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Augmented Reality: Vuforia by Qualcomm | View Clip
01/25/2012
Mobile Magazine
Augmented Reality: Vuforia by Qualcomm
By Alexander Udalov
At this past CES, rare demos of Augmented Reality (AR) implementations failed to attract much attention. There are many reasons for the fading interest in AR on mobile devices. Reviewers quote numerous technical problems with “live view” class encoding; 3D scene generation is the major obstacle on par with the inclusion of AR functionality being a daunting task even for the most powerful quad-core SoCs (think Tegra 3).
However, Qualcomm continues to push AR as a viable tool for bringing their Snapdragons to the front scene. At their presentation on CES 2012, they brought no less a character than Grover himself on stage to show off a toy called the Sesame Street Playset, a basic set of toys that works with a table and figurines. There’s a chance that in the demo presented for Mobile Review, the HTC Jetstream (Puccini, for some markets) tablet was used. However, the HTC Jetsream-looking case could be used fo Qualcomm’s prototype of their next generation dual and quad-core Snapdragon/Krait processors:
As much amusing and attractive AR-enhanced Grover may look here, this is just one example of the possibilities that Qualcomm’s Vuforia technology presents:
For marketers, Vuforia can drive brand engagement in entirely new ways. Advertising can literally jump off the printed page. Product packaging can come alive on retail shelves. And once purchased, products themselves can provide enhanced interactivity to provide instructions and drive future sales. See how leading global brands are using Vuforia today.
For developers, Vuforia provides industry-leading technology and performance on a wide range of mobile devices. Vuforia’s computer vision functionality will recognize a variety of 2D and 3D visual targets. With support for iOS, Android, and Unity 3D, Vuforia will allow you to write a single native app that can reach over 400 models of smartphones and tablets.
Vuforia SDK can be downloaded from Qualcomm’s site, so if you are interested to push your product in rare hyper-reality space, you can start your AR project today.
We wrote about using elements of AR in gaming before. Namely, we suggested using Google’s Street View as a scenery for Bethesda’s highly popular Skyrim. Vuforia by Qualcomm could be very a useful tool too.
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LG Optimus LTE smartphone grabs 1 million in sales | View Clip
01/25/2012
CNET.com
LG Optimus LTE smartphone grabs 1 million in sales
by Lance Whitney
LG has sold more than 1 million of its Optimus LTE smartphones.
LG’s Optimus LTE phone is proving to be a hot seller around the world, racking up more than 1 million in unit sales.
Debuting in South Korea last October, the phone grabbed sales of 600,000 units in its native country during the first three months.
From there, the Optimus LTE traveled to Japan to capture sales of 8,500 units in its first day, then to Canada, and finally to the U.S. where it was rebranded the LG Nitro HD, altogether pulling in more than 400,000 in additional sales to take in a cool million.
The phone is currently selling in North America through three of the major carriers, including AT&T.
Dubbed the world’s first HD LTE smartphone by LG, the Optimus LTE offers a high-definition 1280 x 720 pixel (16:9 aspect ratio) IPS (in-plane switching) display. Composed of 2.76 million sub-pixels, the 4.5-inch True HD screen is touted as delivering sharp clarity and a natural color accuracy.
The phone is currently running Android 2.3 Gingerbread but is slated to receive a bite of Ice Cream Sandwich sometime in the second quarter of 2012.
Beyond its screen, the Optimus LTE is powered by a 1.5 gigaherz dual-core processor, offers an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture and playback, and includes a 1,830 mAh battery to provide extra life to handle all of the phone’s multimedia features.
Users will also find an HDMI port and support for DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) to play content from the phone through compatible TVs and media systems. And of course, the LTE connectivity provides high-speed access in locations that support it.
“With brisk sales for a high-end smartphone, the Optimus LTE reaffirms LG’s leadership in mobile LTE technology,” LG CEO and President Jong-seok Park said in a statement. “The combination of LTE connectivity with LG’s True HD IPS display has resonated with the public regarding the potential of LTE technology.”
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Core suppliers savor bigger Apple pie | View Clip
01/25/2012
Thomson Reuters – Helsinki
Core suppliers savor bigger Apple pie
Tarmo Virki
(Reuters) – Suppliers basked in the reflection of Apple’s glowing results on Wednesday after the company’s gold standard iPhones and iPads flew off the shelves over the holiday sales season.
Apple’s forecast-beating fourth-quarter figures late on Tuesday helped it to beat Google’s Android as the largest smartphone platform in the United States and to regain the world’s largest smartphone maker spot from Samsung.
Apple’s results were spearheaded by sales of the iPhone 4S, which is packed with technology from British chip designer ARM, said analyst Nick James at Numis.
Apple accounts for about 10 percent of ARM’s technology revenues, and for about 35 percent of graphics and video chip designer Imagination’s technology revenues, he said.
“It means people are still driven by performance in terms of having the highest performance, highest functioning devices, and those tend to have quite a number of ARM-based chips in them.”
“It is one of the key things that drove Imagination to come through to the next level,” James added.
Shares in ARM jumped 4.2 percent, while shares in Imagination were 4.1 percent higher at 1030 GMT.
Analyst Didier Scemama at RBS said that although Apple was only one of many ARM customers — the Cambridge-based company supplies virtually every smartphone and tablet with their cheap designs — from a sentiment standpoint there has been a strong correlation between the two stocks.
