Business Tech

What's the 'Internet of Everything' worth? $613 billion, Cisco reckons

Cisco Systems wants its customers to know that there is a huge amount of money to be made if they focus their strategy and IT budget on what the company and others call the Internet of Everything.

That's the idea that more than half of the people and 99 percent of the things on the planet are unconnected and that by connecting them and riding the wave of industry transformations, such as smart factories, digital health, mobile collaboration, virtual assistants, and connected commercial vehicles, giant profits will follow.

In other words, the companies that invest in the "connections … Read more

Designer product site Fab now worth $1 billion

Fab is now worth a cool $1 billion.

Self-dubbed the world's design store, Fab is an online retailer that sells quirky products, ranging from clothes to jewelry to furniture to food. Its "True Blood" shop, for example, allows fans of the HBO series to buy books, perfume, and even fangs to celebrate the show.

Chinese Internet site Tencent Holdings clearly sees something in Fab. It has kicked in $150 million in financing, earning itself a spot on Fab's board. Fab is now worth more than $1 billion -- not even counting Tencent's investment -- The … Read more

Adobe CEO: We're off to a good start with subscriptions (Q&A)

Shantanu Narayen, chief executive of Adobe Systems, just took a big step through a difficult transition.

The company is moving from selling perpetual licenses to Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, and other members of the Creative Suite to selling the $50-per-month Creative Cloud subscription that grants access to the whole collection and to some online services. There's plenty of disgruntlement from customers who prefer the old sales approach, which now only works for the old CS6 incarnation of Adobe's software, but Adobe showed on Tuesday that there's significant support for the new way, too.

That support came in … Read more

Redesigned iPad Mini may arrive before Retina: DisplaySearch

A slimmer iPad Mini may arrive before the Retina version, according to a report Tuesday from NPD DisplaySearch. A 9.7-inch iPad with a future A7 processor may also be on the way.

The next Mini, due in the second half sometime, will sport a 1,024x768 display (like the current version) but get a processor upgrade to the A6 from the A5 that's in the Mini today, said NPD DisplaySearch in blog post today.

"The new iPad mini will continue to use a 7.9-inch display with a 1024×768 resolution, but it will use the … Read more

Dish steps down from Sprint merger to clear way for Clearwire

Just when it was looking like Dish would never let Sprint go, it has.

The satellite company announced Tuesday that it was planning to step down from it's $25.5 billion offer on Sprint to focus on it's deal with Clearwire. This means that Sprint will most likely soon be in the hands of Japanese wireless carrier SoftBank.

"While DISH continues to see strategic value in a merger with Sprint, the decisions made by Sprint to prematurely terminate our due diligence process and accept extreme deal protections in its revised agreement with SoftBank, among other things, have … Read more

Dell special committee slams new Icahn plan as incomplete

The special committee of Dell's board managing the computer maker's effort to go private rejected the latest takeover proposal put forth Tuesday by activist investor Carl Icahn as lacking key details necessary for its approval.

Earlier Tuesday, Icahn proposed in a letter to shareholders that Dell buy back 1.1 billion shares at $14 as an alternative to the plan to take the company private proposed by company founder Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners. Icahn also announced that he had purchased 72 million Dell shares from proxy fight partner Southeastern Asset Management, making him the second largest … Read more

Nvidia to license its graphics technology to device makers

Could Apple tap Nvidia for graphics power in its mobile devices? Maybe, now that the chipmaker has decided to license its graphics technology.

Nvidia on Tuesday said it would begin licensing its GPU cores and "visual computing" patent portfolio to device manufacturers -- a new business model for the company. The technology could appear in a full range of products from phones to supercomputers, the company said, with products likely emerging in 2015, given design and testing requirements.

"It's not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market," David … Read more

Adobe beats profit expectations, mulls subscription changes

Adobe Systems beat analysts' profitability expectations by 3 cents per share in the second fiscal quarter, ratcheted its Creative Cloud subscriber total up 221,000 to 700,000, and is considering new measures to mollify those who don't like the subscriptions, the company said Tuesday.

For the company's fiscal second quarter, which ended May 31, the company reported net income of 36 cents per share on a non-GAAP basis that excludes various charges, a notch better than the 33 cents average expectation of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Using generally accepted accounting principles, the company's net income … Read more

HP shifts PC chief to China, global focus

Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday that Todd Bradley will step down as head of the company's PC and printing unit to focus on growing the company's footprint in China, partnerships and the channel.

Bradley's new title will be executive vice president of strategic growth initiatives. The move is interesting since Bradley was supposed to meld printing and PCs and find synergies between the two businesses. Both product lines are challenged by slower growth going forward and the PC business has to reinvent to focus on mobility. In HP's second-quarter results in May, personal systems sales were down 20 … Read more

AMD to launch its first ARM chip

Advanced Micro Devices is dipping into the ARM world.

The chipmaker announced Tuesday that it plans to develop its first ARM chip starting next year. Codenamed "Seattle," the chip is being touted by AMD as the industry's first 64-bit ARM processor from a major chipmaker.

AMD said that the chip will offer two to four times the performance of its Opteron X-Series processor with improved compute per watt. Based on the ARM Cortex-A57 processor, Seattle is expected to run at speeds of 2 gigahertz or higher and will support up to 128GB of DRAM.

Aimed at the … Read more