Showing posts with label BlackBerry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BlackBerry. Show all posts

2017-10-28

Tech Review | Apple Struggles To Get iPhone X To Market (video)

Tech Review (TR 2017-10-28)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech news with commentary, analysis and opinion: Features • 1) Apple Struggles To Get iPhone X To Market, 2) iPhone X Notch an Ugly Deception? 3) Investing: a.The Week, b. Netflix $NFLX House of Cards, c. Cryptocurrency "rational to be irrational"   4)ICYMI Tech News.

1) Apple Struggles To Get iPhone X to Market

Bloomberg.com video above published Oct 25, 2017: Bloomberg's Alex Webb reports on Apple's struggle to get the iPhone X to market on time. He speaks with Bloomberg's Sheryh Ahn and Vonnie Quinn on "Bloomberg Markets."

Oct 27, 2017: As pre-orders open, Apple says iPhone X screen replacement will cost $279, compared to $169 for iPhone 8 Plus; other out-of-warranty repairs will cost $549. [Editor's note: "There's a sucker born every minute."]

See also:
Also note Apple's troubles in China:

 2)  iPhone X Notch an Ugly Deception?--iPhone X "entirely screen"?--"It offends me. It's ungainly and unnatural,"  said influential Apple commentator John Gruber of the so-called "notch," adding, "I think Jony Ive either lost a bet or lost his mind. It looks silly, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense." The marketing, however, tries to turn the nonsense into magical truth says CNET.com. You decide:
The iPhone X "notch" | images source: Apple.com
See also: Apple’s iPhone X notch is an odd design choice | TheVerge.com: "adds a black cut-out to every YouTube video." [Editor's Note: iPhone X pre-orders began Oct 27, shipping to begin November 3.] Apple $AAPL reports its FY17 Q4 earnings Nov 2, 2017.

3) Investing
The Bulls Are Still Running on Wall Street - S&P500 index Oct 27, 2017
a. The Week: Q3 2017 earnings exceed estimates and expectations, markets end week higher.

 •  Markets:  CNBC.com: NASDAQ and S&P 500 rip to record close after blowout tech earnings; Amazon tops $1,100; and Stock market hits records as tech rally powers gains | MarketWatch.com.

 •  U.S. Notches Solid 3% Economic Growth, Despite Hurricanes | WSJ.com: "GDP growth strong in the face of storms that temporarily shuttered major population centers in Texas and Florida"--[Editor's Note: the "Trump Economy" continues to defy Wall Street & Beltway pundits' predictions.]
"The U.S. economy posted its best six-month stretch of growth in three years, rebounding quickly from two hurricanes and showing momentum for the final quarter."--Wall Street Journal Oct 27, 2017.
•  US Treasury Rates Hit Nine-Year Highs | WolfStreet.com Oct 22, 2017. Trump will announce his nominee to be next Fed Chair next week.

 •  University of Michigan: consumer sentiment in October was the strongest seen in 13 years.

b. The Netflix $NFLX House of Cards: "Netflix, whose shares went from $9.94 to $192.47 in five years, is on a peculiar and accelerating treadmill: It needs to borrow ever larger amounts just to cover its ever-larger negative cash flows year after year." --What Junk-Rated Netflix just Said about the Bond Market | WolfStreet.com. 

Why can’t Netflix find a self-sustaining business model? Because, like many other high-flying Silicon Valley companies, it doesn’t have to. It can always borrow the money instead of making it. What’s Netflix's secret? Netflix’s stock price. Investors in $NFLX shares are not only subsidizing Netflix subscribers, they also provide a "guarantee" to the bondholders (at least in the minds of the bondholders). Netflix bonds carry little premium for risk of default because the bondholders reason that Netflix can always sell more stock to pay off the bonds--which is true, until the stock crashes, and it can't. Rue the day!

c. Cryptocurrency: A Letter to Jamie Dimon | Chain.com: "Bitcoin is up 5x in a year, Ethereum is up 30x. The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is ~$175B, up from $12B just a year ago. Why? As in every mania in history, it is currently rational to be irrational ... on almost every dimension, decentralized services [cryptocurrencies] are worse than their centralized counterparts ... slower; They are more expensive; They are less scalable; They have worse user experiences; They have volatile and uncertain governance."  See also: Reuters.com: Backroom battle imperils $230 million cryptocurrency venture; Chaos and hackers stalk investors on cryptocurrency exchanges--Reuters.com; Big money stays away from booming bitcoin--Reuters.com: "too lightly regulated, too volatile and too illiquid."

