Articles from The New York Times

Europe Weighs a Tough Law on Online Privacy and User Data

Explore The New York Times (Jan 23 2012)

SAN FRANCISCO — Europe is considering a sweeping new law that would force Internet companies like Amazon.com and Facebook to obtain explicit consent from consumers about the use of their personal data, delete that data forever at the consumer’s request and face fines for failing to comply. The proposed data protection regulation from the European Commission, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, could have significant consequences for all Internet companies that trade in personal data, whether it is pictures that people post on social networks or what they buy on retail sites or look for on a search engine. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   The New York Times   Amazon.com   Europe

Floodwaters Are Gone, but Supply Chain Issues Linger

Explore The New York Times (Jan 20 2012)

KHLONG LUANG, Thailand — The floodwaters receded weeks ago from this sprawling industrial zone, but the streets are littered with detritus, the phones do not work and rusted machinery has been dumped outside warehouses that once buzzed with efficiency. Before Thailand’s great flood of 2011, companies like Panasonic, JVC and Hitachi produced electronics and computer components that were exported around the world. Now of the 227 factories operating in the zone, only 15 percent have restarted production, according to Nipit Arunvongse Na Ayudhya, the managing director of the company that manages the Nava Nakorn industrial zone, one of the largest in Thailand and located just north of Bangkok. “The recovery has not been that easy,” Mr. Nipit said in an interview Friday on the sidelines of a meeting where he sought to soothe anxious foreign factory managers. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Western Digital   Panasonic   International Herald Tribune

Nine Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter

Explore The New York Times (Jan 18 2012) Microblogging

Twitter, the minimalist-format social network that claims to have 100 million users, has built its reputation around its simplicity. Members can post to the service only in text messages of 140 characters or less. They can include a link to another site, or to a photo or video. They can repost other users’ messages on their own pages. They can send each other equally spartan private messages. That’s about it — or so it seems. Enlarge This Image Dongyun Lee Look more closely, and you’ll find that Twitter has been augmented, by the company and by other Internet toolmakers, with a virtual appliance store of simple, utilitarian features, widgets and services that let users find interesting posts, create photo albums or search Twitter more efficiently. Yet unlike, say, Facebook or Microsoft Office, Twitter’s power tools are easy to find and easy to figure out. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Facebook

Jerry Yang, ‘Chief Yahoo,’ Steps Down From Board

Explore The New York Times (Jan 17 2012) Hydro

Jerry Yang has left Yahoo, the stumbling Internet company he co-founded 17 years ago, the company announced Tuesday. Rick Wilking/Reuters Jerry Yang is leaving Yahoo, the Internet company he helped start 17 years ago. He did not cite a reason. In a statement, Roy Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman, said Mr. Yang would immediately give up his board seat at Yahoo and step down from the boards of the Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan. Mr. Yang did not give a reason for his departure, but it occurred as the company undergoes a strategic review under a new chief executive, Scott Thompson, on whether the company should sell off its Asian interests and focus on its media assets. Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba and a 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Yahoo   eBay   Microsoft Corp

Blackbaud Offers to Buy Convio for $275 Million

Explore The New York Times (Jan 17 2012)

Blackbaud, which provides software and services to help nonprofit groups manage their relationships with donors and supporters, has made an offer to acquire a competitor, Convio, for about $275 million. Add to Portfolio Blackbaud Inc Go to your Portfolio » The combined companies would capture roughly 10 percent of the market for online fund-raising done by nonprofit groups, according to Blackbaud, but some large charities were concerned that the acquisition could drive costs higher from less competition. The companies sell packages of products and services that help nonprofits keep track of donors and reach out to them in various ways; manage and organize events like bike- and walk-a-thons online; and analyze and track fund-raising via social media and other technology. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Corp

Novelties: A Wireless Way Around Data Center Traffic Jams

Explore The New York Times (Jan 14 2012)

