Insight: As Brazil's Batista falters, Rio dream does too

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Reuter site - Big data heralds return of the Cray supercomputer

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Big data heralds return of the Cray supercomputer

Sun, Oct 20 07:33 AM EDT

By Bill Rigby

SEATTLE (Reuters) - "Big data" means big computers, and good news for Cray Inc.

The pioneer of supercomputers in the 1970s stood on the brink of obscurity 20 years ago but is now surging back to prominence. Its shares have almost doubled over the past 12 months.

The explosion of data - measuring weather, traffic, health and countless other areas - coupled with a desire to tease meaning out of it, demands greater computing power than is accessible via standard machines.

"The assumption was that supercomputers were cliche five years ago. People thought, 'I can run my simulation on my laptop'," said Barry Bolding, a Cray vice president, at the company's Seattle headquarters last week. "That may have been true, so long as the data associated wasn't growing as well. But raw data is being created in exabytes as we sit here. More data means bigger computer, bigger computer means more data."

Experts estimate that 2.5 exabytes - or 2.5 billion gigabytes - of data are now generated every day, and the world's capacity to store that data is doubling every 40 months, which all plays to Cray's strengths.

A basic Cray cabinet costs $500,000 and up and is roughly the size of a refrigerator. Big customers can group 200 or more into massive supercomputers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, such as "Titan" at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Titan, completed by Cray last year, is the world's third-fastest supercomputer, takes up the size of a basketball court and can perform more than 20,000 trillion calculations a second.

To be sure, most companies will never need that scale, or can process what they need through multiple machines running in tandem on a high-speed network or in the cloud, which for many projects works out cheaper and more power-efficient.

What makes supercomputers different is that they can make a huge number of interconnected calculations at the same time, rather than a consecutive list of unconnected calculations, which makes them good for running complex simulations and mining unrelated data.

For example, weather apps on smartphones are based on vast models run by research agencies on supercomputers. Financial firms can detect online fraud or cybersecurity breaches in seconds rather than days by using supercomputer models, which would take days on standard set-ups.

"Big data is a new term, but arguably the supercomputer market was the original home of big data, and Cray has been dealing with it forever," said Steve Conway, an analyst at tech research firm IDC.

MARKET ON FIRE

The Seattle-based company, with just over 900 employees and a market value of around $940 million, has changed ownership several times but was started in 1972 by Seymour Cray, the "father of supercomputing."

With a recent resurgence in supercomputers, Cray is garnering Wall Street's attention. This June, it sold one of its new XC30 supercomputers to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts for $65 million, nabbing a contract from a long-time IBM customer.

That sort of deal is piquing investor interest. Wall Street analysts are expecting revenue of $519 million this year, up 23 percent from 2012, with a gross profit margin around 34 percent. Its shares are up 91 percent over the past 12 months while rival Silicon Graphics International Corp's are up 90 percent. Cray is now richly valued, with a share price 36 times estimated earnings for the next 12 months, compared with 19 times for SGI.

The global market for computers costing more than $500,000 is on a tear, according to IDC, having more than doubled to $5.6 billion in 2012 from $2.7 billion in 2008.

The whole market for high-performance computing (HPC) - essentially any machine bigger than a desktop used for intense computation - is forecast to grow 7 percent a year through 2017, well ahead of the stagnant business server market.

The U.S. government directly or indirectly accounted for two-thirds of Cray's revenue last year. But the company is reaching out to new customers interested in big data. Last year it set up a new unit called YarcData - Yarc is Cray backwards - to focus on analyzing huge amounts of information and teasing out unseen patterns in a process known as graph analytics.

"Unstructured databases are becoming more prevalent, gathering raw data from everywhere," said Cray's Bolding. "Now you start asking very complex questions, and it starts to create links between sets of data."

The YarcData unit is helping the U.S. government detect fraud patterns in Medicare and Medicaid payments. Private sector customers include medical research group Mayo Clinic and several financial services, life sciences and telecommunications firms, which Cray cannot name for contractual reasons.

New efforts are working and should boost revenue over time, said Sid Parakh, an analyst at fund firm McAdams Wright Ragen.

"This is not a commodity market. It takes years of experience," said Conway at IDC. "It's easy to build a big computer, but it's not easy to build a big computer that works."

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Twitter quitters dog IPO

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Reuter site - U.S. cable companies should create Netflix rival: Malone

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U.S. cable companies should create Netflix rival: Malone

Thu, Oct 10 17:10 PM EDT

By Liana B. Baker

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cable pioneer John Malone said on Thursday that cable companies should team up to create a rival to Netflix Inc <NFLX.O> that would deliver programming over the Internet on a national basis.

