Technology Industry Archive

Semiconductor design tool vendor Cadence Design Systems has given up on buying rival Mentor Graphics when the price became more than it could afford, or borrow. This isn’t an isolated failed deal, but an indicator of the problems that the electronic design assistance (EDA) market has been seeing – a flat market, entrenched competition, and nothing new on the horizon making chip...

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There is a mania in this country for mobile advertising. Not on the part of consumers at the moment, and not necessarily on the part of advertisers, either. The big supporters are the people who want to facilitate the conversation of commerce and make a buck in the process. The latest bellying up to the bar was done yesterday by Google’s Eric Schmidt in an interview with Jim Cramer. The...

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Ever since the FCC blessed the union of Sirius and XM to form one satellite radio company, opinions have run the gamut. At least one analyst firm expects total unit sales to continue rising, but as a long term subscriber to one of the services, I wonder whether some of the inherent limitations I’ve found, and others that might come up, are going to cap the potential popularity. The...

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Ars Technica has what should be for Apple a daunting list of problems that appeared within the first month of the new iPhone. The company will probably address a number of these in time, but chances are that nothing fundamental will change with the way it does business now or when the next version comes about. That’s because the entire technology industry wants to start in the new film,...

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Apple has confirmed that it can turn off an application already sitting on a user’s iPhone. There’s been a fair amount of controversy around kill switches, and I suddenly wondered whether, given the specifics of Apple’s operations, whether the company was opening itself up to liability. So I asked Mark McCreary, a partner with law firm Fox Rothschild, about it. BNET: Because...

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On August 1, The House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters out to 31 major Internet players to ask whether they track consumer web use to better target online advertising. As of Monday, 25 had answered and the House posted the responses. The exercise had been enough to get Yahoo and Google to announce new opt out procedures, and understandably. The questions were tough and the answers...

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Ironically, for all the Yahoo trash talk you hear, the company’s revenue, profits, and shareholder equity are all on a six month rise compared to last year. So why are people so down on it? Might it have made more sense for Yahoo to buy Microsoft’s search business? To be fair, staving off a takeover bid is expensive work. The New York Times‘ DealBook pointed out that Yahoo...

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Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch wrote an interesting analysis of Google’s growth. The core of his analysis is an examination of organic growth, or the increase in revenue from Google’s own pre-existing activities and not acquisitions. What I found interesting was taking his analysis and looking at where Google’s revenue originates, because the combination says even more about...

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IFRS — the international financial reporting standards that define accounting practices in most of the world — had turned North America into a business island. What separated Canada and the United States from everyone else was GAAP: the two versions of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles that companies in those countries used in bookkeeping and financial reporting. But...

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Many in the software and entertainment industries hire lawyers and involve the courts in an attempt to stop product piracy. But few ever ask the people who use their products without paying why they do so. Cliff Harris, owner of Positech Games, has actively fought piracy, but started wondering what motivated participants and decided to ask people who had pirated games to email him and honestly...

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