Tech Roundup: BBC Instafax, Google Anti-trust Agreement & More
[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]
It's time to unload unprofitable ventures, say Google and Sony:
Google acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012 for US$ 12.5 billion and in less than a period of two years, it's selling it to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo for US$ 2.91 billion in a mixture of cash and a 5.9% stake in the PC maker. For its part, Google will still continue to retain its ownership over a majority of Motorola's patent portfolio, with Lenovo being granted a license to the intellectual property.
Already the number one PC manufacturer thanks to its purchase of IBM ThinkPad biz back in 2005, Lenovo hopes to gain a foothold in the US smartphone market with this acquisition and has promised to turn around Motorola's fortunes within the next few quarters. Google, after acquiring the struggling handset maker to materialize its hardware plans (and for the patents too), was left facing a catch-22 situation. It neither could risk alienating its partners over at Open Handset Alliance (Samsung in particular given its massive user base) by giving Motorola preferential treatment nor could employ it to further its primary objective of coming up with its own smartphones without having to rely on OEMs (like its Nexus product line). The patents haven't been much help either.
The search behemoth has since then lost hundreds of millions each quarter struggling to revive its subsidiary and even sold off Motorola's set-top box unit for US$ 2.35 billion last April. Oddly this news comes at a time when Google and Samsung have struck a broad patent cross licensing deal for the next 10 years, allowing the two companies to cooperate with each other more than ever. Moto's current CEO and ex-Googler Dennis Woodside, who found himself caught in the crossfire, has since then quit the company to join cloud storage service Dropbox as its COO.
Sony on the other hand is even more ambitious. Realizing that PC business isn't profitable as it used to be (except only for Lenovo), it has decided to sell off its high-end VAIO computer division altogether to focus on mobile. The Japanese electronics conglomerate, under the leadership of CEO Kazuo Hirai, has been on a restructuring spree as it strives to focus on its key profit areas - smartphones, games and imaging. VAIO PC's may have had an admirer in Steve Jobs, who wanted Sony to make Mac OS compatible VAIO's, but the latest move signals the shifting trends in the PC industry. Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella's job just got a bit more harder!
Android apps on Windows operating system?
It may sound strange, but if the latest report from The Verge is to be believed, Microsoft is seriously considering allowing Android apps to be run on its Windows platforms, both desktop and mobile. App parity is something Windows is yet to achieve when compared to Android and iOS and this attempt by Redmond seems to be aimed at bridging this gap. Many other OS'es like Jolla's Sailfish and BlackBerry BB10 already have the capability to run Android apps, so let's wait and watch to see how this one turns out.
BBC Instafax is just fantastic:
I love the Wibbitz news app for its unique way of presenting text articles from various news outlets as video summaries. Now BBC News has done more or less the same with Instafax, offering concise news in 15-second videos through its Instagram account. A great way to check news on the go!
Google signs anti-trust agreement with EU:
That search giant Google is abusing its dominance in the search engine market to boost its own services has been quite a polemic in the European Union, sparking off an anti-trust investigation three years ago. The European Commission, which began to scrutinize its anti-competitive practices, has announced that Google has agreed to display search results from three of its rivals in addition to its own. Furthermore Google has also consented to allow third-party companies to opt-out from the use of their data in search results without affecting their ranking.
The tech giant's compliance with the proposed rules will be monitored by an independent body for the next five years and will affect only users from the European Union, the report adds. It's worth noting that Google reached a similar deal in its homeland last year with the US Federal Trade Commission with regards to search bias. Coincidentally, Google has tweaked its search results yet again. If you are googling for a music video, you will now be presented with a big card styled video showing links to YouTube (Vimeo and Dailymotion are also there) at the very top of the search results.
