Internet giants Amazon, Apple and Google targeted ahead of world‘s biggest book fair

Organisers of the world's biggest book fair warned on Tuesday against the domination of Internet giants as the publishing world grapples to blend old and new forms of reading. 

American giants Amazon, Apple and Google -- whose entry into the world of online sales and digital books is threatening the traditional publishing industry -- are "logistics magicians but are not publishers", said Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair. 

"There's no passion there," he told reporters as the giant German book fair prepared to open Wednesday. 

Boos warned it was essential to maintain diversity in what people read and publish. 

Doing so, he said, meant that technical standards that influence the way people read and access content, such as payment systems, should be designed to serve customers. 

"Technical standards are tools. They must be designed to serve people and their needs, not the other way around," he said. 

He called companies such as Apple and Amazon "machines for customer retention". 

But he insisted international publishing was not "paralysed with fear" and was fighting back with innovations, while smaller, independent book shops were also developing new ways to entice customers. 

Asked about a bill approved by French lawmakers last week to prevent Amazon from offering free deliveries of discounted books, Boos said: "We look at France actually in many matters as an example." 

He said France's support for its independent book trade through measures such as tax relief showed "esteem" for a sector that is part of the country's culture. 

"I think there we can actually learn from France," he said. Despite pressure from the US Internet giants, publishers were upbeat about the industry's future as it adapts to embrace the digital age. 

 

 "The much-heralded digital revolution is no longer on the way, it has arrived," Stephen Smith, chief executive of US-based Wiley publishing company, told reporters. 

"It's here, and it is now, and it is causing publishing leaders around the world to radically re-think what they do," he said, adding there were "plenty of reasons" for optimism and confidence for the future. 

Gottfried Honnefelder, president of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, said sales from book stores, e-commerce and department stores grew this year by 0.8 per cent until end-September compared to 2012. 

Taking book store sales alone, the growth was 0.9 per cent, he said, adding that although the figures were small, they showed a "trend", with book stores projecting a "new self-confidence" in Germany. 

Authors, writers, publishers, literary agents and translators from around the world will gather for the five-day fair, with Brazil as guest of honour. 

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Brazil's hosting of the football World Cup next year and the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro two years later "offer an important chance to present Brazil to a wide world public." 

"At the same time, we know from our own experience the challenges that are linked with it," he told the official opening ceremony Tuesday, the day before the festival was to open its doors. 

Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, and several editions of the Olympics have been held there. 

Brazil, which was hit by massive street protests earlier in the year against the billions being spent on the sporting events, is represented by around 70 writers during the fair. 

The country is a "cultural heavyweight", Westerwelle added. Brazil's Vice President Michel Temer said that as a young boy he had to walk six kilometres to the public library in his small town, which had no bookshop, and that he had discovered the "larger world" through reading.

Read More

Now, ‘feel‘ images on your smartphone

Smartphone users can now 'feel' images and objects seen on their touchscreen! 

In a game-changing invention, engineers at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, have developed a new technique that allows you to feel the texture of objects seen on a flat touchscreen. 

The novel algorithm enables a person sliding a finger across a topographic map displayed on a touchscreen to feel the bumps and curves of hills and valleys, despite the screen's smooth surface. 

The technique is based on the fact that when a person slides a finger over a real physical bump, he perceives the bump largely because lateral friction forces stretch and compress skin on the sliding finger.

By altering the friction encountered as a person's fingertip glides across a surface, the Disney algorithm can create a perception of a 3D bump on a touch surface. 

The method can be used to simulate the feel of a wide variety of objects and textures. 

"Our brain perceives the 3D bump on a surface mostly from information that it receives via skin stretching," said Ivan Poupyrev, who directs Disney Research, Pittsburgh's Interaction Group. 

"Therefore, if we can artificially stretch skin on a finger as it slides on the touchscreen, the brain will be fooled into thinking an actual physical bump is on a touchscreen even though the touch surface is completely smooth," Poupyrev said in a statement. 

In experiments, researchers used electrovibration to modulate the friction between the sliding finger and the touch surface with electrostatic forces. 

