National Post Tech Desk

Apple Watch is the top wearable device I have ever used, but I’m still not sold on the concept of a smartwatch, especially one as pricey as Apple Inc.’s.

With this in mind though, Apple has still created the best-looking, best-performing and most feature-rich smartwatch released so far, making top competing devices such as the Android Wear-based Moto 360 and even Pebble, two of my favourite smartwatches, almost feel like limited toys in comparison. However, Apple Watch has a number of flaws — some of which nearly ruin the smartwatch experience — making it difficult to not recommend most consumers wait for the next, likely superior version of the product.

Also, with the Apple Watch’s significant price point in mind, it’s a hard sell for consumers on the fence about the concept of a smartwatch in general.

But make no mistake, Apple Watch continues with the premium-priced, high-end direction Apple is known for, and in some ways consumers get exactly what they’re paying for.

It’s undeniably pretty and functional

Every Apple Watch model is impressive looking, but the Apple Watch Edition version (starting at $650) is the most visually appealing iteration. However, it has a few significant drawbacks in terms of build-quality.

The chrome body of the Apple Watch Edition is prone to scuffs and scratches. After using an Apple Watch Edition for approximately a week and a half, I was frustrated that it already showed a number of hairline scrapes on various parts of its chrome body (I tend to be very careful with my electronics). Considering its $650 price tag, I expected the Apple Watch Edition to be able to take more abuse before showing signs of wear and tear.

Patrick O'Rourke/National PostThe Apple Watch's digital crown is intuitive, but not as easy to pick-up and use as a touch screen.

This leads me to believe the brushed-metal Apple Watch Sport might be the best option in terms of durability. It seems I’m not alone: Many other technology critics have similar sentiments. Some experts also say Apple Watch Sport has a superior screen, claiming the more durable sapphire display featured in the Apple Watch Edition unfortunately results in poor viewing angles and that it doesn’t look as sharp as the Sport’s glass display.

Next there is the underused favourite contacts button, located on the left side of he Apple Watch just under the Digital Crown, depending on how the device is oriented and which hand it’s being worn on. This button seems to be largely ignored by Apple and is currently only used to access favourite contacts as well as to turn the wearable on and off.

However, the button’s limited use makes it much easier to access the favourites section of the Apple Watch. Still, its placement makes it a little difficult to access and it’s hard not to wonder if Apple intended to use it for additional purposes, but ran out of time when designing the Apple Watch’s user-interface (UI).

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• Apple Watch game review roundup: Lifeline, Rules!, Trivia Crack, Spy_Watch, Battle Camp, and more
• Six Apple Watch features you probably haven’t heard of

Patrick O'Rourke/National PostThe Apple Watch's Sport Band is surprisingly comfortable.

On the other side of the spectrum, Apple Watch’s Digital Crown offers a simple and intuitive way of scrolling through messages as well as zooming the Apple Watch’s main UI screen in and out, but it’s hardly the navigation revolution Apple has touted it to be.

It shares a lot in common with the classic scroll wheel featured on older iPods. While the Digital Crown works adequately, the fluid scroll wheel isn’t as intuitive as a touch screen — one of the main factors that made the iPad and iPhone so popular and helped the devices reach such a broad audience.

This means there’s a learning curve when it comes to understanding the Apple Watch’s user-interface. Most people I showed the Apple Watch to were initially unsure how to navigate through apps. It often took a number of minutes before they were able to grasp the basics of Apple Watch navigation.

That’s not to say that the Apple Watch’s UI isn’t impressive, because it is. Similar to BlackBerry’s BB10 operating system, using an Apple Watch just takes a little getting used to. After a couple of hours with the smartwatch zooming in with the Digital Crown and scrolling through glances, it can become second nature.

Straps/bands are intuitive and comfortable

Patrick O'Rourke/National PostOne of the most surprising aspects of the Apple Watch is how much thought has gone into the device's bands.

The various impressive, but often very expensive, Apple Watch straps are perhaps the aspect of the device I have been the most surprised about.

The Apple Watch Sport’s fluoroelastomer synthetic rubber band is silky smooth and doesn’t stick to skin like other smartwatch bands. It also costs a reasonable $69 — not a bad price for a product that’s designed for when you’re working out.

The Leather Loop’s magnetic band conforms perfectly and snuggly to the wearer’s wrist. This is my favourite band because it is a good mix between style and comfort, and also doesn’t add additional weight to the Apple Watch. The Leather Loop’s $199 price will likely be too steep for most people, though.

With the Steel Link Bracelet you’re able to easily remove magnetic links from the band for sizing purposes. This strap costs an astronomical $599, a high price to pay for something that gets easily scratched.

After using the Steel Link Bracelet for only a few days, a number of small scuffs began cropping up on its buckle and various links. It may be a minor issue, considering many of these scratches will likely be able to be buffed out. But at a $599 price tag, most would expect the Steel Link Bracelet to be significantly more durable.

Other bands such as the Modern Buckle and intricate Milanese Loop, are also available.

Some apps are great. Others? Not so much

Patrick O'Rourke/Financial PostWhen you strip the Apple Watch down, it almost amusingly looks very similar to older iPod Nano models.

Apple Watch’s app selection initially seems robust and varied, but there are really only a handful actually worth downloading right now. Montreal-developed Transit App is one of the Apple Watch’s most useful applications, but even it has drawbacks.

While Transit App often pulls data from its iPhone app counterpart in just a few seconds, sometimes the transfer can take up to 10 seconds. When this occurred I often opted to pull out my phone and check upcoming public transit times on it instead, defeating the inherent easy-to-access intended purpose of Apple Watch.

This brings to light perhaps one of the Apple Watch’s most significant issues. Apple Watch apps are always tethered to the iPhone and every current application for the device pulls data from the smartphone. In some cases users are forced to manually open an app on their iPhone before being able to use its Apple Watch counterpart. Sometimes this only needs to be done once, but other apps need to be opened multiple times on the iPhone.

If the Apple Watch’s purpose is intended to revolve around gathering information at a glance, then this is an issue that needs to be fixed.

In terms of other Apple Watch applications there are a few standouts: Twitter (although the app is very limited), Instagram, Calcbot, Deliveries, Clear and perhaps surprisingly, a simplistic games called Spy_Watch, that tasks players with sending virtual spies on real-time missions, all work perfectly within the platform’s limitations.

News applications and simple built-in companion apps such as Music, Phone and Photos, felt useless on the Apple Watch because they’re simply a more limited version of their iPhone counterparts. It makes more sense to just open the app on your iPhone instead.

Glances are a great idea hindered by technical issues

Patrick O'Rourke/National PostNavigating through the Apple Watch's UI takes some getting used to, but it's still intuitive and well thought-out.

Glances are Apple’s version of Google’s automated Google Now system, a feature that aims to give Android Wear watch users access to information they want before they even know they need it. Google Now isn’t very customizable but still works great in most cases, giving users access to emails, movie times, weather and a variety of other information, with just a few swipes on an Android Wear smartwatch or Android smartphone.

But with Glances, Apple has taken the concept of a personal information gatherer to another level, allowing developers to create custom widgets, giving customizable and quick access to the information they need. For instance, I have Glances set up for Transit App, Calendar, Twitter, Spy_Watch, and weather – all apps I use frequently.

While all this might sound great, these always-on widgets are hindered by the same issues as standard Apple Watch apps. They’re often slow, crash on occasion and sometimes fail to pull data from their iPhone counterparts. With that said, there’s something special about the ability to personally cater your experience with Glances on the Apple Watch that makes me think the feature will likely become a significant part of the Apple Watch’s experience, and the direction smartwatches are headed in general.

If app developers and Apple are able to find a way to make Glances more stable and responsive, then they could be the key UI feature that will give Apple Watch a significant advantage over anything Android Wear is currently capable of.

It’s all about notifications

Patrick O'Rourke/National PostIt also tells time. After all, the Apple Watch is still a "watch."

Apple Watch’s most useful purpose, which is also arguably how any smartwatch can be used best, is to notify you of important information. This means sending emails, text messages, Instagram notifications, as well as a variety of other app messages, directly to your wrist. This means your smartphone can stay in your pocket for longer and you can concentrate on things that are more important, rather than constantly checking your phone for that important email you’ve been waiting for.

