Business, Financial & Legal - Page 82

In something that is totally new tech-related, Carl's Jr. has announced it will be selling a CBD-infused burger at one of its locations in Denver, on 4/20.

CBD is all over the place in the US now as more states legalize it, and the industry is quickly growing as a whole including a now major fast food chain in the US with Carl's Jr. and the first CBD-infused burger. The burger in question is the Rocky Mountain High: CheeseBurger Delight features two beef patties, pickled jalapenos, pepper jack cheese, waffle fries and then around 5mg of hemp-derived CBD extract in the burger chain's Santa Fe Sauce.

The burger will of course sell for $4.20, while Carl's Jr. will have at least 1000 of them to sell. Denver, Colorado was the first US state to legalize marijuana, so it's fitting that Carl's Jr. uses the state to sell the first CBD-infused burger. Carl's Jr. senior vice president of marketing, Patty Trevino, explains: "We are a West Coast brand. The states out in the West Coast have been the ones to really adopt and appreciate and be open to cannabis".

Huawei has had one helluva year, with the Chinese giant posting a huge $107 billion in revenue for 2018, the first time the company has broken the $100 billion mark. Revenues were up 19.5% from 2017, while pulling in a net profit of $8.8 billion, an increase of 25% over 2017's numbers.

The consumer business slice of Huawei made the most revenue in 2018 hauling a large $52 billion, which is the first time in Huawei's history that the consumer business made the majority of the revenue for the year. 2018 was good to Huawei with a huge 45.1% increase year-over-year in its consumer business division.

Huawei sold over 200 million smartphones in 2018, and just days ago now revealed its new flagship P30 series smartphone with what appears to be the best camera in a smartphone by a long shot. As for this year, Huawei is expected to do well with January and February 2019 doing extremely well with year-over-year increases of 30%.

GoFundMe inception is happening in San Francisco, with the company donating $5000 towards a GoFundMe campaign that is acting as both a counter, and troll against a separate GoFundMe campaign.

The legal battle ensuing is over the construction of a Navigation Center, which will act as a higher-end homeless shelter that doesn't just provide a safe place to lay your head at night, but it will offer other services and counselling in San Francisco. Some residents took to GoFundMe in a campaign called "Safe Embarcadero for All" attempting to raise $100,000 that would be used "exclusively for legal and related costs to oppose the proposed Navigation Center at Seawall Lot 330".

This particular GoFundMe has an interesting person at its center with lawyer Andrew Zacks involved in the fundraising through the Safe Embarcadero for All which retains the lawfirm he's a partner at; Zacks, Freedman & Patterson that call themselves "the voice of Bay Area property owners". SF Weekly reports that "very wealthy residents of the eastern edge of the city has raised more than $44,000 in 11 days. The recipient: a lawyer, Andrew Zacks, who is representing the residents in their fight against a homeless shelter that's been proposed for a parking lot on Embarcadero between Beale and Bryant streets".

The rumors from the last 48 hours or so have been correct: NVIDIA has just announced it is acquiring Mellanox in a deal worth $6.9 billion. Mellanox is a networking company that is a leader in its field, building super-fast interconnects for datacenters, a market that NVIDIA itself dominates in with its GPUs.

Mellanox was being eyed off by other companies including Intel, but the Israeli-based chipmaker has become NVIDIA's largest acquisition ever. The acquisition will see NVIDIA bolster its position in the datacenter and server markets, which account for nearly 1/3 of its sales. Mellanox mostly makes chips that power high-speed ethernet and InfiniBand networks that are found in servers, primarily in datacenters in the cloud and storage worlds as well as super-fast supercomputers for AI and deep learning.

NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang said: "The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world's datacenters. Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine".

NVIDIA is reportedly eying off an acquisition of Mellanox for a huge $7 billion, according top sources familiar with the matter reports Reuters.

The purported $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox would be NVIDIA's largest acquisition ever, and would see the GPU giant bolster its business of making various chips for the datacenter. NVIDIA wasn't the only one with its name in the acquisition hat with Intel being outbid by the GPU giant in its quest to acquire Mellanox.

Mellanox is based in both the US and Israel where it makes high-speed network connecting servers, with a market cap at the end of trading on Friday of around $5.9 billion. We should expect this deal to cement in this week, leading directly into NVIDIA's biggest event of the year: the GPU Technology Conference, or GTC.