Researchers created and validated a psychophysical model that closely simulates friction forces perceived by the human finger when it slides over a real bump. 

The model was then incorporated into an algorithm that dynamically modulates the frictional forces on a sliding finger so that they match the tactile properties of the visual content displayed on the touchscreen along the finger's path. 

A broad variety of visual artifacts thus can be dynamically enhanced with tactile feedback that adjusts as the visual display. 

"The traditional approach to tactile feedback is to have a library of canned effects that are played back whenever a particular interaction occurs," said Ali Israr, a Disney Research, Pittsburgh research engineer who was the lead on the project. 

"This makes it difficult to create a tactile feedback for dynamic visual content, where the sizes and orientation of features constantly change. With our algorithm we do not have one or two effects, but a set of controls that make it possible to tune tactile effects to a specific visual artifact on the fly," Israr said. 

The new research will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in St Andrews, Scotland.

Read More

Indian smartphone market: LG vs Samsung

Call it a tale of two strategies. Korean chaebols Samsung and LG waged furious battles against each other and the rest of the Indian consumer durables industry a decade ago. Today, LG claims leadership, but that's not enough. It wants a bigger slice of the premium market. 

Samsung shot up the sales and perceptual charts with a record run from its mobile division. It is now trying to transfer some of that equity to its durables business. 

As Nilesh Gupta, CEO, Vijay Sales puts it, "Most marketers are looking for profitability and not market share apart from the mobile category. They tell us if you cannot sell, don't buy. They used to go halfway down the crease to hit the ball, now they are on the backfoot. Four or five years ago, they considered India an emerging market and were investing. Now they are telling India we want profits." 

Both players however claim they are just as aggressive as always but are just showing it differently. We examine how Korea's finest are finding their way... 

The LG story With the launch of the G2, LG made its belated entry into the stratospheric premium range of mobile handsets. In a market where consumers are notoriously hard to impress, the phone has some unique bells and whistles to justify its Rs 40,000 plus price tag. 

LG India's managing director Soon Kwon hopes such products will be, if not the norm, at least less of an exception. And it better happen sooner than later given his ambition to make the Indian operations among LG's Top 3 businesses globally, by 2015. 

LG currently claims a 30% market share for itself in the consumer durables space. According to Gfk figures sourced from the industry for August 2013, its share for microwaves is 39%, washing machines is 38%, refrigerators is 37%, TVs are at 25% and air conditioners at 23%. And yet, the company is in the throes of a struggle. For too long, it has been perceived as a mid-priced middle class oriented brand and for the last few years has been trying to become a more significant force in the lucrative premium segment. 

It's the biggest challenge since its launch in 1997 and the years in which LG transformed from an unknown entity to a ubiquitous presence. 

Marketing consultant Nabankur Gupta observes, "It got into a volume game when multinationals were perceived to be playing on value. Apart from heavy advertising, certain products were subsidised." Consumers soon believed they were getting a good deal across the portfolio: a multinational brand at an Indian price tag. 

Rajeev Karwal, founder and CEO of Milagrow who headed sales and marketing for LG at the time, recalls the many coups the brand pulled off. In a market dominated by exchange offers, LG launched a TV for 7,500 claiming to stand for no scheming. One of its campaigns featured the grandiose claim of making other televisions history. 

It was all backed by a unified concept says Karwal: "We'd positioned the brand on the health platform which ran through all their communication whether it was 'Golden Eye' TVs for wrinkle free eyes or 'Health Wave' microwaves. By building innovative technologies and smart marketing, we came across as a lot bigger than we were." 

The health platform is gone, today. More significantly, so is the frenetic momentum. The reasons vary depending on who you ask. To LG's critics it is evidence of the brand becoming complacent and driven by diktats from the Korean headquarters. On the flipside, LG believes the strategies needed during a launch phase are quite different from those required to sustain and grow. 

Addressing LG's move away from emotional advertising Kwon says, "For the last 15 years, we may have been known as more of a family oriented brand. But, in fact, we are also strong in the very high end. We have decided to focus on a different element to the brand which is technology." 