Cable companies could "solve the problem" of high programming costs by acquiring content for an Internet-based service under one brand that they would sell in a bundle with broadband, Malone said at Liberty Media Corp's <LMCA.O> annual investor conference.

Malone, who is chairman of Liberty Media, used the example of Comcast Corp's <CMCSA.O> Xfinity video streaming product one day being shared with the rest of the cable industry to become a national brand.

He added that another alternative would be for Hulu to "be bought and syndicated" by cable companies or for an entrepreneur to create a new product from scratch that the cable industry can get behind. He had said previously that cable companies should make a joint bid for Hulu, the Internet streaming service that was for sale at one point.

The cable industry has a history of working together, and he pointed the creation and funding of HBO, saying it "made us all rich."

A national Internet-based TV service could help the cable industry get back market share from satellite and telecommunications competitors, and also give a boost to smaller cable companies that lack infrastructure.

When asked about whether he still has an appetite for a merger or acquisition, Malone said that, if cable came up with a transformational product to rival Netflix, it would "increase my appetite as an investor to be willing to invest in the business through consolidation."

Malone, whose media holding company has an investment in cable provider Charter Communications Inc <CHTR.O>, made an offer for Time Warner Cable Inc <TWC.N> over the summer, but it was rejected, Reuters has reported.

Time Warner Cable shares closed up $6.68, or 6 percent, on Thursday at $116.95 per share.

During a question and answer session with investors, he praised Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings and launched into an analysis of Netflix's business model, saying it was big enough to buy exclusive national content at good prices, something the cable industry has struggled with.

"The cable industry has been very slow (which has) created a window of opportunity to the over the top guys," he said, referring to Internet based TV services such as Netflix.

Wunderlich securities analyst Matthew Harrigan said that Malone's cooperation idea was a good one. But he added it would be difficult to get all the players on the same page because the large companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable have more advanced technology than the smaller players.

"It's kind of like herding cats," Harrigan said about cable companies working together

Earlier on Thursday, another one of Malone's companies, Liberty Interactive Corp <LINTA.O>, said it would split into two tracking stocks, and also create a new company made up of its stake in TripAdvisor Inc <TRIP.O>.

(Reporting By Liana Baker; Editing by David Gregorio, Ronald Grover and Andre Grenon)

'Bionic man' walks, breathes with artificial parts

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Higgs Boson Wins Physics Nobel for Two European Scientists - Bloomberg

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WikiLeaks leaks 'Fifth Estate' screenplay

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Reuter site - AT&T seeking buyers for towers, could fetch $5 billion - Bloomberg

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AT&T seeking buyers for towers, could fetch $5 billion - Bloomberg

Tue, Sep 17 13:53 PM EDT

(Reuters) - AT&T Inc is seeking buyers for its wireless telecommunication towers and is working with TAP Advisors LLC and JPMorgan Chase & Co on the sale, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The assets could fetch about $5 billion and buyers could include Crown Castle International Corp, SBA Communications Corp and American Tower Corp, the report said, citing one of the people. (http://link.reuters.com/qus23v)

AT&T declined to comment.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore and Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Maju Samuel)

Reuter site - Insight: How freewheeling Twitter became a money-spinning juggernaut

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Insight: How freewheeling Twitter became a money-spinning juggernaut

Mon, Sep 16 20:30 PM EDT

By Gerry Shih and Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Around midnight on Christmas Eve of 2009, a handful of employees at Twitter received an unconventional holiday greeting from Dick Costolo, then the chief operating officer.

"It was an email that said, 'We have to move really, really fast. There's no time to rest because we have a massive opportunity in front of us," recalled Anamitra Banerji, who headed the team that built Twitter's first advertising product. "It was kind of crazy because we were all on break, but that attitude was exactly what we needed at Twitter."

The company is now on the verge of fulfilling the opportunity Costolo foresaw as it prepares for the most highly anticipated initial public offering since Facebook's debut last May. The offering is expected to value Twitter at up to $15 billion and make its early investors, including Costolo, very wealthy indeed.

Yet Twitter's quick transformation from an undisciplined, money-losing startup into a digital media powerhouse took every bit of whip-cracking that Costolo could muster, along with a rapid series of product and personnel decisions that proved effective even as they disappointed some of the service's early enthusiasts.

