Snowboarders' smooth start in Sochi, but off-slope problems persist

Aimee Fuller of Great Britain competing at the women's snowboarding slopestyle qualifying sessions at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park on Thursday. Photograph: Zuma/Rex

Amid the toothpaste terror warnings and the hotel woes, the corruption scandals and the anti-gay controversy, the first sporting events got under way at the Sochi Winter Olympics on Thursday. As snowboarders opened the action on the slopes of the Caucasus mountains high above Sochi, athletes reported excellent conditions and facilities, suggesting that in a sporting sense at least, the Sochi Games could still prove a success.

The Olympics will officially open on Friday evening, in a ceremony at the Fisht Olympic Stadium – a purpose-built, modernist structure on the shores of the Black Sea. President Vladimir Putin will give an address and there will be a lengthy, choreographed ceremony meant to rival Danny Boyle's 2012 effort in London, which will take in Russian historical and literary references, starting with Peter the Great and ending with the Soviet period. The event is directed by Konstantin Ernst, the head ofRussia's state-controlled First Channel television station.

Few western leaders will be in attendance but the Chinese, Japanese and Turkish leaders will be at the stadium, as well as the embattled Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Putin held talks with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, on Thursday.

The first competitive action at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park in the "mountain cluster" above Sochi was an Olympic debut – slopestyle snowboarding, where riders perform tricks on a series of rails and jumps.

British rider Jamie Nicholls came fourth in the qualifying round to make it straight through to Saturday's final. At the end of the run he said: "I feel amazing. I can't explain it. I came here and all I wanted to do was land a run and landing a run and getting to the finals is a dream come true."

Meanwhile, to cacophonous noise in the Iceberg Skating Palace, one of a number of shimmering new venues, Russia's multiple medallist Evgeni Plushenko appeared on the first day of the new team figure skating event.

Ban Ki-moon speaks to the IOC's general assembly before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Photograph: David Goldman/AP

Nevertheless a day before the official opening ceremony, the political cloud of Russia's "gay propaganda" laws refused to dissipate. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, used his speech to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Thursday to condemn attacks on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, amid growing criticism of the Russian laws."Many professional athletes, gay and straight, are speaking out against prejudice," said Ban.

"We must all raise our voices against attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people. We must oppose the arrests, imprisonments and discriminatory restrictions they face."

More than 50 current and former Olympians have called on the IOC to uphold principle six of its charter, which forbids discrimination of any kind, and this week more than 200 writers added their voice to the protest against the new laws in a letter to the Guardian. Speaking to reporters after his address, Ban, who later met Putin, added: "I know there has been some controversy over this issue.

"At the same time I appreciate the assurances of President Putin that there will be no discrimination and that people with different sexual orientation are welcome to compete and enjoy this Olympic Games."

Asked about the new laws on Thursday, the Russian deputy prime minister, Dmitry Kozak, said Russia did not discriminate against anyone based on their religion, sexuality or nationality but said the new laws were to protect children.

He said: "We are all grown up and every adult has his or her right to understand their sexual activity. Please, do not touch kids. That's the only thing. That's prohibited by law in all countries whether you are gay or straight."

Kozak also appeared to highlight an apparent inconsistency between the IOC and the Russian organisers over the issue. The IOC president, Thomas Bach, has said athletes should not protest against the issue on the medal podium but are free to speak out in press conferences. But Kozak said: "Political propaganda is prohibited during the sporting event. It is prohibited by the Olympic charter not by Russian law."

Kozak was also asked about renewed security concerns sparked by reports that US homeland security sources had warned that terrorists might try to smuggle explosives aboard flights bound for Sochi in toothpaste tubes. He said he had not received information about this particular threat, and the department said later that it was not aware of any specific threat.

A poll released by the independent Levada Centre this week suggested it is not just western media who are sceptical about the Games.

Asked what they saw as the main reason behind authorities' desire to hold the Games, 38% said it was "opportunity for graft" and only 23% said it was important for national pride and to serve for the development of sport. About half of respondents put the record price tag of the Sochi Games down to corruption.

Kozak said there was no evidence of any large-scale corruption or theft during the run-up to the Games, and that to say otherwise would "violate the democratic principle of presumption of innocence".

The Games will last for two weeks and take place in two separate clusters – one by the sea and one in the mountains. Much of the construction work has gone down to the wire and many journalists have arrived to find their hotel rooms incomplete.

But for competitors, it is a different story. Team GB chef de mission, Mike Hay, praised the facilities. "The engineering and construction that has gone on is amazing. The quality of the accommodation in the coastal village and the mountain village are as good as we've seen at any Olympic Games.

"We're quite spoiled about the proximity to the venues. The venues are stunning and state of the art and will be thrilling for our athletes to compete in."

