Category Archives: Reviews

Economic & Innovation World Review Report April – June 2014

Consumer Technology World Brief

A web startup that has been gaining lot of momentum recently is Tinder – the so-called online dating app – technically defined as a location-based service dedicated to social discovery. It combines the natural desire to vet by appearance with tech-powered asynchronous two-way approvals to make rejections invisible and more acceptable. Another startup in the news and bringing in the money is the on-demand ride-hailing service Uber – they have confirmed today USD 1.2 billion has been raised in funding from a group of mutual fund managers and venture investors that value the company at USD 17 billion pre-funding. The company is expected to raise a total funding of about USD 1.4 billion once it completes a second close of strategic investors. 360cam by Giroptic is also kicking up a storm … but in a smaller scale. The 360cam designed by Girotropic captures HD video at 2048 x 1024 at 30 frames per second with a field of view of 360 x 300-degrees – it can take photos and video of the sky as well as your feet. The 360cam is currently one of the hottest Kickstarter projects, blasting past its modest USD 150,000 goal to rack up nearly USD 800,000 in crowd-based funding with 29 days to go.

Continue reading Economic & Innovation World Review Report April – June 2014

Economic & Innovation World Review Report April – May 2014

Consumer Technology World Brief

The recent confirmation of the impending IPO filing of Alibaba has attracted the interest of the consumer technology world not just in terms of the potential success of an Asian origin tech company in the U.S. market (the IPO is widely expected to surpass the USD 16.4 billion raised in 2012 by Facebook) but also in terms of the positive impact it will have on Yahoo which owns a 24% stake in Alibaba. Continue reading Economic & Innovation World Review Report April – May 2014

Economic & Innovation World Review Report March – April 2014

Consumer Technology World Brief

The recent unveiling of the Microsoft Office for IPad is not just a standard release of software with additional OS support but it signifies a more symbolic gesture in terms of the change in direction of Microsoft’s strategy in terms of support for crucial support on competing platforms. Rather than offering basic stripped-back versions on IPad they have released a slick and efficient version showing their seriousness in supporting the Apple platforms. Continue reading Economic & Innovation World Review Report March – April 2014

Economic & Innovation World Review Report January – February 2014

Consumer Technology World Brief

                3-D printing has been popping up in technology reviews and highlights since a few years due to its ability to innovate in the areas of customized design and manufacturing in various domains ranging from art to the medical field. And if you are wondering if it was just a fad then fear not, it is being accepted and integrated into more and more workflows. The next step for 3-D printing appears to be “mass customization” – the process of printing something unique for each user – and to leverage this evolutionary step companies like Shapeways and Cubify are promoting a marketplace environment for these mass customization based 3-D printing services. One of the major and interesting deals in recent history in the Consumer Technology world is the sale of Motorola’s smartphone business to Lenovo for USD 2.9 billion and the point of interest is not only the sale price but also the fact that Google acquired Motorola Mobility for USD 12.4 billion in 2012. According to analysts the huge difference in the purchase and sale price is due to the perceived value Motorola’s portfolio of mobile patents which are being retained by Google. In the interesting world of patent infringement disputes, especially in the consumer technology world, the perceived growth and opportunities of wearable tech industry can be observed based on the recent law suit filed by Adidas on Under Armour for alleged patent infringement of mobile-app technologies in the wearable tech domain.

Continue reading Economic & Innovation World Review Report January – February 2014

Economic & Innovation World Review Report December 2013 – January 2014

Consumer Technology World Brief

There are 17 competing teams in the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge. The agency, which funded basic science research for now commonplace technologies like the Internet and global positioning satellites, hopes the competition will spur the development of robots that can work in places too dangerous for humans. The challenge was launched in 2011 in response to the meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant after it was hit by a massive earthquake-spawned tsunami. Nearly 160,000 people were forced to flee the area. During the two-day trials at a south Florida professional race car track, the platoon of robots faced obstacles designed to mimic the challenges following a disaster. Robots had to cut through reinforced concrete wall, navigate debris-strewn terrain and locate and turn off leaking valves. Officials from DARPA also disrupted the link between robots and their operators, further simulating a disaster. The eight teams with the highest scores will be awarded USD 1 million in funding to prepare for the final round in late 2014, where the winning team will be awarded USD 2 million.