4) ICYMI Tech News:
  • Amazon offered billions in tax breaks for second U.S. headquarters; Amazon added 159,500 employees in the last quarter,  now has 541,900 employees worldwide after the Whole Foods acquisition, nearly 7 times that of Google and 4 x Microsoft, and is now the second-largest US employer after Walmart. Amazon $AMZN shares soared this week after releasing Q3 2017 earnings. Amazon Key takes deliveries to new level: Inside your home--CNET.com.
  • Google-Cisco cloud deal | CNBC.com: Google still racing to catch Amazon AWS.
  • Snap badly overestimated demand for Spectacles, has hundreds of thousands of unsold units in warehouses, either fully assembled or in parts.--The Information.com.
  • Pay With Google, now lets Android users shop faster by using a debit or credit card setup previously on a Google service such as YouTube. Android 8.1: Oreo's AI future--"Pixel Visual Core and Mate 10 event offer clues about what's next for Android and AI."--AndroidCentral.com
  • Bad Rabbit: Ten things you need to know about the latest ransomware outbreak | ZDNet.com: "4. It spreads via a fake Flash update on compromised websites."
  • U.S. warns public about attacks on energy, industrial firms--Reuters.com
  • Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab has acknowledged its security software took source code for a secret American hacking tool from a personal computer in the United States. [Editor's note: this illustrates another problem with "security software"--a program used for "security" ends up creating a vulnerability--identifying and taking files off a client's computer.]
-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo  

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2017-07-08

Tech Review: AI, Data, Jet Packs, and the Future of Tech (video)

Tech Review (TR 2017-07-08)--Domain Mondo's weekly review of tech news:

Features • 1) AI, Data, Jet Packs, and the Future of Tech, 2) EU Antitrust Regulators and Facebook $FB, 3) The Once Great BlackBerry, 4) Microsoft could lay off thousands, 5) Tencent Dominates in China, 6) No Money in Internet Culture, 7) Silicon Valley Cracks, 8) ICYMI Tech News.

1) Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data, Jet Packs, and the Future of Tech:

Video above published Jul 3, 2017, by WSJ.com: The future of technology was up for discussion at the Founders Forum (domain: ff.co), an invite-only community of global entrepreneurs, CEOs, and investors in the digital, media and technology sectors.

2) EU Antitrust Regulators Eye Facebook:

Video above published Jul 3, 2017:  EU Antitrust and Privacy--Facebook Inc.’s small print may be the next big thing in European antitrust as watchdogs home in on how the world’s biggest social network collects information from users that helps generate vast advertising revenues--Bloomberg.com's Alistair Barr reports on "Bloomberg Technology."

 3)  The Once Great BlackBerry: On Misleading Positives | BlackBerry Ltd. (NASDAQ:BBRY) | SeekingAlpha.com: "The bearish thesis remains the same: The BlackBerry of today is a collection of small, stagnated and unprofitable businesses, trading for 160x earnings 2 years down the road."

4)  Microsoft could lay off ‘thousands’ as it focuses more on cloud services | TheVerge.com: "Microsoft says it will now focus on two distinct areas: big enterprise customers, and then small to medium-sized businesses."

5)  Tencent Dominates in China. The Next Challenge Is Rest of the World | Bloomberg.com: "The WeChat app has almost a billion users, and many of them use it all day. So why isn’t the company everywhere by now?"

