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It was an image of one of the pearl cuff bracelets she designs and sells, nestled among snapshots of other coveted items that users display on Pinterest, a virtual bulletin board. Yet anybody who clicked on the picture could end up unwittingly watching pornography or downloading a virus.
“I can’t gauge how many customers I lost,” Espinoza, based in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, said in a phone interview. “But I did have people messaging me asking, ‘Are you linked to spam?’ I was just distraught.”
When Pinterest debuted two years ago, e-mail was still the favored format for spam messages peddling diet schemes, sexual enhancement and other unsolicited services. Since then, better filters have banished more spam from inboxes, pushing tens of billions of pieces of mass marketing to social-media sites, according to Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting Group in Beaverton, Oregon.
“Social spam can be a lot more effective than e-mail spam,” said Mark Risher, chief executive officer of anti-spam software provider Impermium in Palo Alto, California. “We see a lot of it, and we see it increasing. The bad guys are taking to this with great abandon.”
Spammers create as many as 40 percent of the accounts on social-media sites, Risher said. About 8 percent of messages sent via social pages are spam, approximately twice the volume six months ago, he said.
Spam Blockades
The looser the controls, the more prevalent the fake accounts. While Facebook Inc. (FB), the world’s largest social network, has matured enough to spot and stop much of the attempted spam, younger entrants like Pinterest have yet to erect effective blockades.
Erica Billups, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto-based Pinterest, declined to make executives available for interviews.
“As a growing service, Pinterest is not immune to challenges faced by sites across the Web including spam,” she said in an e-mailed statement. “Our engineers are actively working to manage issues as they arise and are revisiting the nature of public feeds on the site to make it harder for fake or harmful content to get into them.”
Some 50,000 people may open a spam message on Facebook within one hour, Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser in Vancouver for anti-spam vendor Sophos Ltd., said in an interview. Spammers can make money by advertising goods for vendors, selling their own products, stealing personal information through surveys, or installing viruses that can grab consumer data.
‘Con Artists’
“For an average Facebook scam, it’s easily on the scale of e-mail scam,” Wisniewski said. “It’s a rather mature economy of con artists.”
Facebook and Twitter Inc. -- social media’s old guard -- have bulked up on programmers and security specialists to deflect spam. When that fails, they go to court.
In January, Facebook sued Adscend Media LLC, accusing the company of running scams on fraudulent pages designed to bait users into visiting other websites. A typical lure cited in Facebook’s suit: “You will be SHOCKED when you see this video. Simply “Like” this page to see the video.”
At least 280,214 users were tricked into interacting with spam set up by the defendants in the case, Menlo Park, California-based Facebook said, calling the practice “Likejacking.”
Canceled Accounts
About 80 percent of Adscend’s monthly revenue of $1.2 million came from Facebook scams at one point in time, the social network said. Adscend said this month it settled the case for $100,000 without admitting wrongdoing.
Twitter last month sued Skootle Corp., JL4 Web Solutions, a man affiliated with TweetBuddy.com and four other individuals, claiming that they were responsible for spam that had caused some users to cancel accounts. Twitter said it spent more than $700,000 to combat spam attacks by the defendants.
TweetBuddy.com created software to automate the creation of fake accounts and mass distribution of tweets, Twitter said in the suit. TweetBuddy.com also sold Twitter accounts to spammers, according to the court filing.
“We hope this suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter,” the company said in a blog posted the day it filed the lawsuit. The Tweet Buddy site now says its products have been pulled from the market and urges users to comply with Twitter’s terms of service.
‘Integrity Systems’
Twitter, based in San Francisco, also set up software to analyze links posted on the site and shut down any containing malware or malicious content, which helped eliminate hundreds of thousands of abusive accounts.
“Tens of millions of dollars are spent on our site integrity systems including hundreds of full time employees,” Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens said.
Facebook has been expanding its URL blacklist system, which uses data from partners including Intel Corp.’s McAfee to detect and block known threats. Facebook Immune System inspects every action on the site, using the reputation of the cookie or IP address involved to halt any suspicious action.
