Apple delays WatchOS 2 due to bug

                              

Apple says it's delaying the release of new Apple Watch software after finding a computer bug.

WatchOS 2 was scheduled to go public to customers on Wednesday. But on Wednesday morning, the company announced the update's delay to news reporters.

In a statement, the company said: "We have discovered a bug in development of WatchOS 2 that is taking a bit longer to fix than we expected. We will not release WatchOS 2 today but will shortly."

Apple (AAPL, Tech30) did not detail the computer flaw.

The updated Apple Watch software will add new watch faces, let users reply to emails, and allow for more powerful apps and additional customization. It's also expected to make the machine run faster.

Apple Part Sales Help Boost Samsung Profits

                            

Electronics giant Samsung has posted a surge in quarterly earnings as profits from sales of components – including to rival Apple – masked disappointment in its smartphone business.

Operating profit was up 82% to 7.4 trillion won (£4.2bn), partly boosted by currency movements.

Sales of 51.7 trillion won (£29.7bn) were 9% higher but profits from Samsung’s smartphone business fell compared to the second quarter  – though they were higher year-on-year – after it cut prices for some of its high-end Galaxy handsets.

This was despite the company releasing premium models more quickly than in previous years and expanding those using curved screens.

Volume sales and revenues from its own phones were higher but the growth came from cheaper models.

South Korea’s Samsung phone sales have been squeezed in the last year by the introduction of Apple’s larger iPhone 6 Plus – a "phablet" similar in size to several of its own lines. At the lower end of the market it has been hit by competition from Chinese manufacturers.

Industry data shows Samsung sold more smartphones than any other producer during the third quarter, with 84.5m compared to Apple's 48m iPhones. But Samsung’s models are cheaper.

It saw improvements for other parts of the company including a division which supplies processors powering Apple's iPhones.

Samsung also said it secured deals with a number of smartphone makers to supply display panels known as OLED screens.

Elsewhere, Japanese rival Sony posted a quarterly operating profit of 88bn yen (£477m), boosted by strong Playstation 4 sales, compared to a loss of 85.6bn yen (£464m) last year when it booked an impairment  charge for its struggling mobiles business.

The video games division, together with image sensors used in smartphones and digital cameras, helped the company offset a fall in its own phones’ sales, helping to keep the company on a recovery track after years of decline in its consumer electronics business.

Apple Refuses To Stock Adele CD - Report

                                        

Apple has rejected a demand by Adele for hard copies of her upcoming album to be stocked in their stores.

Her agency William Morris Endeavour is reportedly in talks with Apple over the company's proposed sponsorship of her tour.

The asking price of £19.5m is around 10 times the size of a typical sponsorship deal for an artist of Adele's fame.

But as well as the huge payment, Adele's agent wants physical copies of her CD to be made available in Apple stores.

This is despite the fact that most Apple laptops don't have CD drives, and the company is one of the biggest sellers of digital music downloads.

Apple has reportedly refused.

The lead track from the upcoming album - called 25 - is called Hello and sits at number one in the charts.

The song's video also broke the Vevo record for the most views in a daywith 27.7 million.
The album is out on 20 November, and is likely to be number one in 93 countries based on pre-order rates.
The report of the proposed tour sponsorship appeared in the New York Post.

Google has 3.8 million GB of our photos (at least)

Since debuting in May, Google Photos has gobbled up 3,720 terabytes of pictures and videos -- a staggering stash of personal memories that now live in the cloud.
                                                

To put the number in context, picture this:

-- You would need 3,809,280 one-gigabyte flash drives to store all those photos. If Santa were to pile them into his sleigh, Rudolph and the crew would be dragging 119,040 pounds of the thumb drives around the world. And the bill for all those $2 stocking stuffers would come out to more than $7.6 million.

-- You would need at least 238,080 iPhone 6S devices with 16 gigabytes of storage. Without tax, that would cost $154.5 million altogether, and span about 21 miles in length when placed end to end. If you stacked the phones on top of one another, they would weigh more than 74,995 pounds, or about 16% of the heft of a grounded, un-fueled Boeing (BA) 747-8.

And that's just the photos processed by the Google Photos app when it asks users to free up space. Think about how many more pictures and videos we share through Gmail and other Google(GOOGL, Tech30) services.

Google Photos is a free app that you can use on your smartphone or your computer. The program's technology detects when you might run out of space and asks you if you want to delete photos on your device that have already been saved to the cloud.

Twitter Shares Dive 12% As User Growth Slows

The early reaction to Twitter's latest results is negative despite a 58% surge in quarterly revenue.

