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Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Komen Breast Cancer Charity Cancels Races in 7 Cities

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has canceled half of its “3-Day” fund-raising races around the country next year as it struggles to regain support nearly 18 months after its 2012 decision to withdraw funding for breast cancer screening at some Planned Parenthood affiliates.

Citing the economy and concerns about meeting fund-raising and volunteer participation goals in seven cities, Komen, the nation’s largest breast cancer advocacy organization, canceled its 2014 races in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Phoenix, San Francisco, Tampa and Washington.

It will continue to hold races in Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Philadelphia, San Diego and Seattle.

After Komen announced its Planned Parenthood decision last year, many longtime supporters took their anger to social media platforms, leading Komen to restore the funds. The foundation, based in Dallas, has struggled to regain those supporters.

The announcement about the race cancellations was made on Monday on the Facebook page Komen had set up for the 3-Day races.

As the Susan G. Komen 3-Day continues to evolve, next year will bring changes that will affect many members of our Komen 3-Day family. The 2014 Susan G. Komen 3-Day will return to Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Michigan, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle and the Twin Cities. However, we are saddened to share that the 3-Day will not be returning to the following markets in 2014: Arizona, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Tampa Bay, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Please note the 2013 3-Day series will continue as planned.

We are in the process of notifying all of the 3-Day family about plans for 2014, but wanted to share this news with you all here, too. The difficult decision to exit these markets was not made lightly, as we know this bold and empowering event has touched the lives of thousands of participants like you. While the 3-Day has brought great awareness to the breast cancer cause, participation levels over the last four years have made it difficult to sustain an event of this magnitude in 14 cities.

We’d like to thank all of our 3-Day participants for generously giving their support and participation to the Susan G. Komen 3-Day. We deeply appreciate your passion and commitment in helping find a cure for breast cancer and we hope all of you continue your support of the 3-Day and consider participation in one of the seven markets in 2014.

The decision prompted another wide-ranging conversation online, with some people writing on Twitter and Facebook that they were not surprised by the news.

Others expressed disappointment.

A Komen representative replied on Twitter:

A spokeswoman for Komen said on Wednesday that the decision would not affect other races sponsored by the foundation.

On Facebook, Paulene Layher Bitners, who has Stage 4 breast cancer, wrote that she had been looking forward to joining the walk in San Francisco in 2014 “as a ‘triumph’ walk.”

I had many wonderful supporters when I walk in SF in 2009…those people are now supporting me as I walk through Stage 4 Breast Cancer (stage 4 at diagnosis). I was looking forward to walking in SF in 2014 as a “triumph” walk…I will never be called a survivOR, but wanted to walk to show that I am survivING! Now, I won’t be able to walk at all as the travel expenses will be too much on top of the fund raising. So sad to see one more dream stolen from me!!!



Civil Disobedience on a Turkish Game Show

Video from Monday’s broadcast of the Turkish quiz show “Kelime Oyunu,” or “The Word Game,”which took the protests as its theme.

While most of Turkey’s journalists were carefully avoiding mention of the tens of thousands of protesters who poured into the streets this week, out of a deference to the government that enraged supporters of the demonstrations, the host of one Turkish game show found a way to raise the issue not once but 70 times during a broadcast on Monday night.

As dozens of flabbergasted viewers reported on Twitter, Ali Ihsan Varol, the star of the Bloomberg TV quiz show “Kelime Oyunu,” or “The Word Game,” crafted the questions so that answer after answer â€" words like “Taksim,” “Gasmask,” “Twitter” and “Dictator” â€" were thinly veiled references to the government’s failed crackdown on dissent and the way that the media blackout was undermined by social networking.

Writing about the game-show host’s act of puckish civil disobedience on her blog on Wednesday, the Turkish sociologist Zeynep Tufekci translated all 70 leading questions and pointed answers. The final two were:

To voluntarily give up a position: Resign

The act that makes a person bigger by asking to be forgiven for wrong actions: Apologize

The evening after his sudden turn into political satire, Mr. Varol said that he was asked not to do a live broadcast and a prerecorded episode of the show would be broadcast.