Pinterest encourages users to form a virtual neighborhood watch and report spam before it spreads. Last month, Pinterest posted a blog suggesting that consumers use a “Report Pin” button to identify spam.
Pinterest Spam
On Pinterest, spam often lurks in the embedded links attached to photos, making it tricky for users to spot. Espinoza, the 40-year-old jewelry maker, said she contacted the company at least 10 times in as many days before the fraudulent links tied to images of her bracelets were banished.
Lauren Williamson, a 31-year-old in suburban Chicago, didn’t even sign up for Pinterest to get spam from the site. After somebody else used her e-mail for a Pinterest account, she now gets several spam messages each week. She said she e-mailed Pinterest twice attempting to fix the problem and then gave up when she got no response. She says the messages keep coming.
“I get e-mails from mortgage brokers and online retailers,” she said in an interview. “It’s an annoyance.”
Based on his own analysis, Hunsader has come to a startling conclusion: Markets today are even more susceptible to sudden failure than they were two years ago during the “flash crash,” which brought the stock market down by about 1,000 points in mere minutes.
That’s because a new breed of trader armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy is trading so fast—and with such spikes in volume—that he can dry up liquidity in an instant, causing severe price swings.
To explain to a lay person, Hunsader offers up two examples of the kinds of trades he’s seeing. The first happened less than a minute before the April Jobs report was released by the Department of Labor in Washington.
That report is traditionally one of the most dramatic market-moving events of each month. As a result, traders tend to lie low in the minute or so before the number comes out at 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of each month, so they don’t get caught when the market changes.
But Hunsader argues that he’s seeing a small group of high speed traders who aren’t lying low. In fact, they’re taking advantage of the regular and predictable lull in the market to pop high speed trades in order to intentionally create a several hundred millisecond burst of volatility, and then execute follow-on trades to profit from that.
To understand what happens, you have to go inside just one second of trading and look at the way markets move at speeds that can be almost imperceptible to human beings.
On May 4, Hunsader says, he spotted those traders just before the April number was released. At 8:29:20 and about 200 milliseconds, he says, someone — he has no way of knowing who — executed a trade in the five year T-note futures market worth about $150 million.
A chart of that single second in the market shows that prices are relatively stable until the trade. And just after that, for the rest of the second, prices spike, and gyrate up and down as other automated high speed computers react to the trade.
Hunsader says he doesn’t know exactly how the traders make money off the volatility that they create, but he suspects they’re making other trades in the milliseconds following their market moving trade that take advantage of the relationships between this market and others that are impacted by it.
The traders that move first, and fastest, win, he says.
“It’s like two guys running in the woods, and they see a bear and one guy drops down and puts his shoes on and the other guy says, ‘what are you doing that for, you can’t outrun a bear,’” Hunsader says. “And the guy goes, ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.’”
On another occasion, Hunsader says he saw traders taking advantage of something as fundamental as the speed of light.
Because trades are executed by fiber-optic cable, the fastest they can travel—and the fastest anything in the universe can travel—is the speed of light. But even at that speed, it takes about 11 milliseconds for information from exchanges based in New York to get to exchanges based in Chicago. And that provides an opportunity for arbitrage for those who can move fast enough.
“Recently, they put in this new high speed line between Chicago and New York,” Hunsader says. “Essentially (they) drilled through mountains to shave a few milliseconds — thousandths of seconds—off, getting it down to 11 milliseconds. But I think somebody’s figured out how to get it to zero milliseconds.”
And the way they do that, in effect, became clear on May 3, Hunsader argues.
At 9:59:11 and about 620 milliseconds, someone executed a trade in Chicago, purchasing about 1,300 ES contracts for about $70 million. That happened to come in a lull just before two economic indicators were to be released at 10 a.m. that day.
At the exact same millisecond, 9:59:11 and about 620 milliseconds, Hunsader says, another trade was executed: Somebody bought 260,000 shares of a closely correlated product, SPY, for about $36 million.
Hunsader has no way of knowing for sure it was the same person executing both trades. But he says he sees same millisecond trades happening in both cities in related products often enough that he doesn’t think it can be pure coincidence.