Costolo was a comparative late-comer at Twitter, joining the company three years after it's 2006 launch, but the company increasingly bears his imprint as it hurtles towards the IPO: deliberate in decision-making but aggressive in execution, savvy in its public relations and yet laser-focused on financial results.

Costolo has not flinched in pruning and reshaping his management team, while Twitter, the company, has been ruthless in cutting off the smaller companies that were once a part of its orbit. A one-time comic actor who cut his teeth in business at Andersen Consulting before starting several companies, Costolo may never be as closely associated with Twitter as Mark Zuckerberg is with Facebook, yet he is arguably just as important.

"The founders consider Dick a co-founder, that's how deep the connection is," said Bijan Sabet, an investor at Spark Capital and a Twitter board member from 2008 to 2011. "He's not this hired gun to run the company. He understands building out the business but also the product, strategy, vision."

Twitter declined to make Costolo available for comment, citing the pre-IPO quiet period.

BIRTH OF THE PROMOTED TWEET

When Twitter's then-CEO Evan Williams brought on Costolo, an old friend and colleague from Google Inc, as COO in September of 2009, the three-year old company was already under pressure.

The microblogging service was gaining hip, young users at an unprecedented pace, and its trio of co-founders - Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey - had been splashed across magazine covers as the embodiment of San Francisco cool. Yet the whispers in Silicon Valley were growing louder: Twitter didn't have the technical chops to make the service reliable at huge scale, and it didn't have any way to make money.

"Having been on the core original team of engineers, we didn't have the skills among us to build a world class service," said Alex Payne, an early Twitter engineer, noting that many of the team members came from smaller start-ups and non-profit organizations rather than established Web giants like Google.

Williams viewed fixing the site's notorious technical problems as the top priority but was ambivalent about the business strategy. For months, people familiar with the situation say, Williams weighed options ranging from display advertising to licensing Twitter's data to becoming an e-commerce hub to offering paid "commercial" accounts to businesses.

Costolo - who had sold Feedburner, an advertising-based blog publishing service he founded, to Google for $100 million - had no such doubts. By his second month on the job, he had helped persuade Williams to green-light engineering positions to build Twitter's first ad unit, which would become the "promoted tweet" - the cornerstone of Twitter's business today.

"Dick's conversations with Ev were key," said Banerji, now an investor at Foundation Capital. "He had a fundamental belief that this was the future of Twitter monetization and said, 'You have to do it.'"

Over four months in early 2010, Costolo, working closely with Banerji and Ashish Goel, a Stanford engineering professor who specialized in the science of auction algorithms, to refine the promoted tweet. It resembled an ordinary Twitter message in every way, except that advertisers could pay for it to appear at the top of users' Tweet streams and search results.

Costolo threw his heft within the company behind the advertising strategy. In early 2010, as the ads team drew up a related product called "promoted trends," Costolo privately told them to make sure he was in the room when they pitched the product to Williams, so it would get pushed through.

A central mechanism governing the promoted tweet was "resonance," a concept coined by Goel. Because Twitter users can re-circulate or reply to tweets, including paid advertisements, the company had the real-time ability to gauge which ads were most popular, and those ads could then be made more prominent. And because the ads appeared in the same format as other tweets, they were perfectly suited to mobile devices, which could not handily display traditional banner ads.

Paid ads that are inserted into a stream of status updates have since become something of an industry standard for mobile advertising. Its adopters include Facebook, which has enjoyed a 60 percent rise in its stock price in recent months due to its newfound success in mobile.

"The closest thing before this was the contextual advertising that Google was selling, but the problem was that it was clearly an ad," said Charlene Li, the founder of Altimeter Group, an online research and consulting firm. "Promoted tweets look just like every other tweet. The form factor, the way it is displayed in stream - that was a breakthrough."

When Costolo unveiled the promoted tweet in April 2010, Twitter announced it as a trial for only five brands, including Starbucks Corp and Virgin America, and users almost never saw the ads.

But by the summer of 2010, Costolo felt confident enough in his concept that he began seeking a deputy to ramp up the company's sales effort. For months, he courted Adam Bain, a rising star at News Corp, and at the same time began assiduously courting marketers, from corner suites on Madison Avenue to industry conferences on the French Riviera.

Under Bain, the Twitter ad team set it sites on the most lucrative advertising market of all: television. Twitter attached itself to TV programmers and major brand marketers by positioning itself as an online peanut gallery where TV viewers could discuss what they were watching.

