Relive the magic moments of Google I/O 2013, including the keynote, sessions, Developer Sandbox, and After Hours.

www.netkaup.is

Google 

The world’s largest media owner, according to ZenithOptimedia’s Top Thirty Global Media Owners report.

It estimates that in 2012 Google accounted for 65 per cent of all internet searches across the world 82 per cent of all paid search advertising. With its investment in Youtube, ownership of Google+ and moves into mobile advertising – ZenithOptimedia estimates that Google has 15 per cent of display advertising worldwide

Top 30 media owners for 2012 (ranked by media revenue in $bn).

1	Google	37.9
2	The DirecTV Group	27.2
3	News Corporation	26.4
4	Walt Disney Company	19.7
5	Comcast	16.2
6	Time Warner	15.6
7	Bertelsmann	11.3
8	Cox Enterprises	11.1
9	CBS Corporation	10.8
10	BSkyB	10.2
11	Viacom	9.1
12	Vivendi	6.8
13	Advance Publications	6.6
14	Clear Channel Communications	6.2
15	Yahoo!	5.0
16	Gannett	5.0
17	Globo	4.7
18	Grupo Televisa	4.5
19	Fuji Media Holdings	4.5
20	Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings	4.1
21	Axel Springer	3.9
22	Mediaset	3.8
23	Hearst Corporation	3.8
24	JCDecaux	3.4
25	Asahi Shimbun Company	3.2
26	Microsoft	3.2
27	Facebook	3.2
28	ProSiebenSat.1	3.0
29	ITV plc	2.9
30	Sanoma	2.5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Leaked image spotted ahead of expected summer release

The Galaxy S4 mini was leaked on Samsung’s own website – and spotted by Israeli site tgspot

This image claims to show the Galaxy S4 mini (right) next to the full size S4, showing the smaller screen size of 4.3 inches on the mini compared to 5inches on the full sized handset

More…

• These shoes were made for charging: The footwear that can power up your iPhone as you walk
• Google Glass ‘eye wear’ is ‘potentially dangerous’ as it may stop users from seeing something ‘utterly obvious’

Another leaked shot of the Galaxy S4 mini, which according to Samsung’s own website, will be available in two versions

Still there?

Sorry for the big shocker. Almost a year after reports that Amazon was testing smartphones in Asia, half a year after rumors Amazon was buying a smartphone chip processor, a year after more reports that Amazon was building its own smartphone, five months after unveiling a notifications system that would look really nice on a smartphone, and six months after probably wild speculation that Amazon was going to unveil a smartphone for the pre-Christmas shopping spree in 2012, there’s yet another report that Amazon is building a smartphone.

But this one has a 3D screen.

The Wall Street Journal says that Amazon is building at least two smartphones, including a high-end model with 3D graphics and retina-tracking technology so that users can navigate content by “using just their eyes.” Plus an audio-only “streaming content device.”

Harrumph.

Amazon is almost certainly working on a smartphone and almost certainly planning to release it in 2013. There’s just too much smoke for there not to be fire. And having made its bet on digital content being the growth engine of the company’s future success — 12 of the 15 highlights in Amazon’s recent earnings release were about digital content — a smartphone that makes use of Amazon’s recently expanded app store and burgeoning virtual shelves of ebooks, TV shows, movies, and all other forms of digital content makes way too much sense.

But a couple grains of salt.

Amazon hasn’t made its bones in the tablet market by offering the absolutely latest and greatest technology but by presenting a solid product at a rock-bottom price. So I’m a little skeptical about all the wild 3D speculation — especially because that could be a sweet datapoint plant for the company to identify leak sources. And, in reality, a company the size of Amazon, like Apple, is working on many different projects at any given time. Some of them will come to market, and some of them won’t.

One company that can’t be happy about Amazon impending smartphone plans, however, has to be Google. Amazon has essentially hijacked Android for its Kindle offerings, taking the open-source mobile operating system that Google has developed, stripping out the Google app store, Google apps, and Google branding, and replacing them with its own offerings. Amazon will doubtless adopt the exact same strategy with any smartphone play — as Samsung might as well.

And, given the fact that Kindle is probably the leading Android-based tablet, it has the potential to do well in smartphones as well.