Continue reading Economic & Innovation World Review Report December 2013 – January 2014

Economic & Innovation World Review Report November – December 2013

Consumer Technology World Brief

Yota Devices has launched its first smartphone, hoping its novel double-sided screen will allow it to break into foreign markets. The idea is definitely unique with a normal high resolution screen on one side and on the other side an electronic paper display designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper, which is always switched on. Having an e-ink display on the back of the phone so you can comfortably read books or long articles without quickly draining the battery with a bright LCD display is a great idea in theory. However the YotaPhone is not quite there yet. Its e-ink screen is very low-quality, which usability quite unpleasant, and at the moment there are very limited support for the display form 3rd party developers. Nothing much can be done with it yet. However the idea is definitely a great one and the next generation model might be a better bet if it ever comes out.

Sekisui Chemical recently announced that they are on track to build new silicon-based material for use in lithium ion batteries that could result in batteries delivering a driving range of about 370 miles — roughly equivalent to how far a typical car can go on a full tank of gas but at a much lower cost. More important however is that the new material can bring battery production costs down to just above USD290 per kilowatt-hour, a decrease of more than 60 percent from around USD 976 today. The impact of this development would see the price of electric cars dropping. Other benefits of the new type of lithium ion battery are that it is about one-third the weight of a conventional electric car battery, allowing for a highly-compact car battery. If truly this development can be realized commercially, electric cars are poised to become more practical in the near future.

North America Review

U.S. gasoline demand has increased in recent months, following five years of decline, a change that some experts say could continue into 2014. From July to October, demand outstripped monthly government forecasts. Sales by refiners and other suppliers have shown year-on-year increases in six of the first nine months of 2013, the most monthly gains since 2010. Gasoline demand had been steadily declining since 2007 as motorists drove less and car fuel efficiency improved. The U.S. government still forecasts a 0.4 percent fall in gasoline demand in 2014. But demand is expected to rise 0.5 percent this year, after declining by 0.8 percent to 10.5 million barrels per day in 2012, according to the EIA, the statistical arm of the Department of Energy.

U.S. borrowers are increasingly missing payments on home equity lines of credit they took out during the housing bubble, a trend that could deal another blow to the country’s biggest banks. The loans are a problem now because an increasing number are hitting their 10-year anniversary, at which point borrowers usually must start paying down the principal on the loans as well as the interest they had been paying all along. More than $221 billion of these loans at the largest banks will hit this mark over the next four years, about 40 percent of the home equity lines of credit now outstanding. The big banks, including Bank of America Corp, Wells Fargo & Co, Citigroup Inc, and JPMorgan Chase & Co have more than $10 billion of these home equity lines of credit on their books each, and in some cases much more than that. How bad home equity lines of credit end up being for banks will hinge on the percentage of loans that default. Analysts struggle to forecast that number. In the best case scenario, losses will edge higher from current levels, and will be entirely manageable. But the worst case scenario for some banks could be bad, eating deeply into their earnings and potentially cutting into their equity levels at a time when banks are under pressure to boost capital levels.

Asia Review

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is readying a $182 billion economic package this week in his latest bid to pull the economy out of deflation, but the new measures will not require the government to sell more debt. The package, to be approved by Abe’s government on Thursday, will have a headline value of 18.6 trillion yen ($181.6 billion). That puts the overall package on a par with Abe’s 20 trillion yen burst of spending early this year as part of his campaign to end 15 years of falling prices and tepid growth. But the bulk of the package includes loans from government-backed lenders, spending by local governments and corporations. The headline figure usually announced by the Japanese government on economic measures often includes spending that has already been committed, and tends to far exceed the amount of actual new government spending.

China plans to roll out financial sector reforms in the Shanghai special economic zone in the next three months and most will be implemented in a year, suggesting authorities are accelerating the pace of dismantling capital account controls. A People’s Bank of China (PBOC) statement  for the first time gave a timeline for launching deep reforms in the zone, adding they could then be duplicated in other similar zones around the country. The statement came after the PBOC provided additional detail for its plans for financial liberalization in the Shanghai free trade zone (FTZ) in a separate document published on Monday. The apparent tempo of reform in the FTZ is consistent with other moves by China to promote the use of its currency in global trade, including seeding offshore yuan centers in London, Paris and Singapore and allowing banks and companies to freely move the yuan across its borders for trade-related services. China now conducts nearly a fifth of its trade with the world in its own currency compared with about 1 percent at the start of 2009. That share is expected to rise to as much as a third in the next couple of years, various estimates suggest.

