Samsung is investing in hardware after the company agreed to spend 53 billion won ($48 million) to acquire a 10 percent stake in fellow South Korean firm Pantech, the country’s third-largest maker of mobile devices.

The company announced — via Yonhap News Agency – that the deal will “help further solidify” its relationship with Pantech, and in particular their joint work around smartphones, tablets and other areas of hardware.

The duo already work together on semiconductor and display businesses, and, last year alone, Pantech is reported to have spent 235 billion won (around $211 million) buying electronics and components from Samsung affiliated businesses to order to build its devices.

The deal is quite unique in a sense, because devices from Pantech compete with Samsung’s range of smartphones and tablets, and it isn’t often that rival companies would collaborate in an investment deal such as this.

While the Pantech name is strong in Korea, where its sales trail only local rivals Samsung and LG, the firm has not tasted similar success overseas. At this year’s Mobile World Congress event, however, it caught the attention of media with the Android-based Vega No 6, the world’s largest full-HD smartphone, while its budget range — including the Discover, available for $50 on contract in the US — has garnered positive reviews.

Like other once strong electronics firms in East Asia, including most notably Sharp — in which Samsung is also an investor — Pantech has suffered financial issues of late. Last year, a five-year refinancing program was set up to managing its fiscal development, and Samsung’s investment will aid that.

With the deal, the world’s largest becomes Pantech’s third-largest shareholder, behind only chip-maker Qualcomm (11.96 percent) and the Korea Development Bank, which owns 11.81 percent.

The Pantech agreement follows Samsung’s decision to invest in Sharp in March. The firm agreed to spend 10.4 billion yen (around $112 million) for a 3.08 percent stake in Sharp, which will also grant it greater access to its technology.

Headline image via Jung Yeon Je / Getty Images

More to follow

Tempo, a smart calendar mobile app, has released an update bringing improved controls around event scheduling and communication to its users. With this release, people can now invite attendees to meetings, share events with their contacts, and communicate using the Gmail app for iOS instead of the native Mail client app on the device.

A useful tool to help people prepare for their next meeting, Tempo was created at SRI International, the non-profit research institute in Silicon Valley — the same one that introduced the world to Siri and her travel-related sibling Desti. The concept behind the app is that it’s a calendar. It takes all your meetings and events and provides you with the necessary information to help you be more productive with your time.

Tempo takes details inputted by users and enhances it by curating data through services connected to it, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. The app will dig through emails, look at the location to pinpoint driving directions, and more.

With today’s release, users can now invite attendees to their events. Tempo will access your phone’s contact list and emails to find people that it thinks should be included. Anyone can be added to the event — similar to what is possible with both Google and Outlook’s calendar.

Additionally, users can now share events with people. This is different than the above new feature because when an event is shared, the recipient is not added as an attendee.

How this could come in handy is if you meet a friend and want to invite them to an event, say The Next Web Conference, they don’t need to scrounge online to find the details — through Tempo, you can forward the event details to them.

Finding the share option is a bit tricky.  It’s actually under the “Message” option when viewing the details of a specific event. And it’s not a polished execution as you might expect. When sharing, the details will be embedded into the body of an email and be delivered to the recipient through the use of the iOS’s default Mail app.

But while sending emails through the Mail app might be normal for some, there are those who would rather it be sent through a cloud-based service like Gmail. Today, Tempo is giving users an option to send communications right from the Gmail for iOS app.

Tempo is available for free, and competes with Fantastical, Sunrise, and other smart calendar apps. It recently became available in its first international country: Canada.

➤ Tempo for iOS

Photo credit: Thinkstock

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Qihoo 360 has quietly launched an online shopping search engine in collaboration with Alibaba’s Etao, as the two firms partner up to step up efforts against rivals Tencent and Baidu.

The site, 360.etao.com, directs the domain to Etao, which will likely drive more traffic to Alibaba but, most importantly, it could develop into a high-profile service to rival Baidu’s dominance in China’s search market.

