Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 130

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Razer (yes, the Razer) has acquired a smartphone manufacturer, Nexbit. Nexbit was a startup company that gathered around $1.3 million via Kickstarter campaign for, what is marked as, the cloud-first smartphone. Their idea was to make a phone that would allow usage of apps and content that transcended between phone's onboard storage and a complimentary cloud service.

The Kickstarter campaign was a success. Twelve hours after it was launched, the phone reached its funding goal of $500,000 instead of reaching it within a month and completed its $1 million goal within two weeks.

This resulted in a smartphone named the Nextbit Robin, a phone with 32GB of internal storage. However, the phone utilizes the cloud storage of 100 GB offered by the manufacturer which is integrated within the phone's software as additional storage. The phone went on sale in May last year.

Oculus has been stuck in real life court for the last few weeks, defending itself against claims that it stolen precious code from ZeniMax, in a lawsuit that could now be worth a hefty $4 billion.

Polygon has reported that the closing arguments have been made, and the case is now in the jury's hands. It will now be decided if Oculus CTO John Carmack stole IP from ZeniMax and had it with him when he joined Oculus in 2013, and in the closing arguments - ZeniMax doubled the damages it was seeking - from $2 billion, to a total of $4 billion.

ZeniMax are the owners of id Software - the creators of DOOM, Quake, and more - the developer John Carmack worked for until he jumped ship for Oculus. It's being argued that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey didn't have the technical expertise to built the Rift, without needing Carmack's help.

A new report from Counterpoint Research shows that Apple's iPhone is no longer the top-selling smartphone in China. The iPhone held this position for the past five years, but it looks like it's time for a new star.

And in China, that star is Oppo's R9. The report says that a total of 17 million units of the R9 were sold in the country last year, which is around 4% of the market share. Apple managed to sell 12 million units, meaning they captured around 2% of the market.

Apple became top-selling smartphone in China in 2012, and it held that position for five years. The American company is clearly becoming more vulnerable in China with many Chinese phone manufacturers like Huawei, Oppo, and Xiaomi gaining more fans.