Tuesday, October 9, 2012

A Galaxy S3 with a four inch screen?

Samsung to reveal mini Galaxy S III Thursday

Posted by Brittany Hillen on October 10, 2012.

Last week, we posted that Samsung seemingly planned to announce the existence of the much-rumored Galaxy S III Mini on October 11th. The company had sent out invitations to an event, which hinted at the announcement of “something small that will be big,” and given the massive popularity of the Galaxy S III, it wasn’t hard to guess what they meant. Following this is an announcement that Samsung does, indeed, plan to announce a 4 inch version of the massively popular Galaxy S III, confirming the rumors that have been circulating.

JK Shin of Samsung Mobile Communications stated that the 4-inch version of the S3 will be released in Germany on October 11th. Less the smaller size make you think otherwise, Shin assured reports at the announcement that the phone will have “full form factor,” and that it will not be an entry-level smartphone. The Galaxy S III Mini will be bucking the trend set by other high-end Android smartphone by offering such a small screen; most high-end smartphones have considerably larger displays.

Perhaps most intriguing was that this announcement has come shortly before the fabled Apple iPad Mini announcement that has been circulating the Internet. Rumor has it that Apple will be releasing a smaller form-factor iPad in order to compete with the variety of 7-inch Android tablets that have been gaining traction in the market, mostly due to their much lower price point. The Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7, in particular, have proven to be very popular, but a cheaper iPad made possible by adopting a smaller form factor could cause serious competition for both.

Although Samsung’s announcement has trumped whatever announcement Apple might have planned, it’s not likely that a miniature Galaxy S III would pose any threat to either a smaller iPad or any of the currently popular Android tablets. The mini iPad is rumored to have an 8 inch screen, twice the size of the Galaxy S III Mini, and while the mini iPad (if it comes to fruition) is a tablet, the mini S3 is a smartphone. Any comparisons made between the two should be taken lightly, since, while similar on the surface, they are dissimilar devices with different markets.

Apple's iOS family and the field of medicine.

How Apple's mobile devices are re-defining medicine
Mike Schramm | Oct 9th 2012

The New York Times examines how Apple's iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad are changing the way the health industry works. Of course, a light, powerful, and simple touchscreen computer can be handy almost anywhere, but that's especially true in the field of medicine. Much of the work involves reference materials and careful measurements, and Apple's little devices are quickly becoming many doctors' first step in helping patients. From huge reference books slimmed down into easy-to-access apps and websites, to special accessories designed to measure specific patient conditions.

In fact, the Times notes, some professors of medicine are cautioning their students to remember that they have more tools at their disposal than just that iPhone in their pocket. Examining and dealing directly with the patient is always a priority, obviously, and some doctors in the piece say certain tasks just call for a good old fashioned pen and paper.

But Apple's iOS devices are certainly great tools to be used in the medical field, as we've seen before. Apps and accessories both, in conjunction with Apple's great computers, are just adding more and more weapons to doctors' growing arsenal of tools to do their jobs.

The new iPod touch 5th gen....


Apple has today begun shipping its new, fifth-generation iPod touch. The device was announced alongside the iPhone 5 on September 12, and the first orders are expected to arrive on October 15 — more than a month after they first went on sale.

Like the iPhone 5, the new iPod touch boasts a larger 4-inch display, with a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. It also features a dual-core A5 processor and 512MB of RAM, which provide speeds comparable to those offered by the iPhone 4S. This is the first iPod touch to come in a variety of colors, including green, red, pink, blue, silver, and black.

Prices start at $299 for 32GB of storage, and rise to $399 for for 64GB of storage. Apple’s website still says that the devices will ship in “October,” and it’s yet to offer more specific estimates. It’s likely the Cupertino company will deal with the backlog of orders before updating that.

The reason the new iPod touch takes so long to arrive after shipping is that, like a lot of new Apple products, it’s going to be coming straight from China — hot off the factory floor. When you get your email to say it’s on its way, you’ll be able to track your device to your front door.

Has your new iPod touch begun shipping yet?

[Via: The Next Web]

VW does it again.


Behold the fastest production hybrid in the world. For the second time this year, the Volkswagen Jetta Hybrid LSR has moved the terminal-veolcity bar higher by averaging 186.313 mph at Bonneville. That breaks the SCTA's land speed record for production cars with forced induction engines of less than 1.5 liters.

On Oct. 5, Motor Trend Associate Road Test Editor Carlos Lago also posted the fastest run ever by a hybrid, hitting 187.147 mph during the last part of his second run. That bests the previous record by 1.753 mph set by the same car and driver in August.

In the official press release from Volkswagen (available below), the company brags that the "all-new 2013 Jetta hybrid is a distinctly different offering in the compact hybrid class, offering excellent fuel economy while retaining the fun-to-drive nature expected from a Volkswagen." But don't let that fool you. While the car may look stock, SCTA rules allow some major modifications in the "production car" class.

The suspension was lowered, the interior gutted and replaced with a full roll cage, and the car got special Salt Flat wheels and tires. Major engine modifications took the 170-horsepower motor all the way to 300 horses.

