China :: Science & Technology

When Comcast announced that it would be partnering with Skype to bring video chat to the living room of its subscribers, there was some question about whether or not it would succeed where other home-video-chat services failed. For the service to really take off, it would need to be drop-dead simple: After all, Mom and Pop arent going to sign up if its not as easy to make a video call as it is to make a phone call. On the Comcast Voices blog on Thursday, the company showed off a couple of videos demoing exactly how it will do just that. The good news, not just for Skype but for Comcast subscribers, is that it looks like the companies succeeded in creating a service that virtually anyone can use. The key to the service, from a user-experience perspective, is that it doesnt try to do too much. In fact, its the lack of user distractions that really stands out. With a totally stripped-down user interface, the service is really just about making voice and video calls to other users. Meanwh

Tencent shopped again. Lin Nin, CEO of FTuan , a daily deal site in China, confirmed that Tencent invested in the company for an undisclosed sum. Tencent already had several group buying offerings, including QQTuan and Gaopeng , a joint venture of Tencent and Groupon, along with deal aggregator SOSOTuan . Obviously Gaopeng has neither adapted to Chinese market nor lived up to its parent companys reputation. With so many group buying initiatives, one just cant help but wonder what Tencent want to do with them. And also, Chinese group buying market has already showed signs of declining, according to a research by Tuan800 , a Chinese daily deal aggregator, in May therere over 4500 group buying sites in China but sales fell in 40 major cities month over month. Prior to that, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou had already showed signs of weakness in monthly sales; these three cities are separately the largest, second and third largest group buying market in China. Market Decreasing Amid Inte

When it comes to group buying daily deal sites, two of the key things that influences your decision to buy now is how many other people have bought the deal and how much time you have left. Obviously if you wanted a deal and thought it was going to run out soon, you would of course make the decision to buy it now. In China it is widely known that many of these group-buying sites manipulate some of these numbers to persuade potential customers to buy as soon as possible. Although many people have come to accept this practice as normal, some group buying sites diligently try to defend their reputation and gain respect from the public.So much so that some group-buying sites explicitly say theirnumbers are genuine and not misleading. The example below is from Noumi.com , one of the largest group buying daily deal sites in China. If you look at the yellow box, it translates to True sales number. We never fake sales numbers. Under Noumi.coms commitment section, they try to assure people thei

Werther (far left) at our Structure Big Data conference For anyone concerned about the difficulty of doing advanced analytics tasks with Hadoop, the answer might be just around the corner. A stealth-mode Palo Alto, Calif.based startup called Platfora is working to make Hadoop usable even for the non-data scientists among us. According to the details available on its website, Platfora is working on software that will let users do new kinds of processing with Hadoop via an intuitive and beautiful user experience. It will provide data science for mortals questions and exploration rather than walls of math. All of this sounds great, but it will be awhile until we see what Platfora has up its sleeve: Founder and CEO Ben Werther told me the company isnt releasing details right now but should have more to say in the three-to-six-month time frame. Werther was formerly the VP of products at DataStax, a startup software and services company dedicated to the Cassandra NoSQL database. At our Str

Something is percolating in Facebooks Seattle office. On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook Seattle the company plans to launch something awesome next week, according to a Reuters report published Thursday. The new product was developed at Facebooks Seattle office, he said. Facebook Seattle, which opened in March and currently has around 40 employees, is the companys only engineering outfit outside of its Silicon Valley headquarters. As of press time, Facebooks public relations team has not responded to GigaOMs request for comment on the impending launch. The new product could well be an iPad app, something that has been notably absent from Facebooks portfolio for some time now. According to reports published earlier this month, Facebook has been readyin g an iPad app for over a year and was in the final stages of testing as of mid-June. Meanwhile, the company is also understood to be building an HTML5-based platform to serve a mobile version of its si

Research in Motions declining fortunes have been well documented. Its losing momentum in sales as consumers drift to other platforms like iOS and Android. More recently developers have started to back off the platform , saying its not worth their effort. And now there are signs that the workforce is restless and concerned, potentially on the verge of losing hope. In an open letter sent to BGR , an unnamed senior exec lays out in painstaking detail where the company has gone astray and what it needs to get back on track. Though the post ends on a hopeful note, it is littered with doubt and fears, alternating with anger at the squandered opportunities the company has had. It is not surprising given the state of the company, but it shows how precarious things have gotten for RIM. RIM responded with a statement that questioned the veracity of the letter and provided some general upbeat talk about the companys efforts to weather its transition. But it doesnt address the major points raise