Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 274

First, HP were killing off their PC unit, then they said they were keeping it, now the group's chief technology officer announced that he is leaving in a statement on his personal blog. December 31st will be his last day and his statement is below in its entirety.

Earlier today, I announced that I will be retiring from HP.

This is not the traditional retirement. I'm not planning on spending my days playing golf or sitting around the house driving my wife crazy. I have far too much passion, energy and ideas to sit on the sidelines.

Facebook sometimes gets the cold shoulder when it comes to privacy and their mobile apps, but todays news is a little different. Facebook are set to build a massive server farm 62 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Luleå, northern Sweden. The facility will include three 300,000 square feet server halls and it will be the first time that Facebook has built a data center outside of the US.

This is becoming a trend for American companies, with Microsoft looking to build a server farm in Siberia, but the deal never gelled together. Google on the other hand is currently building a similar data center in Hamima in southern Finland. Facebook chose Luleå because of its cold climate, with server farms requiring massive amounts of cold air to keep the operating temperatures down. The average temperate in the area is around 2C (35.6F) and the temperature has not been above 30C (86F) for more than 24 hours since 1961.

The plan Facebook have is to pump in cool air from outside to aid in temperature management. Despite this, the server farm will still require a fair amount of power, with the number hovering at around 120 MW. This will primarily be supplied by the Lule River which produces twice as much hydroelectric power as the Hoover Dam.

Sony have just announced that Sony Ericsson will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony and Sony is said to integrate Sony Ericsson into their broad platform of network-connected consumer electronics devices. The transaction also provides Sony with a broad IP cross-licensing agreement and ownership of five essential patent families. Payment wise, Ericsson will receive EUR $1.05 billion as a cash payment.

The transaction gives Sony a new opportunity for their products, where tehy will rapidly integrate smartphones into its broad array of network-connected consumer electronics devices, including tablets, televisions and PCs - for the benefit of customers and the growth of its business.

Sir Howard Stringer, Sony's Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President says:

Apple today filed its Form 10-K with the SEC that discloses information to stockholders and the commission. It also allows sites like TweakTown to perve at some of the wallet-busting numbers included. Apple currently have $81,570,000,000 in cash, marketable securities and cash equivalents. What this means is Apple raked in $37.5 billion in cash profits in fiscal 2011. This is all in a time where they "missed" industry estimates.

That is after Apple spent $2.4 billion on research and development in 2011, up from $1.8 billion for last year and $1.3 billion in 2009. Apple also forked out $4.3 billion for equipment, most likely for factory investments and the North Carolina-based data center. Apple also had purchases of $3.2 billion in 'intangible assets", which is most likely the $2.6 billion share of the Nortel patent purchase that it went in on with other companies, including Microsoft.

Apple only spent $244 million on acquisitions, which would include it's voice-based app Siri, which it acquired in Q1 2010. Other Apple numbers also state that they own or lease 13.2 million square feet of building space, primarily in the U.S. Apple Retail Stores across the world account for 3 million square feet of that number. The data centers Apple run are also included. Also included is the 2.6 million square feet that is located in Cupertino, California which isset to be demolished for Apple's new 'spaceship' campus. Apple also owns a total of 584 acres of land in various locations.

Jon Peddie Research says that the PC gaming hardware market will continue to grow at a rate of 11-percent from now until at least 2014. These figures are based on the fact that over 250 million game-capable PCs will ship in 2011 alone, compared to only 230 million PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 consoles (combined) have shipped since 2005.

The PC gaming market will generate $19 billion in sales in 2011, with estimates that half a billion people regularly play PC games. New markets such as social networking and mobile gaming on tablets and smartphones are continuing the threaten the PC's gaming reputation, a phenomenon that senior gaming analyst Ted Pollack noted in his research.

We are starting to see mobile computers dig into the sales of low end PCs a bit. Consequently this has actually increased the average gaming purchase motivation for mainstream desktops and notebooks because some people with very low computing requirements have been taken out of the denominator, and the potential customer base for desktops and notebooks is more concentrated due to their superior performance in graphically intense applications.

