Tech wrap: Apple cares, says CEO Tim Cook
Apple has never turned “a blind eye” to the problems in its supply chain and any suggestion it does not care about the plight of workers is “patently false,” Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an email to employees. Cook was responding to a report in The New York Times about working conditions at Apple’s main contract manufacturer, Foxconn, in China, an issue that for years has been a thorn in the company’s side.
Facebook plans to file documents as early as Wednesday for a highly anticipated IPO that will value the world’s largest social network at between $75 billion and $100 billion, the Wall Street Journal cited unidentified sources as saying on Friday.
Jon Rubinstein, who was instrumental in crafting Apple’s iPod music player, has left Hewlett Packard after two years on the job there. Rubinstein was CEO of smartphone maker Palm when that company was acquired by HP in 2010. He last held a product-innovation role within HP’s Personal Systems Group headed by Todd Bradley.
Samsung Electronics posted a record $4.7 billion quarterly operating profit, driven by booming smartphone sales, and will spend $22 billion this year to boost production of chips and flat screens to pull further ahead of smaller rivals.
Tech wrap: EBay acts on Hunch
EBay said it acquired the data analysis firm Hunch to help it develop more recommendation technology for its online marketplace. Hunch analyzes data from social networks like Facebook and from questionnaires to make personal recommendations. EBay said Hunch will help it suggest relevant products for shoppers on its online marketplace. Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis, who founded Hunch in 2009, will stay on at eBay and remain based in New York. The purchase price was not disclosed, although tech blog Uncrunched pegged it at around $80 million.
Hewlett-Packard reported quarterly revenue slightly better than Wall Street estimates, after the bell. The world’s largest technology company by sales said non-GAAP net revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter inched up 1 percent to $32.3 billion. Analysts had predicted revenue of $32.05 billion on average, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Retailers are saving some of their deepest discounts on Black Friday for video game products, with large chains Wal-Mart and Best Buy putting some rock-bottom prices tags on hot games to lure shoppers into stores. To accommodate pressured buyers, retailers are heavily discounting top games, from Electronic Arts’ “Battlefield 3,” to Warner Brothers’ “Batman: Arkham City,” and Microsoft’s “Gears of War 3.”
Olympus said that a third-party panel appointed by the company to look into an accounting scandal has, so far, found no evidence that funds from its M&A deals went to organized crime syndicates or that “yakuza” gangsters were involved. A unit from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s organized crime division has joined the investigation, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. But the source added it was premature to say if gangsters were involved.
Hard drive maker Western Digital said it was asked to pay $525 million in an arbitration brought by competitor Seagate. The award involves claims brought against Western Digital and one employee — who was earlier with Seagate — alleging misappropriation of confidential information and trade secrets, Western Digital said in a statement.
Nvidia will again be the supplier of graphic processor units to Apple after rival AMD botched efforts to create a GPU for Apple’s MacBook Air laptop, tech blog SemiAccurate writes. The decision was made about three years after Apple replaced Nvidia GPUs with by those made by ATI/AMD and two years after the first ATI/AMD Macs in recent memory hit the shelves.
How to generate media value: Fire your CEO
Some outfit called General Sentiment has set about the task of evaluating the media value of top global brands and then ranking those companies accordingly. Some brands made their way up the list because they ousted their head honcho.
To compile the rankings General Sentiment monitors the news, blogs, tweets and other social media for a brand’s “buzz” — negative or positive — to calculate the estimated cost to generate the same media exposure through traditional advertising.
For the latest list, Google claims the spot as the “top brand” with $917 million worth of media value during the third quarter ahead of Apple
General Sentiment reasons that Google’s held onto its top spot because of its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility in mid-August, the growth of Google + and the purchase of Zagat. Even though during the same quarter Apple announced that Steve Jobs was stepping down as CEO. Apple apparently lost 16 percent of its media value from the last quarter because it did not launch any new products.
Two companies that made its way to the top five got there because of turmoil. Hewlett-Packard, which jumped 7 spots, and Yahoo. Both companies saw the ousting of their CEOs, proving once again that even negative news has its value.
The list:
1. Google, MV (media value) $917 million
Marc Andreessen to Larry Ellison: You’re my idol. And Oracle’s day are numbered
Hewlett-Packard’s perhaps most respected board member, Marc Andreessen, wasted no time trashing its Silicon Valley antagonist, Oracle, at a conference Wednesday.
