| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 2:28:43 PM | | | | | | Walmart is coming for Amazon
Walmart is in talks to buy Jet.com, The Wall Street Journalreports.
If completed, the acquisition could give Walmart the e-commerce muscle it needs to overtake Amazon.
Jet.com, which sells household goods and groceries, is just one year old.
But it has been growing rapidly — adding approximately 350,000 customers a month — by offering lower prices than Amazon and free shipping on all orders over $35.
By comparison, Amazon charges $99 annually for free two-day shipping as part of its Prime membership.
Walmart has been investing heavily in its online business in an attempt to catch up to Amazon.
But it has a long way to go. Walmart's online sales were $13.7 billion in fiscal 2015, while Amazon's sales in 2015 were $107 billion.
businessinsider.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 2:31:22 PM | | | | | | The world's biggest hedge fund thinks the next radical change in central bank policy is almost upon us.
Bridgewater Associates sent a note to clients on Wednesday written by Greg Jensen, Jason Rotenberg and Jeff Amato. Jensen is Bridgewater's co-CIO and former co-CEO.
The note said that central bank policies up until now — such as dropping interest rates and quantitative easing — haven't boosted economies enough. Policy makers need to try something radical — putting money directly into consumers' hands.
Here's the key passage from the note, which was obtained by Business Insider (emphasis is ours):
"The world is not transpiring as most central bankers had expected. They have had to consistently adjust their thinking about what interest rates and monetary policies are appropriate, and they have had to be more accommodative than they had expected and buy more 'risky' assets. We believe that at this stage either fiscal stimulation that is monetized or putting money directly into the hands of spenders (i.e., MP3) is the logical next move."
businessinsider.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 2:38:58 PM | | | | | | Time Warner Takes Stake In Netflix Rival Hulu, Joins Live Service
Nettflix ( NFLX), watch out: The big boys are banding together. Time Warner said it is joining peers Walt Disney ( DIS), 21st Century Fox ( FOXA) and Comcast ( CMCSA) unit NBCUniversal in becoming a joint owner in streaming service Hulu.
The HBO and TNT parent is acquiring a 10% stake. The deal is worth $583 million, according to Wall Street Journal sources, and values Hulu at $5.8 billion. Disney, Fox and Comcast had previously been equal 33% stakeholders in Hulu, with the Journal reporting last fall that Time Warner had been mulling an equal 25% stake.
Time Warner turned in mixed results early Wednesday, topping Q2 earnings views but falling short on revenue. The company hiked 2016 EPS guidance by a nickel to $5.35-$5.45 vs. current Wall Street estimates for $5.39.
Time Warner rose 2.7% to 77.86 in early afternoon trade in the stock market today. Netflix shares fell 0.5%.
The move comes after about a year of hand-wringing over the health of the pay-TV and cable environment, which has weighed on media stocks and put even heavyweights like Disney under the microscope.
investors.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 2:45:36 PM | | | | | | Spinoff Is Best Thing That Ever Happened To Young Fiber-Optic Firm
As with baseball trades, sometimes it's for the best when technology deals fall through. Just ask Lumentum Holdings ( LITE).
When JDS Uniphase spun off Lumentum nearly a year ago, analysts expected consolidation in the fiber-optic parts industry, where price competition was fierce. In fact, Lumentum shares shot up from its initial public offering on takeover speculation.
At the time of the spinoff, analysts speculated JDS rival Finisar ( FNSR) was poised to acquire Lumentum, which still had plenty of cash on its balance sheet. But Finisar balked at Lumentum's asking price, and so the new company forged ahead with its post-spinoff growth strategy.
Meanwhile, Lumentum's stock tumbled as disappointed investors fled. Lumentum stock bottomed out at 14 in October, but has surged since then.
investors.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 2:48:07 PM | | | | | | Looking For A New, Hot IPO To Get In On? Why This Could Be The One
Have you ever stopped to think about what it takes for your smartphone or laptop's data to be transmitted? Every search on Alphabet ( GOOGL)-owned Google, Facebook( FB) post, Netflix ( NFLX) binge-watch session and shopping session on Amazon( AMZN) requires powerful data networking equipment in order to work.
And with global data center and internet traffic expected to grow at compound annual growth rates of more than 20% through 2019, the need for speed -- as bandwidth demand rises -- is mounting.
Acacia Communications ( ACIA), which went public nine weeks ago in May after creating the first device of its kind capable of transmitting at 100 gigabits or more, is leading the charge. The Maynard, Mass.-based company makes high-speed optical interconnect modules for use in long-haul global markets, metro local markets and connecting data centers.
