Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 261

A new challenger has appeared. Apple is no longer the only one doing frivolous lawsuits; now, they are at the receiving end of one! Yes, it's true, one of Apple's stores, with its slick and modern design, "caused" an 83 year old woman to break her nose by walking into the glass--guess they use Windex!

As a result of the collision, Grandmother Evelyn Paswall is suing the company for a cool $1 million. Her lawyer explains:

There were no markings on the glass or they were inadequate. My client is an octogenarian. She sees well, but she did not see any glass.

New iPhone (will that be the new name?) development is of course under way, but a massive part of this is the actual production of the smartphone itself. Foxconn are key partners to Apple, but right now, Foxconn's northern plant in Taiyuan, which is in China's northern Shanxi province, may become both a key hub of the new iPhone, as well as a flashpoint for working condition issues.

The China Times reports that the factory was facing a "huge" shortage of workers, to the tune of 20,000 of them, as it got ready for the new iPhone. It is being reported that they would be in charge of producing as many as 85-percent of total orders, or close to 57 million new iPhones. So, we'd be talking about just under a year of stock for one single model.

The problems with the workers apparently stem from Foxconn allegedly promising to raise pay packets for everyone, but then only delivered their promises to mid- and upper-tier workers, which of course, pissed off some employees, rightfully so, too. The raises supposedly reduce the requirement to work overtime in order to get a decent pay, but the managers have been pushing an all-or-nothing attitude toward overtime. Either you work insane amounts of overtime, or you get offered no overtime at all.

Research in Motion were born in Canada, and have enjoyed Canadian's being loyal to RIM, but this has just begun to stop. In 2011, RIM shipped 2.08 million BlackBerry smartphones, versus the 2.85 million iPhones that Apple sold. Rewind another twelve months into 2010, and we have RIM selling over 500,000 more units than Apple did in Canada.

If we go back a bit further to 2008, RIM sold 500-percent more BlackBerry phones than Apple did iPhones. But, we all know that the iPhone has grown in popularity immensely, and Canadian's just don't want to continue being blindly loyal. Bloomberg notes that Canada-based sales make up roughly 7-percent of RIM's total revenue.

RIM has enjoyed local support in Canada, which would hurt them considerably seeing Apple overtake them on their home ground. Alfred DuPut from research firm Interbrand says that this is due to RIM not investing enough in promoting their devices once the iPhone shipped. If you ask me, it's because Apple have a totally contained system, with hipsters wanting them, grandmas wanting them, great marketing, they just 'work', and are simple enough that a 5-year-old could use it.

Earlier today, we reported the FaceBook issued a statement regarding employers and the like who asked for FaceBook log in credentials. Well now, a senator in the USA is reportedly drafting a bill to make this illegal. The DOJ has already said they believe breaking FaceBook's ToS, which ban giving your password to someone, is a federal offence, but have sated they will not be prosecuting it.

The senator described the requests as an "unreasonable invasion of privacy for people seeking work," adding that the bill would be ready "in the very near future." The practice is akin to them asking to open your postal mail to see if there is anything interesting in there. With everyone up in arms about the practice, it's no wonder someone thought it to be a good idea to write a law regarding it.

France's President, Mr. Sarkozy, said in a statement, "From now on, any person who habitually consults websites that advocate terrorism or that call for hate and violence will be punished. France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil." If politicians aren't blaming games for violent behavior, they turn to the internet. It's common political rhetoric, but does this announcement even make any sense?

What caused this? Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old, killed seven French people - three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi. He claimed Al Qaeda inspired him to do so. Luckily, there is a good distance to travel from this statement issued in the heat of the moment to it being implemented in a law. Sticking to this particular case, is there any evidence that Merah visited any of these "extremist websites?"

Besides, as most people know, these videos can be found pretty much anywhere, including sites like YouTube. Also, how would this law be implemented? This is starting to sound like an assault on France's internet freedom. Besides, how do you tell apart a PhD student from a radical? The simple answer: you can't. Let's just hope today's announcement is just more political rhetoric in an election year.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (say that ten times fast), who is kind of equal to the US Secretary of the Treasury announced that the government would make tex credits available to UK-based video game developers in the next budget. Andrew Eades, CEO of UK developer Relentless Software, said in a statement released by The Independent Game Developers Association (TIGA):

UK developers have been competing on an uneven global playfield. Today's decision by the government to back TIGA's tax break campaign will help ensure that we can remain competitive in the global market.

