Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 112

Huawei has had one helluva year, with the Chinese giant posting a huge $107 billion in revenue for 2018, the first time the company has broken the $100 billion mark. Revenues were up 19.5% from 2017, while pulling in a net profit of $8.8 billion, an increase of 25% over 2017's numbers.

The consumer business slice of Huawei made the most revenue in 2018 hauling a large $52 billion, which is the first time in Huawei's history that the consumer business made the majority of the revenue for the year. 2018 was good to Huawei with a huge 45.1% increase year-over-year in its consumer business division.

Huawei sold over 200 million smartphones in 2018, and just days ago now revealed its new flagship P30 series smartphone with what appears to be the best camera in a smartphone by a long shot. As for this year, Huawei is expected to do well with January and February 2019 doing extremely well with year-over-year increases of 30%.

GoFundMe inception is happening in San Francisco, with the company donating $5000 towards a GoFundMe campaign that is acting as both a counter, and troll against a separate GoFundMe campaign.

The legal battle ensuing is over the construction of a Navigation Center, which will act as a higher-end homeless shelter that doesn't just provide a safe place to lay your head at night, but it will offer other services and counselling in San Francisco. Some residents took to GoFundMe in a campaign called "Safe Embarcadero for All" attempting to raise $100,000 that would be used "exclusively for legal and related costs to oppose the proposed Navigation Center at Seawall Lot 330".

This particular GoFundMe has an interesting person at its center with lawyer Andrew Zacks involved in the fundraising through the Safe Embarcadero for All which retains the lawfirm he's a partner at; Zacks, Freedman & Patterson that call themselves "the voice of Bay Area property owners". SF Weekly reports that "very wealthy residents of the eastern edge of the city has raised more than $44,000 in 11 days. The recipient: a lawyer, Andrew Zacks, who is representing the residents in their fight against a homeless shelter that's been proposed for a parking lot on Embarcadero between Beale and Bryant streets".

The rumors from the last 48 hours or so have been correct: NVIDIA has just announced it is acquiring Mellanox in a deal worth $6.9 billion. Mellanox is a networking company that is a leader in its field, building super-fast interconnects for datacenters, a market that NVIDIA itself dominates in with its GPUs.

Mellanox was being eyed off by other companies including Intel, but the Israeli-based chipmaker has become NVIDIA's largest acquisition ever. The acquisition will see NVIDIA bolster its position in the datacenter and server markets, which account for nearly 1/3 of its sales. Mellanox mostly makes chips that power high-speed ethernet and InfiniBand networks that are found in servers, primarily in datacenters in the cloud and storage worlds as well as super-fast supercomputers for AI and deep learning.

NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang said: "The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world's datacenters. Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine".

NVIDIA is reportedly eying off an acquisition of Mellanox for a huge $7 billion, according top sources familiar with the matter reports Reuters.

The purported $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox would be NVIDIA's largest acquisition ever, and would see the GPU giant bolster its business of making various chips for the datacenter. NVIDIA wasn't the only one with its name in the acquisition hat with Intel being outbid by the GPU giant in its quest to acquire Mellanox.

Mellanox is based in both the US and Israel where it makes high-speed network connecting servers, with a market cap at the end of trading on Friday of around $5.9 billion. We should expect this deal to cement in this week, leading directly into NVIDIA's biggest event of the year: the GPU Technology Conference, or GTC.

In a move that isn't so surprising for people looking forward with how big Disney is getting, the company has announced that its upcoming streaming service Disney+ will be packed with "the entire Disney motion picture library".

The news is coming directly from Disney CEO Bob Iger, which will effectively end Disney's current 'Vault' system, which wasn't anything to brag about anyway. This is a huge departure from the usual operating procedure at Disney, as it never offered its entire library of content and instead held classic films that people wanted badly, just to drive hype up to its launch. Try it yourself; older Disney movies aren't the easiest to find, but this new move will make them incredibly easy to find.

Iger explained during the announcement at a company shareholder meeting: "The service, which I mentioned earlier is going to launch later in the year, is going to combine what we call library product, movies, and television, with a lot of original product as well, movies and television. And at some point fairly soon after launch it will house the entire Disney motion picture library, so the movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in a 'vault' and brought out basically every few years will be on the service".