Europe Review

Euro zone states are considering cheap loans to member governments as an incentive to carry out painful economic reforms, an EU document showed, introducing a discussion on fiscal transfers. The loans would be part of so-called contractual arrangements, which would be legally binding contracts with economic reform targets and milestones that trigger the payout of tranches of the agreed loan. The loans would be attractive because they would be offered at interest rates below those in financial markets. In that respect, they would amount to a degree of subsidized lending, ultimately amounting to a mutualising of risk among involved member states and a degree of financial transfer – an idea that Germany has long resisted. The size of the loan would not be linked to the cost of reform and would be meant as general support for the economy. It is not clear what time-frame the loans would be offered for, or what the limit on the size of any loan would be. While there were no details on how the loans could be financed, one possibility, the official indicated, might be for the euro zone’s rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism, to raise money on international markets and on-lend capital to a contracted member state, although the exact framework and process of the lending is yet to be finalized.

European banks, which eliminated more than 140,000 jobs in two years, are poised to keep shrinking. Lenders in the region probably will cut at least 5 percent of trading and advisory staff next year, according to a survey of three London-based investment-bank recruiters, and the reductions could reach 15 percent.  That would be twice the 7 percent shrinkage across the industry since 2011. European firms are lagging behind U.S. counterparts in meeting stricter limits on leverage, putting pressure on them to cut assets. . At the same time, a stagnant economy is crimping fees from investment banking and merger advice, eroding returns.  After exiting its longest recession in the second quarter, the euro area remains economically fragile. The European Union last month trimmed its forecast for growth next year in countries that share the euro to 1.1 percent and raised its unemployment estimate to 12.2 percent.

Economic & Innovation World Review Report October – November 2013

Consumer Technology World Brief

Motorola has unveiled Project Ara which is an open source initiative for modular smartphones with the goal to “do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software”. Motorola will be working with Phonebloks, which recently showed off a similarly ambitious concept for modular smartphones. The design consists of an endoskeleton to which various components such as camera, battery pack and more unusual components can be attached. This allows the user to customize the phone according to their needs such as higher memory space or longer battery life. This will result in a complete overhaul of the mobile industry with focus geared towards component interchangeability.

Fully electric cars and range-extended vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S, and Chevrolet Volt have only been on the market a few years, but it’s pretty clear that they’re on the front line of an automotive revolution. However the battery capacity is a problem with the charging logistics still in the development phase with no suitable commercial options. And that’s where the folks at HEVO Power come in. They’ve designed a new system for wireless charging that they’ll be testing next year in New York City. If all goes as planned, it could make life much easier for electric car drivers and fleets. HEVO’s system relies on charging plates embedded in the street, designed to look like manhole covers. When parked above them, electric car owners can power up their batteries with no fuss. HEVO’s prototype is expected to debut in early 2014, using two specially outfitted Smart Fortwos owned by New York University.

North America Review

President Barack Obama signed a bill that ends the 16-day partial government shutdown and raises the debt ceiling. Weeks of bitter political fighting gave way to a frenzied night in Washington as Congress passed the bill that would prevent the country from crashing into the debt ceiling. The debt cushion now extends through February 7, with current spending levels being authorized through January 15. That means a few months of breathing room, but little more. After all, the bill doesn’t address many of the contentious and complicated issues – from changes to entitlement programs to tax reform – that continue to divide Democrats and Republicans. The past 16 days of the partial government shutdown has come at a steep cost. Standard and Poor’s estimated it took USD 24 billion out of the economy.

The chaotic launch of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law has Democrats in Congress increasingly anxious about its potential impact on them in the 2014 elections and scrambling to protect themselves if the program’s problems persist. Some of the Democrats, such as New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, represent states where enthusiasm has been high for the Affordable Care Act. Among other things, the law aims to provide inexpensive health insurance to many of the estimated 15 million Americans with little or no coverage. The balky website, HealthCare.gov, has been unable to process an untold number of applications for insurance since its debut on October 1, and the frustration both types of Democrats have had with it was evident on Thursday. If the Obama administration is able to fix it and ensure a smooth rollout then there will be no problems for the 2014 elections but if not then evidently they are heading for choppy waters ahead.

Asia Review

In defying four years of official cooling efforts, China’s soaring house prices reveal an uncomfortable truth: government is one of the biggest obstacles to the success of taming the market. Homes in cities such as Beijing are more expensive by some measures than Britain or Japan, a dismal outcome for a central government campaign aimed at making homes more affordable to Chinese. House prices in September rose nationwide at their fastest pace in three years. China’s reform efforts, such as lowering government reliance on land sales for revenue and providing speculators with more investment options, should help iron out these factors. Nowhere in China is the problem of a surging property market more acute than in Beijing and Shanghai, where the lure of good education and employment have underpinned demand as millions of Chinese are encouraged to migrate to cities.