“(Apple) should help the whole sector today, but especially Dialog Semiconductor and other suppliers,” said a Frankfurt-based trader.
Shares in Dialog Semi were up 3.9 percent.
OVERTAKING SAMSUNG
Samsung became the world’s largest smartphone maker in the third quarter, but analysts said the 37 million iPhones sold in the fourth quarter should easily beat Samsung’s expected sales of around 30 million.
Samsung is due to report on Friday.
Research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said Apple’s share of the U.S. market doubled from a year ago to 44.9 percent in the October to December period, just beating the total for Android smartphones, which slipped to 44.8 percent from 50 percent.
“Overall, Apple sales are now growing at a faster rate than Android across the nine countries we cover,” said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at the research firm.
Apple’s iPhone 4S also uses chips from Samsung Electronics, Qualcomm, Toshiba and a host of smaller semiconductor companies, including TriQuint, Skyworks Solutions and Avago Technologies Inc.
In stark contrast to Apple’s success, sales of handset makers using Android, including Motorola Mobility, HTC and Sony Ericsson, have stumbled in the quarter.
(Reporting By Tarmo Virki, Paul Sandle and Harro ten Wolde; Editing by Will Waterman)
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Ericsson Profit Plummets | View Clip
01/25/2012
International Herald Tribune – Berlin
Ericsson Profit Plummets
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN
BERLIN — Ericsson, the market leader in wireless networking equipment, said on Wednesday that its profit plummeted 66 percent in the fourth quarter amid losses at its SonyEricsson and Swiss handset chip ventures.
The company, based in Stockholm, also said that sales slowed in the United States, partly because of the aborted merger of AT&T Mobility with T-Mobile U.S.A.
Net profit at Ericsson fell to 1.5 billion Swedish krona, or $235.3 million, from 4.4 billion krona a year earlier. Sales rose 1 percent to 63.7 billion krona from 62.8 billion krona.
Sales at Ericsson’s business of managing telephone networks for operators rose 18 percent, helping to offset a 9 percent decline in its biggest business of selling network equipment.
Hans Vestberg, the Ericsson chief executive, said profit fell amid restrained spending by operators in the United States, India and Russia — markets that had been growing quickly.
The company also had to absorb a 1.9 billion krona loss caused mostly by ongoing problems at SonyEricsson, which makes handsets, and ST-Ericsson, a joint venture with the French chipmaker ST Microelectronics.
SonyEricsson, which Ericsson is in the process of selling to Sony, had a loss of €207 million, or $269 million, in the quarter, after an €8 million profit a year earlier.
ST-Ericsson, a Geneva-based unit that makes hardware and software components for cellphones, lost $231 million, more than a $177 million loss a year earlier.
“Our joint ventures had a very bad fourth quarter,” Mr. Vestberg said at a conference with financial analysts in Stockholm. “We are seeing operators being cautious in 2012. If that leads to lower sales, we can’t say at this point. But it may take longer to make decisions.”
Shares of Ericsson fell as much as 13 percent in morning trading in Stockholm.
Hakan Wranne, an analyst at Swedbank in Stockholm, said Ericsson’s struggling joint ventures, plus the U.S. market slowdown, caused the sharper-than-expected decline in profit.
Mr. Vestberg, the Ericsson chief executive, said AT&T and T-Mobile deferred buying network equipment as they sought to merge their businesses. After nine months, the operators abandoned the plan in December amid opposition from U.S. regulators and lawmakers.
“Ericsson had had fantastic, high-margin sales in the United States with Verizon and AT&T,” Mr. Wranne said in an interview. “But those started to shrink in the third quarter and all but went away in the fourth quarter. That was good money in high-margin investment that disappeared in a bigger way than we had expected.”
Ericsson said sales in North America fell 27 percent in the quarter from a year earlier.
Mr. Vestberg, at the conference with analysts, said operators in India virtually halted their purchases of network equipment amid economic uncertainty.
Nevertheless, demand among consumers globally for mobile broadband services and devices keeps growing, Mr. Vestberg said. The only question, he added, is whether operators will still make needed purchases at some point during 2012, or put them off until later years.
“At this point, we cannot answer that,” Mr. Vestberg said.
The loss at SonyEricsson, a venture that Ericsson created with the Japanese consumer electronics maker in 2001, will not affect Ericsson’s plans to complete the sale of its 50-percent stake back to Sony in February, Mr. Vestberg said.
Ericsson in October said it had reached agreement to sell its stake in the venture to Sony for $1.47 billion.
“This will not affect the price,” Mr. Vestberg said, referring to the handset maker’s fourth-quarter loss. He added that Ericsson would probably end up reporting less capital gain from the sale, however.
With ST-Ericsson, the handset component venture, Mr. Vestberg said Ericsson had was reviewing the company’s business strategy and intended to return the venture to profitability “as soon as possible.”
“But it will take some time,” Mr. Vestberg said, without being more specific.
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Apple’s Profit Doubles on Holiday iPhone 4S Sales | View Clip
01/25/2012
New York Times, The
Apple’s Profit Doubles on Holiday iPhone 4S Sales
An Apple store in San Francisco. The new iPhone 4S and the iPad were wildly popular in the last quarter of 2011.
By NICK WINGFIELD
It turns out Apple didn’t need an iPhone 5 to bolster sales.
The company reported on Tuesday that its profit for the holiday quarter more than doubled. And that was largely thanks to sales of the iPhone 4S, which, when it was introduced in October, was greeted with grumbling from pundits and some users for lacking the razzle-dazzle that many imagined an iPhone 5 would bring.
