You are not the only one who loves all those cool gadgets you see so much of,
especially during this time of year. Technology companies also really love them.
After all, they are like jet fuel for sales in this sector of the economy.
And investors adore them as well. This is because even as
the real estate crises, dismal global trade deficit reports and ever-increasing fuel prices have put much of Wall Street in a cranky mood,
many investors are still finding plenty of profits in technology stocks, which is an area that the United States leads the world in. The
Apple Corporation, Nokia and and Research In Motion are just a few of the companies which are profiting handsomely from the gadget boom.
In addition to these industry giants, the standard bearer IBM, mega corporation Oracle plus virtualization software pioneer VMware are reaping rich dividends
thanks to the gadget driven consumer spending. As an example, Thomson financial has stated that Technology companies which grace the S&P 500 are predicted to outperform
all the other sectors in the 4th quarter of the year. Pretty impressive and also a godsend for an otherwise embattled economy. of course, each company is affected by
slightly different factors at work here. The Apple Corporation, for example, is benefiting greatly from 2 sweeping items in particular: strong notebook sales plus a thriving wireless market,
courtesy of the iPhone.
In fact sales are anticipated to grow by just under a third in Apple’s current year to over thirty-one billion! Likewise,
Hewlett-Packard has capitalized on the strong laptop computer demand. In fact their 4th quarter notebook sales have leaped by nearly fifty percent!
And Personal Computer sales in China, which is currently theor third largest market overall, doubled in the fourth quarter.
Furthermore, the Microchip leader, the Intel corporation, produces over eighty percent of the processors which power these machines.
There has been good reason for investors to be optimistic, as everything seems to be falling into place for these particular companies.
For instance, the BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion, which many finacial and stock market experts had predicted could be victimized by the iPhone,
is nonetheless up by around a staggering one hundred and seventy percent thus far this year. It has risen by eighty percent in the last 2 months alone, when it mapped out it’s plans
to start selling product in China. This month, the company has yet again issued earnings guidance which has substantially topped the experts’ estimates. It has just been
an incredible run to be sure. So what will the future hold? Can the good time continue forever? You know the answer to that but
the investment bank predicts twenty percent growth for notebooks verses a mere three percent growth for desktop Personal computers.
Globalism meets the legal realm as the
The Applied Materials corporation and the Chinese firm
Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Incorporated
(AMEC) are in a rather bitter legal battle concerning
a confidentially motion filed
in court, according to reports from several news
outlets.
The Applied Materials Corporation, which is based in
santa Clara, California, is hoping to prove their
lawsuit against AMEC (Shanghai) by turning over a
“trade-secret list” which has been under wraps up to
this point in time. In a document filed this month,
Applied Materials states that AMEC is in fact fighting
this legal manuevre and thus delaying the motion.
Sounds like your typical feet dragging ploy straight
from the handbook.
The motion in question just one section of a lawsuit
filed by the technology firm against it’s Chinese
competitor several months ago. In fact, their suit,
filed in the United States District Court in the
Northern California jurisdiction, states that the firm
is in fact involved in misappropriation of trade
secrets, breach of contract plus unfair competition.
The co-defendants in the suit include several AMEC
executives and former employees at Applied Materials:
Gerald Yin, Aihua Chen, Ryoji Todaka and Lee Luo. As a
matter of fact, the lawsuit states that some thirty
former Applied engineers now work over at the Chinese
firm.
All in all, The co-defendants in this lawsuit
apparently have been employed at Applied at 1 time or
another and had “access to highly sensitive Applied
trade secrets” involving etch and CVD, they maintain.
“Defendants willfully breached multiple duties to
Applied by transferring and converting Applied
inventions and trade secrets to AMEC.”
Applied is seeking certain damages in this lawsuit.
These 2 cfirms simply can’t seem to concur “as to whom
and under what circumstances Applied’s trade secret
list can be shown,” according to court documents. A
hearing is expected to take place next month.
The Reuters news network has reported that a
download collaboration which has been planned between the Pepsi Corporation and Amazon.com is among a few developments forcing additional consideration by the Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment Division to follow EMI &
Universal Music Group’s lead in distributing music in the MP3 format, which forgoes restrictive digital rights management technology. All the while,
the Disney’s corporations Hollywood Records has joined the list of distributed labels testing the MP3 at both Amazon and walmart.com. The firm has supplied thirty to forty titles from its huge catalogue in the MP3 format. In other news, it was noted that with the new M-Toy MP3 player, designed by Sung-kyu Nam, appears to think that children using this particular gadget need to brush up on their pattern-matching skills.
