Business, Financial & Legal - Page 97

While Google Glass looks to have stalled, Sony looks to be moving forward with wearable eye-tech by registering a patent for some very interesting contact lenses.

According to Futurism, Sony's patent includes the "ability to record and playback images, store them internally, and even autofocus." It's not currently known how far the company has gone into creating real-world applications for such tech (I'd bet not much), but the patent refers to some cutting edge technology such as piezoelectric sensors and tiny electromagnetic induction so I wouldn't expect to see these available to purchase for quite a few years to come. But with tech like this, maybe the future won't be so bad after all.

Twitter's stocks dropped to $13.90 this morning according to Bloomberg, an all-time low since the company's public inception three years ago. It rose slightly to $13.99 later in the day, putting its market cap at $9.7 billion: a significant drop versus last week's $14 billion, which was estimated prior to the release of the company's quarterly results. As of press time, they sit at $14.08.

Things haven't been going well for Twitter lately, between a recent smattering of executive departures and a trend of dropping stock values. Months ago, The New Yorker went so far as to say the end is near for the social media service, while USA Today stated about the same time that it could go on for hundreds of years due in part to its $3 billion cash reserves. We're inclined to think the truth is somewhere in between.

Vivendi has just purchased a larger stake in Ubisoft, where until now they had a 10% stake in Ubisoft, but have recently purchased more - now holding 17.73% of Ubisoft's capital, and 15.66% of voting shares.

The company filed documents this week which were reported on by Reuters, with the company saying that it had "no plans" to try and push for an Ubisoft takeover, nor would it make an offer for Ubisoft's outstanding shares. Rewinding back to 2015, Vivendi increased its hold on Ubisoft from 6.6% to 10%, which Ubisoft said was "unsolicited and unwelcome".

Ubisoft has since met with investors and the Canadian government to "fight to preserve our independence". Vivendi used to own Activision Blizzard, but sold its majority stake in 2012, and then fully in 2013. It still owns around 12% of the company in 2013, and now it has less than 6%.

Wealthy investor Carl Icahn, has pulled his entire investment out of Apple stock. With Icahn being one of Apple's biggest backers, claiming multiple times that Apple stock was undervalued, and offers more to investors than meets the eye - well, Icahn has pulled his stock and it's making headlines.

Just a month ago, Apple stock was trading at $110, and now it's sitting at $93.74 at the time of writing. How much did Icahn hold in Apple stock? Well, he owned around 0.83% of Apple stock - which is a huge portion of stock for a single investor, which was valued at an insane $4.5 billion. Late last year, Icahn sold around $700 million worth of shares, but this time it was a much bigger chunk.

The reason Icahn sold his Apple stock? Apple is facing issues in China, which are struggling to create devices for the middle class - you know, the people who can't afford $1000 smartphones. This is why Apple has shifted into devices like the iPhone SE, but it hasn't been enough. Apple recently reported that their revenue decreased for the first time in 13 years, due to falling iPhone demand across the world.

While the entire gaming market has shifted to mobile and consoles in terms of AAA game development, the PC is still a powerhouse when it comes to profits.

According to Newzoo's latest Global Games Market Report, we have the latest sales numbers on mobile, PC and console gaming. PC gaming is more profitable than console gaming, but mobile gaming blows them both away. Newzoo's Global Games Market Forecast Model projects gamer numbers and revenues per segment, region and screen on a global, regional, and country level. The report also shows the share of paying gamers and average spend in the same granularity.

The company explains in the report: "These projections are analyzed in various ways, comparing year-on-year growth rates, market share, CAGRs and absolute amounts in USD between the regions and segments, as well as the development of specific regions or segments in time. These projections are compared to available third-party sources on a local or global level. Given the pace of the developments in the games industry, Newzoo reviews its conclusions and assumptions every quarter, taking into account newly available data and insights. Before publication of any data, Newzoo also performs validation checks in various ways including comparison against historic internal data, comparison against market figures from alternative sources and validation from several Newzoo clients".

Valve has officially teamed with Bitpay, introducing support for Bitcoin as a payment method on Steam. Gamers can now use digital currency to purchase games and more through Steam, which is pretty damn cool.

Rory Desmond, Director of Business Development, North America and APAC, explained on the official website: "Today we're announcing a new payment integration with software and gaming giant Valve which will bring bitcoin payments to Steam gamers worldwide".

The quote continues:

Gamers and PC enthusiasts have long thought of Intel as a PC company thanks in part to sheer longevity, and of course its technically excellent processors. But as the PC market under-performs, Intel is now looking at itself in a new light, one that focuses more on other technology sectors.

The company's chief executive Brian Krzanich made it crystal clear for the first time this week that it's transforming itself "from a PC company to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices." Which is only logical, given 40 percent of its revenue and 60 percent of its profit margin now come from sources other than the PC space.