According to a report on Sina Tech, sources say that collaboration with Alibaba is a key strategy of Qihoo 360 going forward. “As a late entrant into the search engine scene, in order to get a greater market share Qihoo 360 has to spread out traffic and not accumulate everything in its own hands. This is why it has chosen to cooperate with a number of sites for vertical search engines, and Alibaba is one of them,” the report cited the sources as saying.

As of now, Qihoo 360 has already launched music, maps, software and medical search engines as it looks to close the gap on Baidu, which accounts for more than 80 percent of China’s search traffic.

Qihoo started off with security software before branching out into operating a browser and just last summer, launching a search engine. It has been very aggressive in taking on Chinese search stalwart Baidu — which has resulted in warnings of unfair play from regulars — and its roster of existing partners includes Sina, the firm behind China’s popular Weibo microblogging service. Now, this partnership with Alibaba will take the competition up a notch.

Earlier this year Qihoo 360 stated its aim of achieving 20 percent market share in the Chinese search industry by the end of this year and 40 percent by 2015.

Etao was launched in 2010 by Alibaba’s e-commerce site Taobao, as it sought to compete against Baidu in terms of online shopping searches. Alibaba is also striving to tap into the social market. It recently took an 18 percent stake in Sina’s Weibo in a bid to slow down Tencent’s WeChat success and also bought 28 percent of AutoNavi, China’s top mapping system, suggesting that it is focusing on maps as another prong of its social strategy.

Alibaba’s mobile business, Aliyun, launched a search service that will rival Baidu, and of course Google, on mobile.

Update: We contacted Qihoo 360 and were given confirmation of the partnership with Alibaba, but the company declined to provide further details at this point.

Related: China’s Qihoo sees profit fall to $5.6 million in Q1 2013, even as revenue climbs 58.6%

Image Credit: Peter Parks via AFP/Getty Images

In my aim to simplify and aggregate my life, one gadget has had an enormous impact, meet CardNinja.

Card Ninja is effectively a wallet replacement that attaches to the back of your phone. I use it on the back of my iPhone but it works on virtually any smartphone.

It’s a pretty magical little gizmo. Irrespective of the number of items you include in it, it manages to hold your cash and cards in there no problem. I’ve had as many as ten cards, and a stack of cash (naturally) and it’s held it in there without issue. Conversely, I’ve had just two cards in there and no cash and it still manages to hold everything in there, even with a solid shake of the phone upside down. It really is very impressive.

To attach Card Ninja, you simple glue it to the back of your phone. It comes off fairly easily if you ever want to remove it, but you will need to hand pick bits of glue off the back of your phone — nothing too tiresome though, just a little time consuming — it does no damage to your phone.

CardNinja is also ideally sized so you don’t cover your phone’s camera, just make sure you attach it as far down your phone as possible.

The people I’ve shown it off to have some immediate concerns I’ll address here.

Cards falling out? Not a problem for me (or others), as mentioned above.

Losing both your phone, cash and money at the same time? Valid, but at least with Find My iPhone, Where’s my Droid and others, you stand a better chance of getting them all back than if you just lost your wallet somewhere.

Will it ruin my credit cards at all? I can say from almost a year of first hand experience that no damage has been done to any of my cards.

This might appear to be a near flawless ad-like mention of a product but the truth is I rarely get the time to write any more and when I do, it’s only for products that I’m in love with. This is one of them.

On face value, it might not appear to be the most glamorous, cool or cutting edge, but it is, however, incredibly useful and has proven to be the most used phone accessory I’ve ever owned.

Get yourself one here, $19.95 and comes in three colors: black, purple and eggplant.

Headline image via CardNinja

Today at an event in Redmond, Microsoft revealed the new Xbox One console. In addition, it provided backstage tours with looks at new components like the freshly updated Kinect sensor.

This new Kinect is superior to the old one on just about every metric. Not only is it more compact, it’s also far more sensitive, with a 1080p RGB camera and an active infrared system that allows for precise tracking even in low-to-no light situations.