Of course, incumbent leader in Android sales Samsung might have a thing or two to say about that.

By Matthew Lynley

Samsung finally pulled the curtains back on the Galaxy S 4, its next flagship Android smartphone, at an event in New York today.

In addition to bumping up the size of the screen from 4.8 inches to 5 inches, the guts of the device also received a significant boost — putting it ahead of the major competition in many technical aspects.

Granted, we haven’t seen the Apple‘s AAPL +0.96% next iPhone model for 2013, but for the time being the specifications of the Galaxy S 4 are a significant upgrade.

In addition, the device also sports some new software features not seen in the competition, like the ability to interact with the phone using eye movement and hand gestures without touching it.

The Galaxy S 4 will be available late April on most major U.S. carriers, and will run the most recent version of Google‘s GOOG -0.46% Android operating system, called Jelly Bean.

In the meantime, here are how the specs compare with its predecessor and the iPhone 5:

Carriers

Like the iPhone 5, the Galaxy S 4 will be sold at the major U.S. carriers, as well as at U.S. Cellular and Cricket.

Screen resolution

Galaxy S 4: 1920 x 1080 pixels

iPhone 5: 1136 x 640 pixels

Galaxy S III: 1280 x 720 pixels

Pixels Per Inch

Galaxy S 4: 441 ppi

iPhone 5: 326 ppi

Galaxy S III: 306 ppi

Processor

Galaxy S 4: Qualcomm Snap QCOM -0.28%dragon Fusion Pro, 1.9 GHz quad-core processor; or Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, 1.6 GHz quad-core + 1.2 GHz quad-core processor (chip depends on market)

iPhone 5: Apple A6, 1.3 GHz dual-core processor

Galaxy S III: Qualcomm S4, 1.5 GHz dual-core processor

Display size

Galaxy S 4: 5 inches

iPhone 5: 4 inches

Galaxy S III: 4.8′ inches

Weight

Galaxy S 4: 4.59 oz

iPhone 5: 3.95 oz

Galaxy S 3: 4.69 oz

Memory

Galaxy S 4: up to 64 GB. 2GB RAM

iPhone 5: up to 64 GB. 1GB RAM

Galaxy S III: up to 64 GB. 2GB RAM

Camera

Galaxy S 4: 13 megapixel rear, 2 megapixel front

iPhone 5: 8 megapixel rear, 1.2 megapixel front

Galaxy S III: 8 megapixel rear, 1.9 megapixel front

Video Capture

Galaxy S 4: 1080p

iPhone 5: 1080p

Galaxy S III: 1080p

Battery

Galaxy S 4: 2,600 mAh

iPhone 5: 1,440 mAh

Galaxy S III: 2,100 mAh

Price

The iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III start at $199 on contract. The Galaxy S 4 has not been priced yet.

• android,
• Galaxy,
• Google,
• iPhone,
• Larry Page,
• samsung,
• Samsung Galaxy S 4,
• Tim Cook

• By Stephanie Mlot
• February 25, 2013

 PC MAGAZINE                www.netkaup.is  

                                            

Steve Wozniak, or Woz as he is known, was a co-founder of Apple along with the late Steve Jobs. He contemplates future technological breakthroughs that can help solve some of the world’s problems from personalized medicine to the production of energy.

The Company gets a little help from the Galaxy Note II with SAFE technology in making Unicorn Apocalypse come to life. Play Hard. Work Safe. The Next Big Thing for Business is Here. Learn more and join the conversation at :

http://facebook.com/samsungmobileusa

Samsung has announced a fourth-quarter profit for 2012 double what it was the year before, capping a record year for the company. The Korean technology giant made 20 trillion won ($18.8 billion) in profits in 2012 and 8.8 trillion won ($8.3 billion) in the fourth quarter alone. Revenue was boosted in part by record sales for Samsung’s high-end smart phones. The company launched 37 models in 2012, and its flagship, the Galaxy S III, sold 30 million units.

Analysts from Nomura and Macquarie Securities are projecting that Samsung’s stock will rise 40%-50% in 2013, on the back of a 35% increase in smartphone sales, to a mind-boggling 290 million units. Apple, by contrast, is expected to sell 180 million.

