Tag: Tmobile

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Supplier Report: 5/1/2020


Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

The trend for this post is leaders leaving.  AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is stepping down, John Legere resigns from the T-Mobile board (completely cutting ties), and SAP dropped the co-CEO model a few months after starting it.

Companies are pivoting for the times ahead and certain leaders have other options or just don’t want to deal with the headaches of day-to-day operations (see Disney’s Bob Iger).

Meanwhile, IT news is shifting back to normal… more talk about cloud and AI and less about Zoom and security concerns.

Artificial Intelligence/Robotics

  • Pope Joins Forces with IBM, Microsoft to Develop Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    Pope Francis threw his support behind the development of AI during a speech that was read on his behalf at a conference that was attended by Microsoft president Brad Smith and IBM Executive Vice President John Kelly. At that time, the pope was sick and was unable to deliver the speech himself.

    The joint document specifically referenced the potential abuse that can occur with facial recognition technology.

    “New forms of regulation must be encouraged to promote transparency and compliance with ethical principles, especially for advanced technologies that have a higher risk of impacting human rights, such as facial recognition,” the document stated.

    https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/149005/pope-joins-forces-with-ibm-microsoft-to-develop-artificial-intelligence-ai/

Cloud

  • Google’s Thomas Kurian on COVID-19, customers in crisis and the big cloud fight

    This is a little dark, but it seems like it’s going to be a good shopping opportunity. There’s going to be a lot of companies that don’t come through this, or don’t come through this at the same level that they were at six months ago.

    Over the last year, if you look at what we’ve said repeatedly, yes, we need a very clear, crisp product strategy. I think the feedback we’ve received from customers, from partners has shown that we have now clarified our product strategy. So if we were to do acquisitions, they know how it complements our footprint.

    We’ve also scaled our go-to-market organization significantly, with credit to Rob Enslin and his team. They’ve done a great job and to be honest with you, a lot of examples of customers I gave you [above] were illustrative of the reach that we now have through our customer service and sales organization to help customers through this.

    We continue to work with partners to bring them business. One of the things that we’ve always felt is that the best partnerships are tested during a difficult period, and we remain committed to bringing as much business as we can to the partner community.

    As I said, we’re not ruling in or out any acquisition discussion. We don’t need acquisitions to grow; you’ve seen our growth rates. Nor are we saying we won’t do anything, because it would not make sense to make such a public statement.

    https://www.protocol.com/interview-with-google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kurian

  • IBM First-Quarter Sales Decline as New CEO Aims to Revive Growth

    International Business Machines Corp. IBM 0.24% posted lower first-quarter sales, withdrew annual earnings guidance because of uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic and took a large restructuring charge, highlighting the challenges new Chief Executive Arvind Krishna faces in trying to revive Big Blue’s fortunes.

    IBM on Monday said it was withdrawing full-year earnings guidance that included generating at least $13.35 in adjusted earnings per share, citing the Covid-19 crisis. The company said it would reassess the situation at the end of the current quarter.

    “It was a tough decision to withdraw guidance,” Mr. Krishna told analysts. “But these are unprecedented times, and this quarter is not the time to declare we have clarity—that does not benefit us, and it does not benefit you as investors and analysts.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-first-quarter-sales-decline-as-new-ceo-aims-to-revive-growth-11587415010

  • Amazon Is Running Out of Ways to Stop Microsoft’s JEDI Deal

    Between the fourth quarters of 2018 and 2019, AWS’s share of the global cloud platform market dipped from 33.4% to 32.4%, according to Canalys, while Azure’s market share jumped from 14.9% to 17.6%.

    Azure is growing faster for three main reasons: It’s tightly tethered to Microsoft’s other services, it’s increasingly popular with retailers that have been burned by Amazon, and it’s cheaper for Windows Server and SQL Server users, who are granted prices for “bundled” licenses instead of stand-alone services.

    AWS generates most of Amazon’s operating profits and supports the growth of its lower-margin marketplaces. If Azure keeps pulling customers away from AWS, Amazon’s profit growth could decelerate — which would leave it less room to expand its e-commerce ecosystem with loss-leading strategies.