SAP’s Purchasing Power Play

SAP just did a big acquisition, along with a little head fake.

While the announcement by SAP, the German enterprise software company, said this was a deal about online marketing, in fact, it’s part of a broader effort by many companies to reshape retail sales.

SAP announced Wednesday that it was buying Hybris, a Swiss e-commerce software company. The price was not disclosed, but someone familiar with the deal who was not authorized to speak on the record, said SAP paid “somewhat less than $1 billion” for hybris.

The deal follows Tuesday’s announcement by Salesforce.com that it was acquiring ExactTarget, an online marketing services company, for close to $2.5 billion.

Not surprisingly, many industry analysts wanted to make a connection between the two deals.

That link was reinforced when Bill McDermott, SAP’s co-chief executive, took a couple of shots at Salesforce during the conference call about the Hybris deal, saying Salesforce had bought an old-fashioned e-mail marketing company (yes, that’s old-fashioned now). Gartner, an industry research firm, recently announced that Salesforce had replaced SAP as the leading vendor of customer relationship management software, giving Mr. McDermott reason to want to get even.

The Salesforce deal, however, is part of a larger plan by Salesforce to blend advertising, marketing and sales. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, has said that technologies like cloud computing and social media increasingly break down the distinctions between those things.

This is particularly true for customer relationship management of sales from one company to another, where complicated specs and contracts mean e-mail matters more.

SAP is going after consumers as much as businesses with Hybris and hoping to use the data from online commerce for Big Data marketing, and eventually, things like planning inventory and manufacturing. That is a much bigger goal, and ties into both SAP’s roots in enterprise resource planning software and the online data analysis of its HANA platform.

“You can read this purchase as us being serious” about customer relationship management,” said James Dever, a spokesman for SAP. “But it’s deeper than that. This touches a company’s back end transactional data,” or information about things like inventory.

One feature of Hybris’s software is that it allows customers to open an online shopping cart on one computer and then adjust an order later on another computer before closing a sale. Using its HANA platform, SAP hopes to let sellers see behaviors, then offer deals or companion offers before a sale is completed.

Eventually, companies may be able to use that overall information and data analysis to figure out faster how much of a product they need to make, store or sell quickly. The product could also help in planning what to stock in retail stores.

In some ways, the SAP deal is closer to last year’s move by NetSuite, another SAP rival, to offer online commerce services. While that business has been slow to emerge, NetSuite recently announced some significant deals involving blended online and traditional brick and mortar sales.

“The big picture is that consumers want to connect with companies on a personal, individualized basis, online and offline,” Zach Nelson, the chief executive of NetSuite, said.

In an even bigger picture, deals like this are part of the broader move to create the immediacy and data-led insight (or, if you prefer, cookie-based spying) of online retail with the high-touch experience of physical stores.

Amazon.com moved early into online skills and has edged into the physical world by offering fast delivery of goods. Apple has gone farther, designing stores that in many ways embody its online sales presence, from the minimalist look to the absence of formal checkout kiosks.

If SAP can build out Hybris, it could blur further the barriers between ads, sales and marketing. And more companies could break down barriers between things online and off.



Israeli Newspaper Focuses on Samantha Power’s Remarks in 2002

A YouTube video clip from 2002 of Samantha Power’s interview about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Even before the official announcement by President Obama on Wednesday that Samantha Power would be the next United States ambassador to the United Nations, various aspects of her record were being picked apart and debated, weighed against the potential for confirmation.

Ms. Power has spoken and written extensively about genocide, human rights causes, and discussed foreign policy issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That last subject was the focus of an article on Wednesday by Chemi Shalev, who writes for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and said remarks that Ms. Power made more than a decade ago might come back to haunt her.

Mr. Shalev linked to his story which had the clip of the 2002 interview, which took place at the University of California at Berkeley, on his Twitter account @chemishalev.

A 2002 YouTube video that is less than 3-minutes long is likely to play a prominent role in any campaign launched by right-wing Republican and Jewish groups against the appointment of Samantha Power as America’s next ambassador to the United Nations.

