MEDIA
Murdoch, Jobs plan ‘Daily’
News Corp and Apple are to unveil the Daily next week, a digital newspaper for the iPad, the tablet computer News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch hopes might emerge as the savior of the struggling news industry. A source familiar with News Corp’s plans said the Daily, which has been the object of months of top secret development at News Corp, will be introduced at an event in San Francisco next Wednesday. According to News Corp-owned Dow Jones, Murdoch and Apple head Steve Jobs are to personally take part in the event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
REAL ESTATE
Record foreclosures in 2010
Banks moved to repossess a record 2.87 million US homes last year as the two-year-old mortgage crisis continued to weigh heavily on the economy, foreclosure specialist RealtyTrac said yesterday. Foreclosures hit 2.23 percent of all housing units in the country, or one out of 45, an increase from 2.21 percent in 2009, RealtyTrac said in its report for last year. However, the pace of foreclosures eased up in the fourth quarter, as banks ran into increasing legal challenges from owners angry that banks had repossessed their homes under a slipshod process. Last month’s 257,747 foreclosure filings were 26 percent lower than the year-earlier figure and 2 percent down month-to-month, the report said.
SMARTPHONES
Samsung, IBM team up
Samsung Electronics Co and International Business Machines (IBM) Corp will jointly develop a new technology for chips that can be used in devices including smartphones, according to a statement from Samsung yesterday.
AVIATION
Cebu to invest US$1 billion
Top Philippine carrier Cebu Pacific said yesterday it would invest US$1 billion in new aircraft and hire 2,000 more staff over four years as it boosts its international operations. The planned investment centers on 21 new Airbus 320 planes, five of which would be delivered this year, its chief executive and president Lance Gokongwei said in a statement.
RETAIL
Tesco PLC misses estimates
Tesco PLC, the UK’s largest retailer, reported holiday sales growth that missed estimates as snow kept Britons from visiting out-of-town supermarkets. Sales at UK stores open at least a year rose 0.6 percent, including value-added taxes and excluding gasoline, in the six weeks ended on Saturday, the Cheshunt, England-based retailer said yesterday. Excluding VAT would reduce the figure by about 1 percent, Finance director Laurie McIlwee said yesterday in a conference call. Analysts had estimated 1.5 percent growth on that basis.
TELECOMS
Sprint slashes tablet price
Sprint Nextel Corp slashed the price of Samsung Electronics Co’s rival to Apple Inc’s iPad tablet computer by a quarter, following cuts by Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and T-Mobile USA. Sprint, the third-largest US wireless carrier, now sells the Galaxy Tab for US$299.99 with a two-year wireless-data contract, Sprint spokesman Mark Elliott said. Verizon Wireless and AT&T cut the device’s price this month by US$100 each to US$499.99 and US$549.99 and Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile pared its price by US$50 to US$349.99.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”