I was able to test the device out in a room with a bunch of other press types and the demonstrations were suitably impressive. First, we were shown how improved the depth graph of the Kinect is. This allows for precise placement of people in a room, as well as much better tracking of extremities, like fingers. The demo, which displayed our figures on the screen looking like cast pewter puppets, clearly showed fingers waving and had no trouble defining detailed objects like my badge.

The field of view is 60% better than the last generation, and allows for six ‘skeletons’ to fit in the frame at once. it allows for the sensor to be used in smaller rooms as well, because people can get closer. The minimum object threshold is 2.5x better, allowing the use of fingers and hands more accurately.

The new Kinect has an active IR system for the first time, allowing the Xbox to identify you using the new ‘time of flight’ sensor. The new sensor captures more data, more accurate data across a larger field of view than the older version. The ‘time of flight’ measurement is the time it takes light to get to an object and back. This helps the Kinect correct for latency and produce more accurate results.

The new Kinect is also so accurate that it can pinpoint not just joints but also joint rotations. This allows it to see which direction you’re bending an arm, for instance. Going a step further, it can now track muscle tension based on body models. This means that it can interpret the amount of force being applied to both your body and say, a surface like the floor.

This also allows Kinect to track the speed and violence of movements like punches and kicks. The audio capabilities of the new Kinect were also demonstrated, showing how it could filter out a crush of game and room noise to pick out voice commands.

In a mind blowing demo, the Kinect then switched to a mode in which it monitored the heart rate of a person standing in front of it using the color cameras to measure how flush the skin was and the infrared cameras to track blood flow underneath the skin. This could ostensibly allow a developer to determine whether a user was scared, or even lying, and could also have health monitoring implications.

Then things started to get super freaky. A demo was run that showed the faces of people standing in front of the sensor. The Kinect was able to not only detect which controllers they were holding (player 1, player 2 etc), but also exactly who they were and whether they were happy, sad or neutral. This was done using imagery of the face to see whether they were smiling or frowning. It was pretty wild.

Though the demo was short, it was undoubtedly impressive. This new Kinect is vastly more sensitive than the previous model, which sometimes took a lot of arm flailing to boost into gear. We’ll have to see how it actually works with games once Microsoft gets around to demonstrating them.

In a interview with Bloomberg television, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey admits that he never wanted to start a company or be an engineer or a programmer. Rather, he had “an idea and decided to pursue it.” The result is, as we all know, the development of two popular services that have certainly impacted on the way we communicate today.

Speaking with journalist Emily Chang today, Dorsey talked about his unconventional path to becoming an entrepreneur. In many ways, we could respect that journey — after all, do people become entrepreneurs to start companies or to help solve problems in the world? Dorsey’s statement indicates the latter.

But sometimes, Dorsey probably didn’t see the potential impact of his creations. A couple of weeks ago, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at the commencement ceremony for the University of Michigan where he said that none of the co-founders, including Dorsey, had “any expectation or understanding of what could result from millions of people using [Twitter] to communicate.”

The idea that Dorsey pursued, alongside Ev Williams and Biz Stone, has resulted in affecting the Arab Spring protests, the US Presidential election, and the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, among others major events.

In talking about his entrepreneurial career, Chang spoke with Dorsey about his work with the Build organization and helping mentor students in the craft. He first got started with the group after it was mentioned to Dorsey by one of Twitter’s first board members, San Francisco 49er’s team president and co-owner Gideon Yu. It was there that Dorsey learned Build would help students become entrepreneurs.

Dorsey has been an active supporter of the group, including helping raise funds. Last week, he raised more than $70,000 through two auctions where he gave away an opportunity to have lunch with him.

When asked about what advice he would give young founders today, Dorsey replied that if you have an idea, get it out of your head and start working on it.

As someone who didn’t complete college, Dorsey appears to have done very well in his career. But would he do anything differently? In retrospect, probably not. He says that he did a lot of things wrong, but he “learned from those mistakes” and that he learned at the pace that he needed to learn.

Running two rather popular and successful companies can’t be easy and there’s tales of how Dorsey has an aggressive work schedule, so how does he find time to do things that are meaningful like mentoring young entrepreneurs? He says he makes time — “if it’s important, I’ll make time.”

