Zuckerberg Resolves to Invent, Encourages Girls to Invent Too

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 resolution to challenge himself outside his work is to build a simple artificial intelligence assistant to run his home and help him do a better job juggling his business responsibilities.

"You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in 'Iron Man,'" he suggested.

Zuckerberg first will explore the available technology, then train it to understand his voice to control everything in his home.

At work, the AI will allow him to visualize data in virtual reality to help him build better services and lead his organizations more effectively.

"It's a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so my personal challenge is to do that," Zuckerberg said.

He could be tempted by some of the shortcuts already available, however.

"Mark says he wants to write the code, but he'd find it easier if he starts with a kit like the one from iRobot," remarked Sue Rudd, a research director atStrategy Analytics.

Or, he could look at Brookstone's Robotis Mini Robot Kit, she told TechNewsWorld.

The Masses React

Zuckerberg's announcement drew responses from a crowd of people marketing their products, along with some who offered observations ranging from wise to wacky.

One comment that elicited great interest -- as well as a reply from Zuckerberg -- came from Darlene Loretto, who wrote that she keeps telling her granddaughters to "date the nerd in school, he may turn out to be a Mark Zuckerberg!"

It would be "even better ... to encourage them to *be* the nerd in their school so they can be the next successful inventor!" Zuckerberg responded.

That triggered a spate of comments.

"Amazing response, Mark!" wrote Melanie Maiorca.

"I say the same to my daughter Eden," commented Debbie Parry, who said she was "badly bullied at school" and didn't want her daughter to go through that.

"Great answer," wrote Cookie Caporaso. "Love that. I taught myself how to rebuild and repair computers and build gaming systems. I had no idea 20 years ago but never gave up."

Women in STEM

The Obama administration considers supporting women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) an essential part of America's competitive strategy.

The United States Office of Science and Technology Policy is working with the White House Council on Women and Girls to increase the participation of women, girls, and other underrepresented groups in STEM.

In Europe, there's the TWIST (Towards Women in Science and Technology) project.

However, the number of women in physics, engineering and computer science is low globally, according to Women in Global Science & Technology, and it's declining in several leading countries -- including the U.S.

In countries where the number of women studying science and technology has increased, it has not followed that more women have been employed in those fields.

The Zuckerberg Factor

"It would be great to see STEAM and STEM programs at schools quoting [Zuckerberg] on this suggestion that girls should be nerds, not just try to date them," said Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, a research director at Strategy Analytics.

"There are lots of sports role models, but fewer good nerd role models, especially female role models," she told TechNewsWorld. Schools could then move beyond that to "transform the idea that innovating and creating technology is not just a nerd thing, or that being a nerd is a very positive thing."

Zuckerberg should promote the idea of girls becoming nerds jointly with his COO, Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Rudd suggested.

"Even in my youth many executives were encouraging to women, but I find there are fewer women in technology today than when I started," Rudd said. "Sheryl's book deals with some of the reasons."

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Samsung Rolls Out Stylish Gear S2 Classic Smartwatches

Samsung on Monday began a global rollout of the latest versions of its Gear S2 Classic smartwatch, hitting China first.

There are two models in the Gear S2 Classic New Edition line -- one with 18K rose gold plating and the other with a platinum finish.

They have ivory and black genuine leather bands, respectively.

The watches' new faces feature characters from the Peanuts comic strip, as well as designs created by artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Twisting the bezel changes the face.

New apps from CNN and Bloomberg include their own specialized watch face features.

Samsung also has added apps from eBay, ESPN, Uber and Voxer.

Introduced at CES in January, the New Edition line also includes Samsung Pay, NFC technology that soon will be available to users, beginning in the United States.

Samsung didn't indicate pricing for the line.

Fashion Forward

"The new designs launched at CES are part of the larger trend towards more bling and enhanced appeal for women that we also saw from Huawei at CES, and from models like the Moto 360 2 and Pebble Time Round earlier this year," remarked Cliff Raskind, a senior research director at Strategy Analytics.

That sensibility is reflected in "the premium metal-plated models, campy watch faces, and ... leather straps," he told TechNewsWorld.

"The larger trend, of course, is that smartwatches are meeting the challenge of adding style and fashion a lot faster than they're meeting the challenge of practical day-to-day convenience -- battery life, comfort, size," Raskind said.

Too Cool for the Real World?

Despite being extremely well made, with an intuitive interface and other good features, the Gear S2, predecessor of the New Edition line, reportedly has connectivity issues and only a limited number of apps for its Tizen OS, according to Kris Carlon, who reviewed it for AndroidPit.

