Business, Financial & Legal - Page 102

I've caught a number of Uber rides over the last few years, but it's normally for convenience - but this guy had another idea. A man from Grand Rapids, Michigan called an Uber after he was shot, telling the driver to take him home.

Uber driver David Heinicke said he told the 20-year-old gunshot victim that he needed to go to a hospital, but he refused. Heinicke said: "(I) tried to get him to go to the hospital, he would not do it, refused to do it. Looked like a handkerchief or something tied around his leg, trying to stop the bleeding. You could see right into his leg and the big crease down his pants where something had obviously hit him in the leg, and he later told me he had been shot by a .22 pistol".

Even after Heinicke said to his passenger that he needed to go to the hospital, all the Uber passenger wanted to do was go home. Heinicke added: "(He) said if I didn't take him here, he was going to get out and walk the rest of the way, so I brought him here. Then I called the police, and that's why you're here".

Cards Against Humanity used a black screen and a form to accept credit card payments over Black Friday, and guess what? Even by selling nothing and asking for you to give them $5, they made a huge $54,000 over Black Friday.

Most people would have to know it's a joke, but for some $5 is something you can throw to some company that you already love - like Cards Against Humanity. The FAQ on the website is pretty awesome, where it says:

About This Amazing Offer

While $50 million in pre-sale tickets have been sold for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Disney is downplaying some of the estimates of the domestic opening of the movie - with some estimates seeing the movie hitting $300 million.

Disney is predicting around $170 million for the opening weekend, with other estimates having it open to somewhere between $185 million and $210 million. The biggest December opener in the United States until now is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which pulled in $85 million, less than half of the lower estimates for The Force Awakens.

But, The Force Awakens is now going to be fighting huge openings like Jurassic World, which stomped away with $208.8 million.

Most people have had those days when they just don't want to go to work, but Aaron O'Neill took it a step too far by asking his friend to call in a bomb threat at his work, so he wouldn't have to slump into his job as a sub-contractor at Intel after a big night of drinking and recreational drugs.

O'Neill paid his friend Colin Hammond to call in a hoax bomb threat to Intel, which ended up with a motorway being shut down, disrupting air traffic control and stopped some 4000 employees at Intel from having to go to work. Intel reportedly lost around 6000 hours of production in a "conservative estimate" according to Garda Eamonn McFadden.

Hammond called the authorities, saying that there were bombs located at Intel that would explode in 12 hours. Hammond told emergency services: "You will not find them. This is a warning, we're everywhere now". When asked who was making the call, Hammond stepped over a big line by saying he was a part of the terror cell "Islamic State".

YouTube stated today it will be paying legal fees for some of its video creators facing what they believe to be unfair takedown demands. While many demands are legitimate, YouTube's feeling is fair use laws -- which protect reuse of content for commentary, criticism, news, and parody -- aren't getting enough respect.

The aim is to fight for fair use, but also to strengthen the relationship between itself and its content creators. As of now, it's backing four of them (one runs "UFO Theater", another is abortion rights group Naral Pro-Choice Ohio), but has said it may expand.

"We want, when we can, to have our users' backs," says YouTube's legal director for copyright Fred von Lohmann. "We believe even the small number of videos we are able to protect will make a positive impact on the entire YouTube ecosystem."

Fastbrick Robotics claims that its new machine can lay a four-bedroom brick house in just two days, with zero human assistance during the construction process.

Now beginning to trade on the Australian Stock Exchange, this robotics company has spent over $7 million AU over a 10 year period developing and testing initial super machine, naming it the Hadrian 105. Pooling together $5.7 million AU in capital raising, Fastrick Robotics is now looking into building its Hadrian 109 machine, being the technology capable of this incredible feat.

Utilizing a 3D CAD structure design, much as a builder or architect would, this new technology uses a 28 meter telescopic boom to lay bricks to the configured specifications. The brick mortar is then pumped and applied through the brick-laying head, utilizing a laser alignment system to provide complete accuracy.

