Month: November 2016

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Samsung buys auto and audio giant Harman for $8 billion

Samsung has acquired Harman International Industries, an auto parts supplier best known by consumers for its Harman Kardon audio division. The $8 billion, all-cash deal is the largest in Samsung’s history, and an unusual move for a company that normally develops tech in-house. It instantly makes Samsung a much bigger player in the connected and autonomous vehicle industry dominated by Google, Apple and automakers like Tesla, GM and Volvo.

Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal says that Samsung’s displays, connectivity and processing tech is a good fit with his firm’s automotive products. "Samsung is an ideal partner for Harman and this transaction will provide tremendous benefits to our automotive customers," he said in a press release. Samsung Vice Chair Oh-Hyun Kwon added that Harman has an "unmatched automotive order pipeline" and a "strong foundation for Samsung to grow our automotive platform."

Samsung’s largest previous acquisition was a deal to buy AST for $840 million back in the ’90s. If you don’t remember AST, that’s because Samsung was forced to close the division shortly after purchasing it. That failure is the main reason Samsung decided to do its own research rather acquiring companies to gain new technology.

A Sprint Corp. Store Ahead Of Earnings Figures

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Samsung paid a 28 percent premium over Harman’s current share price, but Harman has a projected order backlog of $24 billion, according to the WSJ. While the California-based firm is known for audio products like Harman Kardon, JBL and dbx, about two-thirds of its sales come from the auto industry. The company builds infotainment, connected safety, security and telematics devices and services used in over 30 million vehicles built by BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen and other automakers.

Samsung reportedly put a task force together to figure out how to break into the automotive market and decided it would take too long to do it internally. It chose to go the acquisition route instead, and reportedly started talks with Harman in the summer. Samsung has cash reserves of around $70 billion and "expects to use cash on hand to fund the transaction." The deal should close in mid-2017.

Via: WSJ

Source: Samsung

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This HIV Test Fits on a USB Drive

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(Credit: Imperial College London/DNA Electronics)

A new HIV test is as simple as plugging a USB drive into a computer.

Scientists from London’s Imperial College and a private genomics analysis company created a device that uses pH to test for the HIV-1 virus and communicates the results to a USB stick. The test requires only a drop of blood and the researchers say that it is simple and cost-effective to manufacture, offering a low-cost option for the millions of HIV-positive individuals who must monitor the effectiveness of their treatment regimes.

Test On A Stick

The test uses a sensor to measure changes in acidity levels and a chip to communicate that information to the USB. When the sensor heats up blood containing the HIV virus hydrogen ions are produced, altering the acidity of the sample in a specific way. The sensor measures this change and passes it along. The whole process takes less than half an hour, and yields a success rate of 95 percent in the lab. The success rate when the test was actually applied on the stick was 88 percent. The device fits neatly atop the USB stick, requires no external power sources, and is easily disposable. The researchers published their results Thursday in Scientific Reports.

Antiretroviral drug therapies are largely successful in controlling HIV infections, but sometimes the virus will mutate, rendering the drugs ineffective. When this happens, patients and doctors need to know as soon as possible, both to preserve the patients’ health and prevent the spread of drug-resistant strains of the disease. For this reason, regular tests are recommended for patients with HIV.

Small and Accurate

Current HIV tests are either not reliable enough or difficult to perform, especially for patients in developing countries. Home test kits can produce results in about 20 minutes, but some tests have an error rate of almost 10 percent, requiring follow-up tests. Lab tests are more accurate, but are expensive to perform, require access to healthcare and take several days to return results. For those living in rural villages in poor areas, getting these kinds of tests is difficult.

The researchers say that more work needs to be done to prepare their device for field use, including making the device more accurate, but that it has the potential to be used to detect multiple viruses in addition to HIV.

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Spotify is writing massive amounts of junk data to storage drives

Enlarge /

The SSD module is still removable, still proprietary.

For almost five months—possibly longer—the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users’ storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren’t uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn’t storing any songs locally.

The behavior poses an unnecessary burden on users’ storage devices, particularly solid state drives, which come with a finite amount of write capacity. Continuously writing hundreds of gigabytes of needless data to a drive every day for months or years on end has the potential to cause an SSD to die years earlier than it otherwise would. And yet, Spotify apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux have engaged in this data assault since at least the middle of June, when multiple users reported the problem in the company’s official support forum.

“This is a *major* bug that currently affects thousands of users,” Spotify user Paul Miller told Ars. “If for example, Castor Oil lowered your engine’s life expectancy by five to 10 years, I imagine most users would want to know, and that fact *should* be reported on.”

