DealBook: The Changing State of Smartphone Competition in China

Stark Earnings for Intel Reflect Its Changing Market

For years, Intel executives scoffed at potential threats to its computer chip business from makers of less expensive chips for video games and mobile phones. The largest maker of chips, Intel continued to focus on putting those chips in personal computers, where they could be sold at a high profit margin.

That strategy appears to have run its course. The quality of mobile and gaming chips made by other companies has improved to a point where they run most of the world’s mobile phones and tablets. And partly because more people are turning to those mobile devices, PC sales are waning.

The move to mobile devices started to hurt Intel’s results in recent quarters, but the quarterly earnings that the company reported on Wednesday were particularly stark. Net income was $2 billion, or 39 cents a share, a drop of 29 percent from a year earlier. Revenue was $12.8 billion, down 5 percent.

Intel’s results were slightly below expectations. Analysts had predicted 40 cents a share and revenue of $12.9 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters. Intel cut projections for annual revenue, gross margin and research and development.

“At the end of the day, the market will go where the market goes,” Brian M. Krzanich, Intel’s chief executive, said in a call to analysts after the earnings were released. “We’ve not always lived up to the standards we’ve set for ourselves.”

Mr. Krzanich, who took over in May, has previously said that Intel was slow to see the threat from tablets and smartphones. On Wednesday, he said that organizational changes, along with a renewed commitment to looking for “the next big thing,” would bring Intel back.

In the near term, this means going after the lower end of the PC and tablet market. A new chip will be out in time for the Christmas season, he said, in notebook-type computers that will be sold for as little as $300 and tablets costing $150. Intel also has plans to soon put new chips in higher-end touch-screen devices.

“He’s got to manage in a very tough environment,” said Douglas Freedman, analyst with RBC Capital Markets, referring to Mr. Krzanich. “Intel has done a good job showing they can make chips for mobile devices and tablets, but in the next three or four quarters he has to show he can bring that home.”

While chips for PCs still make up almost three-quarters of Intel’s revenue, few analysts expect the PC market to recover to its old highs. Last week, International Data Corporation said that PC sales fell 11.4 percent in the second quarter of the year. Most of the developed world is now saturated with the machines, and people are buying replacement computers at a slower rate.

Mr. Krzanich said Intel would “leave no computing opportunity untapped” to make up for the loss. In particular, he said, Intel’s “highest priority” would be small mobile devices.

Mr. Krzanich has also focused on cost-cutting and streamlining at the company, giving Mr. Freedman and others some hope that Intel’s profit will rebound.

In Wednesday’s call, the company noted that Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet, which carries a high-margin Intel chip, was not counted in the PC sales numbers by I.D.C. and others. The analysis firm has said, however, that in the first quarter of this year Microsoft’s tablets, including tablets not carrying Intel chips, had just 4.4 percent of the tablet market, compared with 39 percent for Apple’s iPad. There is little to suggest significant improvement from there, an I.D.C. analyst said.

In a Changing China, New Matchmaking Markets

“This is a good place to hunt,” she told me. “I always have good luck here.”

For Ms. Yang, Joy City is not so much a consumer mecca as an urban Serengeti that she prowls for potential wives for some of China’s richest bachelors. Ms. Yang, 28, is one of China’s premier love hunters, a new breed of matchmaker that has proliferated in the country’s economic boom. The company she works for, Diamond Love and Marriage, caters to China’s nouveaux riches: men, and occasionally women, willing to pay tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to outsource the search for their ideal spouse.

In Joy City, Ms. Yang gave instructions to her eight-scout team, one of six squads the company was deploying in three cities for one Shanghai millionaire. This client had provided a list of requirements for his future wife, including her age (22 to 26), skin color (“white as porcelain”) and sexual history (yes, a virgin).

“These millionaires are very picky, you know?” Ms. Yang said. “Nobody can ever be perfect enough.” Still, the potential reward for Ms. Yang is huge: The love hunter who finds the client’s eventual choice will receive a bonus of more than $30,000, around five times the average annual salary in this line of work.

Suddenly, a signal came.

From across the atrium, a co-worker of Ms. Yang caught her eye and nodded at a woman in a blue dress, walking alone. Ms. Yang had shaken off her colleague’s suggestions several times that day, but this time she circled behind the woman in question.

“Perfect skin,” she whispered. “Elegant face.” When the woman walked into H & M, Ms. Yang intercepted her in the sweater aisle. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said with a honeyed smile. “I’m a love hunter. Are you looking for love?”