Totally allowed under the rules, but a bit misleading considering the production car name.

Leave it well enough alone? That's what Jim Cramer says...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Kicking the can down the road is working

Jim Cramer

He reflected on the economic policies in both Europe and China over the past year, noting that this time last year U.S. markets were caught off guard by the faltering global economies.

This year, the U.S. has become important again.
Cramer said "kicking the can" has been scorned but in retrospect it's been working. Last year the Europeans had no idea how badly their economies were faltering, but the strategy of endless delays gave the markets time to process and prepare for the worse-case outcomes. U.S companies, he said, have moved to contain their losses in Europe, which is why they're able to thrive this year.

In China the same is true. As the Chinese have made small steps to stabilize their economy, U.S. companies have also been given time to prepare and adjust. More importantly, U.S. investors have taken the time to realize that not that many U.S. companies are even affected by China.

Look at today's biggest winners, said Cramer, companies like Netflix (NFLX), Carmax (KMX) and Marathon Petroleum (MPC) are all domestic stocks with no European or Chinese exposure. Other winners today included Eli Lilly (LLY), Petsmart (PETM) and Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG). No international worries there either.

Even Cliffs Natural Resources (CLF), which is dependent on China, was able to rally today on the hopes of a "bad news is good news" scenario where things get so bad in China that the country is forced to act to save itself.
Cramer gave "three cheers" for the kick-the-can strategy, as its helped put American stocks back on the map.
Know Your IPO

In the "Know Your IPO" segment, Cramer featured Workday, the enterprise resource management company that's set to come public later this week under the ticker WDAY.
Cramer said Workday plays in the same space as Salesforce.com (CRM), only instead of offering cloud-based software solutions for sales and customer service, Workday is offering similar software for human resources, payroll and employee expense management. This is a red-hot sector, said Cramer, which is why Workday should be on everyone's radar.
Workday is not yet profitable and only has 340 customers thus far, but Cramer said what's important to note is both the market opportunity, $39 billion, and Workday's growth rate -- the company increased revenue by 98% last year. While Workday is still losing money while it invests in its business, the percentage of the company's costs versus its revenue is declining rapidly, which is a very good sign.

So how much should investors be willing to pay for Workday? The IPO is expected between $21 and $24 a share, but Cramer said strong demand may send shares higher. At the middle of that range, Workday would be trading at 18 times sales, which is expensive by traditional metrics, but well below stocks like Guidewire (GWRE) and Palo Alto Networks (PANW), two recent IPOs that popped on their first day of trading and continued higher.

Based on the valuations those companies received, Cramer said he'd be willing to pay up to 20 times sales for Workday, which would put the share price at no more than $27.50 a share. He said this premium is justified given how fast the company is growing and how solid its management team has executed thus far. Beyond $27.50 a share however, Cramer said he'd take a pass.
Looking for Winners

As we enter the fourth quarter of the year, Cramer said growth and momentum fund managers follow a predictable pattern, they identify a handful of stocks that they deem winners and start piling in. These "anointed" stocks just cannot be stopped, noted Cramer, which is why he's featuring 10 of them throughout the week.

His first two anointed winners were Amazon.com (AMZN) and Google (GOOG).

Shares of Amazon are already up 50% for the year, while Google is trading just 17% higher. But these gains won't stop money managers from taking them a lot higher, said Cramer, as there is a lot to like at both companies.

Amazon has become the Wal-Mart (WMT) of the Web, said Cramer, a beloved retailer with prices and selection that are second to none. But Amazon hasn't stopped there. Under the leadership of CEO Jeff Bezos, the company has expanded into making hardware like it's successful Kindle tablets, as well as into online media distribution, making it a true online marketplace for the world.

With over $5 billion in cash on its books, Amazon currently trades at a whopping 110 times earnings. That may sound wildly expensive, noted Cramer, but fund managers look at the "out years," like 2015, where Amazon is expected to trade for a more reasonable 35 times earnings. This makes the stock not so expensive given its 36% growth rate.

Google is in a similar position. It dominates online search, commanding a 66% market share in the U.S. The company is a major in mobile with its Android operating system and it has a mobile and social strategy, as well as YouTube and other opportunities.
Given that online advertising still represents only 10% of all advertising, Google clearly has lots of growth ahead of it. Google trades at only 11 times its expected 2015 earnings of $67 a share.

FB. Charging fees, really?

Now That Facebook Is Charging Users, Why Not Offer These Paid Features?

If you really love someone, promote it from the rooftops! Facebook shows how your 'reach' can increase if you pay.

Back in 2011, a rumor spread that Facebook was going to introduce a membership fee. Facebook put a stop to it with an update to its Wall, saying, “We have no plans to charge for Facebook. It’s free and always will be.” But now it’s 2012, and the revenue-hungry company is hedging on that statement.

Last week, Facebook engineer Abhishek Doshi informed U.S. users that if they really want to make sure to spread their personal news on the network, they should consider paying to promote their posts.

A diamond is forever, but an engagement announcement’s appearance in the News Feed will be fleeting… unless you put a down payment on it.