"Hashtags," which help people find the conversations they're looking for on Twitter, soon grew ubiquitous on TV, appearing in Super Bowl commercials, at Nascar races and on the Oscars red carpet.

"It wasn't easy for Twitter to explain to people why they should buy content on Twitter until they sold it as a companion to TV," Ian Schafer, the chief executive of Deep Focus, a digital advertising agency. "Now you're even seeing the networks selling Twitter's inventory for them. That's magic."

Twitter has steadily refined its targeting capabilities and can now send promoted tweets to people based on geographic location and interests. This month, the company paid more than $300 million to acquire MoPub, which will enable it to target mobile users based on websites they have visited on their desktop computers.

As the promoted Tweet became a reliable revenue engine -generating a substantial chunk of the estimated $580 million in ad sales the company is expected to earn this year - Twitter began to evolve the service beyond its 140-character text messaging roots. Tweets today can embed pictures, videos, page previews and are expected to eventually have more interactive features, including those for online transactions and deals.

FOCUSED AND RUTHLESS

While Costolo has been widely credited with bringing management stability to a company that had struggled to find the right leadership formula among its three founders, he hasn't hesitated in making changes in the executive suite.

"Jack always said he 'edited' his team, and Dick looked at it the same way," said a former employee. "He wanted to choose the top people around him, but he was ruthless with replacing his top people."

Bain and Ali Rowghani, Twitter's influential chief operating officer, have emerged as Costolo's key deputies. A string of recent high-profile hires includes former TicketMaster CEO Nathan Hubbard as head of commerce; Geoff Reiss, former Professional Bowlers Association CEO, as head of sports partnerships; and Morgan Stanley executive Cynthia Gaylor as head of corporate development.

Meanwhile, once-powerful executives including product guru Satya Patel, engineering vice president Mike Abbott and head of growth Othman Laraki have left the company, with each departure stoking chatter about Twitter's unusual rate of employee turnover.

Rank-and-file employees described a chief executive who will pause from his workday to laugh with them at YouTube clips but who will also nudge them to put in long hours.

At a conference last fall, Costolo told the audience he had sought out a new office for Twitter in central San Francisco partly because it would allow employees who lived in the city to go home for dinner with their families and still come back to work at night.

Despite his on-stage charisma, several employees describe a CEO who can seem aloof.

"He's always very cordial," said one former employee. "But try to get into a deeper conversation with him, and he's thinking about how much time he has to do that, because his schedule is tight and he has a lot to do. He's all business."

Costolo's single-minded focus on Twitter's business goals has not been welcomed by everyone. It alienated many early Twitter enthusiasts who were interested in the political, social and technical potential of a unique new service that could fairly claim to express the sentiment of the world in real time.

Twitter has slowly shut off third-party access to its data, preferring to keep the information for its own business purposes. It has cut off many developers that want to build new features that would interact with the Twitter platform.

Its status as the most aggressive of all the global Internet companies in defending free speech and protecting its users from government spying is also in question. After years of essentially ignoring foreign governments that wanted it to comply with local laws, it announced last year that it had developed the technical capability to block Tweets by country, and it has recently begun to use it in countries including Germany and Brazil.

Twitter is currently banned in China, where the country's own Twitter-like service, Sina Corp's Weibo, has 500 million registered users.

"The most obvious effect of the IPO will be that it will push Twitter to go more international," said Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"I don't think there's much evidence that their position on free speech has softened in the U.S, but internationally, yes. I think they've absolutely run into the complexities of opening offices in other countries, potentially even made some promises that they couldn't keep."

Yet Costolo has clearly kept his biggest promise: turning Twitter into a major media business. And in that regard, the IPO may be just the beginning.

(Editing by Jonathan Weber and Ken Wills)

Reuter site - Engineers searching for smartphone innovation look within

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Engineers searching for smartphone innovation look within

Thu, Sep 12 14:13 PM EDT

By Noel Randewich

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As Apple and other smartphone makers find it harder to wow consumers with new devices, engineers think future breakthroughs may depend more on finding new ways to integrate existing components than on inventing more powerful chips.

Apple's new iPhone 5S introduced on Tuesday shows how difficult it is to keep coming up with compelling innovations after years of blockbuster hits. The new device boasts a fingerprint reader and a beefed up processor, but it failed to inspire a rally on Wall Street typical of past smartphone launches by the Cupertino, California, company.

While the first iPhone captivated the world in 2007 with multitouch screens and Apple's intuitive iOS platform, more recent top tier phones have featured less spectacular breakthroughs and consumers are becoming harder to impress. Many on Wall Street are concerned that serious smartphone innovation is drying up.

