SolarCity is making solar power pay

(Fortune)

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive talks about what makes his company unique among solar ventures.

Q: There's a stigma attached to solar firms, but not for SolarCity (SCTY). Your stock has leapt from its IPO price of $8 last December to $19 recently. Why?

A: Most of the taint is around solar manufacturing. Our business model is totally different. We're an energy company. We install solar systems for free, and we sell the electricity at a lower rate than you can buy it from the utility. So given the option of paying more for dirty power or paying less for clean power, what would you take?

How did you choose the 14-state territory where you operate?

We first look at the functional economics: What is the current cost of electricity? Then we look at how much sun that market gets. And then we look at the state's [tax] incentives.

Sunshine isn't enough?

It helps a lot. As an example, the cost of electricity is relatively cheap in Arizona. But they get an incredible amount of sun. Oregon is a state where the sun's not so great. But Oregon has a strong state incentive and wants to see residents adopt clean energy, so the economics still work.

Home Depot is a big part of your sales process.

Someone might go to Home Depot (HD, Fortune 500)to buy dirt, and they'd speak to one of our solar consultants, who explains, "Hey, you can get a solar system for free and pay less for the electricity."

Do you pay rent?

No. We pay Home Depot per customer we sign up.

In February, you announced a partnership with Honda for a $65 million fund to help its customers and dealerships finance solar. Why?

It's the first time they're promoting a non-Honda product. Honda has a mission to reduce its carbon dioxide footprint and to educate its customers too.

How will tariffs on Chinese solar panels affect your business?

Tariffs have already affected panel pricing from China into the U.S. That's built into the cost. The cost reduction was a larger number than the tariff itself. So if there wasn't a tariff, the price would be even lower.

You went public during a tough time. Investors initially were unreceptive, forcing you to lower your share price. Why didn't you wait altogether?

We decided to take the hit to get out, show the market that this is a different business, with a growth potential that is almost infinite based on the market size. We'll let investors grow with us.

--Connected is an interview series with leaders of innovative companies. For a video, go tofortune.com/connected.

- See more at: http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/28/technology/solarcity-lyndon-rive.pr.fortune/index.html#sthash.qJiOZF13.dpuf

Your fantasy smartphone feature

As 65,000 people assembled at Mobile World Congressthis week to reveal the cutting-edge advances coming soon to the world of smartphones, we asked you what features you're desperate to see on the phones of the future.

Readers responded with a raft of comments on the site, Facebook posts, Tweets and Vine videos, comprising their wish-lists for future innovations.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/business/2013/03/01/ns-mwc-future-mobile-phones.cnn.html

This is Z10, the first BlackBerry 10 handset (6:05) 

Research In Motion is no more! BlackBerry is the new company name and the Z10 is the first BlackBerry 10 handset. Here's a quick overview of the new phone.

http://www.reuters.com/video/2013/01/30/this-is-z10-the-first-blackberry-10-hand?videoId=240855123&videoChannel=3400&title=This is Z10, the first BlackBerry 10 handset

Nielsen: the past, the present, but not the future of TV

This week, Nielsen announced that its viewership numbers will include the TV shows that get to the living room via Internet-connected TVs rather than through antennas or a cable/sat box. It’s a modest acknowledgement of the cord-trimming trend by which viewers are turning to non-traditional sources for “TV” such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.

That’s good news, as far as it goes. But only a thimble’s worth. Nielsen, television’s quantifier of record, isn’t going nearly far enough to keep up with the times. Not accounting for rapidly evolving viewing habits and methods is a greater threat to the veracity of Nielsen’s numbers than age-old criticism of its method of computing them. 

Video consumption from Internet sources may still be just a blip – it’s at 4.2 percent now, though it’s growing rapidly. But consumption on devices that are not TV sets – tablets, smartphones, computers ‑ is also happening, with perhaps an even more rapid rate of growth. A recent study by The Diffusion Group (TDG) predicts that 10 percent of TV watching will be on tablets within four years. Nielsen itself reports that about 40 percent of Americans use a tablet or smartphone as a second screen, while watching TV, at least once a day ‑ and 80 percent at least once a month.

Sales of TV sets are in decline as tablets and smartphones fly off the shelves. The living room war is being won by mobile devices, which aren’t even on Nielsen’s radar.

