Technology news in brief

Monday, June 30, 2014

Facebook discloses workforce diversity

Facebook Inc. said its workforce is 31 percent female, the fourth major technology company to report its numbers amid a Silicon Valley debate over diversity.

Facebook, whose Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has been vocal about the need for women to be represented in leadership roles, said women make up 15 percent of technical employees and 23 percent of senior managers. Ninety-one percent of employees at the world's largest social-networking service are white or Asian, the company said in a blog post Wednesday.

The numbers from the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company are in line with those from Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and LinkedIn Corp., which made similar disclosures in the past month. The figures highlight a lack of members of minority groups and women at all of the companies, an issue that Sandberg helped bring into the spotlight with her Lean In campaign.

The numbers don't differ much from those of the other Silicon Valley Web companies. Google is 30 percent female, while Yahoo is 37 percent and LinkedIn is at 39 percent.

Facebook is the first to disclose the makeup of its technical workforce, which shows an even bigger gap -- 94 percent white or Asian, with only 3 percent Hispanic and 1 percent black.

Facebook said it's teaming up with several organizations, including the National Center for Women & Information Technology and the National Society of Black Engineers, to improve diversity.

-- Bloomberg News

Barnes & Noble to spin off its Nook unit

Barnes & Noble said Wednesday that it planned to spin off its Nook business, once viewed as the company's best hope for surviving in an age of a dominant Amazon.com, as a separate public company.

The announcement moves Barnes & Noble forward on a plan it has considered for nearly two years.

Over the past two years, the retailer has brought in Microsoft and the publisher Pearson as minority investors in the Nook business, in part to help defray the costs of building and selling e-readers.

But the Nook -- which Barnes & Noble once trumpeted as its best answer to Amazon.com and its Kindle device -- instead fell increasingly behind. Barnes & Noble has moved to downsize the unit, focusing more on media sales and teaming with Samsung to build the devices.

Revenue at the unit fell 22 percent in the fourth quarter, to $87.1 million, even as sales at physical bookstores and the college division rose. The Nook division cut its losses by 69 percent during the quarter, in part because of lower marketing expenses and other cost cuts.

"We believe we are now in a better position to begin in earnest those steps necessary to accomplish a separation of Nook Media and Barnes & Noble Retail," Michael Huseby, the company's chief executive, said in a statement. "We have determined that these businesses will have the best chance of optimizing shareholder value if they are capitalized and operated separately."

The separation of the Nook Media business is expected to be completed by March 30.

-- The New York Times

Bureau prodded on digital currencies

Bitcoin and other digital currencies will get more attention from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after prodding from a congressional watchdog.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, wrote in a confidential report last month that the bureau, created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul, needed to become more active in developing U.S. digital-currency policies. In a written response, the agency agreed.

"We're looking forward to increasing our involvement in formal working groups as they engage on specific issues relating to consumer protection," William Wade-Gery, CFPB's acting assistant director for card and payment markets, wrote in a May 6 letter to the accountability office.

While the report didn't specify the issues that should be addressed by the bureau, fraud and security have been serious problems for some bitcoin users. For example, an exchange based in Tokyo went bankrupt in February after losing most of its users' accounts to hackers.

"Thus far, interagency efforts have had a law enforcement focus, reflecting the attractiveness of virtual currencies to those who may want to launder money or purchase black market items," the accountability office said in the May report that was posted Wednesday after Bloomberg News wrote about its findings.

Bitcoins emerged in 2009 out of a paper written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, retailers selling items such as gummy bears and luxury homes have started accepting bitcoins, and new companies have begun offering ways to ease its use as a payment system.

-- Bloomberg News

Canadian Solar, Samsung to build plant

Canadian Solar Inc., the second-best-performing solar maker in the past year, agreed to build a utility-scale power plant in Ontario with Samsung Electronics Co.'s renewable unit.

Construction on the 140-megawatt Sol-Luce Kingston Solar PV project is planned for the third quarter, Guelph, Ontario-based Canadian Solar said Thursday in a statement. The power plant is expected to begin providing electricity to more than 16,000 homes in the second half of next year.

