Business, Financial & Legal - Page 134

Tim Cook had some interesting things to say during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, where the Apple CEO touched on a number of topics, including some rumors of a next-gen iPhone including a larger screen.

Cook talked about the user experience, saying that the experience is more important than what cranks along inside of the phone. When talking about a larger screen size on the iPhone, Cook said:

Cook continued, talking about smartphone displays, saying that "some people are focused on size." He continued, explaining that some things are better than just increasing the screen size, citing the poor color saturation and brightness on OLED displays:

Japan's mobile market is a new territory for Apple to conquer, but it looks like last year was good to them as the iPhone maker scooped up the top spot in Japan's mobile phone market for a twelve-month period for the first time ever.

Apple took 16% of Japan's mobile market - this includes smartphones and feature phones - in Q4 2012, giving them an overall 15% share of the year as a whole. This pushes Apple just ahead of Japan locals Sharp and Fujitsu who both held 14% share eacj, according to a new report from Counterpoint Research.

Apple have previously taken the top spot in Japan's mobile industry but it has always been short lived and usually happened at the beginning of new product launches, like the iPhone 4S' launch in 2011. Apple reaching the top is a big fact, with Sharp being knocked off their top spot after a six-year run as number one.

On their rampage for world domination, Corsair have just acquired Scotland-based Simple Audio. Simple Audio have been around for five years and is mostly known in Europe for their networked set-top receivers.

These receivers are capable of sharing music from PCs, Macs, TVs, iPods and MP3 players, so we should expect Corsair to expand their audio lineup in the coming months and years. Corsair's acquisition will see Simple Audio's products jump across the pond, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Corsair haven't said anything about the amount of money they paid for Simple Audio, but the American computer component maker have said that they'd been checking out Simple Audio's dance moves for a while now - even since 2010 - and felt that now is the right time to acquire them.

In a new Harris poll that sought the opinions of more than 14,000 people, Amazon has come out on top in two of the six categories. The poll asked respondents to rank companies based upon six criteria: social responsibility; emotional appeal; financial performance; products and services; vision and leadership; and workplace environment.

Amazon pulled out a win in the "emotional appeal" and "products and services" categories. Amazon managed to place in the top five for the other four categories. Overall, Amazon managed to come out with a grade of 82.62, which makes this the fifth year in a row that they placed above 80 out of 100.

"Our results show that Amazon has managed to build an intimate relationship with the public without being perceived as intrusive," Robert Fronk, executive vice president of Reputation Management at Harris Interactive, said in a statement. "And as the company that is so widely known for its personal recommendations, more than 9 in 10 members of the public would recommend Amazon to friends and family."

Numbers from AdDuplex show that Nokia has roughly 75 percent of the Windows Phone market. AdDuplex's numbers are usage numbers from the company's ad network. While the numbers only come from 294 applications, which creates a fairly small and unreliable sample size, general questions, such as the top manufacturer, can be asked fairly reliably.

As you can see, Nokia holds just over 75 percent of the Windows Phone market. HTC comes in second with just over 10 percent. From there, the numbers drop off pretty significantly. It's no surprise that Nokia is leading the market; it's Lumia line of devices are solid and Nokia has worked closely with Microsoft.

We're always on the lookout for data and trends. We'll keep looking to see if we can come up with some interesting trends in the Windows Phone market.

As an Australian myself, it hurts so much to see products so over priced here versus other places in the world. The government here hates it, as they lose out because consumers purchase the goods overseas, bypassing the GST (goods & services tax) that they would normally make.

The Australian government are now stepping in, with the government's IT Pricing Inquiry into something that is known as the "Australia Tax", which is now going after the big boys in Microsoft and Apple. The committee has issued three summonses to appear before the inquiry today to three repeat offenders: Microsoft, Apple and Adobe.

These three companies will appear before the House Committee on March 22 at 9:30am to answer concerns raised by Choice and the ACMA in regards to the "Australia Tax" on goods sold across the country. Federal Member of Chifley, Ed Husic, said:

Blackberry has announced that they have no plans to launch the new BlackBerry 10 devices in Japan. According to BlackBerry, "Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 devices there at this time." Part of this could be to the fact they have just 0.3 percent of the market currently.

After all, why launch a device in a country when they appear to not be very keen on your previous devices. This appears to be the logic BlackBerry is operating off of as they say the cost of translating BlackBerry 10 to Japanese is just to high for them to consider it a good investment.

Current BlackBerry owners can rest easy knowing that BlackBerry will continue to offer to support to existing owners in Japan.

