Also: What Tim Cook said at a Town Hall meeting; Is Quora just a content farm reborn?
Box CEO Aaron Levie.
The enterprise cool kids [TECHCRUNCH]
But the hype is changing. Conversations about “the next Instagram” at Coupa, The Creamery or on Caltrain have been replaced with staid assessments about the future of Big Data, storage and the cloud. The mobile, social, local gold rush of 2011 has been put on pause, at least as far as consumer Internet is concerned. VCs are staffing up with enterprise experts to handle the sharp shift in focus. We’ve even heard someone was working on something described only as, “a Path for enterprise.”
Apple’s Town Hall meeting: Tim Cook talks Android, China, earnings, retail, more [9 TO 5 MAC]
On the note of working for Apple, Cook also announced a new employee discount perk. Apple, for a while, has offered its employees an EPP (Employee Purchase Plan) that provides discounts on various Apple products. Now, an expansion of the EPP program will include discounts on unlocked versions of the iPhone. This new offer will become available this upcoming Monday.
Huawei passes Nokia, RIM in smartphones [THE WALL STREET JOURNAL]
Since plunging into the consumer market, the company has pushed aggressively to forge close relationships with wireless carriers experiencing strong demand for cheap phones. While just over half of Huawei’s smartphone shipments went to China in the third quarter, some of Huawei’s biggest gains last year were in Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to IDC.
Are Medium & Quora just the rebirth of content farms? [HUNTER WALK’S BLOG]
What am I finding about my writing behavior and these new services? Well, I still do most of my publishing on this blog because I like having my own dry piece of land. I also contribute to LinkedIn because it seems to reach a different audience and enjoy seeing what gets popular there. Published to Medium once or twice but right now doesn’t have enough engagement with readers for me. Svbtle, I haven’t been invited, nor applied, and don’t think it’s really for me. And Quora I enjoy answering questions from time-to-time but currently have zero interest in creating a blog.
How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail [ARSTECHNICA]
It’s all a sham. Court records show Soverain hasn’t made a sale—ever. The various voice mailboxes were all set up by Katherine Wolanyck, the former Latham & Watkins attorney who is a co-founder and partial owner of Soverain. And the impressive list of big corporate customers on its Web page? Those are deals struck with another company, more than a decade ago. That was OpenMarket, a software company that originally created these patents before going out of business in 2001. It sold its assets to a venture capital fund called divine interVentures, which in turn sold the OpenMarket patents to Soverain Software in 2003.
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