1 Billion Archive

  • Flipboard Launches World’s First Social Magazine

    Posted on July 21, 2010 | No Comments
    var AdBrite_Title_Color = '0000FF'; var AdBrite_Text_Color = '000000'; var AdBrite_Background_Color = 'FFFFFF'; var AdBrite_Border_Color = 'CCCCCC'; var AdBrite_URL_Color = '008000'; try{var AdBrite_Iframe=window.top!=window.self?2:1;var AdBrite_Referrer=document.referrer==''?document.location:document.referrer;AdBrite_Referrer=encodeURIComponent(AdBrite_Referrer);}catch(e){var AdBrite_Iframe='';var AdBrite_Referrer='';} document.write(String.fromCharCode(60,83,67,82,73,80,84));document.write(' src="http://ads.adbrite.com/mb/text_group.php?sid=2053203&zs=3436385f3630&ifr='+AdBrite_Iframe+'&ref='+AdBrite_Referrer+'" type="text/javascript">');document.write(String.fromCharCode(60,47,83,67,82,73,80,84,62)); ASPEN, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH — Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and...

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  • Hey, what about OS X?

    Hey, what about OS X?

    Posted on June 7, 2010 | No Comments
    It’s interesting that this WWDC keynote was all about mobile. Obviously he had a big reveal this year – last year was all about the 3GS and Snow Leopard – but there was a decided lack of desktop talk this year. iOS looks like the horse Apple is betting on, at least this year. The uptake [...]

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  • The Star Wars Kid is back and he’s going to be a lawyer

    The Star Wars Kid is back and he’s going to be a lawyer

    Posted on June 3, 2010 | No Comments
    It was eight years ago that Ghyslain Raza slashed his way into our hearts with his Star Wars Kid video. Sadly, Raza suffered from severe bullying and abuse for his video and eventually ended up in a psychiatric ward for children. However, his video was seen 1 billion times and multiple thousands of geeks came immediately to his defense. While those must have been the worst years of his life, things are now looking up. He and his family sued the kids who leaked the video for $250,000, settled, and that seemed to be the end of it. Now, however, Ghyslain just became the president of the Patrimoine Trois-Rivières, a heritage society dedicated to conserving his hometown in Quebec. He's also working on law degree at McGill in Montreal.

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  • Google TV Unveiled. It’s All About The Ad Reach

    Google TV Unveiled. It’s All About The Ad Reach

    Posted on May 20, 2010 | No Comments
    Today at Google I/O, the company made the announcement that everyone was waiting for — Google TV. While some glitches in the demo (with the Bluetooth keyboard) prevented it from being a “wow” moment, the implications are pretty clear what Google is going for. That is, the 4 billion TV users worldwide. Or rather, advertising [...]

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  • Weaker Wii sales: Nintendo’s profit drops for first time in 6 years

    Weaker Wii sales: Nintendo’s profit drops for first time in 6 years

    Posted on May 6, 2010 | No Comments
    Nintendo in Japan released its annual fiscal report [ENG, PDF] today, and even though pretty much every financial key figure took a nose dive, things still look pretty good on the whole. The company racked up $15.2 billion in revenue last financial year (which ended March 31, 2010), down 22% from last year. Operating profit dropped 36% to $3.8 billion, while net profit - for the first time in six years - dropped to $2.4 billion, compared with $2.9 billion a year earlier.

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  • Infinity Ward employees sue Activision for up to $500 million over withheld bonuses

    Infinity Ward employees sue Activision for up to $500 million over withheld bonuses

    Posted on April 28, 2010 | No Comments
    Why haven't we applied the "gate" suffix to this Infinity Ward-Activision story yet? "Infinity Gate" has a certain ring to it, sorta sounds the name of a private military company. Anyway, how would you feel if you worked for a company and you made a product. It was a successfully product, like, you made the company $1 billion in just a few months. As per your contract, you're due a certain amount of money (royalties) for your troubles. The thing is, the company says, "Hey, you know that money we owe you? We won't give it to you until you finish another product. If you leave us you forfeit all claims to that money we owe you." Not cool, no, but that's what the Infinity Ward Employee Group now claims.

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  • Darpa wants a real C-3PO to translate for troops Over There

    Darpa wants a real C-3PO to translate for troops Over There

    Posted on February 17, 2010 | No Comments
    Shocking admission: I've never seen a Star Wars movie. Well, that's not entirely true: I did see Episode One and Episode Three, but I'm pretty sure those don't really count. (I liked the song "Duel of the Fates," though, and the one that played when Anakin fought the other guy in the lava or whatever.) I bring this up because this story is about C3PO, the friendly robot that I'm only familiar with because, well, I'm pretty sure everyone has heard of R2D2 and C3PO, including myself. The scoop: Darpa, made famous by Metal Gear Solid, wants to commission a C3PO-like software/device that's able to translate 20 languages on the fly, identify specific speakers, and whatnot. It'd be useful for our troops in foreign lands, obviously.

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  • First Sony, now Panasonic swings into black and raises outlook

    First Sony, now Panasonic swings into black and raises outlook

    Posted on February 5, 2010 | No Comments
    Sony isn't the only electronics powerhouse reporting good news from the financial front these days. Today Panasonic, which, as you will remember, recently acquired Sanyo for $4.4 billion, announced it returned to profit in its fiscal third quarter (October to December 2009), too. The company's profit nearly quadrupled to $1.1 billion, while revenue almost stayed the same at $20.1 billion in that quarter (on a year-on-year basis).