 6)  No Money in Internet Culture: Tumblr's uncertain future indicates the difficulty of monetizing internet culture (creative expression or content), as do Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and even YouTube--nymag.com

 7) Silicon Valley Begins to Crack Visibly | WolfStreet.com: "Chilling photos of for-lease signs lining the Great America Parkway"

 8) ICYMI Tech News:

-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo  

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2016-12-31

TechReview | Tech Story of the Year: Tay, Microsoft's AI Chatterbot

Domain Mondo's weekly review of technology news:

Feature •  Tech Story of the Year: Tay, Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatterbot:
"As many of you know by now, on Wednesday [March 23, 2016] we launched a chatbot called Tay. We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay. Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values ... The logical place for us to engage with a massive group of users was Twitter. Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. As a result, Tay tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images. We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time. We will take this lesson forward as well as those from our experiences in China, Japan and the U.S. Right now, we are hard at work addressing the specific vulnerability that was exposed by the attack on Tay."--Learning from Tay’s introduction | blogs.microsoft.com
Afterwards, Microsoft accidentally re-released Tay, the AI chatbot, on Twitter on March 30, 2016: Microsoft's Tay chatbot returns briefly and brags about smoking weed | mashable.com.

Madhumita Murgia of The Telegraph called Tay a public relations disaster:
Tay was built to speak like a  teen girl and released as an experiment to improve Microsoft’s automated customer service. Instead, “she” turned into a complete PR disaster - within hours of being unleashed on Twitter, the “innocent teen” bot was transformed into a fascist, misogynistic, racist, pornographic entity. Her tweets, including phrases like “Heil Hitler”, were disseminated widely as an example of why Twitter reflects the worst of humanity ... This is an example of artificial intelligence at its very worst - and it’s only the beginning. 

Other Tech News: 

 •  FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report: A Fatally Flawed Effort | Medium.com: "... It adds nothing to the call for evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the DNC, the DCCC, the email accounts of Democratic party officials, or for delivering the content of those hacks to Wikileaks. It merely listed every threat group ever reported on by a commercial cybersecurity company ... and lumped them under the heading of Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists ..." See also: Something About This Russia Story Stinks | RollingStone.com: "Nearly a decade and a half after the Iraq-WMD faceplant, the American press is again asked to co-sign a dubious intelligence assessment ... President Obama issued a terse statement seeming to blame Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails ...
"The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up. If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized campaign to derail the U.S. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response. Voices in both parties are saying this now."
See also: Creator of NSA's Global Surveillance System Calls B.S. On Russian Hacking Report | WashingtonsBlog.com.

 •  Alibaba's Magical Numbers: Population in the United States is a factor .24 of that of China (324 million people in the US vs. China 1.37 billion). Offsetting that however is that consumer spending is much higher in America than China. The United States has a GDP of $18 trillion of which $12.3 trillion (~68%) is driven by consumer spending. China GDP is estimated at $11 trillion of which approximately 37% is estimated to be driven by consumer spending. Taking 68 over 37 implies that Americans outspend the Chinese by a factor 1.8 on consumer spending.
"Combining the factors (12 x 1.8 x .24) gives us an estimate of how Alibaba's customers' mobile purchase behavior is close to 5 times higher than the mobile shopping behavior of consumers in the States. That is an incredible factor and outside of Alibaba's metrics, I could not find any source that corroborated or justified that multiple."--SeekingAlpha.com
Quick Takes:

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2016-09-29

End of the BlackBerry Phone and How Smartphone Batteries Catch on Fire

The end of the BlackBerry phone:

BlackBerry has finally pulled the plug on its handset division after struggling to stay relevant. Nic Fildes, FT.com telecoms correspondent, reflects on the company's hits and misses over the years. Video published Sep 28, 2016.

 Domain: blackberry.com

Stock chart of BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ: BBRY)

 How Smartphone Batteries Catch on Fire:

The recall of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 after some devices caught fire has put the spotlight on phone batteries and the suppliers. This is how batteries can malfunction. Video above published Sep 28, 2016.
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