In the clip, which she has since disavowed, Power appears to refer to the pro-Israel lobby as “a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial support,” indicate hostility toward U.S. aid to Israel, and sound as if she supports an American-imposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would be backed by a “meaningful military presence.” In the clip, she also appears to describe both Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat as “terribly irresponsible.”

The interview, conducted by Harry Kreisler of Berkeley while Power was an academic at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was a linchpin in right wing attacks against her during U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign. Power was described as being pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli â€" and her views were said to reflect Obama’s own.

In the article, Mr. Shalev wrote that while Ms. Power has since disavowed those remarks, they could resurface during the hearings.

As my colleague Mark Landler reported, Ms. Power is intended to replace Susan E. Rice at the United Nations. Ms. Rice is to replace Tom Donilon as Mr. Obama’s national security adviser.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Start-up to Connect Thermostats, Light Sensors

One of Silicon Valley’s favorite buzz phrases is “Internet of things,” a catchall for everyday stuff like home appliances and light bulbs that are connected to the Internet. Nest Labs, a company founded by a former Apple executive that makes a smart thermostat, has brought cachet to the category and gotten a lot of other manufacturers thinking about how they can bring the Internet to their otherwise humdrum products.

But the companies that make typical products on the shelves at Home Depot don’t have the Internet expertise of a Nest, nor can they afford adding technology that significantly balloons the price of their products (the Nest thermostat, elegant as it is, costs $249).

A start-up, Ayla Networks, unveiled a technology on Wednesday that it said would make bringing the Internet to ordinary devices more attractive for appliance makers. The company, which announced that it had raised $5.4 million from Voyager Capital and Crosslink Capital, makes software that goes into Wi-Fi chips that, say, a maker of electric switches could embed in its products. Ayla operates a cloud service that people who buy connected appliances can access so they can configure the products or get stats about their energy consumption.

One of the advantages Ayla says it has over competitors is that it charges manufacturers a one-time fee for including its technology in their devices, rather than an ongoing charge that would be harder for them to stomach. The company says it can do this in large part by making sure appliances are very efficient about the way they connect to Ayla’s cloud service, which minimizes its data center costs and allows manufacturers to price their connected appliances more aggressively.

“They don’t need to be networking companies like Amazon, Apple or Google, who make it a core competency,” said Adrian Caceres, vice president of engineering at Ayla, who was previously an engineer working on the Kindle at Amazon’s Lab126 operation in Silicon Valley.

While it doesn’t sound all that complicated â€" jam a wireless chip into your widget and you’re done â€" making the software inside of it idiot-proof is not an easy task. It needs to be very simple to connect these devices to a home’s existing wireless network. Because of the extra cost, most of these devices don’t include screens or keypads for entering things like network passwords.

Ayla’s software deals with these limitations by allowing people to use their smartphones and tablets as the interface for connecting to networks. The company estimates that a manufacturer’s cost to add Internet capabilities using its software and related hardware will be as low as $10 per device, a figure that should fall in half in a few years.

The company on Wednesday announced that the first consumer product to use its technology was a personal weather station that Sina, the Chinese Internet company, would offer in that country. The small device, attached to the outside of a home or office, will feed data about local temperature and precipitation to a smartphone app via Ayla’s cloud service.

David Friedman, the chief executive and co-founder of Ayla, said the next products Ayla’s technology would be embedded into will be smart plugs that could be controlled by a smartphone. Mr. Friedman says he believes garage doors, light switches and sprinkler systems are all other good candidates for becoming Internet-connected over time.

Thomas Lee, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University who is a co-founder and investor in Ayla, said he was skeptical for a while that ordinary household appliances needed to be connected to the Internet. But Dr. Lee said he came around to the idea after realizing how baffled he was by programming his own thermostat. He said connecting appliances to networks means that smartphones can become user-friendly interfaces for remotely controlling and configuring them.

“My cellphone should be my remote control for my entire universe,” he said.