Samsung’s move into mobile devices seems especially savvy given stagnating sales of other consumer-electronics goods, such as televisions, where it faces stiff competition from cheaper Chinese rivals. Giants in mainland China like Huawei and Hisense, which made its stateside debut at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, are eager to take market share from Samsung, moving up from contract manufacturing to high-end branded products—which is exactly how Samsung became so successful.

However, it’s not all about mobile. Samsung is also projecting that it will becomethe biggest supplier of home appliances (like refrigerators and washing machines) by 2015.

Despite all this, Samsung is still not the most profitable technology company on Earth. Apple will retain that title through 2013, out-earning Samsung despite selling fewer phones and making none of the other products in which Samsung dominates, like chips and displays.

That difference in profitability reflects, in part, that fact that Samsung started out making parts and got into branded goods only later. The company’s diverse portfolio buffers it against the success or failure of any one product, but it also means that Samsung competes in increasingly commoditized products with manufacturers throughout mainland China and Taiwan.

They might out-compete it eventually. But for now Samsung can boast of being the largest vertically integrated technology company on the planet. It enjoys both healthy margins for its high-end products and huge volumes for its basic goods. Success across this spectrum should bolster the company’s fortunes through 2013, at least.

www.netkaup.is

November 25, 2012 12:00 PM PST

 

 

 

Jeremy King was ignoring the largest retailer in the world. For a month, he’d been getting calls from a Walmart recruiter. King was used to being wooed, since he was well known in Silicon Valley as an engineer who built key parts of eBay’s infrastructure. The calls kept coming. Finally, he picked up the phone and let Walmart know exactly what it would take to get him to interview. “I was like, ‘Why don’t you get the CEO on the phone–let him talk to me and then maybe I’ll come in?'” recalls King, who didn’t even know who the CEO of Walmart was. “I was being cocky. The CEO of the world’s largest retailer wasn’t going to meet with me just so I’d do an interview.”

The next thing King knew, Walmart arranged for him to join a videoconference with CEO Mike Duke. “It was the strangest thing,” King says. “Mike’s office in Bentonville is the original one that Sam Walton had, complete with 1970s wood paneling. I was looking at this video, thinking, Where is this place?”

Over the next 45 minutes, though, Duke made what King calls an irresistible pitch. After years of seeing his company lag online, Duke swore that digital was now a priority for Walmart. Duke had restructured the company, placing e-commerce on equal footing with Walmart’s other, much larger divisions. He had made serious investments in high-tech talent, acquiring several startups. One, a 65-person social media firm called Kosmix with expertise in search and analytics, was the impetus for Walmart rechristening its Valley operations “@WalmartLabs.” Duke was looking for people who would revive the company’s sites and services, and energize its entire culture. He hoped to turn a company famous for rigid, coldly effective business processes into one that’s flexible, experimental, and entrepreneurial. In other words, Duke wanted to inject a bit of Silicon Valley into Bentonville, Arkansas. In the summer of 2011, King signed up as CTO of Walmart.com. “We’ve hired hundreds of incredibly talented people, in Silicon Valley and around the world,” says Duke of his aggressive moves. “We are playing to win.”

WalmartLabs is now housed in a boxy office tower in San Bruno, California, a few miles south of San Francisco. In just over a year, it has helped Walmart.com revamp its search engine; presciently identified the potential of the now red-hot “social gifting” market, where companies use social media cues to suggest presents; and this fall launched a test that offers same-day shipping to customers.

This last move is a clear signal of Walmart’s serious intent to compete in digital e-commerce–and blunt the looming threat of Amazon, which has its own same-day shipping experiments. Having marginalized Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, Jeff Bezos has his eyes on a bigger target. Amazon has been moving aggressively to sell Walmart staples such as diapers, soap, pet food, and cereal, even letting customers subscribe for items they want to receive regularly. Walmart is the world’s biggest grocer, and a central part of its strategy is that the millions of folks who visit its stores weekly to buy food will purchase a lot of other stuff. That’s a key reason Walmart’s 2011 revenue of $419 billion dwarfed Amazon’s 2011 sales of $48 billion.

