Later this week, Kyle Wiens will travel to an undisclosed European country, stand in line for hours to buy Apple’s new iPhone, and then find a comfortable, well-lighted place to take the phone apart.
European privacy regulators could be about to throw a spanner into the works of attempts by social networking sites such as Facebook to find new ways to increase profits as they try to restrict the way internet groups release personal data.
It’s a well-known story by now: Europe, the US, and plenty of other countries have made it generally illegal to circumvent DRM, even when users want to do something legal with the content.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Are things picking up at Nokia?
Maybe… or at least, they seem to be getting worse at a decelerating rate.
RBC Capital’s Mark Sue this morning repeated his Outperform rating on the stock and lifted his price target to $16, from $12, asserting that the company’s operating margins in mobile device many have bottomed. “It’s been the most volatile global handset quarter since we can remember, yet the shock to the system seems to be dissipating,” he writes.
India’s tech boom has inspired other developing nations to promote themselves as outsourcing destinations. The latest to try to cash in: Egypt.
Egypt seems like an unlikely place for Western companies to send tech work and open call centers, but Tarek El-Sadany, a government official in charge of helping to grow the country’s information-technology industry, says that the country is well positioned to do these tasks–literally.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Cisco, true to its word, began reducing its headcount this week. Drastically. Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Wachovia Capital Markets, noticed that the total number of the company’s job listings has fallen 93 percent in the last week. Rakers isn’t specific about how many of those jobs are in Silicon Valley, but job-listing businesses advertising on the radio in the Bay Area may want to change their recession-defying promises of “thousands of job openings” to “thousands of applicants.”
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Have things gotten that bad in the solar industry? Something has prompted Germany’s SolarWorld to state its intention of offering one billion Euros to acquire four production plants and one headquarters currently owned and operated by the Opel division of General Motors. The goal? To create Europe’s first “green” car company and–presumably–sell enough electric and hybrid cars to offset the dismal margins of the company’s core solar business. One would think there’d be other fish to fry.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Yesterday, Travelzoo posted weaker-than-expected results for this quarter. The company’s aggressive expansion into the Asia Pacific and European markets, coupled with troubled economic conditions in North America, impacted the company to an unforeseen extent. CEO Holger Bartel plans to curtail activity in both markets during Q4.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Marvell (MVRL) shares are down sharply again today, pressured this morning by Deutsche Bank analyst Arnab Chanda, who cut his rating on the stock to Hold from Buy. He cut his target price on the stock to $15 from $20.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
This morning, the market is suffering in Dell (DELL) hell.
Last night, the company posted results for its fiscal second quarter ended July, which beat the Street impressively on the top line, but at the cost of lower-than-expected gross margins, resulting in a miss at the EPS level.
The Internet is still very young. It was only November 1977 when a group of computer scientists successfully connected three networks around the world, including one at University College London.
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