    AWS generated $35 billion in revenue, or 12% of Amazon’s top line, in 2019. Assuming the JEDI contract pays out $1 billion annually over the next 10 years, it would only lift its AWS revenue by less than 3%.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/22/amazon-running-out-ways-stop-microsoft-jedi-deal.aspx

Software/SaaS

  • Fishtown Analytics raises $12.9M Series A for its open-source analytics engineering tool

    “I wrote this blog post in early 2016, essentially saying that analysts needed to work in a fundamentally different way,” Fishtown founder and CEO Tristan Handy told me, when I asked him about how the product came to be. “They needed to work in a way that much more closely mirrored the way the software engineers work and software engineers have been figuring this shit out for years and data analysts are still like sending each other Microsoft Excel docs over email.”

    The dbt open-source project forms the basis of this. It allows anyone who can write SQL queries to transform data and then load it into their preferred analytics tools. As such, it sits in-between data warehouses and the tools that load data into them on one end, and specialized analytics tools on the other.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/22/fishtown-analytics-raises-12-9m-series-a-for-its-open-source-analytics-engineering-tool/

  • Another pandemic woe: Zoom fatigue

    We’re using it for everything now. It would be one thing if we only used Zoom for team meetings and one-on-ones at work. But Zoom is now the go-to tool for informal social gatherings and virtual happy hours, family events and religious services, not to mention kids’ online classes, doctors’ appointments and perhaps a therapy session to process it all.

    Videoconferencing imposes cognitive and psychological frictions and aggravates social anxieties. As experts in human-computer interaction point out, using Zoom means putting on a show for others without being able to rely on the cues we primates depend on in physical encounters.

    https://www.axios.com/zoom-fatigue-coronavirus-teleconferencing-f5c0ce17-483f-4c71-9a7d-f023d7e7a45b.html

Other

  • SAP Drops Co-CEO Structure to Simplify Leadership During Pandemic

    SAP said Co-CEO Jennifer Morgan, 48 years old, would leave the company on April 30.

    “More than ever, the current environment requires companies to take swift, determined action which is best supported by a very clear leadership structure,” SAP said in a written statement. “Therefore, the decision to transfer from Co-CEO to sole CEO model was taken earlier than planned to ensure strong, unambiguous steering in times of an unprecedented crisis.”

    Christian Klein, 39, would stay on as sole CEO, SAP said late Monday in New York.

    Ms. Morgan, who is American, joined SAP in 2004 and ran the company’s cloud-computing business before being elevated last year to co-CEO. Mr. Klein, who is German and joined SAP in 1999 as a student, served as chief operating officer before his co-CEO appointment.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/sap-drops-co-ceo-structure-to-simplify-leadership-during-pandemic-11587425462

  • John Legere abruptly resigns from T-Mobile board of directors ‘to pursue other options’

    “Mr. Legere noted that he was not resigning because of any disagreement with management or the board on any matter,” T-Mobile said in its note, which also contained a quote from Legere addressed to the company and its employees:

    In his notice to the company, Mr. Legere stated “It has been a privilege and honor to have led T-Mobile as CEO for the past seven and a half years and served on the Board of Directors. And although I will be leaving the Board just a few weeks earlier than planned, be assured that I remain T-Mobile’s #1 fan!”

    Whatever Legere has planned next, apparently it couldn’t wait another month and change.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21235226/john-legere-resigns-tmobile-board-directors

  • AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson to step down, COO Stankey to take over

    AT&T announced Friday that CEO Randall Stephenson will retire and will be succeeded by President and COO John Stankey on July 1, months earlier than expected.

    Stephenson, 60, said in February he would remain CEO for the rest of the year, though he refused to project beyond that date. He will remain executive chairman of the board until January. AT&T shares were largely unchanged following the announcement.

    Stankey, who was being groomed as Stephenson’s successor over the last couple years, recently dropped his position as CEO of AT&T’s WarnerMedia, which will soon be led by Hulu co-founder Jason Kilar.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/att-ceo-randall-stephenson-to-step-down.html

Posted on

Supplier Report: 9/27/2019


Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

The darlings of the tech world are facing the harsh embrace of reality. Both Uber and WeWork have been under fire for their valuations and other operational issues. Now leaders from other companies are commenting on their future viability.

Meanwhile many firms are clinging to the hope of artificial intelligence to improve their margins, increase their sales, and usher in a new market for customers to get excited about.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • McDonald’s Is Acquiring AI Startup Apprente

    McDonald’s is acquiring Apprente, a startup which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to understand speech in multiple languages. The technology will be used in the company’s drive-thrus and could also be used in its self-order kiosks and a mobile app. This is McDonald’s third tech deal this year.