“The clock is really ticking,” he said about oldline software companies, singling out Oracle as “the most vivid case.”
Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, invests in upstart software companies such as cloud-storage service Box, which hosted the conference that Andreessen spoke at on Wednesday.
He also got in a dig at Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison. “Larry is one of my idols,” Andreessen said. “I wouldn’t quite say my role model,” he quickly followed up as the audience laughed.
HP and Oracle have feuded in court over Oracle’s hiring of ousted HP chief executive Mark Hurd. And the two companies are currently in litigation over Oracle’s announcement that its software would no longer support the Itanium chips co-developed by HP and Intel.
HP’s board chairman is Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ray Lane, whom Ellison pushed out of his position as Oracle president and chief operating officer in 2000.
Of course, HP could also be considered one of those “oldline” companies– but it has made some stabs at becoming more cutting edge, including picking up software-as-service technology Opsware, formerly known as Loudcloud. Thank Andreessen for that– he co-founded Loudcloud, which eventually sold for $1.6 billion in 2007.
andreessen’s comments are nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention away from the ongoing pr crisis at hp: http://littlebiggy.org/2882567
As Hewlett Packard goes, so goes the world
By Peter Sims The opinions expressed are his own.
If there is one company that best exemplifies the crisis (and deficit) of leadership that we face worldwide, it is Hewlett Packard. For all Meg Whitman’s strengths as a person, she is not the right leader for HP. If anything, HP’s challenges exemplify why power-centric bureaucracies fail.
Let’s rewind for a moment. I’ve spent over 10 years learning about HP as a venture capital investor, student and researcher of HP’s leadership and innovation, from my vantage points at Stanford Business School and the Stanford Institute of Design. Based on hundreds of discussions with HP leaders, managers, employees (long timers and newbie’s), partners, customers, here are a few observations.
1) HP grew, on average, 18% a year for 60 years — a remarkable feat. Long-time HP veterans like Ned Bornholt, HP senior executive and former Agilent CEO, and Chuck House, the respected HP historian and coauthor of The HP Phenomenon, attribute this remarkable growth to a few factors.
One was the highly effective and balanced partnership between Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Hewlett was the more creative, intuitive pillar, known for spending a lot of time with customers and the R&D team, and for fostering a climate of innovation, especially by encouraging small bets.
Packard, meanwhile, was an operational force, and could optimize any core business. For many years, HP was extremely decentralized, with thousands of product skews, and an engineering culture that prided building products (and services) for customers than betting big on great ideas that resonated like printers and computers, while selling small increments of the other products. House reckons that out of their giant catalog, in many cases, maybe 10 units per year became breakthroughs.
2) One critical problem with the original HP culture was that for all its admirable values, such as Packard’s philosophy of “management by walking around,” almost no one ever got fired. The “two martini” lunch culture of the 1960s persisted well into the 1990s, by which time HP had clearly started to lose its way to outsiders. Complacency was a real threat to the business and the dotcom bust. The company then looked to “leaders,” often from the outside, to shake up the culture and spurn reinvention and innovation.
Insightful article that leaves out only the spinoff of Agilent by Lew Platt. This was supposed to give the remaining HP some much-needed focus as a computer company, rather than an “anything high-tech” company, and it worked, but at the cost of severely limiting the scope for innovation in an increasingly commoditized marketplace where growth comes only via economies of scale.
Ronald Coase wrote many years ago about how companies grow until their internal transaction costs exceed the revenue generated by the those transactions. HP’s improvements in efficiency have come at the cost of a rigorous planning process whose rigidity makes it almost impossible to do anything quickly in order to react to a rapidly-evolving marketplace.
Reducing opportunities for innovation and slowing the pace of incremental changes in order to maintain strict cost control is a recipe for stagnation that can be successful in mature industries, but it’s a formula for failure in technology.
Tech wrap: HP’s TouchPad sell-off
Hewlett-Packard has finally discovered the magic price point for its TouchPad tablet: $99. The tech giant announced the new low price for the 16 GB model of the recently discontinued device over the weekend, also dropping the price for its 32 GB version to $149. Retailers such as Best Buy, Staples and Walmart followed HP’s lead by offering TouchPad fire sales of their own.