In a move that isn't so surprising for people looking forward with how big Disney is getting, the company has announced that its upcoming streaming service Disney+ will be packed with "the entire Disney motion picture library".

The news is coming directly from Disney CEO Bob Iger, which will effectively end Disney's current 'Vault' system, which wasn't anything to brag about anyway. This is a huge departure from the usual operating procedure at Disney, as it never offered its entire library of content and instead held classic films that people wanted badly, just to drive hype up to its launch. Try it yourself; older Disney movies aren't the easiest to find, but this new move will make them incredibly easy to find.

Iger explained during the announcement at a company shareholder meeting: "The service, which I mentioned earlier is going to launch later in the year, is going to combine what we call library product, movies, and television, with a lot of original product as well, movies and television. And at some point fairly soon after launch it will house the entire Disney motion picture library, so the movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in a 'vault' and brought out basically every few years will be on the service".

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has taken to his official Twitter account to congradulate the recently former Nintendo of America President, Reggie Fils-Aime.

Last week we heard about the saddening yet humbling news of Nintendo America's COO stepping down, Reggie Fils-Aime. The famous President of Nintendo of America announced that he would be surrendering his position as President to none of their than Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Doug Bowser. Fils-Aime has had an epic 15 long year career at Nintendo of America and will be departing from his position on April 15th, 2019.

Reggie took to the official Nintendo of America's Twitter account to post a highlight video of many of his most iconic moments while in his position. He also thanked the fans for their support throughout his time serving as President and said that he is going to be spending much more time with his family and wife. There was quite a lot of positive feedback from the Nintendo community, and surprisingly enough Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson got on board the positivity train as well by congratulated Fils-Aime on his incredible career.

I still remember laughing for hours and hours and then being embarrassed for the guy who starred in what could've been a parody but was serious, at The Verge's attempt at a 'Gaming PC Build Guide' video on YouTube. Well, it sucked - it was categorically wrong and would actually misinform and possible damage a novice gamers build if they followed those stupid guidelines.

Well, a bunch of YouTubers thought it would be funny to give the video sh*t and attack it and rightfully so - that's what they do for a living. Well, The Verge's parent company Vox Media is now trying to rid the internet of these videos attacking their cringe-worthy build guide.

For those who aren't in the loop, The Verge collaborated with a credit card company for a paid advertisement on building a PC. There were plenty of people up and down the food chain that would've written scripts, edited, starred in the video, shot the video, edited the video, uploaded to YouTube, and more. But still, the video was filled with errors and gaffs that were just too good to be skipped over by YouTubers, and especially Kyle 'Bitwit' who used his alter ego 'Lyle' to rip the video a new one. It was absolutely hilarious, and knowing Kyle in person (one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet) it was even funnier because everything he said was true.

Respawn's new Apex Legends battle royale game helps EA bounce back from a big stock dive.

EA had a bad third quarter. Not bad for a games company, but bad for EA, who expects continual growth and hundreds of millions in earnings every three months. The company missed its forecasts by as much as $116 million on the heels of lower than expected Battlefield V sales, subscriptions, and delayed mobile games. This miss caused EA stock to nosedive by over 16%, dropping from $96.52 per share to $78.79 in a day.

But now the games titan's stock is back up to $97.60 per share, its highest point in the last month. EA likely owes this turnaround to Respawn's new smash hit BR game Apex Legends. The free-to-play game has generated considerable buzz across the industry, amassing 10 million players in just 3 days and pulling in untold monetization.

A recent article from Bloomberg has claimed that Activision-Blizzard are planning to get rid of 'hundreds' of employee's next week in wake of the recent declines or flat-lining or their titles.

Bloomberg has reported that Activision-Blizzard employee's that are close to the matter have told Bloomberg that the company is planning on laying-off "hundreds" of jobs next week. The rumored decision is reportedly due to to titles such as Overwatch and Hearthstone having declines or flat-lines in their player-base numbers. Another fact that could contribute to the decision would be that the companies share prices recently dropped 2.5% just last Friday.

According to Bloomberg, analysts have also predicted that Activision-Blizzard's sales will decline a further 2.5% by the end of this year, this will bring the company's net value to $7.513 billion. Activision-Blizzard just recently separated from Destiny developer Bungie, this separation could see the company loosing out on a revenue stream of around $400 million.

