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Facebook and Twitter stars on Saturday shared lessons learned with young entrepreneurs aspiring to be the next hot technology firm.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone were among speakers at a daylong Startup School conducted by Y Combinator.

“It’s really awesome to be here,” Zuckerberg said as he joined Combinator’s Jessica Livingston on stage in a packed auditorium at the University of California, Berkeley.

“This is, like, my people. One of the things cool about the Y Combinator program is you have these T-shirts that say ‘Build something people want.’ I think that is right on.”

Y Combinator, established in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View in 2005, takes small stakes in startups in exchange for grooming them and exposing them to investors.

“We prefer groups with a lot of technical depth,” Y Combinator explains at its website.

“We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.”

More than 1,600 aspiring entrepreneurs applied to be in the class Saturday at Startup School, which is held once a year.

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A nearly 800-seat auditorium was filled to capacity through the day.

Twitter sprang from a “two-week hack day” at Odeo, a podcasting company that Williams took part in starting after leaving a job at Google in 2004, the founders said in an on-stage chat with Livingston.

“I remember early on someone saying Twitter is fun but it isn’t useful and Ev said ‘So what? So is ice cream’,” Stone said while warning to be wary of skeptics. “We liked it. So we kept working on it.”

Since Twitter was entering new terrain with a microblogging service, Stone and Williams had faith in their idea but a dearth of market data.

“One thing I’ve always admired about Google is they are good at saying this thing is huge and we are going to kick ass and do it better than anyone else; they did it with search and advertising,” Williams said.

“With Twitter, there was no market; no possible way to justify an investment other than it made us laugh and it’s really cool.”

Twitter was able to incubate in Odeo, sparing its creators from pitching what “sounded like a stupid idea” to investors, according to the founders.

Among the questions dogging Twitter today is how the San Francisco firm is going to cash in on its global popularity.

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“We’ve never had any doubt that if you create something popular you can make money,” Williams said.

Twitter’s biggest challenge is capitalizing on its position before a competing technology firm tries to commandeer the microblogging market,” according to Williams.

“Things are going well and the stakes are really high,” Williams said. “We are going to face serious competition.”

Another challenge facing Twitter is preserving the company’s culture of doing social and environmental good woven as the small firm grows, according to Stone.

“Twitter is two years old and in the global spotlight,” Stone said.

“We don’t want to be like the child actor that found fame early and grew up all funky and freaky. Part of working at Twitter is giving back to the world.”

Stone said it is possible Twitter could go public with an offering of stock, but that he is hoping the company will find more creative ways to fund its growth.

“It sounds silly, with no revenue, to talk about going public, but I wouldn’t say that is ridiculous anymore,” Stone said.

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“Our goal is to change the world. The needs of the platform mean growing bigger. At some point going public may make the most sense.”

Zuckerberg said the creation of Facebook boiled down to a Harvard University student with hacker tendencies starting a company with smart friends.

“By the time I got around to building Facebook, I did it in two weeks,” Zuckerberg said.

“Launch early and iterate; Facebook is a really good story of that.”

The evolution of Facebook has been driven by what members of the online social networking community do at the website and their feedback, according to Zuckerberg.

“We pride ourselves on building stuff quickly,” Zuckerberg said. “We have this technology company that is really like a hacker company. My friends are people who really like building cool stuff.”

Zuckerberg told the predominately young audience how he was just 19 years old when he left Harvard in 2004 and went to Silicon Valley to build Facebook into a serious technology company.

“The biggest risk you can take is to take no risk,” Zuckerberg said. “In an evolving world, if you don’t change you lose.”

© 2009 AFP

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Time Inc., publisher of Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People and other magazines, plans to lay off some 540 employees starting next week, or six percent of its workforce, The New York Post reported Friday.

The Post, which is owned by Time Inc. rival News Corp., said the job cuts will be staggered over two weeks.

The New York Times said the layoffs were among measures at Time Inc. aimed at cutting costs by 100 million dollars. The Times did not put a figure on the number of expected job cuts.

The Times said the layoffs announcement is expected to coincide with the release of third-quarter results on Wednesday by Time Inc.’s parent company Time Warner.