It's yet another earnings season:
Yes, Apple sold a record 51 million iPhones and 26 million iPads. But the biggest takeaway from the earnings call was the massive decline in iPod sales and CEO Tim Cook's admission that iPhone 5c's demand wasn't stronger as expected, although he stopped short of being vocal about the phone's future especially given the latest speculation that the company plans to scrap the model this year in favour of two new versions with bigger screens. In what was a truly bizarre move, Apple recently relaunched the iPhone 4 8GB variant in India for Rs. 23,000 and surprisingly even slashed the price of iPhone 5c by Rs. 5,000 (only 16 GB), a first for Apple.
Facebook couldn't have had a better way to celebrate its tenth birthday (that's on Feb 4 by the way) when it announced spectacular quarterly earnings, beating Wall Street expectations once again. With more than 53% of its US$ 2.33 billion revenues coming from mobile and a whopping 1.228 billion monthly active users, it looks like the social network has finally left its dark IPO days behind.
In contrast, Twitter, which reported its maiden earnings post its IPO last year, faced a bloodbath of sorts after investors dumped their stock following revelations that the social network's user base is plateauing. The company reported 241 million monthly active users (against 237 million the previous quarter) and earned US$ 242.7 million in revenues, 75% of it already coming from mobile. Twitter indeed is reliving Facebook's hellish beginnings!
In other news:
It's time to unload unprofitable ventures, say Google and Sony:
Google acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012 for US$ 12.5 billion and in less than a period of two years, it's selling it to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo for US$ 2.91 billion in a mixture of cash and a 5.9% stake in the PC maker. For its part, Google will still continue to retain its ownership over a majority of Motorola's patent portfolio, with Lenovo being granted a license to the intellectual property.
Already the number one PC manufacturer thanks to its purchase of IBM ThinkPad biz back in 2005, Lenovo hopes to gain a foothold in the US smartphone market with this acquisition and has promised to turn around Motorola's fortunes within the next few quarters. Google, after acquiring the struggling handset maker to materialize its hardware plans (and for the patents too), was left facing a catch-22 situation. It neither could risk alienating its partners over at Open Handset Alliance (Samsung in particular given its massive user base) by giving Motorola preferential treatment nor could employ it to further its primary objective of coming up with its own smartphones without having to rely on OEMs (like its Nexus product line). The patents haven't been much help either.
The search behemoth has since then lost hundreds of millions each quarter struggling to revive its subsidiary and even sold off Motorola's set-top box unit for US$ 2.35 billion last April. Oddly this news comes at a time when Google and Samsung have struck a broad patent cross licensing deal for the next 10 years, allowing the two companies to cooperate with each other more than ever. Moto's current CEO and ex-Googler Dennis Woodside, who found himself caught in the crossfire, has since then quit the company to join cloud storage service Dropbox as its COO.
Sony on the other hand is even more ambitious. Realizing that PC business isn't profitable as it used to be (except only for Lenovo), it has decided to sell off its high-end VAIO computer division altogether to focus on mobile. The Japanese electronics conglomerate, under the leadership of CEO Kazuo Hirai, has been on a restructuring spree as it strives to focus on its key profit areas - smartphones, games and imaging. VAIO PC's may have had an admirer in Steve Jobs, who wanted Sony to make Mac OS compatible VAIO's, but the latest move signals the shifting trends in the PC industry. Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella's job just got a bit more harder!
Android apps on Windows operating system?
It may sound strange, but if the latest report from The Verge is to be believed, Microsoft is seriously considering allowing Android apps to be run on its Windows platforms, both desktop and mobile. App parity is something Windows is yet to achieve when compared to Android and iOS and this attempt by Redmond seems to be aimed at bridging this gap. Many other OS'es like Jolla's Sailfish and BlackBerry BB10 already have the capability to run Android apps, so let's wait and watch to see how this one turns out.
BBC Instafax is just fantastic:
I love the Wibbitz news app for its unique way of presenting text articles from various news outlets as video summaries. Now BBC News has done more or less the same with Instafax, offering concise news in 15-second videos through its Instagram account. A great way to check news on the go!
