Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 125

All the latest Business, Financial & Legal news as it relates to tech, gaming, and science - Page 125.

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Turkish businessman in exile buys Vertu for $61 million

Lana Jelic | Mar 13, 2017 2:55 PM CDT

Vertu, a manufacturer, and retailer of luxury phones was established back in 1998 by Nokia. However, the company has changed hands a couple of times by now.

Turkish businessman in exile buys Vertu for $61 million

First, the company was sold to EQT VI in 2012, and their most recent owner, a Hong Kong-based holding company Godin Holdings, bought the company in 2015.

Now, Vertu once again has a new owner - a Turkish businessman Hakan Uzan, who is currently in exile. Uzan reportedly bought Vertu for $61 million.

Continue reading: Turkish businessman in exile buys Vertu for $61 million (full post)

Toshiba's 2016: fastest growing storage device vendor

Anthony Garreffa | Mar 7, 2017 8:00 AM CST

Toshiba has had a great year in the storage world throughout 2016, with the company becoming the fastest growing vendor in the world with $25 billion in HDD sales, and $17 billion in SSD sales.

In two IDC reports, they state: "Toshiba's broad HDD and SSD portfolio enabled them to participate in nearly all market segments for storage devices, a key factor that helped to underpin Toshiba's strong year-over-year revenue growth in CY2016. With successful launches of new HDD and SSD products over the next few quarters to address demand from cloud service providers and the traditional IT market, Toshiba should be well positioned to sustain further HDD and SSD revenue growth in 2017".

Toshiba's hard work in the HDD market saw 9% increase in unit market share in Q4 2016, with Toshiba now taking a large 24% stake in the market - a 60% increase over Q2 2015, where they had just 15%. Interestingly, Toshiba was the only HDD maker that saw total revenue increase in 2016, and increase in revenue share in every product segment: mobile, desktop, performance-optimized enterprise, and capacity-optimized enterprise for the year.

Continue reading: Toshiba's 2016: fastest growing storage device vendor (full post)

Apple new headquarters is ready for April's opening

Lana Jelic | Feb 23, 2017 7:28 AM CST

Apple has announced the name of their new spaceship-looking headquarters - Apple Park. The 175-acre campus will be ready for employees to begin occupying in April.

Apple new headquarters is ready for April's opening

Over the next six months until the official opening, more than 12,000 people will move into the futuristic structure.

To honor the memory of Steve Jobs, Apple decided to name the theater at Apple Park 'Steve Jobs Theater.'

Continue reading: Apple new headquarters is ready for April's opening (full post)

Amazon will deliver packages with drones, and parachutes

Anthony Garreffa | Feb 15, 2017 2:06 AM CST

Amazon already has me excited about the future of deliveries with drones, and even freakin' warehouses floating in the sky - but now the company has filed a patent for drone deliveries, with package parachutes.

CNN reports that the US Patent and Trademark office provided Amazon with a patent that sees the everything giant delivering packages with drones and parachutes. The patent shows Amazon would use drones to delivery packages "at altitude" and "monitor and adjust package trajectory during descent". CNN reports that Amazon's drones could "radio a message to an off-course package, instructing it to deploy a parachute, compressed air canister or landing flap".

At the moment drones still need human supervision, but in a future of 'automate all the things', Amazon could be a leader in drone/automated delivery very, very quickly.

Continue reading: Amazon will deliver packages with drones, and parachutes (full post)

Husband cheats on wife, sues Uber for $48 million

Anthony Garreffa | Feb 12, 2017 11:29 PM CST

A bit of a light hearted story - well, at least in a way - as a man is suing Uber for causing his divorce. Yeah, you read that right.

The French businessman is suing the ridesharing giant for a huge $48 million, after a notification bug with the Uber app let his wife spy on his whereabouts. The man used his wife's smartphone to order Ubers, and then signed out of the app - but, the notifications continued rolling in, after he thought he had signed out.

His wife would've have learned about the affairs from the Uber notifications, with all of his orders, drive names, license plate, and arrival times. His real-time location wouldn't have been tracked, but if he said he'd be working late at the office or catching up with friends for a drink, his wife would know he's lying from his Uber notifications.

Continue reading: Husband cheats on wife, sues Uber for $48 million (full post)

Vizio sold TV viewing habits without permission

Anthony Garreffa | Feb 7, 2017 3:33 AM CST

Vizio has been tracking, selling your TV viewing habits - in something that we've found out from a settlement with the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General, costing Vizio a swift $2.2 million.

