Amazon Executive on Why the Fire Phone Failed to Take Off

Amazon's top executive David Limp in an interview on Thursday admitted that the company got the pricing of the phone wrong.
Speaking to Fortune, David Limp, Senior Vice President of Devices, said that "We didn't get the price right, [...] I think people come to expect a great value, and we sort of mismatched expectations. We thought we had it right. But we're also willing to say, 'we missed.' And so we corrected."
The Amazon Fire Phone was launched in June. The company had priced the 32GB model at $199 (approximately Rs. 12,000) and 64GB model at $299 (approximately Rs. 18,000).
The company's splashy launch of its Fire phone was quickly followed by mediocre reviews and a steep price cut to entice buyers.
(Also see: Amazon Fire Phone Review)
In September, along with release of the phone in Germany and UK, Amazon slashed the pricing of the Fire Phone as low as $1 (approximately Rs. 60) in the US.
The price was cut from $199 to less than $1 for US customers opting for a two-year contract with AT&T. Similarly, in Germany, consumers could buy the Fire Phone at EUR 1 (approximately Rs. 77) via Deutsche Telekom contract. In Britain, the company didn't even charge any upfront cost in partnership with the carrier operator O2.
The company had also slashed the pricing of the unlocked variant of Fire Phone to $449 (approximately Rs. 27,000), from $649 (approximately Rs. 39,000) at launch.
While reporting its recent quarterly earnings, Amazon said it took a charge of $170 million related to "inventory evaluation and supplier commitment costs" for the Fire, although it did not give further details. Amazon has about $83 million of Fire phone inventory at the end of the quarter.

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NSA hacks into email servers of Chinese tech giant Huawei

US intelligence agencies hacked into the email servers of Chinese tech giant Huawei five years ago, around the time concerns were growing in Washington that the telecommunications equipment manufacturer was a threat to US national security, two newspapers reported Saturday.
The National Security Agency began targeting Huawei in early 2009 and quickly succeeded in gaining access to the company's client lists and email archive, German weekly Der Spiegel reported, citing secret US intelligence documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The New York Times also published a report Saturday about the documents.
Huawei objects to activities that threaten network security, said William B. Plummer, the company's vice president of external affairs.

The National Security Agency began targeting Huawei in early 2009 and quickly succeeded in gaining access to the company's client lists and email archive, says a report.

"Huawei has declared its willingness to work with governments, industry stakeholders and customers in an open and transparent manner, to jointly address the global challenges of network security and data integrity," Plummer said in an email. "The information presented in Der Spiegel and the New York Times article reaffirms the need for all companies to be vigilant at all times."
Among the people whose emails the NSA was able to read were Huawei president Ren Zhengfei, Der Spiegel said.
The operation, which Der Spiegel claims was coordinated with the CIA, FBI and White House officials, also netted source codes for Huawei products. One aim was to exploit the fact that Huawei equipment is widely used to route voice and data traffic around the world, according to the report. But the NSA was also concerned that the Chinese government itself might use Huawei's presence in foreign networks for espionage purposes, it said.
In response to the Der Spiegel report, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said the agency doesn't comment on specific alleged activities. She reiterated the NSA's position that its activities are aimed only at "valid foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements."
"In addition, we do not use foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of - or give intelligence we collect to - US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line," Vines said in a statement emailed to The Associated Press.
In 2012, the House Intelligence Committee recommended that Huawei be barred from doing business in the US, citing the threat that its equipment could enable Chinese intelligence services to tamper with American communications networks.
In January, the company rejected a previous Der Spiegel report claiming that its equipment was vulnerable to hacking. The magazine had reported that the NSA was able to install secret "back doors" in telecoms equipment made by Huawei and other companies.
Der Spiegel's latest report claims the NSA also targeted top Chinese officials, such as former President Hu Jintao, as well as ministries and banks.

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Facebook unveils new programming language, Hack

 It is called Hack but it has little to do with hacking. It is a new programming language designed by Facebook that lets programmers build complex websites and other software quickly and without many flaws.
"We can say with complete assurance that this has been as battle-tested as it can possibly be," Bryan O'Sullivan, the Facebook engineer behind the language, said in a statement.
Experts say Hack is a new version of PHP -- the language Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used when he started building Facebook.
Hack too runs on the Hip Hop Virtual Machine but it lets coders use both dynamic typing and static typing. For the next decade, Zuckerberg and his rapidly growing company continued to build their site with PHP.
But as a PHP site grows, you need far more computer servers to run the thing than you would with other languages and it can be difficult to manage all your code and keep it free of bugs.
Hack makes it easier to manage code and eliminate errors. It provides these benefits without slowing down the developer. Unlike other statically type languages, Hack can run without compiling.
"You edit a file and you reload a web page and you immediately get the feedback. You get both safety and speed," O'Sullivan added.

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Apple might launch iTunes for Android because music downloads are down

Apple is thinking of launching an iTunes app for Android, as well as an on-demand streaming service similar to Spotify, Billboard reports.

This is likely because downloads of music from iTunes are in decline as more and more people transitioning to streaming music services like Pandora, Spotify, Beats Music and Rdio.

Thanks to those streaming services, the music industry was able to sustain revenues of $7 billion, nearly the same as it has been since 2009, the RIAA says. It's neither growing nor shrinking at this point.

Digital downloads still brought in the most revenue to the music industry, but a 1% decline to $2.4 billion suggests that people are moving away from purchasing music and moving toward streaming services.

That's why it's no wonder Apple launched iTunes Radio, a streaming version of iTunes that competes directly with Pandora. Apple is reportedly working on a standalone app for iTunes Radio so that it can better target Pandora.