Canadian Solar expects to generate about $280 million in revenue from the project, according to the statement. This is the second solar power plant the company has agreed to develop with Samsung.

-- Bloomberg News

Google takes another run at TV system

Google Inc. still imagines a world in which people talk to their TV, commanding it to switch from ESPN to YouTube, start playing Orange Is the New Black on Netflix or answer "What's the weather like tomorrow?"

But nearly four years after struggling to achieve its vision and watching it flop, Google last week declared that it will try again. At the Google I/O conference for application developers, the company demonstrated a system that purports to tie various devices together to deliver quick access to movies, television shows, video games and Web videos on smartphones, tablets and TVs.

Google's new run at television validates the importance of owning a piece of the living room, said Colin Dixon of the tech consulting firm nScreenMedia.

The Android operating system simplified work for mobile device manufacturers and now powers about 70 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IHS. Forecast by MarketsandMarkets to be worth $265 billion by 2016, the smart-TV market could be far more lucrative for Google.

The reincarnation of the failed Google TV platform, known as Android TV, enters a world in which streaming apps from Netflix, Hulu and the content owners themselves have widened the availability of shows and movies online. Smartphones and tablets have introduced more than 1 billion people to the Google-backed Android system, and many of those users have become casual gamers.

Chris McKillop, engineering manager for Android TV, told software programmers last week that Google would require them to make apps that can be controlled by a simple five-button directional pad rather than a full keyboard and a smattering of buttons. Voice commands, of course, also work. The apps must use simple grid layouts that Google's dubbed the "Leanback" scheme.

Google will improve the interface, too. On the home screen, the most-used apps would be on the left to limit unnecessary scrolling, while specific content recommendations would go up top based on previous viewing, gaming or listening.

-- Los Angeles Times

Museum's robots interact with public

TOKYO -- The new robot guides at a Tokyo museum look so eerily human and speak so smoothly they almost outdo people -- almost.

Japanese robotics expert Hiroshi Ishiguro, an Osaka University professor, says they will be useful for research on how people interact with robots and on what differentiates the person from the machine.

The two life-size robots, which have silicon skin and artificial muscles, went on display Wednesday at Miraikan museum, or the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, in Tokyo, allowing the public to interact with them extensively.

In a demonstration, the remote-controlled machines moved their pink lips in time to a voice-over, twitched their eyebrows, blinked and swayed their heads from side to side. They stay seated but can move their hands.

In a clear triumph, one robot named Kodomoroid read the news without stumbling once and recited complex tongue-twisters glibly.

The robot, designed with a girlish appearance, can use a variety of voices, such as a deep male voice one minute and a squeaky, girly voice the next. The speech can be input by text, giving them perfect articulation, Ishiguro said.

There were some glitches -- such as the lips not moving at all while the robot spoke or the robot named Otonaroid staying silent twice when asked to introduce itself. But glitches are common with robots because they are delicate gadgetry sensitive to their environment.

The two robots were joined at the demonstration by the minimally designed Telenoid, a mannequin head with pointed arms that serves as a cuddly companion.

-- The Associated Press

Filipinos to get disaster alerts by phone

MANILA, Philippines -- The Philippines has passed a law that requires mobile phone companies to send early warnings to millions of people in the path of deadly typhoons, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in an effort to reduce high number of fatalities that occur almost every year.

The measure was in response to one of the deadliest typhoons ever to make landfall -- Typhoon Haiyan, which killed more than 6,300 people and displaced 4 million in the central Philippines last year.

The Free Mobile Disaster Act, which was signed earlier this month by President Benigno Aquino III but announced Friday, directs mobile phone operators to send out alerts about storms, tsunamis or other calamities whenever required by national disaster agencies.

Similar early warning systems are in place in several other countries, including Japan.

The Philippines is hit by about 20 typhoons a year in a region that generates some of the world's strongest tropical cyclones. It also sits along the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire where volcanic activities and earthquakes are common.

The new law says that the alerts should include up-to-date information sent directly to subscribers in or near the area to be hit by a potential calamity. The messages should also include contact information for local governments and other agencies and possibly details such as evacuation or relief sites and pickup points for those fleeing their homes.

-- The Associated Press

SundayMonday Business on 06/30/2014