A visible manifestation of LG's newfound, some would say belated aggression is its mobile handset strategy. Rival brands dove headfirst into smartphones and even dabbled with the nascent tab category because it positioned them on the cutting edge. 

LG, instead, was sluggish on smartphones and ignored tablets entirely. It now has to run a lot faster. It's doing so with a slew of models that offer more for slightly less and a strong dealer push. It's stated goal is cornering 10% of the smartphone market by 2014. Kwon expects Rs 150 crore turnover from the G2 alone. 

LG's priorities on the marketing mix have shifted too. Like many of its contemporaries, it's investing a lot more on the in store experience. It has around 2,000 exclusive stores, a necessity in a market where modern trade has performed below expectations, according to Kwon. 

Where LG claims its priorities have not shifted is coming up with India specific products. These are especially relevant to the rural sector where business growth is higher than in developed markets. LG's mix for these markets includes the ever cool refrigerator and tougher LCD TVs. 

To reach these price conscious customers who do not have access to easy finance, the units are priced lower and their features and benefits communicated in detail, according to Sanjay Chitkara, head - marketing, LG India. The urban segment on the other hand will be the focus of LG's Diwali campaign which according to Chitkara is built around launches of premium television sets. 

However, others see confusion in LG's attempt to straddle various segments. According to Karwal, "Samsung changed completely around the launch of its smartphones. It began to internationalise communication and moved out of low end TVs and washing machines. They got the platform LG used to be known for — the cutting edge of technology." 

As for LG, he believes, "The company is more focused on margins than marketing. A lot of their inefficiency and poor product planning gets covered up since they there is no alternative for the trade. If today there was a good marketing company that can synergise all its divisions they will have a run for their money." 

Given entry barriers have only gone up since LG rushing the market in the early 2000s this falls squarely into the easier said than done category. Karwal concedes, "It has one of the strongest nationwide distribution channels which itself is a competitive advantage." 

LG has a new sign off these days with It's All Possible. Instead of replacing the old Life's Good slogan, the new line sits alongside it as a supplementary message according to Kwon, drawing the consumer's attention to a vast assortment of products in different categories. It can also be seen as an internal affirmation: a brand reassuring itself that it can in fact try to be all things to all people. 

The Samsung story It's typically hard to define the point at which the fortunes of men and brands change. Not so with Samsung. 

It all changed in June 2010 with the launch of the Galaxy smartphone series. Suddenly from being one of the many consumer durable players dabbling across washing machines, air conditioners, TVs and yes mobile phones, it began to set the agenda for mobile telephony. It dethroned doughty stalwarts like Nokia and Blackberry and currently accounts for 31.5% of the Indian mobile handset market estimated to be worth Rs 35,946 crore according to a Voice & Data survey. 

Samsung executives still nevertheless have sleepless nights. There's the all too real fear of complacency setting in. 

Atul Jain, senior vice president - consumer electronics, Samsung who has spent two years in the mobile division admits, "We are completely on the edge as far as the next wave is concerned. I'm not satisfied with S III and the Note doing well or with being the first ones to have launched LED smart TVs, two years ago. That streak in our DNA of looking for the next stage is critical. The lack of it is why a lot of companies fall by the wayside." 

Samsung is trying to keep the momentum going. Vineet Taneja, country head - mobile business, Samsung India recalls telling the global chief about what he believed the country needed, only to have a product in hand four months later. "Any other company might have taken 12 or 18 months," he says, speaking of Samsung Grand a mid price smartphone which packed the gigantic screen size of the Note series into a more affordable model. 

For people who wanted the most high end devices and couldn't afford them, Samsung was the first to start EMI schemes. Taneja admits, "Affordability doesn't necessarily mean cheap. It means I will make great products accessible so consumers don't have to shell out so much." 

It has helped Samsung move to outlets that were hitherto beyond its reach. Taneja speaks excitedly of a small 2X2 store in Hyderabad with an EMI machine which guarantees a turnover. 