In e-commerce, however, Walmart is a distant challenger. The company has never broken out its Internet revenue, though in 2011, the analyst Internet Retailer estimated it to be $4.9 billion. In October, Walmart projected that global e-commerce would be $9 billion in the year ahead. Meanwhile, Amazon has been on a tear, with sales rocketing toward $100 billion annually in 2015. Analysts I spoke to believe Amazon has eaten into Walmart’s sales of books, music, DVDs, electronics, and even toys. “When people started to say that Amazon was going to be the Walmart of e-commerce,” notes Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce technology and consulting firm, “that’s when we started to see more signs of life from Walmart.”

It would be a radical oversimplification to chalk up Walmart’s digital revival solely to a hungry competitor (and Walmart execs often insist, perhaps a bit too strenuously, that they are not fixated on Amazon). No, Walmart needs to get digital because that’s where its customers are headed. Soon everyone’s phone will be smart enough for easy shopping. With Internet-enabled tablets selling for well under $200, lower-income families are already turning into online customers. “The way our customers shop in an increasingly interconnected world is changing,” Duke says.

“I’m not going to be Chicken Little and tell you the company is going to go away if we don’t get the Internet and mobile right,” adds Neil Ashe, the company’s top-ranking e-commerce executive. “We have an obligation to the mission to get this thing right because the customer expects it of us.” Like the best Internet companies, Walmart obsesses about its customers more than its competition.

In 2012, Walmart celebrated its 50th birthday. In its first 25 years, Walmart became the world’s biggest general merchandise retailer. But Sam Walton wanted to be a grocer as well. “A lot of people said that was crazy,” says Joel Anderson, the CEO of Walmart.com U.S. who joined the company in 2007. “Twenty-five years ago, we couldn’t even spell grocery. People thought we’d never figure it out.”

Anderson says the next 25 years are about becoming a digital company. “In the first few years, were we tinkering and experimenting and not moving? There’s some truth to that. But look at our history. When Walmart leans into something, it’s like a tidal wave.”

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In April 2011, Walmart bought Kosmix for a reported $300 million. Kosmix’s expertise lay in simplifying the sprawl of the web for users; its algorithms were novel because they tried to understand what a user wanted rather than just match her query text. For example, if a user searched for “presidential election,” Google would return pages that contain variations on that term. Kosmix could find pages that were part of that topic even if the pages didn’t contain the specific phrase. It then sorted them into categories such as candidate biographies, news stories, and polling data. Only in the past year have Google and Microsoft’s Bing added Kosmix-like topic pages to their search results, but Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, hit upon the idea way back in 2004.

Walmart wanted to apply Kosmix’s artificial intelligence to commerce, but it also wanted the real brains behind the tech. Harinarayan, 45, and Rajaraman, 40, both born and raised in India and graduates of the prestigious IIT Madras university, have been inseparable friends since they met as PhD students at Stanford in the 1990s. Both skinny and short, they have more than a passing physical resemblance, and they operate as a united pair. In the Valley, which loves its duos (such as Bill and Dave, Jobs and Woz, Ev and Biz), they’re known as Venky and Anand.

The pair first tackled the problem of organizing the web in 1996, when they founded Junglee.com. In 1998, Jeff Bezos acquired the company for $250 million in stock. He realized that Junglee’s technology would help its customers compare prices with other online stores, a bold move toward transparency that turned out to further solidify the company’s hold on those customers. Rajaraman became Amazon’s director of technology, while Harinarayan was charged with creating Amazon’s Marketplace, where any merchant could sell its wares on Amazon’s site. “I’d meet with Jeff for a couple hours every week,” says Harinarayan. “What we came up with in 2000 was pretty much what Amazon has executed on since then.” Analysts estimate 40% of the goods sold on Amazon are via Marketplace.

The duo left Amazon in 2000, and after a four-year stint as venture capitalists, founded Kosmix. The company had a unique ability to find meaningful information in the cacophony of the web. An application it built, called Tweetbeat, became one of the hottest ways to explore Twitter during the 2010 soccer World Cup, because it made it easy to discover who was talking about your favorite team or even individual players. That’s part of what lured Walmart execs–they salivated at the idea of bringing this kind of intelligence to shopping. People are always offering clues about products on social media–writing reviews, liking brands, checking into stores, announcing the products they want to buy.