In fact, he says, someone placing big orders in related products in both cities would gain a valuable advantage: for 11 milliseconds, they would be the only ones in the world who knew what happened in both markets.
By the time Chicago received the information about what happened in New York, and New York received the information about what happened in Chicago, Hunsader says, the traders who execute such trades would have a relatively long time to position themselves for the predictable fallout. And that’s a profit opportunity.
“The speed of light is fast,” Hunsader says, “But it’s not as fast as the high frequency traders would like it to be.”
The trick is, you have to have a super-fast computer and $100 million in deployable cash to make it work.
Hunsader says he sees these trades happening so frequently, in fact, that he advises individual investors not to make any trades at all between 9:58 and 10:02 a.m. Eastern, since many economic reports are released at exactly 10 a.m.
The high speed, high volume trading he’s seeing can cause asset prices to gap by small increments — so that if you’re executing a trade at that minute and a high speed trader is jamming data lines at the same time, you might not get the deal at the price you thought when you pressed the button to process the trade.
What’s more, Hunsader says, this kind of trading is causing market instability—to the extent that the right set of circumstances could set off a cascade much worse than the flash crash of 2010.
“You might hear, ‘we’re doing fine, now,’” Hunsader says. “Well, yes, everything will be just fine as long as, as the news is sunshine-y happy. If you get a shock to system, you’re going to see very quickly just how undercapacity we are.”
Not everybody sees high speed trading as dangerous, of course. CNBC spoke to Jim Oberdhal, a vice president at NERA Economic Consulting, who argued that high frequency trades are an important tool for professional traders.
“I think the bottom line argument on the benefits of high-frequency trading: it’s a risk management tool for professional traders,” Oberdhal said. “It allows them to quickly revise their quote and offer better quotes because they’re able to manage the risk of being picked off by better-informed trader sort readers with superior information about order flow or market moving news.”
( Source: CNBC )
Taiwan's DigiTimes, an online trade news site, reported that Apple recently placed large mobile dynamic random access memory (DRAM) orders with Elpida's12-inch plant in Hiroshima, Japan, securing around half the facilities total chip production. It cited unnamed industry sources in its report, which hit shares of major chip suppliers to Apple.
SK hynix shares closed almost 9 percent lower at a 20-week low — the biggest one-day drop in nine months. Samsung, the world's biggest DRAM maker, tumbled 6.2 percent to a 9-week low of 1.23 million won ($1,100) — the stock's biggest daily fall in nearly four years.
"It looks like Apple doesn't want to see Samsung and hynix dominate the chip market. Apple wants to maintain its bargaining power by keeping Elpida running," said Choi Do-yeon, an analyst at LIG Investment & Securities.
U.S.-based Micron Technology is in talks to acquire Elpida's business as the Japanese firm tries to restructure after tough market conditions and global competition drove it into bankruptcy protection.
"A merged Micron-Elpida could pose a significant threat to South Korean memory chipmakers, and Elpida's huge order from Apple was the spark that triggered these worries," said Lim Dol-yi, an analyst at Solomon Investment & Securities.
Samsung declined to comment, as did the Japanese court-appointed trustee handling Elpida's rehabilitation.
A spokeswoman for SK hynix said: "We are receiving more orders for mobile DRAM chips from our customers." She declined to comment on whether Apple had reduced orders from the firm.
Technology shares were also impacted by a broader sell-off after talks to form a new Greek government failed, stoking concerns the country may exit the euro zone and increase financial market uncertainty. Shares in flat-screen maker LG Display slid 4.5 percent. Hyundai Motor lost 4 percent.
"Samsung shares were already facing pressure since offshore investors began cutting back on risk during the latest streak of sell-offs, but the news surrounding Elpida was the straw that broke the camel's back," said Rhoo Yong-suk, an analyst at Hyundai Securities. "It was just unfortunate timing that coincided with jitters surrounding Greece."
| Sachin Tendulkar |
News:
The Delhi High Court has issued a notice to the Centre on a PIL challenging Sachin Tendulkar's Rajya Sabha nomination. The Delhi High Court has asked the Centre to reply by July 5.