And this is where Apple Watch will either shine or fall apart for most people, depending on how much effort you put into configuring which notifications land on your wrist. The idea behind smartwatches, particularly Apple Watch, is to simplify your life and to not have every single message you receive on your iPhone also be sent to your wrist. This is why I opted to only receive emails, phone calls and text messages to the Apple Watch, rather than Google Hangout, Facebook, Twitter, and countless other notifications.

This keeps things simple and allows me to quickly raise my wrist to see the information I need right away. It’s also important to point out that while there is an option that allows users to only receive primary emails or emails from a specific sender via the Apple Watch with Apple’s stock mail app, this same filtering is not carried over to Gmail and other applications.

If you’re deeply tied to Google’s ecosystem you’re going to have issues with the Apple Watch since the company has launched very few Apple Watch apps, an issue that is expected given Google created the operating system most of Apple Watch’s competitors take advantage of. Currently only Google News and Weather are available on Apple Watch.

Cool, but not very practical features

Patrick O'Rourke/National PostThe Apple Watch shines an eerie green light through the user's skin to monitor their heartbeat.

The Apple Watch is also full of cool but not exactly practical features. For example, you can take calls from your wrist with the Apple Watch, an act that makes you look ridiculous in public and that I have not found a practical purpose for.

Additionally I found myself often sending simple doodles and handwritten messages to people in my top friends list who also have Apple Watches. You’re also able to send your heartbeat to other Apple Watch users, which on some level is mildly creepy. Unfortunately both of these capabilities can only be received by other Apple Watch users.

Other cool features include the ability to use the Apple Watch as a shutter remote for the Apple Watch’s camera, opening up new photography opportunities for iPhone users, and Siri voice controls and search capabilities, another feature that tends to make you look rather ridiculous if you opt to talk to your wrist in public.

Multiple watch faces are also available for the Apple Watch, although they aren’t very customizable and Apple hasn’t opened up the feature to third-party developers.

Price is still a barrier for the best smartwatch out there

Despite its flaws Apple Watch is an impressive device. Battery life is solid, clocking in at an impressive 8-12 hours with moderate use as long as I charged the smartwatch every day. This is in part due to the battery-saving technology behind its screen, which turns on approximately 98 per cent of the time I raise my wrist to look at the device (this was a huge issue with the Moto 360).

But the question of whether smartwatches are set to be the next device everybody needs, similar to an iPhone or any other smartphone, still remains. Apple is on to something with Apple Watch and similar to its past devices, the company has already blown away wearable competitors both in terms of functionality and aesthetics.

But with the impressive looking and much more affordable $250 Android-focused Pebble Time on the horizon, it’s unclear if Apple’s current smartwatch supremacy will last.

TORONTO — Step aside Hollywood because this year Cineplex is placing its bets on Canada’s burgeoning video game community.

After years of dabbling in various small gaming events, the Toronto-based movie exhibitor wants to show gamers it’s ready to invest in their obsession.

This summer, Cineplex will hold a series of gaming-themed screenings it hopes will eventually lead to hosting local video game competitions at its own theatres.

The move comes as the company focuses on building a sustainable business that doesn’t solely rely on the volatile profits of the movie industry, which thrives on the latest blockbuster and stumbles on the flops.

Enthusiastic gamers could offer the company a reliable way of drawing crowds any time of year.

Multi-player video game tournaments, also known as Esports, have become a global sensation that attracts thousands of spectators to live events held at arenas and other venues around the world.

Fans cheer on players who compete head-to-head in popular games like “Counter-Strike: GO” and “Call of Duty” as their every move is projected on giant screens. The winners can go home with thousands of dollars in cash prizes.

Cineplex chief executive Ellis Jacob said Wednesday that he wants to tap into that energy within the Canadian gaming community this year.

“There’s a lot of vitality,” he said at the company’s annual meeting.

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• Cineplex sees concession sales soar to record heights

In July, Cineplex will gauge the national interest of gamers with an event screening of the documentary, “All Work All Play: The Pursuit of Esports Glory” at 85 theatres across much of the country. The movie will be followed by a casual Esports competition between audience members inside the theatres.

Cineplex hopes the documentary will trigger interest from a hungry gaming community that has faced a lack of public spaces to hold competitions in many parts of the country.

In August, Cineplex also plans to host a live screening of the ESL One Cologne 2015 gaming tournament from Cologne, Germany.

Video games aren’t an entirely new area of business for Cineplex. The company first put gamers on its radar in 2008 when it began renting out downtime at theatres to Xbox 360 players who wanted to compete on the big screen.

In 2013, a Cineplex theatre in Toronto hosted a tournament to promote “EA Sports NHL14” on PlayStation 3 before the game was released in stores.

Theatrical exhibitors have struggled in recent years to convince younger people — in particular teenage boys and young men — to buy movie tickets, as a slate of blockbusters compete against video game consoles and entertainment alternatives like YouTube and Netflix.

Esport competitions have proven to be one of the few sure bets, as the gaming business grows in leaps and bounds.

Video game research firm Newzoo expects that gaming “enthusiasts” will surge from an estimated 89 million in 2013 to as many as 145 million by 2017, while revenues for the gaming industry are projected to climb as high as $465 million in 2017.

Advertisers salivate over the demographics of the gaming community, with Coca-Cola signing up to be a leading sponsor of Riot Games’ League of Legends tournaments in the United States.

Sports broadcaster TheScore Inc. also joined the gaming world earlier this year with an app that tracks scores and statistics for top gamers.

TheScore also delivers breaking news related to select games and says it plans to expand coverage as its app gains traction.

The Canadian Press

Thursday at Salesforce World Tour in Toronto, Salesforce.com Inc. announced a series of initiatives to assist the Canadian startup community, including a partnership with Communitech, an industry-led innovation centre that supports, fosters and celebrates a community of nearly 1,000 tech companies.

Salesforce is partnering with Communitech to support Communitech’s Rev program, which is a first of its kind sales accelerator that enables high-potential startups to scale revenue growth quickly. Salesforce will provide training, mentorship and resources to Rev companies, and will also work closely with Communitech to support the growth of the broader local startup ecosystem.

“Salesforce is an ideal partner for Communitech and the Rev program,” said Iain Klugman, CEO, Communitech. “With their industry leading technology and expertise, Salesforce can provide the mentorship, training and resources that will help our companies scale quickly.”

In addition, the company announced the Canadian launch of Salesforce for Startups. It will give technology entrepreneurs the resources needed to successfully build and grow their businesses, including technology, and connections with experts who can assist them.

The three core elements of the program are:

• Build: As part of the program, startups will have access to the Salesforce1 Platform, enabling them to quickly build any kind of app at scale.
• Grow: Salesforce for Startups provides access to curated content and tools to help startups delight customers and grow.
• Give Back: Startups are encouraged to integrate philanthropy into the fabric of their company from the very beginning.

“We’re thrilled to join forces with the Canadian tech startup ecosystem to accelerate innovation,” Ludovic Ulrich, director of startup relations at Salesforce, said in a statement. “The tech startup sector is a critical part of the Canadian economy and we’re proud to provide the technology, tools and expertise entrepreneurs need to take their businesses into the future.”

To assist with the third element, Give Back, Salesforce for Startups is working with Pledge 1%, a movement it co-founded with Atlassian and EFCO. Pledge 1% encourages startups to pledge one per cent of equity, product and/or employee time to their communities. It is entirely funded by its co-founders, so all pledges go to causes designated by pledging companies. With the help of Canadian non-profit Upside Foundation, over 30 companies, including Candid, Organimi, Switch Video, Empty Cubicle, Funnelcake, Hubba, MeetVibe, and Mindstack, have already made the commitment.

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Through the Salesforce Foundation, Salesforce itself has donated over $80 million in grants, and almost one million volunteer hours through its 1-1-1 initiatives since it was founded in 1999, co-founder Parker Harris noted. In addition, it sponsors an initiative for customers at its annual Dreamforce user conference. Last year, its goal was to raise one million meals for those in need, either with cash or canned food donations from participants; when combined with matching contributions, the conference tripled that number, yielding three million meals.