And what lured Harinarayan and Rajaraman, besides the money? They saw an opportunity to do something more interesting than merely replicate their work at Amazon for its rival. (In a delicious irony, Bezos profited from the Walmart deal–he was an early investor in Kosmix.) “What has changed since Amazon became big?” Rajaraman asks rhetorically. “You can connect the social experience, the in-store experience, and the online experience. Nobody could do that.”

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When the Kosmix team landed at Walmart in the summer of 2011, they found a mess. “The only thing Silicon Valley about Walmart was that we had an office in Silicon Valley,” says Gibu Thomas, the senior VP who heads up Walmart’s mobile tech team and was one of the first executives to approach Kosmix about a deal. “It was run like a traditional IT organization,” he says, explaining that Walmart used outsourced, off-the-shelf systems to power key parts of its site. Worse, Walmart’s 27 worldwide subsidiaries used incompatible technologies; the sites did not connect seamlessly with the stores or with Walmart’s legendary supply chain.

Walmart.com’s search engine epitomized its failure. “Executives at Walmart–at the board level–were running searches and saying, ‘This is embarrassing,'” says Sri Subramaniam, the WalmartLabs exec who ran the rebuilding effort. If you used Walmart.com’s old search engine to check out “smartphones,” you’d get links to a couple of cell-phone chargers, not the iPhone. A “cotton socks” query returned results for cotton candy and balls of yarn.

The Kosmix team, so deeply ensconced in the ways of Silicon Valley, worried that cultural differences would hamper their efforts to turn the site around. “My first reaction was, Wow, this is going to be interesting,” says Chris Bolte, who works on Walmart’s search marketing systems. But those fears proved unfounded. More than a half-dozen people on both sides of the acquisition say that Kosmix’s integration into Walmart was amazingly smooth. “I think part of it was that Walmart knew that they needed us, that this was a turnaround situation,” Subramaniam says.

Their first job was to create a new search engine. It took just 10 months, with just a dozen or so engineers. Walmart will not discuss specific sales figures, but execs report that the improved search tools have increased the number of people who are converted from visitors to buyers on Walmart.com by as much as 15%. If you search for cotton socks now, you’ll actually find them.

When Harinarayan and Rajaraman transformed Kosmix into WalmartLabs, they put roughly half the staff on such boring but crucial tasks. They deployed the rest as true lab workers, with the freedom to experiment in small teams on far-flung new ideas. “We organize these teams as mini startups with six to eight people,” says Harinarayan, who learned from Bezos’s organizational innovation of so-called two-pizza teams. “One person acts as CEO, and they have a clear business goal. We step out of the way and let these guys run it.”

One of the first projects born from this approach was Shopycat, a gift-recommendation app that Walmart.com launched on Facebook before the 2011 holidays. Shopycat scans your friends’ profiles to identify interesting gift ideas from their stream of likes, comments, and status updates, discerning if the “Ted” your pal is raving about is the geeky ideas festival or the Seth MacFarlane stoner comedy. Shopycat then seeks out an appropriate gift for such a stoner/thinker from Walmart’s product database. Walmart says Shopycat led to an increase in purchases on the site, though it won’t say by how much. For the 2012 holidays, the team built Shopycat into a section of Walmart.com called Walmart Gifts; customers will log in with their Facebook or Twitter account to get personalized recommendations.

Another clever retail application of WalmartLabs’s core technology has been to use spikes in social network chatter to predict demand for out-of-the-ordinary products. Last year, the team correctly anticipated heightened customer interest in cake-pop makers based on social media conversations on Facebook and Twitter. A few months later, it noticed growing interest in electric juicers, tied in part to the popularity of the juice-crazy documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. The team sends the data to Walmart’s buyers, who right now are only using it to confirm its other research. But as these signals become stronger, execs say it will play a larger role in purchasing decisions.

WalmartLabs has also created projects that just get customers to think differently about Walmart and e-commerce, including Get on the Shelf, an online contest for people to submit their own inventions to go on sale at Walmart. Get on the Shelf was a social marketing blockbuster, garnering more than 4,000 submissions, over 1 million votes, and news hits in small towns across America. Then there’s Goodies, a subscription service in which Walmart customers pay seven dollars a month for home delivery of a gourmet food box–creating a discerning test market for the grocer in the process.