Those aren't the only reported problems.

"You can't use the Verizon Message+ to respond through the watch. Typing is a joke ... can't use Gmail app to look at entire mailbox, only notifications, have to set up the email app to see everything," said Foxy in a comment posted in response to the AndroidPit review.

When using WhatsApp on the Gear S2, the reply icon disappeared and couldn't be retrieved even after the smartphone had been reset, reported Alfred Tang in another comment.

Battery life was "five to seven hours instead of the advertised 30 or 48" after the Instagram app was downloaded and used, BlueEyed Apache complained. "You can get a good 25+ hours from the battery but only if you use the watch solely for telling time."

However, dropped connections weren't a problem for commenter Adeshina Adeniran, who wrote that using the Gear S2 was "amazing and fun."

Getting Better All the Time?

Lack of apps is a problem, but "with ESPN, Uber and CNN, I think we're seeing the big names come in," said Ramon Llamas, a research manager at IDC.

"We need to see more local ones, but these are good ones to have," he told TechNewsWorld.

Tizen smartwatch shipments will grow from 1.7 million units shipped in 2015, with 8.2 percent of the market, to 2.5 million in 2019, according to IDC.

That's a 9.5 percent compound annual growth rate, but it won't be enough. The market share for Tizen smartwatches will slip to 2.8 percent in 2019.

"More ecosystem and SDK focus is clearly needed if Tizen is to compete head to head in apps with watchOS, Android Wear, and even Pebble's budding developer ecosystem," said Strategy Analytics' Raskind.

Tizen "remains much more confined to Samsung, limiting its ecosystem potential," he continued, while Android Wear, watchOS and Pebble OS "continue to evolve and gain a following." Attracting more developers to build more Tizen apps "will not be an easy task from its current low base."

There might yet be hope, Raskind suggested, because Samsung Electronics' new chief, DJ Koh, who took over the role Dec. 1, has the required software chops to address the apps shortfall.

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Can Apple escape iPhone fatigue?

A year ago, the iPhone 6 helped Apple report the best quarter in its 38-year history. This time around, the company must deal with consumers who don't race to buy the latest smartphone like they once did.

iPhones -- heck, phones in general -- don't rev you up like they used to, and that's a problem for Apple.

The Cupertino, California-based electronics giant has expanded its horizons over the past few years, entering the wearables market, broadening its phone and tablet lineups, and launching a streaming-music service. But its fortunes are still closely tied to the iPhone, which is responsible for two-thirds of its sales and much of its profit. So what happens when demand starts to slacken?

The outcome of the company's fiscal first quarter, which ended in December, will be released Tuesday. It may mark the start of a slowdown.

Disappointing results would reaffirm the belief that we're suffering from phone fatigue, meaning that new phones no longer excite us and that we're increasingly content with the one we own. Rival Samsung has had to contend with sputtering smartphone sales, and some worry that Apple may no longer be immune.

We'll see if that's the case come Tuesday. It will be tough for Apple to top last year's results, when the tech giant posted the highest profit of any public company ever, thanks to the larger screens of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Can Apple do it again and sell more iPhones than ever before? In October, CEO Tim Cook said the company's iPhone sales would rise in its first quarter. Most analysts polled by Fortune agreed, but they've also grown more cautious over the past few weeks.

The problem is that the latest iPhone models, the 6S and 6S Plus, didn't add enough new features to prompt customers in places like the US to upgrade. In addition, the economy in China, one of Apple's most important markets, has been struggling and may have put a damper on the willingness of consumers there to snap up a new phone.

Analysts now expect iPhone sales to rise only 2.8 percent from a year earlier, to 76.5 million units, below the earlier forecast of 78 million units, according to Fortune. Many believe unit sales could actually decline in the quarter ending in March and in the full fiscal year, which would mark the first time iPhone sales have dropped since Apple started selling the device in 2007.

Wall Street analysts polled by Thomson Reuters also expect a modest 3 percent rise in revenue in Apple's first quarter, followed by a 3 percent revenue drop in its second quarter, a rare slip for Apple.

The company declined to comment.

Reading the tea leaves

Apple isn't alone in dealing with waning enthusiasm. Samsung has warned that its December-quarter profit and sales would be weak. Even super-hot Chinese startup Xiaomi struggled and sold fewer phones in 2015 than anticipated.

Market researcher Gartner said last week that while global shipments of mobile phones will rise 2.6 percent this year, overall spending will decline. Consumers in countries like China are buying cheaper phones instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars for high-end models.

"Local and Chinese brands are delivering more-capable basic smartphones with appealing features at a lower price," Gartner said, "which means that there is less of a need for users to upgrade to a premium smartphone."

Some of Apple's key component suppliers and partners have issued their own warnings. They include Analog Devices, which makes components for the iPhones; Cirrus Logic, which provides audio chips; Dialog Semiconductor, which makes power-management chips; and Qorvo, which provides radio frequency processors.

Intel, which supplies processors for Apple's Macintosh computers, reported disappointing quarterly results, and Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith warned about the conditions in China. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which builds chips for Apple's mobile devices, said demand for high-end phones has been weak.

Apple has said in the past that faltering financial results at its suppliers don't necessarily translate to its own condition. But industry watchers say it's getting tough to ignore warnings that sales are slowing down.

Said JP Morgan analyst Rod Hall: "The drumbeat of bad news from Apple suppliers keeps building."

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Facebook's Sports Stadium steals a page from Apple playbook

When Facebook announced a foray into sports, the question on everyone's mind was, "Hey, didn't Twitter do that first?" But Facebook is simply borrowing ideas from competitors -- a time-honored tradition espoused by none other than the late Steve Jobs.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Twitter should be glowing with pride.

It should be, but perhaps the company is nervous instead. That's because the imitator is Facebook, Twitter's biggest rival in the war for your social-media attention.

Facebook on Wednesday announced a new feature to help the more than 1 billion people who use its service every day follow sports games live. You can track the game with friends, and the feature encourages you to discuss stats, plays and everything else from anywhere around the globe. It's called Sports Stadium, and it arrives just in time for Super Bowl 50, set for February 7.

But longtime tech watchers said Facebook's newest feature should have a different name: Sports Twitter.

The perennial second-banana to Facebook, Twitter is a darling of the tech and media worlds, but one that's struggled to meaningfully expand its social-networking site. It's about a fifth the size of Facebook in terms of people who use it regularly. Now one of Twitter's most promising features, people talking about sports in real time, may be undercut by Facebook's Sports Stadium.

Let the games begin.

Whenever there's a big event, Twitter lights up with commentary, links and photos from people watching in real time. Twitter has at times helped to encourage this by creating quick links people can tap on to find the conversation. Or it'll highlight tweets through its Moments news feature or company-run account, @TwitterSports, which is followed by more than 12 million people. Sports fan are, well, fanatics, and the thinking is that people who care about sports are more likely to want to talk, or tweet, about them.

A good move on Twitter's part, but now Facebook has shown that anything Twitter can do, it can do too. The question is, can Facebook do it better? Or does that even matter?

Let's face it: If we had to declare a winner in the war for social-networking supremacy, it'd be Facebook. More than half the world's online population is using the service. It's already the world's top place to post photos, and plenty of people are sharing political opinions there ahead of the US presidential election. More and more people are also checking in during disasters and terrorist attacks to let friends know they're safe.

As new projects like Internet-beaming drones get off the ground to bring even more people online, Facebook has pounced on them to make sure most of us communicate with our friends and family using its service. The trick now is to get you and me to use Facebook even more than we already do.

Can sports be the next big thing? Well, Twitter users think so. And now Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, do too. What's unknown is whether sports broadcasters and fans will follow suit.

You may look at all of this and think Facebook is just nicking a competitor's idea. But that's what rivals do -- steal each other's best ideas. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1996 famously repeated a quote he attributed to Picasso, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." Jobs then added, "we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." For years, some software developers would watch Apple events with some trepidation, fearful the computer maker would build their ideas into its software, give it away for free and put them out of business. They weren't being irrational, as You Control: Desktops, Quicksilver and Menuet can attest. (Never heard of them? That's the point.)

Though Zuckerberg hasn't talked much about his opinions around borrowing ideas, Facebook didn't make him available for comment for this story. A look at Facebook's initiatives over the past year, however, shows that sports isn't the first idea Facebook has borrowed from some of its social-media rivals. The company also added popular ideas like trending topics (another key part of Twitter), ephemeral messaging (a hit from Snapchat) and location services (made popular by Foursquare).

Just because a company creates a smart new idea doesn't mean it can't be improved on and made even more popular, said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner. "Ideas are a dime a dozen; execution isn't."

So maybe the question isn't whether Facebook stole from Twitter. Instead it's, what app will you be swiping through during the Super Bowl?

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