Apparently, this device consists of 3 concentric circles, onto which a certain scrambled image is shown. When the child in question spins the discs to align this image, the music stored on the plugged in USB stick begins to play.
This device uses older technology, which in the authors opinion should be developed for new televisions and not brain-baffling MP3 players. Still, I am sure that this toy will be on a lot of Christmas shopping wish lists this holiday season.
According to an interesting AP article out of technology centre San Jose, California,
the day is appears to be coming when it will be technologically impossible to make microchips any
smaller than they are now. When the day does come when microchip manufacturers in Oregon, Taiwan, the Valley and elsewhere
cannot cram any more information into the same-sized size piece of silicon, the major gains as well as cost effeciencies in computing over the previous years could suddenly slow,
which will in tuen slow down growth of the information age economies, which have been making such big strides ever since the information age started in 1992 or so when firms
like Microsoft and Intel helped lead the way and fuel this explosive growth. Sice that time, everything has been getting faster and smaller: the first cell phones were as big
cigarette cartons and home computers generally had about 2 gigabytes of hard drive space, if that.
The
Intel corporation, for instance, is predicting that several “highly speculative” alternative technologies, like quantum computing, optical switches and so on, will be required to continue Moore’s Law (regarding chip doubling capacity on an exponential level)
beyond the year 2020 or so.
Transistors are somewhat similiar in overall function to light switches, flipping on and off inside a microchip to generate the 1’s and 0’s which warehouse and process the data inside a computer.
In any case, the modern transistor was first invented by research scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to amplify voices in phones for a Bell Labs experiment, an effort for which they later shared the annual Nobel Prize Award in the field of physics.
You cannot obtain a much loftier achievement than that in this world….
After the first transister was created in 1947, their steadily shrinking dimensions combined with their low power consumption made them the perfect replacement of the bulky vacuum tubes used at that time to amplify electrical signals and switch electrical currents. The telecommunications giant AT&T recognized
them as a replacement for the clattering telephone switches.
They ultimately found their way into various portable radios as well as other related electronic gadgets, and are probably most prominently used today as the building blocks of integrated circuits, another Nobel Prize-winning invention which is the foundation of microprocessors, memory chips and certain other related gadgets as well.
Then, when the integrated circuit was pioneered in the late 50’s the pace of innovation has been ever-increasing. A struly breathtaking fact is that
the quantity of transistors in compters has jumped from only a few thousand in the 70’s to almost a billion now! The CEO of Sun Microsystems says that you should not
bet against Moore’s law because of the economic investment cycle and finacial incentives for it to contune is so great. In other words, follow the money.
According to a recent article in the Bizjournals.com online news publication, t
he Spacehab Corporation has signed an agreement with Praemittias Group Incorporated to sell Spacehab’s technology to the United States DOD.
The Praemittias corporation, which is an Englewood, Colorado headquartered defense firm, will market the spectrometer technology which detects,
identifies as well as analyzes possible dangerous explosives plus related harmful materials as well. Under
Under the particular licensing terms of the agreement, the Praemittias corporation will produce sales of ten million dollars in 2008, fifty million in 2009, and one hundred million in 2010 for Spacehab (NASDAQ: SPABD).
This particular technology is just the initial product to come out of their wholly owned subsidiary known as Spacetech. In related financial news,
the Spacehab Corporation stated December 12 (today) it has approved a 1-for-10 reverse stock split.
They also stated that the split will go into effect on November 29, when their stock will begin trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol SPABD for twenty trading days.
Then on December 28, the firm will continue to trade under the symbol SPAB. After
the conversion of their shares of preferred stock into corresponding common stock and Thursday’s reverse split, the defense firm should have some thirteen million or so shares outstanding.
They also reported a quarterly ney loss which they said was due to their support of space shuttle mission STS-118 which returned to the planet several months ago.
This particular mission was the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s flight to continue on their construction on the ISS lab.