By themselves, none of these projects will single-handedly boost Walmart’s e-commerce business. Taken together, though, they showcase a new dynamism at the retailing giant. “We’re going to find ways to live at the edge,” says Walmart e-commerce exec Ashe. “Every three or six months, you’ll see something come out from us that will make you say ‘Wow.’ ”

The next step, says Harinarayan, is about “scaling up Labs.” But he and Rajaraman won’t be part of it: In June, Harinarayan and Rajaraman announced that they were leaving WalmartLabs. To many outsiders, the abruptness of the founders’ departure seemed troubling. It had been only a year since the acquisition, and they hadn’t completed the “earn-out” phase, meaning they wouldn’t receive their full share from the sale. Was their departure a sign that dynamic tech entrepreneurs felt smothered by Walmart’s corporate culture? Or was it that Walmart could no longer tolerate leaving these hands-off leaders in charge?

Harinarayan and Rajaraman dismiss the speculation. They say they had spent eight years on the startup, and they were simply ready for time off. One Friday not long after the announcement, I meet Harinarayan at a coffee shop across the street from Kosmix’s first office in downtown Mountain View. He’s the picture of a relaxed man. After chatting about Walmart and Amazon for an hour, he told me he was free to keep talking, as he didn’t have anything else to do that day. And he is quite sanguine about walking away from the money. “Given the fortune that Anand and I have had in our careers, if you’re doing anything just for money, at this point it’s going to be the wrong thing to do.”

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Jeremy King took over as the head of WalmartLabs, and to get a sense of where he will bring the skunk works, I visit the gleaming new Walmart store off the Almaden Expressway in San Jose where Jonathan Sherman, a WalmartLabs product manager, gives me a peek into the digital dimension being woven into this temple of American retail.

That future begins, like everything else, with a smartphone app. Walmart imagines that as you go through an average day, you’ll remember things you need–milk, bread, a new tennis racquet, a toy truck for your nephew’s birthday–and tell the voice-enabled Walmart app. The app will list each item’s location inside your local Walmart and include product info; eventually, it will also learn your preferences and offer recommendations. And once you’re actually in the store, you’ll be able to summon an associate to help you.
Walmart’s current iPhone app has only a few of these features: The voice-list system works very well, and, depending on which store you’re in and what you’re looking for, the app can sometimes locate your product.

At the moment, though, it won’t show you extensive product info for all items, and it won’t summon store help. The company has begun to test mobile checkout in select stores. As part of it, Walmart presents customers with a running tally of their total bill as they shop, the first explicit nod in my journey through WalmartLabs to the fact that millions of Walmart shoppers are on tight budgets.

This effort to reinvent the in-store shopping experience is an argument that Walmart’s physical stores are a great asset, not a liability. “We are uniquely positioned to give customers anytime, anywhere access to Walmart by combining the smartphone, online, and the physical stores,” Duke says. “Ultimately, that will give us an edge over any competitor.” When I ask Walmart executives about Amazon’s moves to offer more customers next-day and same-day shipping, many were amused. “It’s fun to see them trying to be us,” says Walmart.com CEO Anderson. “We have more than 4,000 forward-deployed fulfillment centers and we’re already doing shipments from some of them. Some people call them stores.”

“If you think about the last 20 years of retail, how people shop in a store has not changed,” Thomas says. “The question we’re asking is, how do you bring to a store the capabilities that have made e-commerce successful? With 200 million customers a week, if you can increase the average basket size by a dollar–that’s billions of dollars every year.” In fact, it’s more than $10 billion–more than its projected annual e-commerce revenue this year.

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If Walmart fails in its digital transformation, it won’t be for lack of resources or possibilities. Ninety-six percent of Americans live within 20 miles of a Walmart. No one has as much money; no one has a better supply chain; no one has such a close connection with so many customers. Walmart execs know this. “We’ll spend more on capital expenditures this year than Amazon has spent in its entire history,” Ashe tells me (hyperbolically).