THE vast data centers that process information for the Facebooks and Amazons of the Web work at a brisk clip. But even so, they can’t always keep up. Add to Portfolio Microsoft Corporation Go to your Portfolio » Enlarge This Image Microsoft At Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., 60 GHz wireless links are atop server racks. The links are intended to speed data flow at crunch times. During sudden bursts of activity, bottlenecks occur as traffic moves among dense clusters of servers. Typically, the servers are stacked one on top of another in rack after rack — and are connected by switches, routers and cables. To better handle the congestion, researchers are testing a shortcut that doesn’t involve costly rewiring. They are experimenting with wireless links, mounted atop the server racks, to supply extra bandwidth for moving data along at crunch times. Researchers in the field, as well as data ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Microsoft Research   Microsoft Corp

Top 1% of Mobile Users Use Half of World’s Wireless Bandwidth

Explore The New York Times (Jan 5 2012) Cloud Computing , Networking

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Apple   The New York Times   Europe

Yahoo Seeks to Rebrand Itself at Sundance

Explore The New York Times (Jan 5 2012) Hydro

Many a company has tried to burnish its image by basking in the Sundance Film Festival’s cultural heat. Will it work for Yahoo? Enlarge This Image Yahoo Robert Redford of Sundance, left, with Ross Levinsohn of Yahoo. Related Yahoo’s Renovator in Chief (January 5, 2012) Add to Portfolio Yahoo! Inc Go to your Portfolio » Lately focused more intently on offering higher-quality entertainment — and still struggling to create a more defined consumer identity for itself — the Internet company on Thursday plans to announce a flurry of Sundance-related activities. The centerpiece involves short films: Yahoo will stream 12 shorts from the festival on its recently redesigned video hub (accessible via screen.yahoo.com) starting Jan. 19, the festival’s first day. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Yahoo   eBay

Unboxed: How Samuel Palmisano of I.B.M. Stayed a Step Ahead - Unboxed

Explore The New York Times (Dec 31 2011) Cloud Computing

BECAUSE it has become so consistently successful, I.B.M. is almost boring. This is a company so predictable that its financial forecast is packaged as a “five-year road map,” as if it were some sort of state planning exercise. Related Times Topics: Samuel Palmisano | International Business Machines Corporation Add to Portfolio International Business Machines Corporation Go to your Portfolio » Yet behind I.B.M.’s relentless progress over the last decade is a game plan that has been anything but conservative. The company shed multibillion-dollar businesses. It chose higher profit margins over corporate size, and expanded aggressively overseas, seeking sales, low-cost engineering talent and quicker organizational reflexes. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Samuel J. Palmisano   Hewlett Packard

Intel Lowers Forecast Because of Shortages

Explore The New York Times (Dec 12 2011)

The chip maker Intel Corp. said Monday that its fourth-quarter revenue would be lower than expected because of shortages of hard drives. Its shares tumbled more than 3 percent in early trading. Intel, a technology bellwether, said it now expected fourth-quarter revenue of $13.4 billion to $14 billion. It had previously forecast revenue of $14.2 billion to $15.2 billion for the holiday quarter. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting revenue of $14.65 billion. Intel is the world’s largest maker of microprocessors, the brains of computers. The company said it expected personal computer sales to be up from the previous quarter. But it said computer makers are reducing inventories and microprocessor purchases because of hard drive shortages. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Intel   Intel Corp.

Salesforce, a Leader in Cloud Computing, Draws Big Rivals

Explore The New York Times (Dec 12 2011) Cloud Computing

For over a decade, Marc Benioff has had to listen to dismissals of the company he founded, Salesforce.com, as a marginal player in the business software industry. Enlarge This Image Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Marc Benioff, chief of Salesforce, in his San Francisco office. But recently Salesforce has won the sincerest form of flattery known in tech: its competitors are spending billions of dollars to acquire firms that do the sort of thing it does, which is to offer business software as a kind of rental service using a cloud of computers inside the Internet. Last Thursday, I.B.M. announced it would buy DemandTec, a cloud-based vendor of data analysis software for retailers, for $440 million. A week before that, SAP of Germany, one of the largest providers of traditional enterprise software, said it was paying $3.4 billion for SuccessFactors, which sells human resource ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   The New York Times   Amazon.com   Oracle

