>>> UK trade deficit widens to 8-year high

The UK’s trade deficit widened to £13.3bn in the first quarter, the worst result since the financial crisis in 2008, despite a narrowing in the gap between Britain’s imports and exports during March.
In the latest sign of weakness in the UK economy, the total trade deficit for goods and services widened by £1.1bn between January and March compared to the fourth quarter of 2015.
Britain’s goods deficit with the European Union rose to the widest on record. It widened by £0.7bn to £23.9bn during the first quarter as exports rose 1.6 per cent but this was outpaced by a bigger 2.3 per cent increase in imports.
The poor first quarter numbers come despite a decent month in March, when the total trade deficit for goods and services narrowed by £500m to £3.8bn. Economists had expected a reduction between February and March but had forecast a higher deficit of £4.2bn.
Howard Archer, chief European & UK economist at IHS Economics, called the first quarter numbers “truly horrible”, adding:
It is evident that negative net trade was a factor limiting UK GDP growth to 0.4% quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter – furthermore, this will have been a third successive quarter that negative net trade held back GDP growth.
The increased first quarter total trade deficit does not bode well for the first quarter current account deficit. This reached an eye wateringly large £32.7 billion (7.1% of GDP) in the fourth quarter of 2015 as it was lifted by a sharp jump in the shortfall in the UK’s net primary income account as well as in increased total trade deficit.

(Makor) Tech View: The bullish case for Europe and a very interesting long/

Tech View: The bullish case for Europe and a very interesting long/short trade idea



Euro Stoxx 50 Index (2,985 last) – while above 2860 favor a move higher towards the 200dma at 3173 and then 3316

 

·         Through November 2015 to February 2016 the Index traded in a declining channel. After completing a 5 wave move lower the Index broke out to the upside from its declining channel, the breakout level is 2,860 and while above it the Index should continue higher.

·         We continue to view the current move as a correction and therefore treat it as an A,B,C pattern. We believe that 2860 represents the bottom of wave B and therefore expect one more leg higher (wave C). If wave C will equal wave A in its length one should expect a move higher towards 3,316.00. The fact that the wave C target of 3316 is also very near the declining trend line connecting all the highs since April 2015 makes me believe this target could be reached.  

 

Daily chart

 

 

Dax30 Index (10,043 last) – while above 9,484 a move higher towards 10,700 should be on the cards

 

·         Similar to the Euro Stoxx index the structure here remains bullish as long as 9,484 caps the downside. 9,484 is the recent higher low and therefore while above it the short term trend remains to the upside.

·         The nearest resistance level is the 200dma at 10,194 and then April high at 10,474. A move above 10,474 would make the 9,737 the new important low.

·         Similar to the Euro Stoxx, the trend line connecting the highs since April 2015 comes at 10,700 which seems to be the ideal target for this move higher.

 

Daily chart

 

Euro Stoxx Banking Index SX7E (100.54 last) – above 97.63 a significant move higher could occur, risk/reward very attractive

 

·         If one believes in the bullish scenario the euro stoxx bank index offers a very attractive risk/reward.

·         The entire move from the July 2015 high to the February 2016 low looks constructive (A,B,C move). If this was the case a significant up move could develop.

·         For the bullish case to remain valid the Index should not take out the bottom of the suggested wave 2 which is 93.12. since this level is pretty far from current levels one could use 97.63 which is the  May 6th low.

 

 

 

Short S&P 500 Vs Long Euro Stoxx 50 Index

 

·         From an Elliot wave perspective the spread has a 5 wave move higher were wave 1 equals the length of wave 5.

·         Bearish divergence on the chart is another sign that a top might be in sight

·         This trade might be a very good way to be involved in the market with a hedge –

·         The setup is interesting and the so is the risk/reward, a move back to the bottom of wave 4 would argue for a 20% move!

 

Weekly chart

 

 

(TheDailyBeast) Stealth Drones Could Be U.S. Pilots’ New Wingmen

Stealth Drones Could Be U.S. Pilots’ New Wingmen

It was supposed to be a cheap target drone, meant to keep fighter jocks busy during shooting practice. But it might become the next, lethal American warplane.

The U.S. military is quietly developing a stealthy “fifth-generation” drone warplane with potentially cutting-edge combat capabilities. But the drone isn’t technically a frontline fighter. It’s a target—in essence, a high-tech clay pigeon that Pentagon war-game organizers would launch into the air for fighter pilots to hunt down and destroy for training purposes.Largely unnnoticed by the mainstream media, the Air Force has been tinkering with new software that, with the flip of a switch, transforms target drones into robotic “wingmen” for manned F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters.
Combine the new software with the radar-evading target drone and you’ve got the world’s first armed robotic jet fighter—and a big advancement compared to today’s propeller-driven surveillance drones.
“If we do it right, a custom-built stealthy target aircraft is going to have a performance envelope that’s pretty close to an actual stealth fighter,” Dan Ward, a retired Air Force officer and author of The Simplicity Cycle: A Field Guide to Making Things Better Without Making Them Worse, told The Daily Beast.
“The target drone will lack many of the bells and whistles of a full-up stealth fighter, but that’s more feature than bug,” Ward added. “The drone is designed to only do the core essential functions, and most of the time, that’s what we really need anyway.”
The Air Force began work on the Fifth-Generation Aerial Target, or 5GAT, way back in 2006. At the time, the military mostly used Vietnam War-vintage F-4 fighters as targets, fitting the old F-4s with remote controls, adding a “Q” to their designation to indicate their target status and then sending them zooming over training ranges for the flying branch’s F-15s, F-16s and F-22s to shoot down.
The Air Force ran out of QF-4s in 2015 and began adding the remote controls to decommissioned F-16s, instead. Both the QF-4s and the QF-16s—“third-generation” and “fourth-generation” warplanes, respectively—are supersonic and at least reasonably maneuverable.
But there’s one thing the old drones are not—stealthy. Both jet types lack the carefully-calculated angles that help stealth fighters such as the Air Force’s F-22s and F-35s to scatter electromagnetic energy and keep them off of radar scopes.
With both Russia and China developing radar-evading warplanes of their own, the Air Force decided it needed a new target drone that could help American fighter pilots and missile crews learn how to find and destroy enemy stealth planes.
“The target drone’s intended uses are to test air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, and to ensure that modern tracking systems are capable of identifying and targeting fifth-generation fighters,” Dennis Carter, Patrick Burris, and Steven Brandt—three of the 5GAT’s lead designers—wrote in a 2011 academic paper (PDF).
"5GAT will represent stressing characteristics of fifth-generation threat aircraft that cannot be met by the QF-4 or QF-16,” Maj. Roger Cabiness, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Testing and Evaluation, or DOT&E, which oversees the target-drone project, told The Daily Beast.
Because it’s a mere target at the moment and—by aerospace standards—unglamorous, the 5GAT largely eluded the attentions of the U.S. defense industry.
It’s an industry that, for obvious reasons, has a bad habit of producing the extraordinarily complex and expensive warplanes. After all, complex designs require lengthy and costly research and development that the government—and by extension, the public—underwrites. And expensive designs maximize corporate profits.
Instead of contracting out the 5GAT to industry, the Air Force organized a mostly internal contest between four teams to design the 5GAT. Brandt, a professor at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, led a team composed mostly of Air Force cadets in their early 20s. The whole competitive design effort set the government back just $11 million.
The cadets’ winning design, which is 41 feet long and weighs just three tons minus fuel, emphasizes arguably the most important qualities of a stealth warplane—lightness and the angles of its wings—and strips out other features that might add performance but aren’t necessarily worth the extra cost. “It’s a case of the 80-percent solution outperforming an over-engineered 110-percent solution—and doing so for one 10th of the price,” Ward commented.What’s more, the 5GAT is stealthier than an F-16 is—although exactly how stealthy is classified—and much less expensive than is any fighter the Air Force is currently buying. Modifying an F-16 into a QF-16 costs the government around $1.5 million. Compare that to the price tag on a single Lockheed Martin-made F-35 stealth fighter: more than $100 million.
5GAT blueprints in hand, the Pentagon is now working on an actual flyable prototype. Finishing this prototype will cost $27 million, the Defense Department’s main testing agency reported in January 2016. Cabiness said the prototype should be ready to fly by 2019 or 2020.

“The prototyping effort will provide cost-informed, alternative design and manufacturing approaches for future air vehicle acquisition programs,” DOT&E explained in its most recent annual report. “These data can also be used to assist with future weapon system development decisions.”
That last comment is important. Translated into plain English, it means the 5GAT could, in the future, inspire robotic planes that are more than just target drones. The 5GAT could even itself evolve into a frontline weapon. That’s because, in 2015, the Air Force’s research branch began developing new computer algorithms that could add autonomous combat capability to the military’s target drones.
The so-called “Loyal Wingman” program takes those clay-pigeon QF-16s and swaps out a few black boxes—“line replaceable units,” or LRUs, is their technical designation. Voila, you’ve added all the code the robot plane needs to reverse roles, and evolve from the hunted to the hunter. The first Loyal Wingman drone is scheduled for flight tests in 2018.
“You take an F-16 and make it totally unmanned,” deputy defense secretary Bob Work told an audience in Washington, D.C. in March. “The F-16 is a fourth-generation fighter, and pair it with an F-35, a fifth-generation battle network node, and have those two operating together.”
The armed former-targets could accompany F-35s and other manned fighters into combat, flying ahead to scout for the enemy or carrying extra missiles to blast targets that the stealth-fighter pilots pick out. The one problem with the concept is that an F-35 is stealthy—an F-16 isn’t. An accompanying F-16 (even the armed target drone version) could betray an F-35’s location.
But the robotic F-16 isn’t the only eligible “loyal wingman.” LRUs are, by design, compatible with a wide range of plane models. Install in a 5GAT the same LRUs and you’ve got a drone wingman that’s potentially as stealthy as the F-22 or F-35 it’s flying alongside of.
Asked whether 5GAT could become a frontline combat drone under the Loyal Wingman program, Cabiness was evasive. “Since Loyal Wingman is conceptual at this point in time, it would be premature to state that 5GAT could fit the Loyal Wingman mission,” he told The Daily Beast.
But Peter W. Singer, an analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based New America Foundation and author of the recent technothriller Ghost Fleet—whose plot involves robotic wingmen fighting alongside manned jets—told The Daily Beast that a war-ready 5GAT makes sense.
“The new tech open all sorts of new possibilities,” Singer said. “Can the drone operate like a wingman, or does it get used more like a swarm? Does the human pilot manage it or team with it? Do you even deliberately use the target drone in battle the way it was intended, deliberately sacrificing it to make the enemy use up their missiles or reveal themselves?”
“The possibilities are amazing,” Singer added, “if we allow ourselves to take advantage of them.” And thanks to the simple, cheap but potentially very effective stealth target drone, and the new computer code that could teach it fighting skills, the Air Force has the opportunity to try out a new kind of air combat. Fast, maneuverable, stealthy, drone air combat.

(Re/Code.net) Inside Evan Spiegel's very private Snapchat Story

Inside Evan Spiegel's very private Snapchat Story http://www.recode.net/2016/5/9/11594144/evan-spiegel-snapchat

It's Evan Spiegel's world — we're all just snapping in it

Before Evan Spiegel was Evan Spiegel, there were times he wanted to fit in.
Like in June 2012, when Spiegel walked across a makeshift stage erected inside Stanford University’s football stadium to collect a diploma he hadn’t actually earned.
Spiegel, then 22, was still a few credits short of graduating with his degree in product design. Stanford let him walk at its graduation ceremony with the assumption that he’d eventually finish his schoolwork.
His friends were all graduating, and his family was in town for the ceremony. Missing that moment would have been embarrassing.

