Tuesday, April 1, 2014

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HP writes cheque to make shareholders go away

Posted: 01 Apr 2014 03:28 AM PDT

The maker of very expensive printer ink, HP, has written a cheque for $57 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the outfit of defrauding shareholders by suddenly walking away from its business model.

It all started after former Chief Executive Leo Apotheker decided it would be a great idea to refocus the company on business services and products.

Apotheker scrapped WebOS which was about the only thing useful that HP had obtained when it bought Palm in 2010. Apotheker paid $11.1 billion for British outfit Autonomy and talked about spinning off HP's personal computer business. He also halted sales of the TouchPad, after just seven weeks on the market.

Shareholders were a little upset. They thought they had invested in a successful hardware company but suddenly they had put their money in a less successful version of SAP.

The lead plaintiffs include the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System; the Labourers' Pension Fund of Central and Eastern Canada in Oakville, Ontario; the LIUNA National Pension Fund and LIUNA Staff & Affiliates Pension Fund in Washington, D.C.; and Union Asset Management Holding AG in Frankfurt, Germany.

Under the settlement, HP will deposit $57 million in used banknotes into an interest-bearing escrow account. The cash will then be divided between the plaintiffs and their laywers.

Jonathan Gardner, co-lead counsel for the class action said that he was very happy with the settlement and was glad to have achieved this recovery for the affected HP shareholders. 

Yahoo rumoured to buy news distribution service

Posted: 01 Apr 2014 03:27 AM PDT

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth bit of gossip claiming that Yahoo is in preliminary talks to buy online video service News Distribution Network for $300 million.

The rumours appear to have been started by the Wall Street Journal and have been hotly denied by NDN.

NDN spokeswoman Krystal Olivieri was quoted in the Wall Street Journal story as stating that the company was not in talks to be acquired by Yahoo. Reached by phone on Monday, Olivieri declined to comment.

The deal makes a lot of sense for Yahoo. Its CEO e Marissa Mayer is looking for ways to take YouTube down a peg, or two and has made online video a centrepiece of her strategy to get users to spend more time on Yahoo pages and watching ads.

NDN is a video syndication outfit that supplies newspapers and other Web publishers with clips about news, sports, politics and other topics. It would help Yahoo expand its video offering to thousands of new sites and potentially create lucrative opportunities for marketers to work with Yahoo.

It is not the first time that Yahoo has tried to buy NDN. The company discussed it before Mayer joined in 2012, but no deal was reached. The talks have been renewed in recent weeks, apparently. 

Samsung versus Apple case getting silly

Posted: 01 Apr 2014 03:25 AM PDT

The latest patent case between Apple and Samsung is going to be nasty and silly, if the opening shots are anything to go by.

Yesterday Samsung lawyers objected to the jury seeing a handy video made by the Federal Judicial Centre called "How Patents Work: An Overview for Jurors". Samsung's beef with the video was that it used, as a case study, Apple.

Samsung said the video includes several scenes in which Apple products are depicted and used. It recommended that the jurors be shown an earlier video that was also shown to the jury in another patent dispute between Apple and Samsung in the court, and does not feature products and brands at question in the trial.

Shown in the video are the iPad, a newer model of a laptop computer, and an iPhone. Samsung said. "The narration during this portion of the video addresses how the disclosure of a patent may 'inspire new inventions.'

US District Judge Lucy Koh overruled Samsung Electronics' objections. In her order on Sunday, Judge Koh wrote that the parties shall bring the November 2013 version of the video, and shall include a handout referenced in the video in the jury binders.

In the lawsuit, Apple claims that Samsung infringed five of its patents in 10 models of phones and tablets, while Samsung has counterclaimed that Apple has infringed on two of its patents in nine phones and tablets.

Still if things are getting this messy at this point we can expect them to get uglier later. 

Microsoft cuts Azure price

Posted: 01 Apr 2014 03:24 AM PDT

The price war on cloud prices between Microsoft, Amazon and Google is heating up and everyone is slashing the cost of their service.

Today it was the turn of Microsoft to announce cuts in the price of its Azure service in a move that will keep its promise of matching the price of Amazon . Amazon announced price reductions last week, Microsoft followed up with theirs today.

Microsoft made an announcement that "Consistent with our previously announced commitment to match Amazon on prices for commodity services, we are cutting prices on compute by up to 35 per cent and storage by up to 65 percent."

Vole said that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best in class on price performance.

In addition Vole announced a new tier of General Purpose Instances called "Basic" (A0-A4) that offers similar machine configurations as the Standard tier of instances offered today (Extra Small [A0] to Extra Large [A4]).

This will end up 27 percent less than the corresponding instances in use today. These will still be around but will be called "Standard" and will not include load balancing or auto-scaling, which are included in Standard.

Microsoft's announcement is showing how cutthroat the cloud market is becoming and how much difficulty Amazon is going to have staying on top.

Google started the current price war two weeks ago citing the plummeting costs of hardware. It was followed by Amazon matching the cuts.

However, it is good news for companies thinking of moving onto the cloud. The continual cloud price cuts make it hard to justify continuing to run in-house operations, which would be far more expensive, both in terms of hardware costs and maintenance costs. 

Leblond tunnels out of Microsoft Volehill

Posted: 01 Apr 2014 03:22 AM PDT

Antoine Leblond has announced that he is leaving Microsoft after working there for nearly a quarter of a century.

Leblond was a close chum of Windows chief Steven Sinofsky who cleaned out his desk after Windows 8 was released. However, he stayed even though CEO Steve Ballmer announced his "One Microsoft" strategy which left many of Sinofsky's close colleagues with unclear roles in the Microsoft Volehill.

Soon after announcing his cunning plan, Ballmer also quit and was replaced by Satya Nadella who was promoted to CEO in February.

Everything seemed to calm down a bit so Leblond's announcement came as a surprise – although it is more of a surprise that it did not come sooner. He was one of the last of Sinofsky's chums still in Redmond and it looks like that faction has gone the way of the Starks in Game of Thrones.

Leblond spent most of his Vole years working closely with Sinofsky and for the first 20 years that was on Microsoft Office and recently worked on building the Windows Store and cloud services for Windows 8.

According to an email to staff, Leblond has started to wonder if there is life outside the Volehill and plans to burrow his way to the top and see the sunlight for the first time. Then he might join with a water rat and a frog and have many new adventures and mess about in boats.

"After almost 25 years, I've decided it's time for me to go out and see what the non-Microsoft world has to offer. Every single day I have had here has been amazing in its own way, and I will never look back on all of these years with anything but fondness, pride in what we've accomplished together, and a real appreciation for having been lucky enough to be part of so many awesome things," he said. 
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