The $2.2 million settlement will settle the state and federal charges placed against Vizio, as the company were busted installing software on 11 million smart TVs to track viewing histories, all without consumer knowledge. Vizio is being order ed to delete any user data that was scooped up before March 1, 2016.

Vizio was busted working with a third-party company to build its smart TVs that were capable of capturing "second-by-second" viewing information about what's being displayed on the screen. This information captured includes what was on your cable, internet, set-top boxes, DVD players, over-the-air broadcasts, and other streaming devices.

Continue reading: Vizio sold TV viewing habits without permission (full post)

DRM giant forgets to secure server, log files leaked

Anthony Garreffa | Feb 7, 2017 12:48 AM CST

Denuvo has been in the headlines lately with the DRM-maker being a part of some of the biggest games of the last 12 months, and now the company is faking something very different - with a massive chunk of private web-form messages being leaked.

The first messages appeared on 4chan, with the messages including contact between game developers and Denuvo. The 11MB file has messages from Denuvo's public contact form, with messages from all the way back to April 25, 2014 - furthermore, it seems like their web database content is totally unsecured, with root directors for "fileadmin" and "logs" opened at the time of writing.

There are also messages from game developers like 343 Industries asking Denuvo about applying their DRM tech to Halo Wars games on the PC, Harmonix Games asked about an in-person meeting during GDC this year, and Capcom asked for a few things, too. Other developers including Ninja Theory and TaleWords also saw their private messages with Denuvo opened to the world.

Continue reading: DRM giant forgets to secure server, log files leaked (full post)

AMD hits LG, Vizio products with patent infringement

Anthony Garreffa | Feb 6, 2017 10:07 PM CST

AMD is getting confident against some very large companies over a patent infringement, with LG, MediaTek, Vizio, and Sigma Designs all in AMD's crosshairs right now.

AMD filed the claim last month, saying that the four companies are manufacturing products that infringe on two patents filed by ATI, and one owned by AMD as well. The patent infringements claim that the companies are infringements with unified shaders, graphics processing architecture, and parallel pipeline graphics systems.

An interesting take on AMD's pursuit is that MediaTek, LG, Vizio, and Sigma Designs normally license their GPU technology from third-party companies like Imagination and ARM. AMD is now suing the manufacturers direct, versus the physical products that the companies are making. AMD is alleging that the infringed products include MediaTek's Helio P10 processor that powers a few LG smartphones, while the Sigma Design SX7 (STV7701) processor for 4K TVs with HDR support, something Vizio uses inside of their high-end TVs.

Continue reading: AMD hits LG, Vizio products with patent infringement (full post)

AMD shares up 16% riding upcoming Ryzen, Vega waves

Anthony Garreffa | Feb 2, 2017 8:54 PM CST

AMD had quite the year in 2016, splitting its GPU division off into the successful Radeon Technologies Group, with the newly-focused RTG team quickly jumping into action with the Polaris unveil, launch, and now the new cycle is coming in for Vega in 2017.

Consumers and investors are also excited for AMD's return to the enthusiast CPU arena with their upcoming Ryzen processors, with AMD shares increasing after their Q1 2017 financial results. The company pulled in $1.1 billion in revenue, beating analysts' expectations of around $1.07 billion, and quarterly losses of 1c per share - lower than analysts' expectations of 2x per share.

This resulted in a 16% increase in AMD shares from $10.40 or so, to $11.60 each. AMD President and CEO Lisa Su said in a press release: "We met our strategic objectives in 2016, successfully executing our product roadmaps, regaining share in key markets, strengthening our financial foundation, and delivering annual revenue growth. As we enter 2017, we are well positioned and on-track to deliver our strongest set of high-performance computing and graphics products in more than a decade".

Continue reading: AMD shares up 16% riding upcoming Ryzen, Vega waves (full post)

Apple overthrows Samsung as top smartphone vendor in Q4

Lana Jelic | Feb 1, 2017 1:52 PM CST

Apple overtook Samsung's #1 position in Q4 and became top global smartphone vendor in the world.

According to a report from Strategy Analytics, Apple sold around 800,000 units more than Samsung in Q4 2016. Apple shipped 78.3 million smartphones worldwide and captured 18% market share in Q4 2016, rising 5% annually from 74.8 million units in Q4 2015. This was the iPhone's best performance in over a year.

Playing a huge role in this was Samsung's fiasco with the Galaxy Note7. The Korean company shipped 77.5 million units worldwide, around 800,000 less than Apple.

Continue reading: Apple overthrows Samsung as top smartphone vendor in Q4 (full post)