When HTC chief executive Peter Chou said this month that he was on the lookout for further acquisitions, he wasn’t kidding. The Taiwanese smartphone company on Tuesday announced it had acquired Inquisitive Minds, a US company that developed Zoodles, a kids-friendly browser designed to give children a safe browsing environment.
Tech news from around the web:
Google is in talks with major record labels to expand its online music service and open an MP3 store that would compete with Apple and Amazon, the New York Times reports. The music store is expected to be linked to Google’s existing cloud service, Music Beta, which lets people back up their songs on remote servers and stream them to mobile phones and other devices.
Steve Jobs was a hero for many around the world, but in China, his status was almost mystical. Like his life, his death has captivated millions of Chinese Apple fans, and prompted some wistful questioning over whether China could ever have its own technology magician.
Already in Beijing, white flowers have appeared on the steps of the Apple store, while its iconic Apple logo will remain unlit until 10am on Friday.
Is the US ready for a Chinese Yahoo?
A leading US online media and communications firm owned and controlled from mainland China?
That spectre was raised on Friday by Jack Ma, head of Alibaba, as he announced his interest in buying Yahoo. After all the angst caused by US internet companies venturing into China in recent years, his declaration raises the possibility of an interesting reversal.
Google announced on Wednesday that it is spending more than $200m to build its first proprietary data centres in Asia, a move that reflects the growth in demand for internet and cloud-based services in the region.
These are not, of course, Google’s first servers in Asia, though they are the first in the region where Google is publicly disclosing their locations. They will also be the first that Google will build from the ground up, from acquiring the land to designing the customised servers.
If MiCloud had been launched this week in the US, it would have been just the latest entrant into the growing market of cloud-based services aimed at developers and small companies, a la Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud.
But the venture, a joint effort by MiTAC, one of the world’s biggest IT distribution and systems integrators, and Joyent, whose cloud services power LinkedIn, had its debut in Taiwan. There, it makes the claim of being the island’s first public cloud service.
It is no secret that HTC is keen to move beyond hardware manufacturing to online services and content – it had earlier acquired or partnered with, variously, a games provider (OnLive), a mobile video specialist (Saffron Digital), an e-books company (Kobo), and a music streaming service (Taiwan’s KKBox).
But its ambitions may range further still. Cher Wang, HTC chairwoman, recently revealed for the first time that the Taiwanese smartphone maker had considered acquiring a mobile operating platform.
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