We know that mobile gaming is huge, but did you know it was worth up to $25 billion? According to the latest report from EEDAR 'Deconstructing Mobile & Tablet Gaming 2015', the global market for mobile gaming will be worth $25 billion or so by the end of 2015.

The United States, Japan and China are where most of the money is made with $5.41 billion, $5.16 billion and $5.01 billion, respectively. South Korea is behind considerably, but still worth a large chunk of $1.37 billion. The Asia Pacific countries collectively make up most of the world's mobile gaming business, with 50% of the world's mobile gamers making 56% of the global revenues coming from the Asia Pacific region.

When you take a closer look at the numbers, the US is where there are more female mobile gamers, with 55% of mobile gamers being women. In Japan, China and South Korea, 55-60% of mobile gamers are male. When you break down the amount of money gamers are spending on mobile gaming, mobile gamers in the US spend around $3.30 per month each on games. But in China, it drops to $1.32 and up considerably for South Korea with $5.91. Looking at the Japanese mobile gamers, where they have an overall average spending of $9.39.

Northern California citizen Tom Dickey has filed a lawsuit on behalf of himself and other AMD customers, alleging that AMD misrepresented the amount of cores present in its Bulldozer CPUs.

Bulldozer CPUs were marketed as having eight cores. And while this is true, Dickey posits the design is such that this was achieved by "stripping away components from two cores and combining what was left to make a single module." In doing so, the cores do not work independently, and therefore cannot perform eight instructions simultaneously and independently, as an eight-core CPU is expected to.

Dickey is suing for "statutory and punitive damages, litigation expenses, pre- and post-judgment interest, as well as other injunctive and declaratory relief."

Last month, Jim Keller left AMD as their CPU architect, with the last of his work being done on the Zen architecture. Keller had helped AMD with their K7 and K8 architectures, which were some of AMD's more golden times in the CPU market.

It's now being rumored that Keller has joined Samsung, where he'll begin work in the mobile processor division. Keller has previously worked on mobile processors, where he helped out on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S with Apple's A4 and A5S processors, respectively. The news of Keller joining Samsung is big, as he will be working out of their R&D centers in Austin, Texas.

Keller should further develop Samsung's already great mobile offerings, especially since the South Korean giant is on the forefront of 14nm FinFET technology.

Days after we reported that 21-year veteran to AMD left for the warm arms of NVIDIA, AMD reports its third quarter financials. The chipmaker reported revenues of $1.06 billion ending September 30, much lower than the $1.43 billion from last year.

AMD's net loss was $136 million, or 17 cents per share, compared to last year where they made a profit of $41 million or 5 cents per share. AMD said that it had a write-down of $65 million for inventory of its older APUs, which saw the company take an 8 cent a share charge. AMD's higher semi-custom chips, such as the APUs powering the Xbox One and PS4, are doing well, but GPU sales are down from last year - even in the wake of the new Radeon R9 390X and new HBM-powered cards in the R9 Nano, R9 Fury and R9 Fury X.

The company has also announced a new agreement with Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics (NFME) to create an Assembly, Test, Mark and Pack (ATMP) joint venture, with NFME handing over a cool $436 million to secure itself an 85% chunk in the new partnership. NFME will hand over $ 371 million in cash, with the deal closing in the first half of next year. What about the last quarter of 2015?

AMD has lost another valuable member of its team, with Phil Rogers leaving the company after a huge 21-year stint. Rogers was one of the key personnel that lead the development of Heterogeneous Computing, which is set to kick start the next era of computing.

Rogers has joined NVIDIA, where he takes the throne of the Chief Software Architect of Compute Server. He had been a Corporate Fellow of System Architecture and Performance at AMD before he jumped ship. Rogers' updated LinkedIn profile also shows that he is now with Team Green. For AMD, this isn't the first veteran to leave the company in recent months, with its CPU architect Jim Keller leaving the company last month.

