Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 232

It's not exactly a pretty scene over at OCZ Technology Group Inc right now as their stock continues to plunge towards being worthless. On Wednesday morning, the stock plunged a massive 42 percent to $1.88, down from a close of $3.15 the day prior. Today, the stock has taken another dive, though not quite as large.

At the beginning of today's trading, OCZ's stock was valued at $1.84. It has now dived nearly 22 percent to $1.46, at the time of writing. But why is OCZ's stock in the toilet all of a sudden? Well, it stems from OCZ delaying the filing of its financial results for the second quarter for fiscal year 2013.

In the press release detailing the delay, OCZ warned investors that the second quarter revenue would be "materially lower" than the guidance released on September 5, 2012. This decrease is blamed upon "the impact of customer incentive programs." The company now expects to report a "significant net loss."

Apple has s suffered another loss of sorts as one of the post-trial sales bans instituted by Judge Koh has been overturned by an appeals court. The federal appeals court ruled that Apple would not suffer significant harm by the infringement that was found during the trial, and as such removed the sales ban.

The Next Web put it beautifully when they described Samsung's arguments: "Samsung argued, somewhat humiliatingly, that the sales of the Galaxy Nexus were so poor that they didn't pose a threat to Apple's iPhone and that the unified search feature was not essential to the success of its device. The appeals court apparently agrees."

An excerpt of the official order:

OCZ, a maker of popular solid state drives, lost their CEO recently, but not to fear as the Board of Directors has picked a new replacement from its Board of Directors. Enter Ralph Schmitt, the former CEO of PLX Technologies up until Monday. Tuesday morning, the new OCZ CEO held a conference call and laid out his plans.

"Our actions will be based on innovation, quality, and profitability. Our focus will be to further penetrate OEMs and the enterprise market," he said on the conference call. "OCZ is committed to supporting our customers. We have already made great strides in discontinuing value products and non-core products. Focusing strategy on enterprise. We have lost credibility but we will win it back. We will focus on predictable, sustainable, & profitable results, but this will not happen overnight."

OCZ is planning to trim away at its value offerings as a company of its size just can't have as many as they do. Along with this, OCZ had offered customer incentives that were also too big. The CEO is looking to make the company profitable and work on its image:

In a world completely dominated by smart devices like smartphones and tablets, less and less people are buying traditional PCs. The "post-PC" era has been touted for quite sometime, but the market has been doing well, until now.

ISH iSuppli's numbers for annual PC sales have dropped for the first time in over ten years, since 2001. iSuppli's numbers aren't devastating, representing a drop of only 1.2% from this time last year, but it's the first decline since 2001. Last year saw a 2.2% growth, so a 1.2% drop is actually something to talk about.

Expectations of growth were pushed and relied on the economy recovering somewhat, Intel's huge push of Ultrabooks and more. Manufacturers shipped 348 million PCs so far, down from 352 million of 2011's numbers. iSuppli does ask some questions:

If you haven't noticed by now, Microsoft are going through a period of change. This is something I truly applaud the Redmond-based company of doing, as it really is required as the competition has changed, and is constantly changing at every turn.

We've now had Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer putting pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, on a new letter to shareholders explaining that Microsoft now sees its own devies as crucial to the company as anything else. He adds that there's a "fundamental shift" in how the company's employees works and he says that investors should expect Microsoft to periodically make "specific devices for specific purposes", like Surface, or Xbox.

This new shift in strategy doesn't mean Microsoft are ditching Windows, it is actually looking like it's quite the opposite - they're listening to their customers, and shifting toward a new era of energy that looks to help all areas of Microsoft's business. This includes Windows, Office, tablets, gaming, phones and more. Microsoft are looking to deliver premium hardware experiences on all devices. Ballmer says "it truly is a new era at Microsoft. We see an unprecedented amount of opportunity for both this year and the long term...I couldn't be more excited and optimistic."

It's time for another update in the ongoing legal battle between Kim Dotcom, founder of MegaUpload, and the US Government. Kim Dotcom and his lawyers requested that the case against him and his company be dismissed upon the grounds that he does not have a United States-based address at which he could be served.

Of course, the courts didn't exactly let him off this easy. In fact, they went as far to say that the absence of a U.S. address under criminal law "does not require a result so extreme as dismissal" of an indictment. It looks like, for now, Kim Dotcom and his lawyers will have to continue fighting the charges brought by the US Government.

Those charges, for the uninitiated, include criminal copyright charges that claim Kim Dotcom encouraged users to upload pirated content to the service so that he could make money from the advertising and premium subscription fees. Megaupload argues that they fall within the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.

From time to time, software giant Microsoft ask Google to remove links from their search engine for webpages that display or distribute copyrighted material. Most of these copyright holders use automated systems to identify and inform Google and other sites of infringements.

As with most things, these automated tools aren't perfect, and Microsoft's latest filings show this. Back in July of this year Microsoft were trying to stem the distribution of its leaked Windows 8 beta listed 65 "infringing" websites, reports Torrent Freak.

Over half of these sites had nothing to do with the beta release of their OS, with Microsoft's automated software accidentally reporting that CNN, Wikipedia, Buzzfeed, BBC, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, The Washington Post, Real Clear Politics, Rotten Tomatoes, AMC Theaters and various websites belonging to the United States government were infringing on Microsoft's copyrights - look at that list!

In case you didn't already realize that all of these patent wars between various companies was hurting not just consumers, and businesses, but it's also hurting innovation. This innovation stops you from getting better, thinner, more exotic products, and now The New York Times has chimed in with a piece on the subject.

The Times' piece covers the fact that big companies usually strong arm small start-ups with an extensive patent portfolio that usually ends up with an acquisition, and if the smaller company isn't acquired they're sued.

The Times' piece also reveals that the smartphone industry spent a whopping $20 billion (or so) on patent litigation in the past two years. Companies such as Apple and Google have spent more money on legal battles than research and development in the past twelve months. Splitting this up, we find Apple spending around $3 billion on R&D last year, with another $4 billion to be spend this year. Those numbers may seem large, but they are far less than most other technology companies.

Samsung have have a great year for 2012, but according to Interbrand's latest data, they're really climbing up the ladder when it comes to the value of their brand.

Interbrand gives the world's top companies a brand value, with multiple points of data used to create this "brand value". As you can see from the chart above, Samsung climbed from 17th place in 2011, to 9th place this year. Apple really ramped up the ladder where last year they were 8th and now they're 2nd.

Coca-cola smashes the list sitting at number one both years in a row. What's surprising is that Samsung have overtaken huge companies such as Pepsi, American Express, HP, Disney, Nokia and more. Facebook sit all the way down that list at 69th place.

You might be waiting an extra week or three for that new iPhone 5 that you ordered. At 1PM October 5 Beijing time, Foxconn workers went on strike over new quality control standards implemented by Apple and Foxconn. It seems that Apple wanted to reduce the number of iPhone 5s coming with scratches from the factory and tightened quality standards.

Unfortunately, they didn't provide any additional training to workers to meet these new standards. Workers were frustrated by the fact that they couldn't meet these new standards and started beating up quality control inspectors. These inspectors, in turn, went to their management where the managers turned their back on the issues.

This led to a strike of about 4,000 workers and quality control managers, bringing the iPhone 5 production to a halt. The watchdog group China Labor Watch has the following to say about the incident: