cash
Latest
Dish Network settles Voom HD lawsuit, AMC comes back on the air tonight
Dish Network customers have been without AMC and its family of channels since July 1st, but thanks to a settlement between the satellite company and Cablevision's former Voom HD unit, AMC will be back on the air starting tonight. The possibility of a settlement leaked out late last week via a court filing, and it looks like Dish CEO Charlie Ergen will avoid taking the stand Monday after all. According to the terms, Dish will hand over $700 million in cash plus its 20 percent stake in Voom, and receive 500MHz of video and data spectrum licenses in 45 areas. In a separate deal, Dish and Cablevision spinoff AMC Networks have a new multiyear deal that should bring back AMC (on channel 131) in time for The Walking Dead to air tonight, and all of its other channels (IFC, WE tv, Sundance and for the first time, Fuse) starting November 1st. While Dish had previously claimed the channel deal was being held up by AMC's distribution of its shows via iTunes, Netflix and Amazon, now that lawsuit is over those concerns seem to have faded away.
Editorial: Square gets the attention, but credit cards rule
Lower Manhattan, Pearl Street, the Financial District. A Starbucks with broad windows, great for people watching. Sipping my $5 flavored coffee, I watched a homeless man sit on the sidewalk. I liked him immediately: his sharp gaze and thoughtful expression. When I left, I squatted down next to him and put five bucks in his jar, contributing the cost of my first-world coffee to the man's case for survival. We talked. He knew his tech, this man of no possessions, describing his favorite productivity gadgets of the past decade, scorning Apple for form over function. He had been living on the street day and night for two years. My five dollars was "huge," he said. I knew that was true only microcosmically. He liked cigars. That's where the cash would go. Meanwhile, Starbucks had recently cut a deal with Square, one of the hottest startup stories of the season, so that people with five dollars to spend on coffee needn't pull out a wallet and ponder their privilege.
New 'nano-code' could help fight banknote forgery by embedding invisible QR-style ciphers
We've all seen (and probably used) QR codes at some point. And, handy as they are for quick linking to apps, or value added content etc, there's usually not much else going on. Unless you're one of the team at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, that is, who have created a tiny version of the quadrilateral-codes that could be used to spot counterfeit money. The invention uses nanoparticles combined with blue and green fluorescent ink, and can be sprayed onto surfaces such as glass, plastic film, or of course, pictures of American presidents. The nano-code remains invisible until placed under a near-infrared laser, making it ideal for helping spot legit bank notes. The creators say they have done significant wear tests, which suggest that it's durable, but they also accept that eventually criminal technology could eventually catch up, in the constant cat and mouse game between mandated money producers and forgers. Whether there'd be links to the Benjamin Franklin Wiki page is unclear.
PayPal arrives on Windows Phone devices running version 7.5 or higher
eBay's money-exchanging service has brought its payments platform to Windows Phone 7.5 handsets. PayPal's new app lets you send and request cash and check your account details (hopefully while laughing maniacally at your own affluence). A "local" feature will also direct you toward vendors who accept the standard, just remember that NFC supporting handsets don't get here for another few weeks.
Acronym-loving Samsung joins Intel and TSMC, buys stake in ASML
Samsung's round of cash-flashing continues with a $629 million purchase of a three-percent stake in ASML. It's joining Intel and TSMC in pumping money into the Dutch business, developing tooling for chip-making machines with Extra Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) designed to "extend Moore's Law." It'll also help reduce the cost of future silicon, since it'll enable the companies to use wider silicon wafers along the manufacturing line. Given that Samsung's investment caps of a project to raise nearly $5 billion in cash and that ASML's home is just five miles west of PSV Eindhoven's stadium, we just hope they threw in a few home tickets for their trouble.