                     

Twitter shares fell 12% after-hours after the loss-making social network reported another quarter of slowing user growth.

The early investor reaction to its latest results followed the revelation that monthly active user numbers grew by 11% year-on-year in the third quarter of its financial year - down from a rate of 15% over the previous three months to total 320 million.

Twitter's revenues surged ahead - growing by 58% on the same period a year earlier to $569.2m - but its forecast for future earnings in the current quarter came in below analysts' expectations.

Chief executive Jack Dorsey - who returned to the role this month following the departure of Dick Costolo - has already acted to limit costs by cutting more than 330 jobs.

The number of employees affected - mostly engineers - totalled 8% of the workforce.

Mr Dorsey said today: "We’ve simplified our roadmap and organisation around a few big bets across Twitter, Periscope, and Vine that we believe represent our largest opportunities for growth."

He is under pressure to secure value for investors who have never seen a profit in Twitter's near-decade-long history.

Twitter lost $132m during the company's third quarter, with the total now at around $2bn.

Amazon Could Launch Its Own Shopping Channel

Amazon has reportedly been looking into the idea for some time, and the channel is expected to launch next year.

                        

Amazon is planning to go head-to-head with TV shopping channels, it has been reported.

People with an Amazon Fire TV device can already purchase items featured on homepage banner adverts with the click of a button.

But the firm wants to go one step further and launch its own shopping channel, reports say, where purchases will be able to be made instantly from the screen.
Amazon has reportedly been looking into the idea for some time, and the channel is due to launch next year.

Home shopping channels are an old idea - the first channel launched in the US in 1982.
But Amazon - one of the world's biggest and most advanced retailers - sees potential.
It has already been experimenting with using video to sell products.

Around a year ago its camera product page was taken over by a 48-minute live event highlighting Sony's answer to the GoPro camera.

Amazon is also looking to integrate new technology that will allow viewers to easily purchase clothing and other items as they appear in TV shows or movies.

Amazon has not yet commented on the reports.

Deutsche Bank to cut 15,000 jobs

                            

Deutsche Bank has said it will cut 15,000 jobs as it announced a third-quarter €6bn (£4.3bn) loss.

Germany's biggest bank said it would cut 9,000 full-time jobs and 6,000 contractor roles.

It is also planning to sell businesses employing 20,000 people over the next two years.

By 2018, "we expect to see the benefits of our hard work and potentially be in the midst of a powerful turn-around," said John Cryan, co-chief executive.

The cuts represent just less than 15% of the firm's total workforce. The bank's shares fell 5.5% in Frankfurt trading.

Deutsche is trying to cut €3.8bn of annual costs as European banks struggle with sluggish economic growth in their home markets and stricter regulation.

Google's Project Loon internet balloons to circle Earth

                 
                                 

Google believes it is on course to have enough internet-beaming balloons in the stratosphere to form a ring over part of the world next year.

It told the BBC the move would let it trial a continuous data service to people living below the balloons' path.

The declaration coincides with the announcement that three of Indonesia's mobile networks intend to start testing Project Loon's transmissions next year.

One expert said the plan had benefits over other solutions.

Sri Lanka previously signed a separate agreement signalling its wish to be another participant in the giant helium balloon-based scheme.

4G-like speeds

Google first revealed its superpressure balloon plan in June 2013, when about 30 of the inflatable plastic "envelopes" were launched from New Zealand.

Android users are ditching their phones for the iPhone at a record rate

Three in 10 people buying replacement iPhones in the last quarter were switching from Android devices, Apple says

More Android users than ever are switching to the iPhone, Apple’s chief executive has said, revealing that three in every 10 iPhone buyers replacing their device are converting from Google’s smartphone operating system.

Tim Cook said that of the 48 million iPhones sold in the three months to September 26, 30pc of those who were replacing their current smartphones, rather than buying their first one, were ditching their Android device.

This is the highest rate the company has ever seen, Cook said.

Android, developed by Google, dominates the world’s smartphones, with around 80pc of total sales. But sales of the iPhone have increased by 22pc in the last year, with China’s growing middle class partly responsible.

Earlier this year, Apple released an Android app – its first for the platform – encouraging users to switch to the iPhone. The app was immediately bombarded with negative reviews from Android fans, however.

Cook said the unprecedented rate at which people were switching from Android to the iPhone meant he was confident that Apple would continue to grow iPhone sales, despite the recent iPhone 6s and 6s Plus being relatively incremental upgrades to the iPhone, unlike last year’s 6 and 6 Plus.

