Business, Financial & Legal - Page 154

Do you currently own stock? If not, is it because of all the fees and difficulties associated with buying and selling it? Well, it appears that shortly after Facebook goes public, you could be able to purchase stock in companies straight from their respective Facebook page without any fees or brokers. The minimum amount would be $10, so it's not like you have to spend a fortune to start.

All of this is according to former Facebook executive and current director at Loyal3 Chris Kelly. Loyal3 would like to point out that only 18% of American families own stock, a number which they hope to change with this CSOP, or customer stock ownership plan. Direct purchase isn't new, but few companies use it since it isn't cost efficient to oversee millions of tiny share holders.

Loyal3 hopes that by making ownership easy and without fees the average person will be more inclined to purchase stock. CEO Barry Schneider points out that ownership changes a persons point-of-view regarding an item. People usually care more about something they care than something they don't. Think about it, have you ever washed a rental car?

AMD reported its first quarter financial results today and it's not quite as bad as was expected. AMD beat expectations, but they still posted a loss of $590 million. AMD has a strong product line-up in both the CPU and GPU markets, but it's pretty hard to compete against the chip giant that is Intel.

The loss, however, is not due to operations but rather an accounting charge. Revenue for the quarter was $1.59 billion which was higher than the expected $1.56 billion Including the accounting charge, the loss of $590 million amount to 80 cents a share. If we take out the accounting charge, AMD had a good quarter, with a non-GAAP profit of 12 cents a share, or $92 million. Analysts predicted only 9 cents a share with the accounting charge taken out.

"AMD delivered solid results in the first quarter as we remain focused on improving our execution, delivering innovative products, and building a company around a strategy to deliver strong cash flow and earnings growth," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "A complete top-to-bottom introduction of new APU offerings, combined with ample product supply resulting from continued progress with our manufacturing partners, positions us to win and grow."

RapidShare and MediaFire certainly don't want to be the next cyberlocker services to be taken down, but it's a fear that they are having to deal with after the US government took down MegaUpload back on January 19, 2012. They are now trying to distance themselves from MegaUpload in order to prevent being shut down on similar complaints.

All of the online cyberlocker services have fear that they could be next, and they are now publicly trying to show that they are different from the now defunct MegaUpload. Danny Raimer, who is RapidShare's general counsel, told U.S. News & World Report that Megaupload's approach to piracy was "so far from what we're doing and what we want to stand for."

RapidShare continues to deny that they are or have violated copyright laws publicly released a "responsible practices" manifesto for cyberlocker and cloud storage companies. This includes practices like including in the TOS that the company reserves the right to go through repeat offender's lockers.

eBay, in the midst of a rather uncertain economy has done very well in the first quarter of 2012. With economies around the world on the brink of destruction, eBay has managed to increase sales and income, much to the delight of Wall Street investors. Stock in the company is up more than 3.5% in after-hours trading.

The first quarter ended March 31, 2012 and the numbers that have come in have pleased investors. Net income rose to $725 million, or 55 cents per share, against $619 million, or 47 cents per share in the same quarter one year ago. Sales have increased a massive 29% to $3.3 billion. A majority of this growth is due to the strength of the company's Marketplace and PayPal businesses.

"We believe that innovation in retail today is technology driven, and consumers are embracing smarter, easier, better ways to shop," CEO John Donahoe said. "We are enabling commerce in this new retail environment, supporting and partnering with sellers of all sizes and giving consumers worldwide the ability to shop anytime, anywhere, for whatever they want."

Apparently selling Windows Phone is not as easy as some people seem to think it is. Maybe this explains why Gavin Kim has left Microsoft just 5 months after he joined in as General Manager of Windows Phone Product Marketing. Before Microsoft, he was a vice president with Samsung.

"We can confirm that Gavin Kim has made a personal decision to leave Microsoft," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail. "We feel very good about the work he has done to set the team, and its new lead Eugene Ho, up for success. We wish him all the best." No actual reasons for his departure have been given.