Three miles away, in a Beijing park near the Temple of Heaven, a woman named Yu Jia jostled for space under a grove of elms. A widowed 67-year-old pensioner, she was clearing a spot on the ground for a sign she had scrawled for her son. “Seeking Marriage,” read the wrinkled sheet of paper, which Ms. Yu held in place with a few fragments of brick and stone. “Male. Single. Born 1972. Height 172 cm. High school education. Job in Beijing.”

Ms. Yu is another kind of love hunter: a parent seeking a spouse for an adult child in the so-called marriage markets that have popped up in parks across the city. Long rows of graying men and women sat in front of signs listing their children’s qualifications. Hundreds of others trudged by, stopping occasionally to make an inquiry.

Ms. Yu’s crude sign had no flourishes: no photograph, no blood type, no zodiac sign, no line about income or assets. Unlike the millionaire’s wish list, the sign didn’t even specify what sort of wife her son wanted. “We don’t have much choice,” she explained. “At this point, we can’t rule anybody out.”

In the four years she has been seeking a wife for her son, Zhao Yong, there have been only a handful of prospects. Even so, when a woman in a green plastic visor paused to scan her sign that day, Ms. Yu put on a bright smile and told of her son’s fine character and good looks. The woman asked: “Does he own an apartment in Beijing?” Ms. Yu’s smile wilted, and the woman moved on.

The New Matchmaking

Three decades of combustive economic growth have reshaped the landscape of marriage in China. A generation ago, China was one of the world’s most equal nations, in both gender and wealth. Most people were poor, and tight controls over housing, employment, travel and family life simplified the search for a suitable match — what the Chinese call mendang hudui, meaning roughly “family doors of equal size.”

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Changing a PC's Start-up Routine

I installed the Windows 8 preview on an old laptop, but now the computer won’t start up unless I have the DVD in the drive. Help!

When you installed the Windows 8 software on the computer from the DVD, the system may have been switched to start up from the disc drive instead of the hard drive, and never switched back. Unless the hard drive is damaged, you can usually fix this by adjusting a setting in the computer’s BIOS — Basic Input/Output System, a bit of software built into the hardware.

To do so, restart the PC and watch the screen for information about which key to press to change the normal start-up routine or adjust the BIOS. This key varies by manufacturer, but it is often the F2, F8, F10 or the Delete key; your computer’s manual should have instructions.

Once you press the key and land on the text-based BIOS Setup Utility screen, use the keyboard’s right arrow key to move to the Boot menu. Use the down arrow key to get to the Boot Device Priority area and hit the Enter key. Here, you can change the first boot device from the disc drive to the hard drive. Select the option from the on-screen menu to save the setting and exit the BIOS Setup Utility. The computer should now start up from the hard drive and not require the DVD in the disc drive.

Changing of the Guard: China Pressures Businesses to Help Censor Web

Starting earlier this year, Web police units directed the companies, which included joint ventures involving American corporations, to buy and install hardware to log the traffic of hundreds or thousands of computers, block selected Web sites, and connect with local police servers, according to industry executives and official directives obtained by The New York Times. Companies faced the threat of fines and suspended Internet service if they did not comply by prescribed deadlines.

The initiative was one in a range of shadowy tactics authorities deployed in the months leading up to the 18th Party Congress, which is scheduled to end on Wednesday, in an escalating campaign against information deemed threatening to party rule. The effort, while spottily executed, was alarming enough to spur one foreign industry association to lodge a complaint with the government. Several foreign companies quietly resisted the orders, which posed risks to communications and trade secrets that they take pains to secure.

The events surrounding the party congress magnify the constant challenge facing China’s Internet security apparatus, which is to maintain the party’s lock on political power without choking off a wired China from the global economy.

The more intrusive recent measures appear aimed at plugging some of the gaps in China’s nexus of surveillance and censorship, sometimes termed the “great firewall.”

“It goes this way pretty much every time there’s some big political event in Beijing: the DVDs are gone, the prostitutes are gone, and the Internet’s slower,” said David van Meerendonk, an American who operates an information technology company here. “They’re struggling to find a balancing point.”

Over the past couple of weeks, partial blocking has crippled access to Google and other sites, at times completely. It has also disrupted programs that many people here use to circumvent surveillance and reach blocked overseas sites by other means. Some Internet providers have cut service for hours, citing “maintenance.” Democracy activists and foreign journalists have reported increased attacks on their e-mail accounts.