Why Google has 200m reasons to put engineers over designers

Google's HQ in California. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Switching the shade of blue used on advertising links in Gmail and Google search earned the company an extra $200m a year in revenue, a Google executive has said.

Google's commitment to data-driven decisions is well reported, and the company has been ridiculed for the "50 shades of blue" episode, when then Google executive Marissa Meyer led a project testing the impact of using different coloured links in ads.

But a new insight proves that the company significantly benefitted from the experiment, to the tune of £200m.

The figure comes from Google UK's managing director Dan Cobley, speaking on Tuesday at an event organised by law firm DLA Piper, who positioned the company's approach to data against the traditional route of the "highest paid person's opinion".

"About six or seven years ago, Google launched ads on Gmail," Cobley explained. "In our search we have ads on the side, little blue links that go to other websites: we had the same thing on gmail. But we recognised that the shades of blue in those two different products were slightly different when they linked to ads.

"In the world of the hippo, you ask the chief designer or the marketing director to pick a blue and that's the solution. In the world of data you can run experiments to find the right answer.

"We ran '1%' experiments, showing 1% of users one blue, and another experiment showing 1% another blue. And actually, to make sure we covered all our bases, we ran forty other experiments showing all the shades of blue you could possibly imagine.

"And we saw which shades of blue people liked the most, demonstrated by how much they clicked on them. As a result we learned that a slightly purpler shade of blue was more conducive to clicking than a slightly greener shade of blue, and gee whizz, we made a decision.

"But the implications of that for us, given the scale of our business, was that we made an extra $200m a year in ad revenue."

The form of testing Google undertook is known as A/B testing (offering users two different versions of a site and picking the most effective one); this particular battle was widely seen as a turning point for the company, the moment it sided with engineers against designers. In 2009, Doug Bowman, then the company's top designer, cited it as part of the reason for his departure.

"It's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues," he wrote in his goodbye post, "so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

Apple bans another bitcoin app from iPhones

A German bar announcing that it accepts bitcoin. Photograph: Alamy

Apple has removed the bitcoin app Blockchain from its iOS App Store, underscoring the belief that the company has an unstated policy against such services.

The Blockchain app has been on the app store for two years, and hooks in with popular online wallet service Blockchain.info to enable users to use their iPhones and iPads to make bitcoin transactions.

On Wednesday, Apple pulled the app. Blockchain cites official communication saying that the removal was due to an "unresolved issue", and argues that this is "a claim that cannot even be disputed and boils down to 'because we said so'".

"There was no communication prior to removal of this popular app," the company continued in a written statement, "no indication of any problems and no opportunity to redress any issues, making a mockery of the claim that there was an 'unresolved issue'."

Apple has a record of clamping down on apps that can be used to send or receive bitcoin. In December, it forced secure messaging app Gliph to remove bitcoin functionality, while BitPak, Bitcoin Express and Coinbase have also entered the graveyard of bitcoin apps.

While the company seems to have a consistent stance against Bitcoin apps, it does not provide consistent reasons to the developers themselves about why their apps are being removed.

BitPak's developer was told "that Bitcoin thing is not legal in all jurisdictions for which BitPak is for sale", while Bitcoin Express was told the app violated rule 22.1 of the company's guidelines, which state that "apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where they are made available to users. It is the developer's obligation to understand and conform to all local laws".

In April 2012, Blockchain itself was rejected by Apple's moderators in Korea, who told the developers that "the facilitation of trading of virtual currency is not appropriate for the App Store".

Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn argues that Apple's attacks are "obfuscation".

"If Bitcoin wallets were illegal then I wouldn't be working on them, would I?

"It's widely known that Apple would like to get into mobile payments, and banning competing apps from the App Store is classic Apple behaviour that they have engaged in many times before. When the App Store was new, they even had an explicit rule saying you couldn't "duplicate the behaviour" of Apple's own apps!

"If they had a more dominant market position their actions would trigger anti-trust investigations, but because iPhone users can switch to Android, Apple are under less pressure to play fair."

Hearn points to CoinPunk as an option for Bitcoin users who have an iOS device, but says that iPhone usage may be hindering take-up of the currency. "If you look at Berlin, where there are a huge number of local businesses accepting Bitcoin by now, low iPhone usage is one big reason they've been successful. I'm hoping over time the UK and USA will go the same way."

Apple had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Twitter share price tumbles further after news of slowing growth

Twitter only added 9m users since the previous quarter. Photograph: Joerg Carstensen/EPA

Twitter’s share price dropped more than 20% Thursday morning as investors reacted to news of slowing growth.