    There is a new self-checkout shopping cart that makes grocery shopping easier. When you are shopping with a Caper cart, all you have to do is scan the item barcode and simply add it to your cart. Once you are done shopping you pay directly on the cart. Caper recently closed a $10 million Series A led by Lux Capital.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/339394

  • T-Mobile’s Sprint merger is opposed by 18 state attorneys general

    In July, the Department of Justice approved T-Mobile’s $26.5 billion bid to merge with Sprint — on the condition that it sell some of its business to Dish Network. And Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai endorsed the deal. But opposition from so many attorneys general could pose a legitimate threat.

    The state attorneys general fear the merger would hurt competition, raise prices for cell service, result in a loss of retail jobs and lower wages for the employees who remain. “The merger between T-Mobile and Sprint would severely undermine competition in the telecommunications sector, which would hurt Pennsylvanian consumers by driving up prices, limiting coverage, and diminishing quality,” Shapiro said in a statement.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/18/t-mobile-sprint-pennsylvania/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Google’s quantum bet on the future of AI—and what it means for humanity

    The full reach of Google’s AI influence stretches far beyond the company’s offerings. Outside developers—at startups and big corporations alike—now use Google’s AI tools to do everything from training smart satellites to monitoring changes to the earth’s surface to rooting out abusive language on Twitter (well, it’s trying). There are now millions of devices using Google AI, and this is just the beginning. Google is on the verge of achieving what’s known as quantum supremacy. This new breed of computer will be able to crack complex equations a million or more times faster than regular ones. We are about to enter the rocket age of computing.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90396213/google-quantum-supremacy-future-ai-humanity

  • Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis

    Pineau is trying to change the standards. She’s the reproducibility chair for NeurIPS, a premier artificial intelligence conference. Under her watch, the conference now asks researchers to submit a “reproducibility checklist” including items often omitted from papers, like the number of models trained before the “best” one was selected, the computing power used, and links to code and datasets. That’s a change for a field where prestige rests on leaderboards—rankings that determine whose system is the “state of the art” for a particular task—and offers great incentive to gloss over the tribulations that led to those spectacular results.

    The idea, Pineau says, is to encourage researchers to offer a road map for others to replicate their work. It’s one thing to marvel at the eloquence of a new text generator or the “superhuman” agility of a videogame-playing bot. But even the most sophisticated researchers have little sense of how they work.

    https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-confronts-reproducibility-crisis/

Cloud

  • IBM sees Amazon and Microsoft as cloud allies, not rivals

    CEO Ginni Rometty is betting on the hybrid cloud, which lets IBM offer services on corporate customers’ cloud-based servers as well as on third-party clouds operated by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. IBM has traditionally viewed these cloud giants as direct competitors, but it now aims to partner with them by supporting clients as they shift sensitive databases on to the cloud, regardless of which provider they use.

    After struggling to keep up in the cloud market for more than a decade, IBM has switched to a hybrid cloud strategy, cementing its future with last year’s US$34-billion acquisition of Red Hat, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based open-source software provider.

    https://techcentral.co.za/ibm-sees-amazon-and-microsoft-as-cloud-allies-not-rivals/92641/

  • Larry Ellison says Oracle will ‘write into your contract that your bill will be half’ of what you’d pay Amazon, as the database giant announces new cloud products

    Larry Ellison announced a new so-called autonomous operating system in a new initiative to challenge to Amazon Web Services, the leader in cloud computing — and took a jab at Amazon over its small role in the massive Capital One hack.

    A highlight of Ellison’s speech was the unveiling of what it touted as the world’s first autonomous operating system, that will automatically be maintained and updated and will not require manual management. This operating system is based on Linux, the free and open source operating system that’s ubiqitious in server rooms and data centers around the world.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-oracle-autonomous-os-free-cloud-access-2019-9

Security/Privacy

  • The FBI Tried to Plant a Backdoor in an Encrypted Phone Network

    The FBI tried to force the owner of an encrypted phone company to put a backdoor in his devices, Motherboard has learned. The company involved is Phantom Secure, a firm that sold privacy-focused BlackBerry phones and which ended up catering heavily to the criminal market, including members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, formerly run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa73dz/fbi-tried-to-plant-backdoor-in-encrypted-phone-phantom-secure

  • Thinkful confirms data breach days after Chegg’s $80M acquisition

    Thinkful, based in Brooklyn, New York, provides education and training for developers and programmers. The company claims the vast majority of its graduates get jobs in their field of study within a half-year of finishing their program. Earlier this month, education tech giant Chegg bought Thinkful for $80 million in cash.

