Russia Stock Bounce Gives Reprieve to Some Investors

        The Wall Street Journal reports,Monday’s stock selloff on political brinkmanship in Ukraine was a nail-biter for owners of Russian stocks, but also a chance to buy for bargain-hunting investors.

Global stocks, particularly Russia, were slammed Monday amid the escalation of the Ukraine crisis. The Market Vectors Russia ETF fell 6.9%, its biggest one-day loss in more than two years.

This chart of Russian stocks is so yesterday.

 

Bloomberg

Mark Yusko, chief investment officer at Chapel Hill, N.C.’s Morgan Creek Capital, which advises on $4.5 billion, said that he was in the market on Monday buying the Market Vectors Russia ETF as well as Russian Internet-search company YandexNVYNDX 0.00% (YNDX), which dropped 14%.

“The reaction seems much bigger than the actual events,” Mr. Yusko said late on Monday. “I don’t perceive that the profitability of companies was materially changed overnight, so we started to nibble.”

Yandex was up 7.2% in recent trading on Tuesday.

Mr. Yusko still doesn’t own much Russia and keeps a skeptical view on emerging-markets, but the selloff was too much of a bargain to pass up, he said.

Tuesday’s fast rebound also gave a partial reprieve to investors who held on.

Buying beaten-down global markets, especially those knocked by geopolitical concerns, tends to pay off historically, says Mebane Faber, chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management, which manage and advises on around $330 million in in El Segundo, Calif.

He points out that Russia’s stock plunge on Monday put its valuation, as measured by cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratios, which adjust P/E for business cycle fluctuations, on par with beaten-down Greece. With a CAPE near 6.5, Russia is far cheaper than the U.S., which is near 25 for the U.S.

“We rarely see markets valued as low as Greece and Russia,” Mr. Faber said.

The idea is that these beaten-down markets eventually bounce back fast. Look no further than the Global X FTSE Greece 20 ETF (GREK), a large Cambria holding, which is up 170% since the middle of 2012, when worries that the debt-laden country could get booted from the European Union began to ease.

GLOBAL MARKETS-Asian shares win reprieve, euro hobbled ahead of ECB

 Asian shares enjoyed a reprieve on Thursday as diplomatic efforts moderated the crisis over Ukraine, while the euro came under pressure as investors speculate whether the European Central Bank will ease policy later in the day.

Any steps the ECB takes to support the still-fragile euro zone economy could benefit some assets, though gains could be limited ahead of pivotal U.S. payrolls data on Friday.

Japan's Nikkei share average <.N225> gained 1.1 percent in early trade, while MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.MIAPJ0000PUS> rose 0.4 percent to a nine-week high, with Taiwanese shares at two-year high <.TWII>

Wall Street shares finished little changed, with the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.SPX> closing just a hair's breadth below its record closing high set on Tuesday.

"The Ukraine crisis is not over yet so the markets will keep an eye on it. But as long as there is no armed conflict, it will be gradually coming off the radar," said a chief currency trader at a Japanese trading firm.

Although diplomatic efforts between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine have made little obvious headway so far, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said discussions would continue in coming days. 

That assurance was enough to mollify investors' immediate fears of military confrontation, directing their attention instead to what steps the ECB might take to support the economy and ward off deflation.

The euro traded at $1.3728 , little-changed in early Asia but off two-month high of $1.38255 hit on Friday.

On Wednesday, International Monetary Fund officials called on the ECB to start buying public and private assets or extend more cheap long-term loans to banks, as well as cutting interest rates to a new record low.

Yet the ECB may hesitate to buy government bonds, unlike other major central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan that have done so, in part for fear such a step could infringe its ban on financing governments directly.

The ECB might explore other policy options, such as cutting rates or stopping "sterilisation" operations that soak up the money it spent buying the bonds of Greece and other countries at the height of the euro zone sovereign debt crisis.

"The chances the ECB will not do any of the steps floated in markets are pretty small. The actual economic impact of ending sterilisation will be small, but the markets will take it as opening the way for further easing in the future," said Arihiro Nagata, head of foreign bond trading at Sumitomo Mitsui Bank.

With the euro in retreat, the dollar index kept some distance from a two-month low hit last week, and was last at 80.164 <.DXY>, versus Friday's low of 79.688.

Against the yen, the dollar held at 102.63 yen , near its highest level in about a week, reflecting abating concerns over Ukraine.

