China’s Tencent To Restructure Into Six Groups, Here’s Why
China’s Internet juggernaut Tencent announced today that it would undergo a restructuring of its business units into six groups. Ren Yuxin was also named as the new chief operating officer and will head up the media and social-networking groups.
The six groups include:
TEG – Technology & Engineering Group, comprised of Tencent Research and operating divisions.
SNG – Social Networking Group, comprised of its Internet business lines and some divisions from Tencent Research.
CBG – Creative Business Group, formed by Tencent Guangdong R&D Center and its corporate development arm. Read more...
Windows 8 ARM tablets suffering pricing problems due to Microsoft fees, report claims
According to Digitimes, original equipment manufacturers are having a hard time meeting price targets for tablets that will run Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 RT operating system, which is coded for touch input.
This is no small matter. TNW has written on topic a host of times, fretting publicly that Windows 8 devices may be too expensive, and thus price themselves out of contention for mass market consumer dollars.
However, Digitimes has some encouraging figures, and some that sting. From its report [Edited and condensed by TNW]:
“[The tablets], based on estimated general BOM costs of US$300-350 for 10-inch tablet PCs and US$150-200 for 7-inch models, are struggling to meet vendors’ price targets [...] because of the additional US$90-100 fee for Windows 8.” Read more...
British hackers get jail terms
Two separate and very different cases in the UK saw hackers receive jail terms of twelve and eighteen months. In one case a 21-year old British man, Gareth Crosskey of West Sussex, plead guilty to hacking into a US citizen's Facebook account and gaining access to that person's email account in January 2011. The Metropolitan Police Service's Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) was informed of the breach via the FBI and arrested Crosskey in July 2011 under the Computer Misuse Act. The PCeU says that "By taking swift action" it was "able to quickly detain Crosskey thereby preventing further disruption to the victim", and says it hopes the prosecution acts as a deterrent. Read more...
Avast and ahoy: Google’s student doodle contest winner named!
A 7-year-old Wisconsin boy's drawing of his dream visit to the time of pirates, ships and treasure has won him the annual Doodle 4 Google competition, which means he'll get quite a bounty for it: a $30,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 technology grant for his school and the drawing itself featured on Google's U.S. home page Friday.
Second-grader Dylan Hoffman was among more than 114,000 kindergarten through senior high school students around the country who entered drawings tied to the theme of "If I could travel in time I'd visit ...."
In his submission, the Prairie School student wrote that he'd "sail a pirate ship looking for treasure, have a colorful pet parrot and enjoy beautiful sunsets from deserted islands.” His drawing shows all that and more: ingenuity incorporating the very non-pirate-era word, "Google." The annual challenge by the search giant asks students to create redesigned versions of its logo. Read more...
Verizon fumbles on “kill unlimited data plans” damage control
Yesterday, at the J.P. Morgan 40th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, Verizon EVP and CFO Frank Shammo mentioned that his company would be forcing customers away from their grandfathered unlimited data plans. The decision is purely financial: "A lot of our 3G base is unlimited. As they start to migrate into 4G, they will have to come off of unlimited and go into the data share plan. And that is beneficial for us for many reasons, obviously. So as you pick what tier you want to be and we think that there will be some price up in those tiers." Read more...
Want Facebook Shares? HK’s 8 Securities Offers $200 Worth If You Join Its Trading Platform
With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.
The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China. Read more...
European Activists Could Force Facebook’s New Privacy Changes To A Worldwide Vote
The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook.
Specifically, if you go to Facebook’s English-language Data Use Policy page where it has detailed the new proposals, there are now over 9,000 comments on the post. The proposal, you can see, has some XXX’s at the top: that’s because it is due to close this evening, at 5pm Pacific Time (yes, more business as usual at Facebook, despite the fact that it also happens to be going through the biggest IPO ever in tech history). Read more...
Mozilla product director says Firefox on Window RT ‘probably not worth it’
A Mozilla product director yesterday said that unless Microsoft allows other browser makers to call important APIs in Windows RT, it is "probably not worth it to even bother" building a version of Firefox for the new operating system.
In a Wednesday post to his personal blog, Asa Dotzler, product director of Firefox, again slammed Microsoft for not allowing third-party browsers access to Win32 APIs, or application programming interfaces, in the upcoming Windows RT.
Windows RT, once called Windows on ARM, or WOA, is the operating system Microsoft is developing for devices -- tablets primarily, but also lightweight laptops -- that rely on processors designed for the ARM architecture. Read more...
Apple no longer censoring the word ‘jailbreak’ in U.S. iTunes Store
Yesterday a bit of a hullabaloo was started when it was discovered that Apple was censoring the word ‘jailbreak’ in the U.S. App Store. Now, that censoring has been corrected, and the word is visible across all categories, including podcasts, songs, iTunes U, iBooks and more.
This censoring was likely the result of an error in the ratings for the U.S. App Store, as the word appeared just fine worldwide. As I conjectured yesterday, we have seen Apple fix the problem quietly, and the error has been rectified. Read more...
Wake up to the sound of tweets in the morning with The Listening Machine
If you fancy waking up to the sound of the world in 140 characters? Then you will be delighted to know that there’s a way to translate tweets into sound for your own dawn chorus.
Clo Willaerts at the brilliant bnox site notes that twitter in sound translates in weirdly wonderful new ways that could emulate morning activity by our feathered friends as well as our digital ones.
The Listening Machine is an automated system that creates a continuous soundscape based on the activity of 500 Twitter users around the UK. Their conversations, thoughts and feelings are translated into musical patters in real time and listeners can tune in through any web-connected device. Read more...