But consumers still came out in droves to buy the iPhone 4S, helping the company sell more than double the number of iPhones for the quarter ending Dec. 31 than it did a year ago, a figure that was also lifted by sales of cheap, older models of Apple’s cellphone.
With the 37 million iPhones that customers snapped up over the holidays, Apple has sold 183 million of the devices since the product went on sale in 2007. Revenue from the iPhone and iPad — neither of which could be bought five years ago — now accounts for 72 percent of Apple’s total revenue, underscoring the transformation of the company.
And although phones based on Google’s Android operating system had been gaining more customers in recent years, Apple has begun to chip away at some of the advantages of these phones, narrowing Android’s lead in the United States over the holidays.
In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, described the customer response to the new iPhone as “breathtaking” and said the company could not meet global demand for the device despite producing a record number of iPhones. “As it turns out, we didn’t bet high enough,” Mr. Cook said.
The supporting act in Apple’s product lineup — the iPad — also had a record quarter, with the company selling 15.4 million of its tablet devices over the holidays, more than double the number it sold during the same period the year before.
After watching competitors stumble for the last two years, Apple faced its first credible competition in the tablet computer category this fall when Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire. The $199 device from the Internet retailer is significantly cheaper than the $499 starting price for the iPad and is closely linked to various Amazon online offerings including its e-book store, movie and music services.
Mr. Cook said Apple’s iPad sales were not hurt by Amazon’s Kindle products, which have less computing power and are missing features like cameras for now. “Customers will buy those and they’ll sell a fair number of units,” he said. “But I don’t think people who want iPads will settle for limited functions.”
The rosy results sent Apple shares soaring more than 7 percent in after-hours trading to more than $450 each. The jump increased the total value of Apple’s shares to more than $426 billion, pushing its market value past that of Exxon Mobil and making it the most highly valued company.
Apple, which is based in Cupertino, Calif., said its net income for the period rose 118 percent to $13.06 billion, or $13.87 a share, compared with net income of $6 billion, or $6.43 a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 73 percent to $46.33 billion, from $26.74 billion a year ago. Apple’s results were inflated slightly because its 2011 holiday quarter included 14 weeks of sales, rather than the 13 weeks in 2010, because of a change by the company.
The results were better than the $10.08 a share in earnings and $38.85 billion in revenue expected by analysts, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters. Apple had forecast earnings of $9.30 a share and $37 billion for the quarter.
“It almost defies words in terms of the strength across all products,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Everything about it eclipsed even the wildest expectations of analysts.”
Apple said it sold 5.2 million Macintoshes during the holiday quarter, 26 percent more than it did a year earlier.
The performance of Apple’s iPhone business underscores how the company has thrived in the mobile phone market, even as Google steadily nibbled away at the iPhone’s share of smartphones in recent years with handsets based on the Android operating system.
Not only are Android phones made by a wide array of manufacturers, they have had wider distribution on carrier networks. The iPhone was initially limited to AT&T’s network in the United States and exclusive relationships with other carriers elsewhere in the world.
But the iPhone is now available on the three largest wireless networks in the United States, with the addition of Sprint in the fall. And after it introduced the iPhone 4S, Apple also made its older iPhone 4 available for $99 and iPhone 3GS free with contracts through wireless carriers. Analysts say they think the move expanded the audience of potential iPhone buyers beyond people willing to spend $199 for Apple’s latest model of smartphone.
There are signs that Apple’s strategy helped narrow Android’s lead in the market over the holidays. Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, said in a recent report that 61.6 percent of United States smartphone consumers surveyed in October said they had gotten an Android phone within the last three months, while only 25.1 percent got an iPhone.
By December, though, Android’s lead among people who had acquired a smartphone recently had narrowed to 46.9 percent while 44.5 percent of consumers said they had bought an iPhone, Nielsen said. About 57 percent of iPhone owners in December said they got the new iPhone 4S, while the rest, 43 percent, got older iPhones.
The iPhone 4S was initially derided by some critics for offering little improvement on the iPhone 4, with none of the bold outward design changes that make it easy for cellphone users to brag about owning the latest Apple gizmo. On the inside, though, the product has a better camera, faster microprocessor and a virtual assistant called Siri that lets people dictate texts and do Web searches with voice commands.
Apple said it expects to report earnings of $8.50 a share and revenue of about $32.5 billion during the fiscal second quarter.
Apple’s cash and securities ballooned to nearly $100 billion, an eye-popping sum that is likely to revive calls for Apple to return some of the hoard to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, told analysts that the company and its board of directors are “actively discussing” uses of the cash, including potential acquisitions and further investments in the company’s supply chain.
“We’re not letting it burn a hole in our pockets,” he said.
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Yahoo’s Income Drops 5% in Struggle for Market Share | View Clip
01/25/2012
New York Times – San Francisco Bureau, The
Yahoo’s Income Drops 5% in Struggle for Market Share
By NICOLE PERLROTH
SAN FRANCISCO — Investors hoping for any hint of what is next for Yahoo in Tuesday’s earnings announcement will have to wait a little longer. Instead, they got the same old story: more cost-controls and declining revenue.
“No fireworks here,” said Colin Gillis an analyst with BGC Financial. “It was a lackluster quarter.”