Samsung May Have Surpassed Apple in the U.S. — for Now

Samsung Electronics may have surpassed Apple to become the top smartphone maker in the United States in May, according to an analyst’s report. Sales of Samsung’s new flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, combined with its bigger-screen Galaxy Note II and the older Galaxy S III, lifted Samsung’s sales above Apple’s last month, the report said.

Canaccord Genuity, an investment research firm, said it surveyed the retail stores of carriers including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and Sprint. The Galaxy S4 was the top-selling phone for Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint last month. But at AT&T, the Galaxy S4 was the second best-selling phone after the iPhone 5, the report said.

“We believe Samsung on the strength of strong Galaxy S4, S III, and Note II sales surpassed Apple to gain top share of the U.S. smartphone market for the first time since the iPhone 5 launch,” said Michael Walkley, the Canaccord Genuity analyst who conducted the survey.

That may look like a milestone, but the report should be taken with a grain of salt. The survey doesn’t include Apple’s retail stores, where many iPhones are sold. And it remains to be seen whether Samsung can beat Apple in sales after Apple releases a new iPhone (or even a cheaper iPhone, as rumors suggest). At one point, Samsung’s Galaxy S III surpassed the iPhone 4S to become the best-selling phone in the world, but when sales numbers for the new iPhone 5 came in later, the iPhone was No. 1 again.

Also, strong performance in May alone doesn’t mean Samsung has crushed Apple in the United States over all. ComScore, the Internet analytics company, issued a report on Tuesday that estimated that Apple had 39.2 percent of smartphone subscribers in the first three months of 2013 and Samsung, in second place, had 22 percent. That includes all models of iPhones and Samsung phones in the United States.

What Samsung’s strong performance in May reveals is that the South Korean manufacturer has figured out how to make good use of the months between iPhone upgrades, when the current iPhone is getting old and its sales are slowing. Samsung is releasing its new phones during these months. And some Apple customers who are waiting for the next iPhone may be caving in and buying Samsung phones instead.

In other words, Samsung has taken advantage of the predictability of the iPhone release cycle â€" Apple’s pattern has been to upgrade the iPhone once a year in the fall to target the holiday season. Will Apple switch up its next move?

Tensions between Apple and Samsung, meanwhile, are heating up as their patent battle continues. On Tuesday, the United States International Trade Commission issued a ban on a handful of older Apple devices, including the iPhone 4 for AT&T’s network. Apple intends to appeal the decision.



Samsung May Have Surpassed Apple in the U.S. — for Now

Samsung Electronics may have surpassed Apple to become the top smartphone maker in the United States in May, according to an analyst’s report. Sales of Samsung’s new flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, combined with its bigger-screen Galaxy Note II and the older Galaxy S III, lifted Samsung’s sales above Apple’s last month, the report said.

Canaccord Genuity, an investment research firm, said it surveyed the retail stores of carriers including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and Sprint. The Galaxy S4 was the top-selling phone for Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint last month. But at AT&T, the Galaxy S4 was the second best-selling phone after the iPhone 5, the report said.

“We believe Samsung on the strength of strong Galaxy S4, S III, and Note II sales surpassed Apple to gain top share of the U.S. smartphone market for the first time since the iPhone 5 launch,” said Michael Walkley, the Canaccord Genuity analyst who conducted the survey.

That may look like a milestone, but the report should be taken with a grain of salt. The survey doesn’t include Apple’s retail stores, where many iPhones are sold. And it remains to be seen whether Samsung can beat Apple in sales after Apple releases a new iPhone (or even a cheaper iPhone, as rumors suggest). At one point, Samsung’s Galaxy S III surpassed the iPhone 4S to become the best-selling phone in the world, but when sales numbers for the new iPhone 5 came in later, the iPhone was No. 1 again.

Also, strong performance in May alone doesn’t mean Samsung has crushed Apple in the United States over all. ComScore, the Internet analytics company, issued a report on Tuesday that estimated that Apple had 39.2 percent of smartphone subscribers in the first three months of 2013 and Samsung, in second place, had 22 percent. That includes all models of iPhones and Samsung phones in the United States.