The Soapbox: The trouble with Kickstarter
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. It was right around the time that the Shadowrun Online Kickstarter went live that I started to wonder whether Kickstarter was doing some nasty things to the development practices of MMOs. This isn't a commentary on Shadowrun Online itself, exactly. The game asked for players to put up $500,000 to fund development, and while that's an awful lot of money to ask from the pockets of fans, it still doesn't qualify as being high-budget by the standards of the industry. But in some ways, it's the apotheosis of something that started with several other games being funded on Kickstarter -- this sense that Kickstarter is the path of the future, that it's the ultimate litmus test of whether or not your MMO is worth developing and a great way to draw in venture capitalists for more funding. I'm not convinced that this is a good thing for the health of MMO development. You can look at it as a way for strange niche titles to get their funding without convincing outside sources that it's worth the effort, but as we're ramping up to seeing the fruits of these projects (or lack thereof), I'm wondering whether it just allows ideas to get further along before they self-destruct.
Twitter quietly adds clickable stock symbols
It might not pack the same thrill as the rumors of in-feed video, but Twitter has added clickable stock symbols on tweets. This now throws up search results for both the stock and the company, using a new 'cash' tag, like $FB, to differentiate from typical links and tags. As noted by TNW, it's bad news for the founder of StockTwits, a service that offered similar functionality to gather tweet-based financial nuggets. The new feature is live across Twitter's web client -- though it hasn't hit TweetDeck just yet -- and should make discovering exactly how many millions companies have made (or lost) all a bit faster.
Facebook testing 'highlight' feature, lets users pay $2 to promote their status updates
Finding ways to throw money at Mark Zuckerberg is notoriously difficult, but a new 'highlight' feature could be just the trick. Currently being tested with a small population of users, it allows an ordinary member to pay $2 to ensure that their latest status update crops up in more of their friends' news streams. Ordinarily, the degree to which a status update is streamed depends on the number of likes or comments it has, which ensures that users generally only see the juiciest gossip, but paying this little premium would cause Facebook's algorithms to distort that in your favor. In other words, it's money replacing popularity, or simply -- sigh -- life.
Apple VP of iOS Scott Forstall cashes in $38.7 million of Apple shares
Tim Cook's salary came up in the news last month when he was awarded a million shares of Apple stock, and cashed out a few, in addition to his many other forms of compensation. And here's another Apple manager who's taking advantage of Apple's soaring stock price when he can. Vice President of iOS Scott Forstall reportedly cashed out over 64,000 Apple shares last week, earning US$38.7 million from the sale. Forstall picked up those shares in 2008. He got 120,000 shares back then as part of a bonus, and as those just vested (minus about half for taxes), he went ahead and cashed them out. But this doesn't leave Forstall without an investment in the company. He's still got 250,000 shares set to vest at different times in the next few years, in addition to 2,988 shares currently held, and that's in addition to an annual salary of $700,000. What did Forstall do to earn all this money? Oh, just run the iOS division, which picked up $29 billion for Apple in just the last quarter. Just that.
RIM offers developers $10,000 incentive for certified apps
At BlackBerry World 2012, RIM is bumping up the stakes for its developers by putting more money where its mouth is, announcing a $10,000 guarantee to get potential coders excited to hop onto Team BlackBerry. If you get your app certified on App World and don't earn ten grand in the first year, RIM will cut you a check for the difference. Of course, incentive programs are nothing new in today's increasingly competitive development world -- Research in Motion has offered free phones and PlayBooks in the past, and Microsoft is known for throwing cash at big-name developers to beckon them to Windows Phone, for instance. The guarantee, however, is certainly a unique approach to entice new devs to BlackBerry 10. As these programs often do, there is one catch: to qualify, you'll need to not only earn quality certification, you'll also have to generate $1,000 on your own accord. All of this is part of a $100 million investment in its new ecosystem, and should help spark some developer interest in the lead-up to Waterloo's upcoming platform refresh. If you think you've got what it takes, start thinking up those million-dollar ideas right now. Joseph Volpe contributed to this report.