"It's time to make this transition and to push the company over all the way to that strategy and that strategic direction," said Krzanich.

Email privacy had always been a point of contention in nearly all circles. It wasn't until quite recently that most cloud providers started encrypting your messages while just sitting in your inbox, and requests for your email data have been made without search warrants under other executive order authority as well as under the auspices of the older law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

The Email Privacy Act was just passed by the US House of Representatives that would require the use of a warrant when looking at emails, even those that are 180 days or older. This new bill is a much needed update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which required only a more simple subpoena to find older emails. This bill subsequently closes that loophole. This bill may be response to the recent lawsuit from Microsoft regarding the older ECPA, who argue that it violates the Constitution.

Just as with before, the government is not required, and won't, notify you if they're rummaging through your emails though some providers have taken it upon themselves to notify users if they're the subject of an investigation. This bill, however, still has to pass through the Senate, and then be rectified by the President, but with the momentum it already has, it very well could be a much needed update to privacy that doesn't get hung up for political reasons.

After taking 13 years of dominance in their quarterly results, Apple has just reported its fiscal Q2 2016 results, reporting a 16% decline in iPhone sales when compared to the same period of last year.

Apple still pulled $50.6 billion in revenue for the three-month period, down 13% from the $58 billion in the same quarter of 2015. The company did warn the decline was on the way, with company CEO Tim Cook saying that the iPhone 6S upgrades were outpacing those when the iPhone 5S launched.

Even with the decent sales, it wasn't enough to match the "accelerated" upgrade cycle it saw with the iPhone 6 in 2014. Two other major sources of iPhone customers are people switching from Android, and first-time smartphone owners. When it comes to this, Cook says that iPhone business is good. In the last six months, Apple has had more people switching over to iPhones more than any other 6-month period, ever.

Rhapsody International -- parent company of streaming music companies Rhapsody and Napster -- has appointed Mike Davis (pictured here) as its first CEO. Until now, the company has been led by executive committee.

Davis' background lies in private equity; he recently served as a "growth adviser" and senior operating consultant to LA firm The Gores Group.

The move seems to be a response to the intense competition seen from Spotify and Apple Music, as has recent feature additions to the Rhapsody client in recent months.

AMD's longstanding residence of the Sunnyvale campus will be no more before long, rumor has it; The Irvine Company is set to buy it from New York real estate investment trust W.P. Carey, according to real estate sources. Irvine Company is known to raze offices and R&D campuses, so it makes sense that we're hearing AMD is consequently seeking another headquarters in Silicon Valley.

While the company forecast for AMD has been looking increasingly better in recent times, it's still 2,000 employees shy of what it was in 2011, and so it's said to be looking at properties with a 35 to 40 percent footprint reduction, or about 175,000 - 225,000 square feet versus the 319,000 square feet of its current location.

AMD's has resided at the Sunnyvale campus since 1977; its lease ends December 2018.

AMD has had a great week, topping it off with a huge 52% rise in stock to $3.99. This is the highest gain in a single day since AMD stock was listed, all the way back in 1979.

For the day, AMD was the biggest gainer and the most active stock on the NASDAQ exchange - with 140 million AMD shares traded. This is 10x the 50-day average of 12 million or so. Why the sudden and huge spike in AMD shares? The company just landed a joint venture deal to sell high performance enterprise x86 processors to the Chinese market.

This move will see AMD compete with Intel on a grander scale, as it has AMD providing the technical knowledge, while THATIC provides the resources, and financial support. The licensing deal should see AMD secure $293 million, plus royalties.

We reported a couple of days ago that Intel was preparing for major global workforce cuts, with the chipmaker announcing that they will indeed be cutting jobs over the next year.

The employment cut is part of Intel's larger and continued restructuring efforts, as the company is facing a slower PC market, and continued struggles in the mobile market. The job cuts will see 12,000 employees sliced away from the company, or 11% of its global workforce. Intel will begin most of the layoffs in the next 60 days, with the entire process working its way through to 2017.

Patrick Moorhead, President and Principal Analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy reached out to us about the global workforce layoffs at Intel, saying: "In spite of the announced layoffs, Intel had a good quarter and even showed PC growth in a very down PC quarter. In fact, all but one segment showed improvements year on year".

In 2005, the Authors Guild sued Google for scanning book excerpts for its database. 11 years later, the battle is over, and Google has won resoundingly following a judgment from the Supreme Court, which denied the option for appeal.

The Guild claimed the project hurt authors' abilities to make money from their work, while Google claimed everything it was doing was protected under fair use laws. After the ruling, both parties echoed these sentiments.

"We believed then and we believe now that authors should be compensated when their work is copied for commercial purposes," said Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson.

While Intel is shrinking down to 14nm right now, it is reportedly looking to shrink down its job numbers, with a new "significant round of job across across business units this spring", reports Oregon Live.