What Samsung’s strong performance in May reveals is that the South Korean manufacturer has figured out how to make good use of the months between iPhone upgrades, when the current iPhone is getting old and its sales are slowing. Samsung is releasing its new phones during these months. And some Apple customers who are waiting for the next iPhone may be caving in and buying Samsung phones instead.

In other words, Samsung has taken advantage of the predictability of the iPhone release cycle â€" Apple’s pattern has been to upgrade the iPhone once a year in the fall to target the holiday season. Will Apple switch up its next move?

Tensions between Apple and Samsung, meanwhile, are heating up as their patent battle continues. On Tuesday, the United States International Trade Commission issued a ban on a handful of older Apple devices, including the iPhone 4 for AT&T’s network. Apple intends to appeal the decision.



Search Is On for Trapped People in Philadelphia Building Collapse

Rescue crews were searching for people possibly trapped in a thrift store after a building collapsed onto it in the Center City section of Philadelphia on Wednesday, according to reports from the scene.

Ronnie Polaneczky, a columnist for The Philadelphia Daily News, shared this photograph on Twitter from the scene at 22nd and Market Streets that housed a Salvation Army thrift shop.

According to reports from the scene, at least five people have been removed by emergency responders and firefighters fear that more people may be trapped inside.

Lloyd Ayers, the Philadelphia fire commissioner, told reporters that rescue crews are searching for 8 to 10 individuals.

Fire officials also said the collapse may be related to demolition work on the building next door, causing it to topple onto the thrift store and also onto several attached row houses.

Television reporters in Philadelphia posted multiple images and reports from the scene online, as well as shared live video coverage.



I.B.M. Buys Cloud Computing Firm in Deal Said to Be Worth $2 Billion

3:29 p.m. | Updated

I.B.M. announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to buy SoftLayer Technologies, a cloud computing company, in an effort to strengthen I.B.M.’s position in the fast-growing market for computing sold to businesses as a service delivered over the Internet.

As businesses demand more services delivered over the Internet, the titans of technology are stepping up their offerings delivered from data centers afar, so-called cloud computing.

I.B.M. made a big move on Tuesday, announcing that it had agreed to buy SoftLayer Technologies, a cloud computing company, in an effort to strengthen its position in the fast-growing market.

The purchase price was not disclosed. But it was about $2 billion, according to a person told of the negotiations, who has asked not to be named because he had not been authorized to speak publicly about the terms.

The acquisition is the largest made under the leadership of Virginia M. Rometty, who became chief executive in January 2012. The purchase, analysts say, also gives I.B.M. a broader presence in the business of cloud computing services.

Amazon is the leader in the public cloud arena, and its roster of customers includes not just start-ups and research projects, but also large companies like Netflix.

Amazon does not break out the revenue for its cloud business, Amazon Web Services, but it is growing fast. The unit had estimated revenue of $2 billion last year, according a recent research report from Barclays, which forecast that Amazon’s cloud business would reach $5 billion or more by 2014.

I.B.M. executives say its strategy is to compete in the public cloud market not with basic computing capabilities like processing and storage, but with software for marketing, procurement and customer service delivered as cloud offerings. Since 2007, the company has spent $4.5 billion on more than a dozen acquisitions to build up its cloud software and services offerings.

“We’re focusing on business services that leverage the cloud model,” said Ric Telford, vice president for I.B.M. cloud services.

I.B.M.’s first moves in the cloud market date to 2007. But its early emphasis, analysts say, had mainly been on so-called private clouds, in which the computing is delivered to users as service over the Internet, but from data centers owned by I.B.M.’s corporate customers.

But the SoftLayer acquisition will sharply expand I.B.M.’s capability to deliver computing services remotely to customers from I.B.M. data centers â€" the so-called public cloud model.

SoftLayer, a private company based in Dallas, has a network of 13 data centers in the United States, Singapore and Amsterdam, and revenue of about $400 million a year. GI Partners, a private equity fund based in Menlo Park, Calif., is the majority owner of SoftLayer.