The demand is outpacing the financial system's ability to keep up. Taneja has met small shopkeepers in a tehsil at Hajipur, Bihar who wanted the EMI option in spite of there being no credit card holders. Asim Warsi, VP - sales, mobile business, Samsung says, "We would love to make, if we could, Samsung Mobile like an impulse brand — people come, decide, buy and walk out — like a packet of chips." 

Accessibility runs a lot deeper than affordability. One of the next big initiatives is getting local language interfaces in smartphones. Warsi observes, "People in interior Gujarat or Maharashtra are not poor for sure — they'll now have access to internet and mobile experience in a language that is their own." 

Samsung's task is to transfer the considerable equity gained via its mobile business to the other parts of the portfolio, inducing excitement even in age old categories like televisions and refrigerators. Given the speed of technological obsolescence in Smart TVs, it is trying to future proof its models. For instance, the evolutionary kit fitted into SmartTVs upgrades the set to the latest software and firmware a year down the line. 

Not all of its technology is that esoteric. Samsung's tweaking refrigerators to work out how often they are opened, for how long and to run accordingly. It could lead to 40% cut in electricity bills according to Jain who used this as a plank for a theme campaign this March called 'Samsung's on, Saving's on.' 

Chief marketing officer Rahul Saighal sees a healthy rub off taking place between Samsung's various divisions: "Smart televisions are contributing to Samsung's image as an innovation leader while our success with devices like Galaxy S4, Note 2 and now Note 3 are further reinforcing that perception." 

Even a notoriously hard to please marketing industry is currently a part of the Samsung fan club. Says Nabankur Gupta, "Every phone with a Samsung badge spells value even at the lower end. The consumer will be favourably predisposed even when there's a durable to be purchased. Both LG and Sony need to create that." 

Gautam Talwar, chief strategy officer, Rediffusion YR believes Samsung is no longer competing with LG or Sony or Canon at a mother brand level but with Apple. He says, "It stands for new age technology and hence can pass the software codes to all other categories rather than the hardware codes which brands like LG land up owning. It needs to move the consumers from the utility and feature enriching platform to the magical world of what technology is capable of doing." 

However, a former Samsung executive at a rival firm has a few words of caution, "Nokia got into the trap of believing that they know how to control technology, Samsung should be careful to avoid the arrogance that comes with the leadership position. Its approach has been primarily of a hardware manufacturer more focused on driving hardware specifications than (industry design) that would appeal. The seamless integration of software with hardware is something that is missing."

Read More

Nest Labs makes the smoke detector ‘smarter‘

 Nest Labs has a new gadget to sell and it's another little-noticed, pedestrian home device: smoke detectors. 

The Silicon Valley startup that elevated the lowly thermostat with attention-grabbing designs is now launching a $129 Nest Protect, a smoke and carbon monoxide detector that speaks and responds to hand gestures. 

Nest -- co-founded by Apple alums Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers -- has embedded its sleek gadget with a female voice that warns users when smoke and carbon monoxide levels get dangerously high. 

Users can wave a hand to silence alarms, and choose to receive alerts on their smartphone or tablet, Matt Rogers said in an interview with Reuters. 

"It's really about finding the unloved and these things are incredibly important that you cannot live without," he said, when asked why Nest decided to work on a smoke detector. "Yet they don't work. They are frustrating. They are ugly." 

Rogers said there really has been no innovation in this market for many years and is ripe for disruption. 

The market for smoke and carbon monoxide detectors is three to four times bigger than thermostats, Nest's first device that retails for $249, Rogers said. "We are again looking at the top end of the market." 

The new device has a battery life between three and seven years, and comes in black and white. It will first go on sale in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. And the smoke alarm can be set to warn in either English, French or Spanish. 

Nest Protect includes nine sensors to help detect hand gestures and other movements. The device can also act as a low-powered night light that automatically switches on when someone walks under it. 

The new gadget goes on sale in November at retailers such as Best Buy and Home Depot, or online at Amazon.com. 

Nest, which counts Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Google Ventures and Shasta Ventures among its investors, employs a large number of designers and engineers from Silicon Valley firms like Apple and Google. 