ORIGIN has announced a new way to contact their customer support. The new method is a bit different than most companies and should help users reach technical support in the most convenient way possible. ORIGIN's Nexus client will allow users to chat with technical support while in-game or on the desktop.

Along with contacting support, the client will allow users to chat with friends, take screenshots and video, and live broadcast gameplay. A nice feature of being able to contact support in-game is the ability to be looking at exactly what isn't working while talking to support. This allows you to get the best description of the problem.

Kevin Wasielewski, CEO and co-founder of ORIGIN PC:

The Mac Pro will no longer be sold in Europe after March 1. The issue apparently stems from new regulatory standards that Apple's Mac Pro fails to meet. It's not clear which standard isn't met by the machine, but Apple apparently doesn't want to update it to meet the standards.

Resellers will be able to continue selling the Mac Pro beyond March 1, though stock will not be replenished. Final orders for Mac Pro units must be placed with Apple before February 18 so that they can be delivered before March 1. The following letter was sent to retailers:

Apple will likely make sure the promised refresh of the Mac Pro, coming later this year, will meet the European Union's new standards. It's likely not cost effective to redesign the current machine to meet the specifications, as the Mac Pro doesn't sell in high quantities.

Apple has posted up a job listing for a Plastics Design Engineer, and that has, of course, sparked questions about whether or not Apple is planning to produce a budget iPhone using a plastic case. The job listing is looking for a Manufacturing Design Engineer with a focus in Advanced Plastic Tooling and Process.

Of course, an engineer hired at this late date would be unlikely to be working on a device rumored to launch later this year, though they could be working on future designs. Most of Apple's products have utilized aluminum, though plastic is still used in keyboards, Apple TV, Airport Extreme, and other accessories.

If you happen to be a Manufacturing Design Engineer, you can find the job listing on Apple's website.

Facebook reported their fourth quarter financial results today. For the fourth quarter, Facebook saw increased revenues, yet experienced decreased profits. Part of the reason profits were down is the amount of investing that Facebook is doing to build an empire and plan for the long-run.

Revenue was up to $1.59 billion, a 40 percent increase from last year. Wall Street estimates had placed revenue at $1.52 billion, so Facebook performed better-than-expected. Revenue, however, was down 79 percent from last year as a result of increased investment spending.

"2012 was a big year for us," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO on Wednesday's earnings call with analysts and journalists. "There are now more people using Facebook on mobile every day than on desktop."

When you've got nothing nice to say, the rule is to say nothing nice at all, so it looks like Amazon are playing this game with Kindle sales, as their lips are still sealed shut. On the flip side, their e-book business is churning through money like it's nothing.

Amazon's e-book business is now a very tidy "multi-billion dollar category" for the US-based retail giant. Amazon had sold out of their e-reader last year, with Amazon's CFO, Tom Szkutak, saying during their earnings call yesterday that if they didn't sell out of their Kindle's, they would've had much higher sales numbers - all without unveiling just how many they sold.

Szkutak was pushed by an analyst who wondered why the company's revenue was lower than expected for Q4, where the CFO cited a number of reasons - sales of consumer electronics fell short of expectations, as well as the shortages of the Kindle Paperwhite. He said:

Philips have just bowed out of the consumer electronics market, and are now focusing all of their energies into the medical equipment and lightning businesses. Philips have sold their consumer electronics business to Japanese manufacturer Funai Electric Co. for $201 million.

Philips' CEO, Frans van Houten talked to The Wall Street Journal, saying "Since we have online entertainment, people do not buy Blu-ray and DVD players anymore."

This is true though - as most consumer electronics are pretty much identical these days as the content displayed on them is completely online. Myself, I use a Samsung Smart TV and don't use any of the 'smart' features apart from two times in eight months I've used Skype. Everything comes from a networked media player, streaming from my QNAP NAS. There should be many changes in the consumer market with more players shifting and changing in the coming years.

CBS Interactive has filed a response to an injunction that is keeping CNET's journalists from talking about bit torrent technology. The injunction alleges that by CNET talking about, and linking to, P2P software that can be used for illegal purposes, they are encouraging users and causing it to become more pervasive.

CBSI has responded to the injunction claiming just the opposite. They say that because they provide warnings about not using the technology to infringe on copyrights, they are actually doing more good. They warn that the software is still publicly available and wouldn't come with these warnings if found by a Google search.

The bit torrent technology has many benefits and uses besides illegal downloading. Bit torrent swarms can provide theoretically unlimited bandwidth and download speed because they can provide an unlimited number of peers. It also works great for redundancy as one server can go down and the file is still available from many other sources, albeit at a reduced speed.

