Zuckerberg, Milner, Brin and Other Tech Titans Donate Millions to Science

When you’re as rich as some of the Silicon Valley elite, most anything is at your fingertips. Jetpacks, yachts, skydiving while wearing augmented reality headgear. Oh, and there’s that whole philanthropy thing, too.

A few are opting for that last option with the launch of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation on Wednesday, a non-profit organization drummed up by a handful of tech billionaires.

“I think that our society needs more heroes, more scientists, more researchers, more engineers,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, one of the sponsors of the foundation, at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. “The things that we can do from the sidelines are build institutions that celebrate your work.”

The prize aims to spur innovation in the field of science research and is backed by tech luminaries including Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, who reached out to Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin months ago to talk about launching the foundation. Art Levinson, Apple chairman and former CEO of Genentech, will act as the chairman of the board for the foundation.

The first round of prize recipients includes 11 scientists from a range of research disciplines, including studies in genetics, cancer research and neural behavior. Each of the 11 prize winners will receive a $3 million award for their work, and Brin, Zuckerberg, Milner and the rest of the sponsors have agreed to a five-year commitment to awarding prizes.

For now, the group’s board intends to remain small. Milner said the design of the five-person board — which also includes Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Brin’s wife Anne Wojcicki (a biology analyst and co-founder of 23 and Me) — is purposely small, targeting research on five specific diseases chosen by the board members. Wojcicki’s donation will go to supporting Parkinson’s research; the other sponsors haven’t named their chosen diseases yet.

At the same time, Zuckerberg said there’s room for expansion. “We specifically said we weren’t going to name the prize after a specific person,” he said, in order to potentially attract more sponsors in the tech industry.

Apple Airs New Ads With Beating Hearts, Sharks and All That Jazz

Here are two ads — called “Alive” and “Together” — that Apple just released to tout its iPad and iPad mini. They’re a clear departure from Apple’s previous TV spots.

With jazzy music and quick word-association, they are much more hyperactively catchy than the usual doink-doink, thinking-nerd style of many others, and they feature a range of very active and visually arresting apps.

Here they are:

Viral Video: Cure "Downton Abbey" Depression With a Dose of Dowager

Without giving away the tragic end to the third season finale of popular PBS Masterpiece Classics television series “Downton Abbey,” it might be a good idea to take a big dose of Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess to feel better.

Here’s a compilation of some of her most withering asides from the first season — take 10 and see me in the morning — and also an interview of Smith that aired last night on “60 Minutes”:

Crashlytics Makes Enterprise Features Free for All

Crashlytics, the mobile crash-reporting and analysis platform that was acquired by Twitter last month, said today that it will make its enterprise-level features available for free. In a company blog post, the company’s co-founder, Wayne Chang, said, “The features and usage we used to charge for based on limits are now unlimited across the board.”

Exploratorium App Explores the World of Sound

The folks at the Exploratorium in San Francisco are some of the best in the world at designing participatory exhibits that teach visitors about their own perception and the world around them through direct experience.

The Exploratorium has long had a website — it was the world's 600th (or so) in 1993 — but the tablet is perhaps a more fitting venue for its craft, given that the devices are by their nature social because they can be easily shared, and that touch provides a less abstract method of interaction.

The Exploratorium’s first free iPad app, Color Uncovered, has been downloaded one million times since late 2011.

Today, it’s launching a second, called Sound Uncovered, with a set of fun and mind-bending audio illusions, manipulations and tests.

Jean Cheng, who led the team that built the app, took me through a series of mini-iPad exhibits on a recent visit to the still-under-construction new Exploratorium building on the water at Pier 15 in San Francisco.

For instance, there’s a Mobius strip kind of demo of a chord progression, where it’s impossible to find the highest note. There’s another one where you move a slider until you can hear a high-pitched sound, and the app estimates your age. There’s another that plays your voice backward so you can teach yourself audio palindromes.

They’re not necessarily things you’d do over and over again, but they’re pretty neat in the moment, with explanations of what phenomena are occurring.

Asked what ages Sound Uncovered is appropriate for, Cheng declined to say. “Anyone’s experience is authentic,” she said. “This is for curious people of all ages. It’s not about answers, it’s about a ‘what happens’ style of thinking.”

Sound Uncovered was developed with a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Exploratorium doesn’t have any particular ambition of making money from it.

In Tepid Times for Tech Stocks, LinkedIn Still Expected to Perform

It has been a rough year on the market for buying tech stocks. Zynga’s worth has been reduced to a shadow of what it once was. And we all know how that whole Facebook IPO went.

And then there’s LinkedIn, one company in the minority of consistently strong tech market performances over the last few years. Since the company debuted on the NYSE nearly two years ago, it has spent most of its time on the market moving in an upward trajectory (save a nasty period in mid-2011).

This afternoon’s expectations are little different. The Street consensus is positive on its earnings report, with an average estimate of $279.5 million in revenue — nearly an 11 percent quarterly sequential increase — and an EPS of 19 cents.

Why so bullish? Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia attributes some of his positive outlook to new products debuted over the last quarter, citing an increase in overall user engagement.

“We believe new features such as Professional Insights (ability to follow thought leaders) and Linkedin Today (a social news curation product that provides members with news most relevant to them) would have helped increase engagement,” Bhatia wrote in a research note to investors this week.

Coupled with the site’s overall design refresh last fall, LinkedIn is focused on its engagement issue. The company saw a 2 percent sequential decline in page views last quarter (down to 9.4 billion, which is certainly no slouch). Part of the problem is the perception that LinkedIn remains an online resume, something you update with your most recent career information and then don’t return to. (Or “set it and forget it,” as Ron Popeil might say.)

Obviously that’s not what LinkedIn wants, and it has beefed up its efforts to increase engagement over the past year. Now users are prompted to leave feedback on each others’ profiles in the form of “endorsements,” essentially a “Like” for someone’s ability to do something (I, for example, get endorsed for journalism by my connections). Or take the little profile completeness progress bar on the right-hand side; LinkedIn wants you to keep coming back, to add content to your page, and to stay up to date on what others are doing.

That’s not an easy feat. Perhaps, as every other Web company seems to believe these days, the answer lies in mobile. LinkedIn’s unique mobile-only visitors jumped to 25 percent in Q3, nearly double that from a year-ago quarter. If the company can continue to bolster its mobile apps on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, we could see that mobile growth sustained. I’d keep an eye out for mobile numbers in today’s earnings release.

We’ll have coverage of LinkedIn’s numbers this afternoon.

Confirmed: BlackBerry to Stop Selling Smartphones in Japan

Looks like the global rollout of BlackBerry’s new flagship smartphones will not extend to the entire globe. Certainly it won’t include Japan.

Confirming news first reported by the Nikkei, a BlackBerry spokeswoman told AllThingsD Thursday that the company is indeed pulling out of the Japanese market — at least for the time being.

“We are in the process of launching BlackBerry 10 globally in key markets, and we are seeing positive demand for the BlackBerry Z10 in countries where it has already launched. Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry, and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 devices there at this time,” spokeswoman Amy McDowell said. “However, we will continue to support BlackBerry customers in Japan.”

The company declined to comment on its plans for other non-critical markets.

A surprising move for BlackBerry, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. Over the past few years, BlackBerry’s market share in Japan has suffered a decline so precipitous that it no longer even ranks by name on comScore’s survey of the top smartphone platforms in country. As of June 2012, BlackBerry was lumped into the research firm’s “Other” category which itself claims only a 0.4 percent share. At the time the survey was conducted, 24 million people in Japan owned smartphones. So, while the country may not be a major market for BlackBerry, it is very much a major smartphone market.

Developing …

Google Shares Hit Another All-Time High

Shares of Google are on an upswing Friday, hitting a new high for the company of $775.32.

That’s up 2.26 percent from the day’s opening price of $758.20. The company’s previous high was $774.38 in October.

Google seems to be benefitting from broader bullishness as the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 14,000 for the first time since 2007 based on the latest U.S. jobs report.

Google beat expectations (well, mostly — Motorola complicated things) with its fourth-quarter earnings report on Jan. 22. And the tech sector overall is having a good earnings season, with strong reports from Qualcomm, Facebook, Yahoo and Apple, among others.

The company also submitted a proposal to the European Commission about antitrust concerns yesterday. As we reported, a source familiar with the content of the submission said it was only marginally stronger than the deal Google and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced to a month ago.

Put together, that could mean Google is likely to scoot away from the threat of major regulatory battles on multiple fronts.

Google also said today that it had created a 60 million fund to support digital publishing innovation in France as part of the resolution of its disputes with French news sites.

Google's revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012 was $11.34 billion, up from $8.13 billion in 2011. Google reported a non-GAAP profit of $3.57 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $3.13 billion a year before.

BlackBerry Bounceback Beat Back

Research In Motion has a new name, a new operating system and a pair of new handsets, but it’s still got the same old sinking stock price.

On Thursday, shares of the smartphone pioneer continued the downward slide they began the day before, during the unveiling of its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 OS and handsets. BlackBerry shares opened down 10 percent and, at $13.21, they’re down nearly 4 percent as I write this.

Why the pessimism after what seemed to be a fairly successful launch event? The estimated arrival dates of the first of BlackBerry’s BB10 phones. Though the touchscreen Z10 debuted in the U.K. and will ship in Canada and the United Arab Emirates next week, it won’t hit the U.S. market until March. And the Q10, a BB10 handset with a physical keyboard, won’t be available anywhere until April. Later-than-expected ship dates imply smaller-than-hoped-for unit shipments, and the Street clearly finds that disappointing.

Beyond that, there are concerns about the BlackBerry ecosystem and addressable market that I mentioned earlier this morning. That said, BB10 is a vast improvement over its predecessor, and has certainly closed the gap with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. It’s not hard to imagine it appealing to BlackBerry diehards looking for a next-generation device. But the legacy user base is an easy mark. Those BlackBerry users who have defected to iOS and Android over the last few years will be a far harder sell.

Temple Run 2 Sets New Mobile Game Download Record

Imangi is giving Rovio a (temple) run for its money. According to a press release, Imangi Studios’ newest game, Temple Run 2, was downloaded 50 million times in 13 days, besting the previous record held by Rovio Entertainment’s Angry Birds Space, which crossed the 50 million threshold after 35 days last year. It’s worth pointing out, however, that the main version of Angry Birds Space costs 99 cents, while the Temple Run games are free. Rovio’s game has been downloaded more than 100 million times, and was the most popular paid app on both iPhone and iPad in 2012.

Salesforce to Seek Four-for-One Stock Split

Salesforce.com just filed a preliminary proxy statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that includes a proposal to seek shareholder approval for an increase in the number of authorized shares of the company. If approved, the measure would have the effect of splitting Salesforce shares on a four-for-one basis.

Salesforce shares have been on a tear of late and touched a 52-week high of $175.74 today, closing at $173.86, up more than 47 percent from where they were trading a year ago. The proposal would boost the number of shares from 405 million now to 1.6 billion. It would also push the number of shares owned by CEO Marc Benioff, the company’s largest non-institutional shareholder, to north of 40 million shares from about 10.2 million shares now.

The thinking about the split, Salesforce says in the filing, is to keep the shares affordable for mainstream investors. At $43 and change, a share of Salesforce would be easier to justify buying than it is at $173 and change. It also makes stock options given to new hires a little more attractive, because there’s a perception that there’s a lot more room to grow. Salesforce puts it like so in the filing:

“The trading price of our common stock has risen significantly over the past several years. The Board regularly evaluates the effect of the trading price of our common stock on the liquidity and marketability of our common stock and believes the considerable price appreciation has made our common stock less affordable and, therefore, attractive to fewer investors. The Board believes that this considerable price appreciation, and the associated reduction in number of shares of stock covered by equity awards we issue to newly hired and existing employees, has reduced the perceived attractiveness of our employee equity awards.”

Twitter Now Reportedly Valued at $9 Billion

Twitter now holds a $9 billion valuation after investment firm BlackRock made an $80 million offer to purchase stock from early Twitter employees, the Financial Times reported on Friday. The new $9 billion number is a 10 percent valuation increase since the company last raised money in 2011, yet lower than the $10 billion and $11 billion valuations made last year after two secondary stock transactions. Twitter declined to comment on the report.

Turkey Shoot on Instagram (In Related "News," People Still Love Pie!)

People love posting pictures of their food … blah, blah, blah. So, no surprise, the photo-sharing service Instagram rushed out the “news” that it had its busiest day so far, when users posted more than 10 million Thanksgiving-related photos. The Facebook-owned company said in a blog post that during peak hours on Thursday, people were posting more than 200 photos every second, double the amount from the day before. By comparison, Instagram users uploaded around 800,000 photos during Hurricane Sandy, and more than 100,000 images on Election Day. (And, yes, this is what a slow news day looks like here at AllThingsD.)

How IBM Is Watching How You Shop Online

Starting yesterday and continuing into today, computing giant IBM has been putting out quick reports on the state of online shopping.

Apparently this is now a officially a thing, so here are some stats taken from the latest snapshot as of 3 pm ET, because we just know you’re not shopping on a tablet, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to hear about how many others are:

• Online sales are up 20 percent for this same time period over Black Friday 2011.
  
  
• The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site is at 28 percent, up from 18.1 percent in 2011.
  
• The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase is 14.3 percent, up from 10.3 percent in 2011.
  
• Shoppers using the iPad led to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices, with conversion rates reaching 4.2 percent, higher than all other mobile devices.
  
• Shoppers referred from social networks like Facebook and Twitter generated 0.18 percent of all online sales on Black Friday.

So you might be wondering how IBM gets all this info. It’s all part of its strategic play in the world of big data, essentially helping companies make more sense of the huge troves of data they’ve gathered that were previously being ignored. Smarter Commerce is the area of IBM devoted to helping retailers better understand that data so they can come up with improved ideas concerning how to sell more stuff.

Where they gather that data is the IBM Benchmark. It’s a cloud-based digital analytics platform that soaks up digital information about how consumers respond to different ways of selling things online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, from 500 different online retailers. IBM won’t name them — they joined the network under condition of anonymity — but Big Blue says the companies that participate include about half of the companies named on the Internet Retailer Top 100 list. A lot of the technology comes from Coremetrics and Unica, acquisitions IBM made in 2010.

Last year, I talked about all this with Craig Hayman, IBM’s VP of the WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group. One quote from that conversation sticks out in my memory; it bears repeating here:

“If you think about consumers, and you think about the amount of technology that they have at their hands, to reach out to read reviews and talk to friends and families, they're incredibly empowered. There's not one purchase decision that they make that is not impacted by some element of social networks. What does that do to the companies that have to deal with that by offering the best products and services, and you see companies are struggling to do that: To make the right offer at the right time with the right price. When they do it well, we all talk about how it went well; and when they do it badly, we talk about how annoying it was.”

So now you know. Not only are retailers and your credit card companies watching you shop, so is IBM.