Spiegel never ended up graduating. Now, he says, he wishes he hadn’t pretended that he did.
"It reminded me that oftentimes we do all sorts of silly things to avoid appearing different," Spiegel told USC’s business school graduates last May. "Conforming happens so naturally that we can forget how powerful it is. But the thing that makes us human are those times we listen to the whispers of our soul and allow ourselves to be pulled in another direction."
Evan Spiegel no longer conforms, and he doesn’t have to: He runs — and controls — Snapchat.
And Snapchat sets the agenda for many people: Investors, media companies, advertisers and, most importantly, its 130 million or so daily users. They’re the ones who follow Spiegel’s lead and play by his rules.
All of this stems from Snapchat’s product, which works differently from everything that came before it. Private messages self-destruct after they’re read. Users film and watch videos vertically, not horizontally, because it’s the same way they actually hold their phones. Publishers and brands are lined up around the block to give Snapchat their content, which won’t even drive traffic back to their own website — there’s no way for them to link back out of the app.
Unlike, say, Facebook, which knows as much about you as some of your closest friends, Snapchat doesn't ask you to tell it everything about yourself, and it doesn't follow you around the internet to collect your data. As a result, it’s not targeting you with the very personal ads that Facebook is known for and Spiegel thinks are "creepy." (More on that soon.)
Everyone plays along because Snapchat is where everyone wants to be. It’s where presidential hopefuls exchange barbs and where you can find behind-the-scenes videos from the NFL and the Academy Awards. Four years ago, teens used Snapchat for sexting. Last week, Barack Obama used it to plug health care reform.

This cultural grip is a direct result of Spiegel, a 25-year-old unlike any 25-year-old you’ve likely ever met. Some of that is strikingly obvious: He owns a Ferrari; he’s a licensed helicopter pilot; his girlfriend is a former Victoria’s Secret model.
Some of it you can’t see, unless you’ve watched him work. Admirers say Spiegel is as good at building products as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. And if you think that’s hyperbole, you should talk to several of the sources we spoke to for this story, who casually likened him to Picasso.
That doesn’t mean you’d like to hang out with Spiegel. He’s headstrong and controlling, and he implements a quick-to-fire style foreign to the Silicon Valley tech scene.
And while his fellow millennials are imprinting their lives on the internet through social networks like Instagram or Facebook and Snapchat, Spiegel tries to stay off the grid. He’s obsessed — with reason, it turns out — with the idea of privacy. He shares very little with very few, a practice that has come to define his role at Snapchat and the company’s underlying culture.
All of this seems to be working — for now.

Building something with feelings
Evan Spiegel isn’t building the next Facebook or Twitter. To some that may be obvious, but it’s important to understand. That’s because Spiegel is driven by the idea that people are looking for alternatives to their curated Facebook and Instagram personas. It’s not a social site, it’s a communication app with a large dose of entertainment on the side.
"We no longer have to capture the ‘real world’ and recreate it online," Spiegel explained during a speech he gave at a conference in early 2014. "We simply live and communicate at the same time."
It’s not just that Spiegel has these novel ideas. He can execute them, too.
Facebook tried and failed twice to replicate Snapchat’s disappearing photos product. (It also famously tried to buy Spiegel’s startup for $3 billion back in late 2012.) Both Twitter and Instagram replicated the Snapchat Stories format but to little effect.
But unlike Zuckerberg, Spiegel knows little code. He leaves his impact through vision and design. And that speaks again to what makes Spiegel different. Many of his ideas — most of which are raw and unorthodox — probably wouldn’t pass the smell test at larger companies like Facebook or Google.
When you open the Snapchat app, for example, you land directly in the app’s camera without anything to read or watch. It’s a nudge to create content, not simply consume it. Snapchat was the first to hone in on vertical video, because that’s how people naturally hold their phones. It was counter to the horizontal way video wassupposed to be filmed.

