Bluetooth 5.0

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced the new Bluetooth 5 spec, currently slated for delivery in late 2016 or early 2017. While it won’t appear in devices until sometime after that, the BT 5 protocol should be a significant improvement over Bluetooth 4.2, which mostly focused on improving compatibility with the Internet of Things (IoT) and associated devices.

Bluetooth 5 is expected to deliver four times the range of Bluetooth 4.2, twice the speed, and eight times the data broadcasting capability. The IoT capabilities baked into BT 4.2 will be expanded as well; the Bluetooth SIG is claiming that the increased range, performance, and total broadcasting capability will allow IoT devices like smartwatches to move away from a paired app-device model and operate independently in their own right. Whether this is actually true is something of an open question: Wearables like the Apple Watch or Android Wear-compatible products would benefit from increased autonomy, but the battery power and screen size on a watch are both intrinsic limiting factors. Transmitting and receiving data is expensive relative to the total amount of battery power packed into most wearables.

Bluetooth low energy will continue to be an important pillar of the Bluetooth 5 standard

The increased capabilities of Bluetooth 5 should make it easier to have a wireless Bluetooth speaker in one room while you stream data from elsewhere. Current Bluetooth can be a bit hit-or-miss in this regard; some peripherals tolerate blocked lines of sight better than others. I have two pairs of equally priced Bluetooth earbuds — one of them can pick up a signal from anywhere in the apartment, while the other pair starts skipping if I slip my phone into my pocket. Walking out of a room and leaving my phone behind simply doesn’t work.

The Bluetooth SIG believes that BT5 will be much more than just a performance-improving update to existing peripherals. “With eight times the broadcast messaging capacity, Bluetooth 5 will further propel the adoption and deployment of beacons and location-based services in the home automation, enterprise, and industrial markets,” the SIG said in a statement. “In scenarios where contextual awareness like navigation and pin-point location are crucial – such as hassle-free airport navigation experiences, asset tracking of warehouse inventory, emergency response, even smart city infrastructure that helps the visually impaired be more mobile – Bluetooth 5 will send custom information people actually find useful in that moment without connection and application barriers.”

That’s a fairly optimistic assumption for a protocol usually used for pairing wireless earbuds or headsets with other hardware, but everyone’s allowed to be an optimist. Even if Bluetooth 5 doesn’t usher in a brave new world of crappy IoT devices, it’ll be nice to see better battery life and increased range from existing types of hardware.

Twitter now lets you retweet yourself

Twitter has often been criticised as a haven for oversharing narcissists: now its vainest users have one

more way to love themselves.

The social network switched on the ability for users to retweet their own posts, allowing them to re-share tweets that have already appeared in followers’ timelines.

Thankfully, a user can only retweet themselves once, preventing them from clogging up timelines by repeatedly retweeting the same message.

The update also makes it easier for users to quote-tweet themselves, which allows them to write a tweet with another tweet embedded in it.

Whereas before users would have to painstakingly copy and paste their old tweet’s URL into a new tweet, they can now do so by effortlessly pressing the retweet button and selecting “quote tweet”. What a world we live in.

Twitter announced the update last month, alongside a number of other changes such as removing photos and usernames from the character count, and changing who sees tweets beginning with a username.

The self-retweet function is the first of these changes to be activated.

Twitter has also updated its block feature, which stops blocked users from seeing a person’s tweets and prevents tweets from the blocked user showing up in the blocker’s timeline.

Previously, if a third person would retweet either user, the other person would be able to see it, but the updated block feature closes that loophole.

Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26bn

Microsoft is buying the professional networking website LinkedIn for just over $26bn (£18bn) in cash.

The software giant will pay $196 a share - a premium of almost 50% to Friday's closing share price.

The deal will help Microsoft boost sales of its business and email software.

Microsoft said that LinkedIn would retain its "distinct brand, culture and independence".

Ben Wood, head of research at CCS Insight, said the deal would give Microsoft access to the world's biggest professional social network with more than 430 million members worldwide.

"That's a valuable asset that can be deeply integrated with a number of Microsoft assets such as Office 365, Exchange and Outlook. That said, Microsoft has stated that the company will continue to operate as an independent business, so we'll have to see how deeply the integration occurs," Mr Wood said.

---

Analysis: Rory Cellan-Jones, technology correspondent

Ever had one of those annoying LinkedIn emails inviting you to "endorse" a contact for some skill or another? Perhaps LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner and its founder Reid Hoffman deserve to be endorsed for salesmanship after today's deal.

After a tricky period in which the shares have fallen amid widening losses, they have persuaded Microsoft to make its biggest deal. The software giant is paying a 50% premium on Friday's closing share price to buy LinkedIn, a price which amounts to $250 (£170) for every active user. To put that into context, that's about the market value of Sky, or eight times as much as Daily Mail owner DMGT - and they are both profitable.

But this deal is about more than money: it is meant as a powerful signal of where Satya Nadella is now taking Microsoft. He sees its future as a cloud computing business providing all sorts of professional services to clients - including a social network to connect them to each other.

"We are trying to ride the wave of the new technologies," Mr Nadella told me from Seattle. "It's about AI, it's about mobile, it's about cloud and we're trying to bring those things together."

However, the deal to buy Nokia's mobile phones division had a similar logic - and the entire value of that purchase was written off just a year later. So Microsoft's investors may look at that $26bn price tag nervously, while anyone with a few LinkedIn shares may be using the network to send a message of congratulations to their board.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said he had long admired LinkedIn: "I have been thinking about this for a long time."

The deal was "key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes", he added.

a different approach to integrating LinkedIn to preserve its culture and brand, Mr Nadella said: "That's what's going to be very very different about thMicrosoft had a long record of successfully integrating acquisitions, he explained, citing Minecraft - the video game whose maker it bought in 2014 for $2.5bn - as well as its very first purchase: the presentation software PowerPoint for $14m in 1987.

Image copyrightMICROSOFT

Image captionLinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner (left), with Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman (right).

LinkedIn shares soared 47%, or $61.50, to $192.60 in New York following the announcement of the deal.
Shares in the company, which floated in May 2011, have fallen by more than 40% this year.

The stock plunged by a quarter in February after the company issued a profit warning for the first quarter and reported an annual loss of $166m.

Ivan Feinseth, analyst at Tigress Financial Partners, said that LinkedIn was a great business "even though the company stubbed their toe back in February. It's a premium company and it deserves a premium valuation."

Shares in Microsoft fell 2.6% to $50.16, bringing the decline this year to almost 10%.

'Incredible opportunity'

Jeff Weiner will remain chief executive, reporting to Mr Nadella. He and Reid Hoffman - the chairman, co-founder and controlling shareholder of LinkedIn - both backed the deal.

"Today is a re-founding moment for LinkedIn," said Mr Hoffman. "I see incredible opportunity for our members and customers and look forward to supporting this new and combined business."

LinkedIn has been trying to expand by offering users more messaging options, mobile apps and a revamped "newsfeed" to help boost engagement.

Last year, the site pledged to send less frequent and "more relevant" messages after numerous user complaints.

The takeover is by far the biggest acquisition made by Microsoft, which paid $8.5bn for Skype in 2011 and bought Nokia's mobile phone business for $7.2bn in 2013.

The LinkedIn acquisition also eclipses the $19bn that Facebook paid for WhatsApp in 2014.

Despite having a cash pile of about $92bn, Microsoft said it would pay for LinkedIn mostly by issuing new debt.

It expects the deal, which must be approved by regulators in the US, EU, Canada and Brazil, to generate annual savings of $150m by 2018.