The SoftLayer data centers will be added to the 10 cloud services data centers I.B.M. now has worldwide. Erich Clementi, a senior vice president for I.B.M.’s technology services unit, said SoftLayer “completes our portfolio.” It expands I.B.M.’s public cloud operations, he said, while adding expertise and technology for private clouds and hybrid services, which blend the public and private models.

Lance Crosby, chief executive of SoftLayer, said his company’s long-term goal had been to become “the de facto and most flexible platform for Internet cloud computing. And we couldn’t get there on our own.” I.B.M., he said, has the financial resources and relationships with corporate customers to accelerate the adoption of its cloud technology.

Beyond the acquisitions, I.B.M. hopes to offer the company’s homegrown technology as cloud services, like its Watson artificial intelligence software, which I.B.M. announced last month was being tailored as a smart customer service assistant.

“Watson has a lot more potential because of the cloud delivery model,” Mr. Telford said.

Dannon, the yogurt maker, is a cloud services customer that reflects the I.B.M. strategy. It uses I.B.M. public cloud software for optimizing its pricing, promotions and product planning. The cloud software has helped Dannon’s sales planning teams improve the percentage of products sold to consumers to 98 percent from 75 percent â€" crucial for a food stuff with a limited shelf life. The software was developed by DemandTec, which I.B.M. acquired last year.

In new projects, Dannon, owned by the French company Danone, is now pursuing a “cloud-first strategy,” said Timothy Weaver, the chief information officer.

I.B.M. has earmarked its cloud business as an area for investment and growth. That business grew 70 percent in the first quarter of 2013 from the quarter a year earlier. By 2015, I.B.M. has forecast that its cloud business should reach $7 billion, including private and public cloud services.

All the major technology companies â€" including Microsoft, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle â€" are pursuing cloud strategies. But analysts say I.B.M., perhaps more than any other company, can assure corporate customers to feel comfortable putting their business information in remote data centers and buying public cloud services.

More than a decade ago, I.B.M. demonstrated that endorsement effect, when it made a big commitment to Linux, the open-source operating system, helping it become a mainstream technology in corporate data centers.

“I.B.M. is very much a trusted brand here,” said Steven Milunovich, an analyst at UBS Securities. “Once they show up, they tend to have a big impact.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 4, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a senior vice president for I.B.M.'s technology services unit. He is Erich Clementi, not Clement.



Viacom Strikes Deal With Amazon to Stream Children’s Shows

In Viacom Deal, Amazon Scoops Up Children’s Shows

Nickelodeon

The deal includes hundreds of episodes of popular preschool shows like “Bubble Guppies.”

If parents of preschoolers want to plop their children in front of the laptop or tablet to watch “Blue’s Clues” and “Dora the Explorer,” they may have to join Amazon’s subscription streaming service.

The agreement gives Viacom a chance for tie-ins with branded goods that Amazon sells, like Dora the Explorer products.

On Tuesday, Viacom and Amazon announced an extensive, multiyear deal that includes granting Amazon exclusive rights to Nickelodeon’s preschool shows. The agreement, estimated to be worth several hundred million dollars, is Amazon’s biggest streaming deal yet and signals that the heated battle for online rights has increasingly moved to television’s youngest viewers.

In April, Netflix said it would allow its deal with Viacom to expire. Then last month Netflix struck a deal with the Walt Disney Company to gain exclusive rights to stream Disney Jr. series like “Jake and the Never Land Pirates” and Disney XD’s “Tron: Uprising.” In 2011, Netflix introduced its “Just for Kids” menu with a selection of shows and movies aimed at children, or parents looking to entertain them.

That put pressure on Amazon to secure children’s programming for its Amazon Prime subscription service, which it hopes will compete with Netflix and Hulu in the streaming video market.

Amazon has a smaller streaming audience than Netflix, but for Viacom the arrangement presents the opportunity to have tie-ins with the consumer products that Amazon sells, like DVDs, “Dora” backpacks and “SpongeBob SquarePants” beach towels.

