Apple has bought back $14 billion worth of its own shares in the two weeks after it announced earnings for its first fiscal quarter of 2014, which the market responded to rather negatively, company CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal.
Cook told the WSJ that an 8 percent decline in Apple’s shares on the day after it reported its earnings “surprised” the company, and it wanted to be “aggressive” and “opportunistic.” With the latest buyback, Cook reveals that Apple had already repurchased more than $40 billion of its shares over the past 12 months, as part of its plan to repurchase $60 billion of its own shares.
Apple’s move comes as activist investor Carl Icahn has been pushing for Apple to implement his pretty extreme buyback proposal, saying that based on the company’s current circumstances, an additional $50 billion share repurchase over the course of fiscal year 2014 seems “more than reasonable.”
Last month, Icahn revealed his purchase of an additional $1 billion worth of Apple stock, increasing his holding to $3.6 billion in a bid to motivate the company’s board to increase its buyback program.
Interestingly, Cook also revealed to the WSJ that Apple has bought 21 companies over the past 15 months — seeking to shed some light on how the company has been investing its cash pile.
Quora has released some new data about its platform that it believes shines some light on its topics hierarchy. In a blog post by two of its data scientists, Don van der Drift and Shankar Iyer, the company revealed that there are more more than 5,000 topics in its system with at least “100 good questions”.
In addition to touting the quality of its topic network, Quora has also disclosed for the first time the most popular topics that people have questions about.
One of the things that users find great about Quora is the way information is organized. van der Drift and Iyer say that people follow topics to indicate their interests, which helps the company show them content that they’ll find valuable and engaging. Additionally, tagging plays a big part in filtering questions to the appropriate topics. All of this is necessary as Quora seeks to become the “Internet’s best source for knowledge” for the topics that it covers.
As part of a study van der Drift and Iyer conducted, they discovered that people have been creating quality content on a “rapidly growing” number of topics. Additionally, by tagging content with relevant topics and curating the metadata, Quora found out that people are creating “a sensible hierarchy” of domains of knowledge.
So how did Quora’s network come to be? According to the post, the team began constructing snapshots of questions asked from mid-2011 to today. A question was deemed “good” if at least two people pointed to it. From there, they simply counted how many of these questions pointed to a particular topic. You can see the graph that was plotted below:
With 5,000 topics in its platform with at least 100 good questions, Quora says that this is nearly four times the number of topics back in 2011.
The blog post goes into a more detailed mathematical explanation and we’ll spare you from our explanation of it — you can read it in full here. However, the end result is that through its system, it has been able to visualize the largest 33 topics on its platform. Some of the more notable ones include startups, psychology, social media, medicine and health, tips and hacks, software development, parenting, US politics, and more.
The point Quora wants to let you know is that it has been working to create a system that can handle a large, scalable topic hierarchy that’s forming in its database. It believes that over time, its topic structure will become more detailed and enable users to discover the “best and most relevant content”.
LinkedIn has made its biggest acquisition deal to date today. The professional social network has purchased the job matching service Bright for $120 million, made up of 73 percent stock and 27 percent cash.After the deal closes in the first quarter of 2014, several members of Bright’s team will join LinkedIn, including its engineering and product divisions. Existing users will be able to access their data on Bright’s website through February 28.
Bright founder Eduardo Vivas said in a statement that the deal took place because “[LinkedIn] shares a similar vision and is equally obsessed about using data and algorithms to connect prospects and employers.” The one problem that Bright apparently lacked was the ability to scale. Yes, Vivas’ team had the talent in-house to build out its product and has successfully calculated billions of scores, but it didn’t have the ability to bring its technology to a much larger marketplace.
As Vivas puts it: “We may become less visible than we were before, but it’s now more likely than ever that you’ll feel the impact of our work.”
If you’re not familiar with Bright, it’s a service that utilizes machine-learning algorithms to recommend jobs to those looking for work. It also uses data-driven matching technology to make sure that users aren’t finding irrelevant listings.
The $120 million for Bright is the most LinkedIn has paid. Previous acquisitions include Slideshare, which cost $119 million, and Pulse, worth $90 million. It will be interesting to see Bright’s impact as LinkedIn continues to grow in terms of membership. As Re/code points out, Bright is a natural fit for LinkedIn as it makes a bulk of its revenue from its Talent Solutions group. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has made several updates and launched new features to improve the process for recruiters — Bright may kick things up a notch.
I’ve been curious about Dbrand’s 3M vinyl skins for a while now, but I could never get a solid sense of how they’d look in real life from just the images on the company’s website. After trying out sample skins for the PlayStation 4 and iPhone 5s, I have to say the results are impressive.
Dbrand’s texture choices include a carbon fiber weave, brushed titanium, leather, colorful powder-coated material and wood. We went with wood for the iPhone 5s and a gold and matte black combination for the PS4. We also tried out a white leather Moto X skin, but we don’t recommend it (more on that later).
Other devices you can outfit with vinyl include Nexus smartphones and tablets, iPads, the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation Vita, HTC One, BlackBerry Z10 and the Galaxy S4. A full PS4 set of skins cost $45, while the Moto X and iPhone 5s versions cost $16 and $24, respectively.
The other factor holding me back from buying skins for my devices is the fear that I’d mess up the application. It takes a rare combination of patience and coordination to apply a skin or a screen protector without a few blemishes or air bubbles in the process.