We were nearly here before, back in 2010, when the current UK government cancelled plans for gaming industry tax breaks when they came into power in 2010. Critics have said that the cancellations of these tax breaks were pretty catastrophic for the UK gaming industry, where they caused studio closures, impeded the nation's ability to compete internationally, and have caused a brain drain of talent seeking better jobs in countries like Canada.

OK. I admit it: since I purchased the new iPad, I've been obsessed about 'Draw Something', the Pictionary-like drawing game which is just insanely addictive. Most of the people around me, family and friends, have been playing it too, which makes it great. Today I wake up to the news that the maker of Draw Something, OMGPOP, has been acquired by social gaming powerhouse Zynga.

What price did Zynga draw on Draw Something's cheque? A very cool $210 million. TechCrunch has heard they were offered $180 million upfront, plus a $30 million earnout. OMGPOP chief executive, Dan Porter, now becomes a general manager and vice president of Zynga New York, with OMGPOP's employees joining Zynga. OMGPOP had not hit great success with titles up until Draw Something, when they bought the game to iOS and Android just over a month ago, they saw the title explode: racking up 35 million downloads, and 1 billion drawings.

It has also been reported that OMGPOP could have been worth more... a lot more. Simon Khalaf, the chief executive of mobile analytics company Flurry, said to TechCrunch's Kim-Mai Cutler, as well a Business Insider's Henry Blodget that OMGPOP effectively left $800 million on the tablet by selling to Zynga. The reason behind this is that Draw Something could've branched out into different areas, the same way that Rovio took the Angry Birds franchise and made it flourish.

Several job hunters were taken aback recently when applying for a job because of something the interviewer did. The interviewer pulled out a computer, and pulled up the applicant's FaceBook profile. When the interviewer found the profile was private, she did the unthinkable: she asked the applicant for his/her login information to the site. The scary part is that this seems as if its becoming the normal practice; employers checking FaceBook and the Internet to try to find the best applicant.

But what do they do when it's private? Apparently, they just ask the applicant. But, is this legal? Can they do this? Obviously, one can refuse, but they run the risk of not getting the job. Or, in the case of Justin Basset, he chose to withdraw his entire application, citing that he did not want to work for a company that requested such private information.

"It's akin to requiring someone's house keys," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former Federal prosecutor who labeled it "an egregious privacy violation." However, some people don't have a choice, such as Robert Collins of Baltimore who complied with the request citing he felt he needed the job to provide for his family and had no choice.

It seems as though Apple is on track to pass Intel as the world's largest mobile device chip provider, if all things continue as they are, before the end of 2012. This is according to technology research firm, In-Stat. The continued success is thanks to Apple's amazingly popular mobile devices, as well as the selective use of manufacturing partners such as ARM and Samsung.

The study done by In-Stat included what are commonly thought of as "mobile" devices, this includes notebooks, smartphones, tablets, handheld gaming systems, e-readers and the iPod Touch. It completely excludes desktop computers and servers. By the end of 2011, Apple were already in second place, where they sat behind Intel, shy of 5 million processor shipments. Apple had a total of 176 million mobile processors shipped, compared to Intel's 181 million. This provided Apple with a 13.5-percent share of the mobile device market versus Intel's 13.9-percent.

Considering Apple seem to be unstoppable, one would think that Intel would eventually turn into a serious rival of Intel's, but that might not be the case. Intel has long held out the possibility that Apple would eventually switch over to its own mobile processors in the future, and has been spending big amounts of time and money on new smartphone, tablet and Ultrabook-capable chips in order to stake claim in some future market share. Intel hopes to compete head-to-head against ARM's processors with a low-power Atom chip called Medfield, which will roll out over the rest of 2012.

Bit of a strange one here, but I guess it can make sense, too. According to a leaked e-mail from Alain Crozier, the chief financial officer of Microsoft's Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group (SMSG), Microsoft may install a policy that prevents employees from using corporate funds to purchase Macs and iPads.

The e-mail was passed onto a ZDNet writer, in its entirety below:

From: Alain Crozier