With an iTunes app for Android, Apple could even further compete with Pandora, and also potentially increase music downloads.

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Microsoft charged FBI for user data: SEA

WASHINGTON: Hactivist group, Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), has reportedly revealed documents indicating how much software maker Microsoft was charging a secret FBI division to legally collect and view customer data.
The SEA revealed hacked emails and invoices documenting months of transactions between Microsoft's Global Criminal Compliance team and the FBI's Digital Intercept Technology Unit (DITU).
According to The Verge, it was found that every time the DITU requested customer information, Microsoft charged anywhere from $50 to $200 for the transaction.
The most recent invoice for November 2013 totaled to a whopping $281,000.
Although, none of the two parties confirmed the validity of the documents, a Microsoft spokesperson said that it was nothing unusual as under the US law, companies could seek reimbursement for costs associated with complying with valid legal orders for customer data.
The DITU allegedly requested information from Microsoft hundreds of times a month, the report added.

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Microsoft admits to snooping on Hotmail to track leak

LOS ANGELES: Microsoft, which has skewered rival Google for going through customer emails to deliver ads, has acknowledged it had searched emails in a blogger's Hotmail account to track down who was leaking company secrets.

John Frank, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, said in a statement on Thursday that the software company "took extraordinary actions in this case." In the future, he said, Microsoft would consult an outside attorney who is a former judge to determine if a court order would have allowed such a search.

The case involves former employee Alex Kibkalo, a Russian native who worked for Microsoft as a software architect in Lebanon.

According to an FBI complaint alleging theft of trade secrets, Microsoft found Kibkalo in September 2012 after examining the Hotmail account of the blogger with whom Kibkalo allegedly shared proprietary Microsoft code. The complaint, filed on Monday in federal court in Seattle, did not identify the blogger.

"After confirmation that the data was Microsoft's proprietary trade secret, on September 7, 2012, Microsoft's Office of Legal Compliance (OLC) approved content pulls of the blogger's Hotmail account," says the complaint by FBI agent Armando Ramirez.

The search of the email account occurred months before Microsoft provided Ramirez with the results of its internal investigation in July 2013.

The email search uncovered messages from Kibkalo to the blogger containing fixes for the Windows 8 RT operating system before they were released publicly. The complaint alleges Kibkalo also shared a software development kit that could be used by hackers to understand more about how Microsoft uses product keys to activate software.

Besides the email search, Microsoft also combed through instant messages the two exchanged that September. Microsoft also examined files in Kibkalo's cloud storage account, which until last month was called SkyDrive. Kibkalo is accused of using SkyDrive to share files with the blogger.

Kibkalo has since relocated to Russia, the FBI complaint says.

Frank said in his statement that no court order was needed to conduct the searches.

"Courts do not issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves," he said. "Even when we have probable cause, it's not feasible to ask a court to order us to search ourselves."

Hotmail's terms of service includes a section that says, "We may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, in order to... protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers."

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has taken a defiant stand against intrusions of customer privacy, in the wake of National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden's revelations of government snooping into online activities.

General counsel Brad Smith said in a blog post in December that Microsoft was "especially alarmed" at news reports of widespread government cyberspying.

Microsoft also has a long-running negative ad campaign called "Scroogled," in which it slams Google for scanning "every word in every email" to sell ads, saying that "Google crosses the line."

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Why I'm quitting Microsoft Office forever

So yesterday I decided to write a guide to getting started with Microsoft OneNote, which is now available free for Mac and all versions of Windows. First step, of course: download and install the OneNote client. Nothing complicated about that, right?
Wrong. The installer quit midway with a cryptic error message. Weird. Tried again: same result. Sigh. Well, no time to mess with this now, I'll come back to it later. Let me just check my email real quick and...whoa! Where's Outlook?
The icon was gone from the Windows taskbar. I clicked into the Start menu and...whoa! Where's Office? The entire suite had vanished. I clicked into Settings and found it still listed among my installed programs, so I tried the Repair option. Same error the installer threw. Reboot, Repair, again: same error. Uninstall Microsoft Office: same error. So, basically, the simple act of trying to install a Microsoft product fully and irrevocably crippled another Microsoft product.
In the end, I tracked down a Microsoft Fix-It that allowed me to uninstall Office. And you know what? I'm not reinstalling it. Not now, not ever. Because I've had it up to here with this kind of nonsense (which is way politer word than I'd be using if this wasn't a family blog).

(Credit: Microsoft)

A brief history of hating Office Earlier this week I was already feeling a bit insulted by Microsoft's introduction of Office 365 Personal, which gives you a single license (for one PC and one mobile device) for $70 -- for one year. Yep, it's a subscription option, same as the newly rechristened Office 365 Home, which costs $100 and comes with five licenses. Uh, math isn't really my strong suit, but there's something amiss with those numbers.
Full disclosure: My Office 365 installation came courtesy of Microsoft, a one-year demo license for journalists. It expires next month, so I was already planning my Office exit, so to speak. But for nearly a year I've been using Kingsoft Office Free 2013, which I consider the best Microsoft Office alternative. It's pretty, capable, and more than sufficient for my everyday-user needs (which amount to word processing, occasional spreadsheets, and once-in-a-blue-moon presentation viewing).
The alternative: pay Microsoft $70 or $100 annually for tools that are far beyond my needs -- and that apparently crash and burn when you try to add a new one.
The only reason I've continued using Office 2013 at all is Outlook, which is actually pretty nice in this version. Plus, I have a PST file containing years' worth of email. But just the other day it was producing oddball password-error messages for one of my Gmail accounts, even though I had no trouble signing into that account on the Web.

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