The response: overwhelming. According to PC World, many retailers had sold out of the devices by mid-day on Saturday. By Monday morning, the TouchPad had climbed to the No.1 spot on the Amazon best-seller list for electronics. Expect the selling frenzy to continue this week: HP said on Monday it intends to deliver more of the tablets until the supply runs out. HP originally launched the smaller model with a $500 price tag, but reduced it to $400 soon after its July 1 release in an attempt to spur demand.
Separately, HP launched a new desktop on Monday, days after the technology company revealed that it might spin off the world’s largest PC business — part of a wrenching series of moves away from the consumer market, including killing the TouchPad. HP billed the new computer — the HP Compaq 8200 Elite All-in-One Business Desktop — as the “first all-in-one PC” aimed at corporate and public sector customers.
Is the patent arms race over in the mobile phone sector now that Google has announced it’s buying Motorola Mobility Holdings? Reuters correspondents Poornima Gupta and Bill Rigby take a closer look in a new analysis: “The bubble in mobile phone technology patent values may just have popped. Now that Google has agreed to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings — scooping up a trove of 17,000 phone-related patents to give itself some ground to defend its Android operating system — the most motivated buyer looks to be off the market.”
Skype is beefing up its mobile communications services. The Internet calling company said on Sunday it was buying GroupMe, a New York-based startup that lets people communicate in private groups over cellphones. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
I just overclocked my Touchpad to 1.5Ghz and I installed the Hulu fix so I can watch Hulu on my Touchpad! Here is the step by step instructions:
http://www.fatdeals.net/forumdisplay.php ?f=10
Very easy to follow instructions!
Tech wrap: HP investors running for cover
Shares of Hewlett-Packard slumped by more than 20 percent to a six-year low on Friday as investors wiped about $16 billion off the market value of the world’s biggest PC maker in a resounding rejection of its plan for a major shake-up.
Blog Zero Hedge posted an article by Tyler Durden, titled “Here Is Who Is Getting Creamed On Today’s Hewlett Packard Bloodbath“, that includes a chart of the the top 40 holders of HPQ stock.
Reuters blogger Felix Salmon credits Durden with breaking the “real” news yesterday about HP, after Bloomberg broke the M&A news of the IT firm’s internal shakeup and it’s $10 billion acquisition of UK company Autonomy. Salmon on the scoop: “…looks like an attempt by HP to manage media coverage and to distract attention from its dreadful earnings guidance.”
Technology company Apple is now worth as much as the 32 biggest euro zone banks. That’s the stark result from a steep fall in the share price of banks including Spain’s Santander, France’s BNP Paribas, Germany’s Deutsche Bank and Italy’s Unicredit, compared to a steady rise in Apple’s valuation, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Earlier on Friday the DJ STOXX euro zone banks index fell 4 percent, valuing its 32 members at $340 billion. In contrast, Apple’s market capitalization has soared to $340 billion.
Wired contributor Steven Levy compares Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of mobile handset maker Motorola to the Internet search company’s Book Search Settlement.
NYT’s Bits blog reports the Federal Trade Commission will not investigate Ashton Kutcher, after the actor failed to fully disclose his investments in a slew of tech companies profiled in the latest version of Details magazine’s online publication for which he served as a guest editor.
Tech wrap: HP spinning off PC division
Hewlett-Packard is close to a deal to buy software company Autonomy for $10 billion and will announce a long-rumored spinoff of its PC division.
Autonomy, which counts Procter & Gamble among a long list of major corporate customers that use its software to search and organize unstructured data like emails, confirmed it was in talks with HP.
Google+, which has picked up more than 25 million users since launching in June, is headed down the right path and is the first serious challenge to Facebook’s dominance.
Google’s infant social network, which counts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a member, has met skepticism so far but some venture capitalists see reason to be optimistic.
Speaking of Facebook, the social networking giant has won access to computers, files and emails it hopes will prove an upstate New York man’s claim to own half of Zuckerberg’s stake in the company is a fraud.
At issue is the authenticity of an alleged 2003 contract under which Paul Ceglia said he hired Zuckerberg, then a Harvard University freshman, to work on StreetFax.com, a street-mapping website intended for the insurance industry.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is close to rolling out its own music streaming service that will work across its mobile devices.
HP’s TouchPad tablet: The reviews
Hewlett-Packard’s decision to enlist funnyman Russell Brand to promote its new TouchPad tablet in a series of online videos seems to have been the right one. People love the ads. Whether consumers will warm to the device itself remains to be seen, though.
