The question that arises from this Wednesday report is the following: Now that Samsung has purchased 10 percent of Pantech, its rival South Korean mobile device maker, does this mean we have to add 10 percent of Pantech's devices to Samsung's total when calculating its global market share?
Tongue-not-in-cheek-wise, Samsung has confirmed the deal. The Korean giant -- the largest mobile device maker in South Korea, by far, paid $48 million for that minority stake in Pantech, which is the country's third-largest mobile device manufacturer. LG is the second largest.
Samsung said:
Samsung Electronics has agreed to acquire a 10-percent stake in Pantech, valued at approximately KRW 53 billion (approx. $48.5 million). The investment is aimed at solidifying our relationship with Pantech, a key component customer of Samsung. Samsung will have no involvement in Pantech’s business management in any way or form.
It's true that Pantech -- like Apple -- spends a lot on Samsung components. In 2012, Pantech reportedly spent about $211 million to purchase Samsung components that it used in its own devices.
With the deal, Samsung is now Pantech’s third-largest stakeholder. It trails only chip-maker Qualcomm -- which makes the processor in Samsung's latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4 -- which owns 11.96 percent of Pantech, and the Korea Development Bank, which owns 11.81 percent.
In March, Samsung made another major investment. It agreed to spend about $112 million for a 3.08 percent share of Sharp. While that was a rather minor investment, it reportedly raised red flags in Cupertino, Calif., as Apple is believed to buy about a third of its LCD panels from Sharp.
Conversational search, which Google demonstrated about a week ago at Google I/O, has arrived on the latest version of Chrome. That version, 27, was released on Tuesday.
Here's how it works: On Google's home page, click on the microphone in the search edit box and speak your query. That, in and of itself, is not new. That feature was rolled out by Google two years ago. What is new, though, is that Chrome will now speak back to you, in a manner similar to how the Google Search app works on Android or iOS.
In addition, once you speak, you’ll see your query appear -- assuming, of course, it's understood.
Sometimes, particularly with searches that are easy to answer -- such as "How old is U.S. President Barack Obama," the results will be include a direct answer (an information card, per Google Now terminology). In that case, the answer is (of course), 51.
What's far more impressive, though, is that you can continue the "search conversation" from that point. For example, you could then ask the query, "How tall is he?" Notice that you are not saying "How tall is Barack Obama?" but rather "How tall is he," using a pronoun.
Using a voice query, you'll see the result: 6'1" (Barack Obama, height).
Further questions such as "Who is his wife" will continue to conversation.
If you want to try it out, ensure that you have the correct version -- 27.0.1453.93 or later. If you don't, open your Chrome browser settings, and click the About menu item. Chrome will both tell you the current version and check for an update. If an update is available -- it may even tell you it's downloaded an update and you just need to restart the browser -- it will download it and ask you to restart the browser.
Once Chrome restarts, you can head to www.google.com and click the microphone in the search box to try it out yourself.
Last week Apple told the U.S. District Court in California that it planned to add Samsung's newest flagship phone, Galaxy S4, to the patent lawsuit that is already underway against the Korean giant. Never one to break a promise, Apple on Wednesday filed a motion that details five different patents that the S4 allegedly infringes on.
In addition, Apple's filing claimed that two of those five patents -- Siri-related patents '604 and '959, which cover a "universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system" are infringed upon by the Google Now search app.
These two are among the five that the Galaxy S4 allegedly infringes upon. The other three patents are:
'414, which covers "asynchronous data synchronization amongst devices."
'502, which covers a "graphical user interface using historical lists with field classes."
'647, which covers a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data" (often dubbed the "data tapping" patent.
Apple filing states that these are all claims that the other 22 Samsung devices listed in Apple's lawsuit already violate.
There will be a hearing to discuss Apple's newly filed motion on June 25 in San Jose. The lawsuit, which covers newer devices that were not a part of Apple's original lawsuit -- won handily by Apple in August of last year -- is expected to go to trial in March of 2014.
The information wasnt't revealed via a press release -- or even Twitter, which some seem to think is the best way to break news. Instead, it came during Cook's Tuesday appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Cook said that the state in which its Made-in-USA Mac would be manufactured would be Texas.
That is, of course, as long as Texas elects to stay in the United States, instead of seceding, as some of its residents seem to want to do.
Cook said:
We’re investing $100 million to build a Mac product line here in the U.S. The product will be assembled in Texas, include components made in Illinois and Florida, and rely on equipment produced in Kentucky and Michigan.
Just because this manufacturing is being done in the U.S. doesn't mean that Apple is a) setting up its own production facilities, or b) eschewing Foxconn. The company may, in fact, still use Foxconn.
Foxconn is known to operates plants in Texas. Considering the company's relationship with Apple, it wouldn't be surprising if it handled this job, too. In fact, it would be somewhat shocking if it did not.
