(Reuters) - A visitor plays a Microsoft application on a mobile at the Microsoft stand during the Gamescom 2011 fair in Cologne August 17, 2011. REUTERS/Ina Fassbender
SAN FRANCISCO – Steve Jobs has been Apple's most recognizable personality, but much of its cachet comes from its clean, inviting designs. For that, Apple can credit its head designer, Jonathan Ive.
Ive, a self-effacing 44-year-old Brit, helped Jobs bring Apple back from the brink of financial ruin with the whimsical iMac computer, whose original models came in bright colors at a time when bland shades dominated the PC world. He later helped transform Apple into a consumer electronics powerhouse and the envy of Silicon Valley with the iPod, the iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.
In the wake of Jobs' resignation as CEO, Apple must show that it can keep churning out head-turning products even without its charismatic leader. Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, is now CEO, taking on the role of Apple's public face.
But in many ways the real pressure will fall on Ive to make sure Apple continues its string of gadget successes.
Ive, known to his friends as "Jony," has led Apple's design team since the mid-'90s. Working closely with Jobs, Ive has built a strong legacy at Apple, ushering in products that are sleek and stylish, with rounded corners, few buttons, brushed aluminum surfaces and plenty of slick glass.
Apple's pride in this work is evident even in the packaging: Open up any iPhone box, for example, and see Apple proudly proclaim, "Designed by Apple in California." Six of Ive's works, including the original iPod, are even part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
People who have worked with Ive describe him as humble and sweet, quiet and shy, but also confident, hard-working and brilliant. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design for MoMA, said she knows "hardly anybody that is so universally loved and admired" as Ive.
"Products have to be designed better now for people to buy them because of Jony Ive and Steve Jobs and Apple," Antonelli said. "All of a sudden people have gotten used to elegance and beauty, and there's no going back."
Design, as well as software that makes the gadgets easy to use, is a crucial part of setting Apple products apart from those of its rivals. Apple didn't make the first music player or smartphone, but it blew past rivals by making ones that looked cool and worked well.
Ive started out far from Apple Inc.'s Cupertino headquarters. He grew up outside London and studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in Newcastle, England. After finishing school, he co-founded a London-based design company called Tangerine. There, he designed a range of products including combs and power tools. It was through Tangerine that he first got to work with Apple.
In 1992, while Jobs was still in the midst of a 12-year exile from Apple, the company's design chief at the time, Robert Brunner, hired Ive as a senior designer. Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked under Ive at Apple in the `90s, believes Ive came because he understood Apple was different from other computer companies.
"He came to Apple to take that even further," Meyerhoffer said.
And Ive did, but not right away. Ive quickly became a leader, working as the creative studio manager and helping to build Apple's design team during a period in which the company struggled to innovate.
Apple declined requests for an interview with Ive. But during a 1999 interview with The Associated Press, Ive said that for years, designers would produce foam models of computers only to be sent back to their drawing boards because of managers' fixations with focus groups and marketing figures.
"We lost our identity and looked to competition for leadership," Ive said at the time.
Brunner left in 1996 and suggested that Ive take over the post, even though Ive was only 29. When Jobs returned from his exile and became interim CEO in 1997, he named Ive as senior vice president of industrial design.
With Jobs again at the helm and Ive as his style guru, Apple refocused around design and produced a hit that got the company back on track. Apple shook up the personal computer industry in 1998 with the candy-colored all-in-one iMac desktop, the original models shaped like a futuristic TV.
Unlike previous product attempts, the iMac concept was immediately embraced by the top decision makers at Apple, and the design went through very few revisions.
"We knew we had it when we saw it, and with Jobs' support we were able to make it happen," Ive said in 1999.
At a time when most computers were boxy and largely black, beige or gray, the iMac was bulbous and flashy. People snapped up 150,000 of them in the first weekend following its release. Apple sold 800,000 iMacs by the end of the year.
The iMac changed the way consumers thought about personal computers and about Apple itself. It gave Apple a vital boost that helped it usher in a new era of consumer electronics that were quirky, fun and colorful. The marketing team even teased consumers by encouraging them at one point to collect all five — strawberry, blueberry, grape, tangerine and lime.
With Ive in charge of design, Apple then bought out the first iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. In recent years, the company has largely dropped the bright color palette (though you can still find it on some iPods) in favor of black, white and silver hues. Yet they retained simplicity that made them approachable to everyone — from the tech geek to Grandma — as well as the curves, shiny surfaces and expensive appearance.