    But the company would not say when the breach happened — or if Chegg knew of the data breach prior to the acquisition announcement.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/thinkful-data-breach-chegg-acquisition/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

    This new investment is in addition to the $7 billion the company has invested since 2007 in the EU, but today’s announcement was focused on Google’s commitment to building data centers running on clean energy, as much as the data centers themselves.

    Of the 3 billion Euros, the company plans to spend, it will invest 600 million to expand its presence in Hamina, Finland, which he wrote “serves as a model of sustainability and energy efficiency for all of our data centers.” Further, the company already announced 18 new renewable energy deals earlier this week, which encompass a total of 1,600-megawatts in the US, South America and Europe.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/20/google-is-investing-3-3b-to-build-clean-data-centers-in-europe/

  • IBM will soon launch a 53-qubit quantum computer

    IBM notes that the new 53-qubit system introduces a number of new techniques that enable the company to launch larger, more reliable systems for cloud deployments. It features more compact custom electronics for improving scaling and lower error rates, as well as a new processor design.

    The fact that IBM is now opening this Quantum Computation itself, of course, is a pretty good indication about how serious the company is about its quantum efforts. The company’s quantum program also now supports 80 partnerships with commercial clients, academic institutions and research laboratories. Some of these have started to use the available machines to work on real-world problems, though the current state of the art in quantum computing is still not quite ready for solving anything but toy problems and testing basic algorithms.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/18/ibm-will-soon-launch-a-53-qubit-quantum-computer/

Other

  • Uber Vows to Fight California Legislation on Gig Economy

    The legislation, which intends to force companies to reclassify certain contract workers as employees, is considered a serious threat to Uber and Lyft, already losing billions of dollars a year combined, as their business models have relied on flexible labor and minimal worker costs.

    The bill’s passage in the state Assembly on Wednesday, after the state Senate’s passage the night before, reflects the degree to which the large Democratic majority in Sacramento has increased scrutiny of tech companies in recent years, as well as the strength of labor unions in the state.

    Given California’s size and history of creating influential business regulations, it also is the first significant step in a new paradigm for a changing workforce, fueled by people who have forgone benefits for the sake of flexibility and occasional incentives.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-governor-still-in-talks-with-uber-lyft-over-gig-workers-law-11568212014
    Oracle Founder Larry Ellison Calls Uber and WeWork ‘Almost Worthless’

    Ellison argued that while Uber raises capital to spend on gaining market share from rival Lyft (LYFT), the business they secure doesn’t necessarily stay with the company. He pointed out that Uber doesn’t own its cars and doesn’t control their drivers. And he declared that “they have an app my cat could have written.”

    Ellison said losing money to gain market share is “idiotic” if customers won’t stay with the firm. “They have nothing,” he said. “No technology. And no loyalty.”

    He mocked WeWork’s assertion that it is a technology company. “WeWork rents a building from me, and breaks it up, and then rents it,” Ellison said. “They say, ‘We’re a technology company, and we want a tech multiple.’ It’s bizarre.”

    https://www.barrons.com/articles/oracles-larry-ellison-calls-uber-and-wework-almost-worthless-51568924122

  • Avaya Goes Global With IBM Cloud

    As part of the IBM deal, Avaya gains access to Watson, to help its contact center customers improve routing and automation for dealing with customer calls, McGugan says. Additionally, IBM provides important automation tools and professional services for the cloud migration.

    In addition to IBM, Avaya has partnerships with other cloud providers, with compute resources in Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. “My customers sometimes dictate where they want their solutions housed,” McGugan said. Some workloads span multiple clouds.

    https://www.lightreading.com/services/unified-communication/avaya-goes-global-with-ibm-cloud/d/d-id/754203

  • Amazon Will Double Chicago Headcount, Add 70K SF at Tech Hub

    Amazon plans to expand its Chicago Tech Hub and create 400 new tech jobs in fields including cloud computing, advertising, and business development. To accommodate this job creation, Amazon will expand its space at Tishman Speyer’s Franklin office tower by more than 70,000 square feet.

