Tech News 2Night 82(Transcript)

[Top TN2 Animation ] Tonight, Yahoo CEO has lots of 'splainin' to do, tech stock crumble, and now you can fly like an eagle while safely on the ground Tech News 2Night is Next! [TWiT Open] [Main TN2 Open] This is Tech News 2Night Episode 82, for Wednesday, May 7, 2014 I'm Sarah Lane, Let's get right to the Tech Feed! Big names in tech such as Amazon, Google, Kickstarter, Twilio, Codecademy, OpenDNS, Zynga, Tumblr, Reddit and Foursquare have signed a letter protesting the proposed net neutrality rules the FCC is considering ahead of its May 15 meeting. The letter protests the FCC’s plans to implement net neutrality rules that could let ISP’s charge content providers like Netflix or Amazon to deliver their packets faster or at a higher quality, and that "Instead of permitting individualized bargaining and discrimination, the Commission’s rules should protect users and Internet companies on fixed and mobile platforms against blocking, discrimination, and paid prioritization, and should make the market for internet services more transparent." This proposed change in rules, which comes after the original network neutrality rules implemented in 2010 were struck down by a U.S. Federal Court of Appeals earlier this year. / Yesterday we talked about Twitter's 18% stock drop due to a big selloff. Today it's now down more than 20% over both days. But it's not just Twitter. AOL is down more than 20% today. King Digital, which just reported its first earnings as a public company, is down more than 10%. FireEye is down more than 20%. And Groupon is down 17% after its earnings, again, failed to thrill investors. In general, a troubling trend for tech stocks. So what's going on? As Techcrunch notes today: "venture capital behaves like an amped version of the NASDAQ, and when the latter falls apart, it closes the liquidity cycle for private money, which impacts valuations down to the earliest stages." We'll keep an eye on these numbers through the week. / When it comes to e-commerce sales, Amazon is #1. Amazon sold $67.8 billion of electronics, media and other products last year — more than its next 10 biggest online competitors combined. But 2013 e-commerce sales data from trade publication Internet Retailer shows a new runner up - Apple, which took the No. 2 spot long held by office supply chain Staples. Apple took a 24% increase in online sales to $18.3 billion last year, thanks in part to Internet Retailer’s inclusion of Apple’s online hardware sales for the first time, not just the digital sales from its App Store and iTunes. On the growth side, Global Internet sales at Wal-Mart rose by 30% to $10 billion last year, besting Amazon’s 20% sales growth during the same period. / Clouds for everyone! Under the name HP Helion, HP will spend $1 billion over the next two years on products and services around OpenStack, as the open source cloud software is known. HP will offer its own free version of OpenStack, but also bundle its existing cloud offerings like workload management and software development under the Helion brand. The company will also offer a commercial version of Helion OpenStack in June. And it sounds like HP is really going all in - Just last week, HP also announced a joint venture between itself and Foxconn to sell cloud-optimized servers to providers of communications services, like telecommunications companies and Internet Service Providers. Now onto Google, which just bought Stackdriver, a startup with software for monitoring the performance of applications running on cloud infrastructure. This is interesting because until now, Stackdriver has been oriented toward monitoring applications on Amazon Web Services. Google could pull in revenue by letting customers monitor applications on the Google cloud as well as Amazon cloud — or Google could cut off Stackdriver support for the Amazon cloud. A mystery, for now. / Google's wallet was busy today - the company is ALSO buying Appetas, a site where restaurants can build websites for themselves, and integrates services like GrubHub and OpenTable to add extra features like delivery services and reservations. Hope you didn't like Appetas too much, Google says it will shut down the service, and will begin transitioning existing users to alternative platforms “to focus on our new endeavors,” whatever those are. Appetas included not just reservations and delivery systems, but social media integrations and mobile websites. Coming up... the virtual reality, sent-powered flying machine! [Segment #2] BENJAMIN KABIN, Reporter with Entrepreneur Today at TechCrunch's Disrupt CEO Marrissa Mayer talked with Michael Arrington a lot about how Yahoo will improve. In your article: ""Mobile Was a Huge Missed Opportunity for Yahoo"" Mayer admits the company is behind in mobile. What do they plan to do to catch up? -It's not all bad for Yahoo. What about their successes with Tumblr? -They hired Katie Couric and have made a bit deal about video. What is their new video strategy? -Regarding the hire and departure of COO Henrique De Castro she said: “There were issues there that I potentially created, and it was important for me to fix them.” What did she mean by this? " [Kicker!] If you had one wish, what would it be? I'd say 75% of you would answer - to fly, right? If so, you'll love Zurich University of the Arts' Birdly machine, modeled after the Red Kite bird, which lets you flap through the air. Motors translate your hand movements to virtual wings, and an Oculus Rift VR headset gives you a bird's eye view of the scenery. A fan simulates headwinds depending on your speed, and you'll even smell whatever's below. Birdly still needs some tweaks to avoid making users queasy, though it's mostly meant to be an art installation, rather than a sport. [good bye] That's it for this edition of Tech News 2Night. Subscribe to this show at Twit.tv/tn2, and write us at tn2@twit.tv Don't miss our morning news program, Tech News Today, tomorrow and every weekday at 10am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. I'm Sarah Lane, thanks for watching. [Close, Cache Fly BB, Credits] [Bandwidth Billboard]