The company made no mention of a new strategic direction in what was the first earnings announcement under Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s new chief executive. The announcement was timed just three weeks into Mr. Thompson’s term as chief executive and one week after Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang, stepped down from the board.
It also occurred as Yahoo’s board underwent a strategic review that began in September that includes selling its Asian assets.
But the company made no mention of the deal in its earnings call with analysts. “The work is ongoing,” Mr. Thompson said in the conference call. “I believe there is big potential at Yahoo, much bigger than the outside world envisions today.”
Yahoo increased its operating income 10 percent from the same quarter a year ago, but reported declining revenue and profit for the second consecutive quarter. The company’s net income in the fourth quarter dropped 5 percent, to $296 million, or 24 cents a share, from the year-ago quarter. Revenue fell 3 percent, to $1.17 billion, excluding commissions paid to Yahoo’s partners. Wall Street analysts had expected 24 cents a share, but slightly higher revenue of $1.19 million, according to a survey of analysts by Zacks Investment Research.
The company has been trying to cut costs and build on its strength in online editorial content. With 702 million monthly users, Yahoo remains the most trafficked news site online. But, as Mr. Thompson acknowledged Tuesday, “the sheer number of users will not get us to where we need to be. We need to improve the quality of customer experiences.”
To that end, the company announced a partnership with ABC to feature ABC News content on the Yahoo home page in October. But the biggest element of that turnaround effort, Yahoo’s display advertising business, fell 4 percent, to $546 million, compared with the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, the overall market for display advertising in the United States grew 23.5 percent, to $9.2 billion last quarter, according to eMarketer.
Display advertising had traditionally been one of the company’s bright spots, but Yahoo continues to lose share to Facebook and Google. Yahoo’s share of the online ad market declined 11 percent last year, down from 13.3 percent in 2010. While Google’s share grew to 40.8 percent, from 38.5 percent, and Facebook’s share reached 6.4 percent, from 4.6 percent for the same period, according to eMarketer.
“Getting our display advertising business on the right course is what I spend all my waking moments thinking about,” Mr. Thompson said in the call, though he did not offer any specifics.
Yahoo’s search business also contracted for the quarter. It is operated by Microsoft under an agreement that extends to March 2013. Revenue from search, after payments to Microsoft and others, fell 3 percent, to $376 million.
Mr. Thompson hinted that much of the company’s future innovation might come from the wealth of data it has on its 702 million users.
“The data is very, very impressive,” he said. “If you believe data and great technology and great technologists can begin to predict what’s in a user’s mind, having that data to start from is a huge advantage. You’ll see some interesting, data-oriented experiences coming out sooner versus later.”
Yahoo’s board has faced mounting pressure from activist investors, like Daniel Loeb of Third Point, to unlock shareholder value. The board had initially considered selling a minority stake to private equity suitors. It is now leaning toward a tax-efficient sale of its Asian assets to refocus on its core media assets in the United States where it has long suffered from declining revenue and an exodus of senior sales employees. Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba and a 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, valued at approximately $17 billion. Yahoo’s total market value is only slightly bigger at $19.5 billion.
The company is looking to sell its interests in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan in a complicated “cash-rich split” tax deal in which these companies would buy some other operating businesses and trade them to Yahoo in exchange for their own stock.
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Nvidia cuts revenue outlook, citing hard disk shortag | View Clip
01/25/2012
CNET News.com
Nvidia cuts revenue outlook, citing hard disk shortag
by Brooke Crothers
Nvidia has lowered revenue expectations for the period ending January 29, citing the hard disk drive shortage in Thailand.
Revenue for the fourth quarter is expected to be lower than the company’s previous outlook provided with its financial results for the third quarter ended October 30, 2011, the company said this afternoon.
Revenue is now expected to be $950 million, plus or minus 1 percent, compared with original expectations of $1.066 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, provided on November 10, 2011.
“The global disk-drive shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand had more impact on the mainstream GPU (graphics processing unit) segment than anticipated. Shipments by some PC [makers] were reduced. And the higher prices of disk-drives constrained some PC [maker's] ability to include a GPU in their systems,” Nvidia said in a statement.
But it’s not just hard drives that are causing problems, as the company also cited diminished orders for its Tegra 2 chip that powers tablets and smartphones. “Additionally, the Tegra 2 mobile business declined more rapidly than expected, ahead of devices based on the Tegra 3 processor ramping into production in the first quarter of calendar-year 2012,” Nvidia said.
Nvidia will report financial results on February 15.
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Apple ‘Didn’t Bet High Enough’ on Chinese Demand for IPhone 4S, Cook Says | View Clip
01/25/2012
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Apple ‘Didn’t Bet High Enough’ on Chinese Demand for IPhone 4S, Cook Says
Apple Inc. (AAPL) underestimated the “staggering” demand for the iPhone 4S when it started sales in China this month, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said.
“We thought we were betting bold,” Cook said about sales of the device in China on a conference call yesterday. “We didn’t bet high enough.”
Crowds pelted Apple’s oldest store in China with eggs on Jan. 13 when the shop in Beijing’s Sanlitun district failed to open on the first day of sales for the iPhone 4S. After Beijing police sealed off the area to remove more than 500 people, Apple announced that it would suspend sales of iPhones at all stores in Beijing and Shanghai “for the time being” to ensure safety.
With sales halted at its China retail outlets, Apple is now offering the iPhone in the world’s largest mobile phone market through its online store, carrier partner China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., and authorized resellers. The company’s online store in China is currently sold out of the iPhone 4S.
