Is Acer Doomed?

Taiwanese PC maker Acer reported worse-than-expected quarterly loss. Actually, it had been expected to be bad, but no one had predicted it would be this bad.

For the fourth quarter, the world’s No.4 PC vendor reported a net loss of $254 million. The company had posted a worse-than-expected net loss of $446 million in the third quarter and a $112.31 million loss in the same quarter of 2012. In short, its troubles have been getting worse for more than two years.

At the end of last year the company named former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co sales executive Jason Chen as its new CEO and launched a new initiative to integrate hardware, software and cloud services. It will be a while before the new broom can sweep out two years of doom, so many are expecting more doom to emerge. Acer relied too heavily on making low-end laptops, which weakened its brand, it also missed the shift to mobile.

Acer’s senior executives are taking a 30 per cent voluntary salary cut starting January, the company said in a statement.

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Venture capitalists invested more money into Internet companies last year than they have since the dot-com bust, according to a survey published last Friday.

Internet companies in the U.S. took in $7.1 billion from VCs in 1,059 deals in 2013, the highest level of Internet investment in terms of dollars and deals since 2001, according to The MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters. In comparison, VC investment in Internet companies totaled $6.7 billion in 995 deals in 2012, another strong year, according to the MoneyTree report.

In addition, VCs invested $110 billion in 1,523 software industry deals last year, the highest level in both dollars and number of deals for the sector since 2000, according to the MoneyTree report. VC dollars going into software rose 27 percent year over year, while the number of deals increased 10 percent.

The amount of money invested in the software industry accounted for 37 percent of total VC investments in 2013, the highest percentage since the MoneyTree report was initiated in 1995.

All this is taking place against a backdrop of a generally strong VC environment, as VCs invested $29.4 billion in 3,995 deals across all sectors in 2013, a year-over-year increase of 7 percent in dollars and 4 percent in deals, according to the report.

Companies involved in big data, mobile apps, security, digital marketing, and medical and health software are among those that are especially interesting to VCs, according to Mark McCaffrey, PwC’s U.S. and global software leader.

Top deals in the fourth quarter of 2013 included a $225,000 investment in Pinterest, a site for sharing photos, recipes and other items of personal interest, and a $177,514 investment in Palantir Technologies, a government contractor in the systems integration business, according to MoneyTree data.

Going into 2014 a sense of optimism prevails, but this does not mean that the tech industry is going through a bubble of the sort that arose in 1999 and 2000, McCaffrey said.

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The tame Apple Press has enthusiastically been running storied about how well Apple is doing in China. Reuters for example has been saying that the one million pre-orders that Jobs’ Mob has just collected is a triumph for Tim Cook’s negotiating ability. Getting a deal out of China Mobile was something the sainted Steve Jobs could not manage.

However saner heads are urging caution, While it is true that launching its iPhone on China Mobile vast network on Friday, opening the door to the world’s largest carrier’s 763 million subscribers and giving its China sales a short-term jolt, it is not likely to last. For a start the deal could start a war which China Mobile would not want. Some analysts predicting a costly subsidy war as rival carriers compete to lure customers. If China Mobile does not make its targets on sales for these phones, they are going to increase the subsidies.

China Mobile’s iPhone sales are expected to reach 12 million in its 2014 fiscal year, but its subsidies will leap 57 percent to $7 billion. In addition, the prices are still really high for the Chinese market. For the basic 16GB iPhone 5S, with no subscriber contract, China Mobile is charging $870.

China Unicom and China Telecom slashed their iPhone prices by as much as $210 following the announcement that a deal had been struck between Apple and China Mobile. The pair have also offered a range of cut-price deals on contracts. But there are also some problems with the pre-orders. Reuters checks showed that there were multiple registrations using fake ID numbers which means that people are buying up hoping to make a swift buck on resales.

All this is the least of Apple’s Chinese worries. The outfit has fallen out of favour with consumers who are increasingly opting for domestic products. Those who want an iPhone do not need to pay excessively to get one through China mobile either. In China, you can buy handsets typically smuggled from Hong Kong and then sign up for a China Mobile contract. This is a swings and roundabouts for Apple. If people buy from China Mobile, they will not buy from Hong Kong so it will lose sales there. If they don’t then the China Mobile contract is rubbish.

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Since AMD officially launched its 4th generation A-Series Kaveri APUs and lifted the NDA veil from all press materials, we noticed that it has started to use a new term to define the structure of its new Kaveri APUs. As we reported last week, AMD is now talking about Compute Cores, which practically puts CPU and GPU cores on an equal footing, suggesting that there should not be any difference between them and that some tasks, previously limited to the CPU, can be done by the GPU as well.