France, for a Moment, Becomes Focus of Digital Optimism

Explore The New York Times (Dec 11 2011)

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France acted like old friends. Karl Lagerfeld, the head designer at Chanel, introduced a new online-only fashion brand. The Ting Tings gave a private concert at the Louvre for a gathering of the global digerati at the LeWeb technology conference here. For a few days last week it seemed that France had stopped worrying and learned to love the Internet. Mr. Schmidt demonstrated Silicon Valley’s proficiency for multitasking, shuttling between Brussels, where he met with European Commission antitrust regulators, and Paris, where he opened the Internet giant’s new headquarters for southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Google’s move from a plain office building into a palatial, 107,640-square-foot building that once served as the headquarters of a French railroad is the most visible sign of the company’s campaign to woo Mr. Sarkozy and ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Forrester Research   Europe   Google

London’s Battersea Power Station for Sale, Again

Explore The New York Times (Dec 9 2011)

At first it was going to become the London equivalent of Disneyland, then a shopping center with a roof-top ice-skating rink and finally 3,400 luxury apartments. But each grandiose plan failed as one developer after another ran out of cash. Trains traveled to and from Victoria station past Battersea Power Station in central London. Now the decrepit Battersea Power Station stands as a sad reminder of the big ideas that flourished when credit was cheap and the economy was buoyant. On Monday, it goes on sale again. A London landmark that was featured on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals,” the power station has been without a roof for two decades. Its Italian marble hall and Art Deco turbine control room with parquet flooring are slowly rotting away. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Europe

Phones and Tablets Getting Game Power In the Cloud

Explore The New York Times (Dec 7 2011) Cloud Computing

We can shop on our phones and read magazines on our tablets. But playing high-end video games on a mobile device has been out of the question. That might be about to change. OnLive, a Silicon Valley start-up, on Thursday plans to release software that will let people play the richest, most graphically intense games on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as on Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other devices based on Google’s Android software. In the past, these games have been far beyond the relatively anemic computing power of such devices, requiring the horsepower of a PC or a console. But OnLive runs all of the games on its service entirely on powerful server computers in its data centers and delivers them over the Internet, through so-called cloud computing. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Apple   The New York Times   Amazon.com

BlackBerry Maker Cuts Estimates Again

Explore The New York Times (Dec 2 2011)

Comment Mentions:   Hewlett Packard

DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data

Explore The New York Times (Nov 30 2011) Cloud Computing

BGI, based in China, is the world’s largest genomics research institute, with 167 DNA sequencers producing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day. Related Times Topics: DNA | Biotechnology Enlarge This Image Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times Nabil Azmay, a technician at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, checks a HiSeq 2000 that reads 300 billion bases per run. BGI churns out so much data that it often cannot transmit its results to clients or collaborators over the Internet or other communications lines because that would take weeks. Instead, it sends computer disks containing the data, via FedEx. “It sounds like an analog solution in a digital age,” conceded Sifei He, the head of cloud computing for BGI, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. But for now, he said, there is no better way. The field of genomics is caught in a data deluge. DNA sequencing ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   The New York Times   Goldman Sachs

12 Things You Didn’t Know Facebook Could Do

Explore The New York Times (Nov 30 2011)

The designers and engineers who build Facebook are anything but complacent about their success. They face a constant threat from the career-centric LinkedIn, specialized upstarts like Instagram’s mobile photo network and now Google’s fast-growing Google+, an attempt to improve on Facebook’s core design that has picked up tens of millions of users in its first few weeks. Enlarge This Image Minh Uong/The New York Times So Facebook has been adding features to make the reigning social network more useful and convenient. As the number of features grows, though, so does a corresponding problem: Most of Facebook’s 750 million users don’t know these features exist. Some don’t know how to find them, some don’t go hunting for them in Facebook’s ever-growing interface of controls and many don’t even think of them in the first place. A few minutes of exploration can ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   The New York Times   Google   Facebook

A Proposal for E.U.-Wide Data Protection Regulation

Explore The New York Times (Nov 29 2011)