Photo credit: Max Morse/Getty Images

Today Politico reported that Senators Hatch and Schumer have reached a key point of compromise regarding high-skill, and thus high-technology related immigration reform. Details are somewhat sparse, but information has been released in a controlled fashion that indicates the deal is sewn.

According to Politico’s post, the agreement includes raising the number of H-1B visas based on market factors. A part of the original bill that forced companies to state that they were not removing domestic workers has been stripped.

For a look at the bill’s original text and policies regarding high-skill immigration reform, TNW has you covered; note, however, that certain provisions have changed, and thus that post is out of date. TNW will dig into the bill’s final format once it is written, and released. Unions are opposed to the bill’s tenets in this area. It appears that that’s just too bad.

The bill, in the view of TNW, does too little, too slowly regarding solving the H-1B visa system. For context, here a segment from TNW’s coverage of this year’s high-skill shortage:

Get ready to grimace: It wasn’t too surprising news that the H-1B visa cap was met in the first five days of open applications; interesting however was how far over the 85,000 ceiling applications managed to streak: all the way to 124,000, or 39,000 over the limit.

A lottery was held.

Given that fact, that the number of H-1B visas made available will rise is a good; but it is a lesser good than what could be accomplished with more slots. A short meditation: There is a common fear that allowing more foreign and high-skill workers will lead to a decline in hiring of citizens that would protract current high levels of unemployment. It’s an understandable concern.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that companies looking to hire workers that are highly skilled, and are willing to jump through the H-1B hoops cannot find that particular skill in the United States; thus, the choice isn’t between hiring a US citizen for the gig, or someone from abroad, but instead between companies investing money at home or away.

Helping companies based in the United States hire the workers they need is a way of reducing external friction on their operations; healthier companies at home are just what the doctor, and the unemployment rolls call for.

Steve Case, former CEO of AOL and now activist in the immigration debate released a statement on the news of compromise that manages to say exceptionally little despite being winded and slightly breathless:

I applaud Senators Hatch and Schumer for reaching a bipartisan agreement that moves us closer to passing comprehensive immigration reform.  The Hatch-Schumer compromise is a major breakthrough in the Judiciary Committee’s markup, as it will help our country recruit and retain talented entrepreneurs and innovators, thus enabling us to win the global battle for talent.  This legislation will help us create jobs, grow our economy, and remain the world’s most entrepreneurial nation.

I look forward to participating in tomorrow’s March For  Innovation to be sure the voices of innovators from all over the country are heard as the Congress votes on immigration reform.   Now’s the time for Republicans and Democrats to come together and pass this legislation with broad bipartisan support.

As more details become known, we’ll bring them to you.

Top Image Credit: guygzohar

Hours following the reveal of Microsoft’s latest Xbox game console, the company has set up a notification system on the Xbox One website to alert people when it’s time to place your pre-order.

Now before you get too excited, it’s important to note that while the specifications of the Xbox One are known, two important items remain shrouded in mystery: its cost and when exactly the console will be available.

If you’re interested in purchasing the Xbox One, you can go to the Microsoft store and enter in your email address to be notified when the company will begin accepting pre-orders.

To encourage people to sign-up, it is offering $10 online store credit, although it’s only valid through June 9, 2013 — which doesn’t really help in the purchase of the new game console, just for games and accessories for older hardware. This is actually a rather useless offer since Microsoft says that the Xbox One will not be backwards compatible with Xbox 360 games.

For more from the Xbox One unveiling, head over here to read TNW’s coverage.

➤ Microsoft Store

The controller of the Xbox One is a refinement of the 360′s controller on pretty much every cosmetic vector. But there are also a few changes that go more than skin deep and we got a chance to chat with some of the Microsoft folks about the update.

The new controller has been slimmed along all axes, and the battery has been trimmed down to fit inside the casing. Microsoft told us that no formal specifications were currently available (or they weren’t releasing them to us at any rate), so we don’t know how that change has affected battery life.

