Business, Financial & Legal - Page 160

AMD have announced they've hired Mike Wolfe as AMD's chief information officer. Wolfe brings more than 30 years of engineering and information technology experience as well as being vice president of IT for product development and engineering at HP for the past five years.

The swipe of AT&T's ultra-platinum-super-crazy credit card can be heard the world over with news appearing today that AT&T has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom in a cash-and-stock transaction currently valued at approx. $39 billion.

Google have had a great time with YouTube and have said that 2010 has been a great year for YouTube. The results of this success are leading YouTube to hiring more staff to allow YouTube to grow. The plan is to expand its staff by 30-percent which makes it the largest hiring year in the history of YouTube.

Rumor has it AMD is for sale, with the rumors circling around AMD's stock rose by roughly 5-percent on Monday. Wedbush Securities analyst Patrick Wang said "there is no management team there" and he is right. CEO Dirk Meyer was forced out last month, COO Bob Rivet and strategy chief Marty Seyer last week.

Valve's digital distribution platform, Steam, has been rumored to control between 50 and 70-percent of the entire downloadable PC games market. The digital distribution market on PC is said to be worth $4 billion USD.

Facebook and Google both had Twitter in their targets last year and even went as far to have talks with Twitter. Obviously all three companies have declined to comment on the news.

It's hard to keep up with all the goings on in the tech world. The proposed purchase of security firm McAfee by Intel first surfaced back in the summer of 2010. The deal didn't get the nod in the US until December. While the US was eyeing the purchase, the EU was as well.

Google had their quarterly earnings release today and along with it they've announced their top-level management structure, with co-founder Larry Page replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO as of April 4th.

It looks like Apple CEO Steve Jobs is off to battle another nemesis, and it's not the PC or competing tablets. Jobs announced to his employees this morning that he is taking a medical leave of absence from Apple, leaving Tim Cook to handle the day to day operations at Apple.

AMD has just announced that CEO Dirk Meyer has resigned. Currently there is no official reason for his resignation, except that he reached a "mutual agreement" with the company's board.

Google have dropped $1.8 billion like it's hot (shout out to Snoop Dogg!) on a new office in the concrete city where dreams are made of (wink Jay-Z), New York City.

I think I can speak for everyone when I say restocking fees suck. We all know it doesn't really cost companies 10% or more of what the purchase price of a gadget is to restock them. Those fees are just a way for the company to help talk us into keeping the gadgets we really don't like and would return if we didn't have to pay a fee. Best Buy has announced it has finally stopped being such a douche and eliminated restocking fees.

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The fees were killed off on December 18 and the store will even refund you that restocking fee if you made a return in the 30 days or so prior to the 18th and were charged 10% or 15%. The old restocking fees were 10% of the price on an iPhone and 15% on other electronic devices like notebooks, TVs, GPS devices and more. Those high fees could add up to some really big losses for the consumer.

An email that Best Buy sent to stores across the country ended up in the hands of The Consumerist and it read:

" Effective Saturday, Dec. 18, the 15 percent restocking fee will no longer apply to computers (including notebooks, tablets and iPads), projectors, camcorders, digital cameras, radar detectors, GPS navigation, in-car video systems, DJ equipment and lighting, or Pro-Audio equipment. The 10 percent restocking fee will no longer apply to iPhones. Restocking fees shouldn't be charged for any returns of these products going forward.
This policy change is being made because we want to be the best destination for gifts and technology. To do that we need to make it easy for our customers to return product when they need to, which will give them one more reason to love Best Buy."

NVIDIA has lost their Quadro and Tesla manager to AMD. The story of Rob MacDonald begins with how he began with taking over NVIDIA's UK graphics sales operation in 2002 and shortly after was given control of graphic card sales into the Nordic region (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway).

No, not Opera, the web browser - Oprah as in one of the most powerful women in the world, Oprah. Telstra today announced it has secured a deal with The Oprah Winfrey Show to supply network support for the live shows as well as ensuring network coverage for the show's 300 guests next month.

This is not something I thought an ISP in Australia would open, an R&D facility, but iiNet seem to be on a roll here, with acquisitions, customer satisfaction, products on offer and competitive pricing/allowance, they're really smashing down the walls of broadband hell that have kept this country in the dark ages of broadband for years.

Qantas has unveiled their next-gen check-in service which involves micro chipped smartcards replacing boarding passes and RFID to track your bags.

Apple's fiscal 2010 report is out (10-K form) - the document is filled with information and details on the state of Apple's business - one big flashing light is just how much Apple spend on advertising in 2010.

Qantas announced yesterday it's plans to go "Apple-only" on it's frequent flyer lounges around Australia - giving travellers access to the "latest generation Mac's" in a national roll out.

Mana Bar started off in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley - the first of it's kind to use a concept of video game consoles in a cocktail bar - it has been successful enough to venture into a second bar, now set to launch in Melbourne in December.

Intel has announced plans to invest between $6 and $8 billion to upgrade multiple manufacturing plants in the US and also to build a new facility in Oregon. This would create up to 1000 jobs at Intel.