Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Thrust, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

In the top stories last week, Alphabet GOOGL launched its Chrome Enterprise subscription to challenge Microsoft MSFT, Apple AAPL is likely beefing up Apple Music while Western Digital WDC looks set to acquire a stake in Toshiba Memory and prevent its sale to competitors.

Here are the details:

Google’s Chromebook Goes for the Enterprise

Google has announced a service called Chrome Enterprise for $50 per chromebook per year. This compares with Microsoft’s $84 per user per year for Windows ten Enterprise E3. Theoretically, Microsoft may be slightly cheaper because a person may be able to use the service on more than one device. We don’t know yet if Google will suggest bulk discounts.

But Microsoft didn’t win many friends when it withdrew XP support because not everyone was ready to upgrade. Moreover, enterprises increasingly want to keep their options open and not become overly dependent on any one technology provider. These factors work against Microsoft and seem to indicate that the Google service will lead to chromebook invasion at the enterprise.

The Chrome Enterprise service offers a cloud-based management portal that can help administrators manage a fleet of Chromebooks. It also supports virtualized desktop applications and authentication through Microsoft Active Directory, threat prevention and a host of other features. Additionally, Google is partnering with VMware at launch, meaning that it has the capability to run VMware Airwatch’s enterprise mobility management software and through which it will permit chromebooks to run Microsoft applications as well.

RBC Positive About Apple Investment

Apple’s billion dollar earmarking for content has got a lot of speculations going. While a WSJ report earlier said that the amount would be spent for Hollywood content to help Apple rival with stuff from Netflix, Amazon and the like, RBC analyst Amit Daryanani says this is unlikely to be the case. And it makes sense what he says, that the amount is puny compared to the $6 billion Netflix is spending or the $Four billion Amazon is spending for content. And Apple’s earlier attempts in the area also haven’t been so successful. So it will most likely be used to beef up Apple Music to better challenge against Spotify.

True enough, Spotify with its fifty million subscribers and free tier remains well ahead of Apple Music. On the other mitt, it’s been around much longer and Apple Music has been growing very prompt to its twenty seven million strong current subscriber base. So Daryanani figures that it will take Apple just three years to recover the cost if it can add 7-8 million more people. Apple already has a larger catalog and more exclusives, so further boosting content could even help it steal away some Spotify customers and help it dual services revenue by two thousand twenty (as targeted).

Western Digital Consortium To Buy Toshiba Chip Unit After All

Kyodo News reports that Toshiba is ultimately on the brink of approving a deal to sell a majority stake in its memory chip business Toshiba Memory to Western Digital, KKR & Co., Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, Development Bank of Japan and others. Western Digital has agreed that its voting rights will be limited to a third so it doesn’t play a major role in determining management issues. Toshiba is in a hurry to sell the business after its American nuclear power unit went bankrupt and the company was compelled to report a large loss.

Toshiba Memory will sell for almost two trillion yen, which will help the company stay afloat. It’s expected that Toshiba Memory will also be listed some time in the future. Western Digital may have won this round because it went the litigation route, which generally takes time. Toshiba doesn’t have that time, which is most likely why it ultimately chose the WDC-led garment despite the fact that it took a hard stand against it earlier.

Price Switch Last Week

Price Switch Last six Months

Apple Iowa Data Center: Apple is all set to build a 400,000 square-foot state-of-the-art data center in Waukee, Iowa. It will spend $1.Three billion on the structure and also contribute up to $100 million towards a Public Improvement Fund for community development, including the revitalization of streets, libraries and parks. The center itself will employ around fifty people, but setting up the structure on the Two,000 acre plot will also create around five hundred fifty makeshift construction and operations jobs. Apple will get $208 million in state and local tax violates.

Facebook Selects Hardware Chief: Facebook FB veteran Andrew Bosworth, who previously worked as Facebook's VP of ads and business platform, and played significant roles in the development of Messenger and News Feed, has now been made the head of its hardware efforts. These include at the moment, its Oculus unit and the secretive Building 8. Oculus is spearheading Facebook’s VR/AR efforts while Building eight is reportedly working on a movie talk service called Aloha as well as an Amazon Echo equivalent.

Apple Finds Use for Self-Driving Technology: Like Google’s Waymo, Apple has now determined to sell self-driving technology rather than self-driving cars, given the difficulties of getting a fresh car to market, especially since it is far from its core expertise. According to employees familiar with the matter, the company will be testing its technology to shuttle employees inwards the campus.