Walmart's website lets you Pay With Cash, strips away the 'convenience' of shopping online
Here's an idea: order products online, and then pay using regular 'ol dollar bills. Intrigued? That's exactly what Walmart has begun offering on its website today with its new Pay With Cash service. It's no different from initiating a normal web order, save for being another -- and potentially convoluted -- option to hand over your funds and checkout. After selecting PWC, you'll receive an order confirmation, which then allots you 48 hours to print it out and present it at your local Wally World. From there, you can choose to pick up the item in store or have it shipped to your house -- in effect, stripping away some of the key conveniences of shopping online in the first place. Of course, one could likely just give their local store a call to place items on hold for a similar result, but hey, more options are always nice, right? At the very least, many without the likes of credit cards and Google Wallets might find some appreciation for this method of retail purchasing. Hit up the links below for all the details.
Japanese biometric ATM reads your palm, tells fortune
A palm reading cash machine might not tell you your fortune, but it will, at least, dispense some of it. Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank in Japan has revealed that it will introduce the nation's first ATM that lets you withdraw money just by scanning your palm. This isn't the first ATM to use extra human verification, but it claims it's the first that functions without the need for your cash card. Customers will need to pop in to a branch to provide some manual verification -- and of course a palm scan -- then you're away. The bank hopes this will help people access their cash in the event of losing your card, or a natural disaster. Great until you upgrade to one of these.
Cash rules everything around Pathfinder Online
The latest in the series of Pathfinder Online developer diaries has just recently gone live, and this time it's covering something near and dear to the heart of many gamers: money. Even if you don't play an MMO specifically for the size of your bankroll, everyone likes having cash to spend and money in the bank. The diary explains that the heart of the game's economic system will be a currency known simply as coin, which is meant to be the driving force behind the virtual economy in-place. Beyond the basics of the game's economic theory, however, the entry also reveals something of the game's business model, explaining that players will also be able to spend real money to purchase Skymetal Bits. These Bits work as microtransaction currency, running the gamut of the usual microtransaction services (skill training, cosmetic items, special content, and so forth). If you've been following the game along thus far, you'll probably want to see what information the latest entry is providing.
Tim Cook: Apple pipeline "full of stuff"
Earlier today, Apple held a conference call and announced it would start paying shareholders a dividend as well as buy back US$10 billion in stock shares. During his talk, Tim Cook wouldn't discuss iPad sales or new products, but he did hint that Apple was not done innovating. "I am extremely confident in our future. The pipeline is full of stuff. I think customers are going to be incredibly pleased with what they see coming out," Cook said. We already have a new iPad and Apple TV this year, we expect to see a refresh of the MacBook Air and Pro, possibly some new iMacs and a new iPhone later this year. What features in these products would make you "incredibly pleased?"
Tim Cook announces "record weekend" of iPad sales
Gene Munster knew that today's analyst conference call was reserved for discussion of Apple's newly announced dividend and stock repurchase plans, but he couldn't help himself -- he tried to sneak in a question about current results, specifically whether Apple would be issuing a press release about this weekend's iPad launch. Tim Cook, naturally, was prepared for this impudence, and promptly released a squadron of nanodrones to shock Munster into submission carefully guarded his answer. "We had a record weekend and we're thrilled," he said, but declined to provide any specific numbers at this time. iPad presales and in-person lines were reported as hefty around the world, but we'll have to wait a little longer to get an exact measure of how successful the Retina-equipped device launch really was.