As a result, Apple's products are more popular than ever, allowing the company to surpass rival Microsoft Corp. last year as the most valuable technology company in the world.
"He wasn't responsible for them, but they definitely couldn't have done them without him," said Leander Kahney, who has written about Apple in several books and on his "Cult of Mac" blog.
Ive and Jobs have worked hand in hand and, in many respects, have contributed to each other's success. Ive has always been in contact with Jobs and speaks the same language as him, Antonelli said, and they clearly have chemistry.
Don Norman, who worked at Apple in the `90s as vice president of the company's advanced technology group, said that while Ive had good design ideas "sitting on the shelves," he needed Jobs to get those designs off the shelves.
"Jony has always been Jony — brilliant," Norman said. "What he needed was a Steve Jobs to say, `Make this happen.'"
Now, the test will be whether Cook can continue to keep that focus at Apple and encourage Ive to continue creating hits.
In a sense, the challenge won't be as difficult as it had been in the 1990s. Now that Apple has developed a style, it can build on it rather than try to reimagine it with each new product.
And that, Norman says, is now in Apple's DNA.
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Online:
Ive collection at MoMA:
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An man gestures before a computer screen in a file photo.
Credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder
By Dan Levine and Jim Finkle
SAN FRANCISCO/BOSTON |
Wed Aug 24, 2011 7:31am EDT
SAN FRANCISCO/BOSTON (Reuters) - Online data tracking service comScore Inc siphons confidential information including passwords, credit card numbers and Social Security numbers from unsuspecting users, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.
The proposed class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of two plaintiffs who downloaded comScore software, also says comScore scans all files on users' personal computers and modifies security settings, among other allegations.
The lawsuit against comScore, one of the leading companies that measures and analyzes Internet traffic, seeks an injunction against several alleged practices, as well as damages under U.S. electronic communications privacy laws.
ComScore collects data from people who get free software and chances to enter sweepstakes in exchange for their participation. It sells that information to more than 1,800 businesses around the world, including Best Buy Co, Facebook, Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc, according to comScore's website.
Concerns have surfaced about comScore's data collection practices in the past, though the complaint filed on Tuesday by Chicago-based law firm Edelson McGuire appears to be the first such legal action taken against the company.
The lawsuit says comScore's software scans all accessible files on a user's computer, as well as all files from other users on the same network, and transmits information about those files back to the company.
"We have reviewed the lawsuit and find it to be without merit and full of factual inaccuracies," said comScore spokesman Andrew Lipsman. "ComScore intends to aggressively defend itself against these claims."
Privacy advocates have grown more concerned about data collection, inadvertent or not, as people increasingly transfer tasks from shopping to banking onto the Internet.
Last year, Google Inc was criticized for its Street View cars, which roam city streets for mapping purposes, because they accidentally collected reams of data from open, unsecured Wi-Fi networks.
URGE TO PURGE
ComScore warns visitors to its premieropinion.com website that its software monitors all Internet activity, including filling a shopping basket, completing an application form or checking online accounts.
"We make commercially viable efforts to automatically filter confidential, personally identifiable information such as UserID, password, credit card numbers, and account numbers," the warning says.
"Inadvertently, we may collect such information about our panelists; and when this happens, we make commercially viable efforts to purge our database of such information."
In a 2008 blog post, comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said the company obtains consent from people before installing data collection software, and that it does not disclose personally identifiable information to its clients.
ComScore data is routinely cited in media reports about consumer preferences and social networking website use, among other topics.
The company's biggest customer is Microsoft, which accounted for about 11 percent of the $175 million it took in last year. Media companies like News Corp are also clients, according to the lawsuit, as is Reuters parent company Thomson Reuters Corp.
The lawsuit does not accuse comScore clients of any wrongdoing. Best Buy, Microsoft and Thomson Reuters spokespeople declined to comment. Representatives for Facebook, Yahoo and News Corp were unavailable to comment.
EMBEDDED
According to the lawsuit, comScore attracts some users by advertising on websites. But the lawsuit also accuses comScore of using subsidiaries with innocuous names to disseminate its software and gain access to millions of consumers' computers and networks.
ComScore software is embedded in free screensavers, games and other applications without proper notice, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in a Chicago federal court.
Once downloaded, comScore software modifies a computer's firewall settings and gains full rights to access and change any file on the computer, the lawsuit says.
It is nearly impossible to disable the software once it is installed, the lawsuit says.
Jay Edelson, an attorney who represents the plaintiffs, said his firm began its investigation of comScore in July 2010.