The project is called PAIL (Palo Alto Infinite Loop, after its Cupertino headquarters near Palo Alto, situated on a road called Infinite Loop). Veteran Bob Mansfield was recently put in charge of Apple’s self-driving unit, called Project Titan, after another Apple veteran Steve Zadesky abandon in Jan two thousand sixteen over disagreements with design chief Jony Ive.

Facebook to Broadcast College Football: Facebook has a deal with Stadium, a joint venture inbetween Sinclair Broadcast Group, Silver Chalice, and one hundred twenty Sports to live stream fifteen games (nine Conference USA matches and six Mountain West games) on its platform. People around the world can catch the games on the Stadium: Live College Football Demonstrate Page on Facebook. U.S. users can also see them on Observe, the fresh Facebook tab dedicated to original movie. Unnecessary to say, there will be social elements such as a live, curated talk from football personalities alongside the stream and a team of people to interact with the audience.

Fresh Intel Chips for Laptops: The very first of Intel’s INTC eighth generation chips are here, and they’re targeted at skinny and light devices like notebooks, laptops, tablets, convertibles, etc. The fresh “U” series chips dual the cores from two to four and supporting threads from four to eight (than its predecessor released last year), meaning that Intel’s fresh chips are much more powerful now albeit they consume the same power. Distant rival AMD, which made sways with its Zen architecture, is set to launch its quad core chips called Raven Ridge for laptops later this year. Intel says its chips suggest ten hours of battery life.

Microsoft Breakthrough on Speech Recognition: Microsoft’s speech recognition system is reportedly doing better than humans when translating spoken words to transcripts. THE current word error rate is Five.1%, which the company believes is similar to a human error rate and much better than Microsoft’s previous Five.9% error rate achieved a year ago.

Microsoft and IBM are going neck to neck in this battle, with IBM having touched Five.5% this March (its previous rate was much higher at 6.9%). Voice recognition technology and the eco system it serves are interdependent and more accurate interpretations by voice assistants will increase their usage. This in turn will help to improve the technology further.

Microsoft Building Own AI Hardware: Microsoft has built an artificial intelligence system based on Intel’s Stratix ten FPGAs to minimize latency and thereby solve artificial intelligence queries in real time. It’s expected that Microsoft and Intel will be able to further improve speed as the technology is further developed. Brainwave, as the deep learning acceleration platform is called consists of a high-performance distributed system architecture; a hardware deep-neural network engine running on FPGAs; and a compiler and runtime for deployment of trained models, according to Microsoft’s blog post.

Project Brainwave will be available through Azure cloud services. It presently supports trained models created using Microsoft’s CNTK and Google’s TensorFlow frameworks with other contraptions like Facebook’s Caffe2 likely to be added soon.

Google Search for Indonesia: Google is launching a slimmed down version of its search app in Indonesia, where users are primarily mobile only. Despite the low invasion of desktops in the region compared to mobiles, Cisco CSCO says the market will grow eightfold from two thousand sixteen to 2021, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53%. Google estimates that smartphone usage will propel the country to the 4th largest market of Internet users by 2020. So it’s a big chance that needs to be tapped. If successful, the app can be taken to other emerging markets where Internet connections are spotty.

Cisco Goes After Hyperconvergence Startup: Cisco is spending $320 million in cash and extra retention-incentive awards to acquire hyperconvergence startup Springpath. Cisco has in the past helped the startup with finances and based its Hyperflex hyperconvergence platform on Springpath technology. The two have been working together for a while and after a deal to supply its technology was reached last year, Springpath stopped distributing its technology to other players.

So the acquisition was always in the cards. It also makes flawless sense given the growing need to wrest market share from Nutanix, Hewlett Packard’s Simplivity, Dell, VMware, etc. and especially as the core hardware business proceeds to shrink.

Microsoft-Halliburton: Microsoft has a deal with oil and gas giant Halliburton, under which it will host its iEnergy service for exploration and production. Microsoft is suggesting its Hololens and Surface devices to supply voice and photo recognition, movie processing and AR/VR to create a digital representation of a physical asset.Credit Suisse’s Michael Nemeroff said in a note titled “Not your father’s Microsoft anymore,” that “While the economics of this deal were not disclosed, we view these types of announcements and this one in particular, as a prime example of how MSFT is purposely steering its long-term corporate strategy away from its legacy devices and cyclical PC business, and towards the next generation of software technology that will foster incremental productivity gains to create broader competitive advantages for its early adopter customers, which we expect to become technology standards over time.”

Google-Walmart: Walmart’s ecommerce head Marc Lore, who joined the company upon its purchase of jet.com, is doing all he can to grow the retail giant’s ecommerce business. That’s why the company is now partnering with Google, so customers can use Google Assistant, which powers Google Home and also millions of Android devices, to order groceries online. Now, people shopping on Google Express can also order what they need from Walmart, whether they want it delivered or choose to pick up at the store or curb. So Google is bringing voice technology, which to be fair hasn’t truly picked up (because of rotten practice mainly) while Walmart is bringing products and data to the partnership. Both have a common rival is Amazon, which has a 75% share of the voice ordering ecommerce market according to eMarketer, with Google accounting for most of the balance.

Gartner Data on Smartwatches: Gartner shows up to be fairly optimistic about smartwatches, telling that the segment will grow at the expense of simpler wristbands from 13% of total wearables in two thousand seventeen to 16% by 2021, at which time it will generate $17.Four billion in revenue. Research director Angela McIntyre says, “"The overall ASP of the smartwatch category will drop from $223.25 in two thousand seventeen to $214.99 in two thousand twenty one as higher volumes lead to slight reductions in manufacturing and component costs, but strong brands such as Apple and Fossil will keep pricing consistent with price bands of traditional sees."

Other significant wearables categories include Bluetooth headsets, which will be 48% of the total wearables market this year (pulling down to 41% in 2021) and head mounted displays, which the hard says is only in its infancy and will generate just 7% of wearables shipments in two thousand seventeen (growing to 13% of the market by 2021). Other fitness monitors are also expected to grow strongly.

Facebook Gets Back Its Teenagers: The market has been speculating for long about whether Facebook has a teenage problem or not. A latest report from eMarketer resumes this argument. The research stiff says that while Facebook usage by teenagers inbetween twelve and seventeen years of age dropped 1.2% in 2016, the number was expected to decline Three.4% this year. But this may not be such a problem for the social network, which has done a pretty good job of aping Snapchat with its Instagram suggesting. Instagram also has the kind of content that might be lighter to monetize than Snapchat. So while Facebook emerges to be losing a few teenagers on its app, it’s also gaining back a few through Instagram.

More Stock News: This Is Thicker than the iPhone!

It could become the mother of all technological revolutions. Apple sold a mere one billion iPhones in ten years but a fresh breakthrough is expected to generate more than twenty seven billion devices in just three years, creating a $1.7 trillion market.

Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and six tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download seven Best Stocks for the Next thirty Days. Click to get this free report

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Thrust, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Shove, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

Here are the details:

Google’s Chromebook Goes for the Enterprise

RBC Positive About Apple Investment

Apple’s billion dollar earmarking for content has got a lot of speculations going. While a WSJ report earlier said that the amount would be spent for Hollywood content to help Apple rival with stuff from Netflix, Amazon and the like, RBC analyst Amit Daryanani says this is unlikely to be the case. And it makes sense what he says, that the amount is petite compared to the $6 billion Netflix is spending or the $Four billion Amazon is spending for content. And Apple’s earlier attempts in the area also haven’t been so successful. So it will most likely be used to beef up Apple Music to better rival against Spotify.

True enough, Spotify with its fifty million subscribers and free tier remains well ahead of Apple Music. On the other forearm, it’s been around much longer and Apple Music has been growing very prompt to its twenty seven million strong current subscriber base. So Daryanani figures that it will take Apple just three years to recover the cost if it can add 7-8 million more people. Apple already has a larger catalog and more exclusives, so further boosting content could even help it steal away some Spotify customers and help it dual services revenue by two thousand twenty (as targeted).

Western Digital Consortium To Buy Toshiba Chip Unit After All

Toshiba Memory will sell for almost two trillion yen, which will help the company stay afloat. It’s expected that Toshiba Memory will also be listed some time in the future. Western Digital may have won this round because it went the litigation route, which generally takes time. Toshiba doesn’t have that time, which is very likely why it ultimately chose the WDC-led garment despite the fact that it took a hard stand against it earlier.

Price Switch Last Week

Price Switch Last six Months

Apple Iowa Data Center: Apple is all set to build a 400,000 square-foot state-of-the-art data center in Waukee, Iowa. It will spend $1.Three billion on the structure and also contribute up to $100 million towards a Public Improvement Fund for community development, including the revitalization of streets, libraries and parks. The center itself will employ around fifty people, but setting up the structure on the Two,000 acre plot will also create around five hundred fifty improvised construction and operations jobs. Apple will get $208 million in state and local tax violates.

Facebook to Broadcast College Football: Facebook has a deal with Stadium, a joint venture inbetween Sinclair Broadcast Group, Silver Chalice, and one hundred twenty Sports to live stream fifteen games (nine Conference USA matches and six Mountain West games) on its platform. People around the world can catch the games on the Stadium: Live College Football Showcase Page on Facebook. U.S. users can also see them on Witness, the fresh Facebook tab dedicated to original movie. Unnecessary to say, there will be social elements such as a live, curated talk from football personalities alongside the stream and a team of people to interact with the audience.

