Following his resignation from Apple, a move said to have left his colleagues scratching their head, former Apple Music executive and Beats 1 director Ian Rogers has joined LVMH, a French luxury goods conglomerate headquartered in Paris, Re/code said on Tuesday.
This is especially interesting considering Apple itself poached executives from LVMH, including the sales director for watch brand TAG Heuer in July 2014, Heuer Patrick Pruniaux.
Talk that Apple could be working on an augmented reality project of its own intensified Monday with news that the iPhone maker poached Nick Thompson, the lead audio engineer for Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality project.
As noted by Piper Jaffray analyst Travis Jakel, Thompson's LinkedIn page reveals he started working as an engineer at Apple this July. Before joining Apple, he was the HoloLens Audio Hardware Engineering Lead at Microsoft from September 2012.
Ian Rogers, former Beats Music CEO and Apple Music's Senior Director, has unexpectedly left Apple less than two months following the launch of Apple's music-streaming service, according to The Financial Times newspaper on Friday.
The executive is credited with crafting Beats 1 Radio, Apple's free of charge 24/7 Internet radio available in more than a hundred countries, and shaping its playlists. He was also instrumental in hiring away Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe from his post at BBC Radio 1.
Sundar Pichai, Google Senior Vice President of Android, Chrome and Google Apps, is now officially the new CEO at the search company, which itself has now become a subsidiary of a bigger company called Alphabet, Inc.
Yeah, a lot has happened since you were away from your desk! According to a bombshell press release published on Google's Investor website and sent out to media Monday morning, Google is undergoing a massive overhaul of its business structure.
With Pichai now taking the CEO reigns at Google, former Google CEO and company co-founder Larry Page will assume the CEO role at Alphabet. The other co-founder, Sergey Brin, is Alphabet's President.
The Google brand will undergo some changes, too, and will focus on popular web properties such as Search, Gmail, Maps and Advertising. Other ambitious Google projects that have failed to gain traction will be broken out of the Google brand.
Nokia, once the dominant force in the mobile industry, has sold off its prized HERE maps division to a German carmaker consortium comprised of Audi, BMW and Daimler, technology blog Re/code reported this morning.
The $3.07 billion transaction (2.8 billion euros) is pending regulatory approval and should be completed in the first quarter of 2016. The deal is meant to “secure the long-term availability” of HERE maps as an open platform, as per a media release.
News of the deal arrives following months of speculation that a bunch of Silicon Valley technology giants were interested in a takeover bid, including ride sharing service Uber, as well as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Baidu and others.
Surging iPhone demand on the high-end and plummeting sales of its feature phones that are getting squeezed out of the market by Chinese upstarts like Xiaomi are largely blamed for yet another disappointing quarterly earnings that Samsung posted Thursday.
The South Korean conglomerate reported an eight percent annual decline as profits decreased to 5.75 trillion Korean won, or approximately $4.9 billion, from 6.3 trillion won a year earlier. Analysts predicted 5.6 trillion won of net income. The results mark a fifth straight drop in quarterly earnings for the consumer electronics giant.
The bad news gets worse as Samsung's mobile division, its bread and butter, reported a huge 37.6 percent drop in mobile operating income which fell from 4.42 trillion won in 2014 to 2.76 trillion won during the April-June period.
Samsung just can't catch a break.
Although Korean investors thought the flagship Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones would turn Samsung's fortunes around, the financial freefall continued when the South Korean conglomerate said Tuesday it expected to report a decline in revenue and profits when its second-quarter results go public later this month.
As the Wall Street Journal noted today, the unfortunate development marks Samsung's seventh straight quarterly profit decline. A source attributed worse than expected results to seemingly lackluster sales of Samsung's latest flagship handsets and a gross miscalculation in demand for the Galaxy S6 versus the Galaxy S6 Edge.
Apple is going to release earnings for its third fiscal 2015 quarter on Tuesday, July 21, according to an update published last evening on the company's Investor Relations webpage. A conference call to discuss third fiscal quarter earnings with Wall Street investors will be taking place on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern Time.
Today eight years ago, the original iPhone went on sale in the United States after a 6-month period of unprecedented hype triggered by its January 9, 2007 introduction. Like most other Apple products were panned as duds but went on to become smash hits, the Apple smartphone was universally dismissed.
Then industry heavyweights such as Nokia, RIM and Palm—with a little help from shortsighted technology press—ridiculed the device for its poor (by non-smartphone standards) battery life, multitouch interface, software keyboard and many other features that were ahead of its time.
In retrospect, rivals' knee-jerk reaction to the iPhone, coupled with their risk aversion and stubborn insistence on old ways of doing things, contributed to their incredibly fast undoing.
Doomsayers notwithstanding, the device went on to sell hundreds of millions of units worldwide (726 million units to date, to be precise), becoming the de facto gold standard for smartphones. And while the iPhone is now common sight in all corners of the globe, its beauty isn't that it invented, but re-invented the hopelessly-out-of-touch (to quote T-Mobile CEO) industry.
It gave the sleepy, self-absorbed wireless carriers—and handset makers, their partners in crime—a much needed kick in their butt for not listening to consumers' needs at all. Sure, there were smartphones before the iPhone but they looked like they were designed by committees (which they actually were) and one needed a user manual to master them.
There were phones with touchscreens before the iPhone but none implemented the sensation and immediacy of touch so elegantly and seamlessly as Apple's device. There were also mobile app stores, of sorts, before the App Store. But none has offered the ease of use and instant gratification of tapping a colorful icon to have an app arrive wirelessly on your Home screen.
No smartphone other than the iPhone has managed to consistently earn highest customer satisfaction scores to this date. And as we've witnessed, in the process of doing so the iPhone has turned the largely written off, beleaguered computer maker from Cupertino into the most powerful corporation in the world, one that can easily sway whole multi-billion dollar industries with their decisions.
Apple has become a Promoter Member of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), a non-profit industry organization that oversees the development of Bluetooth standards and the licensing of the Bluetooth technologies and trademarks to manufacturers.
As one of the biggest proponents of Bluetooth, the iPhone maker now holds a continual seat on the SIG Board of Directors and can influence future development of the standard even more than before.
Late last year, the Internet giant Google stealthily snapped up a startup called Agawi whose technology let people stream an app to a phone without the need to actually download and install it first.
The deal went under the radar until yesterday, when it was reported by The Information's Amir Efrati. Agawi's tech can stream Android apps and Windows PC games to connected TVs, as well as iOS and Android devices.
While it's unclear whether Google plans to bake app streaming into Android, the acquisition signals a potential new direction for mobile software deployment.
Spotify has a lot to lose should Apple Music catch on with music lovers. Following Monday's WWDC 2015 keynote which saw, amongst other things, the announcement of Apple's ten bucks per month on-demand music subscription service, Spotify has felt compelled to share the latest stats to reinforce its position as the world's leading streaming music provider.
As of May of this year, the Swedish startup had more than 75 million active users, of which more than 20 million are on one Spotify's paid Premium tiers.