"We retained multiple digital forensic firms, who each conducted dozens of independent tests," Edelson said.
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, is Mike Harris and Jeff Dunstan, individually, and on behalf of a class of similarly situated individuals v. comScore Inc, case no. 11-cv-5807.
(Editing by Ted Kerr and Robert MacMillan)
original content on reuters
1 of 2. A Motorola Droid phone is seen displaying the Google search page in New York August 15, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid
By Sinead Carew and Alexei Oreskovic
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO |
Tue Aug 16, 2011 1:25am EDT
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc's biggest deal ever, acquiring Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc for $12.5 billion, is an attempt to buy insurance against increasingly aggressive legal attacks from rivals such as Apple Inc.
The acquisition of one of the mobile telecommunications industry's most storied names is Google co-founder Larry Page's boldest move since taking over as CEO in April, launching the Internet giant into a lower-margin manufacturing business and pitting it against many of the 38 other handset companies that now use its Android software.
Motorola Inc was split this year into two: Motorola Mobility, which got the faster-growing cellphone and TV set-top box businesses; and Motorola Solutions, which sells gear like walkie-talkies to corporate and government clients.
Google is paying a massive 63 percent premium to gain access to one of the mobile phone industry's largest patent libraries. The company had been under pressure to build a patent portfolio after losing out to Apple, Microsoft Corp and others in a recent auction of bankrupt Nortel's assets.
Unlike the Nortel deal and others, the fact that Google avoided having to compete in an auction for Motorola by engaging in exclusive negotiations for the company underscores the pressure it was under to bolster its patent portfolio. Paying such a rich premium even though it was the only buyer dovetails with analysts' view that the increasingly litigious posture its competitors have taken over intellectual property left the Internet search giant with no choice but to pay up.
"No matter how you think about this, you have to look at it through the spectrum of the Android ecosystem under incredible attack from an IP (intellectual property) perspective. And this is Google going out and trying to fix that," said W.P. Stewart Advisors Chief Investment Officer Jim Tierney. "The biggest implication here is that Google wants Android to be one of the dominant phone operating systems for years to come."
Wall Street quickly anointed Microsoft a winner in this deal, with Windows benefiting should the move spur current Android partners to explore other options.
The deal also stoked speculation that struggling Nokia and Research in Motion would become takeover targets themselves, sending Nokia's shares up 17.35 percent and RIM's up 10.3 percent.
Google made its first foray into hardware by co-developing the Nexus One phone with HTC in 2010 -- an effort that met mixed results. Monday's deal, however, could mark the start of a shift to an Apple-style model, integrating mobile hardware with underlying software.
"Google decided to cross the Rubicon on the device side," said Fred Huet, head of telecoms and media consultancy Greenwich Consulting. "There has been growing frustration (at Google) about the lack and speed of internet centric devices.
"With Nexus they tried to show the industry what they thought was the right evolution for handsets and it did not have an impact .... With the patents they make sure that Android stays strong."
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ...
The acquisition is likely to draw even closer regulatory scrutiny than usual, with the search leader already the subject of antitrust inquiries. Experts will want to review how it affects mobile industry competition.
But the deal -- which took Wall Street by surprise -- appears to mark a shift in strategy from Google's traditional Internet search and advertising empire and forays into video and social networking.
"The danger is that other handset makers feel disenfranchised," said Nomura Securities global technology specialist Richard Windsor. "Motorola is the weaker player. This could actually collapse the entire community."
Page, who also launched the ambitious Google+ social network since taking over as CEO, reassured investors on Monday this would not happen, saying Motorola will be run as a separate company licensing Android software in the same way as rivals like HTC Corp and LG Electronics.
Phone makers including Samsung officially said they welcomed a deal that will aid their own legal battles, but some analysts questioned the sincerity of those claims, noting that rival companies would now be unlikely to heavily promote Android since it would benefit a direct competitor.
Andy Lees, president of the Windows Phone Division at Microsoft, said in a statement that, "Investing in a broad and truly open mobile ecosystem is important for the industry and consumers alike, and Windows Phone is now the only platform that does so with equal opportunity for all partners."
Some analysts also doubt that Google will continue manufacturing handsets in the long term.
"We don't think they necessarily want to be in the handset business. They want those patents first and foremost," said Brian Pitz, an analyst at UBS. "This is really a game of protection."