“They’re a very consumer driven company and they also connect our Nickelodeon content to products,” Philippe Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview.

As part of the deal announced on Tuesday, Amazon also secured the rights to stream shows that are first broadcast on Viacom’s Comedy Central and MTV, including some episodes of “Jersey Shore” and “Teen Mom 2.” But the key to the agreement is making Amazon’s Prime Instant Video subscription service the exclusive outlet for pre-school-age children to watch old episodes of shows like “Dora the Explorer,” “Go, Diego, Go!” and “The Backyardigans.” Since children do not mind reruns as much as adults do, deals for these types of shows often cost less than series aimed at adults.

Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president of digital video and music, said in a statement that children’s programming was “one of the most-watched TV genres on Prime Instant Video.”

In a letter to customers, Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said the deal gave Prime Instant Video more than 250 TV seasons and more than 3,900 episodes from Nick Jr., Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central. “We have increased by 55 percent the number of episodes available to top Prime shows for kids,” Mr. Bezos wrote. The deal, he said, added “400 episodes of new shows like ‘Team Umizoomi,’ ‘Bubble Guppies,’ ‘Victorious,’ ‘Big Time Rush’ and ‘Drake & Josh.’ ”

Amazon Prime members pay $79 a year for two-day free shipping, monthly Kindle e-book rentals and video streaming. The company has said it has millions of Prime subscribers but has declined to give an exact figure. Netflix has 27 million streaming subscribers in the United States. Hulu’s subscription service, Hulu Plus, has about four million.

In the past, Viacom has had a complicated relationship with subscription video on-demand services like Netflix. After an unexpected ratings drop at its Nickelodeon channel last year, analysts partly blamed a glut of old episodes available to Netflix for cannibalizing the cable channel’s ratings. Children increasingly watch shows via streaming, but revenue from digital syndication deals still does not come close to that provided by advertisers who pay to reach viewers the old-fashioned way.

In the quarter that ended March 31, advertising revenue at Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. rose 2 percent as the network rebounded with preschool audiences. Mr. Dauman said a fresh pipeline of shows had improved Nickelodeon’s ratings. As advertising revenue grows on the cable channel, Mr. Dauman has defended deals with digital subscription streaming services as good for both parties.

“Our job is to grow the pie,” Mr. Dauman said. “And having all these different revenue streams grows the overall pie.”

Viacom will need to make an additional $125 million to $150 million in streaming deals in fiscal year 2013 to meet its goal of 10 percent affiliate growth, according to Bernstein Research.

Amazon has rapidly built its streaming service to compete with more established services, namely Netflix and Hulu. The Viacom deal is the latest example of the online retailing giant’s swooping in to gain streaming rights after deals with Netflix expire.

After Netflix declined to renew its rights to popular cable series like “Pawn Stars,” Amazon jumped in. In December, Amazon struck a deal with Time Warner to gain the exclusive streaming rights to TNT’s “The Closer” and “Falling Skies.” Netflix got exclusive rights to TNT’s “Dallas.”

Amazon and CBS have a deal that will let Prime subscribers watch “Under the Dome,” a new science fiction series based on the Stephen King novel, four days after episodes are broadcast on CBS beginning June 24.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 5, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Viacom Strikes an Extensive Deal With Amazon to Stream Children’s Shows.

In China, an Empire Built by Aping Apple

In China, an Empire Built by Aping Apple

Jason Lee/Reuters

Lei Jun, the Steve Jobs-mimicking chief of Xiaomi, introduced a new smartphone last summer in Beijing.

BEIJING â€" China is notorious for its knockoffs. But now comes a knockoff of one of the gods of American ingenuity: Steven P. Jobs.

Steven P. Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 in 2010.

In a country where products like iPhones are made but rarely invented, Lei Jun â€" entrepreneur, billionaire and professed Jobs acolyte â€" is positioning himself and his company as figurative heirs of Mr. Jobs. The Chinese media have nicknamed his company, Xiaomi, the “Apple of the East.”