On domestic social networks, already vigorously policed, censors have fine-tuned their craft. Sina Weibo, the nation’s most popular microblogging site, has experimented with “semi-censorship,”as one blog termed it, filtering search results for once-unsearchable terms. One semi-censored term was the Chinese shorthand for the party congress itself: shiba da. Blocking it had prompted some of China’s more playful microbloggers to resort to a similar-sounding English substitute: “Sparta.”

Hu Jintao, China’s departing leader, in his report on the opening day of the congress last Thursday, gave no sign of any relaxation in controls. “We should strengthen social management of the Internet and promote standardized and orderly network operation,” he said.

The police and other agencies rely on legions of local censors, automated filtering and strict regulation of Internet service providers.

GreatFire.org, a Chinese-based blog that tracks government filtering, found in tests this month that Google e-mail was being partly blocked, and that blocking intensified after the congress began. One possible explanation for the strategy was that “authorities are nervous of fully blocking Gmail,” it said. “The government may be scared of a backlash from the urban, educated and young people who tend to use Gmail, not to mention the businesses that rely on it.”

In late summer, the police stepped up jamming on circumvention software, according to two party insiders with Chinese security ties. Students who use Freegate, free software backed by the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, said that as early as August they experienced unusually frequent disruptions.

China says its online security policies are needed to fight pervasive fraud, cyberattacks, pornography and rumormongering.

Adam Century contributed reporting.

Technology Is Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say

The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students’ capability to focus.

Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology’s impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students.

The timing of the studies, from two well-regarded research organizations, appears to be coincidental.

One was conducted by the Pew Internet Project, a division of the Pew Research Center that focuses on technology-related research. The other comes from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that advises parents on media use by children. It was conducted by Vicky Rideout, a researcher who has previously shown that media use among children and teenagers ages 8 to 18 has grown so fast that they on average spend twice as much time with screens each year as they spend in school.

Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students’ attention.

“I’m an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention,” said Hope Molina-Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work.

She said she did not want to shrink from the challenge of engaging them, nor did other teachers interviewed, but she also worried that technology was causing a deeper shift in how students learned. She also wondered if teachers were adding to the problem by adjusting their lessons to accommodate shorter attention spans.

“Are we contributing to this?” Ms. Molina-Porter said. “What’s going to happen when they don’t have constant entertainment?”

Scholars who study the role of media in society say no long-term studies have been done that adequately show how and if student attention span has changed because of the use of digital technology. But there is mounting indirect evidence that constant use of technology can affect behavior, particularly in developing brains, because of heavy stimulation and rapid shifts in attention.

Kristen Purcell, the associate director for research at Pew, acknowledged that the findings could be viewed from another perspective: that the education system must adjust to better accommodate the way students learn, a point that some teachers brought up in focus groups themselves.

“What we’re labeling as ‘distraction,’ some see as a failure of adults to see how these kids process information,” Ms. Purcell said. “They’re not saying distraction is good but that the label of ‘distraction’ is a judgment of this generation.”

The surveys also found that many teachers said technology could be a useful educational tool. In the Pew survey, which was done in conjunction with the College Board and the National Writing Project, roughly 75 percent of 2,462 teachers surveyed said that the Internet and search engines had a “mostly positive” impact on student research skills. And they said such tools had made students more self-sufficient researchers.

But nearly 90 percent said that digital technologies were creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans.”

Similarly, of the 685 teachers surveyed in the Common Sense project, 71 percent said they thought technology was hurting attention span “somewhat” or “a lot.” About 60 percent said it hindered students’ ability to write and communicate face to face, and almost half said it hurt critical thinking and their ability to do homework.

There was little difference in how younger and older teachers perceived the impact of technology.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Changing to a Favorite Font

I don’t like the font that Word 2010 uses when I create a new document and am tired of changing it. Can I set my own font for all new files?

You can change the default font for all new Microsoft Word documents you create with just a few steps. In Word 2010, start by going to the File menu. Select New from the menu. Click Blank Document, then Create.

In the Font area of the Ribbon, click the small gray arrow in the right corner to open the Font box and choose the typeface you want. Click the Set as Default button. Select the option for “All documents based on the Normal.dotm template?” and click O.K. Microsoft’s site has similar instructions for other versions of Word.