Keller was responsible for its future Zen architecture, which will be unveiled next year.

It's no surprise to see huge tech companies follow competitor's methodologies quite closely or even go so far as to "borrow" ideas and patents. But it looks like Apple has outright infringed on technology owned by the University of Wisconson for the A-series CPU chips in modern iDevices, and will face a substantial fine.

Cupertino-based tech giant Apple may have to shell out a whopping $862 million in damages after a jury ruled Apple infringed on a patent owned by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The patent, which was filed all the way back in 1998, is specifically used to boost processor efficiency. Apple used this process to optimize a slew of chips including the A7, A8 and A8X CPUs found in devices like the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, iPhone 6S Plus and iPad models like the iPad Air and iPad Mini.

The jury has ruled that the patent is indeed valid and is currently working out how much in damages Apple will pay to the university. The global company argues that it didn't infringe on the patent and that the patent itself isn't valid, and even tried to convince the United States Patent and Trademark Office to re-evaluate the patent in question. As decreed by U.S. District Judge William Conley, the preceedings will move forward in three parts--liability, damages, and determining whether Apple willfully violated the patent, where it could face even more severe fines.

After spending 9 million GBP on three years' worth of constant guard, the London Metro Police have finally stepped away from their 24/7 surveillance over the Ecuadoarian embassy that houses Julian Assange.

For the past three years now the London Metropolitan Police Service has stood like sentinals outside of the Ecuadorian embassy in round-the-clock guard posts. The world watched on as the controversial figurehead Julian Assange faced his opressors through the safe harbor of the embassy. The polic guard have strict orders to arrest the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange on sight if he should step outside of the safe harbor of the embassy, but for the past three years, Assange has stayed safely ensconced in the building like a hostage.

This endeavor has cost nearly 10 million GBP across three years time, and now the police force has finally called it quits. "Whilst the MPS remains committed to executing the arrest warrant and presenting Julian Assange before the court, it is only right that the policing operation to achieve this is continually reviewed against the diplomatic and legal efforts to resolve the situation," reads an official announcement from the London Metro Police. "As a result of this continual review the MPS has today Monday, 12 October withdrawn the physical presence of officers from outside the Embassy."

Dell has just completed the single most substantial acquisition in the history of technology, paying a whopping $67 billion for EMC Corporation, one of the biggest names in data management.

Bringing EMC into the fold is extremely advantageous for Dell, who plans to bolster its data computing sector with EMC's valuable expertise in services like cloud management, enterprise-grade backup, recovery and archiving, and data virtualization. EMC powers a huge portion of the world's business data management, with companies across the globe utilizing its wide array of services to encrypt, analyze and interpret massive data streams across a wide variety of platforms.

"The combination of Dell and EMC creates an enterprise solutions powerhouse bringing our customers industry leading innovation across their entire technology environment. Our new company will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security," said Michael Dell. "Our investments in R&D and innovation along with our privately-controlled structure will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes. I am incredibly excited to partner with the EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, RSA and Virtustream teams and am personally committed to the success of our new company, our customers and partners."

Just how successful are some YouTubers? Well, YouTube personality Jordan "CaptainSparklez" Maron mostly plays Minecraft, just spent $4.5 million on a new mansion in the Hollywood Hills. His new mansion is just down the road from the massive house that the creator of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, purchased recently.

CaptainSparklez has over 8.8 million subscribers, and has a decent amount of subscribers on Twitch too, with over 1.2 million. Maron has over 1.9 billion views on YouTube, which has provided him with the bank account to dump down $4.5 million on a new house. Not too bad for playing games, hey, Mom?

There have been a number of employees that have reportedly been poached from Tesla Motors by Apple to work on their rumored electric car project, but Tesla founder Elon Musk has had a few choice words to throw into the mix.