Likewise, U.S. 10-year bond prices fell back and yields lifted to around 2.70 percent , off a one-month low below 2.60 percent hit on Monday,

The yield rose despite soft U.S. data that nicked optimism over Friday's U.S. non-farm payrolls.

A report from payrolls processor ADP showed private employment increased by a tepid 139,000 jobs last month, with jobs growth in January also revised down sharply to 127,000 from 175,000.

A separate private-industry gauge of U.S. service sector activity also fell to its weakest level in four years in February, with its employment sub-index contracting for the first time since December 2011.

Still, the data did little to change investor perceptions that recent weakness largely reflected bad weather in the past two months.

Reduced fears over Ukraine led U.S. crude futures near a two-week low of $100.85.

Source: Reuters

Why tablet innovation is far from over by Ben Bajarin

As I survey the tablet market it's clear that a lot has happened in the past three years, but it's also clear that the tablet is still very much early in its evolution with plenty of changes still to come.

In talking with consumers and enterprise customers alike there still seems to be some nuance around the tablet. People are just starting to get their heads around what the piece of glass that is bigger than their phone yet smaller and more portable than their laptop means to them.

My own tablet set up is an iPad Air with the Zagg iPad Air Folio case. I take this out into the world to meetings, or to pop into a Starbucks to get some work done in between meetings and I constantly get the exact same question: What kind of a computer is that?

People see this device and realize that it is in fact a computer. This fundamental point is where the paradigm shift to tablet computing is about to happen.

The amazing thing about a tablet, that sets it apart from every device I have and use it that has more computing capabilities than my phone and is more portable/mobile than my notebook.

I can sit reclined on my couch or bed and learn, work, or play. I can take it to the office and work. I can use it as portable TV or DVD player.  I can use it to make home movies. I can use it to make music. I can take it to the lake and capture video of my family water skiing and edit and create the video right there on the lake.

I can keep going with these scenarios but you get the picture.

This is why, I believe it has the most potential of any form factor out there with regard to the future of computing.

Points are made that most people just need their smartphone. And that once bigger screen phones are more popular in work or consumer environments that they will simply choose to use a bigger phone (or a so-called phablet) and a traditional PC over the tablet.

I don't doubt that there will be a certain percentage of the market that chooses this solution. However, I feel more people will choose the phone (of any size) and a larger tablet solution. If there is any device that may be threatened when 5" and larger phones become the norm, it is smaller tablets not bigger ones.

The best way to think about it is that bigger smartphones will challenge small tablets the same way tablets challenge the PC. Larger tablets, however, are poised to become the dominant computing form factor.

All of this is because of both its unique form and the developer ecosystem behind it.

Where we are with tablets feels very much like 1978 for personal computers. We have a few showcase apps, mostly from Apple with iWork and the iLife suite of applications for iPad. We also have a number of great apps from third party developers on music creation, or art, and any number of genres. But the list of showcase apps to drive home the value of the tablet as a personal computer are still the minority.

Whenever people ask me how I get away using my iPad as my main PC I always show them the above list of applications. I show them how I can capture video and make a movie right on the spot. I show them how I can write my columns and even post to my blog. 

Every time after I give these demonstrations to someone they always respond with a kind of profound tone in their voice "I didn't know you could do all that with an iPad."

This is the point. As consumers catch on that these devices are more capable than their smartphones and more portable that their PCs the floodgates will open. Developers will similarly begin re-imagining entire categories of new applications and new software to drive this unique form factor forward as a computing platform. 

Hardware manufacturerers will continue to increase the tablets capacities from its optics, biometrics, sensors, chipsets, and displays.

And while I fully expect Apple to continue to improve lhe iPad, I am just as sure others are ready to step up to the plate with innovative advances. We're already seeing bigger tablet form factors from Samsung with its Pro series and more innovation is coming.

We really are just getting started with tablets. 

Source: TabTimes

Cisco says it expects mobile data to drive network traffic 11-fold by 2018

Cisco says mobile data is expected to grow by 11 times in the next four years, hitting 18 exabytes per month by 2018. An exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.

On an annual basis, the networking giant says it expects mobile data traffic to grow by 61% annually into 2018. The extra traffic from 2017 is expected to be triple the entire mobile Internet in 2013.

Cisco estimates there will be nearly 5 billion mobile users by 2018 (up from 4.1 billion in 2013) and more than 10 billion mobile-ready devices, including machine-to-machine connections by then (up from 7 billion in 2013).