The petition claims that Sachin's selection was unconstitutional as only people from art, science, literature and social services could be nominated and the sports does not fall under any category.
However, the court refused to restrain the cricketer from taking oath as a Rajya Sabha member.
A bench of Acting Chief Justice AK Sikri and Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw dismissed the application for stay of Sachin's oath ceremony, but asked Additional Solicitor General (ASG) A S Chandhiok to seek instructions from the government and inform the court by the next date of hearing on the PIL.
"How is this sports category covered while nominating a sportsperson to the Rajya Sabha?" the bench queried and asked the ASG to reply on this issue.
Chandhiok argued that the power has been exercised by the President of India and the court cannot interfere in the matter.
The petitioner Ram Gopal Singh Sisodia, a former Delhi MLA, had challenged the nomination on the ground that Sachin does not possess any of the qualifications prescribed under Article 80 of the Constitution for being nominated to the Rajya Sabha.
Appearing for the petitioner, advocate RK Kapoor submitted that the Constitution allowed the government to select from only four categories - arts, science, literature and social science. The selection of a sportsperson was unconstitutional, he said.
On May 14, the Supreme Court had refused to quash 39-year-old batting maestro's nomination to the Upper House and had asked Sisodia to rather approach the high court with his plea.
At an outdoor public pool in Bangalore filled with toddlers in rubber rings and dive-bombing teenagers, two of India’s Olympic swimmers prepare for the biggest race of their lives.
Separated by lane markers from at least 400 locals who pay 38 cents for a cooling dip each day, the elite swimmers carve their way through water turned cloudy green by the chlorine needed to combat the pool’s bacteria. There are no changing rooms, while a lone coach watches over the athletes with a stopwatch.
Amid scant funding from the government, which is struggling to contain the widest budget deficit among major emerging economies, billionaires Lakshmi Mittal and Mukesh Ambani, pictured, have stepped in to bankroll training and equipment for athletes and try to put more Indians on the podium in London. Photographer: Pankaj Nangia/Bloomberg
“The government thinks all you need to be successful in swimming is water,” said Virdhawal Khade, 20, India’s 100-meter freestyle record holder who will lead his nation’s team in London from July. “Unless they start taking sport seriously, it’s hard to see things changing.”
India has won just 18 medals at 21 summer Olympics since 1920, more than half of them in men’s field hockey. At the 2008 games in Beijing, the country where cricket is a national obsession ranked last in the per-capita medals table. Amid scant funding from the government, which is struggling to contain the widest budget deficit among major emerging economies, billionaires Lakshmi Mittal and Mukesh Ambani have stepped in to bankroll training and equipment for athletes and try to put more Indians on the podium in London.
‘Frankly Disgraceful’
“Sport has never been a government priority, it always faced bigger challenges like poverty reduction, that is why our past performance has, frankly, been disgraceful,” Indian Olympic Association Acting President Vijay Kumar Malhotra said May 2. “As the economy has grown, so have expectations.”
The world’s second most populous country, whose economy has surged fivefold over two decades, allocated $48.1 million to fund athletes in the 16 months leading up to the London Olympics. China spent $450 million each year on sports in the decade before Beijing, where it claimed 100 medals. About half of the 54 Indians who have qualified for London in individual sports rely on some form of corporate support.
Most of the 26 Olympic disciplines, including swimming, rowing and gymnastics, are solely in the hands of poorly run federations lacking world-class training facilities and coaching, said Manisha Malhotra, the administrator of the Mittal Champions Trust and a former tennis player who competed at the 2000 Sydney Games. She’s no relation to India’s acting Olympic chief.
‘Plugging Holes’
“We are plugging the holes, putting Band-Aids on the shortfalls,” Malhotra said. “None of the private bodies can have the bandwidth that the government has neither do they have the outreach.”