    In all, Amazon employs more than 11,000 across Illinois, including workers at its fulfillment centers and retail stores.

    https://www.connect.media/amazon-will-double-chicago-headcount-add-70k-sf-at-tech-hub/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 8/2/2019


Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash

Microsoft continues to make strides in the cloud space inching closer to Amazon’s crown (but not that close…yet). The company is also betting on massive AI investments to continue their success in the future.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile and Sprint are finally allowed to merge and Dish will officially become a telecom company.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • T-Mobile and Sprint get DOJ approval for $26 billion merger deal

    The U.S. Department of Justice this morning gave the green light to T-Mobile US and Sprint for their proposed $26 billion merger. The deal, which would combine the nation’s third and fourth largest carriers (by subscriber number) has been green lit on the condition that Sprint sell its prepaid assets (including Boost Mobile) to Dish Network.

    As part of the deal, some nine million prepaid subscribers will move over to Dish, which will also have access to T-Mobile/Sprint’s network for a period of seven years.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/26/t-mobile-and-sprint-get-doj-approval-for-26-billion-merger-deal/

    Experts Say the DOJ Justification for T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Approval Is a Joke

    “Today’s settlement will provide Dish with the assets and transitional services required to become a facilities-based mobile network operator that can provide a full range of mobile wireless services nationwide,” DOJ Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said of the deal.

    But experts consulted by Motherboard say the proposal isn’t likely to work, and the end result of the merger will still very likely be higher prices and worse service for all.

    For one thing, Dish has been promising to build a wireless network for the better part of the last decade with little to show for it. The company has routinely been accused of “spectrum squatting,” or buying spectrum it doesn’t use in a bid to turn around and sell it later when it’s more valuable. Even T-Mobile made this complaint when Dish initially criticized the merger.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjvw55/t-mobile-sprint-merger-is-a-joke

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft to Invest $1 Billion in Artificial-Intelligence Startup

    “This is a big investment for Microsoft, even at their size,” said Stifel analyst Brad Reback. “They’ll do scores of acquisitions annually but most of them tend to be smaller technology tuck-ins.”

    OpenAI was launched in 2015 as a nonprofit with a goal of leading efforts to develop artificial general intelligence. It competes with Alphabet Inc. ’s DeepMind Technologies and others. OpenAI is led by CEO Sam Altman, a former president of startup accelerator Y Combinator.

    The Microsoft investment signals a vote of confidence in OpenAI’s recent transformation into a private company from a nonprofit. In March, OpenAI revamped its legal structure to raise more money and gain scale, which enabled it to accept the investment from Microsoft.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-to-invest-1-billion-in-artificial-intelligence-startup-11563813648

Cloud

  • Google Cloud’s run rate is now over $8B

    Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who recently installed former Oracle exec Thomas Kurian as the new head of Google Cloud, announced that this business unit now has an $8 billion annual revenue run rate. That’s up from the $4 billion the company reported in early 2018.

    While Google often felt like an also-ran in the cloud wars, it’s clearly starting to make up some ground. “Other cloud providers would have you believe that no one is using Google, which is not true,” Kurian told me when I talked to him earlier this year. Now he can put some numbers behind this claim.

    To put that into perspective, AWS’s run rate topped $30 billion last quarter while Microsoft Azure is somewhere around $11 billion, though concrete numbers are hard to come by.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/25/google-clouds-run-rate-is-now-over-8b/

  • The cloud computing market is closing in on a $100 billion milestone, but half of it is going to either Amazon or Microsoft, according to an analyst report

    The cloud market, which covers web-based services for infrastructure, platform and hosted private clouds, totaled about $23 billion in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group. That’s up 39% from the year-ago period and $1.6 billion from the previous quarter.