That size, however, is also Walmart’s greatest enemy. WalmartLabs’s two-pizza teams can come up with a thousand innovative ways to improve shopping, online and off, but none matter if the company’s execution is slow and bureaucratic. And the fact is that implementing these ideas will always be complex. Every change to how items are delivered, or how customers navigate stores, or how applications work with the company’s existing IT structure is a maneuver that requires the coordination of thousands of moving parts.

But Walmart can succeed online without becoming the Amazon of the web. The phrase I hear most often from Walmart people is that the only way the company will win online is “by being Walmart.” And they’re right. Walmart doesn’t need to be something radically different. The company that mastered IT in the service of unbeatable prices must now master web technology. It doesn’t need to chase Amazon so much as it needs to identify how a digital Walmart can be as much a part of its customers’ lives as the stores are today.

And it has to think long term. It may take a decade or more for Walmart to be a successful digital retailer. “Somebody at one of the board meetings asked me, ‘Neil, how long is this going to take, and how much is it going to cost?'” Ashe recalls. “And I said, ‘It’s going to take the rest of our careers, and it’s going to cost whatever it costs. Because this isn’t a project, this is the company.'”

www.netkaup.is

Apple iPhone 5: Everything You Need to Know

J. C. PenneyCompany, Inc. (“jcpenney”) (NYSE:JCP) revealed its plans to become America’s favorite store. In a presentation titled “In Praise of Fresh Air,” Ron Johnson, the Company’s chief executive officer, and Michael Francis, its president, detailed the initiatives that will transform the jcpenney shopping experience by fundamentally re-imagining every aspect of the Company’s business and boldly pursuing change.

