August 2012

While Square is the hot mobile payment startup, Starbucks is no slouch, having recorded 60 million mobile transactions in the last year and a half with its smartphone app or nearly 2 percent of all transactions. It now has more than a million people a week paying with the Starbucks app. So why is Starbucks partnering with Square? It’s because Starbucks has seen the power of mobile payments first hand and knows it has the potential to be huge across all kinds of businesses, big and small. But it wasn’t prepared to expand its barcode-based payments system to other merchants. It made more sense for Starbucks to team with someone already in the larger mobile payment space than expand its current efforts. So it’s placing a bet on Square to be a leader in the form of a $25 million investment at a reported $3.25 billion valuation.

Seth Priebatsch, chief executive of Scvngr, which offers a mobile payment app called LevelUp, said this is an “awesome deal” for Square, but could be a dangerous move strategically. He said that Square had a top-down approach with its technology: It provides an app and a point-of-sales system and acts as a processor. The partnership with Starbucks could scare merchants into scrambling to build their own mobile payment systems, he said. Priebatsch also said that adding Starbucks’s chief executive, Howard Schultz, to Square’s board gives the coffee giant influence over Square’s payment system, so other merchants could feel left out

Suddenly, you can see why News Corp is eager to split its news, TV and movie businesses in two…

Operating income in the group’s existing “publishing” division - comprising Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, The Daily, New York Post, UK and Australian newspapers and HarperCollins – has halved in the last year, according to the group’s disclosure of earnings for the fourth quarter ending June 30. News Corp blames worsening advertising at overseas newspapers, the absence of income from the shuttered News Of The World and the unquantified cost of April’s e-book price-fixing settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. So poor is the outlook that News Corp is writing down the value of its publishing businesses by $2.85 billion in impairment and restructuring costs. That means News Corp as a whole swings to a $1.6 billion quarter loss, compared with a $683 million profit a year ago. The company says the write-off is mostly against its Australian businesses. President Chase Carey told Wall Street analysts: “Our publishing business are clearly in a restructuring mode.” He forecast a flat outlook for 2013, when he said the company will cut news publishing costs. Cuts are more likely in Australia than in the UK, where some cuts and property savings have already been made, Carey said.

Here are some of the latest steps Google is taking today to make search even more intelligent:

1. Understanding the world: In May we launched the Knowledge Graph, our database of more than 500 million real-world people, places and things with 3.5 billion attributes and connections among them. The feedback has been phenomenally positive and we want to extend this feature to people outside the U.S. So starting today, you’ll see Knowledge Graph results across every English-speaking country in the world. If you’re in Australia and search for [chiefs], you’ll get the rugby team—its players, results and history. We’ll also use this intelligence to help you find the right result more quickly when your search may have different meanings.
2. Putting your info at your fingertips: Sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email. We think you shouldn’t have to be your own mini-search engine to find the most useful information—it should just work. A search is a search, and we want our results to be truly universal. So we’re developing a way to find this information for you that’s useful and unobtrusive, and we’d love your feedback. Starting today, we’re opening up a limited trial where you can sign up to get information from your Gmail right from the search box.
3. Understanding your intent: Often the most natural way to ask a question is by asking aloud. So we’ve combined our speech recognition expertise, understanding of language and the Knowledge Graph so that Voice Search can better interpret your questions and sometimes speak the answers back as full sentences. This has been available on Android for a few weeks and people love it.

A growing crop of social networks are racing to capture the loyalties of the Web’s youngest and most vulnerable users.

The rush to capture young users has sparked fresh concerns from lawmakers and health advocates over whether social networks will keep children in front of computer and mobile-gadget screens for too long. They also worry about online predators. Networks that specialize in kids tout themselves as safe environments for children, although they acknowledge that there may be no fool-proof way to block predators. Yoursphere, for instance, says it does a thorough background check on adults who register their children for the site. Under law, the sites must seek permission from parents to sign up users younger than 13. Facebook restricts users under that age, but an estimated 6 million underage users have lied about their age to get on the site, consumer groups say.