The new iPhone's inclusion of a an emerging kind of chip, called the M7, points to where Apple and engineers at other technology companies are delving for future innovation that they hope will keep consumers hyped up about to smartphones.

The M7, along with similar chips used by rival Samsung Electronics, helps smartphone makers take a small step among many toward what experts call contextual or perceptual computing - an emerging trend of enabling smartphones and other devices to continuously integrate data from cameras, microphones and other sensors so that devices can monitor the environment constantly and in real time, and react to it intelligently.

With varying degrees of accuracy and energy efficiency, gyroscopes, barometers, microphones and radio chips already found in many phones can track location, position, orientation - a partial glimpse of what the user is physically doing at any given moment.

The M7 coprocessor is meant to handle data from the iPhone's sensors using less battery power than the phone's main chip would use to manage the same data. That opens the door for developers to create applications that make more or even constant use of sensors in the phone, a small but important step toward improving contextual computing.

"We're moving from purely computing, where you provide the data, to an intelligent system, where it collects its own data and then computes," said Gartner analyst Sergis Mushell. "But we're still far away. We're at the IQ level of frogs right now compared to humans."

Samsung uses sensor processing chips made by Atmel in its Galaxy Note 2 and Galaxy S4 devices and they are on their way to becoming ubiquitous in high-end phones, said Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis.

Smartphones already offer hints of contextual computing although the technology has yet to become a big selling factor for consumers. Phones using Google's Android platform make suggestions of maps and navigation to different destinations, like the home or office, depending on a user's location, habits, traffic and time of day.

Motorola's Moto X smartphone has a microphone that is always listening for commands.

As well as smartphones, semiconductor companies are also working on ways to deliver more sophisticated experiences using combinations of sensors and other chips in bracelets, watches and other wearables. Consumer products using sensors already include bracelets that track sports and fitness-related activity, including distances run and walked, heart beats and sleep.

Last week, Samsung Electronics launched the Galaxy Gear watch, and Qualcomm launched the Toq smartwatch, both of which work in conjunction with smartphones.

On Monday, Intel announced it is working on a new line of ultra-small and ultra-low-power microchips for wearable devices like smartwatches and bracelets, a bid by the company to be at the crest of the next big technology wave after arriving late to the smartphone and tablet revolution.

Computing companies are also pushing contextual computing into medical devices that can help monitor the health of patients and give doctors early warnings when their conditions change.

Better integrating movement and directional sensors with always-listening microphones and more personal data could let smartphones accurately monitor their location and activities, and figure out what advice and solutions to offer at any given time, whether shopping for groceries or running to catch a train.

InvenSense, which makes gyroscopes and other motion sensors and competes against STMicro, plans to sell chips within a couple of years that can detect changes in altitude as small as riding an elevator in an office building and help navigate downtown corridors where skyscrapers block GPS satellites.

After explosive 46 percent growth last year, global smartphone shipments in 2013 will expand another 33 percent and then increase at smaller double-digit rates over the next few years, according to IDC analyst Ramon Llamas. Asia, where many consumers spend less on smartphones, is expected to be the main source of growth.

Citi analyst Glen Yeung downgraded his rating on Qualcomm's stock in July due to concerns the smartphone industry is running out of new ideas. He said that what smartphone makers do with chips and other components is becoming more important for innovating in phones than adding new hardware.

"When you think about the relationship between software and hardware, this is where it's all going. We're getting to a point where we're commoditizing the hardware. All the tools I need exist," Yeung said.

Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, the mobile industry's top chipmaker, disagrees. He says investors who believe that components are already mostly good enough are wrong.

"We're building new radio designs specifically for the idea of the digital sixth sense, of having notifications, discovery of stuff that's around you," Jacobs told Reuters recently.

Chipmaker Nvidia says games on future smartphones and tablets will use cameras and other sensors to add immersive experiences, making the player's environment part of the game.

"End users have to have better experiences. If you just deliver a new chip but don't have the software to build on that ... then the end user isn't going to see any difference, and hence you get a gold iPhone," said Matt Wuebbling, director of product marketing for mobile.

Broadcom, which makes chips that handle wifi, Bluetooth and other kinds of connectivity, is also researching ways to improve how its radio chips interact with GPS satellites and sensors.

"There will be new connectivity technologies, more powerful devices, sensor integration and the integration for wearables," Broadcom CEO Scott McGregor recently told Reuters.

"It's not time to close the patent office yet."

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Claudia Parsons)