Best Buy CEO Says Tablet Sales “Crashing” Re/code has landed in Minneapolis to talk to the folks at Best Buy — the last standing nationwide big-box, bricks-and-mortar consumer electronics retailer, with over 1,000 main stores and hundreds of smaller mobile device stores.
Wall Street Analysts Predict The Slow Demise Of Walmart And Target. The end of the big-box store era may soon be upon us.
That’s the message of a research note published by Goldman Sachs analysts on Tuesday cutting their investment rating on shares of Walmart. Shoppers are increasingly turning to the web or to smaller, more conveniently located stores, cutting into the market share of big-box retailers like Walmart and Target, the analysts wrote. So-called "narrow format" shops -- think dollar stores, drug stores and warehouse clubs -- have been thriving at the expense of big-box stores like Walmart and Target for several quarters now, the analysts wrote. That suggests shoppers are interested more in convenience than in having access to the kind of product variety Walmart and Target offer. What Is Money? - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg. One of our favorite questions from readers for Economics in Plain English was deceptively simple: What, after all, is money?
And what sets it apart from something that's simply valuable? A brief history of macro: How we got here. Property is Theft. The Science of Snobbery: How We're Duped Into Thinking Fancy Things Are Better - Alex Mayyasi. Several months ago, this author sat at a classical music concert, trying to convince himself that wine is not bullshit.
Everything Wrong With How We Think About the Recession, in 1 Tweet - David A. Graham. Sorry, but multimillionaire ex-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson did not "feel the impact" of the economic collapse more than anyone.
It's unfair to beat up on any one publication -- especially BusinessWeek, which is a great magazine, and one of the few economy-focused publications that steers clear of cheerleading for the financial sector -- since this sort of thing is pervasive, but this tweet is egregious: Five years ago, the economy nearly collapsed -- and no one felt the impact more than Hank Paulson | — Businessweek (@BW) September 12, 2013 Beyond the obviously cringeworthy lack of perspective, the statement -- which epitomizes a whole view of the economic crisis -- is dangerously flawed in two ways, each of which illustrates a major public-policy problem.
The New Isolationism: Why the World's Richest Countries Can't Work Together - Mohamed A. El-Erian. The West has lost its ability to coordinate solutions to global crises, from Syria to the long recovery following the Great Recession In rejecting the use of force in Syria, the British parliament did more than deal a blow to U.S. efforts to organize an international coalition against the deployment of deadly chemical weapons in Syria.
Last week’s unexpected development also confirmed a phenomenon that has been clear in economics and finance for a while: countries are turning more insular, even when there are good reasons to believe that collective international action would dominate individual domestic responses. In turn, this has contributed to a global economy that continues to operate below potential and faces renewed risks of financial instability. World braces for retirement crisis. Listen to WORST EVER customer service call – Comcast is 'very embarrassed'
Comcast admits service rep did what he was trained to do. When you don't have a leg to stand on, it's best to sit down and take stock.
This is what appears to have happened at Comcast after a customer service call, in which a retention agent made a customer want to retain a hammer and bang it very hard, went viral. Last week, tech journalist Ryan Block posted part of a conversation he had with a Comcast customer service representative. Why the U.S. Has the World's Most Profitable Airlines. The bankruptcies, mergers and jet-fuel shocks that rocked U.S. airlines during the last decade yielded a surprising result: the world’s most profitable carriers.
U.S. airlines led by Delta now hold the top spots in the global industry by operating income and market value, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Just five years ago, European and Asian companies including Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa dominated the field. Delta, American, United and Southwest pulled themselves up by junking old habits such as adding flights to win market share. Jaron Lanier: We’re Being Enslaved by Free Information. Steven Cherry: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations.”
Facebook bought Instagram a little over a year ago, a deal that Vanity Fair called “the ultimate Silicon Valley fairy tale,” a billion-dollar sale of a company less than two years old. Maybe even more remarkably, at the time of the sale, Instagram had exactly 13 employees. How could a billion-dollar company have only 13 employees? Apple loses sauce, BlackBerry squashed and Microsoft, er, WinsPhones (Nokia's) Year in Review It was a year where Apple slurped down enormous profits but lost some of its bleeding-edge-tech street cred, while Samsung marched inexorably on.
But behind the scenes there was much more going on. Here are the year's trends put through the blender. Apple Apple's strategy is quite simple: instead of making products the developing world can afford, it will wait until the developing world gets wealthy enough to afford Apple's prices. PC market bombs in Blighty as Gartner tracks plummeting shipments.
The growth in tablet sales combined with a dealer inventory dump-off prior to the release of Windows 8.1 caused PC shipments in Western Europe to drop some 12.8 per cent in the last quarter. Research firm Gartner said the desktop and laptop market in Western Europe was declining faster than expected and would likely continue to do so in the final months of 2013 as users lapped up tablets. European Insurers Discover Cyber Protection Market. It's already a booming market in the United States, but in Europe, companies are also waking up to the idea of cyber insurance to protect themselves against Internet attack. And insurance companies are projecting strong growth in the coming years. On the other side of the Atlantic, where companies are obliged to inform US authorities of online attacks, the cyber insurance market is already highly developed, totalling $1.3 billion (960 million euros) per year, according to Christopher Lohmann, head of Germany and central Europe at Allianz Global Corporate and Speciality.
PC sales continue meteoric death plunge through 3rd quarter, drop another 8.6 per cent. The latest figures from Gartner on PC sales will make dispiriting reading for manufacturers; sales for the third quarter are down 8.6 per cent overall, with European sales down nearly 14 per cent. "The third quarter is often referred to as the 'back-to-school' quarter for PC sales, and sales this quarter dropped to their lowest volume since 2008," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner in a canned quote.
"Consumers' shift from PCs to tablets for daily content consumption continued to decrease the installed base of PCs both in mature as well as in emerging markets. A greater availability of inexpensive Android tablets attracted first-time consumers in emerging markets, and as supplementary devices in mature markets. " Forget “post-PC”—pervasive computing and cloud will change the nature of IT. Thought the PC market couldn't get any worse? HAH! Think again. High performance access to file storage. Securing Bitcoin - The New Frontier. Virtual currency is picking up steam, and with that security issues are growing as well.
While many issues with the traditional internet systems (banking, credit card and fund transfer systems, etc.) are averted by the way virtual currency is architected (which gives it a great advantage), security will always be a concern. Where bleeding edge advances include money or gain of any sort, hackers will cleverly find ways around controls put in place to stop them. When Your Music Video Is Not-So-Secretly an Advertisement - Nolan Feeney. Flash Mobs of Trading Robots Coalescing To Rule Markets. Shrinking market doesn't scare the NASty boys of storage. High performance access to file storage The network-attached storage market appears to have shrunk slightly, but it seems that Buffalo, Seagate and Overland think the market's set to grow soon. True Size of the Shadow Banking System Revealed (Spoiler: Humongous)