It will be interesting to watch and see if the marketing strategy of Windows Phone changes now that he is not with the company anymore. I'm sure he found the job difficult to stomach, what with the high expectations and poor results and all. "No one comes into the store and asks for a Windows phone," said a European telecom executive quoted in a Reuters report on Tuesday. The executive added, "If the Lumia with the same hardware came with Android in it and not Windows, it would be much easier to sell."

Today, Twitter announced something akin to a treaty. The pledge gives employees more control over the inventions that they create and, more importantly, promises the patents will only be used for defensive purposes and not to prevent other companies from innovating. This new pledge comes on the heels of the quarterly "Hack Week," in which employees work on projects that are outside their regular day-to-day work.

"One of the great things about Twitter is working with so many talented folks who dream up and build incredible products day in and day out. Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions," Adam Messinger, vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post. "However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator's Patent Agreement, which we informally call the 'IPA.'"

This new 'IPA' allows the inventors to maintain control of their patents and Twitter agrees not to file offensive lawsuits. "This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee's work," the post says. "The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon."

A group of disgruntled parents have filed a lawsuit claiming that Apple is unfairly profiting from in-app purchases of digital content of free games that specifically target children. The group is claiming that it is far to easy for children using the devices to charge up enormous bills without any sort of authorization from their respective parents.

The way Apple's purchasing system allows credit card information to be saved and accessed with just a password for future purchases makes it so that kids don't have to ask parents for permission. Federal Judge Edward Davila agreed with the group of parents and has granted a hearing for the class action suit on the grounds that enough examples had been provided for the lawsuit to proceed.

The court filing accuses Apple of "inducing" children to make in-app purchases. "These games are highly addictive, designed deliberately to be so, and tend to compel children playing them to purchase large quantities of game currency, amounting to as much as $100 per purchase or more," the suit read, according to the Telegraph.

'Google' and 'privacy' probably should never be used in the same sentence, unless of course you are accusing Google of breaking a privacy agreement. Well, the FTC has done that, and will be deciding in the next 30 days whether or not to fine the Web giant for bypassing a Safari setting and placing cookies anyway.

Google, before ceasing the practice, had been using a special code to get around Safari's privacy settings so that they could track users on computers and mobile devices. The FTC is looking into whether this violates a 2011 settlement agreement between the FTC and Google over privacy concerns with the launch of Google Buzz. The fines in this case could be up to $16,000 per day.

Google continues to defend itself and a spokesperson stated that the company's behavior was "[providing] features that signed-in Google users had enabled." "However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser," Google spokesperson Chris Gaither told CNET. "We will of course cooperate with any officials who have questions."

Everyone likes working for Google because of the atmosphere around the campus. One of the neat things at the Google Campus in Mountain View, California is the bikes that are scattered around to facilitate easier moving between campus buildings. Last fall, it became time to replace the bikes and the company knew exactly where to go.

The company turned to its engineers by launching a competition among employees to redesign the 2-year-old fleet of bikes that currently existed. "We've got an entrepreneurial and innovative culture," said Brendon Harrington, Google's transportation operations manager. "We said, 'You tell us what you think is a cool design.'"

There was only 4 design criteria that had to be met by the design. First, it had to be easy to produce. Second, it needed to be affordable. Third, it had to be comfortable and secure. Fourth, the bike had to be Googley, using novel components, structure, and appearance. In response, Google received about 36 entries.

Let's first start this rumor off with a note: EA denies this rumor, however, its statements in regards to it seem to indicate that it is true.

A Mr. Derek Andersen from Startup Grind is claiming that he has confirmed with multiple sources inside Electronic Arts (EA) that the company is planning to layoff somewhere between 500 and 1100 employees. This equates to somewhere between 5% and 11% of the workforce could be on the chopping block. The layoffs were supposedly set for April 9, but have since been pushed back.

However, he claims that they are coming very soon. This year has been rough of EA: Star Wars hasn't matched goals and they were voted 'Worst Company In America' in a poll held by The Consumerist. Additionally, stock prices have fallen from $61 down to the current $16. Zynga has also cleaned out a large portion of EA's management.

