a recent Yahoo homepage:

(Mark Sanchez photo: Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com)

Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me: Yahoo's Latest New Homepage Redesign Tries Dramatic Interactive Tile Look

Kara Swisher — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 13:01:33 +0000

Another week and yet another new design for the Yahoo homepage is being tested out on users — this time, it appears to be one (which you can see below) that looks a lot like Microsoft Windows 8’s touchscreen tiled approach (which is here).

After already putting out tests in the field with infinite scrolling, a simplified logo and giving search more prominence, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is apparently testing an even more drastically different redesign of its key landing page — one that seems to be aimed at being consumed on touch-responsive, non-PC devices.

As you can see from the screenshots below — which a user sent me, and which look exactly like what many Yahoo sources have described to me recently — the design uses big photos tiled across the top of the page. It suggests an ethos that is reminiscent of the new approach by Microsoft, as well as many others, such as Flipboard and Pinterest.

All of these encourage users to reach out and touch, scroll and swoosh. In fact, there are side-swiping arrows on the new Yahoo design.

Also part of the look, which is still being tweaked: More simplified icons for various Yahoo properties, fewer text links, additional social and personalization aspects and — perhaps most importantly — no advertising module at the very top.

That’s interesting, since Yahoo’s homepage is a big moneymaker for the company, because of its huge daily traffic. Thus, any new homepage design will have both massive consumer and financial impact on the company.

Sources said that one possible plan is to move from several 300 by 250-sized ad units to a single 300 by 600, which other sites like AOL have shifted toward. Such a change will not be without controversy for marketers.

It will also present a fresh selling challenge for new COO Henrique De Castro, who arrives at Yahoo from Google next week, and who will be helming sales efforts. (Hey, Henrique — get ready for my upcoming 360-degree profile of you!)

The latest redo is now being iterated under the regime of new CEO Marissa Mayer, under an awfully confident codename, Project Homerun. We’ll see if it is San Francisco Giant’s Panda-worthy, but sources said it is set to be released widely within the next two months.

But, while some new designs that have surfaced have been closer to the current version of Yahoo, the latest design is a more significant shift that would clearly lend itself well to mobile touchscreens, especially on increasingly popular tablets.

Along with Pinterest, Flipboard and Windows 8, other sites have done this, of course, most particularly pioneering content design done several years ago by BermanBraun’s Wonderwall for Microsoft’s MSN portal.

That’s no surprise, since Mayer declared in a recent earnings call — articulating what many desktop-trapped Silicon Valley Internet giants have also done recently — that Yahoo was going to also veer toward a “mobile first” sensibility.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said in the third-quarter earnings call.

Here’s what that seems to mean for Yahoo, with the new homepage images, as well as one of the current one to compare:

Fab Says Mobile Makes Up Half of All Sales During Peak Hours

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 23:44:08 +0000

Some analysts are skeptical that retailers are seeing much of an impact from shopping on mobile devices.

But here’s one counterpoint: Fab.com, the quirky online retailer, said today that over the past few weekends, more than 40 percent of the retailer’s sales have come from mobile, and during some periods of the day, more than half of all sales are occurring on a phone or tablet. “I’m betting we’ll see more 50 percent-plus mobile day-parts within the next few months,” wrote Fab’s CEO Jason Goldberg.

In a blog post, the company provided an hour-by-hour breakdown of when traffic from mobile devices was the strongest. The tendencies show that mobile sales are most frequent in the morning and evening, and not surprisingly, that most PC sales occur while people are sitting in front of a computer at work.

Based on current rates, the mobile sales have nearly doubled over the past several months. In March, Fab was seeing roughly 20 percent of its daily sales coming from its mobile apps.

There’s probably at least one major reason for the discrepancy between what the analysts are saying and what Fab is witnessing — that’s scale. It takes a lot more to move the needle of a major retailer that’s already seeing a lot of traffic on its Web site than it does for a site like Fab, which was able to build a lot of organic traffic on mobile from the start. It also probably helped that Fab recently launched new iOS applications, which are more friendly to view on the iPad.