“When you promote a post – whether it’s wedding photos, a garage sale, or big news – you bump it higher in news feed so your friends and subscribers are more likely to notice it,” wrote Doshi. Only those with fewer than 5,000 friends can take advantage of the promotion opportunity, which costs $7 per post for now — which is more than triple what it cost when being tested in New Zealand in May. Either prices are rising fast in the attention economy or notice from American friends is more valuable than that from Kiwi ones.

Matt Silverman called it “bad for users” on Mashable. Dan Rowinski of RWW said it had a “whiff of extortion: ‘Pay to promote your post or nobody will ever see it.’” Will Oremus of Slate was the lone positive voice calling it “a smart strategy for a company that is under enormous pressure to start squeezing some money out of its massive free-riding user base.” Now Facebook will find out whether users are willing to whip out their credit cards to ensure drunken party photos get the attention they deserve.

But why stop there? If Facebook is going the “freemium route,” there are many other services Facebook users would gladly pay for. Here’s a potential price list to consider:

$5 for Retro Facebook: Allow Timeline haters to revert to “old Facebook.”

$8 for Break-up Protection: Hide photos of and updates from an ex without actually blocking or de-friending him or her. This gives you the option to protect your heart in the short term, but leaves open the option to creep at a later date.

$15 for Divafication: Force said ex and/or frenemies to be bombarded with photos and status updates documenting the good times in your own life.

$5 for Ego Boost: Facebook analytics page that lets you know how often your profile and photos are viewed.

$50 for See-Your-Stalkers: Make the “who viewed your profile” meme come true! A Friendster-style “Who’s Viewed My Page” option to see exactly which Facebook users are creeping on your page and looking at your photos. LinkedIn already offers a partial list of “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” for free, after all.

$50 for Stalk-Without-Being-Seen: Facebook could then sell the right to shadow stalk, and be exempted from the listing above.

$0.25 for Famous Facebook Follows: Charge a small fee to follow people of note. Lady Gaga‘s Little Monsters could yield a scary profit. Dave Winer would suggest throwing a percentage of this to the notable user.

$10 for Actual Privacy Protection: “Privacy, duh!” says Jeff Roberts of GigaOm. Facebook could offer the option to “stay out of sponsored story ads, see no ads, avoid Facebook data collection, etc.”

$3.50 for MySpaceBook: Joe Brown of Gizmodo says he would pony up “for inline animated gifs.”

$7 for I-Don’t-Want-To-See-That:

Facebook could charge $7 a pop for specific filters. “I would pay to block all pictures of new mothers nursing,” says one of my anti-breastfeeding friends. “I [want to] axe those Mitt Romney ‘likes’ that friends keep posting,” says a commenter on a Facebook thread I started.

$1,000 for I-Want-To-See-Everything: All-access pass to Facebook. You can see everyone’s full profiles, no matter what their privacy settings are. Mwah ha ha.

New SEO. What does it mean?

Over the past decade, the publishing industry been swinging on a pendulum created by the effects of search engine optimization (SEO). In the old, primarily print days, the most successful publishers were those that could produce great content for a specific audience and keep that audience engaged via subscriptions or at the newsstands. More recently, the kings of publishing were those that could best engage web crawlers and monetize their sites through a windfall of free search traffic. The focus has been less on creating great content and engaging readers than on producing lots of words on lots of pages to engage web crawlers.

But there is a silver lining to all of this. With last year's Panda release, and the more recent Penguin release, Google is going to flip SEO on its head. If Old SEO enabled some to fool a crawler into indexing borderline junk content to get high rankings, New SEO looks likely to take any notion of fooling anyone out of the equation.

New SEO will put all publishers on more equal footing, favoring those that produce quality content that is highly engaging to a certain audience. If SEO was previously a linear method of feeding a crawler with words and links, Google's results are now the result of a feedback loop: show them that you can produce quality content that people are attracted to, and free search traffic will follow.

There are two ways for a user to arrive at content -- the first is actively searching for it on a search engine like Google or Bing. The second is to discover or stumble onto it via a link on another website, an e-mail from a friend, a link shared on Twitter or Facebook, etc. "Discovery" encompasses all those times we reach a page without first typing a keyword into a search box.

To feed the search rankings with New SEO, publishers must be thinking about the discovery side. How can they get more engaged people discovering their content and engaging with it outside of Google? Ironically, a New SEO expert will probably need to focus more on Facebook than on Google to improve search rankings. The same goes for brands that are investing in content creation and content marketing. To be successful, everyone needs to play by the New SEO rules.

With New SEO, the pendulum is finally swinging back to favoring humans over crawlers. The New SEO rules point directly back to what was valued in the traditional print-dominated days -- content will not be a mechanism to convert clicks but a tool to boost awareness, increase overall engagement and offer opportunities to connect with a quality audience. And the "customer" that content is tailored for will no longer be SEO bots (the software apps that work the web automatically), as the New SEO favors the true end-user: the reader.

These are great days for publishing, and I'm very optimistic about future, weighted by quality content. Like many others, I hated much of what SEO had done to the industry, but the world of New SEO is one I'm looking forward to.