Index and Charles Dunstone buy into iZettle, the European Square
Carphone Warehouse co-founder Charles Dunstone and Index Ventures have invested €8.2m ($11.2m) in iZettle, Europe’s answer to mobile-payment firm Square.
Sweden’s iZettle operates a payment system for small or nomadic merchants – be they market traders, window cleaners or conference-goers – through a card reader that attaches to the bottom of an iPhone.
Supercomputing’s exascale arms race
A supercomputing race is taking place among leading nations to reap the economic benefits of reaching exaflop speeds, according to Steve Scott, formerly of Cray Inc and now Nvidia’s new chief technology officer.
“It’s really critical for industrial competitiveness, military superiority is not the most important thing anymore,” he told us, in the week Nvidia announced it would supply 18,000 of its Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to upgrade a supercomputer at the US’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Intel dissolves Digital Home
Intel has quietly ditched its Digital Home Group, which had championed the Smart TV category of internet-connected televisions – a target market for its Atom microprocessors.
The company made the high-profile appointment of Erik Huggers from the BBC in January to head what was described at the time as a “key strategic business for Intel”. An Intel spokeswoman said on Wednesday that Mr Huggers was remaining at Intel but Digital Home was not now considered a core business.
Tech news from around the web:
Research by Barclays has found that the Amazon’s Kindle E-readers will outsell the full-colour Kindle Fire in 2012, PaidContent reports. Barclays estimates that Amazon will sell 15.3m Kindle Fire tablets and 23.5m Kindle e-readers next year.
The death of Steve Jobs produced a wave of public grief. From accounts of his historical significance to highly personal reminiscences, it was a moment to commemorate a man who did more than anyone to shape the history of personal technology.
The death of Steve Jobs, announced tonight by Apple, was expected but still comes as a shock. There are very few business people who are truly irreplaceable but Mr Jobs was undoubtedly so.
Like many other people, I heard the news via his products – in my case through Twitter on an iPod Touch — and am writing this on a MacBook Air. Mr Jobs’ original vision of a world of personal computers came truer than even he imagined.
Remembering Steve – the world’s ‘one more thing’
Apple’s brief announcement on Wednesday evening of the death of Steve Jobs marked the beginning of a flood of tributes from business leaders and politicians, along with mass outpourings on social networks.
As Apple replaced the new iPhone 4S with a picture of its 56-years-old co-founder and chairman on the front page of its website, its board said: “We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today.”
Tim Cook, Apple chief executive, sent a message to staff and the Jobs family issued a statement. These and further reactions from President Obama to Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s co-founders, Twitter’s CEO, and Bill Gates are after the jump.
A round-up of reaction to the launch of the Apple iPhone 4S:
Apple has come under criticism for failing to manage expectations and speculation about a new iPhone model. Mashable comments that the company usually follows a policy of “under-promising and over-delivering” when it comes to product launches – citing the example of how Apple handled rumours of a retina display screen on the iPad2.
So what happened to the back channels this time? It seems especially odd, considering Apple is still trying to establish Tim Cook as an effective replacement for Steve Jobs, that expectations for his first event weren’t dampened accordingly. But only in the last few days did stories about the iPhone 4S begin to appear, and not from the usual trusted sources. The vast majority of the technology world was still expecting an iPhone 5, and with good reason.
Amazon entered the tablet battle this week, unveiling the Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet that will run on Google’s Android operating system.
While news of Amazon’s tablet was long-rumoured, the unexpected price point caused quite a stir with some commentators. Others saw the Fire as a game changing device for media consumption.
Amazon has launched a head-on challenge to the dominance of Apple’s iPad by unveiling a low-price tablet computer, in a move set to intensify competition over the way consumers enjoy books, music and video.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, launched a new series of Kindle products in New York on Wednesday, at a media gathering. He began his presentation with the launch of a new eReader - the black-and-white Kindle Touch priced at $99, as well as a Kindle without a touch interface priced at $79. But the much-awaited direct competitor to the iPad was the $199 Kindle Fire.
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