The Transport Guy: Maybe Teens Aren't Abandoning Facebook After All

Steve Kovach January 30, 2014 at 10:36AM

On its earnings call Wednesday, Facebook dodged the "teen" question.

One of the biggest concerns with Facebook's business is that teens are no longer using the social network in favor of other services like Snapchat and Whisper. One analyst asked Facebook's CFO David Ebersman if teenagers are still using the service. Ebersman dodged the question: "We don't have any new data to report today."

But according to a study of 960 million Facebook fans by Social Bakers, Facebook content still reaches the same number of teenagers as it has for the past year. The data suggest that teen usage on Facebook is flat, not shrinking.

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Maybe Teens Aren't Abandoning Facebook After All from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: Google Sells Motorola To Lenovo For $2.9 Billion

Steve Kovach January 29, 2014 at 02:21PM

Google has signed an agreement to sell Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion, the company announced after markets closed on Wednesday.

Google will keep the "vast majority" of around 10,000 patents it acquired when it bought Motorola in 2012 for $12.5 billion.

Google's stock was up over 2% in after-hours trading shortly after the announcement.

Motorola has been running semi-independently from Google since the acquisition went through. Last year, Motorola released its first flagship phone, the Moto X, since becoming a Google company. The Moto X was well-reviewed, but it's unclear how many were sold. Motorola has steadily been dropping the Moto X's price since the launch last fall.

Motorola's revenues continue to shrink year over year. In Q3 2013, Motorola revenues were $1.18 billion, down from $1.78 billion for the same quarter a year before. Google will report earnings for Q4 2013 Thursday afternoon.

Here's the full announcement from Goog CEO Larry Page posted to the company's blog:

We’ve just signed an agreement to sell Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. As this is an important move for Android users everywhere, I wanted to explain why in detail.

We acquired Motorola in 2012 to help supercharge the Android ecosystem by creating a stronger patent portfolio for Google and great smartphones for users. Over the past 19 months, Dennis Woodside and the Motorola team have done a tremendous job reinventing the company. They’ve focused on building a smaller number of great (and great value) smartphones that consumers love. Both the Moto G and the Moto X are doing really well, and I’m very excited about the smartphone lineup for 2014. And on the intellectual property side, Motorola’s patents have helped create a level playing field, which is good news for all Android’s users and partners.

But the smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices. It’s why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo—which has a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest (and fastest-growing) PC manufacturer in the world. This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere. As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other hardware efforts. The dynamics and maturity of the wearable and home markets, for example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. We’re excited by the opportunities to build amazing new products for users within these emerging ecosystems.

Lenovo has the expertise and track record to scale Motorola into a major player within the Android ecosystem. They have a lot of experience in hardware, and they have global reach. In addition, Lenovo intends to keep Motorola’s distinct brand identity—just as they did when they acquired ThinkPad from IBM in 2005. Google will retain the vast majority of Motorola’s patents, which we will continue to use to defend the entire Android ecosystem.

The deal has yet to be approved in the U.S. or China, and this usually takes time. So until then, it’s business as usual. I’m phenomenally impressed with everything the Motorola team has achieved and confident that with Lenovo as a partner, Motorola will build more and more great products for people everywhere.

While Google is selling Motorola for much less than it paid for it, the deal isn't as bad as it seems at first. Google is still keeping a bunch of Motrola's patents, which it can license out to other companies. Google also sold off Motorola's cable box business (the home division) for $2.5 billion.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that Samsung, which makes more Android phones than any other manufacturer, is getting more cozy with Google. The two companies now have a 10-year patent deal. There's also a new report from Recode that says Samsung has agreed to feature more Google services in its Android phones.

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Google Sells Motorola To Lenovo For $2.9 Billion from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: Venture Capitalist Compares Criticism Of The Rich To Nazi Persecution Of The Jews

Steve Kovach January 25, 2014 at 08:37AM

Tom Perkins, the founder of venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, wrote a letter to the editor in today's Wall Street Journal in which he compares criticism of the rich to the Nazi persecution of the Jews in the 1930s.

Here's an excerpt:

Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

Perkins goes on to describe recent attacks on the wealthy in the San Francisco Bay Area, like the Google and Apple bus protests. He also writes that the public's turn against the rich represents a "dangerous rift" in America.

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Venture Capitalist Compares Criticism Of The Rich To Nazi Persecution Of The Jews from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

Google was SHUT DOWN: Massive Bug - Be Careful

Google Responds to Massive Gmail Outage

People use Google's SketchUp app during a Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas.

IMAGE: ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES ENTERTAINMENT

BY KARISSA BELL

Friday's Google outage that downed Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents for users around the world was caused by a software bug, according to a statement released by Google Friday evening.

The culprit, said Google, was an internal software bug that ultimately caused users' data requests to be ignored, which then caused errors within Gmail and other Google services.

SEE ALSO: RIP Google Reader and Winamp: 10 Tech Products We Lost in 2013

"An internal system that generates configurations — essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave — encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration," said Ben Treynor, Google's VP of Engineering, on the company's blog. "The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors."