Three Ars reporters who ran Spotify on Macs and PCs had no trouble reproducing the problem reported not only in the above-mentioned Spotify forum but also on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters’ machines, even when the app was idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB.

Spotify officials hadn’t responded to Ars questions more than two days after they were sent. According to comments left in the Spotify forum in the past 24 hours, the bug has been fixed in version 1.0.42, which is in the process of being rolled out. The update remains unavailable to many users, this reporter included. And that means Spotify’s drive-assaulting behavior continues unabated for many.

According to posts in the Spotify forum (see pages here and here, for instance), the massive data writes are tied to one or more database files with titles that include the string Mercury.db. Users have proposed several manual techniques that are supposed to correct or mitigate the problem, but the most preferable solution is for Spotify developers to fix this bug and to make the update available to all users immediately. The performance of millions of storage drives may count on it.

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AdultFriendFinder hacked: 400 million accounts exposed

AdultFriendFinder has been hacked, revealing the account details of more than 400 million people who would undoubtedly prefer to keep their identities private on the “world’s largest sex and swinger community” site.

The hacked database—which appears to be one of the largest ever single data breaches in history—apparently contains account details for numerous adult properties belonging to the California-based Friend Finder Network, and includes customers’ e-mail addresses, IP addresses last used to log-in to the site, and passwords.

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The jaw-dropping numbers behind China’s Singles Day

China’s Singles Day has smashed records yet again.

The total value of orders reported by e-commerce giant Alibaba during this year’s online shopping bonanza hit $17.8 billion, easily topping the previous record of $14.3 billion set in 2015. That’s more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

Here are some of the other jaw-dropping numbers from the online shopping festival:

$1 billion

alibaba singles day five minutes

In just the first five minutes of this year’s festival, crazed shoppers spent more than $1 billion.

Related: World’s biggest shopping bonanza sets new record

115 million

alibaba singles day smartphones

In 2015, more than 115 million shoppers placed orders with Alibaba on Singles Day.

80%

Alibaba and rival e-commerce site JD.com (JD) said more than 80% of Single Day transactions took place on a mobile phone this year.

16,000

alibaba singles day brands

Alibaba launched its Singles Day sale in 2009 with 27 merchants. Now more than 16,000 brands participate. Burberry (BBRYF), Apple (AAPL, Tech30) and Victoria’s Secret made their debut this year, joining companies like Lululemon (LULU) and Gap (GPS).

650 million

alibaba singles day shipping

Online shopping is nothing without a strong logistics network that can deliver packages to customers.

This year, Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao Network will use more than 1.7 million delivery personnel to pack and ship the 650 million delivery orders that were placed during the 24-hour buy fest.

100 million

alibaba singles day tv

More than 100 million viewers tuned into a 24-hour live show tied to the shopping festival in 2015. This year, Alibaba prompted people watching the show to open the company’s app and shake their phones to nab discounts and deals.

One

alibaba singles day kobe

Ahead of the midnight start, Alibaba broadcast a three-hour gala that was part variety show, part MTV music awards. Former NBA star Kobe Bryant was this year’s headliner, after singer Katy Perry canceled at the last minute citing a family emergency.

CNNMoney (Shenzhen, China) First published November 11, 2016: 7:37 AM ET

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The 10 most expensive colleges this year

For the second year in a row, this small liberal arts school is the most expensive college in the U.S. when you account for the published “sticker price” of tuition, fees, room and board.

But it could be worth the cost. All students earn degrees in either a science, tech, engineering or math field and are known for landing high-paying jobs at companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft as soon as they graduate.

And like most colleges, a lot of students aren’t footing the whole bill because they receive scholarships and grants from the school, state and federal government. At Harvey Mudd, about 70% of students are paying less than the sticker price.

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Facebook decides that many of us are dead

If you’re reading this, you’re probably not dead. But Facebook might think you are.

Facebook (FB, Tech30) notified some users on Friday that they are deceased, according to widespread reports across social media.

Many people are seeing a banner on certain profiles that reads: “We hope people who love [Mark] will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate his life.”

Not all profiles were affected — I’m still alive according to my pulse and Facebook. But at one point, even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was declared dead by his own social network.

It’s unclear what’s causing the mass obituaries, but it’s likely a bug in Facebook’s system.

The company did not immediately return a request for comment.

CNNMoney (San Francisco) First published November 11, 2016: 4:04 PM ET

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