    Amazon owned 33% of that market, bigger than the combined share of its four closest rivals: Microsoft, which had 16%, Google, 8%, Alibaba and Tencent. The report also mentioned other key players in the cloud market — IBM, Salesforce, Oracle and Rackspace — which posted lower growth rates and “are more niche-oriented.”

    https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-microsoft-cloud-gap-narrowing-2019-7

  • Microsoft, AT&T sign cloud deal worth more than $2 billion

    Under the deal, Microsoft and AT&T will also work together on so-called edge computing, which will see Microsoft technology deployed alongside AT&T’s coming 5G network for applications that need extremely small delays in passing data back and forth, such as air traffic control systems for drones. The multi-year deal is worth more than $2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    The agreement is a major win for Microsoft, which will become AT&T’s “preferred” cloud vendor and is fighting to gain market share from Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services, the biggest provider of public cloud services. Cloud service customers run their software applications in data centers managed by the cloud provider.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-at-t-cloud/microsoft-att-sign-cloud-deal-worth-more-than-2-billion-idUSKCN1UC1KK?il=0
    IBM Lands AT&T as Client in Cloud Deal

    The partnership builds on IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of open-source software firm Red Hat, which closed last week. Buying Red Hat strengthened IBM’s standing in the hybrid cloud market. Companies use the hybrid cloud to manage software and other systems across different cloud services and their own data centers.

    IBM said that Red Hat’s open-source software will give AT&T Business the flexibility to move data and applications among various clouds and data centers. AT&T Business until now has worked with multiple cloud vendors.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-lands-at-t-as-client-in-cloud-deal-11563317480

Security/Privacy

  • An Equifax hack settlement promises a $125 payout. The truth is more complicated.

    First, if your information (most importantly, your social security number) was part of the hack, then you should assume it’s out there forever. Even if someone hasn’t stolen your identity yet, it could still happen.

    Second, even if you file for reimbursement, there’s a good chance you won’t actually get the full $125 that Equifax and the FTC are talking about. Things are worded carefully in the agreement, but the bottom line is there’s a limited amount of money in the payout pool, and it won’t cover $125 checks for 147 million people.

    Given all that, the biggest loophole you should be aware of is that if you do nothing, you will automatically waive your right to take legal action against Equifax in the future.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/27/equifax-settlement-guide-how-get-money-what-you-need-know/?utm_term=.ae82df97b9e0

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Apple’s and Intel’s No-Brainer Deal

    The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the two are in “advanced talks.” A deal would purportedly involve both the intellectual property and staff related to Intel’s effort to design and build the crucial smartphone component that ultimately landed only Apple as a customer. The reported purchase price under discussion is about $1 billion.

    That is less than a week’s worth of free cash flow for Apple. It also is about what Intel has been losing annually on modems. Despite landing the sizable iPhone business, Intel’s modem-chip operation never achieved the necessary scale to compete profitably with market leader Qualcomm . QCOM -0.17% Meanwhile, Apple was effectively locked into the Intel modem during its bruising legal tussle with Qualcomm. The latter’s advancements in 5G technology ultimately spurred a settlement of that dispute, but it is an uneasy peace. Intel now has a modem operation with no customer following this year’s iPhone model, and Apple is back to depending on a supplier with whom it now has a rather tortured history.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-and-intels-no-brainer-deal-11563900798

  • Sony’s wearable AC will arrive too late to save you from this year’s heatwave

    Sony has announced the Reon Pocket, a small cooling device that you can wear like a portable air conditioner. It’s currently live on Sony’s crowdfunding website, where prices start at ¥12,760 (about $117). SlashGear notes that as well as cooling you during hot days, the device, which slots into the back pocket of a specially designed T-shirt, can also warm you up during the winter.

    https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/7/27/8931701/sony-reon-pocket-portable-wearable-air-conditioner-heater-heatwave-t-shirt

    I need this thing now. Right Now.

Other

  • Tesla’s longtime CTO is stepping down

    Longtime Tesla executive JB Straubel is leaving his post as chief technology officer after some 15 years, CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday evening. Straubel will transition to a “senior advisor” role, according to Musk, and is not fully leaving the company. The news comes as Tesla announced a $408 million loss for the second quarter of 2019.

    “I’m not disappearing, and I just wanted to make sure that people understand that this was not some, you know, lack of confidence in the company, or the team, or anything like that,” Straubel said on the call.

    Straubel is the second C-suite executive to announce a change in his role on one of Tesla’s earnings calls in the last six months. Longtime chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja announced he was retiring on a call in January. Tesla also has a well-documented revolving door when it comes to lower-level executives.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20726728/tesla-jb-straubel-cto-is-stepping-down