Google apologized for the outage, which, it reported, lasted 25 to 55 minutes and affected as many as 10% of users. The company also said they are in the process of putting systems in place to prevent any similar problems in the future.

The outage began Friday at 10:55 a.m. PST, according to Google. The sudden crash of multiple Google services at once caused an an uproar on Twitter, where affected users quickly pointed the finger at Google.

Yahoo was briefly involved in the Twitter firestorm when it dissed Google in a tweet, which was eventually removed. Yahoo later apologized from the same Twitter account saying the tweet "reflected bad judgment."

Elsewhere on social media, an unfortunately timed Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Google's Site Reliability Engineering team was happening during the outage, though the team declined to comment directly on the ongoing outage during the AMA.

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TOPICS: APPS-AND-SOFTWARE, APPS AND SOFTWARE, GMAIL, GMAIL OUTAGE, TECH

The Transport Guy: Care.com, The 'Amazon Of Caregiving Services' Popped 43% On Its IPO Day

Steve Kovach January 24, 2014 at 01:56PM

Care.com, a website that acts as a portal for service providers like babysitters and pet sitters to find clients, had its IPO today. (Think of Care.com as the "Amazon of caregiving services.")

It was a big day too. Care.com priced its shares at $17 when trading started. It popped and was up 30% or more most of the day. The stock closed up 42.9% at $24.30 per share.

Now that Care.com is public, it plans to expand and acquire other similar sites, the company's CEO Sheila Marcelo told Business Insider in an interview.

"Going public allows us to acquire companies," Marcelo said. "We've already acquired four in this fragmented space."

Care.com has 9.7 million registered users. About 4 million of those are caregivers and the rest are families. Marcelo said a large portion of the site's users are women (95% of caregivers and 85% of registered family members) who helped the site grow through word of mouth. The site gets about 2.9 million unique visitors per month, according to ComScore.

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Care.com, The 'Amazon Of Caregiving Services' Popped 43% On Its IPO Day from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: There's A New Apple TV Box Coming In The First Half Of This Year And You Might Be Able To Play Games On It

Steve Kovach January 23, 2014 at 10:23AM

Apple is working on a new Apple TV set-top box that could launch in the first half of this year, reports 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman. Gurman has an excellent track record with Apple news.

Gurman says the box (not a TV set, mind you) will have a new user interface and possibly access to an app store that'll let you download games. iLounge also reports that games could be coming to the Apple TV. There's also a chance the new box will include a motion sensor that will let you control the Apple TV with gestures, sort of like the Kinect sensor on Microsoft's Xbox One video game console.

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There's A New Apple TV Box Coming In The First Half Of This Year And You Might Be Able To Play Games On It from Business Insider: Steve Kovach

The Transport Guy: Netflix Issues Warning On The Dangers Of Ending Net Neutrality

Steve Kovach January 22, 2014 at 01:40PM

Netflix issued a statement today lamenting a federal appeals court's decision to effectively end net neutrality rules.

Without net neutrality, it means Internet providers can treat the content they deliver over the Web differently. For example, if an Internet provider wants to create its own streaming video service, it could theoretically slow down or charge you extra to use a rival service like Netflix.

Netflix, of course, isn't a fan of that. It's better for Netflix if the government keeps net neutrality rules and forces all content to be distributed equally over the Internet. However, Netflix's statement is pretty realistic and notes that Internet providers are unlikely to slow down or charge for services like Netflix any time soon.

Still, Netflix warns that there might be a push for more regulation of Internet providers if they start slowing down certain types of data:

In the long-term, we think Netflix and consumers are best served by strong network neutrality across all networks, including wireless. To the degree that ISPs adhere to a meaningful voluntary code of conduct, less regulation is warranted. To the degree that some aggressive ISPs start impeding specific data flows more regulation would clearly be needed.

Here's the full statement from Netflix:

Unfortunately, Verizon successfully challenged the U.S. net neutrality rules. In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide. The motivation could be to get Netflix to pay fees to stop this degradation. Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISP, we would vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver.

The most likely case, however, is that ISPs will avoid this consumer-unfriendly path of discrimination. ISPs are generally aware of the broad public support for net neutrality and don’t want to galvanize government action. Moreover, ISPs have very profitable broadband businesses they want to expand. Consumers purchase higher bandwidth packages mostly for one reason: high-quality streaming video. ISPs appear to recognize this and many of them are working closely with us and other streaming video services to enable the ISPs subscribers to more consistently get the high-quality streaming video consumers desire.

In the long-term, we think Netflix and consumers are best served by strong network neutrality across all networks, including wireless. To the degree that ISPs adhere to a meaningful voluntary code of conduct, less regulation is warranted. To the degree that some aggressive ISPs start impeding specific data flows, more regulation would clearly be needed.

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Netflix Issues Warning On The Dangers Of Ending Net Neutrality from Business Insider: Steve Kovach