“Brands are over-obsessed with fans,” says Facebook adsales chief
Facebook’s Carolyn Everson, its vice president of global marketing solutions, put on an impressive display before the admen at the Cannes Lions festival on Wednesday, addressing many of the issues about which marketers have been concerned. Read more
Piers Morgan, David Simon and Aaron Sorkin argue over Twitter-speed news
Is social media the death of news reporting or its saviour?
If you ask screenwriters David Simon (The Wire) and Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing and Facebook movie The Social Network), Twitter and other social networks are sacrificing depth for speed – but Piers Morgan, the newspaper editor turned talk-show host, reckons a single tweet added half a million viewers to an onscreen interview with Charlie Sheen. Read more
Google’s Schmidt predicts widespread “tap and pay” within a year
Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, believes that a third of check-out terminals in retail stores and restaurants will be upgraded to allow wireless “tap and pay” from mobile phones within the next year.
Such a development will prepare the ground for what he believes will be a “trillion dollar” industry of mobile advertising and payments. Read more
Many ambitious technology entrepreneurs aspire at some point to relocate to Silicon Valley. But American Salman Malik has done the opposite and headed overseas.
The Princeton graduate co-founded Boston-based Firefly Network in the 1990s, before spending several years in the Valley working for Siebel Systems. Last year, he moved to the UK to take up the chief executive role at Brightpearl, a cloud computing software business in Bristol. Read more
Japan is famous for its fashionistas, but for one hour this month I can confidently claim to have been wearing one of the coolest jackets in the entire country.
Not because the garment in question has the kind of sharp lines featured in star designer Junya Watanabe’s Spring collection or the flowery fabric of a recent Yohji Yamamoto creation. In fact, the modest cotton zip-up would not look out of place on a production line worker. Read more
Shazam gets $32m to break into TV
Anyone holding up their phone to the ringing of the New York Stock Exchange opening bell and hoping to identify Shazam as the artist will have to wait a while longer. Another music discovery service, Pandora, had that ceremonial honour when it IPO’d a week ago, but Shazam has just announced a $32m funding round that puts off any immediate thoughts of going public. Read more
Can storage ever be sexy? Well, slap on Wi-Fi capabilities and a wireless media server to an external hard drive and it can start to look rather attractive.
That’s what Hitachi has done with its G-Connect 500Gb external drive launched today - the Wi-Fi lets the drive act as a local mini-cloud for serving movies, music and photos to iPads and other devices that lack its huge capacity to store media.
Hitachi adds mini-cloud to iPad
Can storage ever be sexy? Well, slap on Wi-Fi capabilities and a wireless media server to an external hard drive and it can start to look damned attractive. That’s what Hitachi has done with its G-Connect 500Gb external drive launched today – the Wi-Fi lets the drive act as a local mini-cloud for serving movies, music and photos to iPads and other devices that lack its huge capacity to store media. Read more
Tech stories from around the web:
Web-video site Hulu is considering whether to sell itself, according to The Wall Street Journal, as the fight over distributing TV online intensifies. Meanwhile the Los Angeles Times reports that Yahoo had recently approached Hulu to discuss a possible acquisition.
Amazon is set launch a range of own-brand tablet computers as soon as this August, DigiTimes says. Quoting Taiwan-based component makers, DigiTimes says the online retailer is targeting global sales of 4m units for 2011. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