The two richest Indians, Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), and U.K.-based Mittal are funding programs to give athletes access to personal trainers, nutritionists, psychologists and state-of-the-art equipment that would otherwise be out of reach. Tata Group (TATA), India’s largest business group and owner of Jaguar Land Rover, runs an archery academy. The country’s No. 2 software services exporter, Infosys Ltd. (INFO), backs an athletics school.
Mittal, chairman of ArcelorMittal (MT), the world’s biggest steel company, decided to intervene after being disappointed with the lack of compatriots to cheer at the 2004 Athens Olympics. He pledged $10 million for a breakthrough in time for this summer’s event.
“This should be the best performance of an Indian contingent,” Mittal told reporters at a press conference at the end of March. “The athletes have worked relentlessly hard for the last four or five years, so some medals have to come.”
Monkey God
For the 150 wrestlers, including Olympian Rajiv Tomar, training in a mud pit near Delhi’s Mughal-era Red Fort, international glory seems a long way off. The men lift rusting barbells as flies buzz around in summer temperatures climbing toward 40 degrees centigrade.
The center, founded by Guru Hanuman, a legendary Indian wrestler who took his name from the monkey god worshiped by many Hindus, sits on land donated in an earlier bout of corporate philanthropy by industrialist Krishna Kumar Birla. The wrestlers train on threadbare mats that also double up as their sleeping quarters.
“We are struggling for the basics like good diet and these boys have to fend for themselves until they get recognized at the national level,” said Maha Singh Rao, a coach at the center as he watched teenagers grappling during evening practice. “It is tough and these kids aren’t from rich families.”
Cricket Billions
The underfunding of Olympic disciplines stands in sharp contrast to India’s sporting passion, cricket, which isn’t an Olympic sport.
Fueled by money from sponsors, television coverage and ticket sales, the Indian Premier League, the world’s richest cricket franchise, is worth $3.67 billion, according to Brand Finance Plc, a London-based consultancy firm.
While India’s national cricket squad has access to the best equipment, dietitians and fitness trainers, the country’s Olympic shooters have been left without bullets to practice, archers without bows and arrows, and boxers with torn gloves, according to Rahul Mehra, a lawyer who took all India’s Olympic sports federations to the Delhi High Court in 2009, seeking fixed terms for sports chiefs and greater transparency.
Half of India’s 25 Olympic sports federations are run by politicians or their aides with little involvement of former players or professional managers, Mehra said May 3.
Chief on Trial
The Judo Federation of India is headed by Jagdish Tytler, a former Congress party government minister who was probed and exonerated by federal investigators over allegations he incited anti-Sikh riots in 1984. Yashwant Sinha, a senior leader of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, chairs the tennis body. Politicians also oversee the boxing, swimming and archery federations.
“Politicians across parties are running the show and they unite to block change the moment you say reforms,” Mehra said in a phone interview.
The Indian Olympic Association has refused to fire its President Suresh Kalmadi, a legislator from the western state of Maharashtra, even after he was jailed and put on trial for alleged corrupt contracts during preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. Kalmadi, who has been suspended by the ruling Congress Party of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was bailed in January.
Surrounded by splashing children at the open-air pool in Bangalore, Virdhawal Khade rues India’s sporting failures.
Khade holds the Indian record with a time of 49.27 seconds in the 100 meter freestyle. That’s almost 2.2 seconds slower than the fastest time this year by the Australian swimmer James Magnussen, the world number one over the distance.
Khade was meant to travel to Australia this month to train in a modern pool with other top athletes. The proposal was approved by the National Sports Development Fund, he said, yet the money never materialized.
“They promise but then they don’t deliver,” Khade said.
Humans have been inventing weird (and often unsavory) ways to get themselves embarrassingly drunk for centuries. But the makers of Wahh, a new inhalable alcohol mist, say their product is designed to do just the opposite.
Wahh is the invention of David Edwards, the Harvard professor whose inhalable caffeine and smokable chocolate have appeared on this site before. Edwards’s line of “breathable food sprays” (yum!) called Quantum Sensations includes Aeroshot, a vaporizing caffeine inhaler that received over $8.5 million in venture funding earlier this year. Edwards collaborated with French designer Philippe Starck to bring us the latest Quantum Sensation, Wahh, which debuted last week in Paris.
