The EU on Tuesday said it would probe tech giant Apple Inc’s plan to buy leading song recognition app Shazam Entertainment Ltd because of fears the deal might “adversely affect competition.”
Apple announced the deal with London-based Shazam, worth a reported US$400 million, in December last year in a fresh bid to secure an edge in the intensifying battle of streaming services.
The European Commission said it launched the inquiry at the request of EU states Austria, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden, and non-EU nations Norway and Iceland, which form part of the affiliated European Economic Area.
“The commission considers that the transaction may have a significant adverse effect on competition in the European Economic Area,” the commission said in a statement.
The deal did not meet the “turnover thresholds” for the European Commission for Brussels to launch a probe by itself.
Instead, it had to wait for Austria to lodge an initial request, which was followed by the other states.
Shazam, which was founded in 1999 in the early age of online music, has offered a solution to a long-time agony of listeners — putting a name to elusive songs. With a click, the app identifies tracks playing on the radio, at parties or as background music.
However, Shazam has struggled to find a way to make money off its technology, even as it said that it had reached 1 billion downloads on smartphones last year.
Shazam only recently announced it had become profitable, thanks to advertising and steering traffic to other sites, such as Spotify and Apple Music.
The technology is also no longer quite as novel, with Shazam facing rivals such as SoundHound and with smartphones capable of ever more advanced recognition functions.
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
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day