Fresh Intel Chips for Laptops: The very first of Intel’s INTC eighth generation chips are here, and they’re targeted at lean and light devices like notebooks, laptops, tablets, convertibles, etc. The fresh “U” series chips dual the cores from two to four and supporting threads from four to eight (than its predecessor released last year), meaning that Intel’s fresh chips are much more powerful now albeit they consume the same power. Distant rival AMD, which made flaps with its Zen architecture, is set to launch its quad core chips called Raven Ridge for laptops later this year. Intel says its chips suggest ten hours of battery life.

So the acquisition was always in the cards. It also makes ideal sense given the growing need to wrest market share from Nutanix, Hewlett Packard’s Simplivity, Dell, VMware, etc. and especially as the core hardware business resumes to shrink.

Microsoft-Halliburton: Microsoft has a deal with oil and gas giant Halliburton, under which it will host its iEnergy service for exploration and production. Microsoft is suggesting its Hololens and Surface devices to produce voice and photo recognition, movie processing and AR/VR to create a digital representation of a physical asset.Credit Suisse’s Michael Nemeroff said in a note titled “Not your father’s Microsoft anymore,” that “While the economics of this deal were not disclosed, we view these types of announcements and this one in particular, as a prime example of how MSFT is purposely steering its long-term corporate strategy away from its legacy instruments and cyclical PC business, and towards the next generation of software technology that will foster incremental productivity gains to create broader competitive advantages for its early adopter customers, which we expect to become technology standards over time.”

Gartner Data on Smartwatches: Gartner emerges to be fairly optimistic about smartwatches, telling that the segment will grow at the expense of simpler wristbands from 13% of total wearables in two thousand seventeen to 16% by 2021, at which time it will generate $17.Four billion in revenue. Research director Angela McIntyre says, “"The overall ASP of the smartwatch category will drop from $223.25 in two thousand seventeen to $214.99 in two thousand twenty one as higher volumes lead to slight reductions in manufacturing and component costs, but strong brands such as Apple and Fossil will keep pricing consistent with price bands of traditional observes."

Other significant wearables categories include Bluetooth headsets, which will be 48% of the total wearables market this year (pulling down to 41% in 2021) and head mounted displays, which the stiff says is only in its infancy and will generate just 7% of wearables shipments in two thousand seventeen (growing to 13% of the market by 2021). Other fitness monitors are also expected to grow strongly.

Facebook Gets Back Its Teenagers: The market has been speculating for long about whether Facebook has a teenage problem or not. A latest report from eMarketer resumes this argument. The research rock hard says that while Facebook usage by teenagers inbetween twelve and seventeen years of age dropped 1.2% in 2016, the number was expected to decline Three.4% this year. But this may not be such a problem for the social network, which has done a pretty good job of aping Snapchat with its Instagram suggesting. Instagram also has the kind of content that might be lighter to monetize than Snapchat. So while Facebook shows up to be losing a few teenagers on its app, it’s also gaining back a few through Instagram.

More Stock News: This Is Fatter than the iPhone!

Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and six tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download seven Best Stocks for the Next thirty Days. Click to get this free report

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Shove, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Thrust, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

Here are the details:

Google’s Chromebook Goes for the Enterprise

RBC Positive About Apple Investment

Apple’s billion dollar earmarking for content has got a lot of speculations going. While a WSJ report earlier said that the amount would be spent for Hollywood content to help Apple challenge with stuff from Netflix, Amazon and the like, RBC analyst Amit Daryanani says this is unlikely to be the case. And it makes sense what he says, that the amount is petite compared to the $6 billion Netflix is spending or the $Four billion Amazon is spending for content. And Apple’s earlier attempts in the area also haven’t been so successful. So it will most likely be used to beef up Apple Music to better challenge against Spotify.

True enough, Spotify with its fifty million subscribers and free tier remains well ahead of Apple Music. On the other palm, it’s been around much longer and Apple Music has been growing very rapid to its twenty seven million strong current subscriber base. So Daryanani figures that it will take Apple just three years to recover the cost if it can add 7-8 million more people. Apple already has a larger catalog and more exclusives, so further boosting content could even help it steal away some Spotify customers and help it dual services revenue by two thousand twenty (as targeted).

Western Digital Consortium To Buy Toshiba Chip Unit After All

Toshiba Memory will sell for almost two trillion yen, which will help the company stay afloat. It’s expected that Toshiba Memory will also be listed some time in the future. Western Digital may have won this round because it went the litigation route, which generally takes time. Toshiba doesn’t have that time, which is very likely why it ultimately chose the WDC-led garment despite the fact that it took a hard stand against it earlier.