HP pitches the TouchPad as a workhorse that’s a boon to productivity and a marvel of multitasking, but which can also hold its own as an entertainment device. The Wi-Fi enabled tablet, which hit U.S. shelves on July 1 (at $500 for 16 GB model, $600 for 32 GB), is up against some serious competition from Apple’s standard-bearing iPad models and a stable of well-regarded Android alternatives.
HP is smart to trumpet the TouchPad’s ability to play Web video and multimedia formats such as Adobe Flash, which Apple has refused to support on its devices despite demands from its own customers. But reviews of the 9.7-inch tablet, which runs on Palm’s webOS mobile software, could so far be characterized as tepid at best. Overall, they seem to suggest that while HP should be praised for some of the TouchPad’s features, it falls short on too many other crucial elements. Here’s a sampling of what’s been said so far:
Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal: “Despite its attractive and different user interface, this first version is simply no match for the iPad. It suffers from poor battery life, a paucity of apps and other deficits.”
Computerworld: “The TouchPad is caught in a no-man’s land for tablets. On the plus side, it supports full multitasking, plays Flash and has the best onscreen keyboard around, making typical tablet tasks easier. However, it’s also chunky, overweight and lacks the apps that are needed to compete with the iPad.”
Engadget: “The shortage of apps is a problem, no doubt, but that will change with time. What won’t change is the hardware, and there we’re left a little disappointed. Holding this in one hand and either an iPad 2 or a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the other leaves you wondering why you’d ever be compelled to buy the HP when you could have the thinner, lighter alternative for the same money. Meanwhile, the performance left us occasionally wanting and, well, what is there to say.”
David Pogue, New York Times: “The WebOS is beautiful . . . It’s graphically coherent, elegant, fluid and satisfying. That, apparently, is the payoff when a single company designs both the hardware and the software.”
no… it is not very hard to understand you need to have an attractive hardware with working operating system… it looks like HP forgot to make an attractive hardware… this is not pc business…
Tech wrap: Want a Google+ invite? You may have to wait
Social media junkies pining for an invite to try out Google+ will have to wait a little bit longer. Google decided to temporarily stop inviting users to join its new social network less than two days after it launched the service. What gives? “Insane demand. We want to do this carefully, and in a controlled way,” a Google engineering executive said in a Google+ post on Wednesday night. A company spokeswoman contacted by Reuters declined to say whether the company had resumed invites on Thursday.
Reviews of Google+ are starting to filter in from those who’ve been lucky enough to get an invite. The general consensus seems to be that it’s a lot like Facebook and that it is an improvement over Google’s past social media efforts, Buzz and Wave. ZDNet rounds up five things it loves about the new service. The Guardian pans the desktop version, but gives the mobile platform a thumbs up. PCWorld says it’s no Facebook. Wired calls its approach to privacy a “pretty good start”. And CNN explores one of its most distinctive features: video conferencing.
Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters on Thursday his company is planning to unveil an “awesome” new feature next week. Details were scant, but tech blogs have speculated in recent weeks about new mobile products in development at Facebook. Could it be the long-awaited iPad app? Or a dedicated photo-sharing app? Or, as tech blog GigaOm founder Om Malik joked on Twitter, is it just an attempt by Zuckerberg to divert attention away from Google+?
Big-name private equity firms have been scouring tech powerhouse Hewlett-Packard for cracks in the hopes they’ll get to scoop up some of its assets, arguing the world’s No.1 PC maker is stretched too thin, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters correspondents Nadia Damouni and Poornima Gupta.
Skype, the Internet video calling service recently bought by Microsoft for a hefty $8.5 billion, rolled out service to users of Android phones on Thursday. The service will let Android users make free video calls to Skype contacts, including those on Apple iPhones.
Multi-national companies are no longer good citizens of their communities because they are now stateless. It used to be that a company was a member of the community and you could identify a company as an American company or a German company, etc but now they are looking for the cheapest labor, the least restrictive environmental regulations, no unions, or whatever local situation they can exploit.
The problem is that we don’t want the kind of America it takes to compete on that stage. The only way to beat that system is with innovation and a great education system but American universities are giving that away too. We need to protect our innovations and the industries they produce or our best export will be the misery we inflict on workers in China and the rest of the developing world. Read more at http://www.china-threat.com