Chinese demand for the handset is “off the charts,” Cook said on the call.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, this month moved closer to expanding its distribution in China through a second carrier partner when regulators approved specifications for a device that would run on the network of China Telecom Corp. (728), the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier.
Cook declined to answer questions about when a second carrier would be added in China.
‘Key Partner’
“China Unicom continues to be a very key partner,” he said on the call. “I’ve got nothing to announce today on an expansion there, but as I’ve consistently said, China is an extremely important market for us and we continue to look at how to grow it further.”
Apple announced yesterday that quarterly profit more than doubled to $13.1 billion in the period that ended Dec. 31 on surging demand for the iPhone and iPad.
The company sold 5.6 million iPhones in China during the first nine months of last year, making it the No. 4 smartphone vendor in the country in the third quarter, according to Stamford, Connecticut-based research company Gartner Inc.
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Edmond Lococo in Beijing at elococo@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net
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LG Electronics Rises on Optimism of Profits From Handsets: Seoul Mover | View Clip
01/25/2012
Bloomberg – Seoul Bureau
LG Electronics Rises on Optimism of Profits From Handsets: Seoul Mover
By Jun Yang and Shinhye Kang
LG Electronics Inc. (066570), the world’s third-largest maker of mobile phones, rose the most in more than a month in Seoul trading amid optimism that its handset business may have returned to profit.
LG advanced 4.1 percent to 77,100 won at the 3:00 p.m. close, the highest level since Dec. 21. The benchmark Kospi index rose 0.1 percent to 1,952.23.
LG, whose handset unit has lost money for six straight quarters, said in November it plans to raise 1.06 trillion won ($940 million) in a rights offer and will invest more than half the proceeds in turning around the unprofitable mobile-phone business. LG’s shares dropped 35 percent over the past 12 months, while its rival Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) gained 14 percent.
“The current share price is pretty low compared to other tech stocks,” Kim Woon Ho, a Seoul-based analyst at Hanwha Securities Co., said by telephone “We’ve been telling investors to reduce holdings of other stocks and buy LG lately.”
The handset division probably returned to profit in the fourth quarter, Kim said. Sales at the air conditioning business will start picking up in the first quarter, while other technology companies typically report slower sales in that period from the previous quarter, he said.
The Seoul-based company will report fourth-quarter earnings.
Samsung Electronics Co. continued its advance today, closing at record 1.114 million won in Seoul.
Hynix Semiconductor Inc. (000660), which supplies memory chips to Apple Inc., rose 1.9 percent to 27,450 won. Apple yesterday reported quarterly profit that more than doubled after a record 37 million iPhones were sold in the fiscal first quarter.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jun Yang in Seoul at jyang180@bloomberg.net Shinhye Kang at skang24@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net
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One-time charge pushes AMD’s solid results for fourth quarter into the red | View Clip
01/24/2012
VentureBeat
One-time charge pushes AMD’s solid results for fourth quarter into the red
Dean Takahashi
In its first full quarter under a new CEO, Advanced Micro Devices reported solid fourth quarter operating income, but a one-time charge threw it into a loss.
AMD reported a loss of $177 million, or 24 cents a share, compared with 14 cents a year ago. Revenue was $1.69 billion, compared with $1.65 billion a year ago.
Rory Read (pictured), left the No. 2 job at AMD customer Lenovo to take the position as chief executive of AMD at the end of August.
Analysts expected the company to report a profit of 16 cents a share on revenues of $1.72 billion. The results included a $209 million non-cash impairment charge for the change in value of Globalfoundries, the manufacturing company that AMD spun out as a separate company.
On a non-GAAP basis, not counting the charge, AMD reported fourth quarter net income of $138 million, or 19 cents a share, and non-GAAP operating income of $172 million. Besides the one-time impairment charge, AMD reported restructuring charges of $98 million related to cutbacks in the fourth quarter.
In a statement, Read said he was encouraged by the success of AMD’s line of Fusion processors, which combine a microprocessor and graphics on the same chip. To date, AMD has sold 30 million accelerated processor units (APUs), or combo chips.
AMD is the perennial underdog to Intel. This morning, AMD’s market value was $4.55 billion, compared with $136.51 billion for Intel.
About a year ago, AMD’s highly respected CEO Dirk Meyer left the top job after a dispute with the board. On Meyer’s watch, AMD outwitted Intel in server chips with the 2003 launch of its Opteron server microprocessors, and he also settled antitrust litigation with Intel, extracting a $1 billion from the bigger company. But Intel bounced back strong in both server chips and laptops chips, and AMD’s market share hovered around 15 percent to 20 percent.
While Intel shifted its focus into low-power chips, AMD bet heavily on combining graphics and microprocessors in the same chip. It launched that family of chips last year under the Fusion name, but Intel also matched it with a less-capable but adequate combo chip dubbed Sandy Bridge. Meanwhile, AMD has been sparring back and forth with Nvidia to provide the fastest graphics processor, a title that AMD says it now owns.
Read now has AMD readying its slate of chips for the introduction of Windows 8, the new operating system from Microsoft that is expected to hit the market later this year.