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  • Sony returns to black in last quarter, sees signs of hope for the future

    Sony returns to black in last quarter, sees signs of hope for the future

    Posted on February 4, 2010 | No Comments
    Sony hasn't been able to report good news on the financial front for quite some time, but now it looks like things changed to the better. The company today said ["Sony Global Earnings Releases" in English] in Tokyo it returned to the black in the October-December quarter (Sony's fiscal year ends March 31) with a handsome $1.6 billion operating profit. This is Sony's first operating profit in five quarters, after CEO Howard Stringer (pictured) reduced the global workforce by 20,000 heads, freezed wages, closed 18% of all plants and cut fixed costs along all business lines. For the same quarter the previous year, Sony logged a $197 million operating loss.

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  • Japanese Twilight/New Moon DVD box includes a movie on microSD

    Japanese Twilight/New Moon DVD box includes a movie on microSD

    Posted on January 19, 2010 | No Comments
    Teenage movie sensations Twilight and New Moon have grossed over $1 billion at box offices worldwide so far (New Moon is still in theaters), and both movies have proven to be extremely successful in the world's second biggest movie market, Japan, too. That's perhaps the reason why the second movie (New Moon) gets a special treatment in this country, namely a huge and Japan-only DVD premium box.

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  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 soars past $1 billion in retail sales

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 soars past $1 billion in retail sales

    Posted on January 13, 2010 | No Comments
    Remember back a couple months? The biggest news on Earth was the Infinity Ward and Activision Blizzard screwed up MW2 and the game was going to fall into a bucket of fail. There were boycotts, petitions, and general chaos concerning the shooter. Then it launched. Then people started playing it in droves. Then people shut-up and within two months the title surpassed $1,000,000,000 in retail sales.

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  • Panasonic ready to pump $1.1 billion into solar energy business

    Panasonic ready to pump $1.1 billion into solar energy business

    Posted on January 13, 2010 | No Comments
    There's a reason why Panasonic paid $4.4 billion in this economic downturn to acquire former rival Sanyo, and the reason is that Panasonic wants to go as "green" as possible in the future. Sanyo isn't only the world's leading maker of lithium ion batteries, but also the (now former) company behind the eneloop brand, which consists of a range of eco-friendly solar products. But buying Sanyo wasn't enough for Panasonic's solar ambitions, as the company says it's now ready to invest another $1.1 billion by fiscal 2015 in its solar business segment. By that time, Panasonic aims at being among the world's top three solar cell makers. The company wants to reach the top spot among Japanese makers as early as 2012.

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  • Avatar has made more than $1 billion. That’s a lot of dollars.

    Avatar has made more than $1 billion. That’s a lot of dollars.

    Posted on January 4, 2010 | No Comments
    Pretty sure none of us here ever said that Avatar would tank at the box office, but did we think it'd make a billion dollars in just a few days? I sure didn't! (To be fair, I never really gave the topic much thought.) But yes, wipe the look of shock off your face as it's now revealed that the James Cameron film made $1.02 billion in three weeks. That includes international receipts, too. That's a nice chunk of change.

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  • Location-based mobile advertising platform AdLocal enters America with years of Japan Know-how

    Location-based mobile advertising platform AdLocal enters America with years of Japan Know-how

    Posted on December 26, 2009 | No Comments
    Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013. While some believe search will account for the biggest chunk of the market, others expect geo-aware advertising, another way of bringing "relevant" ads to users, to have a bright future, too. This is where AdLocal, a location-based, self-service mobile ad platform that (re-)launched yesterday, comes in. Offered by Sunnyvale-based Cirius Technologies USA, the platform has been around in Japan since 2006, currently commanding the largest share of location-based advertising in Japan's $1 billion [PDF] mobile ad space. And now Cirius is ready to utilize the years of experience the company gained in the world's most competitive mobile market in the US (AdLocal isn't available outside America and Japan at this point). AdLocal allows advertisers to manage their campaigns and publishers to add their mobile sites or applications by themselves through a Web-based dashboard. By locating a mobile user's physical location via GPS, cell identification and other methods, the mobile ad network can tell when a consumer is close to a specific business address and then serves up ads for that business in real-time.

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  • SoftBank prepping bid for Willcom?

    SoftBank prepping bid for Willcom?

    Posted on November 27, 2009 | No Comments
    PHS is in a bit of a pickle right now -- the niche wireless standard has no path for technological growth, has just a handful of supporting carriers around the world, and frankly, was never intended for wide-area deployment to boot. That leaves Japan's PHS-powered network, Willcom, in the lurch, which explains why they've recently hooked up with HSPA giant NTT DoCoMo to launch modern data devices. Mooching off someone else's network isn't a long-term strategy for survival, though, so what's next? Reports are flying in Japan today that rival SoftBank may look at scooping up Willcom's assets in exchange for its debtors waiving some percentage of its $1 billion in IOUs; what SoftBank would ultimately do with that extra spectrum is unclear, but presumably they'd continue to run PHS for some predetermined period of time before transitioning it to HSPA or LTE. Of course, Willcom has a rep for releasing wild devices that avoid the beaten path set by its larger rivals, so here's a preliminary word to the wise, SoftBank: if you make this happen, keep the product people on board.

    SoftBank prepping bid for Willcom? originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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