Here’s the hourly breakdown:

Microsoft's Ballmer: Surface Is the Tablet Consumers Really Want

John Paczkowski — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:09:42 +0000

Apple has sold 100 million iPads since it launched the device two and a half years ago. And Amazon, without ever disclosing any sales numbers, perennially maintains that the Kindle Fire is its best-selling product ever. But the millions of consumers who bought those tablets did so mistakenly, because those weren’t the devices they really wanted.

The tablet consumers really want, the one they have always wanted, is Microsoft’s new Surface.

According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, anyway.

“I don’t think anybody has done a product that is the product that I see customers wanting,” Ballmer told CNBC during a recent interview. “You can go through the products from all those guys … and none of them has a product that you can really use. Not Apple. Not Google. Not Amazon. Nobody has a product that lets you work and play that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any price point.

“This is a first-class tablet that people can enjoy and appreciate,” Ballmer continued. “It’s a PC; it’s a tablet. It’s for play; it’s for work. It’s got a great price. That product doesn’t exist today.”

And perhaps that’s so. Surface is unique in the market it’s entering. It’s the industry’s flying, floating car — though as some have recently observed, it’s not clear that it does either of those things well. But, to Ballmer, ever the irrepressible pitchman, Surface is not a compromise. It’s a reimagining of the PC, of Windows and of Microsoft itself, now a “devices and services company.”

And it’s a big risk. Which is why Microsoft is marketing Surface and Windows 8 with a campaign estimated to cost about $1.5 billion.

It’s also why Ballmer is in the media with this hard sell — a variation on the “know what your customers want before they know it themselves” adage: “Know what your customers want after they want something else for a few years.”

But, who knows, maybe he’s right. Maybe a portion of the tablet market does want a more chimeric device, and just hasn’t realized it yet. Maybe Microsoft will change users’ expectations for tablets. But after two and half years and 100 million iPads sold, it’s not going to be easy.

Aereo Adds Browser Support for TV-Over-Web Service

Peter Kafka — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:10:18 +0000

Aereo, the TV-over-the-Internet streaming start-up, is now offering its service on Web browsers for PCs and Macs. Aereo had previously supported the Safari browser on MacBooks, but is now adding support for Opera, Firefox and Chrome. The service also works on iPads, iPhones, Apple TVs and Roku boxes.

Microsoft Hits the Restart Button With Xbox Music

Tricia Duryee — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 04:27:37 +0000

Microsoft is officially unveiling all the details today about its new music subscription service that will work across a variety of devices.

Xbox Music will start rolling out tomorrow on the game console, replacing the Zune marketplace, and on Oct. 26 it will be baked into more devices as part of the Windows 8 launch.

Xbox Music will be familiar to consumers who use other streaming music services, like Spotify and Rdio. From the start, it will have access to more than 30 million songs globally and 18 million in the U.S. It’s launching in 15 countries.

A free ad-supported version will allow users to manage their entire music catalog from their PC and supplement it with an online catalog that is streamed over the Internet. Users will be able to skip from track to track, create playlists or listen to an album without restrictions (at least for the first six months). A premium version will cost $10 a month and will work across PCs, the game console and Windows 8 phones.

Both services will allow the user to purchase songs a la carte for about 99 cents each, or use the Smart DJ feature, which will let consumers discover new music based on their interests.

Xbox Music was first announced last June and, since then, a lot of the details have been spilled, but nonetheless, this represents an important launch for Microsoft. It is the first significant investment it has made in music since the launch of Zune five years ago, and this time it hopes it has come up with a winning formula, given the company’s intense interest in owning the home entertainment space. Digital music is something that Apple has so clearly dominated that others, like Amazon, can be fairly successful and still only make a small dent in its market share.

Next year, Microsoft will also launch apps for iOS and Android devices, which will require the premium version, but obviously will extend the potential consumer base beyond those who are only willing to own Windows devices.

In an interview, Scott Porter, Xbox Music’s principal program manager, said over time, “music became work, and we wanted to make it an enjoyable experience again.”

From a Windows 8 tablet, Porter showed me how you can easily play music after searching for an artist, or how you can create playlists without a lot of dragging and dropping. The free version, he estimated, would play advertisements every two to five hours, which is the standard created by other music servies. With the paid version, though, Porter said users will be able to stream or download songs, and back up their entire music collection to the cloud, which can then be accessed on the phone or other devices.