But I can tell you that the new design has improved the grip significantly. There is more room in the center of the controller for your hands when holding it in the natural grip, and the tips of my fingers are no longer mashed up against the battery casing.

The new d-pad features the wholly discreet plus sign design we’ve come to expect from great pads like Nintendo’s. I know that Nintendo has this design pretty well nailed down when it comes to patents, so I’m sure Microsoft is either licensing or has danced around it a bit. Either way, the directions feel more discreet and the action is crisper than the current mushy stock controller.

The new controller also contains four discreet vibration motors, rather than just two in the grips, as before. The grip motors are still there, but two have been added in the triggers and they’re designed to be more precise, allowing for pressure sensitive actions and feedback that could simulate resistance.

Unfortunately, we were not able to test any games with the controller, so I can tell you nothing about the way that the d-pad actually plays or how the vibrators work in a gameplay context.

What we were able to do is play a demo which had us don headphones and handle the triggers a bit in various scenarios that demonstrated the precision and power of the new motor setup. A helicopter takes off and the blades whup in time with the pulsing of the triggers, a car stops and the ABS brakes tock the triggers in time. A fireball grows in a hand, building your controller’s vibration to a roar and releasing it in a fading blast of shudders.

Overall, the demo felt fairly impressive (if a bit sloppy still, but perhaps that refinement is still up to developers) but didn’t tell us a whole lot about how they’d perform in real life. Developers will have access to those triggers and their motors for tuning, we’ve been told.

So far, the controller looks pretty nice and feels good when you hold it, but play tests will have to come.

Sony Corporation is reportedly mulling over a proposal from a major shareholder Third Point LLC to spin-off its movie and music businesses. Reported by the Japanese daily newspaper Nikkei (via Reuters), the hope is to separate two of successful business units and use the funds to aid Sony’s struggling electronics division.

Third Point LLC investor Daniel Loeb last week stated last week that he hoped the money from the spin-off could be used to bolster Sony’s device-manufacturing unit. Loeb said that by allowing the company to fund improvements in its electronics operations, it would also provide its shareholders with an opportunity to be better connected with the profitable units by owning a piece of them directly.

When presented with the idea, Sony initially rebuffed it, releasing a statement indicating that the entertainment business is not for sale and that it is “trying to strengthen both that division and its electronics operations.”

The New York Times notes that shares in Sony have dropped nearly 85 percent over the last 13 years, leading many to believe that some form of a turnaround must happen if the company will remain competitive. It no longer is considered a company that produces “cool electronics”, having given that title to the likes of Apple and is suffering in other areas including televisions and phones.

Sony is a struggling company and needs to make some changes for it to improve its standing in the eyes of investors. Surely, people will be watching to see how the upcoming Playstation 4 will perform, given that it hasn’t even revealed what it looks like or what it will cost, just that it’s coming. However, as Microsoft revealed earlier today its next-generation Xbox game console, Sony surely needs this newest Playstation to work.

In its 2012 annual report, Sony said that it’s working to reinvent itself. Company President and CEO Kazuo Hirai said that “Sony will change.” He also revealed that only two of its three main business units, entertainment and financial services, are the most stable and “poised for future growth.” Its third area, electronics, isn’t as fortunate: “the operating environment remains harsh, with profits suffering from price competition resulting from product commoditization and the impact of persistently worsening foreign exchange rates.”

Sony has made it a priority in the next year to rebuild its electronics business. To achieve this, Hirai says it will focus on five initiatives: strengthening its core businesses in digital imaging, games, and mobile, turning around its television operations, expanding to more emerging markets, create new business, and realigning its business portfolio and optimize the use of its resources.

Whether Loeb’s proposal works remains to be seen, but it could also be a way for Sony to prevent the lackluster performance its electronics unit has from spreading to other divisions. In the end, money isn’t going to necessarily solve all of Sony’s problems — it needs to focus on innovating and producing products that its customers want to use. Anything short of that will just be Sony putting itself on life-support.

Investors certainly think that Loeb’s proposal is a good one. After news leaked about his idea, shares in the company rose more than 9 percent on the New York Stock Exchange.

Photo credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images