Salesforce World Tour Toronto is Salesforce’s premier event in Canada, bringing together Salesforce experts, partners and customers to demonstrate how companies can leverage the Salesforce Platform to connect all of their apps, devices and customer data in today’s cloud, social, mobile and data science world.

Rdio has announced a new mobile-focused $3.99 per month pricing plan, in an effort to compete in the crowded and quickly-growing music streaming industry. The price undercuts Spotify Ltd.’s $10 premium service price tag significantly, as well as paid versions of a variety of other platforms, and is the lowest priced music streaming subscription available right now.

Rdio says its new pricing tier gives subscribers unlimited mobile access to any station on its service, with no ads or skip limits – a limitation of the free version of the platform restricts the number of songs a listener can skip over. Music is also streamed at high-quality 320 kbps and users are only able to download 25 songs for offline listening, with a limit of replacing these downloads once per day.

Rdio is also offering a 60-day trial of the new “Select” plan.

“We’re excited to reach a new group of price sensitive music subscribers with Rdio Select and have designed the service to appeal to a wide audience,” said Rdio CEO Anthony Bay in a press release. “Rdio Select joins our premium Rdio Unlimited package and reflects our commitment to offering customized streaming options tuned to different listening audiences.”

The catch with this pricing plan is that users will only be able to use Rdio’s mobile app, which means it won’t work with the service’s web-based application. Arguably the two top music streaming platforms, Rdio and Spotify, both offer free music tiers that institute some sort of limit on use. For example, Spotify’s free subscription tier is largely restriction-free, unless you’re using the service’s mobile app which limits songs to shuffle playback.

Ads and lack of enhanced music quality are also restrictions on the free tier of Spotify’s service. Spotify soft-launched in Canada in early September 2014, joining competitors such as Deezer, Google Play Music, Slacker and Songza – which was purchased by Google in July 2014.

Rdio offers ad-free web streaming at $4.99, and unlimited mobile and web streaming is pegged at $9.99, a price point matching Spotify’s standard premium subscription fee of $9.99. In comparison, Google Play Music does not offer a a free subscription level and instead charges $9.99 for unlimited streaming access. The other major player in the Canadian music streaming space is Deezer, which also offers a $9.99 subscription price tag.

Jay Z’s supposedly artist-focused Tidal, which launched to significant fanfare just a few weeks ago, is currently considered a flop after the app fell out of the U.S. top 700 iTunes app charts.

While Rdio’s new “Select” price point might seem insignificant it could signal that competing platforms will begin offering less expensive, but still feature limiting, subscription levels

TORONTO – Financially strapped Mobilicity has secured another reprieve from its creditors from an Ontario court, affording its stakeholders four more months to review “credible interest” from “various parties” for “an acquisition transaction,” according to a monitor’s report filed during the company’s last stay extension.

However, sources familiar with the struggling wireless startup confirmed the potential suitors brought before the court to secure the latest extension until Aug. 31 are the same two prospective buyers that have been circling what’s left of the carrier for years: Telus Corp. and Wind Mobile Corp.

Given that the same hurdles that either blocked or delayed a sale in the past continue to prevail today, it appears Mobilicity may be stalling for more time.

Related

• As Mobilicity goes back to the drawing board, creditors at odds on next move
• Wind Mobile rekindled talks to take over Mobilicity ahead of spectrum auction deadline
• Mobilicity may have lost funding for spectrum auction just before deadline

“Nothing new has happened in two months,” said a source familiar with the company, which has been attempting to restructure since September 2013. “Wind and Telus are still the only ones that have shown interest, but they haven’t been to the table in a very long time.”

Telus clashed with Industry Canada when it tried to buy Mobilicity three times in 2013 and 2014, first offering $380 million and then $350 million. But Ottawa insisted that a marriage of the two carriers would hurt wireless competition and blocked the deal each time.

Joe Natale, chief executive officer of Telus, confirmed the Vancouver-based wireless giant was not in renewed talks with Mobilicity. “We are not, and we have nothing active going with Mobilicity,” he said in a recent phone interview, “nor would we comment on anything we might be doing in the marketplace with respect to business development or otherwise.”

Wind and Mobilicity restarted merger talks earlier this year, which the pair have been doing on and off since 2009, but Wind’s owners have so far balked at the terms Mobilicity is seeking. Sources say Wind will not bid higher than $200 million for its cash-strapped rival.

“Mobilicity has stale numbers in their head that are so unrealistic,” another source said.

A spokesman for Mobilicity declined to comment.

Facing the prospect of insolvency, Mobilicity says it is striving for a “value-maximizing transaction” for both management and creditors, a task that has proven to be a challenge for a group that can’t seem to agree on how to reach the most-optimal exit.

As of April 30, Mobilicity estimates it has 157,000 active wireless subscribers, down from 158,600 at the end of 2014. According to a projected cash-flow statement filed with the court, it expects to record a cash outflow of $2.9 million from operations between April 25 and Sept. 4, forecasting $23.1 million in sales.

The prior stay was extended until May 8 from Jan. 30 so Mobilicity could consider tabling a bid for spectrum licences in March’s AWS-3 auction that were set aside specifically for new entrants, a decision that was deemed to be in “the best interest” of Mobilicity by its board, lawyers and financial advisers.

But the company didn’t table a bid after Catalyst Capital Group Inc. pulled up to $200 million in funding because the Toronto-based lender “determined that all the conditions precedent to funding under the term sheet had not been met,” per the recent court filings.

The benefactor of Mobilicity’s inability to secure financing for a bid was rival Wind, which won set-aside licenses to AWS-3 spectrum in British Columbia, Alberta and southern Ontario for a bargain reserve price of $56.4 million. The biggest loser might be the federal government, which could have fetched a much steeper amount for the coveted resource if someone other than Wind had bid for it. Plus, it’s stuck watching stumbling Mobilicity, a company it had once hoped would vie to be Canada’s fourth national carrier.

Mobilicity’s decision to submit its $62-million deposit to Industry Canada to participate in the AWS-3 auction has cost the carrier $1.9 million in unpaid fees and interest, which is still owed.

Financial Post
cpellegrini@nationalpost.com

For a mobile executive, choosing a laptop is often a tradeoff. Is the priority thin and light, or big and powerful?

With the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015), the choice becomes irrelevant – the X1 Carbon is both.

Before we go on, let’s just clarify the unusual naming. The X1 Carbon (2015) is the third iteration of Lenovo’s premium executive Ultrabook. Rather than change the model name, the company opted to simply append the year. It can be a bit confusing – when people refer to the X1 Carbon, it could be any of the three models. Here, unless otherwise specified, we’re talking about the new 2015 version.

Like its predecessors, the X1 Carbon qualifies as an Ultrabook, tipping the scales at just under 3 lb. and measuring 0.7-inches thick. Our review model was loaded, with i7 processor, 8 GB RAM, and 512 GB SSD. It boasted the top-end 14-inch WQHD touchscreen display with 2560 x 1440 resolution, a mixed blessing as you will see.

The port collection was generous for a modern Ultrabook: 2 USB 3.0 ports (one always powered, a boon for topping up your phone without having to boot the computer), an HDMI port, a mini DisplayPort, audio jack, a Lenovo OneLink docking connector, and an Ethernet extension port (dongle required – the machine is too skinny for a standard RJ-45 port). There is, however, no removable storage, unlike many newer machines that include a microSD or SD card slot.

Lenovo has corrected some of the things that users complained bitterly about in the last model, or rather, it put them back the way they were before they were “improved” into oblivion. Back are the dull old function keys, after a not-too-successful attempt to replace them with adaptive keys last year. Back, too, are the dedicated buttons for the trackstick. The result performs much more as one would expect from a ThinkPad.

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Because the 14-inch screen needs a good-sized footprint, Lenovo was able to include a full-sized, backlit keyboard, with well-spaced keys that accommodate the beefiest fingers. If anything, they were a bit too spaced out for someone used to typing on a smaller laptop. I found the touch comfortable, and the layout was as expected; there was no need to put keys in strange places to fit them in.