It gained a large following with its first thermostat -- a round, brushed-metal device with a convex glass screen that displays temperature and changes hue to match the colour of the wall it attaches to. It also tracks usage and employs that data to automatically set heating and cooling temperatures. 

Nest now has about 280 employees, up from 90 in 2011. 

"It's been an absolute ride," Rogers said of Nest's journey from a startup in stealth mode to a recognized brand in home automation.

Read More

New tool to help robots ‘see‘ better

A statistical tool can improve 'vision' in robots by helping them better understand the objects in the world around them. 

Object recognition is one of the most widely studied problems in computer vision, researchers said. 

To improve robots' ability to gauge object orientation, Jared Glover, a graduate student in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is exploiting a statistical construct called the Bingham distribution. 

In a paper to be presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Glover and MIT alumna Sanja Popovic, who is now at Google, describes a new robot-vision algorithm, based on the Bingham distribution, that is 15% better than its best competitor at identifying familiar objects in cluttered scenes. 

That algorithm, however, is for analysing high-quality visual data in familiar settings. 

Because the Bingham distribution is a tool for reasoning probabilistically, it promises even greater advantages in contexts where information is patchy or unreliable. 

In cases where visual information is particularly poor, the algorithm offers an improvement of more than 50% over the best alternatives. 

"Alignment is key to many problems in robotics, from object-detection and tracking to mapping," Glover said. 

"And ambiguity is really the central challenge to getting good alignments in highly cluttered scenes, like inside a refrigerator or in a drawer. That's why the Bingham distribution seems to be a useful tool, because it allows the algorithm to get more information out of each ambiguous, local feature," Glover said. 

One reason the Bingham distribution is so useful for robot vision is that it provides a way to combine information from different sources, researchers said. 

Determining an object's orientation entails trying to superimpose a geometric model of the object over visual data captured by a camera -- in the case of Glover's work, a Microsoft Kinect camera, which captures a 2D colour image together with information about the distance of the colour patches. 

In experiments involving visual data about particularly cluttered scenes - depicting the kinds of environments in which a household robot would operate - Glover's algorithm had about the same false-positive rate as the best existing algorithm: About 84% of its object identifications were correct, versus 83% for the competition. 

But it was able to identify a significantly higher percentage of the objects in the scenes - 73% versus 64%.

Read More

On Semiconductor to cut up to 870 jobs at Sanyo

On Semiconductor Corp, a maker of power-management chips, said it would cut up to 870 jobs at its Sanyo Semiconductor unit as it looks to reduce costs. 

The company said it would cut 600-700 jobs through a voluntary retirement programme and take a related charge of about $40 million to $48 million, mostly in the fourth quarter. 

It expects to save about $36-$45 million in costs in the first year after completing the retirement programme. 

The company also said it would close a Sanyo unit in Hanyu, Japan, resulting in the loss of 170 full-time and 40 contract jobs. 

On Semi has been trying to turn around the loss-making Sanyo unit it acquired for about $500 million in January 2011. The division designs, makes and sells radio frequency and power-related components used in phones and flash memory devices. 

The company, which had about 20,000 employees as of December 31, cut about 250 jobs and canceled annual cash bonuses for senior executives in August last year.

Read More

Google Glass gets software update

 Google has reportedly given a software update to its much-anticipated wearable computing device Google Glass ahead of its launch. 

The search giant released another update XE10 for its Google Glass Explorers team across the US. 

According to Fox News, the new update allows users to have detailed instructions in step-by-step transit feature from the home screen of the hi-tech eye gear, which also takes into account previous transit modes used by the wearer. 

However, the latest mapping update isn't compatible with Apple iOS as yet and works only when paired with an Android device. 

The software update also features notifications from particular sites, texts, emails, and tweets, and users can tap on the card and select 'view site' to see the messages. 

Another tweak shows up the profile image of the person one is sending a message or comment to behind the text, providing a constant visual reminder of the intended recipient. 

The Google Glass is expected to be rolled out to the masses in the next year.

Read More