Here’s your Cheat Sheet to this week’s top tech industry business headlines:
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG): Closing price $806.19
Inside sources say that Google’s Android division has been negotiating with music firms about launching a paid subscription music-streaming service similar to that of Spotify AB. The persons also related that Google’s YouTube video website is attempting to garner licenses from music labels through which to debut a paid subscription service for music videos and potentially for audio-only songs.
Google struggled against Spain’s data protection authority in Europe’s highest court on Tuesday in a case that will be monitored worldwide. This case asks one of the most profound questions of the Internet age – When is information really private? The dispute is fraught with complex arguments in regards to the right to protect data, freedom of information, what it means to be a publisher and who or what polices the web. Google contends it should not be forced to delete lawful content which it did not create from its search index, but authorities in Spain say that the company should delete information from its results in the case of an individual’s privacy being breached.
On Tuesday, the Defense Department unveiled a new plan for stepping up the adoption of both secure classified and unclassified mobile devices, along with applications. One component of the Department’s plan will be to shift away from its current BlackBerry standard and towards a more “platform agnostic” policy, integrating devices running Google’s Android operating system, as well as Apple’s iOS. A representative from the Department told AppleInsider that this does not mean a total abandonment of BlackBerry’s platform.
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Telefónica (NYSE:TEF): Closing price $13.13
Chief Executive Cesar Alierta, the longest-serving chief of any major European telecommunications company, is apparently grooming his successor, as back in September, he promoted Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete to chief operating officer. Last summer was rough on the 67-year-old Alierta, when pressure from rating firms and investors made it necessary for him to back off dividends and acquisitions. In the meantime, Pallete has exercised more decision-making power than did his two predecessors, indicating that he’s being groomed as CEO, according to inside sources.
International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM): Closing price $202.91
IBM and Deutsche Telekom will work jointly to provide an integrated solutions portfolio that allows cities to make wiser use of their services through intelligent data capture and analysis. The Smarter Cities solutions will capitalize upon IBM’s expertise from thousands of smarter city engagements joined with Deutsche Telekom’s global Machine-to-Machine, or M2M, capabilities, including M2M solutions integration and advanced network connectivity.
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Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA): Current price $3.43
In a move to further reduce costs, Zynga is shutting its Baltimore studio, thereby consolidating its presence in New York City and Texas. This closure follows a series of cost-cutting endeavors that included shutting its Boston and Tokyo offices, along with layoffs for around 5 percent of the firm’s workforce. Those decisions allowed Zynga to save $25 million last quarter.
Chief Executive Mark Pincus, speaking before a Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco on Tuesday said that the firm is not attempting to cash in on the existing hardcore gambling market with its move into online gambling in the United Kingdom. Rather, Zynga will concentrate on what it does best – making gambling games social. Pincus commented that, “It makes it more exciting than when you’re by yourself in an anonymous poker room. We’re not the company to win the hardcore real-money gamers, but we think we are for the mass market audience.” He did not reveal when Zynga would launch into real-money gambling, but in the past, the firm has said it would begin within the first half of 2013.
Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM): Current price $36.65
Commenting that Akamai’s recent sell-off should signal a good buying opportunity, Macquarie moves the shares from Neutral to Outperform along with a $42 price target.
Visa (NYSE:V): Current price $158.08
The world’s biggest electronic payments network is working jointly with Samsung through which to supply a financial program to permit mobile handsets to be used as a credit or debit card. Visa’s PayWave application will become a standard feature on Samsung devices that are equipped with near-field-communication tech, enabling customers to pay for goods or services by tapping their phones on a reader, according to a statement made Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Further, the firms will cooperate on tech for banks to download account information securely to Samsung phones for the payments.
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AT&T (NYSE:T): Current price $36.01
The biggest United States phone company AT&T will move into the European market via mobile licenses for its home-watchdog products as it searches out new growth outside of its wireless service. Glenn Lurie, president of emerging devices, said that thus far, in excess of 30 companies globally have requested to license AT&T’s Digital Life product, a service which permits customers to watch over their homes for leaks and break-ins from a mobile device. Lurie commented on Monday that, “We hoped two or three would be interested and actually a lot more than that were; it was unbelievable. We’re back this year signing deals, talking to carriers. We’re going to announce a full international business for Digital Life.”
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LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD): Current price $170.35
The firm is looking over a product that would help make private communication for enterprises easier and also permit staffers to better benefit from their rolodex on the professional network. Chief Executive, Jeff Weiner, commented Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference that most sharing on LinkedIn occurs in public, so in order to create value for enterprises, LinkedIn should consider creating private-sharing tools that work behind the firewall.
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Facebook (NASDAQ:FB): Current price $27.78
It’s official: The Facebook-owned photo application Instagram has reached 100 million users. Chatter regarding Instagram’s decline has been tooling around the web ever since the service was acquired by Facebook in a deal that was first reported almost a year ago. But since then, the service has also undergone a PR firestorm because of modifications to its terms of service, a bad decision that some said had removed from Instagram 25 percent of its daily user base. It is true that both the acquisition and the terms faux pas did cause lots of users to stray to other photo-sharing sites, but despite these rumors and persistent user backlash over the associated changes, Instagram said it was seeing no signs of slowing.
Facebook is collaborating with data majors such as Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix to enable brands to match data gathered through shopper loyalty programs to individual Facebook profiles, much as it has done previously with marketers’ customer data from their CRM databases. Datalogix, a company with a rich holdings of loyalty-program data, was noticed last fall after Facebook worked jointly with the firm to decipher whether users exposed to ads on the social network later bought any of those products in stores.