Lung Rx, which is a fully-owned subsidiary of the United Therapeutics Corporation and the firm mondoBIOTECH forged a cross-continental strategic partnership focused on helping patients battling various ‘orphan’ type diseases. This particular agreement on delivery of peptide drugs has a possible financial value of some $55 Million for mondoBIOTECH, not including the various royalties plus certain contingent rights & agreements. Lung Rx is essentially a large biotechnology firm with a spotlight on unmet health and/ormedical technology requirements in the pulmonary field of medicine plus pulmonary delivery of innovative therapeutic products.MondoBIOTECH, on the other hand, happens to be a private Swiss biotech company which was founded in 2001 and situated in the beautiful city of Basel in Switzerland. Their primary focus is on treatment options for lethal rare diseases. Overall, they feature about thirty seperate items in development for thirty-odd indications, and is carrying out its “search and development” tactics to identify potential treatments for many other rare diseases. Further, they have out-licensed its lead product Aviptadil for use in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension to Biogen Idec and Interferon-gamma for the treatment of IPF to Intermune Incorporated.
As both the rate of United States house foreclosures plus the rate of houses that are entering into the foreclosure process rose to a record in the 3rd quarter of this year, aggravated by dropping or stagnant house prices as well as increasing premiums,
the Commander & Chief Executive launched an effort today to decrease these foreclosures, which some experts claimed was a good beginning yet would not, by itself, solve all the problems relating to the rather depressed real estate housing market.
The program in question would essentially freeze low teaser mortgage rates for 5 years for the two million or so odd home owners with ARM loans facing steeper payments, according to the Reuters online news Network. Almost
a million American homes are in the process of foreclosure, unfortunately. In addition to this,
The percentage of loans in the actual foreclosure process rose to 1.69 percent of loans outstanding.
Overall, various issues with payments on all kinds of mortgages drove up the pace of homes entering foreclosure, according to certain trade groups.
Furthermore, some experts have warned that the Sub-prime mortgages are not the only ones failing: 2nd mortgages, hybrid intermediate-term ARMS, and of course the much critized Pay Option ARM are likewise feeling the pich to a considerable extent.
These 3 loan types were chiefly thought to be ‘prime’ so they have been overlooked, but could likely haunt the financial markets for many years.
According to the respected Forbes magazine,
New Swiss reporting regulations not far-reaching enough.
According to a breaking story out of Zurich,
Saurer AG Arbon chairman Giorgio Behr stated that he welcomes the revision of Switzerland’s shareholding reporting rules yet also stated that the new regulations in question are not nearly far-reaching enough.
As of December 1, Switzerland lowered the threshold for reporting a stake in a firm to three ercent from five percent.
‘Under the old legislation a hostile bidder needed 6 ‘investors’ to buy up just below 5 pct so as to gain a 30 pct stake. Now ten are needed. That is all the new law does,’ Behr said in an interview with Swiss Sunday paper Sonntagszeitung.
The revision of the stock exchange act was triggered by several deals which saw investors covertly building up stakes of above thirty percent in Swiss firms, such as the acquisition of a 31.4 pct stake in Sulzer AG by Russian federation investor Viktor Vekselberg.
As the world’s countries meet in Indonesia for an important climate summit, a major priority will be to put the focus on the large greenhouse gas emitters.
China appears to be about to overtake the United States as the globe’s top carbon emitter. But they have said that they will not be ready to take on emission caps “for a large period of time”.
In addition, India is also arguing for catch-up time to lift its citizens out of poverty.
The buzz word at the 2-week conference being held in bali, Indonesia will be “roadmap”, with the deadline of 2009 looming for the closure of a future climate deal to replace the Kyoto accord, which expires in about 4 years.
In general, Political momentum has been growing on the climate change issue in the run up to Bali.
For example, just last month the government of Switzerland had announced that it would align itself to the EU targets, which foresee emissions reductions of up to thirty percent or so by 2020.
Furthermore, last month featured the publication of the most damning report yet from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC.
The scientific panel has stated that climate systems have already started to fundamentally change.
They also stated that the evidence was in the measured warming of air and ocean temperatures, melting of snow and ice over a very wide area and rising sea levels.
All in all, The report by the IPCC – co-winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize along with United States politician and climate crusader, Al Gore - is expected to guide negotiators in Bali.
