HTC CEO Cher Wang: "We had to rethink phones as a company. VR is more important."

The struggling smartphone maker's CEO tells Madhumita Murgia what went wrong

Perched above the hustle and bustle of the Las Vegas strip in a 21st floor hotel suite, 57-year-old Cher Wang, chief executive of smartphone company HTC, receives visitors with a smile. Despite a barrage of acerbic editorials in the last year, questioning whether her business will survive 2016, the Taiwanese boss is upbeat and excited. The reason? HTC’s new virtual reality headset, the Vive.

“Virtual reality is something people have talked about for 20, 30 years, in movies, in books and finally it is real,” she says. “VR has been on our minds for a long time, and now HTC has made virtual reality real.”

There are at least three other major companies, including Sony and Facebook, with new VR headsets out this year, but Wang’s optimism is infectious. “With virtual reality,technology becomes limitless. You can inhabit a different world with a head mount. Think how it could change surgery, education, science, even shopping.”

Amidst all the talk about the headset’s new front-facing camera that allows you to switch between the real and virtual worlds, and low latency that keeps nausea at bay, there is a rather large elephant in the room.

We haven’t yet talked about smartphones.

Founded in 1997, HTC is a pioneer of the mobile phone revolution – it was one of the first companies in the world to make handheld computers, touchscreen smartphones like the Palm Treo 650, and Android flagship phones like the G1 and later the Google Nexus One. “We have always been very innovative, we have this history of innovation in our DNA,” Wang says.

But the company is currently in freefall, as its smartphone business implodes. Until as recently as 2012, HTC was one of Android’s most popular handset manufacturers; at its peak in 2011, it had over 10pc of the smartphone market share. Today, its market share is at 1pc.

In August, it was declared effectively worthless when its market capitalisation fell 95pc, dropping below the company’s own cash pile of $1.4bn.

In its most recent third quarter results, it posted an operating loss of about $151m and revenue of $660 million, almost half the $1.3 billion from a year before – and a precipitous drop from the $1 billion in its preceding quarter.

The company, which will announce Q4 results at the end of this month according to Wang, will not provide guidance for the next quarter, or likely any future quarters.

Rumours of a private equity takeover or an acquisition are rife – in June the CFO of Taiwanese laptop-maker Asustek claimed it had “not ruled out possibility of buying HTC.”

When asked what went wrong, Wang doesn’t dodge the question. “Our flagship is in direct competition with several others, we have had some problems with it for two years,” she admits.

“I think the problem was competition – Apple, Xiaomi, these companies spend tons of money on communications and marketing, they pump a huge amount of investment into the market. There are a lot of Chinese competitors.”

Although Apple stands out as a profit-maker, HTC isn’t the only one struggling to sell its phones. Companies like Blackberry and Sony all have drowning smartphone units, and even Korean giant Samsung showed decreased smartphone profits last year.

In fact, data from IDC found that 2015 was the the smartphone industry's lowest growth year, at under 10pc. In 2014, the growth rate was more than quadruple that, at roughly 40pc. Even in China, the world's biggest market, smartphone sales fell 4pc in August last year for the first time, according to market research firm Gartner.

Apple buys company that scans your face to read emotions

Emotient, bought for an undisclosed sum, uses facial recognition technology to detect a range of nine emotions

Your iPhone may one day be able to know whether you're happy or upset after Apple bought a company that uses facial-recognition technology to read people's emotions.

The technology company has acquired Emotient, an American start-up that can detect the slightest changes in expressions to determine whether people are angry, surprised or disgusted.

Emotient, which describes itself as "the leader in emotion detection and sentiment analysis based on facial expressions", uses its technology to analyse videos, revealing which one of nine emotions people are feeling at any one point.

iPhone owners could in theory use the technology to order their photos by whether subjects are feeling happy or excited, or to detect "happy moments" within videos, but it could well be applied to an as-yet unreleased invention.

It has typically been used in focus groups to test reactions to adverts or products, but it is unclear why Apple, which famously avoids customer surveys, is investing in the technology.

Many believe the company is working on an "augmented reality" headset that overlays graphics on top of the user's vision of the real world as Google's Glass does, or a virtual reality product based on patent filings and experts that Apple has hired.

Last year, Emotient announced that it planned to develop software for Google Glass that would allow shop assistants to see how customers respond to them.

Apple has bought other imaging companies recently, including Faceshift, which uses motion capture technology to transpose humans' facial expressions onto animated characters, and Perceptio, which uses artificial intelligence to understand images.

Apple confirmed the deal, saying that the company "buys smaller technology companies from time to time", but did not say why it was buying Emotient.

The start-up said last year that it had analysed the emotions of Republican presidential candidates. It found that Donald Trump primarily expressed "anger" while on camera, and Jeb Bush "revealed a mix of 'neutral', 'surprise' and 'joy'".

Facebook wants to kill off your phone number

Not one to do things by halves, Facebook has claimed the popularity of its Messenger app is sounding a death knell for the phone number

Not content with the scalps of Myspace, Bebo and dozens of other pretenders to the social network's crown, Facebook is looking to kill again, and this time it's a lot closer to home.

The days of the phone number are, quite literally numbered, thanks to the inexhorable rise of the company's Messenger app, according to David Marcus, Facebook's vice president of messaging products.