Dbrand has a helpful series of video and photo directions on their site. I still managed to screw things up a bit, but the material tended to be forgiving. I ended up having to unpeel and reapply several of the pieces, but the end result turned out okay. If you’re willing to spend the extra time to go slowly and carefully line everything up, the skin really does fit perfectly.
Once applied, the mahogany skin looked and felt fantastic on the iPhone. However, the edges of the skin felt a tad sharp on the device when handling it, and I was slightly disappointed by a slight gap on the frame pieces that the product photos on the website didn’t show. The extra vinyl material also made the power button lose some of its travel; it’s only a minor annoyance, but still worth noting.
I feel somewhat guilty putting faux-wood vinyl over Apple’s metal design, but that’s what makes it so cheeky. The look will get old after a while, but the $24 shouldn’t be too much of a setback if you’re the type of person who changes cases every few months.
Despite my fears that the gold PS4 would come across as over the top, it actually looked pretty good. Yes, it borders on ridiculous, but it does so with style. You can customize your color scheme for the top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right sections, as well as the controller. One caveat: I’d skip the gold-accented controller in the future, as it looked tacky and changed the feel of the controls .
As for the Moto X, I don’t see the point when you already have loads of color and accent options with the Moto Maker tool. The white leather skin turned out to be a poor choice, as it didn’t cover up the phone’s underlying color. The setup might look better on a plain-colored Moto X, but it just looked and felt tacky on mine.
From a product perspective, Dbrand’s skins live up to the hype. The company’s use of 3M’s vinyl makes it easy to handle, durable and it doesn’t leave a residue when you take it off. However, when it comes to style, it’s up to you to pick the right one, as the results could turn out either awesome or awful.
Tim Moore is the founder and CEO of Venture Glass, which creates wearable products and solutions, and was recently identified by Forbes as ”an emerging thought leader in wearable technology.” Connect with him on Google+ and Twitter.
Late last month I was invited to attend ISPO in Munich, Germany. It is one of the largest sports business trade shows in the world, promising an opportunity to experience innovative brands, new business horizons, and ‘see the future.’
There was a lot to see; the conference boasted more than 180,000 meters of exhibition space and it was full, every inch of it. From global sporting brands to innovative startups, they must have all been here, and I was sure to find something truly inspiring.
Yet, through the massive areas of product and people, booth after booth of techno music and adrenaline-filled video demos, something was amiss. Yes, the atmosphere was exciting and felt like a perfect buying environment for a customer.
But when I assumed the character of buyer and looking closely at the offerings, I noticed three things that may be helpful for entrepreneurs and retailers.
1. Be a maverick
You didn’t have to go very far before some of the offerings began repeating themselves. I started to search more intently for innovative, smart fabrics, or cool connected items.. but I didn’t find them.
While Oakley sunglasses were there, there were also dozens of sunglasses companies, and they all looked the same. Although Nike was there with moisture wicking fabrics, I found many that looked about the same. And GoPro must have been proud, as there were probably 15 knockoffs, most of which were about the same size, price, and aesthetic.
At which point do maverick brands start partnering with or creating new services to set themselves apart?
For example, the GoPro knockoffs. Why not partner up with premium video editing software companies that an be all-done-on-device? And the ski accessories, why not include safety beacons inside them? How about all the Oakley competitors, why haven’t you jumped the fence and partnered with some smart glasses software to create a completely new product?
Create something new, something that excites us buyers. Don’t just duplicate or imitate others and improve the little specs – that’s boring and consumers are not buying boring. They settle when they have to, but it’s not by choice.
2. Take creative risks
Booth after booth, I saw improvements and seasonal refinements: The use of abstract color designs, very bright ones, were found everything from helmets, eyeglasses, shoes, roller skates, apparel.
Sun Yellow (the color of the year for the sports industry, I was told), intense lavenders, explosive oranges, blues, and greens were all out to grab your eyes’ attention. It’s stunning… but safe.
Buyers were currently still buying, so that’s a good thing. I had to wonder: How long before this trend becomes an old hat? Were buyers buying because this is all you offered?
There’s nothing new about shaving an ounce or two off of the weight, giving it a new name, or bizarrely bright color. As a businessperson, why are you looking around and seeing that your competitors look just like you? More importantly, why does this not make you extremely nervous?
If you don’t stand out from the crowd with some creativity, you are basically invisible.
3. Innovate or perish
Many of the products at ISPO looked great and seemed functional. The problem was that they were exactly like the items I saw in the 90′s (except for the neon shoe laces).
Unless you have deep pockets and major brand equity, you can’t stay competitively in business making newer versions of the same product, year after year. For today’s brands to secure a profitable future, you have to start innovating – revolutionizing!
Think way outside the box, refuse to keep up the battle with all your competitors whose products are eerily similar, which makes both of you invisible to the consumer. Stop duplicating them, stop duplicating what you have been doing, and start modernizing your offerings.
Ask us what we would like to see, what would make our life more convenient and comfortable, then do something about it. We the new connected consumers are standing by to reward brands who do take that risk with credit card, and Bitcoins, in hand.
Love this? Hate it? Start the conversation below – your comments might just be the helpful nudge to your favorite brand to create something that will amaze you.