The trackpad is large enough, at 3.2 x 2.2 inches, to easily support Windows 8.x gestures such as the swipe in to display the Charms bar. It was responsive, yet not too touchy. The “buttons” are merely areas at the bottom of the touchpad, though, and sometimes they didn’t delineate between left and right click well. The trackstick, as mentioned, has its own set of buttons above the touchpad.

The WQHD screen is lovely, but it comes with a price. Well, actually, several prices. One, it costs quite a bit extra ($350). Two, it is hungrier for power, so the battery doesn’t last as long as it would with a lesser display. And thirdly, some software hasn’t kept up with hardware advances. It can’t cope with the high DPI. That could cause teeny-tiny characters, or humongous ones – either way, very ugly, and sometimes unusable. Microsoft is building high DPI support into Windows 10, which may help, but software developers have to get their collective acts together too and make sure their products accommodate the new high-resolution screens.

That said, the colours were good, the display crisp, and there was plenty of screen real estate for those pesky spreadsheets.

Connectivity-wise, we get 802.11ac, plus Bluetooth 4.0. Plug in the Ethernet dongle for hard-wired networking.

With the kind of hardware specs in the review machine, I’d have been surprised if it hadn’t performed well. The executive on the go has nothing to worry about on that front. This could easily be someone’s primary machine.

It’s tough, too. Despite its sleek profile, Lenovo says it passes eight MIL-Spec tests (MIL-STD 810G) for everything from extreme temperatures to humidity, sand and shock. It’s not a computer that needs fussing over.

Security administrators will like it too, for its fingerprint reader and TPM chip. With the $50 upgrade to Windows 8.1 Pro comes downgrade rights to Windows 7 Pro, still the OS of choice for many enterprises.

Battery life for the X1 Carbon is rated at up to 10.9 hours. That’s not bad for a thin-and-light machine, though I wish it were longer, especially since the battery can’t be swapped out for a fresh one. I managed to make it through 8 hours before the system shut itself down at 5 per cent capacity.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015) is an executive machine, with an executive price tag. It starts at $1,529, for an i5 processor, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, and standard 1920 x 1080 non-touch screen. As configured, our review machine’s web list price is $3,209. Add in the optional mobile broadband, and the price goes up by another $250.The base warranty is 1 year depot or carry in, although Lenovo offers up to 5 years onsite warranty for an extra fee.

But if your budget can stand the strain, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015) would look good in any executive’s computer bag.

Apple Inc. is said to be eyeing further inroads into the Chinese market with the introduction of a “rose gold” iPhone, according to reports.

The company’s next smartphone – largely believed to be called the iPhone 6s – could be announced as soon as September, replacing the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models.

According to Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities, Apple is looking to add a rose gold hue to its handset repertoire, which currently come in silver, space grey and gold.

The addition of gold-coloured iPhones in 2013 with the launch of the iPhone 5s was seen as a direct appeal to China, where gold is regarded as auspicious.

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It is unknown whether the new model would be rose gold-coloured anodised aluminium, like the current iPhone 6 and 6 Plus gold option, or 18-carat rose gold like the luxury Apple Watch Edition, which is priced from pounds 8,000 to pounds 13,500. The Apple Watch Edition, which is also available in 18-carat yellow gold, reportedly sold out in China less than an hour after the company started taking pre-orders for the devices at the end of April.

Increasing demand for luxury products – combined with greater iPhone availability following a multi-year deal with the world’s biggest phone carrier, China Mobile – mean China is an increasingly lucrative market for Apple. The Californian company now holds around 27.6 per cent of the smartphone market in urban China, according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

The gold 5s sold out in Hong Kong and mainland China immediately, and demand remains so strong for the 6 and 6 Plus seven months after they first went on sale that smugglers continue to sell them for dramatically inflated prices.

The company also produced gold versions of the iPad Air 2 and mini 3 last year, and recently launched a new 12-inch MacBook, also in gold.

Samsung has also experienced unprecedented demand for gold versions of its latest handset, the Galaxy S6, across Europe, as one in four customers opted for gold over the traditionally more popular black and white.

Mr Kuo also claims the iPhone 6s will be a significant upgrade to its predecessors, offering a 12MP camera, up from the current 8MP lens, and 2GB of RAM up from 1GB. It could also feature a more resilient scratch-resistant sapphire lens cover, and be constructed from slightly different materials to move away from the bending issue which plagued the previous flagships.

The Daily Telegraph

Facebook’s long-rumored direct-to-Facebook publishing deal was finally unveiled officially on Wednesday.

Facebook Instant Articles is a way for publishers to post their articles directly to the social network’s iOS app, allowing the articles to load faster for users than if they had to be redirected to (often clunky) publisher websites. They also include other interactive formats such as embedded video, GIFs that automatically load, and a way to expand a large image by moving your phone back and forward, as BuzzFeed demonstrates.

This could be the future of news on the web, making news articles even easier to publish and share among Facebook’s vast audience.

Or it could further hurt news publishers by stealing the business they have developed on the web and transferring it into an arena controlled by Facebook. Earlier this week Facebook began testing its own search engine, which will allow users to find and post links to articles without venturing anywhere near Google — another way for Facebook to remove the need for you to navigate away from its platform.

The first Facebook Instant Articles partners are: BuzzFeed, The Guardian, The New York Times, National Geographic, NBC News, The Atlantic, Spiegel Online, and Bild.

Some publishers, including News UK, the biggest newspaper publisher in the UK, had been skeptical about the introduction on Facebook Instant. News UK’s CMO told Business Insider last year such an idea would be a “tax on navigation,” and a “tax on audience,” referring to the data Facebook would garner about publishers’ readers, and that visits to their own sites might be cannibalized, along with some associated ad revenue (or, in the case of News UK’s The Sun and The Times, which operate behind a paywall, potential subscription revenue).

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TechCrunch reports, however, that Facebook says it will share analytics and that Instant Articles will be compatible with traditional online measurement systems like comScore, Omniture, and Google Analytics (so audiences will not be lost to Facebook, in other words).

In addition, publishers will receive “100%” of the revenue from ads that appear inside Facebook Instant articles. Facebook will split revenue (with 70% going to the publisher) only if it sells the ads against the articles. They can also use the Facebook Audience Network (which allows advertisers to extend their Facebook campaigns into other non-Facebook apps) to sell any leftover ad inventory. That should also seek to allay publishers’ fears about any potential cannibalization.

Those publishers not part of the launch group might fear that Facebook Instant articles will get bumped up the all-important News Feed, but Facebook says this will not be the case. Of course, if users click on lots of Facebook Instant articles, the algorithm will adapt to their preferences and show them more of that kind of content.

The launch of Facebook Instant is not the first time the social network has asked publishers to form content partnerships. In 2011, a number of publishers including The Guardian, The Washington Post, Business Insider, and The Independent partnered with Facebook to create “Social Reader” apps to allow users to consume and share content in the Facebook environment.

In 2012, however, most of those publishers began to phase out those apps. Though many of them proved extremely popular, the majority of the engagement was happening only on the Facebook platform, without much click-through to the publishers’ sites (where they can generate revenue). In some cases it was even having a negative impact on traffic to publishers’ sites. The Social Reader App also generated what many users deemed as excessive updates about what readers were reading, clunking up the News Feed.

Earlier this year Facebook also launched standalone app Paper, its answer to news-aggregation apps like Feedly and Flipboard. But its popularity tanked soon after launch.

Google last month announced a “Digital News Initiative” with eight European publishers, investing in training, partnerships, and research to develop new digital journalism ideas.

Disclosure: Axel Springer is an investor in Business Insider.

SAN FRANCISCO — Samsung wants to sell the digital brains that will go into billions of “smart” home appliances, industrial sensors and other Internet-connected gadgets — even if the gadgets aren’t made by Samsung.

At a technology conference Tuesday in San Francisco, the South Korean company unveiled a new line of tiny electronic components that combine low-power computer chips, transmitters and software. Manufacturers can build the components into everything from televisions to parking meters to orthopedic shoes.