Analysts say that Google's rivals are likely to continue to enforce their patent rights on mobile devices through legal means. Microsoft, for instance, recently settled a lawsuit with HTC over the Taiwanese company's Android devices. Oracle is also seeking billions of dollars from Google for infringing on Java patents. Analysts expect Apple to continue its increasingly effective patent war against its rivals as well, which could hurt Google by potentially raising licensing costs that need to be paid to Apple.
While Apple's iPhone leads in market prestige and is considered more innovative, Android has managed to quietly surpass it in market share. Android held a 43.4 percent share of the smartphone market at the end of the second quarter, ahead of Nokia's 22 percent, according to Gartner data. Apple ranked third with 18 percent, the data showed.
Shares of Motorola Mobility jumped more than 55 percent on the news, while Google shares fell by roughly 1 percent.
The deal values Motorola Mobility at $40 per share in cash, a 63 percent premium to its Friday closing price. The terms of the deal also features an unusually rich reverse breakup fee of $2.5 billion, according to a source close to the situation.
"It's a deal that will take time to pay off, but they have a lot of cash and they want to chase after profit," BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said.
The deal delivers a windfall for investors including Carl Icahn, Motorola's top shareholder with a stake of just over 11 percent. The activist shareholder had been urging Motorola to look into splitting off its patent business -- one of the biggest in the industry -- from its handset business, ranked eighth in the world by Gartner in terms of unit sales. In late July, Icahn even went so far as to estimate that Motorola could be worth $44 per share, or $13 billion in a sale.
Despite cashing out for $4 less than what he estimated the company was worth, Icahn said he was "quite happy with this result."
It's unclear how much Icahn spent on his stake in Motorola since he started scooping up shares in 2007, but regulatory filings indicate it may have been about $3 billion. His stake in Motorola Mobility is worth about $1.34 billion at the deal price, up by $520 million since Friday. Including his stake in Motorola Solutions, Icahn's total stake is about about $2.9 billion in the two companies.
INTO THE LIVING ROOM
As part of the deal, Google also gets Motorola's set-top box businesses, giving its nascent TV operation a much-needed boost by providing it with a more direct route into the home.
Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett noted that Google, a frequent disrupter of the pay-television market via its ownership of YouTube and launching of over-the-top TV products that allow consumers to get streaming video in the home, will now be one of its largest suppliers.
"It will be fascinating to see whether this tempers their enthusiasm for disruptive business models as they have to face the practical realities of satisfying their cable customers," said Moffett. "I think the cable industry would be delighted to see Google inside the tent."
Google said it expects the deal to close by the end of 2011 or early in 2012, and that it was confident it would gain the regulatory approvals required in the United States and Europe and the blessing of Motorola Mobility's shareholders.
Others aren't so sure.
"The legal question here is would this deal give Google the incentive to make Android less open or somehow discriminate against the other smart phone and tablet makers," said Beau W. Buffier, a lawyer with Shearman & Sterling LLP. "That will be the key issues in any review both here in the U.S. or in Europe."
The fact that the deal has the support of other major mobile device players who have a stake in the matter should help Google in the regulatory process.
Lazard advised Google on the deal, while Motorola used Centerview Partners and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst Partners, sources told Reuters.
(Additional reporting by Sayantani Ghosh in Bangalore, Nadia Damouni, Phil Wahba and Franklin Paul in New York, Lilly Kuo in Washington; Writing by Edwin Chan; Editing by Peter Lauria, Richard Chang, Phil Berlowitz)
original content on reuters
SAN FRANCISCO – It may be the boldest move yet by a company known for being audacious: Google is spending $12.5 billion to buy Motorola Mobility. But the big prize isn't Motorola's lineup of cellphones, computer tablets and cable set-top boxes.
It's Motorola's more than 17,000 patents — a crucial weapon in an intellectual arms race with Apple, Microsoft and Oracle to gain more control over the increasingly lucrative market for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
If approved by federal regulators, the deal announced Monday could also trigger more multibillion-dollar buyouts. Nokia Corp., another cellphone manufacturer, and Research In Motion Ltd., which makes the BlackBerry, loom as prime targets.
The patents would help Google defend Android, its operating system for mobile devices, against a litany of lawsuits alleging that Google and its partners pilfered the innovations of other companies.
In addition to the existing trove of patents that attracted Google's interest, Motorola, which introduced its first cellphone nearly 30 years ago, has 7,500 others awaiting approval.
Phone makers and software companies are engaged in all-out combat over patents for mobile devices. The tussle has been egged on by the U.S. patent system, which makes it possible to patent any number of phone features.
Patents can cover the smallest detail, such as the way icons are positioned on a smartphone's screen. Companies can own intellectual-property rights to the finger swipes that allow you to switch between applications or scroll through displayed text.
