Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 238

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).



Rob was then promoted into Quadro sales and he has been expanding in that role ever since. Why is this news significant you ask? Professional products are the cash cow of the graphics industry...

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.



Back in September, The Oprah Winfrey Show announced that it would fly 300 audience members out to Australia to film two live shows at the Sydney Opera House on 14th of December - the trip is partly paid for by a $3 million fund from the Australian Government.

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.



Speaking at iiNet's annual general meeting today, iiNet chief executive Michael Malone said that iiNet Labs had already commenced with new products to be available in the coming months.

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



The first airports to take advantage of this will be Sydney and Perth - with the latter having live trials since July. Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra will be enabled throughout the first half of 2012.

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.



In previous years, Apple spent $467 million in 2007, $486 million in 2008, $501 million in 2009 and this year Apple have spent an astonishing $691 million on advertising alone - a $190 million increase from last year alone. Even more surprising, Apple is continuing their trend of lowering the percentage of revenues spent on advertising.

While $691 million is a lot on advertising - keep in mind Apple had total revenues of over $65 billion - this equates to around 1 percent of their revenue, spent on advertising. Last year, that percentage was 1.37 and in 2007 it was 5 percent.

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.



Alan Joyce, chief executive of Qantas said that the Apple desktops would be available immediately in the Qantas club facilities and that it would be rolled out in other cities by the end of 2010. He said, "We are launching Sydney Qantas Lounges with the new technology from today; Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth from November; and Alice Springs Cairns, Darwin, Hobart and Townsville from December."

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.



They've confirmed they've signed a lease for a venue to be in Fitzroy and have started renovating the place for the launch later this year. They said they had spent months looking for the right place - to end up settling down on this one as it's situated next to other high class cocktail bars and it's also close to Melbourne's tram network.

There's no concrete date for the opening as they want to get it right before announcing, Guy "Yug" Blomberg said: "The date is something we're taking really seriously. We had people fly up to Brisbane last time, so we want to make sure we get it right."

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.



Intel President and CEO - Paul Otellini said, "Today's announcement reflects the next tranche of the continued advancement of Moore's Law and a further commitment to invest in the future of Intel and America," he added "The most immediate impact of our multi-billion-dollar investment will be the thousands of jobs associated with building a new fab and upgrading four others, and the high-wage, high-tech manufacturing jobs that follow."

The investment is geared toward Intel's move to manufacturing at a 22nm process. Intel is on track to deliver 22nm chips in 2011.

Texas Instruments makes all sorts of chips for a vast range of devices running from mobile phones and set top boxes to other electronic devices that you probably don't even know they work with. TI runs its own fabs where it builds its chips itself rather than being a fabless semiconductor firm like some that farm out the actual construction of their chips to someone else.

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TI has announced today that it has acquired a new analog semiconductor fab in China. The fab is the first that TI has in China, is located in Chengdu, and will be known as TI Chengdu. The fab is a fully equipped 200mm fabrication facility and TI purchased the fab from Cension Semiconductor Manufacturing Company at an undisclosed price.

The lads over at KitGuru have an interesting interview with Richard Huddy of AMD.



If you're a fan of GPU's (from either team) it's a very good read. There will be more interviews to come.

The interview explains a lot about both business practices, benchmark's, the Batman AA scandal, DX11, the future of PC gaming and hardware and how every game up until 2012 will be developed around the AMD Radeon as they were the first GPU company with DX11 level hardware.

Here are some snippets from the interview:

"With one exception, every game released through to 2012 will have been developed on AMD's Radeon"

We asked Huddy about the ways in which differences in hardware design translate into the DevRel push. "AMD being able to deliver DirectX 11 hardware into the hands of developers a full 6 months ahead of nVidia, means that with one single known exception, every game released through to 2012 will have been developed on AMD's Radeon hardware. that gives us a huge advantage".