As we have been saying for ages, Jobs’ Mob is no longer exclusively going with Qualcomm to provide modem chips for the upcoming iPhone 7. The deal, while large, is tailored for some of Apple’s partnerships. Intel gets AT&T phones and Qualcomm remains the supplier for Verizon network phones and for China.

The press has been claiming that it is terrible news for Qualcomm. But it appears Qualcomm knew it was coming and had already factored in the loss of the business into its results. The reason Qualcomm is not losing any sleep over the deal is because the most Intel is going to get is a third of the iPhone modems. This is what in financial terms is considered a “pisser” but hardly a reason to jump off any buildings over.

Other good things are happening to Qualcomm which more than balance out what has been lost to Intel. Firstly its latest Snapdragons are selling extremely well and secondly the shine is starting to go off its number one rival MediaTek.

For a while, naysayers have been predicting that MediaTek was going to sink Qualcomm. In fact there was even a suggestion that Qualcomm should get out of chipmaking and become a patent troll.

MediaTek had been luring away Qualcomm customers with cheaper chips, which combined with Apple, Samsung and Huawei making their own chips was creating a perfect storm of doom.

Now there is a suggestion that MediaTek’s growth wagon might have stalled. MediaTek’s sales fell 9.4 per cent annually last quarter to $1.7 billion. Its operating margin halved from 16 per cent last year to eight per cent. The reason was due to higher expenses across the board. This meant that its net income fell to $136 million. MediaTek is still more profitable than Qualcomm’s chipmaking division has a wafer thin 5 per cent last quarter.

Analysts expect MediaTek to post double-digit sales growth fuelled by rising demand for 4G smartphone chips in China. But its margins are also expected to keep contracting due to tough competition from Qualcomm and Spreadtrum.

Another risk for MediaTek is its dependence on China. Taiwan just got rid of the pro-unification KMT party, which controlled the presidency for the past eight years, in favour of the pro-independence DPP party.

MediaTek needs direct investments from mainland China to fight off Qualcomm, but it is finding that the Taiwanese government is blocking that sort of investment cash.

All this is giving Qualcomm a fighting chance in the area where it makes a lot of its cash. Sure its margins might be lower, but it still making more money. Enough so that it does not have to worry about losing a small about of dosh to Intel.

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While some “fine-tuning” of the self-driving features are needed, passengers, by this fall, should be able to ride around and speak directions to Olli on the private roads at the National Harbor shopping and entertainment area on the Maryland side of the Potomac River, according to a spokeswoman for Local Motors, the designer of Olli.

The vision is that Olli will be used in all kinds of venues, such as crowded urban areas, college and corporate campuses and theme parks. It could also become the “last mile” connection from a subway or bus stop to a job site. Miami-Dade County has ordered two of the vehicles for a pilot project there, said the Local Motors spokeswoman, Jacqueline Keidel.

Olli didn’t give any rides to reporters and bystanders at its Thursday debut, but the vehicle dropped off Local Motors CEO John Rogers with engineers standing by to offer assistance if needed.

“Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue,” Rogers said in a statement, adding that Olli with Watson “acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles.”

Olli is the first vehicle to use cloud-based cognitive computing from IBM Watson Internet of Things to analyze and learn from 30 sensors embedded in the vehicle. Four Watson developer APIs were used that allow Olli to interact with passengers: speech to text, natural language classifier, entity extraction and text to speech.

Since Watson is web-enabled, Olli will also be able to answer questions about popular nearby restaurants or historical sites, at least according to how Local Motors and IBM have described the vehicle’s capabilities.

Green said IBM will expand its Watson IBM research by helping develop and create additional Ollis at Local Motors headquarters near Phoenix and at IBM Watson IoT’s AutoLab, an incubator for cognitive mobility applications. “We have a long term vision with Watson,” Keidel added.

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The researchers have worked out that slowing the speed of light to the extent that it moves slower than flowing electrons can create an “optical boom”, the optical equivalent of a sonic boom.

Slowing the speed of light is no mean feat, but the clever folks at MIT managed it by using the honeycomb shape of carbon to slow photons to slow photons to several hundredths of their normal speed in a free space, explained researcher Ido Kaminer.

Meanwhile, the characteristics of graphene speed up electrons to a million metres a second, or around 1/300 of the speed of light in a vacuum.

The optical boom is caused when the electrons passing though the graphene reach the speed of light, effectively breaking its barrier in the carbon honeycomb and causing a shockwave of light.

As electrons move faster than the trapped light, they bleed plasmons, a form of virtual particle that represents the oscillation of electrons on the graphene’s surface.

Effectively, it is the equivalent of turning electricity into light. This is nothing new – Thomas Edison did it a century ago with fluorescent tubes – but it can efficiently and controllably generate plasmons at a scale that works with microchip technology.

The discovery could allow chip components to be made from graphene to enable the creation of light-based circuits. These circuits could be the next step in the evolution of chip and computing technology, as the transfer of data through light is far faster than using electrons in today’s chips, even the fast pixel-pushing ones.

So much faster that it’s “six orders of magnitude higher than what is used in electronics”, according to Kaminer. That’s up to a million times faster in plain English.

“There’s a lot of excitement about graphene because it could be easily integrated with other electronics,” said physics professor Marin Soljačić, a researcher on the project, who is confident that MIT can turn this theoretical experiment into a working system. “I have confidence that it should be doable within one to two years.”

This is a pretty big concept and almost sci-fi stuff, but we’re always keen to see smaller and faster chips. It also shows that the future tech envisioned by the world of sci-fi may not be that far away.

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The service, which is currently available in 17 cities around the world including Paris, will compete with rivals such as Deliveroo and Just Eat, which have advertised heavily in the capital in recent months.

Britons will be able to download the app on their iPhone or Android handset from midday on Thursday and order meals from restaurants which will be delivered by Uber drivers.

Deliveries will be made to customers in central London from over 150 eateries between 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. with plans to expand further away from the center in the coming weeks.

Uber has faced months of protests from drivers of the capital’s long-dominant black cabs but earlier this year transport bosses rejected options which could have imposed strict new restrictions on how it operates.

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Qualcomm could make piles of dosh if car-makers choose its platforms in the future. While it looks like the whole program and hardware package is not there yet, it gives developers something to play with which should see it under the bonnet of the next generation of car automation.

The next trick will be to get autonomous steering and collision avoidance features into the package. Qualcomm will probably apply its machine learning SDK, announced just a few weeks ago, and the Snapdragon 820 processor.

In a press release Qualcomm said the Connected Car Reference Platform uses a common framework that scales from a basic telematics control unit (TCU) up to a highly integrated wireless gateway, connecting multiple electronic control units (ECUs) within the car and supporting critical functions, such as over-the-air software upgrades and data collection and analytics.

The vehicle’s connectivity hardware and software to be upgraded through its life cycle, providing automakers with a migration path from Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) to hybrid/cellular V2X and from 4G LTE to 5G.

It can also manage concurrent operation of multiple wireless technologies using the same spectrum frequencies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy.

The system supports OEM and third-party applications to providing a secure framework for the development and execution of custom applications.

Qualcomm appears to be working on the problem of over-the-air software updates. Updating software on a mission-critical system such as an autonomous car is a much harder problem than updating a smartphone because it has to be completely secure and work every time without reducing safety. However given that updates have stuffed up the mobile phone business and a car will need lots of them in its much longer working life, it is something which will need to be tackled.

Qualcomm has to solve this problem anyway to accelerate shipments not only to the car market but to the IoT market, where it hopes to sell tens of billions of chips.

Qualcomm says it expects to ship the Connected Car Reference Platform to automakers, tier 1 auto suppliers and developers late this year.

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Big G says the market will shrink from 14.4 per cent growth in 2015 to just 7 per cent in 2016 — with only 1.5 billion smartphone units being shipped globally this year. Compair this with 2010, when Gartner notes the market grew 73 per cent.

However the signs have been obvious for about a year. Mature Western markets saturated, China’s growth engine slowing as demand has topped out and other markets unable to afford the higher margin gear. The smartphone has come to the end of its ability to provide new technology too with companies only able to offer incremental upgrades. Carriers are moving away from subsidizing upgrades which means that them wasting their own profits to prop up the likes of Apple are over.

In emerging markets it says the average lifetime of premium phone is between 2.2 and 2.5 years, while basic mobiles have an average lifetime of three years and up.

Gartner sees the biggest remaining opportunity for smartphone growth in India, noting that sales of feature phones — aka dumbphones — accounted for a majority (61 per cent) of total mobile device sales last year, leaving plenty of scope for upgrades as smartphones continue to become more affordable.

It is estimating 139 million smartphones will be sold in India this year, growing 29.5 per cent year-over-year. It notes the average selling price of mobiles in the country remains below $70, and it expects smartphones priced under $120 to continue to contribute around half of overall smartphones sales there this year.  Apple’s hope that it can save its flailing business numbers by selling into India show the complete lack of understanding of how that market is working. It is tending to favor small local smartphone makers like Intex.

China is going to offer Apple no help either Gartner is expecting “little growth” in the region in the next five years. IT says it is “saturated yet highly competitive” market. Smartphones represented 95 per cent of total mobile phones sales last year.

Gartner analyst Annette Zimmerman said that “non-traditional” vendors in China could do well and thinks that by 2018 at least one such phone maker will be among the top five smartphone brands in the country.

“Chinese internet companies are increasingly investing in mobile device hardware development, platforms and distribution as they aim to grow their user bases and increase user loyalty and engagement,” she said.

The Sub-Saharan African region is also couched as an attractive region for smartphone vendors, with smartphone sales only overtaking mobile phones sales there for the first time last year. Nokia brand licensee and newly formed smartphone OEM HMD will want to take note, given it has paid for the right to build feature phones (and smartphones) bearing the previously iconic Nokia brand name.

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The revamped App Store will let developers advertise their wares in search results and give developers a bigger cut of revenues on subscription apps, while Apple said it has already dramatically sped up its app-approval process.

The goal is to sustain the virtuous cycle at the heart of the hugely lucrative iPhone business. Software developers make apps for the iPhone because its customers are willing to pay, and those customers, in turn, pay a premium for the device because it has the best apps.

The store is now more strategically important than ever for Apple as sales of the iPhone begin to level off and the company looks to software and services to fill the gap. Apple CEO Tim Cook said on a recent conference call that App Store revenues were up 35 percent over last year.

But the store is also a victim of its own success. Eight years after its launch, it is packed with more than 1.9 million apps, according to analytics firm App Annie, making it almost impossible for developers to find an audience – and increasingly difficult for customers to find what they need, as some 14,000 new apps arrive in the store each week.

“The app space has grown out of control,” said Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the internet and now a vice president at Alphabet Inc’s Google, who was speaking at a San Francisco conference on the future of the web on Wednesday. “We need to move away from having an individual app for every individual thing you want to do.”

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While investors believe privately owned Spotify is probably heading for a public listing, some industry analysts see the loss-making company as a takeover target for a larger tech giant with deeper pockets.

“My selfish ambition with Spotify is just trying to show … that we can create one of those super companies here in Europe,” he told journalists at the symposium Brilliant Minds, which aims to bring artists and musicians together with the tech community.

Asked if that meant he was not up for selling the firm, Ek said: “I’m not going to sell, no.”

Spotify, founded in 2006, pays more than 80 percent of its revenue to record labels and artists and has not yet shown a profit as it spends to grow internationally. It competes in a business crowded with formidable rivals such as Apple Music, Google Music and YouTube.

Many other European tech start-ups have been swallowed up by bigger Silicon Valley competitors.

Ek said Silicon Valley got an earlier start in building up its tech giants but that Europe finally has the right conditions to support its own entrepreneurs.

“For the first time now there’s an ecosystem around it with capital and experience that can actually help guide entrepreneurs,” he said.

“The number one advice I tell everyone is ‘don’t sell’, because that’s the biggest problem we have. All these things could grow gigantic if you just kept the course and kept doing what you’re doing,” he added.

Last year Spotify made an operating loss of 184.5 million euros ($205 million), widening from 165.1 million in 2014.

Spotify, whose investors include Northzone, DST Global and Accel, does not disclose details about its ownership but the co-founders no longer own a majority, having sold off stakes.

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In an IDC interview Intel’s data center boss said that Nvidia gained an early lead in the market for accelerated HPC workloads when it positioned its GPUs for that task several years ago. However there is a perception that processors used for machine learning today are GPUs like those from Nvidia and AMD.

Bryant was a bit miffed when she was asked how Intel can compete in this market without a GPU. She said that the general purpose GPU, or GPGPU was just another type of accelerator and not one that’s uniquely suited to machine learning.
It is better to look at Knights Landing which is a coprocessor, but it’s an accelerator for floating point operations, and that’s what a GPGPU too.

She said that since the release of the first Xeon Phi in 2014, Intel now clawed back 33 percent of the market for HPC workloads that use a floating point accelerator.

“So we’ve won share against Nvidia, and we’ll continue to win share,” she said.

She said that Intel’s share of the machine learning business may be much smaller, but the market is still young.

“Less than one percent of all the servers that shipped last year were applied to machine learning, so to hear Nvidia is beating us in a market that barely exists yet makes me a little crazy,” she says.

Intel will continue to evolve Xeon Phi to make it better at machine learning tasks. She said that there are two aspects to machine learning – training the algorithmic models, and applying those models to the real world in front-end applications. Intel’s FPGAs and its Xeon processors mean Intel has both sides of the equation covered.

But Nvidia’s GPUs are harder for programmers to work with which could give Intel an edge as ordinary businesses need to adopt machine learning. Knights Landing is “self-booting,” which means customers don’t need to pair it with a regular Xeon to boot an OS.
However Intel’s newest Xeon Phi has a floating point performance of about 3 teraflops, which is a little slow compared to the five teraflops for Nvidia’s new GP100.

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The service is available in six countries and among a limited range of banks, though in recent weeks Apple has added four banks to its sole Singapore partner American Express; Australia and New Zealand Banking Group in Australia; and Canada’s five big banks.

Apple Pay usage totaled $10.9 billion last year, the vast majority of that in the United States. That is less than the annual volume of transactions in Kenya, a mobile payments pioneer, according to research firm Timetric.

And its global turnover is a drop in the bucket in China, where Internet giants Alibaba and Tencent dominate the world’s biggest mobile payments market – with an estimated $1 trillion worth of mobile transactions last year, according to iResearch data.

Anecdotal evidence from Britain, China and Australia suggests Apple Pay is popular with core Apple followers, but the quality of service, and interest in it, varies significantly.

To use Apple Pay, consumers tap their iPhone over payment terminals to buy coffee, train tickets and other services. It can be also used at vending machines that accept contactless payments.

Apple Pay transactions were a fraction of the $84.5 billion in iPhone sales for the six months to March, which accounted for two-thirds of Apple’s total revenue.

Apple has leveraged its huge U.S. user base to push Pay, but has met resistance in Australia, Britain and Canada where banks are building their own products.

“Payments in general is such a complicated system with so many incumbent providers that revolutionary change like this was not going to happen very quickly,” said Joshua Gilbert, an analyst at First Annapolis Consulting.

The upshot: Apple has rolled out Pay in a dribble, adding countries and partners where it can – Hong Kong is expected to be added next – resulting in an uneven banking landscape with users and retail staff not always sure what will work and how.

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