Business, Financial & Legal - Page 91

Toshiba has had a great year in the storage world throughout 2016, with the company becoming the fastest growing vendor in the world with $25 billion in HDD sales, and $17 billion in SSD sales.

In two IDC reports, they state: "Toshiba's broad HDD and SSD portfolio enabled them to participate in nearly all market segments for storage devices, a key factor that helped to underpin Toshiba's strong year-over-year revenue growth in CY2016. With successful launches of new HDD and SSD products over the next few quarters to address demand from cloud service providers and the traditional IT market, Toshiba should be well positioned to sustain further HDD and SSD revenue growth in 2017".

Toshiba's hard work in the HDD market saw 9% increase in unit market share in Q4 2016, with Toshiba now taking a large 24% stake in the market - a 60% increase over Q2 2015, where they had just 15%. Interestingly, Toshiba was the only HDD maker that saw total revenue increase in 2016, and increase in revenue share in every product segment: mobile, desktop, performance-optimized enterprise, and capacity-optimized enterprise for the year.

Apple has announced the name of their new spaceship-looking headquarters - Apple Park. The 175-acre campus will be ready for employees to begin occupying in April.

Over the next six months until the official opening, more than 12,000 people will move into the futuristic structure.

To honor the memory of Steve Jobs, Apple decided to name the theater at Apple Park 'Steve Jobs Theater.'

Amazon already has me excited about the future of deliveries with drones, and even freakin' warehouses floating in the sky - but now the company has filed a patent for drone deliveries, with package parachutes.

CNN reports that the US Patent and Trademark office provided Amazon with a patent that sees the everything giant delivering packages with drones and parachutes. The patent shows Amazon would use drones to delivery packages "at altitude" and "monitor and adjust package trajectory during descent". CNN reports that Amazon's drones could "radio a message to an off-course package, instructing it to deploy a parachute, compressed air canister or landing flap".

At the moment drones still need human supervision, but in a future of 'automate all the things', Amazon could be a leader in drone/automated delivery very, very quickly.

A bit of a light hearted story - well, at least in a way - as a man is suing Uber for causing his divorce. Yeah, you read that right.

The French businessman is suing the ridesharing giant for a huge $48 million, after a notification bug with the Uber app let his wife spy on his whereabouts. The man used his wife's smartphone to order Ubers, and then signed out of the app - but, the notifications continued rolling in, after he thought he had signed out.

His wife would've have learned about the affairs from the Uber notifications, with all of his orders, drive names, license plate, and arrival times. His real-time location wouldn't have been tracked, but if he said he'd be working late at the office or catching up with friends for a drink, his wife would know he's lying from his Uber notifications.

Vizio has been tracking, selling your TV viewing habits - in something that we've found out from a settlement with the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General, costing Vizio a swift $2.2 million.

The $2.2 million settlement will settle the state and federal charges placed against Vizio, as the company were busted installing software on 11 million smart TVs to track viewing histories, all without consumer knowledge. Vizio is being order ed to delete any user data that was scooped up before March 1, 2016.

Vizio was busted working with a third-party company to build its smart TVs that were capable of capturing "second-by-second" viewing information about what's being displayed on the screen. This information captured includes what was on your cable, internet, set-top boxes, DVD players, over-the-air broadcasts, and other streaming devices.

Denuvo has been in the headlines lately with the DRM-maker being a part of some of the biggest games of the last 12 months, and now the company is faking something very different - with a massive chunk of private web-form messages being leaked.

The first messages appeared on 4chan, with the messages including contact between game developers and Denuvo. The 11MB file has messages from Denuvo's public contact form, with messages from all the way back to April 25, 2014 - furthermore, it seems like their web database content is totally unsecured, with root directors for "fileadmin" and "logs" opened at the time of writing.

There are also messages from game developers like 343 Industries asking Denuvo about applying their DRM tech to Halo Wars games on the PC, Harmonix Games asked about an in-person meeting during GDC this year, and Capcom asked for a few things, too. Other developers including Ninja Theory and TaleWords also saw their private messages with Denuvo opened to the world.

AMD is getting confident against some very large companies over a patent infringement, with LG, MediaTek, Vizio, and Sigma Designs all in AMD's crosshairs right now.

AMD filed the claim last month, saying that the four companies are manufacturing products that infringe on two patents filed by ATI, and one owned by AMD as well. The patent infringements claim that the companies are infringements with unified shaders, graphics processing architecture, and parallel pipeline graphics systems.

