Business, Financial & Legal - Page 237

Western Digital, a company known for their magnetic hard drives, has signed a deal to acquire sTec, a company known for their solid state drives. Specifically, Western Digital has announced that HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital, will make the acquisition for $340 million, allowing Western Digital to enter into the solid state market.

The deal is expected to close in the third or fourth quarter of 2013, allowing Western Digital to hopefully enter the solid state market with the new technology sometime in 2014. Western Digital wants to add SSDs to its enterprise line-up at a time when big companies are ready to start implementing the technology.

For those not aware of who Machinima are, you might want to take a look - they feature more than two billion (that's with a B) YouTube views per month, and are one of the Internet's biggest entities on YouTube.

This is obviously worth a lot of money, but just how much? Well, the people behind the company are looking for a "mega-round" of financing. In 2012, Machinima executives raised $35 million in a financing round led by Google, and this time, they are looking for more than that, much more in fact. The money they hope to raise will help the company setup more advanced content ambitions.

At the moment, Machinima rely on clips contributed by YouTubers, but they want to spend more money licensing original shows like the big boys do. Also, instead of just running their new shows on YouTube for free, Machinima want to work out a way where they can create a subscription-based model like Netflix, or Hulu.

Apple has had a shocking past twelve months or so, where we've seen them fall from grace, and fast. I called it out, and was one of the first to see they were about to stumble, and now everyone else seems to have jumped on the TT bandwagon, which is nice.

Now it seems that Tim Cook is about to feel all of that pain, with Apple's board changing the way the CEO's pay packet is handled. Here's what will happen: If Apple's stock outperforms the market over the next eight years, Cook will keep the one million Apple shares he has now - which he was set to receive no matter what happened to Apple stock. But, if Apple's stock continues to dwindle, which I think it will, Cook could lose up to 40% of his shares.

When Apple first gave Cook his original package, those one million shares were worth $376 million. At the peak of Apple's shares at the end of last year, those shares were worth a cool $705 million, and today? Just $413 million. Apple filed a document with the SEC, which says Cook "has the full support of the Board of Directors", noting that the way they give out bonuses is being changed to all of Apple's top execs.

We all know the United States government and their various agencies such as the NSA, FBI and CIA have counterparts across the world - but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has leaked more documents to The Guardian, which suggest British counterparts also intercept data.

The British operation is codenamed "Tempora" by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and has been in operation for at least 18 months. This operation involves the use of "intercept probes" which are directly attached to transatlantic fiber-optic cables going onto British shores from telephone exchanges and Internet servers in the US. "Intercept partners", or commercial companies as the documents describe them, were secretly used to attach the intercepts on behalf of the GCHQ.

The companies weren't revealed in the documents, but were forced by law to help the GCHQ, and were even paid in some cases. This has allowed the GCHQ to take in countless amounts of data from citizens - with everything from phone calls, to e-mails and Facebook data. The Guardian notes: "For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fiber-optic cables that ring the world."

We all know that you can't just talk about the secret programs the United States government and their multiple tentacles like the NSA run, such as PRISM, and if you do you face criminal charges and are branded with the word 'espionage'.

Edward Snowden talked of NSA's top-secret PRISM program, and is now facing charges that include Theft of Government Property, Unauthorized Communications on National Defense Information and "Willful Communication of Classified Information to an Unauthorized Person." My question is, if he is being charged - is this the United States government's way of admitting the system is there? Is now the time for the United States citizens to stand up to the government?

We've seen Bradley Manning thrown away in a hole somewhere, Julian Assange hiding out in another country, Kim Dotcom with multiple hits against him and now Edward Snowden. It seems if you come forth with a nugget of information that they don't want the general public to see, they'll build a case against you with everything they've got. The papers say that the US government has asked Hong Kon to detain Snowden Let's all hope Snowden makes it out of this and the Chinese government don't get on their knees to the Obama administration.

Sitting at Starbucks sipping on a coffee while enjoying their free Wi-Fi? You'll now be shown a free trial offer which will give you access to Google Play Music All Access. The deal started this week, which saw the two companies partnering up to connect Starbucks' free Wi-Fi offer promotional deals to content on Google Play.

Starbucks will now be displaying an advertisement for Google Play Music All Access, where they will be promoting features of Google's music service and offering a click-through for a free trial. Clicking through will offer up a full browser page where you'll see the full features of the service, offering a 30-day free trial. It also offers the same $7.99 discounted price when signing up before June 30, but doesn't offer this deal beyond Starbucks customers.

It looks like NVIDIA is taking a different, and great new path with their business - where they'll shift from simply making their own GPU's and SoC's to licensing their technology to other manufacturers.

NVIDIA will begin by offering their Kepler GPU architecture, which the company state is the world's most advanced and efficient GPU, and the reference design for their next-generation Tegra mobile processors. Licensees of NVIDIA's technology will receive designs, collateral and support to integrate Kepler into their devices. NVIDIA will also license their vast visual computing portfolio, which will open up to licensees the intellectual property necessary to make their own GPU's.

The company have had trouble getting into the mainstream with their Tegra processors, as good as they are, it's still not mainstream. This new path could lead to a much better future for NVIDIA, as OEM's will most likely just dive onto this plan versus spending buckets of money on their own internal R&D.

Google is one of the first companies to release transparency reports that disclose the number of requests for personal data they receive from various governments. Unfortunately for Google, FISA and NSL requests often come with gag orders to prevent them from disclosing the fact they even received a request.

Google has filed a motion to gain permission to specifically separate the number of FISA requests they receive from general criminal requests in their transparency reports. Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo have all started publishing national security orders in their respective transparency reports.

This is something that could be like pulling a thread from a very large ball of wool, but defense lawyers for Terrance Brown, who is a south Florida man currently facing bank robbery charges, have requested the NSA to provide them with Brown's mobile phone surveillance records to support his claim that he wasn't anywhere near the bank at the time of the robbery.

The reason this request has been done is that we now know that the NSA requires all American phone companies to hand over the complete records of all of their clients' calls, including the GPS location data of the calls themselves.

Most people are unaware of Amazon's grocery business that it runs in its home base of Seattle. More people are about to become aware, if a report by Reuters is accurate. According to their sources who are familiar with the situation, Amazon is preparing to expand its grocery business to Los Angeles as soon as this week and San Fransisco later this year.

Amazon's current grocery business utilizes their own fleet of trucks to deliver fresh produce--eggs, strawberries, and meat--to residents of Seattle. The current business, AmazonFresh, has been operating for a least five years. These sources say that the business could expand to 20 aditional urban areas in 2014, provided the two new markets said to be launching this year go well.

Grocery experts feel Amazon faces a major challenge with AmazonFresh. However, if successful, it could pave the way for Amazon to start delivering their own products via the same trucks used to deliver the groceries.