Good morning
The headlines:
- Samsung is making a noise about inadmissable evidence.
Link: third time wasn’t a charm.
Samsung, for some time, has been trying to put design images into evidence that show that Samsung was developing a phone in 2006 that looked somewhat similar to the iPhone (a 2007 creation).
They keep trying, the judge keeps denying. This is the third time that the Samsung folk have tried to sneak the images in as “attachments” to admissable evidence. Tsk.
And, of course, it may not be admissable in the court room – but now everyone is talking about it, which means that the international public jury has really been presented with the “evidence”.
Observation though: Apple may have released the iPhone in 2007, but even the briefest glance at Wikipedia shows that development of the iPhone began in 2005 – well before the supposed Samsung design date. Hardly conclusive evidence then that “would have established beyond doubt that Samsung did not copy the iPhone design”.
- The big gay Chick-fil-A wedding.
Link: everyone needs to calm down.
Okay – so the news article is actually everyone going “Oh – the executive guys at Chick-fil-A – we’ve been ignoring them in the Forbes 500 list!!” Mainly because the scandal surrounding the company of late has been drawing attention.
So Chick-fil-A – they’re all evangelical morals and WWJD about work on a Sunday. And they’ve been wildly successful.
Except that recently, Dan Cathy has come out against gay marriage; which, you know, has riled the activists. So in a tit-for-tat move, the LGBT community and its supporters have called for a boycott of Chick-fil-A*.
And then this happened:
That’s not very good now, is it. And then they lost the endorsement of the muppets**.Ever since, the Chick-fil-A executives have been scrambling to leave the politics to the politicians.
Probably a little exercise in practical wisdom there.
*Tit-for-tat because last month, Oreo published an advert in support of Gay Pride. The evangelicals were horrified, and called for a boycott of Oreo biscuits. It makes me laugh.
**The real muppets, not the Goldman Sachs clients.
- Microsoft phasing out hotmail.
Link: ahem – that was phased out a long long time ago.
Microsoft is planning to introduce an online version of Microsoft Outlook to compete with gmail. And they’re going to phase out hotmail to do so.
And I was like: who still uses hotmail?
Until Bloomberg pointed out that Hotmail got more unique visits than either Gmail or Yahoo mail in June 2012.
So, it’s actually quite big news then!
- Facebook drops to a new low.
Link: bang bang, my
babyfully-grown teenager shot me down.Down to $21.71.
It’s what happens when you arrive on the scene doing less growing that anticipated.
- UBS and the facebook losses.
Link: the assignation of blame.
UBS announced that its quarterly profit dropped by 58% “in part” because of over $350 million worth of losses in the Facebook IPO.
That is: in the botch-up of the NASDAQ ordering system; where the orders weren’t confirmed so the traders kept plugging in new ones until they were suddenly like “OMG – you mean ALL those trades went through?!”
Read about the original NASDAQ crisis here.
- Romney applauds Poland.
Link: the model of free enterprise.
He says that Europe should take key notes from them about how to solve a debt crisis.
He should have said that America could take a few key notes as well.
My question: what is Romney doing in Poland?
- Deutsche admits to some Libor irregularities.
Link: one small admission at a time.
“A limited number of employees, acting on their own initiative, engaged in conduct that falls short of the Bank’s standards, and action has been taken accordingly”.
I assume that said employees formed part of the 1,900 jobs that Deutsche are getting rid of?
That’s all for now.
Have a good day.