"It’s about building something with feelings," Spiegeltold Recode back in 2014. "Desktop computers were about work. This thing in your hand or in your pocket, you want it to feel fun and friendly and comfortable."
That doesn’t mean he’ll always get it right. "One of the company’s great attributes is their willingness to put out a lot of product," said Benchmark Capital partner Mitch Lasky, who sits on Snapchat’s board. "Evan’s got a lot of interesting ideas and he’s absolutely fearless about putting them out there. If they don’t work, so be it."
Fellow board member and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton heaped similar praise on Spiegel from the Code Media stage this February. "I just don’t think people recognize how difficult it is to pull off what they’ve pulled off," he said.
Even when things don’t work out, they still seem to work out for Snapchat. After visiting anonymous messaging app Secret at the company’s Vegas retreat in the fall of 2014, Spiegel considered buying the company. But he wasn’t willing to pay more than half of Secret’s $120 million valuation, and the deal never materialized. Secret shut down less than a year later.
Spiegel is on a very, very hot streak. Here’s what that looks like in numbers: Snapchat has about 130 million daily active users, according to multiple sources, a number that was just under 100 million a year ago. It’s also creeping up on Twitter’s 310 million monthly active users total, these sources say. Close to 65 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. use the app, up from 24 percent three years ago, according to comScore. It’s the age group that’s most important to advertisers, whether desktop, mobile, TV or even print.
And the company’s still growing: Snapchat ranked higher in the U.S. iOS App Store than every one of Facebook’s apps throughout the entire month of April, according to App Annie. On April 24, Snapchat was the top downloaded app in 28 different countries, almost double the number of top spots claimed by Facebook, Messenger, Twitter and Instagram. Combined.

Becoming a ‘great Evan’
To understand Evan Spiegel’s obsession with privacy, you can look at the parts of his private life that ended up on the internet. It’s a lot, especially for a 25-year-old.
When Spiegel was at Crossroads, a private school in Santa Monica, Calif., his parents, both lawyers, had a messy divorce that left large chunks of his personal life sitting unprotected in court files.
As he started to enter celebrity status in 2013, reporters mined those documents and surfaced with details that laid out a privileged life: As a teenager, Spiegel had a $250 weekly allowance. When his father wouldn’t buy him the new BMW he requested, he moved in with his mother out of protest. She leased him the $75,000 car. He’s not used to being told "no."

As his company’s notoriety grew, so did Spiegel’s. People started to care whom he dated — first was a model who later appeared on "The Bachelor," then there were rumors that he was seeing Taylor Swift.
Shortly after an LA Weekly profile highlighted most of the divorce records, Gawker published a series of embarrassing and sexist emails Spiegel sent as a frat boy at Stanford. Later that same year, Sony Pictures was hacked, exposing even more emails from Lynton, who was in regular communication with Spiegel. The emails showed that Spiegel kept his board in the dark on many important business matters, even fundraising efforts.
Spiegel has always been private, sources say, and the combination of leaks and exposures have only reinforced his reservations. "It’s not fair that the people who try to build us up and break us down get a glimpse of who we really are," he wrote in a memo he shared to Twitter following the Sony hack. "It’s not fair that people steal our secrets and make public that which we desire to remain private." That tweet, and all of Spiegel's tweets, have since been deleted.
Spiegel declined to be interviewed for this story. Snapchat didn’t make any other executives available, either.
What we do know from more than a dozen conversations with colleagues and acquaintances who would talk to us — almost all of whom would only talk off the record — is that Spiegel can be tough to work for, especially for those coming from Silicon Valley where companies preach openness and debate.
Tech giants like Facebook and Twitter and Google host regular all-hands meetings, often talking about important business initiatives or product road maps. Employees have access to new apps before they launch, and company executives take the stage to answer questions from employees.
Snapchat’s all-hands meetings are rare and are mostly used to announce things like birthdays and work anniversaries. Execs rarely field questions, and future products aren’t discussed. The first time many employees learn about a new Snapchat product is by reading about it in the press.
Spiegel’s obsession with privacy is heightened by the company’s physical layout — a string of independent office buildings along the Venice Beach boardwalk that keeps teams separated and projects siloed.
Employees, both current and former, say information of all kinds is typically shared on a need-to-know basis. One of the reasons Spiegel likes walking meetings along the boardwalk is that they’re more private, even though they’re in public — it’s hard to snoop on someone’s conversation when they’re walking amid throngs of people.
That environment doesn’t work for many people. Several of Spiegel’s top execs have quit or been pushed out over the past two years, and many of them lasted less than 18 months. Most notable was COO Emily White, who joined from Instagram and left after little more than a year. Sales boss Mike Randall left after seven months; HR director Sara Sperling was gone after six.
A handful of important positions, including head of sales and head of communications, have been vacant for more than six months.
Everything goes through Spiegel, and his opinions are final. Former employees recall stories of Spiegel killing all-but-finalized ad deals at the very last minute. Arguing with Spiegel brings on a very real fear that you might get fired. One of the quickest ways to get on his bad side is to recommend an idea or project simply because it worked somewhere else. Spiegel wants to do things differently.
"When you go to work at Snapchat you go to work for Evan," said one source who has known Spiegel for years. "You don’t go to teach Evan. You don’t go to show him the ropes."
Spiegel is aware that he is a work in progress.