China’s state-owned GAC Motor scored above average in a closely watched quality survey, as home-grown brands narrowed the gap with the foreign marques that dominate the world’s biggest car market. GAC Motor, which sells cars under its own brand Trumpchi, had 97 problems per 100 newly sold vehicles. That was better than the average 119 problems and beat global names such as General Motors Co’s, Buick and Chevrolet, Ford, Nissan and Honda. Three other Chinese brands — Venucia, Roewe and Luxgen, also performed better than the industry average, compared with none last year. But despite these efforts, foreign brands still grabbed the top spots in the survey – Toyota’s Lexus and Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz tied for the highest quality, with 52 problems per 100 cars, followed by Subaru, made by Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd, Volkswagen and BMW.

Europe Review

The euro zone economy will expand slightly more slowly next year than previously expected because of weaker private demand and investment and inflation will stay well below the central bank target over the next two years. The European Commission forecasts published on Tuesday are likely to add to arguments for an interest rate cut by the European Central Bank, which is to discuss its next policy move on Thursday. Nevertheless, recession was firmly behind the euro zone from the second quarter of this year and the pace of recovery would slowly accelerate quarter-on-quarter. Many euro zone governments were forced to sharply rein in spending over the last three years as investors began demanding unsustainably high prices for lending to them because of concern they might never get paid back. The Commission said that euro zone consumer price growth, which the ECB wants to keep below but close to 2 percent over a two year horizon, will be 1.5 percent this year and next and only 1.4 percent in 2015 as unemployment stays at record high levels around 12 percent.

Four European banks paid a heavy price on Tuesday in a clean-up of the financial industry, with Rabobank fined USD 1 billion and three other major lenders preparing for possibly huge legal costs after a string of scandals. Dutch Rabobank said it would pay regulators in the United States, Britain and the Netherlands 774 million euros after 30 employees were involved in “inappropriate conduct” linked to interest rate manipulation. European and U.S. banks are still struggling to cast off a variety of misdeeds revealed after the financial crisis erupted in 2008, and the relentless rise in the cost of fines, lawsuits and compensation shows no sign of abating. Rabobank is the fifth lender to be fined for manipulating reference rates such as Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate), which are benchmarks for more than USD 300 trillion of financial assets. Regulators have now imposed penalties totaling USD 3.7 billion. Seven people have been charged with criminal offences.

Economic & Innovation World Review Report September – October 2013

Consumer Technology World Brief

Samsung has released the Galaxy Gear a smart watch which on its own has quite an impressive amount of technology squeezed into the form factor of a watch. It has 1.6-inch touchscreen, 4 gigabytes of storage, 24 hours of battery life, a 1.9 megapixel camera, a speaker and a microphone. Samsung essentially shrunk a smartphone down until it was functional as a wristwatch. But the Galaxy Gear isn’t a replacement for a smartphone. In fact, you still need a smartphone or tablet to use most of the smart watch’s features. Complicating matters further, the Galaxy Gear currently works with just two devices: the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the latest edition of the Galaxy Note 10.1. Not included is Samsung’s wildly popular Galaxy S smartphone series, though Samsung has hinted that those devices might be supported in the future. However its functionality is still lacking as for most people it’s still easier to access your phone then to use a proxy device. Ultimately the gear doesn’t do enough that a smartphone can’t.

Continue reading Economic & Innovation World Review Report September – October 2013

Wearable Technology Market Overview

The recent launch of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch has turned the spotlight on the wearable technology segment in general and the smartwatch segment in particular. Wearable technology is not a recent trend – a Visiongain report estimates that the value of the global wearable technology market in 2013 will reach USD 4.6 billion. Further it is projected to grow to as much as USD 50 billion over the next three to five years according to a recent Credit Suisse report.

Continue reading Wearable Technology Market Overview

Economic & Innovation World Review Report July-August 2013

Consumer Technology World Brief

There are hundreds of millions of regular televisions packing HDMI ports, and Google’s new Chromecast device offers a way to put some brains into TVs by giving them access to web-based content. Having a Chromecast dongle connected to your TV means you can stream videos straight from a Google Play, Netflix or YouTube app, or mirror the content in any open tab in Google’s Chrome browser using a tab casting feature. Chromecast is backed by Google, whose relationships with content providers and developers mean that the Google Cast technology powering it will soon be popping up in even more apps. Not to mention, there’s the price. At USD 35, it’s almost a third of the cost of Plair and also Roku 3 and Apple TV, the current most popular devices that bring internet video to your TV. Sure, it’s not as fully featured as some of its competitors, but it does provide a lot for just USD 35, and it’s a platform that’s likely to improve dramatically as more apps start to support the technology.

Continue reading Economic & Innovation World Review Report July-August 2013