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Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL): Current price $430.47
The analyst Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray says that domestic Mac sales experienced an impressive spike in January because Apple probably satisfied some of the gigantic demand it had seen for its redesigned iMac in the fourth quarter. Mac sales were off by 17 percent in that quarter, a loss that Apple credited mostly to a lack of availability of the new iMacs. Specifically, Apple sold 4.1 million Macs in the last quarter of 2012, which was down from 4.9 million year-over-year from 2011. Chief Executive Tim Cook acknowledged that iMac sales were down 700,000 units in the same period, a reduction that would comprise most of the 800,000 fewer Macs Apple sold in the quarter.
Last week, hedge fund manager David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital withdrew its lawsuit against Apple, subsequent to winning an injunction that disallowed it from going forward with a shareholder vote on a controversial proposal. United States District Judge Richard Sullivan ruled in Einhorn’s favor at that time, and on Friday granted the motion to withdraw his lawsuit. For its part, Apple had tried to constrain its ability to issue preferred shares without a shareholder vote, but Einhorn challenged that in court as part of an attempt to unlock more of the firm’s $137 billion cash accumulation.
On Friday, United States District Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan granted Greenlight Capital’s request to block a scheduled February 27th vote that would require shareholder approval before Apple could issue a new class of preferred shares. Following the decision, the firm said that it would withdraw the proposal from its shareholder meeting. David Einhorn of Greenlight has used the lawsuit to bolster support among fellow investors to induce Apple to return some of its $137.1 billion in cash and investments back to its shareholders. The pressure appears as Apple’s stock has fallen 36 percent from a record in September over worries that growth is slowing.
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QIHOO 360 Technology Co. (NYSE:QIHU): Current price $32.04
A month ago, Apple removed applications from the Chinese Internet services and security software supplier QIHOO 360 from the iTunes App Store, but the apps have thus far not been reinstated. Recent industry chatter has it that Qihoo is thinking about abandoning the App Store altogether. An inside source said that the company had sent out its Vice President of Channels, Li Tao, to visit Apple headquarters after the de-listing, but that Li was not received at Apple HQ. Perhaps in response, Qihoo Chairman Zhou Hongyi is said to have decided to abandon the iOS market.
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Marvell Technology Group (NASDAQ:MRVL): Current price $10.27
The chip maker’s forecast results for the first quarter came in largely above analysts’ expectations, as it gained market share in hard-disk drive and flash storage divisions, pushing its shares up by 5 percent after close. The firm anticipates an adjusted profit of around 14 cents per share on revenue between $700 million to $740 million in the first quarter. On average, analysts expected a profit of 13 cents on revenue of $710.8 million, says Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
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Leap Wireless International (NASDAQ:LEAP): Current price $5.26
Cricket owner Leap Wireless indicated in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that iPhone sales have been coming in below expectations, and consequently it is on track to buy only half of its first-year commitment from Apple through June. This new data refutes earlier statements made by Leap’s Chief Financial Officer Jerry Elliot, who had commented that “sales of Apple devices were pretty good in the fourth quarter” and that the carrier was not worried about meeting its commitment with Apple. Analyst Walter Piecyk at BTIG Research believes that Leap could now be obliged to make $100 million worth of additional iPhone purchases in 2013 and $450 million during the life of its three-year contract.
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BlackBerry (NASDAQ:BBRY): Current price $13.26
Macquarie Capital Markets lowered its price target on RIM, now BlackBerry, earlier in February, to $11 with a Neutral, after contending that the stock would bounce back all through 2011 and 2012, and then plunge again. However, this new move marks the first time the firm has told investors that BlackBerry shares will likely continue sliding. While Macquarie does see some positives for the company in the coming months, it commented in a recent research note that the shares will be “trading on sentiment rather than long-term fundamentals” following the March launches, after which the stock will likely continue to move downwards.
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Pandora Media (NYSE:P): Current price $12.30
Along with contending with increasing royalty costs, the streaming radio service Pandora is returning an old idea of limiting free mobile usage at 40 hours per month. Prior to this, the firm limited free monthly desktop usage to 40 hours, but it reversed that in September 2011. Chief Executive Joe Kennedy implied that Pandora’s mobile unit is in a similar position to that in which its desktop business was a few years ago: It needs to make more money. However, Kennedy said that his aim is still to offer free music to everyone, elaborating that “When you have a per-track royalty structure…there’s an inherent conflict between what radio has always been [namely, free] and what’s pragmatically reasonable.We’re trying to balance the two. We’re certainly not backing down from the vision that we’re the future of radio. As mobile monetization improves over time, we’ll lift this.”
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Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK): Current price $3.59
The company’s smartphone head, Jo Harlow, said that Nokia might not have decided against a QWERTY Windows Phone for its portfolio, but the chances of a device with a physical keyboard are falling. Harlow was commenting to SlashGear at the Mobile World Congress this week, where her company presented its Windows Phone 8 range to five devices, plus the Lumia 520 and Lumia 720, and conceded that its hesitation in revisiting physical text entry options originated in a fear of being left on the wrong side of the mobile industry’s momentum.
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Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ): Current price $20.15
HP Enterprise Services said that the Vermont Department of Health Access has approved a $48 million contract through which to continue its 31-year relationship with HP as the state’s Medicaid fiscal agent. The new four-year accord includes services that help the state in reaching its healthcare reform targets. HP also will upgrade provider call-center tech, which will enhance customer service by lowering hold times and dropped calls, along with improving the efficiency of call routing and to increase business-continuity capabilities.
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