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A bird’s-eye view of T-Mobile’s new spectrum trove | View Clip
01/25/2012
Giga Om
A bird’s-eye view of T-Mobile’s new spectrum trove
By Kevin Fitchard
With their planned merger officially dead, AT&T is in the process of handing over T-Mobile’s consolation prize, which includes a grab bag of airwaves T-Mobile will use to bulk up its 4G network. AT&T’s official transfer application popped up on the Federal Communications Commission website over the weekend, revealing for the first time the specific licenses T-Mobile would gain. For those of you who don’t want to dig through the arcane documentation, GigaOM reader and spectrum policy wonk Andrew Shepherd has prepared a map that shows exactly where T-Mobile picks up new airwaves and how much.
T-Mobile didn’t get new spectrum nationwide but it certainly got some valuable licenses in key cities. What’s more, Shepherd found that AT&T had fork over all of its AWS holdings in some pretty valuable markets, including Boston; San Francisco/Oakland; Washington, D.C.; Houston; Baltimore; Atlanta; San Diego; Seattle; Kansas City, Mo.; San Jose, Calif.; San Antonio; and Salt Lake City. While those losses must sting AT&T, the operator was very careful about which markets it chose to relinquish.
AT&T is launching its LTE over both 700 MHz and AWS frequencies, and in all of the biggest cities, AT&T only gave up spectrum where it had enough 700 MHz backfill to get at least a decent-sized LTE network up and running, Shepherd said. In some big cities AT&T will only have enough 700 MHz to launch networks half the size of Verizon’s current LTE setup. But AT&T will be able to boost its capacity considerably when it moves to LTE-Advanced, incorporating the new 700 MHz spectrum it bought from Qualcomm. In the biggest markets such as Chicago, AT&T wouldn’t part with any of its AWS licenses even though it had other spectrum to fall back on.
As for T-Mobile, it made out like a bandit in some of the nation’s most important cities, giving it between 60 MHz and 80 MHz of combined AWS and PCS airwaves in many of the markets involved in the transaction. That will allow T-Mobile to expand its HSPA+ 42 Mbps footprint in some areas and add more 4G capacity in others.
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Mexico’s antitrust commission votes on Televisa-Iusacell partnership | View Clip
01/25/2012
Dow Jones Newswires – Mexico City
Mexico’s antitrust commission votes on Televisa-Iusacell partnership
By Anthony Harrup, Of Dow Jones Newswires
Tie-up would provide money for Iusacell to expand its business and give media company Televisa an entry into mobile market.
Mexico’s antitrust commission said Tuesday it reached a decision on the proposed partnership between mobile phone operator Grupo Iusacell and broadcast and media company Grupo Televisa SAB, but has several weeks to notify the parties involved before making its decision known.
In April 2011, Televisa agreed to invest $1.6 billion for a 50% stake in Iusacell, one of the smaller of Mexico’s four mobile-phone operators. The deal would provide money for Iusacell to expand its business and give Televisa, which also provides Internet and phone service through its cable businesses, an entry into the mobile market.
The Federal Competition Commission, or CFC, said in a statement late Tuesday that its five-member commission reached a decision, but that members are barred by law from making it known until the sides are notified, for which it has until Feb. 7. Spokesmen for Iusacell and Televisa said the companies didn’t have any information on the resolution.
In recent days, Iusacell expressed concern that the commission was planning to reject the tie-up between Televisa, the country’s biggest TV broadcaster, and Iusacell, which is controlled by businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego who also controls the country’s No. 2 broadcaster TV Azteca SAB.
Iusacell said last week that it planned to file charges against CFC President Eduardo Perez Motta and would seek to stop him from voting on the partnership on grounds that he had made known opinions against the partnership ahead of time. In the end the company didn’t file the charges.
Perez Motta said last week that he had yet to make his decision and that his vote would be based on “my appreciation of the impact of the transaction on competition conditions and free access to markets, without responding to pressures from any player.”
He rejected assertions that he favored Telcel, the Mexican mobile phone business of billionaire Carlos Slim, which has about 70% of the country’s mobile subscribers. Iusacell has about a 4% mobile market share.
Televisa and TV Azteca, meanwhile, control between them virtually all of the commercial free-to-air broadcast television in the country, while Telmex, Slim’s fixed-line company, has been refused government authorization to launch its own television service. Telmex has about 80% of the country’s fixed phones lines.
Given Iusacell’s small mobile market share, a rejection or conditional approval of the Televisa-Iusacell deal would likely involve considerations about the television market as technological developments lead to convergence of the different media and communications offerings. Iusacell has a similar mobile market share as NII Holdings Inc. unit Nextel Mexico, and the CFC had previously cleared Televisa to buy a stake in Nextel–a deal Televisa eventually pulled out of.
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Google to Update Privacy Policy to Cover Wider Data Use | View Clip
01/25/2012
New York Times – San Francisco Bureau, The
Google to Update Privacy Policy to Cover Wider Data Use
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Google said Tuesday that it would revise its privacy policies and terms of service, to make them shorter and more readable and to change the way Google can use information that users provide.
To alert users about the changes, which take effect March 1, Google plans to undertake its biggest notification effort ever via e-mail and announcements on its various sites, according to a person briefed on Google’s plans.
Though the announcement comes two weeks after Google was hammered by critics for the way it integrated Google Plus posts into search results, Google said that it had been working on the new policies for a long time and that recent events had nothing to do with the timing.
Still, the biggest change in the new policies goes to the heart of privacy concerns about Google’s new search feature. Google Plus posts that appear in search results are only from people whom Google users have chosen to follow on Google Plus and who have shared specific items with them or made them public. But critics said that it violated users’ privacy because when people posted on Google Plus, they did not know that the posts would show up in search results.
