Rakuten Drops on $900 Million Deal to Buy Viber Message App.

Rakuten Inc. , the Japanese online retailer controlled by billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani, plummeted in Tokyo trading after announcing it will buy the Viber Internet messaging and calling service for $900 million.

Rakuten fell 9.5 percent, the most in more than four months, to close at 1,499 yen in Tokyo trading, wiping out more than $2 billion in market value.

Mikitani, seeking to boost sales after missing analyst estimates for two years, has bought stakes in social-network operator Pinterest Inc. and digital book seller Kobo Inc. Losses at overseas operations and new businesses are approaching levels that may test investors’ patience, Kuni Kanamori, an analyst at SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., said in a note.

“The deal is large and comes despite the absence of contraction in Kobo operating losses,” Kanamori wrote. “As we had hoped to see shrinking losses on M&A projects overseas, the deal leaves a negative impression.”

With Viber, Rakuten will be competing with Naver Corp. Line service and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat, which both combine instant messaging with shopping and gaming, and Microsoft Corp.’s Skye service. Viber had a $29.5 million net loss last year, Rakuten said in a statement last week.
The share-price drop trimmed Rakuten’s climb in the past year to 83 percent, compared with a 26 percent advance for the broader Topix index.

Global music sales fell in 2013 despite strong growth for streaming services.

Global recorded music revenues fell by 3.9% to $15bn in 2013, despite income from subscription streaming services like Spotify and Deezer rising sharply.

Figures published today by music industry body the IFPI in its annual Digital Music Report indicate a bump back to earth for labels after a 0.3% rise in global revenues in 2012 – the first year of growth since 1999.

The IFPI blamed a sharp drop in Japan for 2013’s global decline, noting the impact of a 16.7% dip in sales in a country that accounts for more than a fifth of global revenues. If Japan is factored out, global sales dropped by just 0.1% in 2013.

Overall, physical music sales of CDs and vinyl fell by 11.7% to $7.73bn, while digital revenues rose 4.3% to $5.87bn. Within the latter sector, sales of downloads fell by 2.1% to $3.93bn while subscription streaming income rose 51% to $1.11bn.

Streaming’s first $1bn year is unlikely to dampen the industry debate about whether these services’ growth is making up for the decline of CDs, and seemingly now of download sales too.

The IFPI’s report strongly backs streaming, pointing to overall growth in 2013 in the US and the five largest European music markets: the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. “It is now clear that music streaming and subscription is a mainstream model for our business,” wrote IFPI chief executive Frances Moore in her introduction to the report.

“In 2011, there were eight million paying subscribers to subscription services — today there are 28 million. Ad-supported and subscription streams are rising in most markets, helping grow overall digital revenues for record companies and artists.”

European firms Spotify and Deezer may account for half of those 28m streaming subscribers. Deezer announced in November 2013 that it now had 5m paying subscribers, while label sources tell The Guardian that Spotify now has more than 9m, even though its public figure remains the 6m milestone announced in March 2013.

 

Digital revenue breakdown by format, 2008–2013. Source: IFPI

n the UK, 22% of internet users have used a subscription-based digital music service – including those using them for free – in the last six months according to research commissioned by the IFPI, compared to 33% using download stores.

The IFPI’s report quotes several executives from streaming music services banging the drum for the model, despite high-profile criticism in 2013 from artists including Thom Yorke and David Byrne, who fear it benefits major labels and established artists most, rather than emerging acts.

“This is the way people are consuming music, so the debate about whether it’s a model to embrace has been put to rest over the last year,” said Spotify’s chief content officer Ken Parks in the report.

“Subscribers are the best music customers we have. 120 dollars a year is substantially more than the average user spends on purchasing tracks,” added Zahavah Levine, Google’s director of global music partnerships for Android.

“Relative to the industry’s overall revenue, subscription revenue is still a small piece but it’s growing fast.”

The IFPI’s report also reveals that the top-selling album of 2013 globally was One Direction’s Midnight Memories, which sold 4m copies including physical and digital, beating Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (3.8m units) and Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience (3.6m).

The biggest single was Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, whose 14.8m units tracked by the IFPI includes single-track downloads and “track equivalent streams”. The track beat Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ Thrift Shop (13.4m units) and Avicii’s Wake Me Up (11.1m)

New technologies set to revolutionised by real-time translating technology.

With Google and Microsoft working to develop a real-time translating device, could the days of enrolling on a language course be a thing of the past?

How great would it be to be able to converse fluently or write a grammatically accurate and engaging email in Chinese, Russian and Italian?

Not that great, according to today’s university goers – few of whom are taking modern language degrees. Perhaps they think that translation software, which has moved on a great deal over recent years, will soon render obsolete the ability to communicate in foreign languages.

Google, for example, is working on software that can translate your words – written or spoken – in real time. And Microsoft demonstrated its speech recognition and translation software on a speech given by chief research officer Rick Rashid in November, 2012.

Mr Rashid’s speech – delivered in Tianjin, China – was translated from English to Chinese and the translation used his own voice, which had been sampled.

The aim of the work by Microsoft and Google Research is to create a device that could, for example, translate the words spoken into one handset so that the listener on the other end hears the words in his or her own language.

The Google Research team developing the software is not made up of linguists, though. Instead, they apply maths and statistics to the problem of translation, building algorithms that can correlate existing translations and find the most accurate one.

Google's Project Tango: 3D mapping on a smartphone.

With smartphones featuring ever more advanced sensors that can track everything from the user’s orientation to the acceleration, we have to really wonder what the next big thing in sensors will be. The answer to that could be Google’s new Project Tango, an initiative that effectively wants smartphones of the future to have eyes. What that means is that smartphones of the future will have mini Kinects in them, and that will obviously result in some awesome applications.

The smartphone that will kick off Project Tango is a custom 5 inch device that has a host of visual sensors and special visual processing units. At the back of the prototype Tango smartphone, there’s a 4 megapixel camera, a depth-sensing module and a motion tracking camera. All of these combined with the custom visual processing units give the Tango the ability to scan a room in full 3D.

Now obviously, this could have some amazing applications. And that’s exactly what Google is hoping for. There are 200 developer kits waiting to be shipped to deserving developers, and they’ll all be taken up by 14th of March 2014. If you’re a developer you can apply for one by filling out this form. Just be sure you’ve got a pretty good use for the Tango smartphone, because Google won’t be handing them out willy-nilly. There’s a good chance the top developers on the Play Store will snag them, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

The applications of Project Tango could be pretty game-breaking and industry changing. The most obvious ones come from gaming and navigation. The advanced 3D scanning capabilities could be put to some creative uses in games, much like augmented reality. Developers could also make use of the scanners and create detailed 3D maps of buildings, which users can then navigate with pinpoint accuracy, with the smartphone guiding them.

Apple Acquires A Social Media Analytics Company For ~$200 Million.

Apple has acquired Topsy, a social media analytics company for ~$200 million, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Douglas MacMillian at the WSJ report.

This is a strange acquisition for Apple. It tends to focus more on hardware, software, and applications.

Topsy is one of the companies paying for access to Twitter's firehose of data. It analyzes tweets looking for trends.

The Journal doesn't seem to know what Apple is planning for Topsy, but it suggests Apple will use Topsy for improving advertising in iTunes Radio, Apple's streaming radio service.

We're stumped too, we have no idea what Apple is going to do with this one.

Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch speculates Apple could use it to improve App Store recommendations/rankings.

Apple for its part isn't saying. A spokesperson just says, "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."