"Think about it: SMS and texting came to the fore in the time of flip phones. Now, many of us can do so much more on our phones; we went from just making phone calls and sending basic text-only messages to having computers in our pockets," Marcus wrote in a blog post.

Much like the days of the flip phones, our old methods of communication are dying. In their place a richer, more diverse method of communication has grown, he believes.

"With Messenger, we offer all the things that made texting so popular, but also so much more," he said. "Yes, you can send text messages, but you can also send stickers, photos, videos, voice clips, GIFs, your location, and money to people. You can make video and voice calls while at the same time not needing to know someone’s phone number."

Marcus has a point - you can use Messenger without even owning aFacebook account, and its cross platform nature appeals to those who regularly use desktops, tablets and mobiles. Whereas Facebook was once limited to our laptops, mobile internet innovation coupled with falling costs of internet access mean more people than ever before are communicating through internet-based messenger services (like Facebook-owned WhatsApp) over more traditional SMS.

Mark Zuckerberg plans AI butler

Facebook founder sets himself project of designing intelligent personal assistant

Mark Zuckerberg wants to build an artificially intelligent assistant in 2016 to help run his home and assist him at work, the Facebook founder and chief executive said on Sunday.

Mr Zuckerberg, who commits to a new personal challenge every year, revealed his plan in a Facebook post.

"You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," he wrote, referring to an artificially intelligent butler who appears in the Marvel comic books and movies.

Mr Zuckerberg will start the project by exploring existing technology, he wrote. He will then begin teaching the technology to understand his voice so that it will learn to control everything in his home, such as music, lights and temperature.

His plans also include teaching the assistant to let friends into his home by looking at their faces when they ring the door. The assistant will visualise data to support his work, he wrote.

"This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself," he added. "I'm looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year."

Other challenges the tech entrepreneur has taken on in recent years have included reading two books every month and learning Mandarin.

Slow iPhone? This hidden trick can speed up your handset

If you've had the same iPhone for a couple of years or more, you've probably started to notice its performance slowing down a little, especially on newer versions of the software. Apple has even been sued for the slow performance in iOS 9 when it is used on an iPhone 4s.

But for anyone not up to taking such drastic measures, a solution has emerged that can provide an immediate speed boost by clearing up memory in the phone's App Store.

San Francisco developer Zachary Dryer shared the hidden trick on Twitter, revealing that pressing a series of buttons in the iOS App Store can get rid of a backlog of stuck app updates.

On the App Store, press any one of the five buttons along the bottom of the app 10 times in a row to clear the cached memory. This is data that is meant to be held temporarily but can continue to take up precious resources due to a software error.

As long as the same button is pressed in succession, the screen should go white for a couple of seconds and return to the App Store's homepage, with any app update backlogs cleared.

This is a useful trick if your App Store gets stuck, which can mean app updates not coming through, but should also provide a speed boost. The trick will also work on the iPad.

Clearing temporary memory can often provide a speed boost, and has been a popular trick in the iPhone's web browser, Safari. However, doing the same with apps has not always been so easy. The same trick can be used in iTunes, iBooks and the Apple Store app if those are used often.

Microsoft to warn users about government spying!

US company reportedly kept quiet after thousands of email accounts were compromised in 2011

Microsoft has said it will tell customers if they are being targeted by government spies after it was reported that thousands of Hotmail accounts had been hacked by the Chinese government.

Users of Outlook email and other services will be alerted by the company with a special message saying that details may have been compromised by state-sponsored attackers, Microsoft said.

The move, which follows other tech companies including Facebook andTwitter this year, comes amid growing concerns about governments spying on individuals by accessing their email and social media accounts.

However, it could put Microsoft at odds with the British government, which has said that telling internet users about attempts to access their communications could jeopardise investigations. It emerged this week that employees at Twitter and other internet groups could face up to two years in prison if they tip off customers about state monitoring.

A "disclosure provision" in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill will make it illegal for companies to tell the subject of a surveillance exercise that requests for their data have been made, without express permission. Although the wording of the bill specifically mentions data requests, while Microsoft's new policy covers attacks, governments have become increasingly frustrated at tech companies not co-operating with surveillance attempts.

Uber claims one billion journeys in five years since launch!

                              

Uber claims to have made one billion journeys since its launch in 2010, underlining the massive growth of the ride-sharing service and its challenge to the traditional taxi industry.

The company said its billionth trip was completed in London on Christmas Eve - five and a half years after its first journey in San Francisco.

The figure suggests that Uber has averaged more than 600,000 rides a day since its driver-hailing app went online, although the figure today is much higher. Uber said last year that it was arranging 1 million trips per day, and has since expanded in dozens of new cities around the world.

The company - whose app connects prospective passengers to freelance drivers, charging the passenger's credit card and taking a cut - has raised billions of dollars at a valuation of $62.5bn, which would make it the world's most valuable startup.

However, it has faced a series of threats from regulators in cities where it operates, including London, where the capital's transport authority hasproposed regulations that would damage its ability to operate. Last week, Transport for London closed a consultation on 25 proposals for minicabs, such as a minimum five-minute wait time between ordering a ride and it starting. It will unveil plans in the new year.