If you take a look at the official AMD slide below which details the three new Kaveri APUs, the A10-7850K, A10-7700K and the A8-7600, you will notice that AMD lists the flagship as the APU with 12 Compute Cores or simply four CPU and eight GPU cores. Since the Kaveri APU is actually the first APU with HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support, with hUMA, or equal memory access by both CPU and the GPU, heterogeneous queuing, which allows the GPU and CPU to have equal flexibility to create/dispatch work and an ability to talk about APU GFLOPS, or combined compute power of the entire APU, it makes sense for AMD to also talk about Compute Cores.

Of course, there are still some application specific tasks where the CPU or the GPU are much better, but, according to AMD, Kaveri is the first true APU, where the GPU is not just for gaming, it can actually do much more.

AMD Senior Manager Sasa Marinkovic, Technology lead for the Client Business Unit, said: “At AMD, we recognize that our customers often think of processors (CPUs) and graphics cards (GPUs) in terms of the number of cores that each product has. We have established a definition of the term “Compute Core” so that we are taking a consistent and transparent approach to describing the number of cores in our HSA-enabled APUs. A Compute Core can be either a CPU core or GPU core i.e. Kaveri can have up to 12 Compute Cores (4 CPU and 8 GPU).”

Although it does sound like a marketing gimmick, but actually is not due to HSA, it will definitely mark a new way for AMD to market/sell its APUs and it will definitely simplify the shopping experience for many casual buyers, more Compute Cores, more performance.

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China’s ZTE Corp, the world’s seventh-largest smartphone maker, wants to nearly double its U.S. market share in the next three years by increasing spending on marketing.

ZTE, which trails nearby rival Huawei Technologies Co Ltd in selling both smartphones and telecoms equipment, wants more share of the fat profit margins promised by sales of high-end phones in the United States.

But the company needs to first work on its image. Its mainstay telecom equipment business was essentially shut out of the U.S. and other markets after government officials flagged security concerns about Chinese-made equipment.

ZTE targets a U.S. market share of 10 percent by 2017 from 6 percent in 2013, Lv Qianhao, global marketing director of mobile devices, told Reuters at a company event on Thursday.

That would place it a distant third behind Apple Inc with 41 percent and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd with 26 percent, according to September-November data from researcher comScore.

To that end, ZTE will increase its U.S. marketing budget by at least 120 percent this year from last, Lv said without elaborating. Like other Chinese handset makers, ZTE is grappling with low brand awareness in the world’s second-largest smartphone market and perceptions of inferior quality.

Samsung Electronics, which earns around two-thirds of its operating profit from its mobile division, spent $597 million on marketing in the United States in 2012, according to researcher AdAge.

Last year, ZTE signed a deal with the Houston Rockets basketball team and released a Rockets-branded phone.

“We want young U.S. consumers to participate in our marketing activities, so we will have more NBA (National Basketball Association) stores and channels that sell our products,” Lv said.

Globally, ZTE aims to ship around 60 million smartphones this year compared with about 40 million smartphones last year, said Senior Vice President Zhang Renjun.

The company sees much of that growth in developed markets – including Russia and China- which accounted for 68 percent of mobile device revenue last year compared with 35 percent in 2007, said Lv.

ZTE’s mobile device business sells feature phones as well as smartphones. It was the fifth-biggest mobile phone vendor in July-September, according to researcher Gartner, though it fell out of the top five smartphone sellers list in the same period.

ZTE expects to have swung to a profit for last year having booked its first-ever loss as a public company in 2012.

It based its turnaround on cutting costs, signing fewer low-margin contracts, and winning contracts to build fourth generation telecommunication networks.

The company expects global investment in 4G to reach $100 billion this year, Zhang said.

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Dropbox suffered a major outage over the weekend.

In one of the more bizarre recent incidents, after the service went down on Friday evening a group of hackers claimed to have infiltrated the service and compromised its servers.

However, on the Dropbox blog, Dropbox VP of engineering Ardita Ardwarl told users that hackers were not to blame.

Ardwari said, “On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.”

The fault occurred when a bug in an upgrade script caused an operating system upgrade to be triggered on several live machines, rendering them inoperative. Although the fault was rectified in three hours, the knock-on effects led to problems that lasted through the weekend for some users.

Dropbox has assured users that there are no further problems and that all users should now be back online. It said that at no point were files in danger, adding that the affected machines didn’t host any user data. In other words, the “hackers” weren’t hackers at all, but attention seeking trolls.

Dropbox claims to have over 200 million users, many of which it has acquired through strategic partnerships with device manufacturers offering free storage with purchases.

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The company is looking forward to an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market, so the timing of such a major outage could not be worse. Dropbox, which includes Bono and The Edge from U2 amongst its investors, has recently enhanced its business offering to appeal to enterprise clients, and such a loss of uptime could affect its ability to attract customers.

Scientist have emerged from their smoke filled labs with transparent thin-film organic semiconductors that could become the foundation for cheap, high-performance displays. Two university research teams have worked together to produce the world’s fastest thin-film organic transistors, proving that this experimental technology has the potential to achieve the performance needed for high-resolution television screens and similar electronic devices.