Apple reports biggest annual profit in history with net income of $53.4bn

Enormous profit eclipses that made by ExxonMobil in 2008, although iPhone maker warns of slowing growth

                          

Apple has recorded the biggest annual profit in corporate history, with record sales of the iPhone helping it to make $53.4bn (£35bn) in the last 12 months.

The world's biggest company surpassed the $45.2bn made by ExxonMobil in 2008, after the release of its latest smartphones increased profits by 31pc in its fourth quarter.

However, Apple warned that growth is likely to slow down significantly in the crucial Christmas period, and sales of the iPad fell by a fifth to their lowest level since 2011.

The company predicted that sales in the current quarter would be between $75.5bn and $77.5bn – as little as 1pc up on the same period last year – partially due to a strong dollar.

Apple has been facing questions about its ability to maintain the tremendous growth that propelled it to a $750bn value this year, as China's economic troubles raise fears about customer demand for its pricey devices.

Analysts have also suggested that the Apple Watch, the company's first new product category since Steve Jobs' death four years' ago, has got off to a slow start since launching earlier this year.

Nonetheless, Apple said revenue increased by 22pc to $51.5bn in the three months to September 26, the final quarter of its fiscal year. The company sold 48m iPhones, an 22pc increase, during the quarter, which included the first two days that its new 6s and 6s Plus models went on sale.

Android users are switching to the iPhone at a record rate, the company said.

Apple's full-year revenue reached $233.7bn and annual profits were $53.4bn - equivalent to just over $1bn a week.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said the quarter had been “a very strong finish to a record-breaking year”, and that sales in China, which Apple expects to become its biggest market, had been strong despite recent economic turmoil.

“Looking at our sales trends I wouldn't know there's an economic issue at all in China,” he said.

One low point for the company were sales of its iPad tablet, which at 9.9m were 20pc down on the same quarter last year. Sales of the iPad have now fallen for seven consecutive quarters and are at their lowest since early 2011, with owners upgrading the device far less frequently than their iPhones.

Apple shares were flat in after-hours trading, as the better-than-expected sales were cancelled out by somewhat disappointing forecasts for the next quarter.

Apple Earnings Will Tell Us Whether to Expect Happy Holidays or a Long Winter

               

Apple will unwrap its outlook for the holiday shopping season on Tuesday, and analysts expect growth—just nothing on par with last year's bonanza.

The holiday quarter is projected to bring Apple sales of $77 billion and profit of $18.1 billion, or $3.22 a share, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That would work out to sales growth of 3.4 percent, which is a far cry from the 30 percent Apple put up last holiday season.

During the critical October to December period, Apple generates more sales and profit than any other time of the year. The upcoming forecast will be closely watched because Apple is facing questions about whether the latest iPhones can match the record-setting pace of last year’s models, which included the long-overdue addition of bigger screens. Investors’ doubts about growth have sent the stock down 12 percent since the last earnings report.

The company calibrates its product-release schedule to take full advantage of the year-end holiday rush. This year’s refreshed lineup includes the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus with 3D Touch screens, remodeled Apple TV set-top boxes that went on sale Monday for more than twice as much as their predecessor, and updated iMac computers with sharper displays.

But Apple’s business is increasingly tied to one product: the iPhone. Sales of the iPad have slowed, and newer products such as the Apple Watch haven’t become mainstream hits yet. Dialog Semiconductor, an Apple supplier, reported lackluster earnings and gave a disappointing fourth-quarter forecast on Monday, which RBC analyst Amit Daryanani said has a “negative implication” for iPhone sales. Apple’s stock fell 3.3 percent in New York. Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, wrote in a research note last week that iPhone sales for the holiday quarter are the “biggest investor concern” facing Apple.

The new handsets, released Sept. 25 in a dozen markets, led to opening-weekend salesof 13 million units, topping last year’s record of 10 million. Sales were boosted by availability in China, which wasn’t in last year’s debut. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is banking on the world’s most populous country to help make up for slowing sales in other regions.

Visiting the country last week, Cook posed for pictures on the Great Wall and attended the opening of a new retail store in the port city of Dalian. Greater China, which also includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, accounted for 27 percent of Apple’s revenue in the quarter that ended in June, more than all of Europe. Cook has said the region will eventually be Apple’s biggest market.

For the fiscal fourth-quarter results coming on Tuesday, analysts on average expect Apple to report net income of $10.8 billion, or $1.88 per share, and sales of $51 billion, an estimated increase of 21 percent.