For those of you in the know, you'd know that Mainstream Media is a mostly controlled medium. If they were to tell the real news, then most politicians, presidents, members of Congress and more, would all be thrown in jail. But, instead, the money from powerful people is used to gain control and influence within the power of politics. The same goes for news. This is where Anonymous steps in with something they're calling "Operation Fox Hunt".

Anonymous promise an all-out attack on the Fox News website as retaliation for the network's unjust attack on protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement. In the YouTube clip, the digitized voice says:

Since they will not stop ridiculing the occupiers, we will simply shut them down. Fox News, your time has come . . . Operation Fox Hunt. November 5th. May the hunt begin.

Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs is set to hit next week, and within, we find out more details of how Steve Jobs was absolutely furious about Android "ripping off" the iPhone. Of course, multiple smartphone makers and OS builders have "copied" the iPhone, but its not to say that Apple did it first.

Apple bought something to the market that had been attempted before, but just did it better. Google were hot on the heels and have innovated multiple times within their Android OS, where Apple's iOS has not really grown outside of its initial iPhone launch. Yes it has been upgraded with more features, etc, but an actual change in the way it works, no. It still features the same tile-based icon layout, and has only seen "Notifications" in the last iOS 5 upgrade - something from Android.

But Steve Jobs hated, hated, hated Android. With a passion. To the point where he wanted a "thermonuclear war" with the company because they "ripped the iPhone off". Isaacson has written that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the popular features found on the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-filled rant that Google's actions amounted to "grand theft".

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google Inc. has talked to at least two private-equity firms about potentially helping them finance a deal to buy Yahoo Inc.'s core business. This would be a very strategic move for Google, which would push them right against Microsoft in its bid for the company. The move is of course still in "early-stage discussions" with no formal bid put together. The Journal has a few words as to why the move could be a huge win for Google:

Google is interested in selling some advertising across Yahoo's websites-something Yahoo largely does on its own today-according to people familiar with the matter.

Any deal involving Google could also bring other opportunities, such as bring Google's social-networking service Google+ to Yahoo's audience of nearly 700 million unique visitors a month, these people said.

Netflix have had a very bad time lately, with them admitting on Monday that they lost more customers than expected in the third quarter, which stems from an issue to divorce rentals of DVDs from streaming video services, and they've also predicted that subscriptions for DVD delivery will sharply decline in the current period.

Netflix have also projected that they'll begin to lose money for a few quarters starting in the next period, because of costs associated with their expansions in both the UK and Ireland, also announced on Monday. Investors... not so happy. It was a near-instant reaction with share prices dropping once again. They had already fallen 61-percent from their all-time high in mid-July, falling 26-percent more in after-hours trading Monday, following the quarterly report.

Netflix's market value was $16 billion and has now plummeted to just $4.6 billion, all in the space of three months. Netflix have also stated they've lost roughly 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter, which ended with 23.8 million U.S. customers, this is after years of a steadily increasing subscriber base.

WikiLeaks is pretty close to a cliff right now, unless they can overcome blockades put in place by US financial institutions. Founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said on Monday at a news conference in London that WikiLeaks needs $3.5 million over the next year just to continue normal operations.

WikiLeaks is powered solely on supporter donations and if those backers are unable to throw enough money at the organization, Assange says "we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the year." With both MasterCard and Visa halting donations to WikiLeaks in December 2010, it did not help the situation one bit. Several others have followed suite, including Bank of America, eBay, PayPal and Western Union, which when put together, represented 95-percent of WikiLeaks' revenue.

WikiLeaks is only pulling in roughly $10,000 a month now, which is a huge leap from the $3.5 million that Assange says they need to keep things leaking into 2012. In the interim, WikiLeaks has had to stop processing thousands of secret documents in order to address lawsuits they have filed against aforementioned financial channels. Assange has now vowed to use all of WikiLeaks' efforts to fight "corrupt financial institutions".