Thomas Barnett, senior director of industry thought leadership at Cisco, told Computerworld that wearable device traffic will continue to be channeled through smartphones, using the smartphone as a hub (The amount going through smartphones is now about 99%, and will drop to 87% by 2018).

"Four years ago, nobody knew the network impact of tablets, but tablet growth was significant," he said. "I would call wearables a wild card at this point."

Source: TabTimes

iPad in the enterprise keeps on rolling - latest stats point to 91.4% adoption

The latest stats on enterprise tablet adoption give the iPad a staggering lead over Android. Windows tablets were not covered. 

In its just-releasd quarterly mobility report, Good Technology shows the iPad with 91.4% of tablet activations in the enterprise . 

The results actually reflect a slight increase for the iPad from last quarter, confirming its popularity in large companies. 

Financial services was by far the leading industry sector for iPad activations, accounting for 46% of tablet activations in the quarter. 

The only other sectors to reach double figures in tablet activations were Business & Professional Services (19.6%) and Manufacturing (11.6%). 

The top 3 tablet apps

Another interesting tablet stat is on the app side. Good says the top three tablet apps activated last quarter were for document editing, custom apps and file access which together accounted for 86% of all tablet app activations in the quarter. 

When you add smartphones to the mix, iOS activations made up 73% of total device activations in the fourth quarter of 2013, up from 73% in Q3 and 69% in Q2 of last year.

Good's says its report is based on over 5,000 customers from a diverse set of industries including Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Energy & Utilities, Legal, Government, and High Tech. The metrics are based on Good’s internal data, aggregated from all devices activated across the company's worldwide customer base.

Source: TabTimes

Surprising number of companies pass on using tablets for sales

Using tablets as a sales tool is supposed to be a no-brainer, but a new survey indicates adoption is far from universal

The global survey of over 700 B2B (business-to-business) marketers and salespeople asked how they used tablets to help sales-related activities.

The result? Only 23% said they had deployed tablets. Of the remaining 77%, a whopping 83% said they had no plans to deploy tablets, even though 75% said tablets help, or would help improve sales activities.

(The survey was conducted by Corporate Visions, a provider of marketing and sales messaging tools to business).

Analyst Tim Bajarin found the percentage who hadn’t adopted tablets for sales a shock.

“Maybe if they talked to a lot of international and smaller companies you get a high number, but there’s no question that in the U.S. the majority of sales organizations are using tablets,” Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, told TabTimes.

Tablets help the sales process

As for the 23% on board the tablet train, the devices get plenty of use. For example, 60% said they use tablets exclusively to walk through a sales presentation when meeting with customers in person.

Another majority (56%) said they use tablets to demo a solution live to customers, while a solid minority use tablets exclusively for various CRM activities (45%) and to customize or edit a sales presentation ahead of customer meetings (39%).

“The results from this survey seem to show a tale of two conflicting viewpoints,” said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer for Corporate Visions.

“The majority of people in marketing and sales believe tablets either are or can improve sales enablement, but nearly the same majority of companies have no near-term plans to deploy them.”

Still, Riesterer notes, “tablets are the ideal tool for the outside sales rep who is constantly on-the-go and has a just-in-time mindset for how they access and consume sales enablement coaching and content.”

Perhaps a useful perspective here is that despite the seemingly overnight boom in sales of tablets by both consumer and business, the iPad was only released less than four years ago and there are plenty of areas where laptops and other alternatives continue to hold sway.

“Even if you accept the numbers are as low (as the report says), there is no where to go but up,” says Bajarin. “There’s a huge opportunity ahead for tablets in sales and broader IT as well as for SMBs.” 

Source: TabTimes

IDC: Chinese, global smartphone growth to slow rapidly in 2014/2015

• After growing ~60% in 2013 (and fueling global shipment growth of 39%), IDC expects Chinese smartphone shipment growth to slow to ~20% in 2014 and just ~10% in 2015.
• Though only 40% of China's 1B+ mobile users now use a smartphone, IDC's Kiranjeet Kaur notes most users who can comfortably afford a smartphone have already bought one. Plunging low-end Android prices could expand the addressable market in a country whose nominal per capita GDP is around $6K.
• India, which has a sub-10% smartphone penetration rate, still presents a major growth opportunity. But with a nominal per capita GDP of ~$1,500, the country is even more cost-sensitive than China.
• With China slowing down and developed markets living up to their name, IDC expects global smartphone growth to slow to 19% in 2014; that still spells total volumes of 1.2B. Tough competition and the ongoing mix shift towards emerging markets is expected to lead the industry's ASP to fall $27 to $308.
• Smartphone OEMs with strong Chinese exposure: AAPL, SSNLF, LNVGY, ZTCOY
• Chip suppliers: QCOM, BRCM, CRUS, SWKS, RFMD, MRVL
• Chinese carriers: CHL, CHU, CHA
• Source: Seeking Alpha

Big power talks on Ukraine crisis make little progress

High-level diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis in Ukraine made little apparent headway at talks in Paris on Wednesday, with Moscow and Washington at odds and Russia's foreign minister refusing to recognise his Ukrainian counterpart.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said discussions would continue in the coming days in an attempt to stabilise the crisis and he expected to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again in Rome on Thursday.

"Don't assume that we did not have serious conversations which produced creative and appropriate ideas on how to resolve this. We have a number of ideas on the table," he said after talks with ministers from Ukraine, Russia, Britain and France.

"I don't think any of us had an anticipation that we were coming here at this moment, in this atmosphere of heightened tension and confrontation, that we were suddenly going to resolve that here, this afternoon," Kerry said.

Russia had earlier rebuffed Western demands that its forces that have seized control of Ukraine's Crimea region should return to their bases.

NATO, at a meeting in Brussels, announced it was cutting back on cooperation with Russia to try to pressure it into backing down on Ukraine and suspended planning for a joint mission linked to Syrian chemical weapons. The alliance said it would step up engagement with Ukraine's new leadership. 

The European Union offered Ukraine's new pro-Western government 11 billion euros ($15 billion) in financial aid in the next couple of years provided Kiev reaches a deal with the International Monetary Fund. Germany, the EU's biggest economy, also promised bilateral financial help. 

Ukraine's new finance minister, Oleksander Shlapak, caused a fall in the Ukrainian bond and currency markets by saying his economically shattered country may start talks with creditors on restructuring its foreign currency debt. 


COLD WAR

Russia and the West are locked in the most serious battle since the end of the Cold War for influence in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with historic ties to Moscow that is a major commodities exporter and strategic link between East and West.

Ukraine pulled out of a trade deal with the EU under Russian pressure last year, sparking months of protests in Kiev and the Feb. 22 ouster of Yanukovich, a Russian ally.

Ukraine says Russia has occupied Crimea, where the Russian Black Sea fleet is based, provoking an international outcry and sharp falls in financial markets on Monday, though they have since stabilised.

Lavrov said discussions on Ukraine would continue, but he did not talk to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchitsya, whose new government is regarded as illegitimate by Moscow.

As he left the Foreign Ministry in Paris, Lavrov was asked if he had met his Ukrainian counterpart. "Who is that?" the Russian minister asked.

Deshchitsya said he believed a "positive outcome" would emerge. Asked why he had not met Lavrov, he shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the situation was not easy.

"We are happy that this meeting in Paris allowed us get things under way. We agreed to try to find a peaceful solution in the coming days to get out of this crisis ... something moved in the right direction."


REPORTS DENIED

A senior U.S. State Department official denied Russian reports that Moscow and the Western powers had agreed the Ukrainian government and opposition should stick to a European Union-brokered peace deal.

"There were no agreements in this meeting, and there never will be without direct Ukrainian government involvement and absolute buy-in," the official said.

Wednesday's talks in Paris were an effort by France to capitalize on the presence of major-power foreign ministers in the French capital for a long-scheduled meeting on Lebanon.

A first attempt to get Lavrov and Deshchitsya together at the Elysee Palace of President Francois Hollande failed, as did a subsequent attempt at the Foreign Ministry.

Meetings involving the foreign ministers of France, Russia, the United States, Poland, Germany and Ukraine took place in various combinations during the day, but never with the Russian and Ukrainian ministers in the same room together.

Later, President Barack Obama spoke by phone to British Prime Minister David Cameron, and they expressed "grave concern over Russia’s clear violation of Ukrainian sovereignty", the White House said. [ID:nL1N0M22AH]

Dropping diplomatic niceties on Wednesday, the U.S. State Department published a "fact sheet" entitled "President Putin's Fiction: 10 False Claims about Ukraine."