"I’m not a great manager," he said at Recode’s annualCode Conference last year. "I try to be a great leader. And for me that’s been going through a process of, not how to be a great CEO but how to be a great Evan."
Becoming a "great Evan" involves near-constant curiosity, sources say. Spiegel likes to take crash courses in other people’s brains, meeting with them to mine for information on his topics of interest before graduating onto someone else. Among his previous tutors: SoftBank’s Nikesh Arora, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Eric Schmidt.
Those who have succeeded at Snapchat — there are about half a dozen executives with degrees of influence, depending on who’s recounting the list — seem to gain their power primarily through their access to Spiegel. With the exception of strategy boss Imran Khan, none of them carry any type of public profile outside the company, a plan that’s very much by design.
When asked about Spiegel’s controlling tendencies, his supporters like to point to Steve Jobs, who was not known for running Apple as a democracy.
If it worked for Jobs, why can’t it work for Spiegel?
Not a coincidence: Spiegel has a painting of Jobs hanging in his office.
The Hollywood dream
Evan Spiegel went to school in Silicon Valley. But he is at home in Los Angeles.
He likes to fly helicopters up and down the coast. He loves design and has shown interest in high-end fashion. Spiegel met his girlfriend Miranda Kerr, a model who is no stranger to Snapchat's office, at a dinner for Louis Vuitton. Not long after, he did a photoshoot with Italian Vogue.

He's also savvy enough to understand the statement of an anti-statement, like the deliberately dull sweaters and shirts he'll sometimes wear for public appearances. When he appeared at last year's Code Conference, he wore a plain, oversize white V-neck T-shirt from James Perse, pulled fresh out of the package just minutes before walking onstage. "A staple since high school," he told GQ of the $50 tees.
Spiegel also gets Los Angeles as a company town. While Silicon Valley companies build platforms, he is intent on building a media and entertainment company.
A year and a half ago, he dedicated an entire section of his app to publisher content from brands like ESPN and Cosmopolitan. It’s also why he wanted to buy a music label, and why he has inked deals with sports rights holders like the NFL and NBC. (Spiegel doesn't care about most pro sports himself, although he does snowboard and grew up playing tennis.)
The point is not just to create a messaging service, but one that will be fun and entertaining as well.
"It means we can show people content that they might enjoy while they’re waiting for their friend to respond," Spiegel explained at Code.
The good news for Snapchat is that the thing it does best — video — aligns with this strategy. Snapchat users consume 10 billion videos per day, up from seven billion in January. Its core money-making products, Live Stories around events and publisher content from its Discover section, both rely heavily on video content.