The new Artik components are key to Samsung’s goal of becoming a major player in the so-called “Internet of Things,” the tech industry’s buzzword for the notion that all kinds of electronic devices can be connected over the Internet. This could be a US$3 trillion industry in the next five years, analysts at International Data Corp. have estimated.

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Samsung is going after that market at a time when earnings from its core smartphone business have sagged in the face of challenges from Apple and upstart Chinese phone makers. Samsung also makes other electronic components, TVs, refrigerators and other home appliances.

Company President Young Sohn declined to be specific when asked how big Samsung hopes the Artik business will become. But he noted that analysts have estimated there will be billions of Internet-connected gadgets and machines in coming years.

“Those numbers are subject to change, but anything that is in the billions. I will take that,” Sohn said with a laugh.

Other companies also want a piece of that market. Chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm are also making energy-efficient processors for the coming wave of connected gadgets. IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco want to sell systems for collecting and analyzing data from those gadgets.

Samsung said it will use the Artik components in all the home appliances it makes, but the company hopes other manufacturers will use them too. Sohn said the components are designed to be compatible with other systems. Samsung’s SmartThings division also announced a new Internet-based platform that other companies can use to create programs and track data collected from smart devices.

In demonstration videos, Samsung showed the ARTIK components being used in motion sensors designed for orthopedic patients to wear on their shoes, allowing therapists to monitor their walking ability, and in devices that farmers can use to monitor moisture levels in the soil.

The Associated Press

As I sat at my computer absorbing information and images presented to me in a remotely broadcast first-glimpse briefing for this fall’s Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, I realized that I was actually a bit giddy.

Ubisoft Quebec, working in conjunction with eight other Ubisoft developers around the world, has been labouring for two and half years on this fall’s entry in the French publisher’s expansive historical action series. And all of this effort has apparently been razor-focused on creating a deep, rich single-player campaign.

Let me make that a bit clearer. There’s no competitive multiplayer. No cooperative multiplayer. No companion apps to download and use to access and unlock bits of content.

It’s simply a sprawling solo adventure in a fresh period of history.

Syndicate could be the purist Assassin’s Creed experience in years.

UbisoftAssassin's Creed: Syndicate's Victoria Era London bursts with period accurate details.

Unfortunately, its public unveiling got off to a bit of a rocky start five months ago when a leak revealed some key details to do with its setting.

“Everyone was bummed,” said Marc-Alexis Côté, creative director at Ubisoft Quebec, about the incident. “It was not how we wanted to announce, for sure. But we did have plenty of positive feedback from fans.”

But while the leak revealed images and concepts upon which observers were free to speculate, it contained none of the hard facts provided during my briefing.

To wit, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is set in Victorian Era London in 1868, in the midst of the industrial revolution. Players will get to explore seven of the city’s famous boroughs, from the refined and heavily policed Westminster to the rough and tumble streets of Whitechapel, where uniformed bobbies rarely patrol.

Ubisoft’s London is designed to mirror the real London of the time in both appearance and culture. It’s the heart of a powerful empire that is a beacon of progress, where a mix of wealth and a fledgling kind of democracy represent hope and power for the common man. But it’s also a place where lower classes struggle and frequently turn to crime in an attempt to get ahead.

We take in the city through the eyes of the franchise’s latest protagonist, Jacob Frye, a charming and charismatic young man (a bit more Ezio Auditore da Firenze than Ratonhnhaké:ton) raised by the Assassins in the nearby village of Crawley.

Working with his sister, Jacob begins to build up an underground network to wrest control of the boroughs from the Assassins’ ancient and domineering foes, the Templars, one stronghold at a time.

UbisoftAssassin's Creed: Syndicate's combat system is faster than those of its predecessors. The player's character is a brawler armed with a short blade and brass knuckles.

It seems a pretty familiar formula, but from what I saw during a brief bit of alpha play Ubisoft Quebec has done much to modernize the Assassin’s Creed experience.

For example, Jacob Frye is much more of a brawler than the franchise’s previous protagonists. His fast, powerful attacks are built around the use of brass knuckles and a short, curved Nepalese blade called a kukri.

“We made the fighting faster, more responsive, and more immersive,” said Côté.

As the franchise marches forward in time, so does the technology powering its ranged weapons. At a distance Jacob can use an era-accurate six-shooter pistol – which means no more comical scenes in which two fighters stand across from each other hurriedly loading powder into single-shot blunderbusses.

As usual, sneakiness will play a role as well. A tap of a button puts Jacob in stealth mode, letting him move about quickly and quietly, and another tap brings up the series’ long-running Eagle Vision mode, making it easy to tell good guys from bad.

Ubisoft Quebec has also added more ways to indirectly eliminate enemies, such as the ability to cut ropes suspending loading platforms to make barrels fall and crush enemies, or use throwing knives to turn enemies against one another to distract them.

UbisoftEnvironment traversal is faster and more fluid in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate than in past games, thanks in large part to a new rope launcher hidden within the hero's gauntlet.

Environment traversal appears to have undergone an even greater overhaul than combat.

Graceful parkour movements – completely revamped since Unity – still play a big role, but it appears as though they may take a backseat to a new rope launcher hidden in Jacob’s gauntlet. He can use this rope Batman-style to grapple architecture high above, ascending almost instantly to rooftops. It’s incredibly quick.

“The rope launcher helps players maintain their momentum while moving through the world,” explained Côté.

Also speeding up play is the introduction of horse-drawn carriages and major roads on which to drive them. These vehicles look to be almost everywhere, largely supplanting pedestrian traffic on broader avenues. Players can hijack carriages as they like and use them to zip through streets between locations.

And if pursued or attacked while driving, you can abandon the reins for a good old-fashioned stagecoach brawl, even leaping between duelling carriages while letting the horses take you where they will.

The introduction of carriages may not represent quite the same sort of revelatory play that was naval travel in Assassin’s Creed III, but at the very least they look like they may offer a fun and immersive alternative to standard fast travel points.

UbisoftCarriages play a major role in getting around London in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate.

One question my briefing didn’t answer was whether Syndicate will suffer the same performance issues as last year’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity.

Côté confirmed that the new game runs on the same engine, and I can attest that the environments are stunningly detailed. Posters, puddles, airborne particles in the sunlight – all are breathtakingly realistic. Ubisoft seems to have nailed the vibe of the Victorian Era (or at least our popular modern understanding of it) in much the way it has other periods and locations in previous games.

That said, I can’t really comment on performance. The presentation I viewed was a recording of play on an alpha build streamed from New York to Toronto, and clearly not at all representative of what someone playing the final game on a local machine would experience.

Hopefully we’ll get a clearer picture of how well this thing runs at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles next month.

UbisoftThe carriages in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate are more than just vehicles; they're also moving platforms upon which characters can battle one another.

But at this point I’m not particularly concerned about frame rates or resolution. That Ubisoft Quebec has chosen to place its undivided attention on delivering a rich, resonant campaign is a great sign.

“We wanted to focus all of our teams toward a single-player experience,” said Côté, near the end of our chat. “There won’t be a multiplayer experience or a cooperative experience, and no companion app. We wanted to focus on the core of what Assassin’s Creed is, the navigation, the fighting, and exploring this new period. We want to stay true to the series.”

Free from the distractions of superfluous modes and apps, and with plenty of lessons learned from last fall’s troubled Unity, Côté and his team would seem to have no excuse not to deliver one of the strongest entries yet in Ubisoft’s historical epic.

OTTAWA — Industry Canada says an auction of wireless spectrum used for smartphones and other mobile devices has generated $755.4 million in revenue, with more than half of it acquired by Telus Corp.

Telus is paying $478.82 million for spectrum licences in every province and territory.

Quebecor’s Videotron was the second-biggest buyer, paying $186.95 million for licences in its Quebec home market as well as Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

The rest of the 2500 megahertz spectrum on auction was purchased by a variety of big and small companies including Xplornet, which is buying licences in nine provinces for $25.43 million.