When talking with German newspaper Handselsblatt, Musk was questioned over the key members that Apple had secured, with Musk saying: "Important engineers? They have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the 'Tesla Graveyard.' If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding".

It's quite the statement, with Musk continuing his laugh at Apple when he was asked if he saw the iMaker as a serious competitor to its electric vehicles, where he said: "Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch". He added: "No, seriously: it's good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: 'Build me a car.' But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough".

Last year Uber was hacked with around 50,000 drivers' names and license numbers accessed, Uber's legal investigations into the attack led them to an IP address of who was responsible.

The address? The Chief Technology Officer of Lyft, Uber's competitor - at least according to two sources familiar with the matter. Uber announced it was hacked in February during a lawsuit it filed in the San Francisco federal court, so it could find out who was behind the IP address. According to the ride sharing giant's papers, an at-the-time unidentified person was using a Comcast IP address and had access to a security key that they used for the breach.

According to two of Reuters' sources, the IP address was traced back to the CTO of Lyft, Chris Lambert. The court papers have no correlation between the IP address and the person behind the attack, with Uber finding the IP address through a process of elimination where it worked through all of the IP addresses that accessed a critical security key that had been accidentally deposited on the public code-sharing platform, GitHub. As for the IP address, it was used by a VPN service based in Scandanavia, with the Judge Laurel Beeler saying that the information that Uber wanted through its subpoena for Comcast's records was "reasonably likely" to help reveal the "bad actor" behind the attack.

Cupertino tech titan Apple has yet to be dethroned as the world's most profitable brand and continues its global dominance for the third year in a row.

According to new 2014 rankings published by Interbrand, Apple's total value has shot up by 43% for an estimated brand value of $170,276 million. The second place competitor, Google, sits just $50 million shy from breaking Apple's three-year streak at an estimated value of $120 billion. Microsoft is in fourth place with a brand value of $67 billion increase of 11%. Despite being a world leader in tech, Samsung sits at a cool seventh place with 0% gains and a brand value of $45 billion.

With its new line of iDevices including the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and even a smartring prototype, Apple is poised to continue its reign for 2015. Google has taken aim at the throne with its new Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P handsets that feature Project Fi network support.

In a move that surprised absolutely no one, Twitter's board of directors has officially named Jack Dorsey as acting Chief Executive Officer of the social media giant.

As one of the original founders of Twitter, Dorsey was called back to action after ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stepped down back in June. Within five months after being appointed to interim CEO, Dorsey reprised his role as acting CEO of the company--a position he previously held from 2007-2008. Interestingly enough, Dorsey will actually simultaneously stand as CEO of both Twitter and Square and also maintain his position in Disney's board of directors.

The official SEC filing notes that Dorsey won't be compensated for running the company, and Twitter has no future plans to pay him. This is largely due to the fact that as a co-founder, Dorsey owns a huge portion of company shares. "There are currently no plans to provide Mr. Dorsey with direct compensation for his role as Chief Executive Officer," reads the release.

When you think about profits in the music industry, you'd think that by now the likes of Spotify and Pandora would be making hundreds of millions of dollars - but in reality, they don't.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), music streaming revenue has increased by 27% year-on-year, while vinyl sales have jumped 52% in the same period of time. In the first half of 2015, vinyl sales made $222 million while streaming revenue hit $163 million. Apple Music isn't included in these results, so the streaming side of things will see an uptick when Apple gets onboard.

According to data analyst Joshua Friedlander: "Overall, the music industry has become the most-digital in terms of all traditional media outlets - magazines, newspapers - in terms of transition. There is more optimism out there than there was. Two-thirds of the market is still physical [CDs]. It used to be monolithic. Now it's a mix of things, a revenue diversification that makes a more stable source to grow off of. [Streaming] services have mostly grown through word of mouth. There hasn't been a big Spotify advertising push. When you get a player like Apple involved, that really generates a whole new level of awareness".