Price Switch Last Week

Price Switch Last six Months

Apple Iowa Data Center: Apple is all set to build a 400,000 square-foot state-of-the-art data center in Waukee, Iowa. It will spend $1.Trio billion on the structure and also contribute up to $100 million towards a Public Improvement Fund for community development, including the revitalization of streets, libraries and parks. The center itself will employ around fifty people, but setting up the structure on the Two,000 acre plot will also create around five hundred fifty makeshift construction and operations jobs. Apple will get $208 million in state and local tax violates.

Facebook to Broadcast College Football: Facebook has a deal with Stadium, a joint venture inbetween Sinclair Broadcast Group, Silver Chalice, and one hundred twenty Sports to live stream fifteen games (nine Conference USA matches and six Mountain West games) on its platform. People around the world can catch the games on the Stadium: Live College Football Showcase Page on Facebook. U.S. users can also see them on See, the fresh Facebook tab dedicated to original movie. Unnecessary to say, there will be social elements such as a live, curated talk from football personalities alongside the stream and a team of people to interact with the audience.

Fresh Intel Chips for Laptops: The very first of Intel’s INTC eighth generation chips are here, and they’re targeted at skinny and light devices like notebooks, laptops, tablets, convertibles, etc. The fresh “U” series chips dual the cores from two to four and supporting threads from four to eight (than its predecessor released last year), meaning that Intel’s fresh chips are much more powerful now albeit they consume the same power. Distant rival AMD, which made swings with its Zen architecture, is set to launch its quad core chips called Raven Ridge for laptops later this year. Intel says its chips suggest ten hours of battery life.

Project Brainwave will be available through Azure cloud services. It presently supports trained models created using Microsoft’s CNTK and Google’s TensorFlow frameworks with other devices like Facebook’s Caffe2 likely to be added soon.

Microsoft-Halliburton: Microsoft has a deal with oil and gas giant Halliburton, under which it will host its iEnergy service for exploration and production. Microsoft is suggesting its Hololens and Surface devices to produce voice and pic recognition, movie processing and AR/VR to create a digital representation of a physical asset.Credit Suisse’s Michael Nemeroff said in a note titled “Not your father’s Microsoft anymore,” that “While the economics of this deal were not disclosed, we view these types of announcements and this one in particular, as a prime example of how MSFT is purposely steering its long-term corporate strategy away from its legacy devices and cyclical PC business, and towards the next generation of software technology that will foster incremental productivity gains to create broader competitive advantages for its early adopter customers, which we expect to become technology standards over time.”

Google-Walmart: Walmart’s ecommerce head Marc Lore, who joined the company upon its purchase of jet.com, is doing all he can to grow the retail giant’s ecommerce business. That’s why the company is now partnering with Google, so customers can use Google Assistant, which powers Google Home and also millions of Android devices, to order groceries online. Now, people shopping on Google Express can also order what they need from Walmart, whether they want it delivered or choose to pick up at the store or curb. So Google is bringing voice technology, which to be fair hasn’t indeed picked up (because of rotten practice mainly) while Walmart is bringing products and data to the partnership. Both have a common rival is Amazon, which has a 75% share of the voice ordering ecommerce market according to eMarketer, with Google accounting for most of the balance.

Other significant wearables categories include Bluetooth headsets, which will be 48% of the total wearables market this year (ripping off to 41% in 2021) and head mounted displays, which the hard says is only in its infancy and will generate just 7% of wearables shipments in two thousand seventeen (growing to 13% of the market by 2021). Other fitness monitors are also expected to grow strongly.

Facebook Gets Back Its Teenagers: The market has been speculating for long about whether Facebook has a teenage problem or not. A latest report from eMarketer proceeds this argument. The research hard says that while Facebook usage by teenagers inbetween twelve and seventeen years of age dropped 1.2% in 2016, the number was expected to decline Three.4% this year. But this may not be such a problem for the social network, which has done a pretty good job of aping Snapchat with its Instagram suggesting. Instagram also has the kind of content that might be lighter to monetize than Snapchat. So while Facebook shows up to be losing a few teenagers on its app, it’s also gaining back a few through Instagram.

More Stock News: This Is Thicker than the iPhone!

Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and six tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download seven Best Stocks for the Next thirty Days. Click to get this free report

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Shove, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Thrust, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Shove, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

Tech Roundup: GOOGL Enterprise Thrust, AAPL Investment, WDC-Toshiba Deal

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