Google signs anti-trust agreement with EU:
That search giant Google is abusing its dominance in the search engine market to boost its own services has been quite a polemic in the European Union, sparking off an anti-trust investigation three years ago. The European Commission, which began to scrutinize its anti-competitive practices, has announced that Google has agreed to display search results from three of its rivals in addition to its own. Furthermore Google has also consented to allow third-party companies to opt-out from the use of their data in search results without affecting their ranking.
The tech giant's compliance with the proposed rules will be monitored by an independent body for the next five years and will affect only users from the European Union, the report adds. It's worth noting that Google reached a similar deal in its homeland last year with the US Federal Trade Commission with regards to search bias. Coincidentally, Google has tweaked its search results yet again. If you are googling for a music video, you will now be presented with a big card styled video showing links to YouTube (Vimeo and Dailymotion are also there) at the very top of the search results.
It's yet another earnings season:
Yes, Apple sold a record 51 million iPhones and 26 million iPads. But the biggest takeaway from the earnings call was the massive decline in iPod sales and CEO Tim Cook's admission that iPhone 5c's demand wasn't stronger as expected, although he stopped short of being vocal about the phone's future especially given the latest speculation that the company plans to scrap the model this year in favour of two new versions with bigger screens. In what was a truly bizarre move, Apple recently relaunched the iPhone 4 8GB variant in India for Rs. 23,000 and surprisingly even slashed the price of iPhone 5c by Rs. 5,000 (only 16 GB), a first for Apple.
Facebook couldn't have had a better way to celebrate its tenth birthday (that's on Feb 4 by the way) when it announced spectacular quarterly earnings, beating Wall Street expectations once again. With more than 53% of its US$ 2.33 billion revenues coming from mobile and a whopping 1.228 billion monthly active users, it looks like the social network has finally left its dark IPO days behind.
In contrast, Twitter, which reported its maiden earnings post its IPO last year, faced a bloodbath of sorts after investors dumped their stock following revelations that the social network's user base is plateauing. The company reported 241 million monthly active users (against 237 million the previous quarter) and earned US$ 242.7 million in revenues, 75% of it already coming from mobile. Twitter indeed is reliving Facebook's hellish beginnings!
In other news:
- Kabul reports its first ever case of Polio since 2001.
- Doctors warn of the pandemic potential of latest strain of avian bird flu H10N8 as first cases are reported in humans.
- Australian authorities approve plan to dump dredged sediment in the Great Barrier Reef to create one of the world's biggest coal ports.
- NSA targets mobile apps like Angry Birds and Google Maps to glean mobile user data, reveal latest Edward Snowden leaks; Angry Birds website briefly hacked in retaliation with an image entitled Spying Birds featuring NSA logo.
- Motorola's budget handset Moto G launched in India for Rs. 13,999 with Flipkart as launch partner.
- Indian music streaming service Dhingana shuts down after it fails to renew agreement with record label T-Series.
- Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten acquires popular cross-platform instant messaging app Viber for US$ 900 million.
- Microsoft rebrands its cloud service SkyDrive as OneDrive amid trademark scuffle with broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting group (BSB).
- Airtel becomes the first Indian cellular service provider to roll out 4G LTE data plans in the country (only Bangalore at present) for iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c and Lava Xolo LT900 users.
- Smartphone sales beat dumb phones for the first time in 2013 with 968 million units sold out of a total 1.8 billion.
- Popular Android and iOS game Flappy Bird, notorious for its difficulty levels, goes offline after the Vietnam based developer says he couldn't take it anymore.
- Mozilla's Firefox browser begins to show ads in new tabs page to boost its revenues.
- HP launches Android phablets Slate 6 and Slate 7 in India.
- Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 update to bring in Start Screen backgrounds, browser tab syncing, on-screen navigation buttons, voice-activated personal assistant Cortana among a host of other improvements as the company begins sharing the mobile OS with developers.
- Samsung to unveil Samsung Galaxy S5 at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona.
- Google's market cap cross US$ 400 billion for the first time.
- Yahoo! Mail gets hacked; affected users' passwords reset.
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