An interesting take on AMD's pursuit is that MediaTek, LG, Vizio, and Sigma Designs normally license their GPU technology from third-party companies like Imagination and ARM. AMD is now suing the manufacturers direct, versus the physical products that the companies are making. AMD is alleging that the infringed products include MediaTek's Helio P10 processor that powers a few LG smartphones, while the Sigma Design SX7 (STV7701) processor for 4K TVs with HDR support, something Vizio uses inside of their high-end TVs.

AMD had quite the year in 2016, splitting its GPU division off into the successful Radeon Technologies Group, with the newly-focused RTG team quickly jumping into action with the Polaris unveil, launch, and now the new cycle is coming in for Vega in 2017.

Consumers and investors are also excited for AMD's return to the enthusiast CPU arena with their upcoming Ryzen processors, with AMD shares increasing after their Q1 2017 financial results. The company pulled in $1.1 billion in revenue, beating analysts' expectations of around $1.07 billion, and quarterly losses of 1c per share - lower than analysts' expectations of 2x per share.

This resulted in a 16% increase in AMD shares from $10.40 or so, to $11.60 each. AMD President and CEO Lisa Su said in a press release: "We met our strategic objectives in 2016, successfully executing our product roadmaps, regaining share in key markets, strengthening our financial foundation, and delivering annual revenue growth. As we enter 2017, we are well positioned and on-track to deliver our strongest set of high-performance computing and graphics products in more than a decade".

Apple overtook Samsung's #1 position in Q4 and became top global smartphone vendor in the world.

According to a report from Strategy Analytics, Apple sold around 800,000 units more than Samsung in Q4 2016. Apple shipped 78.3 million smartphones worldwide and captured 18% market share in Q4 2016, rising 5% annually from 74.8 million units in Q4 2015. This was the iPhone's best performance in over a year.

Playing a huge role in this was Samsung's fiasco with the Galaxy Note7. The Korean company shipped 77.5 million units worldwide, around 800,000 less than Apple.

Razer (yes, the Razer) has acquired a smartphone manufacturer, Nexbit. Nexbit was a startup company that gathered around $1.3 million via Kickstarter campaign for, what is marked as, the cloud-first smartphone. Their idea was to make a phone that would allow usage of apps and content that transcended between phone's onboard storage and a complimentary cloud service.

The Kickstarter campaign was a success. Twelve hours after it was launched, the phone reached its funding goal of $500,000 instead of reaching it within a month and completed its $1 million goal within two weeks.

This resulted in a smartphone named the Nextbit Robin, a phone with 32GB of internal storage. However, the phone utilizes the cloud storage of 100 GB offered by the manufacturer which is integrated within the phone's software as additional storage. The phone went on sale in May last year.

Oculus has been stuck in real life court for the last few weeks, defending itself against claims that it stolen precious code from ZeniMax, in a lawsuit that could now be worth a hefty $4 billion.

Polygon has reported that the closing arguments have been made, and the case is now in the jury's hands. It will now be decided if Oculus CTO John Carmack stole IP from ZeniMax and had it with him when he joined Oculus in 2013, and in the closing arguments - ZeniMax doubled the damages it was seeking - from $2 billion, to a total of $4 billion.

ZeniMax are the owners of id Software - the creators of DOOM, Quake, and more - the developer John Carmack worked for until he jumped ship for Oculus. It's being argued that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey didn't have the technical expertise to built the Rift, without needing Carmack's help.

A new report from Counterpoint Research shows that Apple's iPhone is no longer the top-selling smartphone in China. The iPhone held this position for the past five years, but it looks like it's time for a new star.

And in China, that star is Oppo's R9. The report says that a total of 17 million units of the R9 were sold in the country last year, which is around 4% of the market share. Apple managed to sell 12 million units, meaning they captured around 2% of the market.

Apple became top-selling smartphone in China in 2012, and it held that position for five years. The American company is clearly becoming more vulnerable in China with many Chinese phone manufacturers like Huawei, Oppo, and Xiaomi gaining more fans.

Just three days after the announcement that Hugo Barra is leaving Xiaomi in February to "embark on a new adventure," it has emerged that the face of Xiaomi (soon to be ex-face of Xiaomi) is joining Facebook.

The news was posted by Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook where he expressed his excitement about the new member of the Facebook family.

Barra will lead Facebook's virtual reality efforts, including the Oculus team.

China has just made The Great Firewall much, much stronger - making the use of VPNs in the country illegal.

The use of VPNs and special cable connections throughout China now need government approval, which will see the use of VPN services illegal. Engadget reports that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the new rules surrounding VPNs, calling them a "clean-up" of China's internet connections.