If you're a fan of online video, you could be in for a new advertising treat: AOL and Google have announced plans to start selling upfronts. This common practice of television networks is where they sell shows and ad space for the upcoming season. This is a good way to clear advertising inventory and have predictable revenue streams.

Google is set to have these upfronts in May of this year. AOL has since announced that they are getting in on the action. AOL says that they will offer "guaranteed audience delivery for online video advertising campaigns bought across its properties." AOL will host advertisers on April 24 at a Digital Content Newfronts presentation.

Nikesh Arora, chief business officer at Google, highlighted YouTube's brand power. Google hopes to translate that into ad dollars. Arora said:

Google's acquisition of previous powerhouse smartphone maker, Motorola, was approved by the Justice Department in February. There was much talk that Google acquired Motorola for their roughly 17,000 patents they held. Just two months after the acquisition, rumors are circling that Google are looking to dump the entire hardware division.

The Wall Street Journal has tapped the keys on their keyboards and are claiming that Google are already looking to sell their cable set-top box business, and that they've offered the handset division to China's Huawei at a premium. At the moment, Google licenses their Android open-source operating system to 55 manufacturers across the world.

This is where Google run into problems: owning the Motorola hardware division means they could risk relationships with these OEMs, if they were to move forward with developing "in-house" hardware. Other manufacturers could see this as a bias toward Google owning the Motorola hardware division. Getting rid of it, would calm the nerves, obviously. Senior vice president of mobile for Google, Andy Rubin, has actually addressed concerns over this at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Google have just announced a plan in which we'll see the company split its stock in an effort to preserve its corporate governance, and still give co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page control of the company. This will create a 2-for-1 stock split, where Google have said it will create a new class of stock, Class C, that won't sport any voting power.

Any share holders of Google with Class A or Class B stock will automatically receive a share of the new Class S stock. This new class of shares will trade under a different ticker symbol. This new deal is said to preserve the voting power of Google co-founders. The stock proposal was announced as Google reported a first-quarter profit of $2.89 billion, or $8.75 a share, from $1.8 billion, or $5.51 a share, twelve months ago.

Excluding one-time charges and other items, Google's profits sat at $3.33 billion, or $10.08 per share, compared to last years $2.64 billion or $8.08 per share. Google easily beat Wall Street estimates which pegged them at $9.65 per share. Revenue-wise they were not too bad at all, hitting $10.65 billion, a 24-percent increase over $8.58 billion year-over-year. After backing out traffic acquisition costs, revenue amounted to $8.14 billion, missing Wall Street expectations by a slither, pegged at $8.15 billion.

Sony have been struggling over the years, and much more so in the last year or so. We know this, and with newly-appointed CEO Kaz Hirai steering the ship that is Sony, they are now hoping a new set of initiatives designed to revitalize the sluggish business will help. The new strategy is called "One Sony".

One Sony is said to focus on games, mobile and digital imaging in an effort to generate roughly 70-percent of Sony's total sales from these three divisions. Hirai's first big move is One Sony, and from his previous position within the PlayStation division of Sony, he is adding new titles to their downloadable catalog for the PlayStation Vita as well as the PlayStation 3, and will also improve subscription services on the PlayStation Network.

On top of this, the company is preparing better games for their tablet lineup and Vaio-based devices, as well as leveraging their accessories and peripherals market. Sony hopes to generate revenue of around $12.4 billion through gaming by fiscal 2014.

It's pretty hard to find a site on the internet these days without some sort of advertising. The larger the site, the more it costs to run and the more income the site needs to have. Tumblr receives and incredible 4.5 billion impressions each week which makes it one of the internet's biggest destinations.

Incredibly, Tumblr has zero ads on it and they plan to keep it that way. Hosting servers for 4.5 billion impressions a week isn't cheap, so the company is trying to find a way to make money and become self-sufficient. Right now they are simply running on investment dollars, something that can't go on forever.

CEO David Carp has said in an interview that the site does not want ads. He says that Tumblr is "selling our desks to avoid that, it's a complete last resort." That's some dedication to keeping the site ad free, but can it really work? Karp and Tumblr are hiring a professional revenue executive to help monetize the site.