That focus is one of the many reasons Snapchat is drawing comparisons to Facebook, which is also laser focused on video and, specifically, high-quality video from publishers and brands.
Outspoken venture capitalist and early Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya offers up another Snapchat comparison: "At worst, they are the next-generation MTV," he told Bloomberg last May. "At best, they are the next-generation Viacom."
What’s unknown is how (or perhaps just how quickly) Snapchat can turn that video focus into a consistent business. The company is targeting $300 million in revenue in 2016, an impressive jump over its $50 million target last year, but it still lacks a lot of the necessary performance metrics advertisers like to have in hand before setting aside serious ad dollars on a regular basis.
Then there’s this little hurdle: Conventional digital advertising is all about targeting — and, at times, retargeting — with info collected about you from your browsing history. It’s how Facebook and Google make a killing selling ads intended specifically for you. Spiegel, not surprisingly, has rejected that approach.
"We're going to stay away from building really extensive profiles on people," Spiegel told AdWeek last summer. "We have a really big business here that also respects the privacy of people who use Snapchat."
But Snapchat won’t be the shiniest toy on Madison Avenue forever. Common sense tells us that eventually, perhaps sometime soon, Spiegel will need to make a decision about how "creepy" his company will be. And, yes, it will be Spiegel’s decision to make, you can count on that.
All of this matters, sources say, because Spiegel is dead set on bringing Snapchat public someday. Some say he wanted to IPO in 2017. Others think it has been bumped to 2018 or later. Still others believe Snapchat could IPO tomorrow and it wouldn’t give them a shock.
Regardless of when that happens, Snapchat’s relationships with the entertainment and publishing industries will undoubtedly be key. And L.A. — not Silicon Valley — is where entertainment is king.
"I often talk with people about the conflicts between technology companies and content companies," Spiegel said during a conference keynote two years ago. "One of the biggest issues is that technology companies view movies, music and television as information. Directors, producers, musicians and actors view them as feelings, as expression.
"Not to be searched, sorted and viewed — but experienced."
Spiegel is building Snapchat into the new communication experience — and for now, the world seems more than happy to conform.

Reuters Thailand's Central sells stake in Big C to finance Vietnam deal: sources

Thailand's Central sells stake in Big C to finance Vietnam deal: sources



Thailand's Central Group has sold out of domestic retail firm Big C Supercenter Pcl (BIGC.BK), accepting a tender offer from rival TCC Group in a deal that will help Central fund its purchase of a Vietnamese supermarket chain, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Central, Thailand's biggest retailer led by tycoon Tos Chirathivat, is expected to gain at least 50 billion baht ($1.4 billion) from the sale of its 25 percent holding, said one person close to the sale process.

The deal will allow TCC to cement its control of Big C Supercenter without worrying about interference from Central which founded the Thai retail firm in 1993 before selling a majority stake to France's Casino (CASP.PA) six years later.

The latest spate of deals stem from Casino's decision to sell its Thai and Vietnam units this year in an effort to cut debt. Both businesses encompass hypermarkets, supermarkets and convenience stores.

Central lost out to TCC's flagship retail unit Berli Jucker (BJC.BK) in the battle to gain control of the Thai unit. But it emerged the winner for the Vietnam unit, called Big C Vietnam, agreeing to pay 920 million euros ($1.1 billion).

The people declined to be identified as they were not authorized to speak to media. Central and Berli did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Berli made a mandatory offer for the all the shares it does not own after buying Casino's 58.6 percent stake. Berli is expected to own more than 85 percent of Big C Supercenter once the tender offer closes on May 11, the sources said.

Central's purchase of Big C Vietnam is part of rush of deals in the country by Thai firms. They have been attracted by a quadrupling in average incomes during 15 years of economic growth at over 5 percent, and are keen to hedge against political and economic uncertainty back home after a military coup two years ago.

Vietnam's swelling middle-class also sees Thai products as better and more affordable than Japanese and Korean imports, and vastly preferable to the cheap but unpopular goods that flood across the border from China.

TCC purchased the Vietnam chain of German retailer Metro for 655 million euros last year.