The title is a stretch, by almost any measure. But Mr. Lei nonetheless is carefully cultivating a Jobsian image here, right down to his jeans and dark shirts. He is also selling millions of mobile phones that look a lot like iPhones. Chinese consumers â€" and deep-pocketed investors overseas â€" seem to be believers.

And yet Mr. Lei’s biggest believer may be himself. He bounds onto podiums to introduce new cellphones. He proclaims things that may, to many, sound outlandish. For instance:

“We’re making the mobile phone like the PC, and this is a totally new idea,” Mr. Lei, Xiaomi’s chief executive, said during an interview at the company’s spacious, high-rise headquarters here. “We’re doing things other companies haven’t done before.”

That might come as a surprise to Apple and Samsung Electronics, the twin giants of smartphones. But Xiaomi (pronounced SHAO-mee) did sell $2 billion in handsets in China last year. It is emerging as a force in China, the world’s largest mobile phone market, and it expects its revenue to double this year.

Mr. Lei, for his part, hardly discourages comparisons to Apple and Mr. Jobs. And why would he? Founded by a group of Chinese engineers three years ago, his company sold seven million mobile phones last year by using designs that mimic the look and feel of the iPhone and using marketing that seems right out of Apple’s playbook.

It’s no surprise that entrepreneurs aspire to create a Chinese Apple. Many talk about moving China beyond the dead end of assembling devices for other companies.

So far, however, true innovators have been scarce. At best, they have adapted others’ technology to the Chinese market.

Mr. Lei has attracted believers because no company’s annual revenue has reached the $1 billion mark in China faster than Xiaomi, not even Amazon, which took five years to get there. Xiaomi did it while earning a profit.

Its backers include Qiming Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of Qualcomm and Digital Sky Technologies, an investment firm run by Yuri Milner, an early backer of Facebook, Groupon and Zynga.

Xiaomi, which is privately held, says an initial public offering is years away. But the company is worth $4 billion, according to its latest round of financing last June.

If that valuation holds up, it would make Xiaomi one of China’s most valuable technology companies, behind Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and Netease.

The company caters to young, college-educated people who want a smartphone but cannot quite afford one, people like Lu Da, a 26-year-old education consultant in Shanghai.

“I chose Xiaomi because it’s good value for the money,” he said.

Skeptics say the company produces low-price iPhone imitations with no significant software or hardware advantages. They also say the company faces stiff challenges from Apple and Samsung, which are in a position to offer low-price smartphones.

The marketing power of bigger local handset makers like Lenovo, Huawei and Taiwan’s HTC, which together recently sold about 25 percent of all smartphones in China, cannot be discounted either.

Whether the company succeeds, its rise has solidified Mr. Lei’s reputation as a start-up wizard. Part entrepreneur and part start-up investor, he spent more than a decade at the Chinese software company Kingsoft and took it public in 2007. (He remains chairman and holds a $300 million stake.)

He also invested in a string of successful software and Internet companies, including YY, an online social platform that went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the United States last year and is now worth about $1.5 billion. One of Mr. Lei’s earliest successes came in 2004, when Amazon paid $75 million to acquire his e-commerce company Joyo.com.

“Lei Jun is a phenomenal entrepreneur,” said Kai-Fu Lee, the former Google executive who now runs Innovation Works, a Beijing-based firm that invests in Chinese start-ups. “He’s insightful about user needs and markets, and now he has this incredible desire to create a household brand in technology.”

Mr. Lei has revealed little about his personal life, but he has nearly five million followers on Sina Weibo, a sort of Chinese Twitter, and is treated like a celebrity in technology circles.

He grew up near Wuhan, a gritty industrial city in central China, and studied computer science at Wuhan University. It was during college, in 1987, he says, that he read a book about Mr. Jobs, and decided to emulate him.

“I was greatly influenced by that book, and I wanted to establish a company that was first class,” Mr. Lei said. “So I made a plan to get through college fast.”

Xu Yan contributed research.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 5, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Empire Built by Aping Apple.

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