One interesting thing from Apple's appearance on "Rock Center," when asked why the company did not move any iPhone production to the U.S., Tim Cook implied it was because U.S. workers were not skillful enough rather than the far more obvious and common sense fact that Chinese workers cost far, far less.
He said:
Honestly, it's not so much about price; it's about the skills, etc. Over time, there are skills that are associated with manufacturing that have left the U.S. Not, not, so much people, but the education to start producing now.
It's still unclear exactly "which" Macs will be built in Texas.
Live from New York ... no, no, that's "Saturday Night Live." Instead, live from its Redmond, Wash., campus on Tuesday morning, Microsoft unveiled its next-generation gaming console, the Xbox One.
Hopefully, Microsoft will not follow HTC's example from 2012 and release an Xbox One S, Xbox One X, etc.
Unlike Sony's PS4 unveiling, the company actually showed off the video console. The PS4 won't be revealed in total until June 10.
Microsoft’s Don Mattrick somewhat echoed what Sony said during its PS4 event. The company wants the Xbox One to be the center of all your entertainment. He said:
Where all of your entertainment comes alive in one place. To continue to lead, we must provide compelling answers to new questions.
The console was shown off alongside a new gamepad controller as well as a new Kinect motion camera.
In terms of appearance, the Xbox One is all black and mean-looking. It has a two-tone finish, with equal amounts of gloss and matte. The system comes with a slot-loading Blu-ray optical drive (fortunately for Microsoft, there is no argument over Blu-ray and HD-DVD this time around).
In terms of additional hardware specs, the Xbox One comes with an eight-core processor based on AMD's Jaguar design. It comes with 8GB of RAM, the better to compete with the PS4 with (although it will be DDR3 as opposed to the PS4's GDDR5). It will come with a 500GB hard drive -- actually smallish by today's standards, USB 3.0 ports, and WiFi Direct for communicating with the new controller and other devices. It will also include HDMI 1.4 output and passthrough.
Since the Xbox One is -- as is the PS4 -- switching to an x86-style architecture, backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games will be precluded.
A new Kinect was also unveiled, and it will come bundled with the console. Updates include 1080p video capture, along with improved recognition via the ability to detect many more points on a body. It’s also better at recognizing gestures and voice input -- it can even read your heartbeat during exercise.
Xbox Live is getting a revamp, too. 300,000 servers will be behind the service, and Xbox One will have new cloud-based features, including a DVR feature to record game play, along with back up of your media content, games and game saves to the cloud.
This is likely why the Xbox is said to require a constant Internet connection; it sounds like a lot of the functionality is based in the cloud. Microsoft hasn’t said specifically that it won’t work offline, but it’s definitely playing up the Internet capabilities of this new console
A couple of things were missing from Microsoft's event, including the two all important things: release date and price. However, attendees received a vague reassurance that the device won't be more than a year out. Electronic Art's Andrew Wilson said during the event that EA's sports games would be available on Xbox One "in the next 12 months," so that says the console shouldn't be further out than that.
It's been rumored for a while, but a newly released video (on Tuesday) seems to out the device completely. It's the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, and Active means it's designed for use outdoors -- and it's even waterproof.
However, this ruggedized version of Samsung's current and recently released flagship hasn't been officially announced yet. As such, details about the S4 Active's hardware are still unclear.
The video, for one, says that the phone has a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU. However, earlier leaks have pointed to a quad-core Snapdragon CPU. Coming, as it would seem from the language on the settings screen, from Croatia, it's a tad bit disconcerting.
The reason it's disconcerting is because of the recent trend among Samsung's recent flagship phone. U.S. buyers of the Galaxy S III and Galaxy S4 were shortchanged in terms of cores -- the Galaxy S III came with a dual-core processor in the U.S., quad-core almost everywhere else.
The Galaxy S4 comes with eight-cores elsewhere, and quad-cores in the U.S. These changes are the result, though, not of (just) cost-cutting, but because the Qualcomm CPUs have integrated LTE chipsets, which save both cost and battery.
It's doubtful, though, that Samsung would go any lower than dual-core for an S4 device, even if it adds other features while reducing the device's pure processing speed.
The S4 Active isn't just waterproof, it's also dust-proof and adds physical buttons, nice for those who might want to press a few while wearing gloves. Pricing and availability are still unclear.
A New York Times report in April of 2012 said that Apple saves billions in taxes annually, by "taking advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy." That story sat, seemingly unnoticed by Congress, until Monday, when it was reported that Senate investigators have come up with -- basically -- the same conclusion, but with numbers: Using a complex scheme, Apple avoided paying U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore, taxable income between 2009 and 2012.
As reported by the New York Times, Apple isn't the only corporation to use such tactics. It is, in fact, common among multinational corporations with the resources and the foreign offices to pull it off.
