Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram, a fun, popular photo-sharing app for mobile devices.

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted about the transaction on his Timeline:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Nowhere is that more true than in the mobile phone handset and operating system marketplace, which has undergone continuous change over the past 15 years and is still evolving rapidly. Like the BlackBerry, Palm smartphones were also wildly popular for a brief time and brought many innovations to the marketplace, but the company underwent many ownership and management changes and rapidly faded from the scene. After buying Palm in 2010, HP announced it would use its webOS platform in a variety of new products. That effort failed, however, and HP instead announced it would transition webOS to an open source software development mode.


Microsoft also had a huge lead in licensing its Windows Mobile OS to high-end smartphone handset makers until Apple and Android disrupted its business. It’s hard to believe now, but just a few years ago the idea of Apple or Google being serious contenders in the smartphone business was greeted with derision, even scorn. Consider some of the pessimistic predictions that preceded Apple’s entry into the smartphone business:

• In December 2006, Palm CEO Ed Colligan summarily dismissed the idea that a traditional personal computing company could compete in the smartphone business. “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

• In January 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed off the prospect of an expensive smartphone without a keyboard having a chance in the marketplace as follows: “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.”

• In March 2007, computing industry pundit John C. Dvorak argued that “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone” since “There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.” Dvorak believed the mobile handset business was already locked up by the era’s major players. “This is not an emerging business. In fact it’s gone so far that it’s in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.”

This serves as a classic example of those with a static snapshot mentality disregarding the potential for new entry and technological disruption. Today, less than five years after these predictions were made, Nokia’s profits and market share have plummeted and a struggling Motorola was purchased by Google last summer. Meanwhile, Palm appears dead and Microsoft is struggling to win back all the market share it has lost to Apple and Google in this arena.

“The violence with which new platforms have displaced incumbent mobile vendor fortunes continues to surprise,” says wireless industry analyst Horace Dediu. He notes that Nokia’s Symbian platform went from 47% share to 16% in three years, Microsoft’s phone platforms went from 12% to 1%, RIM’s went from 17% to 12%, and other platforms went from 21% to zero. Meanwhile, over a two year period, Google’s Android OS went from zero to 48% and Apple’s iOS went from 2% to 19%.

In a marketplace this dynamic it’s worth asking: How long will it be before Apple and Google’s Android meet a similar fate? That question sounds ludicrous now considering their respective fortunes and current co-Kings of the Hill status. But posing the same question about BlackBerry just a few years ago would have also evoked howls of laughter.
No one is laughing now, however, especially not RIM execs or their shareholders.

"She wanted to put me on medicine," Nagel said. But he worried about the possible side effects and chose instead to exercise more and improve his diet.
"It's been a very positive thing for me," he said. "I've been able to get my blood pressure down. The device was able to show me what changes I was making that were positive and which ones weren't."

Lots of patients could benefit by sharing their medical data more regularly with a physician, said Dr. Joseph Smith of the West Wireless Health Institute in La Jolla, which seeks to lower health care costs in part through new innovations.
"The notion that your needs for health care are best met by seeing a doctor a couple times a year is probably wrong," he said. "There is obvious value in knowing more."
Many people are reaching the same conclusion.

Of 2,000 consumers surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2010, 40 percent said they would willingly buy a device and pay a monthly fee to automatically send their heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar and weight data to their doctors. And Connecticut research firm Nerac estimates that by 2020, "at least 160 million Americans will be monitored and treated remotely for at least one chronic condition."

That represents a big business opportunity. Juniper Research has predicted the global market for remote patient-monitoring gadgets will hit nearly $1.9 billion in 2014. Another research firm, Park Associates of Dallas, has put the U.S. market alone this year at $4.4 billion. Either way, several Bay Area companies hope to cash in.
Besides Proteus and iHealth Lab, those include Santa Clara chipmaking giant Intel (INTC). It announced a deal with GE in 2010 to sell Intel's Health Guide, which helps patients collect information about their vital signs and share it with their doctors via the Internet.

Another company is Corventis of San Jose, which two years ago won Food and Drug Administration approval for its Nuvant mobile device for detecting irregular heartbeats. Able to be worn in the shower or while a person is sleeping, the product wirelessly sends data to the company, which reviews the information and notifies doctors of troublesome signs.

The technology also has aroused some concerns.

Some experts worry that medical monitoring devices could produce an information tsunami. Hospitals, clinics and doctors offices already are flooded with enough electronically generated material to fill nearly 2 trillion file cabinets, according to a report in November by market researcher Frost & Sullivan. And it added that wireless monitors "have the potential to dramatically increase the amount of health care data."

Others fear hackers compromising the equipment could use the information to steal patient identities, post their vital signs on social network sites and alter their data to hide its seriousness or to issue false alarms.

Just a few months ago, a hospital employee admitted having hacked into a wireless medical monitor, according to Larry Ponemon, who runs a data-protection research institute in Michigan and was told of the incident. Similarly, a security researcher in August revealed at an industry conference that he had discovered flaws in wireless insulin monitors that could allow someone to remotely alter their blood-sugar readouts.

That last incident prompted U.S. Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, and Edward Markey, D-Mass., to ask the Government Accountability Office to look into the potential for hacking. While few such breaches have been reported so far, the FDA is concerned because "any system with wireless communication can be subject to interception of data," said Bakul Patel, a policy adviser with the agency.

But others view the trend as inevitable and, ultimately, beneficial.

Preventive care is really the buzzword now," said Adam Lin, an iHealth senior vice president. "The way you do that is by allowing patients to take control of their own health." Because of that, he added, "remote monitoring is going to be big."

What is Vudu, UltraViolet and Digital Movie Streaming?

Digital Movie Streaming  ?

Online services have made it possible to watch movies and TV shows without downloading them to your computer. Services that rent movies- iTunes, Amazon, and Vudu- charge about $3.99 or more for access to stream the movie for a 24-hour period.

Vudu is a movie streaming service from which you can rent or buy new and popular movie titles and store them in an online cloud account. Rented movies are available for streaming within 30 days of when you click on "rent." Purchased movies are available anytime in your online Vudu library. You can stream from your Vudu library to watch movies on any of over 300 connected TVs, media players, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, smart phones and tablets that have the Vudu app. The Vudu service has been popular for many years and was purchased by Walmart in 2010.

UltraViolet is a cloud service where you can stream your DVD or Blu-ray Disc movie titles online. So far, Ultraviolet has been a feature included on a few Blu-ray Disc titles. When you buy a disc with the Ultraviolet feature, you can register the disc with an included code, and be able to stream it from online to any device. Launched in October 2011, the experience has been cumbersome and confusing. It will be helpful to have a Walmart employee do the work of setting up your movies to watch from your Ultraviolet account.

How will the Walmart Disc-to-Digital service will work?


1.Before going into the store, create a Vudu Account (if you don't already have one).

2.Bring your DVDs and Blu-ray discs into one of 3500 participating Walmart Stores. The movies must be from Paramount Home Media Distribution, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment or Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. So far, Disney movies and other independent films may not be available.

3.Pay $2 for the digital version. DVDs will give you access to standard definition version, Blu-ray Discs will give you access to high-definition version. For $5 you can upgrade and get access to a high-definition digital version of a DVD.

4.A Walmart employee will add those titles to your Vudu library.
5.When you want to watch the movie, open the Vudu app and sign into your account on a TV, media player, smart phone or tablet and play the movie on the device wherever and whenever you like.


The Walmart Disc-to-Digital service does not give you a digital movie file.

The Walmart service is different from actually getting a digital copy of the movie that is saved to your computer. The "Disc-to-Digital" name may be confusion as it infers that you will actually receive the digital copy. Instead, the movies will be available to stream using the Vudu service wherever you have internet access.

The Walmart Disc-to-Digital service is easy for everyone to use.

The Hollywood studio executives expressed that Walmart's new program will make it easy for consumers to stream digital movies even if they had never tried it before. They stated repeatedly that this will boost consumer confidence in buying DVDs and Blu-ray Discs even as the trend moves more to digital movie streaming. Owning a physical disc will no longer restrict your access to watching movies at home on your TV.

Ten billion DVDs and Blu-ray Discs have been sold in North America. They are calling the "Disc-to-Digital" Vudu service the "largest movie cloud" that will be created overnight as all movie titles released on DVD or Blu-ray from these five major studios will be available.