The Ministry ad ded that the new rules are live immediately, and will be in place until March 31, 2018. It was only in March 2016 that the country had a large-scale crackdown on VPNs, with The Washington Post adding that China's new VPN and cable regulations are "purposefully vague", adding that "experts on China's Internet said the notice seems to take aim at Chinese companies providing VPN services to individuals in China - and not, say, those helping multinational companies connect with their home office".

Hugo Barra, the face of Xiaomi, has announced that he is leaving the company after three and a half years.

Barra said in a social media post that he will return to Silicon Valley, where he was formerly Google's Vice President of Android Product Management until he joined Xiaomi, to "embark on a new adventure."

In a long post, Barra explained how he misses his life, friends, and family in Silicon Valley, and that lead him to this decision.

President elect Donald Trump was serious when he discussed manufacturing goods in the US, pushing Apple to make the new iPhone into the US - this stirred Apple's manufacturing partner Foxconn to think about the prospects of moving its manufacturing to the United States.

Apple suppliers could be in for a big shift, with the Chairman of Softbank group, Masayoshi Son, recently meeting with Trump in New York. Masayoshi Son, whose group has an alliance with Foxconn, promised Trump that they would consider investing in manufacturing goods in the US, to create jobs. There's even been a Sharp executive who spoke with Nikkei Asian review who said that the idea is Mr Son's idea.

Foxconn is thinking of building a manufacturing plant in the US, as the country has a large market for TVs and other consumer electronics - with Foxconn rumored to be considering a huge $8.6 billion investment in US manufacturing.

It looks like there is going to be a massive injection of wafer plants in China's near future, with Tsinghua Unigroup to reportedly build IC manufacturing sites in three locations in China: Wuhan, Chengdu and Nanjing.

Tsinghua Unigroup's total investment will hit $70 billion, according to Zhao Weiguo, chairman for the state-backed technology conglomerate, reports DigiTimes. The site continues: "Tsinghua Unigroup is assisting subsidiary Yangtze River Storage Technology to establish a new memory plant in Wuhan (Hebei province). Construction of the plant, which will cover an area of about 13 hectares, kicked off recently".

Yangtze River Storage Tech's new plant has an investment of $24 billion or so, and will be dedicated to making 3D NAND flash products, where it is hoped to hit volume production in 2018. Tsinghua Unigroup is currently breaking ground on two new plants, "one located in Chengu (Sichuan province) and the other in Nanjing (Jiangsu province) - in 2017, Zhao disclosed. Total investment in the two sites is estimated at US$46 billion", said Zhao.

CES 2017 - Samsung has a full frontal assault for your kitchen at CES this year, and while it has dabbled in Wi-Fi-connected smart fridges before, it is launching 6 new ones in 2017 - bringing Samsung up to a total of 10 smart fridges.

This includes a new three-door, four-door, and a four-door "flex" model that has dual freezers. Samsung has updated the fridge's OS to Family Hub 2.0, which provides your family with a new UI, allowing everyone to have a profile - and even lets you set individual avatars, just cause.

There's a massive 21.5-inch LED touchscreen built into the front of it, where you can play around with photos, calendars, and even leave handwritten memos. Tizen is the OS powering the fridge, which takes pictures of the contents of your fridge every time you open the door - letting you know when you need to buy more "Groceries by MasterCard".

I like my fridge, I really do... but when I get to the point of having a fridge with a camera, and a microphone - I feel like we've stepped over a line. What next... our toilet roll holders will have built-in microphones? Our showers will have 360-degree cameras for the next level of Big Brother voyeurism?

According to Mark Stokes, the head of the digital, cyber and communications forensics unit at the Metropolitan Police: "Wireless cameras within a device, such as fridge, may record the movement of owners and suspects. Doorbells that connect directly to apps on a user's phone can show who has rung the door and the owner or others may then remotely,m if they choose, to give controlled access to the premises while away from the property".

Stokes added: "All these leave a log and a trace of activity. The crime scene of tomorrow is going to be the internet of things".

Amazon is already incredibly good at advancing the way it gets products to its consumers, and now its next step in delivery systems looks to be a floating warehouse that sends drones out to deliver packages.

The company filed a patent in 2014 that was awarded to Amazon earlier this year, that teases gigantic floating warehouses that the company calls "airborne fulfillment centers". Amazon would man the floating warehouse, something that could be considered a mothership, with staff that would fulfill the orders it receives online, and sends out autonomous drones to deliver them.

Amazon also says that the crew on the ship will arrive on smaller aircraft that will dock, drop off and pick passengers up, and then undock to fly back to the ground - so that the mothership can stay in the air as long as it can. This would give Amazon an exclusive edge against every single other company in the world, in that it could offer items delivered from the sky with the most convenience ever - anywhere in the world it would have one of their "airborne fulfillment centers" are operating.