Examples of what the NYT reported as Apple's methods include a Reno, Nev., office with just a handful of employees, 200 miles away from its corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The office collects and invests the company’s profits, allowing Apple to avoid state income taxes on at least some of its gains. California's corporate tax is 8.84 percent while Nevada's is zero.
In addition, the Times reported that Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax locales such as Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands. Some of these "subsidiaries" are little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office.
None of these methods are illegal. They do, however, show the differences between John and Jane Q. Public, who cannot hide their incomes, and Apple, who can hide its income.
The bipartisan Senate probe also charges -- for the first time -- that three of Apple’s long-established Irish entities, don’t actually have tax-resident status there -- or anywhere else. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a 40-page report on Monday.
One of those subsidiaries, Apple Operations International, has no employees at all. Despite this, it reported $30 billion in income from 2009-2012, but has not filed an income tax return in any country for the past five years, the report said.
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the subcommittee and a longtime proponent of tightening U.S. corporate tax laws said:
Apple wasn’t satisfied with shifting its profits to a low-tax, offshore tax haven. Apple sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance.
Three Apple executives, including CEO Tim Cook, CFO Peter Oppenheimer, and its head of tax operations, Phillip Bullock, are scheduled to testify at a Tuesday hearing, regarding the company’s tax practices.
Ahead of that appearance, Apple released a PDF document detailing its expected testimony. In it, Apple made a number of assertions, including claiming that the company was likely the largest income tax payer in the country in 2012, paying "nearly" $6 billion in taxes.
These payments account for $1 in every $40 in corporate income tax the U.S. Treasury collected last year.
It also claimed to be a huge creator of jobs -- in the U.S. -- although most of Apple's employees, or at least those who perform work for the company, may be at Foxconn in China.
Apple added that it does not use "tax gimmicks." The document also contains a brief outline about how the Cupertino, Calif.-based giant believes the U.S. could simplify its corporate tax system, including the elimination of all corporate tax rates and expenditures and the creation of a "reasonable tax on foreign earnings" when companies want to bring that money back to the U.S.
Apple believes such comprehensive reform would stimulate economic growth. Apple supports this plan even though it would likely result in Apple paying more U.S. corporate tax
Although Apple has been highly successful since it rebounded from the brink of bankruptcy (to put it extremely modestly), it's under scrutiny for its huge cash horde of some $145 billion. Most of that money, over $100 billion of it, is held outside the U.S.
If Apple were to bring it back into the U.S., it would face up to a 35 percent corporate tax rate. Rather than tapping that pile of cash, Apple made another tax-saving move recently: It took on debt as part of a $17 billion bond plan that is estimated to save it some $9.2 billion in taxes.
Much of the Times’ earlier report appears to be confirmed by the Senate’s latest findings.
As noted earlier, Apple isn't the only multinational to use such tax-avoidance strategies. Last September the subcommittee spoke with Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, castigating them for their own heir own, unique methods to allegedly lower their corporate tax bills.
As expected, on Monday morning Yahoo and Tumblr announced that the Internet giant had acquired the six-year old New York blogging service for “approximately $1.1 billion, substantially all of which will be paid in cash " according to Yahoo's press release.
There is another interesting tidbit from the press release, one that can't be missed by anyone watching the mistakes and miscues in the once high-flying company's past. The press release says it in bright bold letters (all right, not really bright and bold, but it should be): Yahoo promised "not to screw it up."
Tumblr founder David Karp will remain as Tumblr’s CEO. According to the press release, Tumblr will be run as a separate entity, and "the product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators."
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer even took to Tumblr to post about the acquisition. In case you were wondering, it appears to be her only post on a newly created blog. Once again, she promised that Yahoo would "not screw it up."
The post included an animated GIF with the rotating text:
Yahoo!
tumblr.
Now Panic and Freak Out
Keep Calm and Carry On
Statistically, as Mayer noted:
Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs
It has over 300 million monthly unique visitors
It sees over 120,000 signups daily
Tumblr sees 900 posts per second
Users spend 24 billion minutes onsite monthly
More than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app; those users do an average of seven sessions daily
Yahoo hopes that the Tumblr acquisition will increase its global popularity. While Yahoo sees about 700 million unique visitors per month, the bulk of them, and the revenue from search and display ads, come from the Americas. Mayer said that the combination of Tumblr and Yahoo "could" (the operative word being could) grow Yahoo’s audience "by 50 percent to more than a billion visitors monthly, and could grow traffic by approximately 20 percent."
It's true, in fact, that with Tumblr in the fold, Yahoo has well over a billion users, since there is little overlap between the two sites.
Karp’s blog post on the acquisition was, as Mayer said, a little more irreverent -- in keeping with the site's normal style. That can be seen in his sign-off:
