Showing posts with label Tizen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tizen. Show all posts

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Big Sitting Cash




Why Are Corporations Hoarding Trillions?
Collectively, American businesses currently have $1.9 trillion in cash, just sitting around. Not only is this state of affairs unparalleled in economic history, but we don’t even have much data to compare it with, because corporations have traditionally been borrowers, not savers. ....... it is probably earning only about 2 percent interest by parking that money in United States Treasury bonds. These companies would be better off investing in anything — a product, a service, a corporate acquisition — that would make them more than 2 cents of profit on the dollar, a razor-thin margin by corporate standards. And yet they choose to keep the cash. ........ if you buy a share in Alphabet, which has sold for roughly $700 lately, you are effectively buying ownership of more than $100 in cash. ......

General Motors is perhaps the most extreme: It now holds nearly half its value in cash. Apple holds more than a third.

....... If the companies spent their savings, rather than hoarding them, the economy would instantly grow, and we would most likely see more jobs with better pay. ....... the 1990s were a period of low unemployment and high growth. Remarkably, the United States government was able to tax all that productive corporate behavior so much that it came close to paying off all its debts for the first time in 160 years........

holding on to cash and carefully shifting it among subsidiaries, especially foreign ones, is a great tool to shrink your tax bill.

....... Google buys about one company a week, on average ..... Companies like Google and GM are holding on to far more cash — many times more — than could possibly be explained by emergency funds and tax efficiencies and M.&A. intimidation put together. ...... finance economists agree that there is a puzzle here ..... a large cash hoard is a sign of an unhealthy company. Maybe its whole industry is doing so poorly that there is nothing worth investing in ....... Corporations, it seems, may have amassed at least a good chunk of that $1.9 trillion in mysterious savings because the stock market is rewarding them for it. ........ both the executives and the investors in these industries believe that something big is coming, but — this is crucial — they’re not sure what it will be. .....

Their hoarding of it hints that they think the next transformative innovation could be just around the corner.



These trillions should go into Clean Energy and Global South infrastructure. There will be solid if not sexy returns. A 10% annual growth beats zero. A trillion going into clean energy makes global warming talk mostly history.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Samsung On The Swing

English: Samsung Logo Suomi: Samsungin logo
English: Samsung Logo Suomi: Samsungin logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Samsung is quite a success story.

Samsung's road to global domination
in the weeks following the launch of Apple's iPhone 5, Samsung sold a record-breaking number of its own signature smartphone, the Galaxy S III. ...... Last year it overtook longtime leader Nokia to become the No. 1 player in cellphones, with 29% market share worldwide. In smartphones, those high-end devices with advanced computing power, Samsung is also No. 1 globally and in a dead heat with Apple in the U.S. ..... Apple sells one device, the iPhone, while Samsung offers 25 unique smartphones in the U.S.) "Samsung is on fire," says John Legere, CEO of mobile operator T-Mobile USA. ..... Thanks to tight control over an extensive supply chain (Samsung makes everything from screens to memory chips), it's been able to move quickly to meet the rising demand for its mobile devices, churning out more than 215 million smartphones globally last year. ..... last summer Verizon Wireless (VZ), T-Mobile, Sprint (S), and AT&T (T) agreed to launch the Galaxy S III phone simultaneously -- a major coup for Samsung. ...... it doesn't wield much control over the wireless ecosystem -- the mobile operating system, application store, and other software services that have helped make smartphones so popular ...... Samsung, which means "three stars" in Korean, started out as a small supplier of dried fish and noodles in the city of Daegu back in 1938. ..... In the most popular of the anti-Apple commercials -- the one that aired during the iPhone 5 launch, it turns out that one of the hipsters waiting in line for an Apple phone is actually holding a spot for his parents. Ouch. ..... Researchers are currently experimenting with innovations like bendable screens .... One of its largest components customers? Apple. .... "One could estimate that there would be at least a quarter's advantage due to internal control of all operations." ...... Today it makes 45% of all Android-based phones ...... it will make a phone that runs on Tizen -- an open-source operating system backed by Intel .... To help beef up its software know-how, the company is expanding its footprint in Silicon Valley. In December, Samsung announced it would soon open a new startup incubator in Palo Alto. The company is also building out a 1.1-million-square-foot R&D center in San Jose. ..... With a proprietary operating system, Samsung could enable its TVs to talk to Samsung-made phones and even washing machines. Applications and content could easily be shared among the different devices, making Samsung's entire line of consumer electronics much, much stickier with consumers.

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Thursday, January 17, 2013

App Stores In The Way

Tux, the Linux penguin
Tux, the Linux penguin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Bringing about the demise of the app store would be a welcome innovation. And with HTML5 the browser is at your service even when you are offline. But that is not to say Android can not swim into a HTML5 reality. Of course it can and will. Google is all about the web. But I am glad it is being pushed in that direction by the competition.

This development is a much bigger threat to Apple than to Google. If Apple loses the app store, what is it left with? Even the demand for iPhones - hardware - is on the decline. Lesson: Soviet control is not a good thing.

The phone will be lighter and correspondingly cheaper. That's good.

New Mobile OSs May Mean the End of the Closed App Store
Firefox OS from Mozilla, Tizen (which came out of Nokia’s MeeGo platform but is now the brainchild of Intel and Samsung), and Ubuntu Phone, based on the wildly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution .... These operating systems are all open source, which means vendors can tinker with them as they see fit and create entirely unique offerings for their consumers. But what’s most important about them is that all will provide for HTML5 applications. Developers will have the ability to quickly port their apps between the platforms, creating a much easier path to revenue-generation. ..... Tizen, Firefox OS, and Ubuntu will attempt to eradicate that paper tiger of controls. The Web will become the basis by which all smartphone owners get their applications. And there won’t be a single entity that will ultimately decide the fate of a respective application. ..... Apple and Google, controllers of their domains, might need to accept that open Web standards truly are the future. And in the process, their control over mobile might ease. .... the Web could win the battle over application control.
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