As expected, BCE’s Bell and Rogers were less active in this auction than Telus due to their previous acquisitions of spectrum for use in their national wireless networks.

The Canadian Press

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Verizon Communications Inc said it would buy AOL Inc in a deal valued at about $4.4 billion, advancing the telecom’s push in both mobile and advertising fields.

Verizon will pay $50 a share, a 17 per cent premium over AOL’s stock price on Monday. AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong will continue to lead AOL’s operations after the deal is completed, the companies said Tuesday in a statement.

“AOL has once again become a digital trailblazer, and we are excited at the prospect of charting a new course together in the digitally connected world,” Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said in the statement.

AOL’s shares jumped as much as 19 per cent to $50.70 in early trading, above Verizon’s offer price.

Verizon said it plans to fund the deal with cash on hand and commercial paper. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of the summer, the companies said.

AOL owns The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, MAKERS and AOL.com.

The acquisition gives Verizon an entryway into the increasingly competitive online video space.

More to come …

© Thomson Reuters 2015

Plans for package delivery by drones were outlined in a patent application filed by Amazon.com Inc., the world’s largest online retailer.

Application 20150120094, published in the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office April 30, covers what Amazon calls an “unmanned aerial vehicle delivery system.” In April the Seattle-based company asked the Federal Aviation Administration for leniency on pending drone regulations. Its service would be known as Prime Air.

The company said the drones, still in development, would mostly fly at least 200 feet off the ground, relying on sensors and computers to select a route to customers’ doors and avoid hazards.

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Amazon said in its patent application that the drones would have a safety barrier around the device enclosing the propellers and engine. The drone would receive inventory information and a destination location, retrieve the items from inventory, compute a route from a materials-handling facility and fly to the destination.

The inventory location could be a materials-handling facility or a third-party seller, Amazon said. The drone could communicate with others in the area to share information about traffic, weather and landing conditions.

If the drone must cross a road for automobiles, its navigation could be adjusted to minimize the potential for contact, according to the application. The drone could use the intended recipient’s mobile device to calculate a delivery location and bring the goods to customers even at a location other than the listed physical address, Amazon said.

Seattle-based Amazon applied for the patent in September 2014.

Bloomberg.com

The Financial Post rounds up recent news that technology leaders need to know:

Microsoft announces Azure Data Lake

At its Build developers conference last week, Microsoft announced Azure Data Lake. A data lake is a relatively new concept, and consists of an enterprise wide repository of every type of data collected in a single place prior to any formal definition of requirements or schema. The Azure data lake is built for the cloud, and designed to support huge volumes of data.

Internet Explorer officially dead

Microsoft’s “Project Spartan” browser now has a name: Microsoft Edge. It will replace the venerable Internet Explorer as the default browser in Windows 10. As well as better performance and compatibility with today’s Web, it features the ability to annotate and comment on Web pages.

Cisco releases security advisory

Cisco has released a security advisory about a flaw in the web framework of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Central software. The exploit could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to take control of the system. There are no mitigating workarounds. The company has released an update to correct the issue (Cisco UCS Central Software Version 1.3(1a)).

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HP updates performance testing tools

HP has announced Community Editions of its performance engineering software suite will be released into the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. LoadRunner and StormRunner Load have been updated with new features, and are pre-configured for Azure environments. LoadRunner is available now, while StormRunner Load will be available next month.

VMware recalls faulty patch

VMware has recalled patch ESXi550-201504002 after systems running VMware NSX for vSphere 6.x or Cisco Nexus 1000v became unable to communicate across hosts with their Edges or Distributed Routers. To recover, customers are advised to use the alternate boot bank to roll back to their previous build. The company has now released a replacement patch, VMware ESXi 5.5 Patch Release ESXi550-201505002 (build number: 2718055).

EMC offers OpenStack reference architectures

EMC has been working with partners to develop reference architectures to enable the use of three key OpenStack distributions on its hardware. The reference architecture guide describes the solution for managing storage life cycle (Cinder) using EMC storage technologies and partners’ OpenStack distributions based on the Juno release. A certified architecture for Mirantis is available now, while those for Red Hat and Canonical will be available soon.

Oracle announces Java 9 release date

After several years of development, Oracle has announced that the next major version of Java will be released on Sept. 22, 2016. The biggest change in Java 9 is the move to modularization, allowing users to only load or install the pieces needed for an application or task. It has taken Oracle five years to implement this because to do so it had to break down Java and rebuild it.

Intel releases new Xeon processors to support real-time analytics

Intel has released the Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4800 v3 product families, with, it says, up to 6x improvement in business processing application performance for in-memory transactional workloads. Processors offer up to 18 cores, and what Intel says is the highest memory capacity per socket at up to 10x greater performance per socket. The processors also feature enhanced security and reliability. The company says that 17 systems manufacturers will be announcing systems based on the new platforms.

Storage giant EMC doesn’t do things in a small way. At its annual EMC World conference last week, it launched a series of products, blew one up during the keynote, and teased about a couple of open source initiatives. And that was just Day One.

The technology victim of the explosion was XtremIO 4.0, known as “The Beast”, the newest member of EMC’s XtremIO all-flash array family. It will be a free, non-disruptive software upgrade to the XtremIO version 3.0 arrays that supports enhanced scale-out replication based on EMC RecoverPoint software, larger clusters (there’s a new 40 TB X-Brick coming to deliver petabytes of capacity per rack), online expansion with no downtime, multi-array management from a common console, improved reporting, and better scalability. In addition, XtremIO’s copy data management functions are integrated into key enterprise application management stacks such as VMware, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange to automate use cases including the scheduling, attachment and expiration of space-efficient copies to application hosts.

Oh – and the explosion? Well, after components were yanked out of the demonstration Beast with no effect on performance, EMC’s president of the core technology group, Guy Churchward, cheerfully blew up the array to demonstrate XtremIO’s failover capabilities. And yes, it worked.

The XtremIO 4.0 software, along with 40TB X-Brick configurations, will be available for order this calendar quarter.

Next up was the announcement of the VCE VxRack System, from one of the newest members of the EMC federation, VCE. VxRack is a new family of hyper-converged RackScale Systems that enables enterprises and service providers to simplify the deployment of next generation scale out mobile, cloud, and distributed Tier 2 applications, starting with dozens of servers and expanding to thousands. They complement VCE’s Vblock and VxBlock converged infrastructure platforms.

There will be two versions: one offering the choice of hypervisor (VMware or KVM) or bare metal, which will ship in July, and one optimized for VMware based on VMware’s EVO:RACK technology; it will be previewed at VMworld in August.

The VSPEX family also received a new member, with the addition of VSPEX with VMAX 100K. EMC says that it will provide customers the ability to seamlessly bridge their VMware private cloud deployment with public clouds, allowing them to hyperconsolidate and connect on- and off-premise workloads into a hybrid cloud environment. It will scale to 2800 VMs. The company claims that TCO is reduced by 30 per cent over the previous generation of the technology.

VSPEX with VMAX 100K is available now.

Storing vast amounts of data is one thing, but protecting it and moving it from storage tier to storage tier as required is quite another challenge. At EMC World, the company introduced FAST.X, which fully automates data movement to storage across the data centre and to the public cloud, as well as CloudBoost, which connects protection workloads to EMC and third-party clouds. CloudBoost is now integrated with the Data Protection Suite, unlocking cloud storage as a seamless extension of EMC protection software. It is based on EMC’s recent acquisition of Maginatics.

To round out the offerings, Spanning Backup for Office 365 provides daily, automated backup, and accurate restore. All will be available this quarter.

Something very weird is happening in the tech world: Microsoft looks cool again.

The guileless, style-less suburban dad of digital America — maker of Clippy, Vista and the Zune — is suddenly intriguing developers, exciting customers and building things people actually want to use.

Now piloted by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s 47-year-old dealmaker, the US$390 billion tech giant is making friends with an army of developers, administrators and former antagonists who are helping strengthen its software and spread the word.

Just a year into the job, Nadella, Microsoft’s third chief executive in 40 years, has pushed the tech titan into surprising territory, unveiling a free version of Windows 10 that pledges to fix the sins of its predecessors while also playing nice with start-ups and studios that once left it behind.