Over the Super Bowl weekend, authorities in Georgia arrested 21 people in "Operation Interception", with the ages of those arrested between 20-25 who traveled near the Atlanta metro area trying to pick up children for sex. Yeah, disgusting... and a game studio worker and Twitch streamer was one of them.

Tommy Cheung worked for Hi-Rez Studios, the developer behind big games like Smite and Paladins, and doubled as a partnered Twitch streamer. Cheung was arrested over the weekend in Brookhaven, Georgia where he was charged with using a compute service "to seduce, solicit, lure or entice" a child, which is a felony in Georgia.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a press release that this child sex sting was months in the works, adding: "The goal of 'Operation Interception' was to arrest persons who communicate with children on-line, have sexually explicit conversations, and then travel to meet them for the purpose of having sex. Additionally, the operation targeted those who are willing to exploit children by purchasing sex with a minor".

NVIDIA has had quite a bumpy ride since the release of its new Turing GPU architecture that split across teh Quadro RTX and GeForce RTX families of graphics cards, but today the company reported its Q4 2018 results and fell $500 million short of its previous guidance.

The company previously expected $2.7 billion in revenue but managed only $2.2 billion in revenues instead, with both gaming and datacenter revenue below NVIDIA's expectations, with NVIDIA promising to better detail its financial results during an earnings call on February 14. In a press release by NVIDIA, the company explained: "In addition, sales of certain high-end GPUs using NVIDIA's new Turing™ architecture were lower than expected".

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang explained that the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti "deliver a revolutionary leap in performance and innovation with real-time raytracing and AI, but some customers may have delayed their purchase while waiting for lower price points and further demonstrations of RTX technology in actual games". Huang also talked about "economic uncertainties" as well as a "number of deals [that] did not close in the last month of the quarter".

GameStop's board of directors no longer plans to sell the company to a third-party, the games retailer today announced.

The future of GameStop remains uncertain. Sales were down slightly by 5% during the holiday season and the company is actively searching for ways to offset its $800 million debt and losses. Pressure is mounting as digital gaming puts a dent in resale and trade-ins, which is a trend that pleases publishers. Without a CEO, the retailer is essentially operating the current industry landscape without a head. GameStop's board bought some time by selling its Spring Mobile business for over $70 million, but there's no other pieces to sell, only the whole pie.

Now GameStop's board announced it won't be selling the company because favorable terms couldn't be reached. The news caused company shares to plummet by over 27% to $11.28 per share, the lowest it's been since 2005.

I chatted with AMD earlier on today with some NDA news regarding some staff changes in very important areas of the company, with an industry veteran joining the company to handle the PC, gaming, and semi-custom businesses.

AMD has announced that it will be unifying all sales operations to Darren Grasby, who will be taking on the role of senior vice president and chief sales officer or AMD. He will "lead the global sales and go-to-market activities across all product lines, channels and regions. Previously, Grasby was responsible for worldwide sales to PC manufacturers and channel partners".

The more interesting hire is industry veteran Sandeep Chennakeshu who will be the new executive vice president of Computing and Graphics for AMD, where he will handle all things high-performance PC, gaming, and semi-custom businesses that include the next-gen Microsoft and Sony consoles with Next Xbox consoles teased, and the upcoming PlayStation 5 which all feature custom Zen 2 processors and custom Navi GPUs.

Spotify has decided that they will implement specific advertising to peoples 'Discover Weekly' playlists. This advertising is aimed for sponsors to display their advising to the correct audience.

One of the biggest music streaming giants is no doubt the behemoth Spotify, and one of the greatest aspects of Spotify is the option to be able to discover music curated for you generated by Spotify's algorithm. This algorithm is called 'Discovery Weekly' and Spotify have decided that they would like to market that. The first sponsor of Discover Weekly will be Microsoft and Global Media representative, Erin Bevington said "Our work in AI is a central part of that mission to unlock human ingenuity. Our partnership with a technology innovator like Spotify offered a way for us to effectively share that message within a personalized entertainment experience powered by AI."

