Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 128

HTC has reported their monthly revenue for April 2017, and it doesn't look good. The company marked a 9.29% decline in revenue compared to March and 18.03% decline compared to the same month last year.

HTC's revenue for April 2017 was NT$(Taiwan New Dollar)4.71 billion or $155 million. The total of revenue for this year is NT$19.24 billion or $625 million, which means that the revenue dropped 6.45% compared to the first four months of 2016.

It seems that the HTC U Ultra and HTC U Play sales aren't that great, and they aren't helping the company to get back on track. The two phones were launched in January, but many were left disappointed with the last year's processor and a steep price that can be compared to the price of Snapdragon 835 powered Galaxy S8.

Apple has acquired a sleep tracking app and hardware maker Beddit. The Finnish startup posted this news to their website adding that users personal data will be collected, used and disclosed under the Apple Privacy Policy.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The Finland-based company was founded in 2007 and in late 2015 they launched their products in Apple stores. Their latest product, Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor, automatically tracks your sleep and works with the Beddit app on your iPhone or iPad to help you achieve better sleep.

Deutsche Bank has published its annual "Mapping of the World's Prices" report in which strategist Jim Reid compares prices of common items in global cities.

The iPhone 7, launched in September last year, also made its way onto this list. Reid compared the prices of the iPhone 7 with 128GB of internal storage in 33 countries around the world. The prices are sourced from official Apple store websites, or online retailers and news websites if the official prices via Apple store weren't available.

According to the report, Turkey is the worst place from the surveyed countries to buy an iPhone since its price there is $1,200. Turkey has replaced Brazil on top of the list of the most expensive places to buy an iPhone.

GTC 2017 - NVIDIA has been constructing its new headquarters for a while now, and we're still 5 months away from completion so that their 2500 employees can have a new home to work.

The company has spent $370 million on the new HQ, which spans 46,500 square meters, and is split into two floors. The entire building is centralized, which has all of the underground garage through to the toilets being accessible from the center of the building. NVIDIA did this, so that they could "capture the energy and the buzz of the company".

NVIDIA has watercooled the entire building, where they're using recycled water that will be piped into a tower sunk under the roof of the building, and will cool the building through "an evaporation system with three giant fans". NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang will not have an office, and will work across different buildings in various places instead.

NVIDIA has come out swinging with its quarterly financial report yet again, with the company seeing a huge 48.4% increase in quarterly revenue, thanks to the never ending demand for its GPUs that are used in gaming PCs, cloud computing, AI, the data center world, and more.

NVIDIA's future HQ

NVIDIA's data center revenue saw nearly double the revenue in Q1 2017 up to $409 million, beating analysts' expectations of $318.2 million, according to FactSet. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said: "All of the world's major internet and cloud service providers now use NVIDIA's Tesla-based GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators".

Apple has jumped to the lead in the wearables market, while former leader Fitbit has fallen to third place.

According to the data obtained by Strategy Analytics, global wearables shipments rose to 22 million units during Q1 2017, which is up 21% compared to the first quarter of 2016.

Steven Waltzer, Industry Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said:

While Samsung and Apple still rule the smartphone market, LG has shown significant growth globally, and they captured a record 20% of the US smartphone market in Q1 2017.

According to Strategy Analytics, the company has sold 7.3 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2017 (up 3-points year over year).

The report contributes this success to the steady sales of LG's lower-price model, K and X series. The company's latest flagship, the LG G6, wasn't included in this report since it only hit the US market in April.

Apple is Making America Great Again by spending $1 billion on a new fund that will promote advanced manufacturing positions in the US, something Apple CEO Tim Cook announced on Mad Money today.

Cook said: "By doing that, we can be the ripple in the pond. Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs around, those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them".

Apple will start announcing the beneficiaries of its $1 billion fund later this month, with the company looking to train developers and help more people coding, with more details on this coming in the summer.

IDC has revealed its latest report on smartphone shipments in the first three months of 2017. According to the analytics firm, phone companies shipped a total of 347.4 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of 2017, which is a 4.3% increase compared to the Q1 2016.

The numbers show that Samsung and Apple are still at the top of this list, although their shipment number stagnates. Samsung regained control as the leader in the worldwide smartphone market despite a flat first quarter (0% year-over-year growth). The South Korean giant holds the biggest market share, 22.8%, with 79.2 million smartphones shipped, the same number they shipped in Q1 2016.

Apple remained essentially flat with shipments reaching 51.6 million units in the first quarter, up slightly from the 51.2 million shipped last year. These numbers mean they hold 14.9% of market share, a slight drop from 15.4% in Q1 2016.

Moving from a PC-centric company to a more datacenter driven one, Intel recently announced that IDF 2017 will be cancelled, and that going forward there will be no more Intel Developer Forums.

Instead, Intel has told us that they will focus on a broader range of industry events. Going forward, TweakTown was told to expect more events such as Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Day and Intel's Artificial Intelligence Day. Intel also told us to expect a more pronounced presence at events, where we don't typically see Intel, such as SXSW and even the LA Auto Show.

This pronounced shift in Intel's strategy comes on the heels of Intel's latest restructuring announcements. IDF has been one of the staple events of our industry, but it was clear that in the past few years the event had shifted from mostly PC-focused to 5G/IoT/DataCenter/PC/AI/etc. focused. Last IDF, we saw technologies from almost every corner of the industry, three days almost wasn't enough to see everything.