At the end of 2015, Intel had 107,000 employees worldwide, with its Oregon-based operations including 19,500 employees. The new cutbacks will reportedly reduce employment in some parts of Intel's business by double-digit percentages, which will result in thousands of job cuts by the end of 2016. We could expect the announcement soon after Intel reports its Q1 financial results on Thursday.

Last year, Intel sliced up 1,100 jobs - but these fresh job cuts will reportedly be even more severe. The company is still insanely profitable, with gross profit margins higher than 60%. Even this year, Intel's forecast sales growth is somewhere higher than 5%, but the job cuts are still reportedly on their way.

If there's one thing that Apple has done better than every other smartphone company, is that their iPhone sales have increased year-over-year... forever - until now, that is.

It's expected that 2016 will be the first year that iPhone sales will experience a decline, with Tom Cook even teasing this during Apple's earnings conference call earlier this year. Cook said: "We do think iPhone units will decline in the quarter. We don't think that they will decline to the levels you'll talk about. We aren't going to project beyond the upcoming quarter".

A new report from Nikkei suggests that the iPhone sales slump might hurt sales during the current June quarter, too. Nikkei reported: "Slow sales of the flagship iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, which debuted last autumn, have forced Apple to adjust inventories. It lowered production for the January-March quarter by about 30% from the year-earlier period. With sales still sluggish, the U.S. company has told parts suppliers in Japan and elsewhere that it will maintain the reduced output level in the current quarter".

Earlier today the US House of Representatives passed a bill, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, that would effectively limit the authority that the FCC has to regulate broadband pricing schemes according to the current Net Neutrality laws.

The Net Neutrality rules that passed in February of 2015 reclassified broadband services as regulated telecom services, which would effectively allow the FCC the ability to regulate how these services are priced, setting caps so that its can be more affordable and available to a larger portion of the population, should they wish to. The Chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, said that they don't currently have plans to do so, however. HR 2666, which passed earlier today, 241-173, was introduced as a measure to essentially hold them at their word. The reasoning behind limiting power preemptively is that the price of broadband should be determined by the market, not controlled by any one person or agency.

The bill itself doesn't quite focus purely on limiting pricing power, either. The Electronic Frontier Foundation opposes the new bill, saying that the terms are overly broad and much too general in their scope. This could potentially eliminate any, or all, protections consumers have against unfair pricing models or even when ISP's introduce data cap exceptions that seem to be arbitrarily made. Their definition of what a rate is, even, a bit vague, and could stand to be more specific.

Google's philanthropic offshoot Google.org has donated $20 million across 30 non-profit organizations to further develop technology that will help the disabled. Its generosity follows the results of its Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities, which launched last year with the aim of seeking great technological ideas from different organizations, all seeking to improve the lives of the disabled.

The grant winners -- The Center for Discovery and Perkins School for the Blind among them -- will develop technology that can convert regular wheelchairs into power wheelchairs for increased independence and freedom, assist the blind in finding their way around better with an app, more readily treat children with clubfoot (rotated feet), and help those with difficulty communicating verbally or with text do so better with a specialized keyboard, among other things.

Google says nearly 1/7th of the planet suffers from a disability; one in three of those lives in poverty, and 90 percent living in developing countries don't have access to the devices they need.

First a Microsoft VP resigned and joined another company and now an Apple designer has done the same. Danny Coster, who joined the company in 1993 and has contributed to many major projects since (likely including the pivotal Bondi Blue Mac pictured here), has left for the position of Vice President at GoPro.

The Apple industrial design group has been tightly knit since its inception with not one shake-up on record, so this move is more than the usual coming and going. Longtime member Richard Howarth will take up Coster's position.

Coster recently expressed a desire to spend more time with family and friends, noting the high pressure that comes with working at Apple, so this is likely the reason for the change.

Microsoft Vice President, OEM Technical Sales Chris Cocks has resigned from his position to take the helm at gaming company Wizards of the Coast, where he now serves as President, replacing Greg Leeds. Cocks previously worked at Procter & Gamble, Xbox, MSN, and Leapfrog.

Wizards is best known for its Magic: The Gathering (MTG) and Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) properties. The former is gaining a particular lot of attention with this move, as Wizards has already confirmed a "new digital platform" for MTG (presumably replacing the current MTG Online client), and has posted job ads for Magic Digital asking for developers with Unity experience, so it looks like the new client will be built with the excellent Unity engine (which powers the ever-popular Hearthstone). In turn, this means it's likely to finally make it to mobile and Mac, as Unity is cross-platform.

"We're very excited to welcome Chris to the Wizards of the Coast family," said John Frascotti, President, Hasbro Brands. "As an avid fan and player [of MTG and D&D] with extensive digital experience, I'm confident Chris is the right person to help us build on the tremendous momentum around our brands and take the franchise to the next level by delivering exciting new experiences to our growing and passionate fan base around the world."