Time Inc. cut around 600 jobs last year and has shuttered several magazines recently including Southern Accents and Life.

The frequency of Fortune was reduced last week to 18 issues a year from 25 and between 40 and 60 editorial jobs were cut at the magazine according to the Times.

Time and Fortune declined to comment on the reports of job cuts.

Earlier this month, publishing group Conde Nast, which owns The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, closed Gourmet magazine and axed other titles including Modern Bride, Elegant Bride and Cookie.

Like other US publishers, Conde Nast and Time Inc. have been facing a steep drop in print advertising revenue, steadily declining circulation and the migration of readers to free news online.

Wall Street analysts expect Time Warner on Wednesday to announce a fall in third-quarter revenue of more than 39 percent compared with a year ago.

Time Warner shares were trading 0.98 percent lower in New York around mid-day on Friday at 30.37 dollars.

© 2009 AFP

Nokia Corp., the world’s top maker of mobile phones, announced on Thursday that it had filed a complaint against Apple with the Federal District Court in Delaware, alleging that Apple’s iPhone infringes Nokia patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards.

The ten patents in suit relate to technologies fundamental to making devices which are compatible with one or more of the GSM, UMTS (3G WCDMA) and wireless LAN standards. The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, according to Nokia. While the move seems to be rather significant, it is strange that it took Nokia over two years to determine the infringement of its patents by Apple.

“The basic principle in the mobile industry is that those companies who contribute in technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for. Apple is also expected to follow this principle. By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia’s intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation,” said Ilkka Rahnasto, vice president of legal and intellectual property at Nokia.

Nokia said that it had created one of the strongest and broadest patent portfolios in the industry, investing more than €40 billion ($60.1 billion) in R&D during the last two decades and built one of the wireless industry’s strongest and broadest IPR portfolios, with over 10,000 patent families. Much of this intellectual property, including the patents in suit, has been declared essential to industry standards.  The company said that it had already successfully entered into license agreements including these patents with approximately 40 companies, including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors, allowing the industry to benefit from Nokia’s innovation.

Nokia has not issued any actual demands to Apple publicly. It is hardly possible that Nokia just wants to make Apple pay for radio-related patents, but the company may be interested in negotiations concerning general unification of mobile phones’ platforms.

Tags: Nokia, Apple, Business

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South Korea’s spy chief has blamed North Korea’s telecommunications ministry for cyber attacks that briefly crippled US and South Korean government and commercial websites in July, reports said Friday.

It was the first time the National Intelligence Service had named a specific body as the user of the Internet protocol (IP) address linked to the attacks, Yonhap news agency and local newspapers reported.

“Our search into the route of the attacks on South Korean and US sites found a line coming from China,” intelligence service chief Won Sei-Hoon told a parliamentary session Thursday, according to Yonhap.

His remarks were quoted by lawmakers who attended the private meeting.

“The line was found to be on the IP that the North Korean Ministry of Post and Telecommunications is using on rent (from China),” Won was quoted as saying.

He reportedly refused to comment further, saying that to “answer in specifics would risk revealing national strategies.”

Intelligence officials refused to confirm the reports.

The National Intelligence Service had said in July that North Korea was a prime suspect in the “distributed denial of service” attacks designed to swamp selected websites with traffic.

The attackers infected tens of thousands of “zombie” computers with a virus which programmed them to send a flood of requests for website access.

But the origin of the attacks was never confirmed, with one Vietnamese expert saying they originated from a master server in Britain.

Experts say North Korea maintains elite hacker units.

The threat of cyber warfare by its neighbour has prompted South Korea to establish a specific military command, which will be active by next year.

Last week Lieutenant General Jeffrey Remington, commander of the US Air Force in South Korea, called on Washington and Seoul to take “aggressive steps” to safeguard their military computer networks from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

© 2009 AFP

Asustek Computer, one of the world’s largest makers of personal computers and the biggest maker of mainboards, plans to lift its freeze on hiring because of improving market conditions, a media report claims citing sources with knowledge of the matter. Even though the number of positions Asus plans to fill does not seem to be high, the fact that a large company actually has unbanned hiring seems to be quite positive in general.