"As Russia spins a false narrative to justify its illegal actions in Ukraine, the world has not seen such startling Russian fiction since Dostoyevsky wrote, 'The formula "two plus two equals five" is not without its attractions,'" the State Department said in the document. [ID:nL1N0M22E5]

Earlier, Lavrov repeated Moscow's assertion - ridiculed by the West - that the troops that have seized control of the Black Sea peninsula are not under Russian command.

Asked whether Moscow would order forces in Crimea back to their bases, Lavrov said in Madrid: "If you mean the self-defence units created by the inhabitants of Crimea, we give them no orders, they take no orders from us."

A U.N. special envoy had to abandon a mission to Crimea after being stopped by armed men and besieged inside a cafe by a hostile crowd shouting "Russia! Russia!" Dutch diplomat Robert Serry flew to Istanbul after the incident. 

In a sign of heightened tensions in eastern Ukraine, a pro-Russian crowd in Donetsk, Yanukovich's home town, recaptured the regional administration building they had occupied before being ejected by police. 

The West is pushing for Russia to return troops to barracks, accept international monitors in Crimea and Ukraine and negotiate a solution to the crisis through a "contact group" probably under the auspices of a pan-European security body.

Britain said it would join other European Union countries in freezing the assets of 18 Ukrainians suspected of misappropriating state funds, and Canada announced economic sanctions on senior members of the government of ousted President Viktor Yanukovich. 

France said EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday could decide on sanctions against Russia if there is no

"de-escalation" by then. Other EU countries, including Germany, are more reticent about sanctions. 

In a rare display of support for U.S. President Barack Obama, Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives said they would work with the White House to address the Ukraine crisis and soon consider a $1 billion loan guarantee package for the country.

A bill to assist Ukraine, backed by both Republicans and Democrats, is also making its way through the U.S. Senate.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended Russia's actions in Crimea, which used to be Russian territory, and said he would use force only as a last resort.

That eased market fears of armed conflict after sharp falls on Monday, although Russian shares and the rouble slipped again on Wednesday, and Ukraine's hryvnia dropped against the dollar.

The Pentagon will more than double the number of U.S. fighter jets on a NATO air patrol mission in the Baltics and do more training with Poland's air force as it strives to reassure allies alarmed by the crisis in Ukraine, officials in Washington said on Wednesday. 

Source; Reuters

U.S. Natural Gas Exports May Not Drive Down Energy Costs After All

     The Wall Street Journal reports,"the U.S. is expected to start exporting LNG in 2015. These new supplies could allow more buyers to purchase gas based on the American natural-gas benchmark, Henry Hub, instead of linking to oil prices.

Henry Hub prices have been historically low in recent years, thanks to record U.S. production. In Asia, where about 80% of LNG contracts are linked to the price of oil, prices are typically at least $10 per million British thermal units higher than in the U.S.

Many of these oil-linked contracts are coming up for renegotiation, said Rajeev Mathur, executive director of marketing at India’s state-owned natural-gas processing and distribution company, GAIL. Some will switch to Henry Hub pricing as U.S. exports increase. But many will stay linked to oil, both buyers and sellers said".

The Brent oil market is traded around the world, while natural-gas markets are regional, making them less liquid and more volatile.

Global demand in the next two decades will grow faster than U.S. LNG supplies, said Laurent Vivier, vice president of strategy for gas and power at French oil major Total SA.

“You still have 100 (billion cubic feet) in Asia which needs to be contracted in order to meet the demand” by 2030, Vivier said. “This cannot come only from the U.S.”

Producers will look to Africa, Australia and elsewhere for new supplies, he said, and they will need to lock in long-term contracts to justify those projects. Those contracts will be oil-indexed, he said.

The Henry Hub market is known for volatile spikes in response to seasonal weather-driven demand. Front-month futures prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange have moved 5% or more on 16 days so far this year alone.

For producers seeking decades of reliable income, Henry Hub “can definitely not be the sole exposure,” Mr. Vivier said.
Japan, the largest LNG importer, has announced plans to launch a futures market for LNG. But that market will need to be linked to storage or downstream trading to ensure it doesn’t disconnect from the physical market, said Stephane Chaudron, head of LNG at commodity trading giant Gunvor Group. “If it works, we would very much like to trade with it,” he said.

Quadcopters Never Have To Crash Again Thanks To This Software-Based Fail-Safe System

If you’ve flown a quadcopter, you’ll know what happens when a propeller stops or fails: the thing flips around and crashes. Using a new system from Mark W. Mueller, Simon Berger, and Raffaello D’Andrea at ETH Zurich, however, quadcopters can automatically right themselves after motor failure and can even allow a human operator to control the drone until it is safely on the ground.

When a motor or propeller fails, the fail-safe routine keeps the drone more or less upright. LEDs on the arms show the user a “virtual yaw angle” so they can handle the robot as it flies, but eventually the team will add a magnetometer to handle this automatically. The team writes:

The failsafe controller uses only hardware that is readily available on a standard quadrocopter, and could thus be implemented as an algorithmic-only upgrade to existing systems. Until now, the only way a multicopter could survive the loss of a propeller or motor is by having redundancy (e.g. hexacopters, octocopters). However, this redundancy comes at the cost of additional structural weight, reducing the vehicle’s useful payload. Using this technology, (more efficient) quadrocopters can be used in safety critical applications, because they still have the ability to gracefully recover from a motor/propeller failure.

The system can even right itself if more than one motor fails. Most important, however, is the fact that the system can work in software – there are no hardware modifications at all. This means your usual quadcopter can become a self-righting, self-flying super machine with just a firmware update.

via Spectrum

A Look At The iBeacon Store Of The Future With Retail Startup Thirdshelf

Source  TechCrunch

At this year’s Dx3 digital business expo, Montreal-based Thirdshelf had a fully functional demonstration retail store with iBeacon proximity based shopper customization in place. The demo store makes real a lot of what you may have heard about the potential of this tech, using Thirdshelf’s whitelabel in-store app and Estimote’s Bluetooth LE-powered hardware beacons.

Thirdshelf’s SaaS solution is working with LXR&Co, a high-end boutique retailer, as well as Lightspeed, a POS software provider also based out of Montreal, and Ottawa-based Shopify for the ecommerce piece. The store features Estimote hardware peppered throughout a mock store layout, which communicates with a user’s own device when they approach to customize iPad-based customer facing software displays, and provide information about in-store shoppers in real-time to a customer service dashboard.

“When a customer walks up, they can choose to browse in personalized mode, in which your wish list and recommendations follow you around,” explained Thirdshelf CEO Antoine Azar. “The salespeople also have a view of what’s going on, so they can get a feel for how many customers are in store, broken down by loyalty level. And, I can drill down and look at each shopper individually and check out their wish list, recommendations and profile.”

It’s integrated with a storefront’s POS software, too, so transaction information and purchase history can be tied to accounts and used to populate and inform recommendations. The consumer app’s design and specific features can be customized by individual retailers to take on branding particular to that store or chain. Thirdshelf is targeting small- and medium-sized businesses so far, and says it aims to focus on that market for the time being, but eventually there’s a big opportunity to sell this kind of solution to large retailers, too.

Azar says that Thirdshelf also offers up a chance to get meaningful data around shopper habits and store layouts to SMBs, as well as to help them partner up to offer better loyalty incentives to their customers through programs that extend beyond single storefronts.

The project is in beta currently, and pricing is still being worked out, but eventually it’ll be a monthly fee based on volume of business driven through the store. Thirdshelf is bootstrapped by a team of experienced entrepreneurs, and hopes to expand its beta project considerably over the next few months.

Digital Advertising Solution Provider Avazu Rakes in $48 Million of Series A Funding

 Avazu a Shanghai-headquartered digital marketing agency, secured $48 million of Series A financing from Gaorong Capital, unnamed Internet giants and U.S. Internet fund (source in Chinese). The capital will be used in research and development as well as acquisitions of companies with relevant businesses, according to Shi Yi, founder and CEO of the firm.

The company’s product portfolio includes three performance marketing platforms, namely Avazu DSP (real-time auction ad exchange platform), Avazu Tracking (cross-platform ad performance tracking system) and Avazu Private Exchange (private ad exchange).

It applies real time bidding (RTB) into Avazu DSP platform, allowing buyers and advertisers to achieve higher campaign efficiency through impression-based bidding, using intelligent data of time, frequency, content, behavior, interest, price etc. for each impression.

Avazu’s partners include both domestic Internet giants like Tencent, Baidu and International companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The company has established offices in Beijing, Tokyo, Amsterdam and planned to branch into New York, Berlin, Seoul and London in future three to six months.

Shi Yi said the company is well-positioned to take the challenge of mobile social marketing in technology. He disclosed that mobile business account for 50% of total business in last year and this figure is expected to hit 80% in 2014.

