Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 108

Since we first broke the story about the possible upcoming fate of Silicon Valley-based retail chain Fry's Electronics, not much has changed within the stores. Shelves are still empty with what limited product they have in stock being spread out across as many isles as possible.

After our story, numerous other news outlets including CBS, San Jose Mercury News, and PC Gamer have begun to speculate, as well as obtain denials from Fry's Electronics spokesperson Manuel Valerio that the company has no immediate plans to go out of business. Even though it is closing its Palo Alto store, the company insists it has no plans to close its other 33 stores in nine states.

One store manager commented to us that they are clearing out the existing product to make room for new vendors. We specifically asked what vendor was replacing copies of Microsoft Windows, which at that point, the manager refused to make any additional comments. On recent store visits to Bay Area and Southern California stores, not only have we seen little to no new products arriving, but employees have told us that what new products we are seeing are mostly inter-store transfers.

AT&T is giving customers some bonus data to enjoy, but what kind of 'bonus' would this be if a company didn't make you pay for it?

Yes, I know that sentence is a strange one to read, but its factually correct. AT&T has recently decided to offer Mobile Share plan customers a 'bonus' 15GB of data, which applies to all Share Value plans. Examples of this are the $130 plan that originally gave 30GB of data, now give 45GB and the $225 a month plan that gave 60GB of data, now gives 75GB.

The catch? Well, AT&T is not giving these 'bonuses' out for free. Instead, they will be adding an additional $10 to customers' monthly bills. It should also be noted that these 'bonuses' are not optional and are completely intentional by AT&T. "Starting with your October 2019 bill, you'll get an additional 15GB of data on your Mobile Share plan. This bonus data comes with a $10 price increase." said AT&T in an article.

If you have ever been on a flight of any kind, you know there are rigorous security checks to ensure passengers aren't carrying anything suspicious, let alone something illegal. Gun-shaped objects (not surprisingly) fall into those categories.

Recently, the Transportation Security Administration agents at the Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey came across something in someone's carry-on luggage that was quite strange. The object was gun-shaped and appeared to be a revolver, but before things got really serious, the TSA agents realized it was just a toilet paper roller.

The toilet paper roller looked remarkably similar to a revolver, and as you would imagine, bringing anything on a plane that even resembles a gun is not allowed at all. The TSA agents gave the passenger three options: give it to someone who wasn't boarding the plane, check it into the cargo luggage, or let them confiscate it. The passenger didn't have any attachment to the item and decided to let the TSA agents keep it.

Netflix is going to be deploying a special 'skip Trump joke' button to Seth Meyers' upcoming stand-up comedy special for Netflix, Lobby Baby. If you don't want to hear the barrage of Trump jokes from Meyers, you can easily press a button.

A button like this isn't strange to Netflix as they have a very similar if not identical button when a TV show theme is playing, giving streamers the option to skip the intro -- something that comes in handy when you're binge watching a new show on Netflix. This time, it's all for Trump.

First, it sounds strange to implement a 'skip Trump joke' button in a stand-up comedy special on Netflix that will have jokes about President Trump... but the button is a joke in itself. Meyers explained to CNN: "It dawned on me that because it was on Netflix, there would be this opportunity to put in technology that would allow people to skip it. It was a way to build in the response to anyone who would say, 'Oh, let me guess there's going to be jokes about the president.'".

Kickstarter continues growing and growing, or at least the amount of money that is pledged to the website.

According to LearnBonds, Kickstarter has registered over $4.56 billion USD that has been pledged to different projects. This number represents an over 16% increase since October 2018, and according to LearnBonds "Crowdfunding have been expanding all over the world during the last twenty years. Kickstarter was launched in 2009 and it launched over 460,000 projects."

It should be noted that Kickstarter does take a portion of the money that is pledged to successful projects, this is of course to keep the site running and give the creators some form of income for the idea. It should also be noted that 63.7& of projects don't receive the funding required to continue, while 37.3% are successful. Justinas Baltrusaitis, Editor at LearnBonds, said "The growth of these platforms is inevitable considering there are more and more creators being inspired by the success of the other crowdfunded projects."