In response to warming market conditions, Asustek has lifted a freeze on hiring that has been in effect since the end of 2008, reports DigiTimes web-site. Various departments are set to hire additional personnel, including the company’s handheld business groups, graphics card, notebook and handheld device businesses also require additional personnel. Moreover, it is reported that Asus is in short of engineers for its communications business, as well as sales and marketing personnel.

Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek Computer, is reportedly very enthusiastic about the company’s sales results in the third quarter of 2009 and expects a major uptick in demand for PCs in the following quarters.

According to DigiTimes, Asus will start hiring by the end of October or early November, and the firm will initiate interviewing for a total of more than 70 job openings. Even though 70 new positions at one of the globe’s largest IT companies may not seem that significant, the very fact that Asustek is ending its hiring freeze seems to be a good news in general.

Asustek Computer has reportedly confirmed the plans.

Tags: ASUS, Business

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Microsoft on Friday capped off a rousing week in which it released Windows 7, snagged a deal with Twitter and released quarterly earnings that easily beat the expectations of Wall Street analysts.

The Redmond, Washington-based software giant said net profit fell 18 percent in the first quarter of its fiscal year to 3.57 billion dollars, or 40 cents per share, from 4.37 billion dollars, or 48 cents per share, a year ago.

Revenue declined 14 percent in the quarter which ended on September 30 to 12.92 billion dollars.

It was the third quarter in a row of sliding revenue for the company founded by Bill Gates, but it surpassed analysts’ forecasts of 12.37 billion dollars.

Microsoft said its first quarter results would have been even better if it had not deferred 1.47 billion dollars in revenue related to Windows 7 pre-sales and an upgrade option program.

Taking this adjustment into account, earnings were 52 cents per share — far better than the 32 cents expected by analysts.

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Microsoft shares surged 5.38 percent in New York to close at 28.02 dollars.

“We are very pleased with our performance this quarter and particularly by the strong consumer demand for Windows,” Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell said in a statement.

“We also maintained our cost discipline, which allowed us to drive strong earnings performance despite continued tough overall economic conditions.”

Microsoft has been battered by weak worldwide demand for personal computers and is hoping to get a boost from the release on Thursday of its much-heralded next-generation operating system Windows 7.

In a clear indication of the importance of the Windows 7 release, Microsoft said revenue from its Windows division fell to 2.62 billion dollars in the first quarter from 4.28 billion dollars a year ago.

Speaking in a conference call to financial analysts, Liddell attributed the stronger-than-expected results to “consumer demand for our Windows and XBox products combined with excellent cost controls.”

He noted that Microsoft’s headcount was four percent lower in the quarter than at the same time last year — “the first time a reduction of that significance has been achieved in the company’s history.”

Liddell said business spending has yet to see a broad-based recovery but there is “potential for a corporate PC refresh cycle beginning in calendar year 2010 although it could be gradual and occur over a couple of years.”

Microsoft said revenue was up slightly in the server division at 3.43 billion dollars from 3.42 billion dollars a year ago while business division revenue fell to 4.40 billion dollars from 4.95 billion dollars a year ago.

Revenue from entertainment and devices, which includes Microsoft’s XBox 360 game console and Zune MP3 music player, was flat at 1.89 billion dollars.

Online services, where Microsoft is battling Google and other Web giants, reported an operating loss of 480 million dollars, up from 321 million dollars a year ago, and revenue fell to 490 million dollars from 520 million dollars.

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Microsoft did manage to get a jump on Google online this week by reaching a deal to integrate Twitter messages into its new Internet search engine Bing.

Microsoft unveiled its real-time Twitter search feature at a Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and said it also planned to incorporate status updates from social network Facebook into Bing.

Within hours of the announcement by Microsoft, search leader Google said it too had reached an agreement with the popular microblogging service to include Twitter updates in search results.

But while Bing already includes a Twitter search feature, Google said its product will only be ready “in the coming months.”

© 2009 AFP