Business, Financial & Legal - Page 133

Game of Thrones is an undeniable hit, so big that it was the most downloaded show of 2012, but how does the director of the show feel being downloaded so many times? David Petrarca, director of Game of Thrones said that you simply shrug your shoulder at piracy, and that illegal downloads don't really matter because your show thrives on cultural buzz.

When talking to a group of panelists at the Perth Writer's Festival over the weekend, the Game of Thrones director said that shows like the HBO smash hit capitalize on the social commentary they create, adding "that's how they survive." Just how many times was the show downloaded? It was averaging roughly 3.9 million downloads per episode in 2012. The closest downloaded show to this was How I Met Your Mother, with around 3 million downloads per episode.

HBO is unique, as the premium cable channel has 26 million US-based subscribers, and 60 million or so across the world. With that amount of subscribers, they can afford to allow illegal downloads as it gets their show some serious press - not just in the normal forms - but socially across Facebook, etc. The director also talked about other huge shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy, saying that while they do well, they can all be consumed whenever, and wherever.

Unfortunately for those who missed the Google Glass pre-order, there is really only one other way to get a headset before everyone else: buy one from someone who pre-ordered a set. Since the competition to win a chance to buy a pair ends today, you're basically left waiting for the public release or buying a pre-release product from one of those lucky few who have purchased one already.

One such person put up an auction on Ebay, which has now been pulled. The auction started at $1,500, the sunk price for the headset, though it quickly skyrocketed to over $15,000 before being pulled. It's not clear whether the user pulled the auction or whether Ebay and/or Google had something to do with it.

From the auction's description:

Last week, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer pissed off a bunch of her employees by banning them from working remotely. Working from home can be great for some people, but now if you did that at Yahoo, you'll have to completely change your day-to-day life and work at a Yahoo office.

Jackie Reses, Yahoo's Human Resources boss, sent a memo out, advising that all remote employees would need to be working in Yahoo offices by June. This will mostly affect parents of young children, where working from home can be a massive benefit. Where it gets weird, is that Mayer herself had a child last year, and is a CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world - so how does she do it? How does she balance the trials and tribulations of motherhood, with the responsibilities of being a CEO?

Well, she builds her own nursery in her office, that's how! This will not bode well with mothers at Yahoo who currently work remotely, and so they should be upset. If it's good for Mayer, and not for them, what does that mean for working parents at Yahoo? Why not just build a nursery and staff it within Yahoo to keep everyone happy? I know that's what I'd do - keep your employees happy, at all costs.

If you thought THQ had sold everything they owned when we first reported on the case, you were wrong, as they still have plenty to get rid of. The remaining franchises that THQ own are now being sold as part of a "court-approved sales process".

This court-approved sale is getting rid of THQ properties such as Darksiders, Homeworld, Red Faction and Destroy All Humans! If you want to get in quick, the final bids on the properties are due no later than April 15. THQ have said that they've already received over "100 expressions of interest" regarding "various titles" they still hold the rights to. There will be six items to be sold off, with four properties available individually, and two "bundle" deals, one for internal properties, the other for licensed IP.

The games to be sold separately include Darksiders, Homeworld, MX and Red Faction. The internal bundle will include Big Beach Sports, Destroy All Humans!, Summoner and "more". Marvel Super Hero, Supreme Commander, Worms and "more" will be included in the licensed bundle.

We reported a couple of weeks ago on the New York Times piece about the Tesla S, where the reviewer had made some shifty moves - but now we're seeing the results of this review rippling through the industry. Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down with Bloomberg TV's Betty Liu on "In the Loop", where he talked about the Model S and the NYT's piece on his vehicle.

Musk has said that the New York Times review of the Model S might have cost the company as much as $100 million in value, and the cancellation of 'hundreds' of orders from customers. Musk said, "It probably affected us to the tune of tens of millions, to the order of $100 million, so it's not trivial." So it looks like Tesla were on the losing end of the Times' piece on their Model S.

Musk continues, saying:

Bittorrent users in the United States will now be subject to the "six-strikes" copyright alert system. Customers of AT&T, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast will face "mitigation measures" if a movie studio or other copyright holder asserts that they were illegally downloading a copyrighted work.

Theoretically the program will affect all users who pirate copyrighted material, though studios and other content owners can only really easily track bittorrent swarms. The program features escalating tiers of warnings, starting out with a simple notice that they were found to be downloading copyrighted material.

The second tier will see users facing more invasive measures, such as being forced to watch a video. The final tier of punishment can see users having their download speed reduced, though no service can be disconnected as a result of these accusations. Users can appeal for $35 to the American Arbitration Association. If a user wins the appeal, the fee is refunded.