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has taken to his official Twitter account to congradulate the recently former Nintendo of America President, Reggie Fils-Aime.

Last week we heard about the saddening yet humbling news of Nintendo America's COO stepping down, Reggie Fils-Aime. The famous President of Nintendo of America announced that he would be surrendering his position as President to none of their than Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Doug Bowser. Fils-Aime has had an epic 15 long year career at Nintendo of America and will be departing from his position on April 15th, 2019.

Reggie took to the official Nintendo of America's Twitter account to post a highlight video of many of his most iconic moments while in his position. He also thanked the fans for their support throughout his time serving as President and said that he is going to be spending much more time with his family and wife. There was quite a lot of positive feedback from the Nintendo community, and surprisingly enough Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson got on board the positivity train as well by congratulated Fils-Aime on his incredible career.

I still remember laughing for hours and hours and then being embarrassed for the guy who starred in what could've been a parody but was serious, at The Verge's attempt at a 'Gaming PC Build Guide' video on YouTube. Well, it sucked - it was categorically wrong and would actually misinform and possible damage a novice gamers build if they followed those stupid guidelines.

Well, a bunch of YouTubers thought it would be funny to give the video sh*t and attack it and rightfully so - that's what they do for a living. Well, The Verge's parent company Vox Media is now trying to rid the internet of these videos attacking their cringe-worthy build guide.

For those who aren't in the loop, The Verge collaborated with a credit card company for a paid advertisement on building a PC. There were plenty of people up and down the food chain that would've written scripts, edited, starred in the video, shot the video, edited the video, uploaded to YouTube, and more. But still, the video was filled with errors and gaffs that were just too good to be skipped over by YouTubers, and especially Kyle 'Bitwit' who used his alter ego 'Lyle' to rip the video a new one. It was absolutely hilarious, and knowing Kyle in person (one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet) it was even funnier because everything he said was true.

Respawn's new Apex Legends battle royale game helps EA bounce back from a big stock dive.

EA had a bad third quarter. Not bad for a games company, but bad for EA, who expects continual growth and hundreds of millions in earnings every three months. The company missed its forecasts by as much as $116 million on the heels of lower than expected Battlefield V sales, subscriptions, and delayed mobile games. This miss caused EA stock to nosedive by over 16%, dropping from $96.52 per share to $78.79 in a day.

But now the games titan's stock is back up to $97.60 per share, its highest point in the last month. EA likely owes this turnaround to Respawn's new smash hit BR game Apex Legends. The free-to-play game has generated considerable buzz across the industry, amassing 10 million players in just 3 days and pulling in untold monetization.

A recent article from Bloomberg has claimed that Activision-Blizzard are planning to get rid of 'hundreds' of employee's next week in wake of the recent declines or flat-lining or their titles.

Bloomberg has reported that Activision-Blizzard employee's that are close to the matter have told Bloomberg that the company is planning on laying-off "hundreds" of jobs next week. The rumored decision is reportedly due to to titles such as Overwatch and Hearthstone having declines or flat-lines in their player-base numbers. Another fact that could contribute to the decision would be that the companies share prices recently dropped 2.5% just last Friday.

According to Bloomberg, analysts have also predicted that Activision-Blizzard's sales will decline a further 2.5% by the end of this year, this will bring the company's net value to $7.513 billion. Activision-Blizzard just recently separated from Destiny developer Bungie, this separation could see the company loosing out on a revenue stream of around $400 million.

Over the Super Bowl weekend, authorities in Georgia arrested 21 people in "Operation Interception", with the ages of those arrested between 20-25 who traveled near the Atlanta metro area trying to pick up children for sex. Yeah, disgusting... and a game studio worker and Twitch streamer was one of them.

Tommy Cheung worked for Hi-Rez Studios, the developer behind big games like Smite and Paladins, and doubled as a partnered Twitch streamer. Cheung was arrested over the weekend in Brookhaven, Georgia where he was charged with using a compute service "to seduce, solicit, lure or entice" a child, which is a felony in Georgia.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a press release that this child sex sting was months in the works, adding: "The goal of 'Operation Interception' was to arrest persons who communicate with children on-line, have sexually explicit conversations, and then travel to meet them for the purpose of having sex. Additionally, the operation targeted those who are willing to exploit children by purchasing sex with a minor".