Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 274

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google Inc. has talked to at least two private-equity firms about potentially helping them finance a deal to buy Yahoo Inc.'s core business. This would be a very strategic move for Google, which would push them right against Microsoft in its bid for the company. The move is of course still in "early-stage discussions" with no formal bid put together. The Journal has a few words as to why the move could be a huge win for Google:

Google is interested in selling some advertising across Yahoo's websites-something Yahoo largely does on its own today-according to people familiar with the matter.

Any deal involving Google could also bring other opportunities, such as bring Google's social-networking service Google+ to Yahoo's audience of nearly 700 million unique visitors a month, these people said.

Netflix have had a very bad time lately, with them admitting on Monday that they lost more customers than expected in the third quarter, which stems from an issue to divorce rentals of DVDs from streaming video services, and they've also predicted that subscriptions for DVD delivery will sharply decline in the current period.

Netflix have also projected that they'll begin to lose money for a few quarters starting in the next period, because of costs associated with their expansions in both the UK and Ireland, also announced on Monday. Investors... not so happy. It was a near-instant reaction with share prices dropping once again. They had already fallen 61-percent from their all-time high in mid-July, falling 26-percent more in after-hours trading Monday, following the quarterly report.

Netflix's market value was $16 billion and has now plummeted to just $4.6 billion, all in the space of three months. Netflix have also stated they've lost roughly 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter, which ended with 23.8 million U.S. customers, this is after years of a steadily increasing subscriber base.

WikiLeaks is pretty close to a cliff right now, unless they can overcome blockades put in place by US financial institutions. Founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said on Monday at a news conference in London that WikiLeaks needs $3.5 million over the next year just to continue normal operations.

WikiLeaks is powered solely on supporter donations and if those backers are unable to throw enough money at the organization, Assange says "we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the year." With both MasterCard and Visa halting donations to WikiLeaks in December 2010, it did not help the situation one bit. Several others have followed suite, including Bank of America, eBay, PayPal and Western Union, which when put together, represented 95-percent of WikiLeaks' revenue.

WikiLeaks is only pulling in roughly $10,000 a month now, which is a huge leap from the $3.5 million that Assange says they need to keep things leaking into 2012. In the interim, WikiLeaks has had to stop processing thousands of secret documents in order to address lawsuits they have filed against aforementioned financial channels. Assange has now vowed to use all of WikiLeaks' efforts to fight "corrupt financial institutions".

Microsoft have had a very first... er.. first quarter ending Sept. 30, 2011. Microsoft posted a quarter revenue of $17.37 billion, a 7-percent increase over the same period of last year and a tad higher than the expected $17.26 billion.

Office was the standout, though; Office accounted for $5.62 of that income, with Windows staying flat and actually falling below expectations. Microsoft's net income of $5.74 billion was a decent jump of 6-percent over the same time last year.

Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft says:

eBay have met expectations of analysts in Q3 with revenues increasing 32-percent to $3 billion compared to the same period last year. eBay's net income sat at $490.5 million, or 37 cents per share. Non-GAAP revenues, which eliminates the impact of several recent multi-million dollar acquisitions, totaled $682.2 million, or 48 cents per share, meeting analyst expectations perfectly.

Revenues estimates were high, with them ranging from $2.25 billion to $2.9 billion which is according to a poll of analysts by Thomson Reuters. Just before the earnings were released, eBay's stock was down 80 cents, or 2.4-percent to close at $33.07, and in after hours, the stock continued the downward motion dropping another 4.3-percent. Reasoning behind this isn't 100-percent, but it could be its revenue outlook for Q4, which should be its busiest because of the holidays.

Q4 expectations from eBay are quite good, with revenue expected to be in the range of $3.2 to $3.35 billion with non-GAAP earnings per share between 55 and 58 cents. eBay have said that full-year guidance included revenues between $11.5 and $11.6 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share to sit between $1.98 and $2.01. GAAP earnings per share are higher given a one-time gain on the sale of Skype to Microsoft.

Dropbox back in 2009, reportedly turned down a nine-digit, rumored to be $250 million, from Steve Jobs and Apple. Back in 2009, Dropbox was only two years old, but Steve Jobs could see the use in Dropbox before there was iCloud. Steve Jobs led the first and only meeting with the Dropbox founders, Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston, telling them they should sell to Apple because Apple would crush their company with a competing product.

That recently product is the recently launched iCloud service... the following quote is from the Forbes article (and cover story) written by Victoria Barrett:

In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his Cupertino office. "I mean, Steve friggin' Jobs," remembers Houston, now 28. "How do you even prepare for that?" When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: "I know what you do."

Well, AMD's Bulldozer launched last week to much of the publics dismay. It did not really cause the ruckus that AMD probably expected, unable to trip up the current CPU champion, Intel's Core i7. AMD's shares have since seen quite the dip, with Friday, October 14 seeing their share price hovering at $4.90 per share, and now they've experienced a sharp decline of 5-percent down to the $4.70 or so per share mark.

Thought that was bad? Well, I clicked on the 12-month period for AMD's shares and on Feb 25th, 2011 they peaked (for the 12-month period) at $9.29 per share... quite the slump they've seen. The point of this complete decline in shares saw it starting on Sep 16th, 2011 where it was sitting at $7.20, and has declined virtually everyday until Bulldozer's lacklustre launch. Did the industry know what was going to happen?

We can see that the shares over the past 6 or so months, have dropped by nearly 50-percent. This is not good, not good at all.

"We had a great quarter" says Larry Page, CEO of Google. Google has made $9.72 billion in revenue, an increase of 33-percent from Q3 2010. GAAP net income is $2.73 billion versus $2.17 during the same period last year. Google also reported $9.02 billion in revenue last quarter, with $2.51 billion in net income. Not bad, Google.

Analysts were expecting Google to earn $8.74 per share this quarter on a revenue of $7.21 billion, representing a more than 30-percent growth from last year. With these estimates, Google have blown away those expectations on both revenue and EPS, as non-GAAP EPS this quarter weer $9.72. Google has had a very active quarter, the acquisition of Motorola, and the public launch of Google's social networking site, Google+.

Google presently employs 31,353 full-time employees and has $42.6 billion in cash. Google's sales and marketing costs doubled from $661 million in Q3 2010 to $1.2 billion this quarter. Research and development costs went from $994 million to $1.4 billion. One of the more interesting items on the ledger... a $500 million charge from the Justice Department regarding pharmaceutical ads. Wow, spare change considering they have $42.6 billion in cash - hey Google, can I have a loan?

A U.S. Judge has said that Samsung's Galaxy tablets infringe on Apple's iPad patents, but also that Apple might have a problem establishing the validity of its patents. These comments are from U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, which came on Thursday in a court hearing on Apple's request to bar some Galaxy products from being sold in the US. Apple and Samsung are currently duking it out in 10 countries with more than 20 cases currently on-going.

Just yesterday, an Australian court barred the Galaxy Tab 10.1 from being sold in Australia. In April of this year, Apple sued Samsung in the US, saying that the South Korean-based company's Galaxy range of smartphones and tablets "slavishly" copies the iPhone and iPad. Fast-forward to July and Apple filed a request to bar some Samsung-branded products from sale in the US, including the Galaxy S 4G smartphone and Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA have both opposed Apple's request, saying that a ban on Samsung Galaxy products would hurt their holiday sales. Apple must now show that Samsung infringed on its patents and that its patents are valid under the law. Judge Koh also stated that she would deny Apple's request for an injunction based on one of Apple's so-called "utility" patents. She did not say whether she would grant the injunction based on three other Apple "design" patents.

Sony have released a statement revealing they have been hacked again, with 93,000 accounts globally being accessed. Sony have temporarily locked these accounts and only a "small fraction" of these 93,000 accounts showed additional activity prior to being locked. Sony are currently reviewing the accounts for unauthorised accessed and will provide more updates as they have them. Sony have also used some number play to seemingly down play the event by saying "less than one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of their PSN, SEN and SOE audience may have been affected".

Sony have used this as an opportunity to remind people of the importance of a strong password and having a username/password combination that is not associated with other online services or sites. They suggest you use a hard-to-guess password and always look out for unusual activity in your account. I've provided the full press release below:

We want to let you know that we have detected attempts on Sony Entertainment Network, PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment ("Networks") services to test a massive set of sign-in IDs and passwords against our network database. These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources. In this case, given that the data tested against our network consisted of sign-in ID-password pairs, and that the overwhelming majority of the pairs resulted in failed matching attempts, it is likely the data came from another source and not from our Networks. We have taken steps to mitigate the activity.