Liveblogging Apple's 'cash balance' conference call
Apple's already told us exactly what to expect on this so-called 'cash balance' conference call, but what they hey -- we'll be liveblogging it just in case Appel slips in that "one more thing." You know, that "thing" about spending a few billion on an Apple-shaped spacecraft for kicks and giggles. The call will get underway at 9AM ET, and we'll have quotes from CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer, as well as any juicy questions from the media. March 19, 2012 9:00 AM EDT
Apple announces dividend and share repurchase program for 2012, expects to spend $45 billion over three years
Surprise, surprise -- Apple just let the cat out of its own bag. In right around a half-hour, the company will officially unwrap plans to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program commencing later this year. 'Course, analysts have been clamoring for such an announcement for quite some time, and with a stock price near $600 and some $100 billion in the bank, the outfit can clearly afford it. More specifically, Apple plans to "initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012." Granted, that's all subject to the Board of Directors giving the ole a-okay, but we highly doubt the company would issue such knowledge without a practical guarantee that everyone is on board. Additionally, the Company's Board of Directors has authorized a $10 billion share repurchase program commencing in the Apple's fiscal 2013, which begins on September 30, 2012; we're told that said program will be executed over three years, with the main goal being to "neutralize the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs."As for CEO Tim Cook's thoughts on the matter? "We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You'll see more of all of these in the future. Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program."Naturally, this all shows that Apple is supremely confident in its future, but it doesn't shed any light into potential acquisitions from a technology standpoint. Strangely enough, it was just a few days ago that Mr. Cook ended his new iPad keynote with a promise that 2012 would be chock full of unbelievable things from his company, but it sounds like the only folks celebrating this particular announcement are those with a hand in the stockpile. We don't expect to glean much more than what's given in the presser just past the break, but we'll be liveblogging the actual conference call starting at 9AM ET.
PayPal's Digital Wallet lets you decide how you empty yours (video)
PayPal has been helping us pay for those impulse purchases for a long time, but now its forthcoming Digital Wallet could see it popping up on our bank statements a whole lot more. Speaking with eBay Ink, PayPal's Sam Shrauger gave a quick demo of some of the new features. As well as the regular payment handling, you'll be able to register gift vouchers, coupons, loyalty points and store credit cards all under one account. This sounds tidy, but more interesting is the ability to change how you pay for something (say, from credit to debit card) up to seven days after the fact. If you want to keep those big purchases on the Amex, that's no problem either, with configurable rules letting you assign different cards to different spending situations, including setting your own custom payment plans. It's not all about buying either, with savings also getting the digital treatment, that's if you haven't doled it all out on gadget rarities. The service is expected to land in May, in the meantime see the new features via the videos after the break.
Sprint raising $2 billion, may throw some dough Clearwire's way
Sprint is looking to sell $2 billion in notes to raise cash, a large chunk of that likely earmarked for network upgrades. The money will come in handy too, as making the leap from WiMAX to LTE won't be cheap. Then, there's its partner Clearwire. After Sprint's board shot down a quest to snatch up MetroPCS, the carrier is even more reliant on the former WiMAX champion -- a company that just saw Google announce plans to dump its shares at a $450 million loss. According to Bloomberg, Sprint may take some of the $2 billion it plans to raise and use it to prop up Clear, which is making the transition to TD-LTE. At this point, we're beginning to think the carrier's cash infusions are the only thing keeping the wireless wholesaler going.
Google Wallet gets prepaid security fix, but 'brute-force' issue still hangs in the air
Google says it's fixed a Wallet security flaw that potentially allowed a phone thief to spend a user's prepaid balance. The ability to provision new prepaid cards had been suspended pending the update, but has now been restored. Things aren't quite back to normal in the Big G's world of mobile money, however. Users still find themselves caught between two competing arguments over an entirely different vulnerability, which involves a 'brute-force' attack on rooted devices. Google insists that this isn't a major concern, so long as Wallet users refrain from rooting, and that the system still "offers advantages over the plastic cards and folded wallets in use today." On the other hand, the company that discovered this issue -- zvelo -- has come back at Google with an equally blunt response. It acknowledges that a handset must be rooted to be vulnerable, but crucially its researchers also say that a device doesn't have to be rooted before it's stolen. In other words, they allege that a savvy thief can potentially steal a phone and then root it themselves, and they won't be happy with Wallet until it requires longer PIN number. Whichever argument sways you, it's worth bearing in mind that there's no evidence that anyone has yet managed to exploit these weaknesses for criminal purposes.