About $26 will buy you a Wahh canister, which contains around 25 “puffs” of vaporized alcohol. Hold the lipstick-sized tube up to your mouth, breath in, and a burst of Vodka-flavored mist delivers a dizzying sensation. The feeling fades within seconds, leaving you sober enough to pass a breathalyzer test.
The science behind the vaporizer is pretty simple. Each puff of vapor contains only .075 milliliters of alcohol--the equivalent of about 1/1000th of a shot of liquor. Edwards explains that by vaporizing a single drop of alcohol, Wahh “increases its surface area by approximately 1,000 times.” In other words, the vapor tricks your brain into thinking that you’re inhaling a thousand droplets of alcohol, rather than one.
“Everyone has an occasional need of light-headedness, distraction, and another place,” says Starck, but we tend to use alcohol as a “social placebo.” The idea behind Wahh, explains the duo, is to enjoy “the sensation of lightheadedness, without the risk of utter drunkenness.” And yes, if you were wondering, the name Wahh was chosen for the sound users make after using it.
The duo say that Wahh is mostly meant for use on food (there’s a spicey flavor called Demon), but the canisters will undoubtedly be popular for the “buzz” they produce. The real question, of course, is whether or not such a product perpetuates our collective misuse of alcohol.
According to their website, Wahh will appear in design stores in the U.S. sometime this summer.
GM Pulls Its Facebook Ads Three Days Before IPO
Via WSJ: General Motors’ marketing executives have decided to pull the company’s $10 million in paid Facebook after deeming the efforts had “little impact” in reaching consumers. The announcement comes three days before Facebook’s initial public offering. The company will continue to use the Facebook platform to promote its brands, operating on a $30 million budget that covers content creation and management. GM, the third largest advertiser in the U.S. behind Procter & Gamble and AT&T, spent $1.83 billion on U.S. advertisements in 2011. Though GM’s decision may be immaterial to Facebook’s $3.7 billion revenue figure, the announcement comes as Facebook executives attempt to assure investors that its advertising business is solid enough to merit the company’s near-certain $100 billion valuation.
ISIS Announces Mobile Payment Merchant Partners
H/T The Verge. NFC's slow start in the U.S. just got a bit of a boost--ISIS, the mobile payment consortium formed by Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, is announcing a slew of national and local merchant partners. Coca-Cola, Aeropostale, Dillard's and Macy's are among the first U.S.-wide adopters of the ISIS Mobile Wallet. Salt Lake City and Austin in Texas (a state that got a jump start on enabling ISIS payments)each have more than a dozen local participants that include cafes, grocery stores and car washes. According to the release, NFC devices with the ISIS Mobile Wallet will go on sale in Salt Lake City and Austin this summer.
Rebekah Brooks To Be Charged In Phone Hacking Case
Rebekah Brooks, former chief executive of News International, will been charged in connection with the U.K. phone hacking inquiry, on three counts of conspiracy to prevent the course of justice. Her husband Charlie Brooks, driver, and security staff are also being formally charged. According to the Telegraph, they are being accused of attempting to conceal information, documents and eletronics from Scotland Yard detectives. It's the latest development in a potentially international privacy scandal that has resulted in the closure of one long-running UK newspaper.
Baidu, China's Google, To Release Own-Brand Smartphone, Cloud Service
Baidu dominates search and many web services inside China, and now it's poised to release an inexpensive smartphone powered by its own operating system, backed up by extensive cloud services (does that sound familiar?). According to the Wall Street Journal the system comes with 100GB of cloud storage and includes Baidu maps and licensed music services, and the handset is just $158 in equivalent price. The device, merely the first of many that Baidu expects other operators to launch carrying its OS, is being made in collaboration with Foxconn--Apple's most significant manufacturing partner. Apple has been seeing incredible sales of its iPhone inside China, despite its high price.