A top lawmaker on Tuesday proposed harmonizing European Union privacy rules so that an Internet company could operate across the 27-country bloc as long as its data protection policies had been approved by a single member state. Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission, said unnecessary hurdles created by privacy rules that date to 1995, when the Internet was in its infancy, were costing companies €2.3 billion, or $3.1 billion, a year as regulators in 27 different nations applied their own rules. Ms. Reding acknowledged the apparent incongruity of discussing the harmonization of E.U. rules at a time of extreme discord within the bloc over economic policy, with debt woes straining the ties that bind together the euro zone. But she said an overhaul of the privacy regulations was crucial to increasing the competitiveness of the European economy to help it surmount the crisis. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Google   Facebook   Microsoft Corp

Moody's Warns of Escalating Dangers From Europe's Debt Crisis

Explore The New York Times (Nov 28 2011)

In a new report, the rating agency said the crisis may end up threatening the credit standing of all 17 countries in the currency union. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Europe   Deutsche Bank   International Herald Tribune

Google Agrees to Allow Owners of Wi-Fi Routers to Opt Out of Database

Explore The New York Times (Nov 15 2011)

Google, under pressure from privacy regulators in the Netherlands, said Tuesday that it had agreed to give people around the world the option of keeping the names and locations of their home or business Wi-Fi routers out of a company database. Google uses the data to help pinpoint the location of cellphones and other mobile devices within broadcast range of the routers. That information is useful for weather and mapping services, among other things, and can allow Google to show relevant advertising for nearby businesses. Under the agreement, which was announced by Google and the Dutch Data Protection Authority, owners of Wi-Fi routers can add “_nomap” to the end of a router’s name to tell Google that they do not want its information included. If many people opt out of the registry, Google’s ability to offer location-based services could be compromised. The company would then have to use ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Forrester Research   Europe   Google

At Google X, a Top-Secret Lab Dreaming Up the Future

Explore The New York Times (Nov 14 2011)

In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined. Enlarge This Image Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times Google is said to be considering the manufacture of its driverless cars in the United States. Related Bits Blog: What Do You Want in the Future? (November 14, 2011) Enlarge This Image David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News Sergey Brin, one of Google's founders, is said to be deeply involved in Google X. It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space. These are just a few of the dreams being ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Google   Larry Page

Twitter Ordered to Yield Data in WikiLeaks Case

Explore The New York Times (Nov 10 2011) Microblogging

A federal judge ruled that Twitter must give information to the Justice Department about three of its account holders who are under investigation for their links to WikiLeaks. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Iceland

Disney and YouTube Make a Video Deal

Explore The New York Times (Nov 6 2011)

Two powerful media companies, the Walt Disney Company and YouTube, are betting that a new partnership will help them surmount separate but equally worrisome hurdles as they each strive for greater Web dominance. The deal, set to be announced on Monday, is small on its surface: Disney Interactive Media and YouTube, a division of Google, will spend a combined $10 million to $15 million on original video series; those shorts will be produced by Disney and distributed on a co-branded channel on Disney.com and YouTube. The channel will also include amateur video culled from the torrent uploaded to YouTube daily. But the alliance is striking because of what it tacitly acknowledges about each company’s weaknesses. Disney, currently working on yet another overhaul of its Web site, is conceding that its own brand is not a powerful enough draw among children looking for video online; YouTube is viewed as ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Google   Yahoo

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn Has Become the Go-To Guy of Tech

Explore The New York Times (Nov 5 2011)

THEY come for his money. They come for his advice. They come — duh — for his connections. But mostly they come, with all the élan of Dorothy on her way to Oz, for a chance at some face time with Reid G. Hoffman, the start-up whisperer of Silicon Valley. Mr. Hoffman made his name and fortune as the co-founder of LinkedIn, the social network that went public five months ago. But he has also emerged as something else — — as the man whom Internet entrepreneurs call when they dream of becoming the next, well, Reid Hoffman. Want to brainstorm about new technology? Build a business? Raise a cool million — or billion? Mr. Hoffman is a man to see. If he can’t help, he probably knows someone who can. He is, as you might expect, a seriously linked-in guy. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   The New York Times   Facebook