But the Redmond, Washington-based giant is also using its gargantuan budget, including US$11 billion spent last year on research and development, in hopes of forging the next generation of tech. One of its biggest, riskiest bets in years: the HoloLens, its sci-fi-style “augmented reality” goggles that project virtual objects in plain sight.

“What things like HoloLens show is this is a company that is still fighting very hard to produce innovative ideas,” said Brad Reback, a managing director and analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. “Some will work. Some won’t . . . but everyone’s paying attention.”

Within the last year, Microsoft cleaned house in its highest ranks, invested heavily in its Xbox One gaming console and spent US$2.5 billion to buy Minecraft, one of the world’s best-selling video games. It also unveiled some long-awaited software, such as Office for the iPad, which helped send its stock to a 14-year high.

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Within the past week, the company went viral with a photo analyzer that guessed (with varying success) how old someone looked and with news that Windows 10 will be the first version with its own middle-finger emoji, shareable in six skin tones.

Even Wall Street is finding something to love. Microsoft’s shares have climbed about 15 per cent since its earnings call last month and more than 40 per cent since 2013. Investors who once sought to cozy up to smaller tech start-ups are suddenly praising the new leadership of one of the world’s biggest computing juggernauts.

Some will work. Some won’t . . . but everyone’s paying attention

Microsoft has never had a heavily hyped, style-oozing release like Apple’s iPod or iPhone. But in the Bill Gates era, the company showed a certain verve and excitement that proved, in the early tech industry, hard to match. Twenty years ago, thousands waited in line to pay US$90 for their fresh copy of Windows 95.

In the years after Gates stepped down as chief executive, in 2000, the company began to bungle releases and lose out on basically every big market-mover in tech, ceding ground to Google, Apple, Amazon and many others on smartphones, search and social networks, as well as online music, books and ads.

Under the watch of Nadella, analysts say Microsoft has radically changed even its most bread-and-butter tech.

David Paul Morris/BloombergThe Microsoft Corp. HoloLens augmented reality headset is demonstrated during a keynote session at the Microsoft Developers Build Conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, April 29, 2015.

It has revamped one of its dustiest offerings, Internet Explorer, and plans to unveil a new, streamlined browser, Edge, to compete with Google Chrome. And Windows 10, set for a summer release, is designed to run on nearly every device on the market, including laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Most notably, Windows 10 will be offered for free to the millions now working on Windows 7 and 8, transitioning what was once one of the company’s fastest-growing moneymakers into a new way to win customer loyalty.

Nadella has pivoted the company away from selling discs loaded with software to users every few years to selling subscriptions to cloud-based services, such as Office 365, that let users run Outlook, Word and Excel from the Web.

Microsoft is optimistic about the results these changes will bring. Nadella expects Microsoft’s yearly corporate-cloud earnings will more than triple within three years, to US$20 billion, and the company wants 1 billion users to be using Windows 10 by 2018.

Microsoft is still one of the world’s most colossal tech firms: 1.5 billion devices worldwide run Windows, and 300 million Windows-loaded personal computers are sold every year. The company had profits of US$22 billion last year, nearly enough to buy Twitter, and still has US$95 billion in cash on hand.

AP Photo/Elaine ThompsonMicrosoft's Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Operating Systems Group, demonstrates new features of its flagship operating system Windows.

But with its 118,000 employees and worldwide tech empire, Microsoft will never be as new or nimble as Silicon Valley’s glitziest start-ups. The company also lacks the moonshot projects of Google or the fashionable mojo of Apple. Campaigns like the Windows Phone have been costly disappointments, while innovative computers like the Surface still sit deep below (literally) the hype and sales of Apple’s iPad.

The HoloLens, analysts said, will mark the biggest test for whether the new Microsoft can restore some former glory. Though some reviewers have praised it as “one of the most amazing pieces of tech I’ve seen,” others have said it falls flat on the basics — for instance, having a field of view that is too constrained.

The risks are huge. The HoloLens is a new and untested gadget in a new and untested industry. Even if it beats out rivals such as Facebook’s Oculus Rift, there’s no guarantee people will want to strap bulky computers to their heads.

The HoloLens could easily go the way of the product on which its motion-sensing cameras were designed: the Kinect, a heavily marketed Xbox add-on that Microsoft increasingly avoids mentioning.

Yet the company once dinged as a modern tech monopoly, analysts said, is doing well to not show any sweat. In other words, it’s playing it cool. As Microsoft executive Dave O’Hara said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in February, “For us it is more about . . . what the customers wanted and less about the competition.”

Washington Post

A little of the lustre on GoDaddy Inc. shares has come off since its successful market debut on April 1, but analysts seem very confident that more gains are coming.

The website-hosting service jumped more than 30 per cent on its first trading day, but has since pulled back about five per cent.

RBC Capital Markets and J.P. Morgan — both underwriters for the IPO — initiated coverage of GoDaddy with buy ratings on Monday.

Analyst Sterling Auty at J.P. Morgan is the more bullish of the two, with a US$33 price target.

He expects GoDaddy’s growth to benefit from a healthy environment for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), its expanding international presence, and the emergence of new generic top-level domains such as .shop, .science and .bank.

Calling it the Wal-Mart of the domain industry, Auty noted that GoDaddy’s large sales and marketing investments have produced an 81-per-cent brand awareness level in the U.S., serving to attract the largest volume of customers in the industry.

“While there are a number of other competitors in the space, we believe GoDaddy will continue to receive a disproportionate amount of traffic and thus the largest potential customer conversion opportunity,” the analyst said in a report.

Mark Mahaney at RBC, whose price target on the stock is US$30, noted that GoDaddy is one of the strongest recent Internet IPOs thanks to its 13 million customers, substantial market share, and consistent growth and profitability.

He thinks the company faces a multi-billion-dollar total addressable market that includes more than 200 million SMBs worldwide. Nearly 500,000 small businesses are started each month in the U.S. alone, and more than half are not currently online.

Mahaney also noted that GoDaddy’s business model consistently generates double-digit revenue growth and EBITDA margins in the high teens.

“We view the GoDaddy management team as particularly strong and experienced,” the analyst told clients. “We also believe the company has developed significant competitive advantages based in part on its large size and scale.”

Some people say Twitter is still the place where you tell the world what you ate for breakfast, but for digital strategist Martin Waxman, it’s the farthest thing from that.

He visits the platform to learn about the world. Because of Twitter, he buys fewer magazines, yet reads more widely than ever. He’s built a career convincing boomers that these social sites aren’t just frivolous fads. He loves Twitter, especially the mobile app. He can’t figure out why more people don’t love it, too.

“I don’t know why it’s not in the 500, 800 million-user range,” said Waxman, a 25-year communications industry veteran who runs a consulting firm in Toronto. The latest quarterly figures show nine-year-old Twitter Inc. has gathered 302 million monthly active users, which is a lot, but still a dwarf compared with rival Facebook Inc.’s 1.44 billion. “Maybe they need to retell their own story so people can realize it’s amazing.”

Waxman isn’t the only one who’s noticed the sluggish growth in Twitter’s user base of late, but that’s only half its problem: Twitter last month posted its weakest quarterly revenue growth as a public company and warned about “headwinds” in its current period. Since reporting the lacklustre first-quarter results on April 28, shares have plunged more than 25 per cent in New York to US$37.59, erasing roughly US$9 billion in value.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as a problem,” says Shailesh Rao, the company’s vice-president of emerging markets, when asked about stalling growth. He manages Twitter’s offices outside of the United States and Europe, which includes the growing Toronto outpost.

The vision we have is something that’ll play out for a longer time horizon than certainly a quarter

“There are communities out there that are still learning about Twitter and that’s a learning process that’ll continue,” he said in an interview. “The vision we have is something that’ll play out for a longer time horizon than certainly a quarter.”

He’s right. Twitter is young, and these hiccups could be growing pains. The site’s functional shortfalls — it’s hard for new users to navigate, its mediocre click-through rates on direct-response ads, its spotty data analytics, among others — are under repair and new iterations are being introduced, the company has said.