According to the latest issue of Nature Communications, engineers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Stanford University show how they created thin-film organic transistors that could operate more than five times faster than previous examples of this experimental technology.

Research teams led by Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, and Jinsong Huang, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering at UNL used their new process to make organic thin-film transistors with electronic characteristics comparable to those found in expensive, curved-screen television displays based on a form of silicon technology.

At the moment the high tech method is to drop a special solution, containing carbon-rich molecules and a complementary plastic, onto a spinning platter made of glass. The spinning action deposits a thin coating of the materials over the platter. The boffins worked out that if they spun the platter faster and coated a tiny portion of the spinning surface, equivalent to the size of a postage stamp they could put a denser concentration of the organic molecules into a more regular alignment. The result was a great improvement in carrier mobility, which measures how quickly electrical charges travel through the transistor.

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Tesla Motors Inc is making changes to prevent overheating of its charging systems, including giving customers upgraded wall adapters and providing charging-software upgrades, the electric-car company said on Friday.

The moves come after a November garage fire involving a Model S in Irvine, California, which the Orange County Fire Authority said may have been caused by a Tesla charging system or by a connection at the electricity panel on the wall of the garage.

At the time, Tesla disagreed with the fire officials’ findings, denying that the charging electronics were related to the fire. A Tesla spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a question on Friday about whether the upgrades were related to the Irvine fire.

In a Friday press release, Tesla said that its goal was to prevent excessive heating of the adapters used to charge its cars. A variety of factors ranging from corrosion to inappropriate wiring of electrical outlets can cause overheating, the company said.

A December tweak to its charging software tackles the issue through reducing charging by 25 percent if the charging system detects fluctuations in power entering the vehicle, Tesla said.

“Tesla believes that this software update fully addresses any potential risks,” the release said. But as a precaution, it said it would make available an improved wall adapter with a thermal fuse for affected customers, staring in a few weeks.

Separately, three road fires in Model S sedans caused Tesla’s stock to fall sharply in October.

The fires occurred in Washington state, Tennessee and Mexico. In the U.S. incidents, Model S sedans caught fire after running over road debris. In Mexico, a Model S caught fire after striking a concrete wall.

On Friday, Tesla’s stock fell 1.23 percent to $145.72, up from levels under $120 in late November but down from its high of $194.50 in late September.

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The openSUSE Forums were hijacked today by a Pakistani hacker who goes by handle H4x0r HuSsY. Apparently the hacker exploited the vulnerability in vBulletin 4.2.1 software which SUSE uses to host the forum. The problem is that the hack revealed that the openSUSE Forums were based on proprietary forum software.

The openSUSE team has denied that the users’ passwords were compromised by the hack.

“The credentials for your openSUSE login are not saved in our application databases as we use a single-sign-on system (Access Manager from NetIQ) for all our services. This is a completely separate system and it has not been compromised by this crack,” the team said.

What the cracker reported as compromised passwords where indeed random automatically set strings that are in no way connected to your the passwords.

While it was good that none of the user data was compromised open sourcers are scratching their collective heads and wondering if the attack would have happened if the outfit had been eating its own dogfood and used some nice open source technologies.

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T-Mobile US has reported a fourth-quarter boost in customer growth and offered to pay customers to ditch rival service providers, escalating already intense competition in the U.S. wireless market.

The company, the No. 4 U.S. mobile operator, promised payments of up to $350 per line to consumers who break their contract with any of its bigger rivals and switch to T-Mobile.

The offer came just days after AT&T Inc promised a $200 credit to T-Mobile customers who switch. While AT&T also offered up to $250 for switching customers who trade in their phone, T-Mobile said it would pay up to $300 for trade-ins.

The companies have been targeting each other because they use the same network technology, making it easy for consumers to bring their phone when they switch, but some on Wall Street are concerned they will cause an industry-wide price war.

T-Mobile said it hoped that whole families as well as individuals would switch to its service in response to the new cash offer, which is aimed at covering early contract termination fees typically charged by wireless operators.

John Legere, the outspoken chief executive of T-Mobile, said he hoped the offer would end the “industry scam” of family plans, which tie entire families into long-term contracts.

Legere joked that AT&T’s recent offer would actually play to T-Mobile’s advantage because it would allow AT&T customers to try a different service with less financial risk than before.

“If it doesn’t work they’ll pay you to come back,” Legere said in announcing the offer at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

T-Mobile, which is 67 percent owned by Deutsche Telekom, managed to turn the corner on four years of customers losses in 2013 by criticizing its rivals and promoting its service plans as being more flexible and consumer friendly.

It said it added 1.645 million net customers in the fourth quarter, up from 1.023 million in the quarter before, marking its third quarter of customer growth for 2013.

The fourth-quarter additions included 869,000 valuable post-paid customers, which was up 13 percent from the third quarter, according to the company.

It said customer defections, known in the industry as churn, stayed at third-quarter levels of 1.7 percent and compared with 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.

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