In an interesting turn of events, the US Government has filed papers objecting to Megaupload's legal firm choice. Last week, it became known that Megaupload had retained the services of Andrew Schapiro. Schapiro is the same lawyer who led YouTube to a summary judgment in its copyright trial against Viacom.

According to TorrentFreak: "In a new court filing the US government complains that Schapiro's past record in copyright cases, and that of Quinn Emanuel as a whole, present a series of conflicts of interest." Mainly, the government is concerned about a possible conflict with YouTube. Their legal battles against Viacom are back on, and they are also listed as a victim and possible witness against Megaupload.

The government says that Schapiro can't have an interest in both cases. Additionally, Schaprio or the law firm he works for has represented many of the companies that could possibly be called as witnesses against Megaupload. These companies include Google, Disney, Fox, Time Warner, Warner Bros., HBO, and various software companies.

We reviewed (in both text, and video) the new iPad, and loved it. But how much does the rest of the world love Apple's latest tablet creation? A lot, it seems. A new study by analytics analyst firm Chitika, has suggested that the third-generation iPads in Internet traffic has doubled since the initial four-day launch window.

The new iPad now makes up around 10-percent of all iPads surfing the web only three weeks after it splashed down. Online tracking metrics aren't a direct method of measuring sales, but it does help. Apple announced four days after the new iPad launched that they had sold 3 million units worldwide, and Chitika have noted that this figure correlated into about 5-percent presence of all iPad traffic, correlating with Apple's own total figure of around 55 million iPads sold up until that point.

If this growth continues, we could be looking at 12 million units sold by the time Apple's fiscal Q2 comes around, and 15 million new iPads sold overall by the end of June. The iPad makes up around 60-percent of all tablets shipped, with online usage rates indicated that in most areas the iPad is responsible for up to 90-percent of tablet web traffic. Some very impressive digits for the Cupertino-based company.

Best Buy has been heading down hill for a while now, and now their CEO has jumped ship. Besides, who better to know how the company is doing and when to get out than the CEO? This announcement by Best Buy comes on the heels of the announcement of the big losses suffered over the past few months and the plans to close 50 stores across the US.

Best Buy's press release states that there were "no disagreements between between Mr. Dunn and the company on any matter relating to operations, financial controls, policies, or procedures." Curiously enough, however, it was still a "mutual" decision that the CEO and company part ways. Director G Mike Mikan has been named interim CEO.

"I have enjoyed every one of my 28 years with this company, and I leave it today in position for a strong future. I am proud of my fellow employees and I wish them the best," said Dunn.

The economy can not still be as bad as every seems to think it is. Apple's building a new data center and even spending the extra cash to power it with an alternative fuel. Now, Microsoft has joined into the party. Microsoft is building a new data center in Wyoming at a cost north of $100 million.

Wyoming is hoping that this new project will bring other new data centers to the state. Microsoft has been quite busy with its construction projects as of late. Just recently, Microsoft has turned on two new data centers for its cloud service Azure. It's not clear if this new data center is for Azure or not.

Microsoft announced the construction this way:

Apple are definitely on their way toward quite an amazing milestone: becoming the world's first $1 trillion company, according to a Wall Street analyst. Brian White from Topeka Capital Markets recently predicted that Apple stock would push past the $1,000 per share barrier in the next twelve months, which would tip the company very close to the $1 trillion mark.

Apple stock has been quite popular over the last few years, with no signs of it stopping. Share prices topped Google's for the first time last week, a milestone that the late Steve Jobs was rumored to be working toward. How could Apple hit $1,000 in share value? Well, it's not that hard at all, really.

Apple's new iPhone could really boost their value, a new iPad that smashes the previous third-gen iPad, iOS 6.0, new MacBooks, iMacs, they're all coming this year alone. On top of this, Apple is opening up in the Chinese market, which is until now, nearly untapped for Apple. It's a huge market, and sure to boost their share prices considerably as iDevices start flooding into the hands of China-based customers.