THQ was broken apart last week, with bits and pieces being sold to other companies in various forms. Now we're hearing that Crysis developer, Crytek, have just opened up a new studio based in Austin, Texas, and have filled it with some of the core developers from Vigil Games.

Vigil Games are the guys and girls behind Darksiders, but with THQ sinking, they were left without anything to do, until Crytek come to their rescue. Ex-Vigil co-founder, David Adams, has now become the CEO of the newly-formed Crytek USA Corp., where he has said:

Crytek CEO, Cevat Yerli, released a statement about the new studio's "strategic" location, where he said:

Following in the footsteps of Google, Twitter has released its second transparency report. The report details that Twitter complied with 69 percent of US data requests, which is less than the 88 percent of requests that Google responded to. It seems that Twitter puts a bit more effort in blocking data requests.

The report also detailed that the US government led the pack in sheer quantity of data requests. For last year, Twitter said it received a total of 1,858 requests for information from governments, 6,646 reports of copyright violations, and 48 demands from governments demanding material to be removed.

815 cases came from the United States government, with 69 percent of those being fulfilled to some capacity. 60 percent of the US requests were from subpoenas, 11 percent were court orders, and 19 percent were search warrants. Subpoenas are generally just looking for basic information, such as an e-mail address and IP logs. To get communication data, Twitter requires a search warrant signed by a judge.

There was a time when the Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone was the undisputed champion, overlooking the grassy knolls quietly whispering 'this changes everything, again' to itself, but those days are behind it thanks to huge competition coming in from what seems like all sides.

Well, Asia's more well-off consumers in Singapore and Hong Kong are slowly switching from iPhone's to the competition - something Reuters is reporting as 'iPhone fatigue'. The problem also comes from consumers wanting to try out other brands, such as South Korea-based Samsung's Galaxy range of devices, seriously chewing into Apple's market share.

Since 2010, Apple has been completely controlling Singapore in terms of market share, with more devices in Singapore running iOS per capita than anywhere else in the world. This is where StatCounter - gs.statcounter.com, who measure traffic collected from a network of 3 million websites, calculate Apple's share of mobile devices in Singapore.

Apple's recently released Supplier Responsibility Report covers the progress they're making for everything from empowering workers to labor and human right issues within their supply chain. The report highlighted results for 393 audits performed over the last twelve months, a 72% increase over the number of audits performed in 2011.

Apple have said that its worker empowerment program providing education on local laws and the company's supplier code of conduct was extended to 1.3 million employees last year. This is a 100% increase in the amount of workers trained in the program since 2008.

The report also had some information regarding a Chinese labor agency that had forged documents for underage employees to work within Apple-connected suppliers. After the company had discovered 74 cases of workers under the age of 16 during an audit of a circuit board supplier in January 2011, Apple cut all ties to their contract with the company and is now going after the agency who did the hiring. The report states:

One woman isn't too happy with the date Match.com set her up with. It's an understandable position to take, as the man she met on the dating site stabbed her ten times in an ambush attack that took place in her garage. Because of this, she is suing Match.com for $10 million in compensation.

Mary Kay Beckman argues that Match.com misled her and failed to alert her of the potential dangers of online matchmaking. She met Wade Ridley in September 2010 via the service. Several online conversations took place and after 10 days of dating, she broke it off. The next day, Beckman alleges Ridley sent threatening text messages.

January 2011, he reportedly hid in her garage and stabbed her ten times. Beckman is looking for the $10 million as compensation for the multiple surgeries she underwent.

Just how much does Microsoft charge for a Windows Phone license? If you're Nokia, it's around $1 billion. In Nokia's earnings report, it announced that Microsoft will be getting a $1 billion payment in royalties for using Windows Phone. Previously, Microsoft had paid Nokia "platform support payments," amounting to $250 million each quarter, and this amount always exceeded how much Nokia had to pay Microsoft.

"To date the amount of platform support payments received by Nokia has exceeded the amount of minimum royalty commitment payments to Microsoft," Nokia wrote in its earnings report. "Thus for the remainder of the life of the agreement the total amount of the minimum software royalty commitment payments are expected to exceed the total amount of the platform support payments."

This should indicate that Nokia will be shipping more Windows Phone devices, likely through its popular and flagship line of Lumias. Nokia sold just 4.4 million Lumia devices in the last quarter of 2012, which is 4 times higher than it managed in 2011. Windows Phone continues to increase in popularity, which partially explains why Nokia can ship more devices.