Apple, for example, has patented the way an application expands to fill the screen when its icon is tapped. The maker of the iPhone sued Taiwan's HTC Corp. because it makes Android phones that employ a similar visual gimmick.
The iPhone's success triggered the patent showdown. Apple's handset revolutionized the way people interact with phones and led to copycat attempts, most of which relied on the free Android software that Google introduced in 2008.
Android revolves around open-source coding that can be tweaked to suit the needs of different vendors. That flexibility and Android's growing popularity have fueled the legal attacks. About 550,000 devices running the software are activated each day.
Many upstart manufacturers, like HTC, had only small patent portfolios of their own, leaving them vulnerable to Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
Getting Motorola's patents would allow Google to offer legal cover for HTC and dozens of other device makers, including Samsung Electronics Co., that depend on Android.
The deal is by far the largest Google has pursued in its 13-year history. Motorola Mobility's price tag exceeds the combined $9.1 billion that the company has paid for 136 previous acquisitions since going public in 2004, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Buying Motorola also would push Google into phone and computer tablet manufacturing, competing with other device makers who rely on Android. The largest makers of Android devices are all supporting a deal that Google CEO Larry Page said was too tempting to resist.
"With mobility increasingly taking center stage in the computing revolution, the combination with Motorola is an extremely important step in Google's continuing evolution," Page told analysts in a conference call Monday.
Google pounced on Motorola less than two months after a group including Apple and Microsoft paid $4.5 billion for 6,000 patents owned by Nortel, a bankrupt Canadian maker of telecommunications equipment.
Leaving no doubt about the mounting antagonism among the companies, Google's top lawyer lambasted Apple and Microsoft for their legal maneuvering earlier this month in a blog post titled "When patents attack Android."
"We believe this acquisition was solely driven by the ongoing patent war," Sanford Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu wrote in a research note, referring to the Google deal.
Apple and Google were once so close that Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, sat on Apple's board. But Google has since rolled out Android and provided hardware makers a way to counter the iPhone and iPad. Schmidt resigned from Apple's board two years ago.
Microsoft, for years one of Google's most bitter rivals, is desperately trying to make inroads in the mobile device market. John McCarthy, an analyst with Forrester Research, says Microsoft may try to counter Google by pursuing a long-rumored takeover of its partner, Nokia.
Investors were betting on that possibility Monday. Nokia stock rose 93 cents, or more than 17 percent, to $6.29. Research In Motion stock climbed $2.55, or more than 10 percent, to $27.11.
Oracle Corp. is seeking billions of dollars from Google in a federal lawsuit alleging that Android owes licensing fees for using the Java programming language that Oracle acquired from Sun Microsystems.
Buying patent protection offered by Motorola Mobility will be expensive. Although Google has $39 billion in cash and can easily afford it, the price translates to $40 per share, 63 percent above Motorola's stock price before the deal was announced.
Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.'s stock soared 56 percent, or $13.65, to $38.12. Google Inc. lost about 1 percent and closed at $557.23.
The deal will test Page's ability to avoid a clash of cultures while he is still learning the nuances of the CEO job, which he took only four and a half months ago. With 19,000 workers, Motorola Mobility's payroll isn't that much smaller than Google's 28,800.
It's a coup for Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha and the company's largest shareholder, billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who had been pressuring Jha to cash in on the patent portfolio. With an 11.4 percent stake in Motorola Mobility, Icahn is in line to be paid more than $1.3 billion.
Motorola Mobility, based in Libertyville, Ill., has been struggling to come up with a product that has mass-market appeal since it introduced the Razr cellphone in 2005.
The company had some success with the Droid, one of the first phones to run on Android, but it now ranks a distant eighth in the smartphone market, with 4.4 million units shipped in the second quarter, according to research firm Canaccord Genuity. By comparison, the market-leading iPhone shipped about 20 million.
An attempt to counter the iPad hasn't paid off for Motorola Mobility, either. In an effort to drum up more demand, the company recently cut the price on the Wi-Fi-only version of its tablet, the Xoom, to $499 from $599.
The troubles saddled Motorola Mobility with a $56 million loss in its latest quarter, sinking the company's stock price to one of its lowest points since its January spinoff from the old Motorola Inc. The remaining part of that company now runs as Motorola Solutions Inc. In contrast, Google earned $2.5 billion in its most recent quarter ending in June.
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Svensson reported from New York. AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in New York contributed to this story.
original content on yahoo