The crux of Nielsen’s business model is in selecting representative households — Nielsen families — from which to extrapolate viewing patterns. Nielsen families agree to have a special box attached to their TV sets that can record viewing habits. There are only 22,000 of these families, carefully chosen to create a polling sample that represents 114.2 million U.S. households.

The Nielsen ratings, which determine whether a TV show is successful and renewed or a flop and canned, are all based on this polling sample. Advertisers set rates on it. The entire TV economy is based on it. 

When Nielsen developed the sampling method in the 1950s, the world was a very different place. All TV shows entered our households over the air. They were seen on TV sets that could only receive, not send, information. Everything was live. If you missed a show, you might get a second chance at a rerun months later; there were no home DVRs or on-demand archives. There was no way for TV viewer habits to be passively monitored. There were no social networks, no blogs, no Twitter where spontaneous water cooler conversation could flourish. There were no portable TVs or mobile devices like tablets and smartphones that deliver TV without power cords or antennas. 

It has not been the ’50s for a very long time. Tablets are perfect flat-screen TVs that go anywhere and do a million other things — we even use them as TVs around the house with apps provided by our cable companies and channels. Broadband access to the Internet is arguably ubiquitous, making it possible to watch TV in your car (rear-seated passengers only, please). Over-the-air reception is going the way of land-lines phone — set-top boxes and gaming consoles and devices designed to stream programming, like the Boxee Box, Roku and Apple TV, are becoming increasingly common, and cheap. Programmers in the era of HBO have been bypassing the networks for decades, and now they are even bypassing TV ‑ witness original programming likeHouse of Cards, paid for and delivered by Netflix ‑ which you can’t even watch on your TV set without special equipment. 

It is easy to imagine that all the connected devices we use to watch TV and video could report “anonymized” information to a clearinghouse (Nielsen, even!) whose sole purpose is to collect data about viewership from every conceivable source, indifferent to the device you are using, whether live or DVR’d, from wherever the show is emanating. The rich metadata that could result include devices used, where people start and stop watching a program, what times of the day certain programming flourishes, etc.

Scared of being “watched” while you watch all the time? Too late. Facebook and Google areconstantly keeping tabs on what you do, if you let them — and billions of people are fine with that (or are blithely indifferent). The trade-off is better and free services that you want and can use.

Don’t think it’s possible to create a crowdsourced database of everything everyone watches? TiVo has had the capacity to measure second-by-second trends for a decade. That is how they knew that Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction in Super Bowl XLVII in 2004 was the most replayed moment ever. The company already provides supplemental ratings information. 

This isn’t just about saving your favorite TV program. When Nielsen reported that President Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address had the smallest TV audience for the annual speech since 1990, it shaped the political narrative. But everyone who might have watched on devices or by Internet streaming or who didn’t bother because they knew the live-blogging on Twitter would be excellent and that the best clips would be shown the next day by MSNBC, Fox and CNN weren’t counted. And since none of that was possible 23 years ago, Nielsen’s misleading number tells us more about our indifference to TV than to politics. 

Nielsen’s decision to add 160 homes to the 22,000 Nielsen families to measure Internet-delivered content — starting no sooner than next September — is very little, very late. And it is quaintly TV-set centric. Measurement of, say, iPad viewership is “sometime in the future,” a Nielsen spokeswoman told Brian Stelter of the New York Times.

Even in the Internet age, television remains a remarkably popular medium. It hasn’t lost its punch because programming continuously evolves. But the business of television hasn’t changed much since the Golden Age of TV more than a half century ago. It remains mired in the past because decisions are based on the perpetuation of imperfect information. And the worst part is, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Yahoo to shut down seven products, including Blackberry app

• Media »

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Mar 1, 2013 7:11pm EST

(Reuters) - Yahoo Inc is shutting down seven products, including its mobile app for Blackberry smartphones, as new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer takes a page from Google Inc's play book by eliminating unsuccessful products en-masse.

The product shutdowns, which Yahoo announced on its official company blog on Friday, are part of what the company said are regular efforts to evaluate and review its product line-up.

"The most critical question we ask is whether the experience is truly a daily habit that still resonates for all of you today," wrote Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's executive vice president of Platforms.