It should be noted that paid Spotify members will not have to worry about this new coming advertising, as paid members don't receive ads on Spotify anyway. With there being 87 million paid Spotify members out of the 200 million users, there is still a substantial amount of people that will have to deal with this specifically targeted advertising. Especially considering that in a memo regarding this announcement, users who decide to enjoy their Discover Weekly playlist stream more than double the content those who don't.

It was both 2017 and 2018 that were massive rides for the entire cryptocurrency market reaching both new highs and dangerous lows, creating ripples in other industries like the graphics card market where NVIDIA, AMD and soon Intel reside.

Well, NVIDIA in the midst of all of this has been slapped with a bunch of class action lawsuits over statements made over the last 18 months. When cryptocurrency pricing and the mining market was in a very strong position, NVIDIA had statements that the company were "masters at managing" the cryptocurrency market and that it was prepared for any instability in the market and that both gamers and investors alike, didn't need to be worried.

Yeah and then an oversupplied market, and juicin' second hand card market and no competition from AMD, NVIDIA stock then tumbled 50% recently and is still dropping. It hasn't been a good couple of months since the launch of the GeForce RTX series of graphics cards, and now some have lawyered up and hit NVIDIA with some class action lawsuits.

Ford has just t eased something that, well I quite frankly didn't think I'd see right now: a prototype noise-canceling dog kennel for dog owners who have pets that are scared of fireworks, and other loud noises.

The new prototype kennel is just one part of a series of "Interventions" the car maker is working on, where it's throwing the knowledge it has from its noise cancellation technology that it uses in its new Edge SUVs, into a dog kennel. Ford's technology in the car uses microphones to record engine and transmissions sounds, and then uses speakers to play the opposite frequencies, canceling out the noise.

Human and dog hearing is vastly different, as dogs can hear up to 400% further away, so Ford had to put some serious work into the prototype kennel in the hopes of helping dogs that are scared of fireworks (that are used far away). Dogs can hear at high frequencies of between 67Hz to 45,000Hz while our puny human ears only hear frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000Hz.

Nintendo have recently released their sales statistics for a five-day period running from Thanksgiving through until Cyber Monday. The Big N has hit new milestones by raking in a huge $250 million just within this time frame in product sales.

In a recent press release from Nintendo, the company details how they went over the course of Black Friday sales to Cyber Monday. According to the press release, the "Nintendo Switch set two new records from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday: It became the best-selling Nintendo console in U.S. history for that five-day period, surpassing even Wii system sales." This strong demand in Nintendo products pushed the company to sell more than $250 million dollars worth of Nintendo products within the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.

According to Nintendo's internal sales figures, the Nintendo Switch sales grew a massive 115% when compared to the same time last year. "Lifetime sales of Nintendo Switch, which is entering only its second holiday season, have reached more than 8.2 million units." The sales data also reveals that 1 million first party titles sold during the period of Nov 22-26, this includes digital downloads as well. Nintendo also mentions the beast title that they haven't released yet, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Smash Ultimate is Nintendo's flagship title and will definitely be pushing the Switch unit sales even further than they already have gone. For more information, check out the official press release here.

Most of us have woken to the news, gotten home from school or work, or saw it in real-time through notifications that Stan Lee has died at the age of 95.

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the news after Lee's daughter told TMZ, with Lee starting out in the business in 1939 and created or co-created some of the biggest names in the comic book, and now cinema world. We're talking about Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, Ant-Man, and many more.

Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige has said: "No one has had more of an impact on my career and everything we do at Marvel Studios than Stan Lee. Stan leaves an extraordinary legacy that will outlive us all. Our thoughts are with his daughter, his family and the millions of fans who have been forever touched by Stan's genius, charisma and heart".

Alibaba has just hosted its annual Global Shopping Festival, which last year sold $30.8 billion of products through 230 countries in just 24 hours, representing a huge 27% increase over the $25.3 billion in sales from the 2017 sales.

But now, Alibaba has a huge milestone for its 2018 annual Global Shopping Festival with a huge $1 billion sold in 85 seconds and $10 billion sold in the first hour. Considering how big the US market is and how popular Black Friday sales are, Black Friday 2017 saw $5 billion in online sales... a number that doesn't begin to come close to the first HOUR of Alibaba's annual sale this year.

Some of the biggest brands in the world are involved in Alibaba's annual Global Shopping Festival (AKA Singles Day), including Apple, Dyson, Nike, and many others.