Opera seems to be making headlines on a weekly basis in 2013, A couple of weeks ago I reported on the companies adoption of Webkit, then a few days later, covered the layoff of over 90 employees. Now Opera is announcing the formation of an entirely new subsidiary.

Over the last few months Opera has made a few strategic acquisitions with the intention of bolstering it's mobile advertising business. The company has spent in excess of $100 million snatching up companies like AdMarvel, 4th Screen Advertising and Mobile Theory and has announced today the formation of Opera Mediaworks.

Opera Mediaworks is a fully-owned subsidiary, which is being touted as the world's largest mobile ad platform. The new arm of Opera includes ad mediation and exchange services AdMarvel and Opera Mediaworks, mobile advertising networks Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising, and the Opera Mobile Store and Opera Payment Exchange to monetize ad solutions.

Apple are looking for someone in Australia for a new position, the position open is for a 'Maps Ground Truth Data Specialist'. This position has been up for a couple of days, and comes just months after Apple's Maps app failing to provide correct mapping data in Australia.

The position will check "changes to map data, provide feedback on unique local map requirements, collect ground truth information, and evaluate competing products." But what is 'Ground Truth'? Well, that is information collected on location versus the data being collected remotely, such as data from satellites.

The full job listing is below:

Last week I reported on CNET being sued by a coalition of artist over its Download.com site offering downloads of BitTorrent clients like uTorrent. CNET argued that it was well within its rights to offer such downloads, and as it turns out, the court agreed.

The coalition claimed, that because CNET had reviewed the software and provided an educational video on how to use said software, that Download.com was encouraging the use of the program. The court disagreed, with the judge saying that "there was no indication of encouragement and that a ban on any distribution of the technology would dampen public discussion of P2P technologies."

The judge did agree with the coalition on the fact that uTorrent and other P2P clients can be used to infringe on copyrights, but said:

NVIDIA has announced that they are working on building a new headquarters right across the street from their current Santa Clara headquarters. The new building's design is being worked on a team at Gensler and is being led by Hao Ko. NVIDIA says the arhitect shares their "values and drive to perfection."

The current renders of the new building are quite awesome and could rival Apple's new headquarters. As you can see in the picture above, NVIDIA's new headquarters will be shaped like two triangles with a connection in the middle.

Let us know what you think of the planned headquarters. I think it looks pretty nifty. You can read NVIDIA's announcement blog post on their website.

It looks like GPU shipments for Q4 2012 didn't do so well according to Jon Peddie Research's latest numbers - where they dropped 8.2% sequentially and 11.5% year-over-year. The drop in GPU shipments is being blamed on the popularity of tablets, as well as the continuing and damaging recession.

This has caused JPR to revise their compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for PC graphics from 2012 to 2016 to 3.2%, with the total shipments of GPUs in 2016 hovering at around 549 million units. Intel's shipments dropped just 2.9%, but AMD dropped by a much larger 13.6% and NVIDIA were worse, dropping by 16.7%. Market share wise, we saw Intel hold onto 63.4%, which was a gain of 3.4%, but this was at the expense of AMD and NVIDIA which dropped 1.2% and 1.73% respectively - down to 19.7% and 16.9%.

There are some breakdowns from JPR's latest report below:

It looks like South Korean electronic giants LG and Samsung are solving their disputes out of court, after a patent battle between the companies started last year with Samsung filing a lawsuit claiming that LG had stolen technology secrets from within their OLED production.

LG fired back, threatening their own injunctions, but it looks like everything has calmed down and a few expensive drinks have been shared between the companies. Samsung Display have come out saying that they've dropped their injunction request, and LG have responded with the same respect - after dropping the request for an injunction seeking to ban the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Note 10.1 in South Korea, LG have said they're now seeking resolution "through an amicable negotiation".

I'm glad we have companies solving things nicely, and not pushing it all through a court - all in the public eye.

It looks like House of Cards has been a success with Netflix, at least according to data from Cowen and Company. According to their survey of 1,200 people, 28 percent were paying Netflix customers with an additional 18 percent having access to a Netflix account. Their data shows that 10 percent of those users have watched at least one episode of House of Cards during its first week.

On average, six episodes were watched by a user. Most people--80 percent--responded that the series was "good" or "exceptional." Netflix releasing all 13 episodes at once was also received positively, with 90 percent watching more than one episode per sitting.

The data suggests that Arrested Development could be even better for the company, with the largest group of users being aware Netflix is bringing the show back. 19 percent of the 1,200 surveyed were aware of House of Cards. 34 percent were aware of Netflix's original content plans.

It looks like the iPad mini's constrained supply has finally caught up to the high demand. The device is now showing as "In Stock" in most countries around the world, showing that Apple's supply has either increased to meet the high demand, or the high demand has dropped off slightly.