Apple Working On More Third-Party Integrations For Siri With iWatch In Mind, Report Claims

Apple is working to make Siri play nice with more third-party apps and services, according to a new report from The Information. Within a larger piece on the mobile search battleground and app integration, the tech site revealed that Apple is working on improving Siri’s search capabilities, and widening its capability set.

The report points out how the Siri of today can’t do things like book a car rental or make a hotel reservation, or use a messaging app other than Messages to send a text. The improvements to Siri would potentially enable those types of things, enabling third-party integrations that don’t require one-to-one business arrangement between Apple and the external company. Current integrations like those with OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha do involve those direct deals, which limits the pace at which new third-party powers can be added to Siri.

Apple’s Siri improvements in development also include tech that would allow it to intelligently select what to display on a device with constrained screen space, so that a running app might be brought to the fore when a user starts jogging, for instance. It sounds like on the whole, Apple is looking to put more intelligence behind Siri’s virtual smarts, to make it more of an actual assistant and less of an interesting add-on feature that primarily takes a back seat to other methods of user interaction.

Both Google and Apple are working on ways to make their respective digital assistants (Google Now for Mountain View) better able to determine the purpose of third-party apps and route requests to the appropriate destination. Google is said to be building a so-called ‘semantic index’ that would parse what each app can actually do, thus improving search suggestions, while also beefing up Google Now’s predictive powers.

All of the efforts above make it seem like the vision of a comprehensive, anticipatory operating system like the one found in ‘Her’ could be an end goal for all of the major tech heavyweights today. As for Apple, additional Siri integrations are definitely high on the wishlist of both users and devs, so it’ll be interesting to see if this is a tentpole of iOS 8, or if we have to wait a bit longer to see it come to fruition.

Source: TechCrunch

Why This Plane Seat Is the Most Profitable

       The Wall Street Journal reports: "a new hybrid class, called premium economy, is appearing on more planes due into its attractive economics. The seats generally give passengers a bit more space than traditional coach and often come with extra amenities like better food. Tickets are pricier than for basic economy, but still much cheaper than flying up front.

For carriers, the whole package costs much less than business class. That means they only need to spend a bit extra to generate higher fares than tourist class and can still pack in seats. Airline executives say it can be the most profitable cabin".

The favorable equation is part of what prompted Deutsche Lufthansa AG to start rolling out a new premium economy section on all intercontinental flights as of this coming October. "It will be a very profitable product," said Jens Bischof, Lufthansa's chief commercial officer.

Airlines, like passengers, fret about space. Fliers want as much elbow and knee room as possible, while carriers want to make optimal use of each square foot. Lufthansa's new seat gives passengers up to seven extra inches to stretch their legs, and four more inches at shoulder-height because each row has two fewer seats than in traditional economy class. There are no shared arm rests.

Lufthansa's new seat takes up about 50% more floorspace than a traditional economy seat. The incremental cost of other extras, such as one additional checked bag, meals served on china tableware and an amenity kit, is proportionally less, Mr. Bischof said.

A round-trip premium economy ticket will average €600 ($824) more than basic economy.

Boeing Co.  now delivers more than 30% of its top-selling 777 intercontinental planes with premium economy seating, and the proportion is rising, said Kent Craver, a director of cabin experience and revenue analysis at Boeing. Ten years ago, no new 777s had the seating.

Even more old planes are being updated with premium economy, although the total isn't tracked. Lufthansa, for example, plans to install the cabin by late next year on 106 long-haul planes, most already in its fleet.

By 2009, about a dozen airlines offered special economy service and today almost twice as many do, said Chris Emerson, senior vice president of marketing at Airbus GroupEADSY -0.88% NV. "Flights are fuller than ever, so there's a renewed interest in capturing high-fare traffic," Mr. Emerson said.

Mozilla’s New JPEG Encoder Promises Up To 10% Reduction In File Size

        Mozilla is launching mozjpeg today, a new JPEG encoder that promises to reduce file sizes by up to 10 percent on standard JPEG images. Mozilla says the idea behind the project is to create a production-ready encoder “that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders.”

Despite multiple efforts from Google, Microsoft and others, JPEG remains the de facto standard for lossy compression. Even though formats like JPEG XR (or HD Photo, as Microsoft called it), JPEG 2000 and Google’sWebP have significant advantages over the base JPEG format, they never got the wide-reaching support necessary to replace JPEG. Besides PNG for lossless images, JPEG still remains the standard for images on the web, which now account for the majority of network traffic whenever you load a webpage.

