Listing its cars on Ebay was evidently not a novel enough gimmick to drive new sales to slumping Detroit automaker General Motors.

A month and a half after announcing their “virtual showroom”, America’s biggest automaker and biggest online auction site are calling off their partnership.

The trial  was set to end on September 30, and will not be renewed. The trial programme, which let California buyers haggle with local dealers online, was heralded as a “win-win for both sides” if it worked.

But after 50 or so days, it looks as if it didn’t. The Ebay site may have attracted 1.5m hits, producing 15,000 leads for dealers. But neither Ebay nor GM would say how many cars were sold, suggesting that the results were less than stellar. Continue reading "Ebay / GM call off partnership"

For all its talk of publicly sharing information with an ever-larger audience, Twitter kept curiously quiet when conversation turned to its own finances this time round.

It was first reported last week that Twitter was about to close a new round of funding. We confirmed as much yesterday, after new details of the funding emerged.

Insight Venture Partners, a New York private equity firm, and T. Rowe Price, a fund manager, are leading the $100m round, which values Twitter at $1bn. This is Twitter’s fifth round of funding, and brings total investment in the company to $155m.

But despite all the chatter, Twitter didn’t tweet about it. Continue reading "Twitter confirms new funding"

Starbucks unveiled a first-of-its-kind app today that lets users pay for in-store purchases using their iPhone, a move that could pave the way for a new generation of e-commerce applications on Apple’s popular phone.

With the Starbucks Card Mobile App, users can sync their prepaid Starbucks Card with the app, check their balance and refill it using a credit card. At some stores, they can also use the app to pay for Venti coffees and Frappuccinos.

When users select the “payment trial” function on the app, a QR code appears on the iPhone screen. A barista then scans the iPhone, deducting the cost from the Starbucks Card balance, and completing the purchase.

The trial is being rolled out at 16 locations in Seattle and Silicon Valley, where there is high usage of both iPhones and Starbucks Cards. But expect the programme to go nationwide soon, and for other retailers to follow. Continue reading "Starbucks app turns iPhone into a wallet"

It is perhaps with good reason that Larry Ellison does not speak in public that often. Whenever he does, the famously bombastic Oracle chief executive seems certain to trash his rivals, make bold predictions about Oracle’s future, and wander off topic.

Last night at a meeting of the Churchill Club, Mr Ellison said that Sun Microsystems was losing $100m a month as European regulators scrutinise Oracle’s proposed takeover of the struggling hardware maker.

On the economy, Mr Ellison said it would be at least another five years before the US begins to recover. He said it would not be a V shaped recovery with a sharp rebound, or a W shaped recovery with a double dip, or a U shaped recovery with a pause before an uptick, but an L shaped recovery — “down and not coming back up.” Continue reading "Larry Ellison on the economy, the cloud, and sailing"

This is a guest post from the FT’s media correspondent, Kenneth Li

Finding a good movie is generally a hit or miss proposition, Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, explained on Monday.

That’s a problem for Mr Hastings, whose billion dollar mail order movies rental business hinges on subscribers being progressively happier about what they watch next or risk dumping the service.

Netflix, which discovered early on that movies that were recommended generally pleased customers more than even new releases, spent a decade struggling to take the guesswork out of what to watch next and were unable to boost accuracy by 10 per cent.

Mr Hastings turned that challenge — telling customers what they want before they want it –- into a million dollar global challenge. The winners were announced today. Continue reading "Netflix’s Geek Super Bowl"

When Singularity University was announced in February, its organisers said that during the 10 week summer course, which concluded today, students would work together to solve humanity’s “grand challenges.” By combining their supposedly above-average wits with Silicon Valley’s latest technologies, the 40 or so SU students would find innovative solutions for perennial problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

The effort, backed by Google and NASA, came across as innovative, if a bit hubristic. With its emphasis on smarter-than-human computers, it also raised plenty of concerns. As we wrote at the time, “many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.”

At its closing ceremony today, four teams of SU students presented their projects. What emerged were not futuristic plans to embed computer chips in the brain and build super-smart machines, but noble (if half-baked) plans that leverage existing technologies to address important (if not entirely grand) challenges. Continue reading "Singularity University students graduate to the real world"

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, like so many private company bosses, is notoriously coy when it comes to numbers. He only periodically provides updates on the all-important number of active users (250m was the last official tally). And don’t bother trying to get Mr Zuckerberg to estimate revenues (unofficial estimates are $500m for the year). But in a rare moment of candour, Mr Zuckerberg provided Bloomberg with two interesting figures.

He said that Facebook plans to expand its headcount by as much as 50 per cent this year. The recession has resulted in a surplus of talented engineers, and Facebook plans to scoop up some of these workers while they are on the market. Though the engineers at FriendFeed were gainfully employed, Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed two weeks ago clearly fits into Mr Zuckerberg’s bulking-up strategy. Continue reading "Facebook’s growth spurt"

As Google celebrates its fifth anniversary as a listed company, the FT’s Lex column considers the search giant’s most costly acquisition — YouTube.

Bought in 2006 for $1.65bn in stock, the video streaming site has rocketed to a dominant position in online video . . . But Google shareholders are paying to provide the world with laughing baby clips. Estimates for the cost of streaming over 5bn videos a month range from $400m to $700m annually. While Google does not break out the figures, losses are likely to be in the hundreds of millions.

Google executives, at least, feel they are on the right track.  Last month they said YouTube was finally on track for its first profit.

Continue reading “YouTube”