The announcement represents Yahoo's second group shutdown of products since Mayer, a former Google executive, became CEO of the struggling Web portal in July. So-called "spring cleaning" announcements, in which multiple products are shut down, have become a regular feature at Google in recent years.

Mayer signaled the company would prune its line-up of mobile apps at an investor conference last month, noting that Yahoo would reduce the 60 to 75 disparate mobile apps it currently has to a more manageable 12 to 15 apps.

Yahoo said its app for Blackberry smartphones would no longer be available for download, or supported by Yahoo, as of April 1.

Yahoo also said that on April 1 it will stop supporting Yahoo Avatars - the cartoon-like digital characters that consumers create to depict them on Web services such as Yahoo instant messenger and Facebook. Consumers who want to continue using their avatar on Yahoo's online services must download the avatar and then re-upload the information to their personalized Yahoo profile.

The other Yahoo products set to be terminated include Yahoo App Search, Yahoo Sports IQ, Yahoo Clues, the Yahoo Message Boards website and the Yahoo Updates API.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic. Editing by Andre Grenon)

Facebook to showcase new look for newsfeed on March 7

The Facebook logo is pictured in the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California January 29, 2013.

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc will unveil a new look for its popular "newsfeed" next week, the latest move by the Web company to revamp key elements of its 1 billion member social network.

Facebook will showcase the newsfeed makeover at a media event on March 7 at its Menlo Park, California headquarters, the company said in an emailed invitation to reporters on Friday.

The event will be Facebook's second high-profile product event this year, following the rollout of its social search feature in January.

Facebook's newsfeed, which displays an ever-changing stream of the photos, videos and comments uploaded from a user's network of friends, is one of the three "pillars" of the service, along with search and user profiles, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said.

The last major update to Facebook's newsfeed was in September 2011. Since then, the company has incorporated ads directly into the feed and the company has shifted its focus to creating "mobile first experiences," as more people now access the social network every day on mobile devices than on desktop PCs.

The mobile version of Facebook still lacks many of the features available on the PC version, said Brian Blau, an analyst with industry research firm Gartner. "So maybe this is a way to bring some of that together," he said.

Shares of Facebook, the world's No.1 social network, were up nearly 2 percent, or 52 cents, at $27.77 in midday trading on Friday.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Marguerita Choy and David Gregorio)

Judge cuts Apple award versus Samsung, sets new damages trial

The Apple logo hangs in a glass enclosure above the 5th Ave Apple Store in New York, September 20, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson

(Reuters) - Apple Inc had a major setback in its ongoing mobile patents battle with Samsung Electronics on Friday, as a federal judge slashed a $1.05 billion jury award by more than 40 percent and set a new trial to determine damages.

Apple won the award last year against Samsung in what was the biggest and highest-profile of a number of legal trials around the world, centered on the use and alleged abuse of patents in a highly competitive mobile market.

The iPhone maker convinced the jury that the Korean company, which in 2012 overtook Apple as the global smartphone leader, had infringed on its iPhone and iPad patents.

"We are pleased that the court decided to strike $450,514,650 from the jury's award," the Korean company said in a statement. "Samsung intends to seek further review as to the remaining award."

Apple declined to comment.

Friday's ruling by Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court Northern District of California in San Jose means the two mobile electronics companies may once again square off in a California court to decide how much of the $450.5 million struck from the damages, associated with 14 Samsung products, should stand.

Koh said the jury had incorrectly calculated part of the damages and that a new trial was needed to determine the actual, final dollar amount. That could end up less than or more than the original $450.5 million set by the jury.

Koh, rejecting Apple's motion for an increase in the jury's damages award, ordered a new trial on damages for the 14 devices, which include the Galaxy SII. The jury's award to Apple for 14 other separate products, totaling almost $599 million, was maintained.

"The court has identified an impermissible legal theory on which the jury based its award and cannot reasonably calculate the amount of excess while effectuating the intent of the jury," Koh said in her ruling.

Apple and Samsung account for one in two mobile phones sold. They also rely on each other for components and business.

Their legal tussle has been viewed as a proxy war between Apple and Google Inc as Samsung's flagship Galaxy smartphones and tablets run on Google's Android operating system.

Shares in Apple closed down 2.5 percent at $430.47 on Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Gary Hill and Richard Chang)