What makes Acacia unique is its use of silicon in its photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which improves performance and capacity at a smaller package size, and reduces associated costs. These modules also can be integrated easily with customers' existing network equipment.
investors.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 2:50:34 PM | | | | | | Veeva Helps The Medicine Go Down Faster for Drug Giants
When health care behemoth Johnson & Johnson ( JNJ) decided last year to use Veeva Systems' ( VEEV) software for gathering data from clinical trials needed to get a new drug approved, Veeva's rivals took notice.
For good reason. Thanks to J&J, it wasn't long before Veeva's content management application turned the heads of its potential customers as well.
"They (J&J) said we're going to standardize this globally, and within 12 months we had 6 customers (among the 20 biggest drugmakers) do the exact same thing," Veeva Chief Financial Officer Timothy Cabral told a Stifel technology conference in June.
In this case, though, imitation wasn't just the sincerest form of flattery; it was pretty much according to plan. The cloud-based software company's insiders call it "the Veeva way."
By that, they mean rapidly developing industry-specific applications with functionality that is miles ahead of the legacy offerings. Then they use positive customer outcomes to take the market by storm.
investors.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 2:58:39 PM | | | | | | The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
Telling Jeff Bezos he’s wrong is always a frightening proposition. In the fall of 2014, though, a small group of the men and women building Amazon’s new voice-controlled speaker felt they needed to confront the CEO. The release of the speaker was looming, and for the most part, things were falling into place. The device looked good, its voice recognition software was improving quickly, and even the boxes it would ship in had been designed and assembled. But there was a lingering issue with the name printed on those boxes: the Amazon Flash.
Many people who worked at Lab126, Amazon’s hardware division, hated the name, according to two former employees. Bezos, on the other hand, was strongly in favor. And there was another worry. A core feature of the device is a “wake word” that cues it to begin taking voice commands when spoken. One of the two words being considered was “Alexa.” Bezos thought the best word would be “Amazon.” This presented a challenge, because people say that word a lot. A common opinion within Lab126 was that the project was hurtling toward a potential disaster: The speakers would wake upon hearing Amazon ads on television and commence buying random stuff from the Internet.
Generally, the engineers and product managers at Lab126 quelled their own dissent before it reached Bezos, instead concentrating on giving the boss what they thought he wanted. “We spent so much time trying to anticipate what Jeff would do or say, and read into little words he would say in meetings,” said one former employee. “It would lead to so much additional work.”
bloomberg.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/3/2016 4:25:20 PM | | | | | | Scientists Harness Quantum Physics to Build a Programmable Computer
Scientists engineered a high-tech computer that can run several simple programs by harnessing the relationships between tiny particles, or quantum mechanics, according to a new report Wednesday.
The work represents a leap in the field of so-called quantum computers, which store information differently than traditional machines, computing experts said.
Classical computers use binary bits of information, whose values alternate between 0 and 1, to store data. Quantum computers use smaller units--“qubits”--which can simultaneously be 0 and 1. That duality underpins their rapidity and potential supremacy over conventional devices like laptops and servers.
The new device combines magnets, lasers and five individual ions, or charged atoms, trapped in single file. Each atom represents singular qubits. The team of researchers, at the University of Maryland in College Park, used the mechanism to run three different basic algorithms, including a primitive version of the algorithm that underlies encryption technology.
wsj.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/4/2016 2:41:53 PM | | | | | | Facebook Just Built A 22,000-Square-Foot Hardware Research Lab
Facebook may be primarily known as a software company whose social networking service is used by millions of people each day.
But increasingly, the company is working on newer projects that incorporate hardware components, like its Oculus Riftvirtual reality headset business and solar-powered Aquila drone project that Facebook hopes will beam the Internet to remote regions of the world.
To help advance these hardware projects, as well as Facebook’s experimental data center initiatives, the social network has built a new 22,000-square-foot hardware lab at its headquarters in Menlo Park.
fortune.com
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 8/5/2016 9:21:05 AM | | | | | | Amazon and Microsoft Are Running One and Two in Two-Cloud Race
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft continue to lead the pack when it comes computing capacity for their public cloud services, according to Gartner.
The research firm’s closely-watched Magic Quadrant annual report surveys the amount and type of cloud computing services offered for rent by big companies. And this year’s edition shows this to be a two-horse race with market pioneer Amazon running first, while Microsoft continues a strong push at second.
Other contenders include Google, IBM IBM 0.55% , VirtuStream (part of EMC EMC 0.00% ), CenturyLink, Rackspace RAX 34.24% , and VMware VMW -0.10% .
Amazon’s AMZN 0.81% continued strength will not surprise many considering the resources it has poured into this now-$10-plus billion a year business. AWS “has the largest share of compute capacity in use by paying customers — many times the aggregate size of all other providers in the market,” according to the report.
fortune.com
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