The new privacy policy makes clear that for people logged into a Google account, Google can use information shared on one service in other Google services.
“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, wrote in a company blog post. “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”
The change will also allow Google to do other useful things, Ms. Whitten wrote, such as letting a user know she might be late for a meeting based on her calendar and current location, or correcting the spelling of a friend’s name in a Google search.
Last year, Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over privacy misrepresentations it made related to Buzz, a social networking tool. It agreed to start a privacy program, submit to audits and pay a fine for any future misrepresentations. One watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said this month that it thought Google’s new social search tool violated that agreement.
Google also shrank and rewrote its privacy policies and terms of service — documents that on many Web sites are known for being too long, convoluted and bogged down by legalese. Google’s main privacy policy, which had more than 70 separate documents for various products, will now cover 60 products in one document. A dozen, like Wallet or Chrome, will still have separate privacy policies. The terms of service are also consolidated and explain legal terms.
Between now and March 1, as Google notifies users of the changes, they will be able to view and compare the old and new policies.
Google’s new efforts build on changes it made to simplify its privacy policy in 2010. Other companies, like Facebook, have also tried to shorten their policies, as industry regulators demand clearer and more concise statements.
Google emphasized that its core privacy guidelines will not change. For instance, it does not sell personal information or share it externally except in the case of a valid court order, and it allows data liberation, which means Google users can export information to other services.
The changes come a week after Google unveiled an ad campaign in United States newspapers, magazines, Web sites and subways to educate people about privacy. The campaign had already been running in Europe, where Google has faced more criticism and investigation of its privacy practices.
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Verizon, others, invest in video tech company Skyfire | View Clip
01/25/2012
Thomson Reuters – Helsinki
Verizon, others, invest in video tech company Skyfire
(Reuters) – The venture arm of Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and others have invested $8 million in video technology company Skyfire, which plans to expand into European and Asian markets.
The other investors are Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures.
California-based Skyfire, best known for its mobile browser, helps operators handle the surging demand for video on cellphones. It has now raised a total of $30.8 million, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Data growth on mobile networks is expected to rise almost 30-fold during next five years as consumers increasingly watch video on wireless devices.
“Wireless operators around the world are facing an explosion in mobile data on their networks, driven largely by mobile video,” Andrew Verhalen, general partner at Matrix Partners, said in a statement.
“Skyfire is well positioned with solutions for operators that can expand network capacity by over 25 percent, as well as generate incremental revenue.”
(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; editing by Andre Grenon)
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Here’s why Obama is visiting Intel | View Clip
01/25/2012
CNET News.com
Here’s why Obama is visiting Intel
by Brooke Crothers
Artist’s rendering of the $5 billion new chip manufacturing facility and support buildings to be built at Intel’s site in Chandler, Ariz. President Obama will visit the site on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, President Obama is due to visit an Intel plant in Arizona. Here’s why.
Obama aims to highlight manufacturing in America–one of the State of the Union’s themes–and it’s hard to find a better example of that than the world’s leading chipmaker. Intel is now one of America’s foremost manufacturers, boasting some of the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities in the world, many of them sprinkled throughout the U.S.
Its development fabs (fabrication plants) in Oregon are the most cutting-edge of its leading-edge factories and have already received one presidential visit, in February of last year.
Obama’s Wednesday visit–as part of his Made-in-the-USA theme–will highlight Intel’s high-volume manufacturing facilities in Arizona (see chart below).
In Chandler, Intel will make its next generation of 14-nanometer (nm) processors that will be its most highly-integrated and power-efficient to date. Those chips–many of them a so-called SoC or system-on-a-chip–will power future ultrabooks, tablets, and smartphones.
And an often overlooked aspect of Intel’s manufacturing might is its strategic relationship with Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology. Those two companies formed Intel Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) in 2006 and operate two U.S. plants, one in Utah and another in Virginia.
The manufacturing technologies used at those plant are world class, too. Flash chips from those plants go into Intel and Micron solid-state drives and, who knows, IMFT chips may someday find their way into Apple MacBooks, iPads, or iPhones.
And all of this is good for exports. “Semiconductors are America’s top exporting industry and with three quarters of semiconductors being designed and manufactured here and 82 percent of our sales outside the U.S.,” said the Semiconductor Industry Association in a statement in October of last year.
Intel chip fabrication plants (fabs) in the U.S.:
•Oregon, Hillsboro: D1X (development), microprocessors, 14nm*, starts 2013
•Oregon Hillsboro: D1D (development), microprocessors, 22nm, started 2003
•Oregon Hillsboro: D1C (development), microprocessors, 32nm/22nm, started 2001
•Chandler, Arizona: Fab 42, microprocessors, 14nm, starts 2013
•Chandler, Arizona: Fab 32, microprocessors, 32nm/22nm, started 2007
•Chandler, Arizona: Fab 12, microprocessors/chipsets, 65nm/22nm, started 1996
•Rio Ranch, New Mexico: Fab 11X, microprocessors, 45nm/32nm, started 2002
•Hudson, Massachusetts: Fab 17, chipsets, 130nm, started 1998
•Lehi, Utah: IMFT** fab, flash memory, 20nm, started 2007
•Manassas, Virginia: IMFT fab, flash memory, 25nm, started 2006
*nanometer
**Intel Micron Flash Technologies, owned 49 percent by Intel, 51 percent by Micron Technology
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Why Apple TV is finally starting to matter | View Clip
01/25/2012
Giga Om
Why Apple TV is finally starting to matter
By Ryan Lawler
Hidden somewhere in Apple’s earnings call is this little snippet: According to CEO Tim Cook, the company sold 1.4 million Apple TVs during the holiday quarter. That’s notable because it’s about half of the devices that Apple had sold in the entire year prior, and one-third of the 4.2 million sold in total. In other words, sales of the second-generation Apple TVs are accelerating nicely after a (somewhat) slow start.
That’s worth noting for a few reasons:
1.Apple is clearly outselling the competition. Apple TV might be a hobby, but it’s already the top-selling device in its class. The next-best-selling Roku streaming boxes have sold 2.5 million units over the past three years, compared to Apple’s 4.2 million units in about half the time.
2.There’s pent-up demand for the mythical “iTV.” Apple is expected to introduce a connected TV soon — possibly later this year — and Apple TV’s sales show that users are already interested in the company’s user interface and services that would likely be available on it.
3.Users want Internet connectivity and access to streaming content on their TVs but might not be willing to buy a new set to get it. Last week, I wrote about how the latest batch of connected TVs from manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, Vizio and others probably won’t convince consumers to upgrade in the near term, but software improvements are likely to come soon. In the meantime, Apple TV is a good stopgap for those not quite ready to jump on the connected TV bandwagon.
All that said, let’s put things into perspective: The Microsoft Xbox 360 sold nearly a million units in one week alone during the holiday quarter. The Apple TV is far from a mass-market device, but its sales numbers show that even in a relatively small market, Apple dominates the competition.
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Motorola Pledges to Take More “Smart Actions” in 2012 | View Clip
01/25/2012
All Things Digital
Motorola Pledges to Take More “Smart Actions” in 2012
After already promising it will introduce fewer new phones this year than last, Motorola said on Tuesday that it is doubling down on some of the bets it made last year.
In particular, Motorola plans to continue investing in so-called “smart actions” — rules designed to make it easier for novice users to make their phones act the way they want them to.
For example, if a phone is consistently running low on battery, the phone recommends settings to improve battery life. If a user misses several calls in a row, the phone can suggest turning up the ringer.
All of those options were there, Motorola says, but required users to know the exact control panels and settings that needed to be tweaked.
“You need to be a geek to do that,” Senior VP Alain Mutricy said in a briefing with reporters.
Motorola also plans to expand the Razr line introduced last year, and will continue investing in the Webtop software that allows phones to connect to laptop-like docking stations. The phone maker has already introduced the Razr Maxx — a new, high-end version of the Razr with a more capable battery.
While not going into details about new devices or the company’s soon-to-be-reported earnings, Mutricy said that Motorola is focused primarily on the high end of the U.S. market, particularly as carriers upgrade to high-speed 4G LTE networks.
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Qualcomm Atheros’ Skifta Kicking Off the Connected Home Trend | View Clip
01/25/2012
Bright Side of News
Qualcomm Atheros’ Skifta Kicking Off the Connected Home Trend
by: Anshel Sag
Qualcomm Atheros’ Android app known as Skifta is billed as a media shifting platform for entertainment driven consumer electronics. So, basically a platform for moving your content for almost all consumer electronics today. The app’s actual motto is ‘May your stuff be with you’ which we find kind of amusing and yet very concise.
The application itself has been available for quite some time on the Android Market, but up until now there hasn’t been much in terms of development for Skifta. Now, though, QA is introducing a wireless adapter development kit as a first component of this platform. This adapter is designed to help manufacturers offer consumers a way to retrofit their non-DNLA and non-UPnP devices to their home networks in order to enable Skifta usage.
How Skifta works is pretty simple. You download the application onto your Android phone or tablet and simply connect to your WiFi network or 3G and select a source of the media content. This media content can be music, videos or pictures and can essentially be played almost instantly on any device inside the selected home network. This is enabled through DLNA and UPnP which enable you to easily stream media to and from certain devices which have DLNA and UPnP functionality built into them. These devices are generally internet connected or at least connected to your home network.
Skifta also has the functionality of enabling remote media playing through 3G/4G connectivity. This is the part that really makes Skifta useful for many users and may likely make it a much more powerful app in the future with more 4G devices and networks coming online this year.
This feature in conjunction with the channels feature of Skifta really could make Skifta the de-facto media accessing app on the Android marketplace. They also plan on adding apps like Pandora and Spotify into their already existing channels like Facebook, Flickr and ShoutCast among many others.
Right now, though, there are a lot of applications, like Polkast, out there trying to do the same thing as Skifta and there will likely continue to be until someone grabs hold of the market or if Google simply undercuts everyone by integrating one of these apps into Android itself. Some apps do require to have a server client running on your computer at home, but Skifta also requires those devices to be powered on in order for their content to be played back remotely. Skifta does offer a server option for your computer as well in the event that your computer doesn’t quite work right with the app or you don’t know how to configure it correctly.
Dan Rabinovitsj, SVP & GM of the Networking Business Unit, indicated to us that Skifta will likely find its way into the iOS market as well, enabling both Android and iOS users to easily access and play back their media to anywhere from anywhere.
He also told us that Qualcomm Atheros plans on offering a Pro version of Skifta with even more expanded functionality while keeping the free version still free in its current state.
© 2009 – 2011 Bright Side Of News
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