As Josh Aas, a senior technology strategist at Mozilla, notes today, the compression efficiency of JPEG encoders hasn’t seen any major improvements lately. That’s one of the reasons why new formats regularly spring up. Mozilla, which so far hasn’t backed Google’s WebM Project, for example, acknowledges that at some point, the new formats will be so good that we will inevitably switch. Until then, though, we are stuck with JPEG.

To push JPEG further, the team forked libjpeg-turbo, a popular open-source JPEG codec, and combined it with jpgcrush, a popular Perl script written by Loren Merritt. Jpgcrush goes through a number of options for compressing the image and then picks out the one that creates the smallest files. The Mozilla team believes this is the first time a production encoder has used this functionality.

Looking at 1,500 images from Wikimedia, the combination of these two applications resulted in an average reduction in file size of about 10 percent. For PNG images that were already compressed with a standard JPEG encoder, the extra step dropped the file size by 2-6 percent.

So far then, this project looks like a cool hack that combines a number of existing products. Looking ahead, though, Mozilla plans to add more features to this tool and is looking at making use of trellis quantization, for example. I had no idea what that is, but as far as I can see after a bit of time on Google, it’s an algorithm that can be used to improve the lossy compression algorithms that form the basis of the JPEG format. Currently, it seems, it’s mostly being used for video compression.

Source: TechCrunch

Stripe Debuts A New Checkout Experience With One-Click Payments For Mobile And Web

Stripe’s is debuting a new seamless checkout experience on mobile and web today, which enables one click-payments for the first time on the payments platform. The new version of Checkout allows for an embeddable payment form for desktop, tablet, and mobile that doesn’t take customers outside of a merchant site, and also allows them to pay without being redirected away to complete the transaction.

From the site, “Checkout is built on Stripe.js and generates a normal Stripe token. You can use the token to charge a card, create a customer, start a subscription.” At first glance, this new version of Checkout with the one click-payments experience could solve a big problem of friction in the mobile payments world for merchants.

The first time a purchaser pays via Stripe Checkout on their phone, Stripe will ask the customer for their credit card info. Stripe will also ask if the customer prefers for Stripe to remember the information, and will require customer to input their phone number. A single-use SMS code will be sent to the user which they can input to complete the checkout. In all subsequent transactions using Stripe (even on different apps and sites using Checkout), the customer can input their email, and a code will be automatically sent via SMS to the phone number attached to the email. You input that code, and the customer can checkout without having to re-enter their card information across sites and merchants.

Stripe says this version of Checkout is already deployed on thousands of sites and has handled millions of transactions (including Dribbble, WillCall and Humble Bun).

Creating a native checkout experience is something that could be a game-changer for reducing friction in the payments experience, especially on mobile devices and tablets. PayPal is also working on its own integrated checkout experience as well, which is set to be released this year.

With both Stripe and PayPal are approaching this in their own unique ways, the idea of attaching credit card identity to your login across devices, and merchants is something we’re going to see more of as even Apple joins the payments race.

While the competition is heating up in the payments world, many investors are betting on Stripe to become a powerhouse–Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund all put more money into the company this year at a $1.75 billion valuation.

Thiel’s involvement in Stripe is particularly interesting as he was one of the co-founders of PayPal, which is currently one of Stripe’s largest competitors. And Thiel actually bet on Stripe early, few years ago, as an angel investor. We followed up with Thiel shortly following Founders Fund’s most recent investment in Stripe in late January to hear his thought’s on the company’s opportunity.

As he explained to me, “Stripe is rethinking the entire payments system as a whole stack offering to companies. This is not just processing, and they are looking to build up entire suite of services.” He adds that because it is a simple, straightforward product, Stripe’s been able to capture mindshare amongst the developer community early on.

“This is a different world than when we started PayPal in the 90s. There are far more people on the internet, and connecting commerce to this is a vastly bigger world than it was during the PayPal days.”

As for Patrick and John Collison, brothers who are the founders of Stripe, Thiel sees something in them that is rare in entrepreneurs. Though young, they have a comprehensive understand of all the layers of business, from product to engineering, to hiring, to managing people, he told me. “The best entrepreneurs are ones that have panoramic understanding of a business,” says Thiel. “And while they are confident, they also have the ability to take feedback and listen.”

Thiel admits himself that innovating in payments is a huge challenge, but “when it works, it works well.”

Source: TechCrunch