Microsoft Japan recently went through a trial of a 4-day work week, with the results of the experiment showing that there was a huge 40% increase in productivity.

The 40% increase in productivity was mostly through shorter, more efficient meetings which saw all 2300 staff at Microsoft Japan taking 5 Fridays off in a row with the same salary, and no days removed from their annual leave. Microsoft Japan named the project the "Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019".

Microsoft Japan president and CEO Takuya Hirano said: "Work a short time, rest well and learn a lot. It's necessary to have an environment that allows you to feel your purpose in life and make a greater impact at work. I want employees to think about and experience how they can achieve the same results with 20 percent less working time".

Joker is scaring up some serious cash at the box office, with the darker DC movie reaching $934 million worldwide since its debut.

So far, the movie has made $300 million domestically in the US and $634 million in international box office sales. Given that WB spent just $70 million to make Joker (and say another $100 million in marketing) then the profits on the movie are actually far greater than even something like Avengers: Infinity War which had a $316 million budget and most likely $200-250 million.

Avengers: Infinity War was also the 4th most-expensive movie ever made, while Joker has a modest $70 million budget. This is a very big win for DC and I'm sure unexpected (at least at hitting $1 billion) when it has already beaten Wonder Woman which had a great reception, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice which was drowning in controversy (I don't know why, it was great -- especially the Ultimate Edition). We won't even talk about Justice League, but I do talk about it with the Snyder Cut of Justice League chatter.

TikTok's parent company could be in a little bit of trouble as an investigation has been opened up regarding its acquisition of Musical.ly.

According to a new report out of Reuters, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has begun to open up an investigation into ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly back in 2017. The acquisition for Musical.ly was for a whopping $1 billion, and the reason for the investigation is over U.S. concerns the Chinese owned company might be censoring politically sensitive content.

Reuters reports that CFIUS has reviewed the company acquisition, and found that TikTok did not seek proper clearance from the CFIUS. A TikTok spokesperson said, "While we cannot comment on ongoing regulatory processes, TikTok has made clear that we have no higher priority than earning the trust of users and regulators in the U.S. Part of that effort includes working with Congress and we are committed to doing so." The CFIUS also had a spokesperson who declined to reveal any details regarding the ongoing investigation.

Google has acquired Fitbit in a deal worth $2.1 billion, with Google SVP of devices and services Rick Osterloh explaining in a blog post that acquiring Fitbit is "an opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS as well as introduce Made by Google wearable devices into the market".

Fitbit will be joining Google itself just like when the company acquired Nest, versus breaking it up or sending it to join Alphabet and be used in a different fashion. Fitbit also had something to say in their own press release, standing by its privacy for health and fitness data (especially now that it's joined the do-no-evil Google). Fitbit said: "Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads".

This is a good fit for Google as it transitions into 2020 it'll need to better fight Apple and its Watch family of wearables, and Google can bring some of its smarts into Fitbit's smartwatches and future wearables. Google has its own fitness tracking software and apps, and could see Fitbit blend works with Google Fit.

NVIDIA and AMD have been releasing products one after the other for over 12 moths now with NVIDIA unleashing an entire stack of new Turing-based GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX graphics cards while AMD has been firing on all cylinders.

In the last 12 months AMD has released its next-gen Zen 2 CPU architecture and new Ryzen 3000 series processors, EPYC Rome server chips, and the soon-to-be-released Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. AMD also returned to graphics cards with the new Navi GPU architecture and the two new Radeon RX 5700 series cards and the impending launch of the RX 5500 series family.

Now we have Harvard Business Review naming NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang as the #1 CEO in the world for 2019, while AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su ranks at #26. Huang was the #2 CEO for HBR in 2018, and #3 in 2017. He has been credited with the 14x increase in the price of NVIDIA share prices from 2015-2018 which is a gigantic achievement (even better for anyone who holds NVIDIA stock).