On Wednesday, after the stock markets closed, Twitter published its first quarterly earnings report since going public. The company made more money in the last three months of 2013 than analysts expected. However, the social network also announced it had 241m users at the end of 2013, just 9m higher than the previous quarter.

Chief executive Dick Costolo also disclosed that, in the last quarter of 2013, the number of “timeline views” – Twitter’s equivalent of page views, and a key measure for advertisers – dropped for the first time in the company’s history.

The shares crashed during after-hours trading and continued to fall as the stock markets opened Thursday.

Sam Hamadeh, founder of financial analyst PrivCo, said it was clear the healthy increase in Twitter’s share price, which the company has enjoyed since its initial public offering last November, had outstripped its actual performance.

“At this stage in its growth, Facebook was growing users at nearly triple the rate Twitter just reported growing them,” he said. “Twitter added just 9 million users, or less than 4% sequential growth. This company is being valued at sixty times its revenues – a nosebleed valuation – on the expectation it will grow revenue 100% annually for the next 5 years or more,” he said.

Hamadeh said Twitter could not possibly grow its ad revenue by 100% if its audience is growing at this rate. “It would be like expecting American Idol to double revenue next year when its ratings show its audience grew just 15%. It’s not happening,” he said.

The slowing user growth and fall in timeline views came as Twitter made a number or major changes, redesigning its mobile apps and websites and adding image and video previews to Tweets. The moves were designed to improve “engagement” – a key measure for advertisers who want to see their content favourited, retweeted and commented upon.

According to the earnings report issued on Wednesday, in the three months ending 31 December, the company had revenues of $242.7m, an increase of 116% compared to $112m in the same period last year. It made a net loss of $511m for the fourth quarter of 2013, compared to a net loss of $9m in the same period last year.

Twitter said it expected first-quarter revenue to be in the range of $230m to $240m, with revenue for the year of between $1.15bn and $1.2bn, nearly double the $665m it posted in 2013.

“Twitter finished a great year with our strongest financial quarter to date,“ said Costolo. “We are the only platform that is public, real-time, conversational and widely distributed, and I’m excited by the number of initiatives we have under way to further build upon the Twitter experience.“

In a conference call with analysts, Costolo was quizzed about his company’s slowing user growth numbers. He said the company was “doubling down on accelerating growth in our core user base” in 2014. Twitter has “massive global awareness”, he said, but needs to make it easier for new people to “get it”.

Costolo said changes to Twitter’s products had already made significant differences, increasing the numbers of retweets and favourites. “We believe combined changes over the course of the year will start to change the slope of the user growth curve,” he said, and asserted that the company had a clear “roadmap” for growing user numbers. “I’m delighted with the early results,” he said.

Twitter has attracted some unusually negative coverage from analysts since it went public last year. Shares sold at $26 a share during the initial public offering and have traded as high as $74.73.

Before the results were issued, 30% of the analysts following Twitter had posted sell ratings on the company’s stock, while 27% listed it as buys and 43% were neutral, according to analyst FactSet. By comparison, 89% of analysts following Facebook are recommending a buy and none are posting sell ratings. Sell notes account for just 6% of all the analyst recommendations covering the S&P 500 list of the top US companies.

Analysts are not only concerned with Twitter’s growth, but also with the fact that while Twitter’s revenue is more than doubling each quarter, it has yet to make a profit. Shyam Patil, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said for many analysts, the company’s share price had risen “too far too fast”.

Patil, who has a neutral rating on the company, said no new information had come out on the company before the quarterly results, and the share price had been driven up by expectations rather than facts. “I think it’s a good business. It is clearly differentiated from the competition,” he said. He noted that Twitter had yet to figure out how it was going to make money, and that at the moment the sky-high valuation was based on bets that it would hit on a lucrative plan.

“You could see an incredible house and think it’s worth half a million only to find out it’s being sold for $2m. It’s still a great house,” he said.

Twitter is still expanding quickly – the disappointing quarterly user growth figures still represent a 30% rise year-on-year. But it has captured a very small portion of the overall digital ad market. Twitter accounted for 0.5% of global digital ad revenues in 2013, according to eMarketer, up compared to 0.3% in 2012. Facebook, by comparison, accounts for 5.7% of global digital ad spending, and Google for 32.4%.

Sochi: No, athletes don't need to disguise their iPhones

Athletes take pictures during a biathlon training session ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia. The make of phone isn't clear. Photograph: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images

Swiss athletes at the Sochi Olympics who received gifts of Samsung Galaxy Note smartphones have reportedly been told to cover up Apple logos on iPhones if they use them at the opening ceremony - but both Samsung and the International Olympic Committee deny having told them to.

