Year: 2017

Snap’s Stock is Sinking, FAST

Dan Uff May 11, 2017 1

(CNBC.com): In early March, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel received a hefty stock bonus worth about $750 million on completion of the company's initial public offering.

But on Wednesday, a poor reception for Snap's first earnings report wiped out more than that amount of his stake in the cmopany.

Snap fell short of Wall Street expectations for revenue and user growth in the first quarter, sending its shares down $5.35, or roughly 23 percent, to $17.66 in after-hours trading.

At that level, they're hovering just above their IPO price of $17.

If that same price drop is sustained in regular trading Thursday, it will cost Spiegel more than $1.3 billion in the space of less than 24 hours. Spiegel's co-founder Bobby Murphy will take a haircut of $1.1 billion.

At the time of the IPO, both men owned 210.97 million shares, including 97.16 million of Class A shares, 5.86 million of Class B and 107.94 million of Class C. Spiegel was granted an additional 37.4 million shares upon conclusion of the IPO.

Given the size of their stakes, any $5 drop in Snap's stock price will slash the value of their holdings by over $1 billion.

Still, even if the shares drop to $17, their holdings will be worth more than $3.5 billion each.

The company's earliest venture capital investors, Benchmark Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, are also in line for a big haircut when markets open on Thursday.

A $5 drop in Snap will cost Benchmark $604 million and Lightspeed $410 million, based on their post-IPO stakes.

Microsoft device quiets Parkinson’s Tremors

Dan Uff May 11, 2017 0

(USAToday.com): SAN FRANCISCO — Tech company developer conferences always feature a wacky demo or three. But at Build 2017 in Seattle Wednesday, Microsoft went for the waterworks at the conclusion of CEO Satya Nadella's keynote address: it showcased a prototype watch that eliminated the arm shaking that often plagues those suffering from the neurological disease Parkinson's.

After a speech that both heralded and warned about coming leaps in technological power, Nadella screened a video that told the story of two British Microsoft researchers, Haiyan Zhang and Nicolas Villa, who decided to launch an independent project to create a tremor-eliminating device for a BBC documentary, The Big Life Fix.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Makers of Handbreak for Mac warn of Trojan horse

Dan Uff May 11, 2017 0

“HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder that’s available on Mac,” Sean Keach writes for Trusted Reviews. “It’s freely available and very popular, as it allows users to convert video to different formats.”

“But that popularity could be about to take a downswing, as the team behind the program are now warning users that they may have accidentally downloaded spyware to their machine,” Keach writes. “If you downloaded the HandBrake for Mac software between May 2 and May 6, you may have downloaded a version of the OSX.PROTON trojan malware onto your system.”

“To check if you’re infected, open the OS X Activity Monitor. If you see a process called ‘activity_agent’ then you’re infected,” Keach writes. “Fortunately, if your machine has been infected, it’s very easy to remove the Proton trojan.”

How to remove the Proton trojan here.

Microsoft

Microsoft announces its own answer to the Amazon Echo

Dan Uff May 10, 2017 0

“First there was Amazon’s Echo, which I characterized as an attempt to advance home automation through Amazon’s Alexa AI. Then there was Google Home, first unveiled last year at Google IO,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Now comes Microsoft’s Invoke, powered by Cortana and built by Samsung.”

“On the hardware side, there isn’t much that the companies can do to create product differentiation. Microsoft tries by enlisting the help of Harmon Kardon, owned by Samsung, to create a miniature speaker with better sound. Harmon Kardon’s involvement may have helped, but this isn’t about sound quality,” Hibben writes. “This is a battle between AIs, whose artificial thoughts bounce around literally thousands of servers somewhere in the Cloud. The smart speakers themselves are just a way to get the AI into your home so that you’ll keep using it even after you put down your smartphone, tablet, or AI-powered laptop.”

“Microsoft’s need for a smart speaker is especially acute, since it doesn’t have a smartphone platform of significance. That may explain Invoke’s… ability to make and receive Skype calls,” Hibben writes. “And Apple appears to be interested in this genre-bending device as well.”

Read more in the full article here.