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.

Courtesy-Fud

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.

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/ibms-watson-powers-self-driving-shuttle-olli-debuts-in-d-c.html

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.

http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/ubereats-launches-in-london.html

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.

Courtesy-Fud

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.”

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/apple-rolls-out-a-revamped-app-store.html

The company will acquire Israel-based EZSource, it said, in the hopes of helping developers “quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code.”

EZSource offers a visual dashboard that’s designed to ease the process of modernizing applications. Essentially, it exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can focus their efforts accordingly.

Developers must often manually check thousands or millions of lines of code, but EZSource’s software instead alerts them to the number of sections of code that access a particular entity, such as a database table, so they can check them to see if updates are needed.

IBM’s purchase is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sixty-eight percent of the world’s production IT workloads run on mainframes, IBM said, amounting to roughly 30 billion business transactions processed each day.

“The mainframe is the backbone of today’s businesses,” said Ross Mauri, general manager for IBM z Systems. “As clients drive their digital transformation, they are seeking the innovation and business value from new applications while leveraging their existing assets and processes.”

EZSource will bring an important capability to the IBM ecosystem, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

“While IBM takes advantage of a legacy architecture with z Systems, it’s important that the software modernizes, and that’s exactly what EZSource does,” Moorhead said.

Large organizations still run a lot of mainframe systems, particularly within the financial-services sector, noted analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics.

“As these organizations roll out new mobile, social and other digital business experiences, they have no choice but to expose these mainframe systems via APIs,” Scavo said.

But in many large organizations, skilled mainframe developers are in short supply — especially those who really understand these legacy systems, he added.

“Anything to increase the productivity of these developers will go a long way to ensuring the success of their digital business initiatives,” Scavo said. “Automation tools to discover, expose and analyze the inner workings of these legacy apps are really needed.”

It’s a smart move for IBM, he added.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/looking-to-transform-mainframe-business-ibm-acquires-ezsource.html

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.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/apple-pay-struggling-to-gain-traction-outside-u-s.html

Bristol Ridge and Stoney Ridge sound a little like locations in a Somerset version of Game of Thrones, but they both feature AMD’s Excavator x86 processor cores and Radeon R7 graphics, which AMD sees powering e-sports gaming on laptops.

Bristol Ridge is the more powerful of the two coming in 35W and 15W versions of AMD FX, A12 and A10 processors, offering up to 3.7GHz of processing power. The former two processors are paired with up to eight Graphics Core Next (GCN) cores in the R7 to provide a decent pool of graphics processing power.

Stoney Bridge offers less in the way of processor power, topping out at 3.5GHz, and versions include 15W A9, A6 and E2 processor configurations coupled with lower powered graphics accelerators.

AMD claimed that the new APUs offer a 50 per cent hike in performance over the previous generation Carrizo APUs. However, this rise is over APUs from the early part of Carrizo’s lifecycle, so performance gains over the most recent Carrizo APUs are likely to be 10 to 20 per cent.

AMD also said that its silicon is faster than rival chips from Intel, including the i3-6100U found in several ultraportable laptops.

Many of these tests are subjective and depend on how a hardware manufacture configures and sets up the APUs in a laptop or tablet, but AMD does have its graphics tech to draw on, such as the GCN architecture, which could give it the edge over Intel’s chips when it comes to pushing pixels.

The APUs will be aimed primarily at slim laptops that need low-power consumption chips, much like Intel’s Skylake line.

Bristol Ridge is currently available to end users only in the form of HP’s latest Envy laptop. But now that AMD has debuted the full range of the seventh-generation APUs we can expect to see them in other ultraportable machines before too long.

Courtesy-TheInq

Nintendo Co Ltd is holding discussions with several global production companies about expanding its video content business, including making movies, said Tatsumi Kimishima, president of the Japanese videogame maker.

The move is aimed at strengthening Nintendo’s character business and expanding the global gaming population, he told the Asahi newspaper in an interview published Monday.

“We’re talking with various partners. I think we’ll be able to decide something in the not-too-distant future,” Kimishima told the Japanese daily.

Kimishima declined to say when any projects would be announced but said it would not be as far off as five years. He would not say which of Nintendo’s popular characters were being considered for use.

A Nintendo spokesman told Reuters that Kimishima’s comments referred to “video content” but did not deny the possibility of making movies.

Nintendo is diversifying its operations to counter a shrinking console business. It has entered the fast-growing mobile game segment and reached a deal with NBCUniversal to develop theme-park attractions.

In fact, Nintendo already allows film companies to use its characters through licensing agreements, such as for the “Pokemon” franchise. There was also a Hollywood live-action movie based on “Super Mario” in 1993 but it was a box office and critical bomb.

But Kimishima told the Asahi that this time, Nintendo would like to do things itself as much as possible, rather than just licensing out its content, and said it was unlikely to be live-action.

In 2014, “Super Mario” creator Shigeru Miyamoto screened a 3D short-animation film based on Nintendo’s Pikmin characters at the Tokyo International Film Festival, and in an interview with Reuters left the door open to future film projects.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/nintendo-mulls-entering-the-film-business.html

For a while now people have been buying Apple shares with the expectation that they will always go up. This always was largely based on a fantasy created by the Tame Apple Press that assumed the company would keep coming up with new technology ideas which would always be successful.

However lately Apple has not come up with any new ideas and has taken to re-issuing its old phone designs. It has also been floundering in its key Chinese market. The company’s only new idea has been for content creation through its Apple Music streaming brand. The only problem with that is that the software has been killing off user’s iTune libraries.  It has also been banned in China which means that hopes that Apple would make money there are still thwarted.

Shares of Apple dropped below $90 on Thursday for the first time since 2014 as Wall Street worried about slow demand ahead of the anticipated launch of a new iPhone later this year. Some more reasonable analysts even think that the iPhone 7 is going to be a disaster because it lacks any new tech and has the same design as the poor performing iPhone 6S

Component suppliers in Taiwan have confirmed that they have received fewer orders from Apple in the second half of 2016 than in the same period last year.

Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang saidt that investors were getting negative data points about component orders and production forecasts, and the features on the new iPhone do not seem to be a big change from the 6S.

Apple briefly relinquished its position as the world’s largest company by market capitalisation to Alphabet – oh the horror.

At the close, Apple and Google each had market values of about $495 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data. In the past year, Apple’s market capitalization has fallen by more than $200 billion. Which just goes to show this whole value thing was an illusion.

Suppliers of iPhone components also fell, with Skyworks Solutions off 4.54 percent, Broadcom down 1.95 percent and Qorvo declining 1.76 percent.

Revenue from China slumped 26 percent during the March quarter. Apple faces increasing competition from Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and Huawei selling phones priced below $200, Rosenblatt’s Zhang said.

Last week, Dialog Semiconductor, which sells chips used in iPhones and other smartphones, cut its revenue outlook due to ongoing softness in the smartphone market.

The Tame Apple press is trying to do its best to find analysts who recommend buying the stock claiming it is too cheap.However how much should you pay for an outfit which has milked its cash cow and has nothing new on the horizon.

Courtesy-Fud