“Twitter is in the early innings of a long game,” said Sarah Hindlian, a New York City-based tech analyst at Brean Capital, “one that we do not anticipate will be linear.” But in today’s equity markets, where traders increasingly jump in and out of stocks hastily, patience to wait and see what could be is ever-thin.

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While Twitter doesn’t disclose the specifics of its user count for competitive reasons, it does say close to 80 per cent of accounts are located outside the U.S.

Rao boasts that Canada has been “punching way above our weight class” in both adoption and ad spending, citing ComScore data that show more people use Twitter on a per capita basis here than they do in the U.S. Canada also ranks among Twitter’s top 10 revenue contributors in the world. Rao, who was born in Toronto, uses the words “consistent growth market,” “inspiration,” “innovation” and “cutting edge” to describe what Canadians have done on the site.

“Some of the most iconic Canadian brands [are] doing some of the most innovative work on the platform globally,” said Rao, who flew in from Singapore to celebrate the opening of Twitter’s new, spacious office in downtown Toronto. He names Canadian Tire Corp., Rogers Communications Inc. and Kraft Foods Canada as some of the brands that have been “engaging the audience and really getting people to participate” using both regular tweets and Twitter’s expanding suite of “promoted” products.

Tony Matta, the chief marketing officer at Kraft Foods Canada, says his portfolio of brands publishes a “healthy mix” of Twitter content that’s organic and bought “to be in the moment with the consumer,” a prized trait of the platform for Matta.

He doesn’t have a “tie-breaking rule” to determine what content is more suitable for Twitter over Facebook, but gives Twitter an edge if being in real time matters to the campaign. But if the objective is to reach the largest audience, Facebook often wins in a knock out. The Kraft Hockeyville initiative, for example, has 4,142 followers on Twitter and 53,934 fans on Facebook.

What would happen to sales of Kraft products if Matta instructed his team to cease all Twitter activity? “I think it would make a difference, I just can’t quantify it in 2015 revenue terms,” he said. “I don’t think we have the metrics that are that specific.”

Matta did qualitatively predict that brand equity would start to decay, ties to the consumer would weaken, and price would drive volume. “You still don’t have a choice not to participate,” he added, “because this is the channel of communication for the modern consumer.”

This fear of losing out, which is shared by many consumer-facing companies, should come as a relief for a social network known in marketing circles for maintaining scant record of its users and their activities.

“I don’t think Twitter’s ad network and their targeting is as good as it should be,” said Leigh Himel, president of digital strategy agency Gravity Partners in Toronto. Advertising that works doesn’t just put a message in front of, say, 100,000 people — it reaches the right 100,000 people. Always.

To that end, how well Twitter’s algorithm matches a user’s interests with relevant ad material and pushes people further along the consumption chain is a work in process. “It’s early days,” Rao said. “It’ll get better and better over time,” especially since Twitter is increasingly billing itself as a one stop marketing shop.

Not all marketers want a deep dive into who follows their brands and why, as long as the dialogue is there. When asked if Twitter amasses enough data about users, Kraft’s Matta says: “We don’t look at that. I don’t think we’d get into that level of analysis.” He’s more concerned about interests than demographics. Nabob Coffee campaigns, for example, target people who either already follow the brand or tweet about coffee.

“If I’m going to join a conversation,” he said, “I’m going to join a conversation with coffee lovers.”

At times, conversation and commerce clash in obvious ways. The top reason to use the site for half of users in Canada is for breaking news, but Twitter can’t always monetize against these tweets.

“Around moments of tragedy or national crisis, you tend not see a lot advertising, just out of respect for what’s going on at that moment,” Rao said brands don’t fit into every conversation. Twitter makes money when they do.

“Maybe you only want to [chat with a brand on Twitter] when you have a problem or need something,” said Waxman. “But that’s okay, because brands can be in other places.”

Financial Post
cpellegrini@nationalpost.com

Postmedia Network Inc. has teamed up with SiriusXM Canada to launch National Post Radio.

Matt Gurney, a columnist and editor at the National Post, will host the radio show, which will feature a combination of topical commentary, debate and round-table discussion with Postmedia journalists and guests from across the country. It will be broadcast on the satellite network’s Canada Talks channel on weekday mornings.

Gurney said the idea for the show evolved after SiriusXM approached the National Post with a desire for more news-driven talk content.

“They gave me a call and asked if I would do an hour-long show where some ‘Posties’ talk to each other,” says Gurney. Eventually it was developed into a three-hour morning segment.

Gurney said that given the amount of time that Postmedia voices were appearing on the channel already, the partnership just made sense: “They were already having Post people all over their channel.”

Postmedia boasts the largest editorial staff of any news organization in the country, something Gurney says is a huge advantage when it comes to getting local coverage for a national audience. “Whenever we need something from across the country, we’re able to go there,” says Gurney.

Although this is Postmedia’s first radio show, Gurney said the challenge faced by most new shows — building a roster of talented and knowledgeable guests — is not an issue. “We already have rolodexes upon rolodexes of sources and guys we’ve worked with who have the gift for the gab.”

National Post Radio had its soft launch last Monday, with the official launch date set for Monday, May 11.

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Salesforce.com Inc. CEO Marc Benioff is tackling yet another social issue: the gender pay gap.

Benioff, who grabbed headlines recently for his opposition to the controversial “religious freedom” law in Indiana, says he’s methodically combing through the pay of all 16,000 employees of his cloud-based software company to make sure his male and female employees are compensated fairly, according to a report in the Huffington Post Thursday.

He’s already given some women raises after finding differences in their pay, and he expects to hand out more. While Benioff said he didn’t know what the current pay divide was at the company, “when I’m done there will be no gap,” he told the Web site. “My job is to make sure that women are treated 100 percent equally at Salesforce in pay, opportunity and advancement.”

Benioff’s move has been called a “radical step” and a “brilliantly simple” way to close the gap. Yet research has also shown that it’s likely quite effective at improving the overall ranks of women at the company, too — perhaps even more so than traditional benefits designed to attract and retain women.

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Here’s the evidence showing why Benioff is on to something. In a study released in November, the consulting firm Mercer asked 164 companies about their benefits and human resources tactics. One of the big findings from its results, which I wrote about at the time, was that companies with flexible work policies or maternity leave benefits were actually linked with a slower promotion of women into top ranks (though in many cases had higher current numbers of women). The explanation: Such benefits can lead to a check-the-box mentality, in which companies think they’ve done enough to help women along.

The report also found, however, two variables that appeared to have a positive impact on both current and future gender diversity — and they’re just what Benioff is doing. One was the involvement of company leaders and men in diversity programs; the other was having a team responsible for pay equity and a process that statistically examines any wage gaps they discover.

Benioff’s pay initiative is reportedly part of a program called Women’s Surge, designed to help improve the ranks of women at the company, where 85 percent of leaders and 71 percent of the overall workforce are men, according to Salesforce data. The program includes efforts to ensure that women make up at least 30 percent of all meetings and that female candidates are evaluated for new hires and promotions.

A team at Salesforce is also using its own analytics software to examine the salary data, determine whether there is a gap and surface the factors influencing it, according to Business Insider.

Salesforce isn’t alone in methodically reviewing the company’s potential gender pay gap. Mercer’s study found that 52 percent of the 164 companies that responded said they have a dedicated team for analyzing any salary differences between men and women.

Still, the combined punch — having not only a rigorous process for analyzing gender pay data, but an involved CEO who is willing to talk openly about the issue — could end up being very powerful.

My job is to make sure that women are treated 100 percent equally at Salesforce in pay, opportunity and advancement

That, after all, is what makes Benioff stand out here. It’s one thing for HR teams to comb through pay data (perhaps partly out of fear of lawsuits), and quite another for a chief executive to commit his time and attention to the issue and publicly hold himself accountable for ending any pay inequities on his watch.

Other companies are increasingly speaking out as well on how they’re addressing pay equity, such as Reddit’s decision to take negotiating out of the hiring process and Google’s focus on removing unconscious bias. Yet Benioff’s public leadership on this from the CEO perch sets the highest bar yet for more companies to reach.