Update: The Changhong H5018 has now been revealed. Carrying a forked and gutted version of Android, the device is actually rather attractive with its colored plastic chassis seeming to take a number of design cues from Nokia's N9 and Lumia range. It has a 3.5-inch screen and is an all-touchscreen affair that also includes Baidu's own voice-recognition technology
Via WSJ: General Motors’ marketing executives have decided to pull the company’s $10 million in paid Facebook after deeming the efforts had “little impact” in reaching consumers. The announcement comes three days before Facebook’s initial public offering. The company will continue to use the Facebook platform to promote its brands, operating on a $30 million budget that covers content creation and management. GM, the third largest advertiser in the U.S. behind Procter & Gamble and AT&T, spent $1.83 billion on U.S. advertisements in 2011. Though GM’s decision may be immaterial to Facebook’s $3.7 billion revenue figure, the announcement comes as Facebook executives attempt to assure investors that its advertising business is solid enough to merit the company’s near-certain $100 billion valuation.
ISIS Announces Mobile Payment Merchant Partners
H/T The Verge. NFC's slow start in the U.S. just got a bit of a boost--ISIS, the mobile payment consortium formed by Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, is announcing a slew of national and local merchant partners. Coca-Cola, Aeropostale, Dillard's and Macy's are among the first U.S.-wide adopters of the ISIS Mobile Wallet. Salt Lake City and Austin in Texas (a state that got a jump start on enabling ISIS payments)each have more than a dozen local participants that include cafes, grocery stores and car washes. According to the release, NFC devices with the ISIS Mobile Wallet will go on sale in Salt Lake City and Austin this summer.
Rebekah Brooks To Be Charged In Phone Hacking Case
Rebekah Brooks, former chief executive of News International, will been charged in connection with the U.K. phone hacking inquiry, on three counts of conspiracy to prevent the course of justice. Her husband Charlie Brooks, driver, and security staff are also being formally charged. According to the Telegraph, they are being accused of attempting to conceal information, documents and eletronics from Scotland Yard detectives. It's the latest development in a potentially international privacy scandal that has resulted in the closure of one long-running UK newspaper.
Baidu, China's Google, To Release Own-Brand Smartphone, Cloud Service
Baidu dominates search and many web services inside China, and now it's poised to release an inexpensive smartphone powered by its own operating system, backed up by extensive cloud services (does that sound familiar?). According to the Wall Street Journal the system comes with 100GB of cloud storage and includes Baidu maps and licensed music services, and the handset is just $158 in equivalent price. The device, merely the first of many that Baidu expects other operators to launch carrying its OS, is being made in collaboration with Foxconn--Apple's most significant manufacturing partner. Apple has been seeing incredible sales of its iPhone inside China, despite its high price.
Update: The Changhong H5018 has now been revealed. Carrying a forked and gutted version of Android, the device is actually rather attractive with its colored plastic chassis seeming to take a number of design cues from Nokia's N9 and Lumia range. It has a 3.5-inch screen and is an all-touchscreen affair that also includes Baidu's own voice-recognition technology
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• Aptiv Solutions Announces the Appointment of Luis Gutierrez as Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer More...
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Update 1: One should exit short positions around 4840 ( Spot Nifty ), Congratulations for profits.
US markets were down on a second day of the week, VIX spiked above 22. S&P 500 traded below 1340, a key psychological level for traders. Germany's GDP expanded more than expected, which helped markets to limit the downside in the early morning trade as markets were flat initially but the report that Greece money were coming out of banks and feared that banking capital will dry up soon. News prompted a fear in a markets and lead to a late sell off in US markets. Following the cues from US, Asian equities are sold off in morning trade as fear mounting about Greece collapse and its Euro Exit. All asian markets were down.
Nifty Trading Tips & Outlook
There is a definite downtrend to emerge today as we will see a sell off led by global cues and weakening rupee, Short Nifty at current levels. Don't try to bottom pick Nifty for a bounce, as US markets are loosing grounds and might impact more to downside in the global markets.Those who have shorted at around 4950 levels as mentioned in our previous day recommendation, they can hold the short positions, book partial profit at 4880 and next target will be 4850.
Check out our previous recommendation here
Keep Profiting from our tips, Happy trading