“The department store is the number one opportunity in retail today. We are going to rethink every aspect of our business, boldly pursue change, and create long-term shareholder value, as we become America’s favorite store. Every initiative we pursue will be guided by our core value to treat customers as we would like to be treated – fair and square. Beginning February 1, we will have Fair and Square Pricing, making every day a great day to shop. We will create tremendous excitement through monthly promotions that are in sync with the rhythm of our customers’ lives. And we will transform each and every jcpenney store over the next four years with a month-by-month, shop-by-shop roll-out of exciting new merchandise initiatives,” Mr. Johnson said.Fair and Square Pricing and Monthly Promotions in Sync with Customers’ Lives:
During the presentation, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Francis introduced a new pricing strategy called Fair and Square, which includes three types of prices. Everyday, regular prices, which are always great; Month-Long Values, even better prices on the things you need now; and Best Prices, jcpenney’s lowest prices, which always happen on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of every month as jcpenney makes room for exciting new merchandise. These prices will be coupled with a new promotional cadence that is in sync with customers’ lives. Rather than inundating the customer with a relentless series of sales, coupons, rebates and retail gimmicks, jcpenney will host 12 promotional events each year, on a monthly calendar. Each month will include even better values on the things customers are looking to buy during the month and a host of exciting products and services that are unique to the month.Commenting on the new monthly calendar, Mr. Johnson said, “We want customers to shop on their terms, not ours. By setting our store monthly and maintaining our best prices for an entire month, we feel confident that customers will love shopping when it is convenient for them, rather than when it is expedient for us.”Re-inventing the In-Store Experience around New and Transformed Brands:
At the event, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Francis also outlined plans to entirely re-invent the jcpenney store experience, to include Main Street — the entire store merchandised in a series of 80 to 100 brand shops, rather than the confusing and seemingly endless racks common in department stores today. It will also feature Town Square — an exciting new place that replaces the traditional retail center core of a department store with a series of services, which customers will enjoy before they buy, while they shop and afterwards. And, throughout, the new jcpenney store experience will merge the physical and digital worlds, assuring the physical retail stores’ vital role as the centerpiece of retailing’s future.They also gave a sneak peek into the exciting new brands that will be featured in jcpenney’s brand shops. They include Martha Stewart® and l’amour nanette lepore™, which were shown at the event today, among many others. jcpenney also announced plans to transform its customers’ favorite existing brands, including, IZOD®, Liz Claiborne® and The Original Arizona Jean Company®, which were also featured at today’s event, and a number of others. jcpenney expects to feature 30 new and transformed brands by fall 2012.o Launching a new jcpenney brand identity, new logo, new look and Ellen!
In celebration of the complete transformation of its shopping experience, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Francis gave an overview of the new jcpenney brand identity. It includes:o The new jcpenney logo, which combines the elements that have made jcpenney an enduring American brand, by evoking the nation’s flag and
jcpenney’s commitment to treating customers Fair and Square. The square frame imagery will be evident throughout all of jcpenney’s marketing, to remind customers to frame the things they love.o New brand marketing to showcase great product in an exciting new way, to solidify jcpenney’s relationship with its loyal customers and entice new ones. This includes the new monthly book, beginning next month, that millions of Americans will receive, which includes 96 pages of highlights for that month, as well as an entirely new look for jcpenney stores in terms of signage and presentation.o Welcoming Ellen DeGeneres back to jcpenney, as jcpenney’s new brand partner. Ellen began her career in her teens as a jcpenney associate and now, as one of the country’s most beloved television personalities, she will help bring the new jcpenney experience to life in her own fun-loving, sneaker-wearing, laughmaking way.Mr. Francis said, “We are redefining the jcpenney brand so we become a store for all Americans, by offering an experience they cannot get anywhere else. This will start by freeing consumers from the barrage of promotions and undifferentiated shopping experiences they have become used to and replacing it with something entirely fresh and new that is evident in every aspect of our store – new brands, new marketing, unique attractions, and much more. Beginning on February 1, our customers will see immediate changes that give a sense of how we will transform jcpenney over the next four years. It will be a breath of much-needed fresh air and give them reasons to visit jcpenney more often than ever before. Our objective is to make our customers love to shop again and across jcpenney, we’re very excited about the changes to come.”The Transformation Begins on February 1
The Company will begin the transformation of the jcpenney shopping experience on February 1, with the implementation of its new logo, pricing strategy and monthly cadence, including new instore signage reflecting true price clarity as well as edited merchandise assortments for the monthly store set.Then, beginning in August of this year, jcpenney will begin a month-by-month, shop-by-shop strategy to update all stores with new and exciting merchandise and presentation. Two to three shops will be installed monthly, each and every month, over a four-year transformation period, including the debut of Town Square during 2013. These initiatives will culminate in the complete transformation of jcpenney by the end of 2015.For additional information on Ellen DeGeneres’ new role as jcpenney’s brand partner and jcpenney’s new brand partnership with Nanette Lepore, please see the separate press releases that the Company issued today on each of these exciting initiatives.Tomorrow, as previously announced, the Company will hold a presentation and Q&A session for analysts and investors beginning at 9:00 am ET through 10:30 am ET, to discuss the financial components of its transformation plans and financial outlook. For webcast and conference call
dial-in information, please visit http://ir.jcpenney.com.About J. C. Penney Company, Inc.
Over 110 years ago, James Cash Penney founded his company on the principle of treating customers the way he wanted to be treated himself: fair and square. Today, rooted in its rich heritage, J. C. Penney Company, Inc. (NYSE: JCP) is re-imagining every aspect of its business in order to reclaim its birthright and become America’s favorite store. The Company is transforming the way it does business and remaking the customer experience across its 1,100 jcpenney stores and on jcp.com. On every visit, customers will discover straightforward Fair and Square Pricing, month-long promotions that are in sync with the rhythm of their lives, exceptionally curated merchandise, artful presentation, and unmatched customer service.For more information about jcpenney, visit jcp.com.
This release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect the Company’s current views of future events and financial performance, involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the Company’s actual results to be materially different from planned or expected results. Those risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic conditions, including inflation, recession, unemployment levels, consumer spending patterns, credit availability and debt levels, changes in store traffic trends, the cost of goods, trade restrictions, changes in pricing strategies, changes in tariff, freight and shipping rates, changes in the cost of fuel and other energy and transportation costs, increases in wage and benefit costs, competition and retail industry consolidations,interest rate fluctuations, dollar and other currency valuations, the impact of weather conditions, risks associated with war, an act of terrorism or pandemic, and a systems failure and/or security breach that results in the theft, transfer or unauthorized disclosure of customer, employee or Company information and legal and regulatory proceedings. Please refer to the Company’s most recent Form 10-K and subsequent filings for a further discussion of risks and uncertainties. Investors should take such risks into account when making investment decisions. We do not undertake to update these forward-looking statements as of any future date.