JP Morgan to launch a rival to Apple Pay called Chase Pay

Bank has already signed a deal with a group of major retailers including Wal-Mart, the largest US retailer, and Best Buy

JP Morgan Chase is to launch its own competitor to Apple Pay that will allow consumers to pay retailers using their smartphones in stores.

The largest US bank, which has already won the endorsement of a major group of merchants, is the latest company to try to profit from the prevalence of smartphones, which many financial executives believe will one day be consumers' preferred way to pay for everything from milk and eggs at the supermarket to a rental car at an airport.

The companies that figure out how to convince consumers to stop pulling credit cards out of their wallets and start paying with their phones stand to earn vast sums by taking a percentage of the trillions of dollars that consumers spend annually.

No clear front-runner has emerged in the business yet. JP Morgan believes its smartphone application, known as Chase Pay, has one key advantage: the caliber of retailers it has brought on board, Gordon Smith, chief executive of the bank's consumer business, said.

BP profits hit by lower oil and gas prices

                             

Oil giant BP has reported a fall in profits due to lower oil and gas prices.

Replacement cost profit between July and September was $1.23bn (£802m), compared with $2.38bn a year earlier. Total revenue was $55.9bn against $94.8bn a year ago.

The oil price dipped below $50 a barrel in the quarter, while it was above $100 for much of the same period last year.

Prices have dropped due to oversupply and weaker demand.

On an underlying basis, profit for the third quarter was $1.8bn, down from $3bn a year earlier but higher than analysts' estimates of $1.2bn. BP's share price rose 1.8% in early trading, reflecting these higher-than-expected earnings.

Replacement cost profit is a standard measure used in the oil industry that takes into account the price of oil.

Reflecting the tougher environment across the industry, the company's capital expenditure for the period fell to $4.3bn, down from $5.3bn. BP continued to rein in spending estimates for 2015, which it now expects to be about $19bn compared with the $24bn-$26bn forecast a year ago.

The company also announced that the total cost of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 would reach $55bn, higher than previous estimates.

Earlier this month, the company said it had agreed to pay $20bn to settle claims in the US.

To meet these costs, it is selling off assets, and expects to divest $10bn this year, with another $3bn-$5bn in 2016.

BP also said it was maintaining its dividend at 10 cents a share.

Apple sued for $5m over new Wi-Fi Assist on iOS 9

                            

Apple has been sued for $5m by a Californian couple who claim that the new WiFi-Assist feature has been eating up their 3G data without their knowledge.

The class action lawsuit accused Apple of "downplaying" the charges that you could accumulate as the result of a new default feature on the new iOS9 software.

The Wifi-Assist feature which was introduced in the iPhone software update iOS 9 last month, is designed to automatically switch your handset's connection from Wi-Fi to cellular data when in an area with poor connection.

According to the lawsuit, which was first discovered by Apple Insider, the couple William Scott Phillips and Suzanne Schmidt Phillips, had to pay excess data charges on both of their iPhone 5s phones after upgrading to iOS 9.

Although Apple did recently create a new support page on its website explaining the implications and details of the Wi-Fi Assist feature in response to complaints about data guzzling, the lawsuit claims that the explanation was too late in their case, and continued to underestimate the potential costs that could be incurred.

According to the complaint, Apple has been sued for unfair competition, false advertising and negligent misrepresentation under California law.

As the data allowance in some phone contracts can be as low as 500MB or 1GB, having the feature activated could technically result in higher bills for users if you use your iPhone to stream music and videos, download and run certain apps and Facetime often.

"With Wi-Fi Assist, you can stay connected to the Internet even if you have a poor Wi-Fi connection. For example, if you're using Safari with a poor Wi-Fi connection and a webpage doesn't load, Wi-Fi Assist will activate and automatically switch to cellular so that the webpage continues to load. You can use Wi-Fi Assist with most apps like Safari, Apple Music, Mail, Maps, and more," the new support page reads.

"Because you'll stay connected to the Internet over cellular when you have a poor Wi-Fi connection, you might use more cellular data. For most users, this should only be a small percentage higher than previous usage."

Bing adds $1 billion to Microsoft's revenue

                             

Microsoft Bing has emerged as the true underdog of search engines.

Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said Thursday that Bing had finally achieved profitability in its firstfiscal quarter of 2016, and that the search engine contributed more than $1 billion to Microsoft's revenue for this quarter.

The last time Microsoft broke down the numbers on Bing, back in 2011, it was bleeding a billion dollars a quarter. And it has remained unprofitable over the last four years.

People were perplexed as to why Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) kept pouring money into a seemingly dead investment. However, the tech giant now has results to show: Microsoft's search revenue, excluding traffic-acquisition costs, grew 29%.

Much of Bing's success can be attributed to its subtle presence. Not many people may actively log on to Bing, but it's everywhere.

Obviously, Microsoft products push Bing -- Internet Edge and Cortana, the virtual assistant on Windows phones, search through Bing. Plus, Windows 10 was more positively received than it's predecessors, which has helped boost Bing's success.

About 51% of Yahoo (YAHO) searches are powered by Bing. In the last couple of years, Apple(AAPL, Tech30) bid adieu to Google (GOOG) and now the tech giant uses Bing for Siri and the spotlight function on Macbooks as well.

Market share is key in search: With it, advertisers flock to you, and you can charge high rates for ads. But without it, search is a very expensive business.

Bing crossed the 20% market share threshold in search for the first time in March, and currently holds 20.7% of the desktop search engine market share, according to comScore's September 2015 data. Although it trails far behind Google at 63.9%, it trumps Yahoo, the third-best search engine, by 8.1%.

Microsoft posted revenue of $20.4 billion overall for the quarter, down 12% from the same quarter a year ago.

China's Xiaomi's is changing the U.S. too

                                       

Xiaomi is the most important phone manufacturer you've never heard of.

In the rich world, dominated by Apple and Samsung and where even fading brands such as Nokia and Blackberry remain familiar, Xiaomi (pronounced like the "show-" in shower, plus "me") is still largely unknown.

Yet this firm, only 5 years old, has already become a formidable supplier of smartphones in its home market of China (the world's largest), and has begun a remarkably successful campaign of international expansion.

As the firm gets ready to announce its newest model, the Mi5, next week, it is worth tuning in, because more than any company other than Apple, Xiaomi will show us where smartphones -- which is to say the mobile, networked computers we all have in our pockets -- are going worldwide.

China and the United States are the two most important economic powers in the world, and that goes double for technology.

For three decades, that relationship could be summed up as "invented here, produced there." (The iPhone box may say "Designed in California," but it is made in Shenzhen, China.) Xiaomi is one indicator among many that that relationship is over. Its phones are well-designed and cheap, and, more importantly, the firm has been engineered to rely on the Internet, allowing it to build one of the leanest manufacturing and sales operations the world has ever seen.

In a half decade, Xiaomi has gone from a startup focused on making a new mobile phone interface to beating Samsung as the No. 1 phone vendor in the largest market in the world last year.

Xiaomi's products are so popular in China that it has become the third largest ecommerce firm there, just selling its own products. As 2014 closed, the company was valued at $45 billion, an increase in value of something like 18,000% since its first round of fund-raising. It is, by several metrics, the most valuable startup ever.

Xiaomi is widely referred to as the "Chinese Apple," a phrase that carries both a sense of awe at its design prowess and derision at its habits as a design copycat. Both reactions are warranted -- some of their phones look like little else on the market (the Mi3), while others are almost-copies of iPhones (the Mi4).

The firm was founded in Beijing in 2010 by Lei Jun, a computer scientist and charismatic serial entrepreneur now in his mid-40s, who is predictably, often compared to Steve Jobs, both for his energy and brilliance, and for his Jobsian taste in clothes and product launches.

Apple's new billion-dollar business

As if Apple needed the money, Tim Cook is about to add yet another billion-dollar business to the company's war chest.

                                

Apple Music now has 15 million subscribers, Cook announced at a Wall Street Journal technology conference in Laguna Beach, California, on Monday evening. Of those 15 million, 6.5 million are paying customers (the other 8.5 million are still on Apple's free three-month trial). Subscribers pay Apple $10 a month for access to unlimited streaming music.

Do the math: 6.5 million times $10 a month times 12 months in a year = $780 million.

That's not quite a billion, but Apple only needs to convert 1.8 million more of the free-trial subscribers to reach that mark.

And Apple Music, which launched in June, would join the iPhone, iPad, Mac, iTunes and Apple TV as the company's billion dollar businesses. Apple Watch will likely reach that mark this year too.

That's not bad for a brand new streaming music service that is taking on a giant field of strong incumbents that includes Spotify, Pandora (P), Amazon (AMZN, Tech30), Google (GOOGL, Tech30)and a sea of other contenders. Apple Music's success is particularly impressive, considering themixed reviews that Apple Music has received, particularly when compared with Spotify.

"This is completely at odds with the feedback that the service has received where Spotify offers a better experience with a much richer feature set at the same price," noted Richard Windsor, analyst at Edison Investment Research.