A report in Bluewin, a Swiss website, said that Swiss athletes received beer tankards, toiletries, and Galaxy Note 3 smartphones - but added that “the gifts came with linked demands”. As an Olympic sponsor, it said, Samsung had said that there should be no rivals’ brands in TV pictures - and so those who attended the Opening Ceremony should cover logos on iPhones.

Olympic sponsors are notoriously sensitive about rival brands gaining exposure at their expense. The 2012 Olympics saw “branding police”responsible for ensuring that sponsors’ brands were protected, as well as policing inside event locations to prevent “guerilla advertising” by non-sponsor brands.

But asked by the Guardian about the claims of an enforced coverup, a Samsung spokesperson said: “Samsung did not request any action of this nature from athletes attending the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. All commercial marketing around the games is overseen by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Samsung has not been involved in any decisions relating to branding of products used by athletes at the games.” Samsung suggested asking the IOC.

When asked by the Guardian whether it had instigated the move, the IOC’s press office said: “it is not true. Athletes can use any device they wish during the Opening Ceremony. The normal rules apply just as per previous games. The Samsung Note 3 that were distributed are a gift to the athletes, so they can capture and share their experiences at the games, and the phones also contain important competition and logistical information for competing athletes.“

The IOC named the Galaxy Note 3 the “official Olympic phone” on Tuesday and said it would provide one to all of the athletes “to enjoy, capture and share” their experience at the games - although athletes are also told that any video or audio that they collect of events, competitions or “other activities which occur at Olympic venues (including the Olympic villages)“ must not be “uploaded and/or shared to a posting, blog or tweet on any social media platforms, or to a website”.

Samsung and Apple are fierce competitors in the smartphone and tablet sectors, and have clashed repeatedly in the courts - with Apple winning a huge damages case in California after alleging that Samsung copied elements of its earlier iPhone designs. Samsung, in response, has produced adverts mocking people queueing for new phones outside Apple-style stores, while also pouring billions of dollars into advertising and marketing efforts - including its sponsorship of the Olympics.

Petition for plus-sized Disney princess reaches 22,000 signatures

Disney is under pressure to make its princess characters less uniformly slim. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

More than 22,000 people have signed a petition for Disney to make its next princess character plus-sized.

Organised by Jewel Moore, a US high school student, the petition is entitled 'Every body is beautiful'. Moore explains: "I'm a plus-size young woman, and I know many plus-size girls and women who struggle with confidence and need a positive plus-size character in the media... it would do a world of good for those plus-size girls out there who are bombarded with images that make them feel ugly for not fitting the skinny standard."

Moore told Yahoo that another reason for the petition was for "little boys to see plus-size Disney princesses so they don't grow up and think women they date have to look perfect."

From Snow White to Pocahontas, Disney princess characters are uniformally slim and beautiful. With recent hits like Tangled and Frozen, the characters have become feistier, more independent and less focused on romance, but still cleave to the same physical attributes.

There are also voices within Disney who are critical of the way it designs its characters. When a curvaceous version of the young Princess Merida from Brave was designed for a Disney toy line, another Change petitionrailed against it, winning the support of the film's director Brenda Chapman – the company backed down from the designs.

Writing in the Guardian recently, journalist Anna Smith criticised Frozen for its own unrealistic body images: "To use these big doe eyes as standard in supposedly realistic human females reduces the characters' individuality and sends out a message: to be a princess, you must not only be brave but have a specific, unattainable brand of beauty."

It comes in a week where the designer of Barbie has defended the proportions of the doll, often criticised for being unrealistic. Kim Culmone said that girls don't draw their self-image from their toys, which are merely for play, and that the doll's proportions are made to allow easy dressing-up.

Paul Walker's Fast & Furious car up for charity sale

Paul Walker, right, with Vin Diesel in Fast Five. Photo: PR

The Nissan Skyline sports car driven by Paul Walker in Fast & Furious has been put up for a charity sale, with a €1m price tag.

The buyer will also receive the rental certificate from Universal Pictures that proves it was the one used in the film, the fourth in the series. The proceeds will go to Walker's charity Reach Out Worldwide, whose work involves responding to natural disasters and other crises via a network of skilled relief workers.

The actor was killed in a car accident last year, when the Porsche Carrera GT his friend Roger Rodas was driving crashed and burst into flames; a coroner's report stated that the car had been travelling at over 100mph at the time of the crash.

For 13 years he headed up the Fast and Furious franchise, starring alongside the likes of Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel in car-racing thrillers. He will appear in the seventh instalment in 2015, as most of his scenes were completed at the time of his death, and another posthumous movie, Brick Mansions, will be released this year. His role in the forthcoming hitman movie Agent 47 was given to Rupert Friend, and he was replaced in romance The Best of Me by James Marsden.