In all reality, it's probably the latter option. People are probably seeing the rumors of a new iPhone 5S and are starting to think that an updated iPad mini could also be just around the corner. There have also been rumors of an iPad mini with Retina display coming soon and this could be contributing to a decrease in demand.

European customers are still seeing 1-3 days as the quoted shipping time, but those should soon change to "In Stock." If you want to pick up a new iPad mini, now is definitely a good time as you shouldn't have to wait for them to ship out.

Facebook have made $1.1 billion in profits since they've gone public, but they won't be paying any federal or state taxes on these profits. Better yet, the largest social network in the world will enjoy a very nice federal tax refund of around $429 million.

Before Facebook went public last year, Citizens for Tax Justice, a research group, said that this would happen, and have just released a breakdown of what the social network's crafty accounting skills have amounted to in their 2012 annual report. It all comes down to the tax deductibility on executive stock options, which Facebook gave plenty out of last year, with the deductible ended up actually being more than Facebook owed in taxes to the state, and federal governments.

This means that instead of Facebook having to pay anything to the government, the roles are reversed and the government will hand money over to Facebook - a refund nearing half a billion dollars. This refund comes from the taxes Facebook paid in 2010 and 2011. The good news doesn't stop for Facebook there, as they'll be carrying "forward another $2.17 billion in additional tax-option tax breaks for use in future years." This means that Facebook will, for as long as they can, continue to do this.

It looks as though we may soon be able to go to our local Google store to check out the company's latest technology offerings. While it will likely be structured a bit like the Microsoft stores in that they feature other companies' hardware, the stores will allow Google the chance to offer hands-on experiences of their own devices, such as the Nexus 4.

The report comes from 9to5Google who cites "an extremely reliable source." They say that Google is planning to have the first of its retail stores open by year's end in major metropolitan areas. These stores will be a bit different than the current Chrome store-within-a-store that Google currently has in Best Buys.

The idea for Google retail stores is said to have come out of plans to take Project Glass to the public. Google felt it would be hard to sell a device that will retail for $500-$1000 without offering a try-before-you-buy opportunity. The retail stores will also give Google a chance to demonstrate other products, such as Chromebooks and driverless cars.

It's a hard market for camera right now, and after both Canon and Nikon both had revisions to their forecasts, Olympus have also followed by cutting their full-year sales and profit forecast.

Olmypus have said that they expect sales to tip at around $7.8 billion, down from their first forecast of $8.09 billion. Profits will drop by 25%, too. When most people think Olympus, they think cameras, but Olympus aren't all just about cameras - they have pushed into the medical equipment and endoscope markets, too.

Last year saw Sony buy a $642 million stake in Olympus which was mainly for the medical imaging side of things. Over the past two years, Olympus' main goals have been to focus on their Pen and OM-D interchangeable lends (ILC) cameras, which has caused people to think the company were slowly dragging themselves out of the traditional SLR market.

The government of Iceland is talking about introducing an Internet filter which would stop Icelandic citizens from downloading or viewing pornography on the Internet. The talk of the filter has transpired through fears of the damages porn can do to children and women.

Iceland's Interior Minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, is currently drafting legislation to stop the access of online porn images and videos through many ways - computers, consoles and smart devices. He says:

There's already laws within Iceland that forbids the printing and distribution of porn, but this law hasn't been updated to include what most would consider the biggest source of porn, the Internet. There are multiple ways of blocking porn under consideration, with one of them blocking access to the porn sites, as well as making it illegal to use Icelandic credit cards to access pay-per-view porn.

We all know Google scrapes countless amounts of data from anyone who uses their services, which, let's face it, is everyone - but, it looks like it goes much deeper than that.

From what Sydney-based app developer Dan Nolan, has found, each time you purchase an app from the Google Play Store your personal details are sent to that developer. This includes your name, address and e-mail address. Nolan spoke with news.com.au, saying that he wasn't comfortable being the receiver of this information, and that there is no reason that a developer needs to have this - very powerful - information given to them without their consent.

Nolan took to his blog, saying:

Both LinkedIn employees and Apple are probably pretty happy with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner right now. The CEO has rewarded employees for a great 2012 by providing them each with their own iPad mini. This means that Weiner spent over $1.2 million on 3,500 iPad minis. Ouch. We hope he worked out a discount!

The good deed was first tweeted about by Darain Faraz: "We wanted to acknowledge the hard work and accomplishments of all of our employees in 2012. During today's biweekly All Hands meeting, we surprised our employees with iPad Minis as a small gesture of the company's gratitude for their contributions."

It's these small things that keep employees happy and working hard for a company. LinkedIn pulled in a record Q4 with earnings topping $303 million.