Samsung (SSNLF) today counter-sued Apple (AAPL) in courts in Germany, Tokyo and South Korea, Bloomberg’s Jun Yang reports this morning, after Apple alleged on Monday Samsung’s “Galaxy” brand of phones and tablets infringe on Apple’s innovations in physical device design and touch-screen gestures.

On Wednesday, during Apple’s fiscal Q2 conference call with analysts, Apple’s COO Tim Cook said that Apple’s business with Samsung for a variety of components should not be harmed by the suit. “We are Samsung’s largest customer, and Samsung is a very valued component supplier to us, and I expect the strong relationship will continue,” said Cook.

And, indeed, one source quoted by Yang today seems to take the whole matter in stride. “This is strictly business,” says business professor Chang Sea Jin of National University of Singapore, as quoted by Yang. “The typical way to deal with cases like this is to counter sue. It’s not between the management of Samsung and Apple, their lawyers will work it out.”

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

During a conference call with analysts this morning to discuss Q1 results, announced this morning, Verizon Communications (VZ) management remarked that the next version of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone will be a “world phone,” capable of working with other carriers’ networks.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo, asked about the sluggishness of the company’s ARPU growth in Q1, when the iPhone was introduced — growth was just 2.2%, compared to 2.5% in Q4, remarked:

The fluctuation, I believe, will come when a new device from Apple is launched, whenever that may be, and that we will be, on the first time, on equal footing with our competitors on a new phone hitting the market, which will also be a global device.

The iPhone 4 that Verizon carries, based on the “CDMA” technology standard, does not have nearly as broad support by network operators throughout the world as does the “GSM” standard used in the AT&T model of the phone, which Apple sells in numerous countries throughout the world.

Apple COO Tim Cook said during Apple’s conference call last night that Apple had signed only two other carriers in the world to use the CDMA iPhone, SK Telecom in South Korea, and Saudia Arabia’s Saudi Telecom. Cook said Apple was considering other carriers to whom it might distribute the CDMA unit. But a world phone at Verizon, presumably using the 4G standard dubbed “Long Term Evolution,” would allow Verizon to sell a phone that can roam on networks in Europe and other parts of the world just as AT&T’s model does.

That would presumably be of special interest given that Vodafone (VOD) in Europe owns a stake in Verizon’s wireless business.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Citi Profit Falls 32 Percent (Reuters, Citi)
Citigroup’s first-quarter profit fell 32 percent as the bank lost less money on bad loans but struggled to grow its business. The bank said this morning it earned $3.0 billion, or 10 cents per share. That compared with $4.4 billion, or 15 cents per share, a year earlier.

Geithner Says GOP Prepared To Lift Debt Limit (WSJ)
In interviews aired on the Sunday talk shows, Mr. Geithner said House Speaker John Boehner and other senior Republicans told President Barack Obama in discussions last week that they were aware of the risk of a credit default and were open to lifting the limit even in the absence of a comprehensive deal to slash the country’s debt load.

Greenspan Says US Should Let Bush-Era Tax Cuts Expire (Bloomberg)
We should “allow the Bush tax cuts to expire,” Greenspan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” today, calling the economic crisis “imminent and dire.” We should “put the rates back to where they were during the Clinton administration,” he said.

Hedge Funds Bounce Back (WSJ)
Total hedge-fund assets are approaching $2 trillion and are soon expected to surpass their peak in early 2008, according to industry analysts. Even start-ups and smaller funds, which were shunned by many investors in the wake of the crisis, are benefiting.

Emerging Nations Reject Capital Plan (WSJ)
The IMF’s plan would have encouraged nations to treat capital controls as a last resort, after they had first tried use other tools, such as policies on interest rates, currency values and government budgets. But ministers of developing economies resisted vehemently, viewing the proposal as an effort by advanced economies to hamstring their policies. Brazil, Turkey, South Korea and several other developing countries have adopted capital controls over the past year to limit surging inflows. “We oppose any guidelines, frameworks or ‘codes of conduct’ that attempt to constrain, directly or indirectly, policy responses of countries facing surges in volatile capital inflows,” Brazil’s finance minister, Guido Mantega, told the IMF’s steering-committee meeting.

Robot Does Hazardous Duty At Nuclear Plant (WSJ)
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said Sunday that the PackBot, a small robot that scoots around on tank-like treads, would monitor radiation and oxygen levels to find out whether conditions were safe enough to allow human workers to go in to try to bring the nuclear crisis at the plant under control.

FDIC Eyes Tougher Rules For Big Banks (FT)
Sheila Bair warned that regulators now had the authority to demand that US banks break themselves into smaller parts — and it “could and should be used.”

Is Sitting Lethal? (NYT)
Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives…Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”

Ferrari Should Be Valued at $7.3 Billion in IPO, Marchionne Says (Bloomberg)
Fiat SpA Chief Executive Officer Sergio Marchionne said he’s told bankers pushing him to pursue an initial public offering of Ferrari that the division may be worth more than 5 billion euros ($7.3 billion).

Greece Denies Restructuring Plan As Traders Raise Bet Default (Bloomberg)
“Restructuring is not an issue we’re discussing,” Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said in an April 16 interview in Washington. “The pain and the cost” of doing so would be greater than repaying lenders, he told reporters the same day.

Greek Default Would Mean Pain All-Around (WSJ)
Economists at the Brussels think tank Bruegel calculate that roughly 20% of Greece’s debt at the end of 2010 was held by domestic banks. They are in difficult straits, and forcing losses on them may simply require the country’s rescuers to come up with more money to help.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. Blames iPad For American Unemployment (HP)
On Friday, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. addressed the United States’s current unemployment crisis and claimed the iPad was “probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs.” Jackson, himself an iPad owner, expanded on his statement by pointing to the recent bankruptcy of Borders Books. “Why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes and Noble? Just buy an iPad and download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine,” the Congressman said.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Think you’re the only one who likes to drizzle the sugary goodness on your breakfast food? Think again!

In a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of town, some 40 kilometres southwest of Quebec City, there is a stash of maple syrup. A 6.3-million-kilogram stash of maple syrup, to be exact. About 60 kilometres further south, another 1.4-million-kilogram cache is squirrelled away in Plessisville, a town proclaimed as the World Maple Capital in 1976. Together, these stockpiles are officially called the International Strategic Reserve, which works like a Fort Knox for Canada’s most-cherished breakfast condiment – a massive arsenal of sweet, liquid gold ready to be deployed to feed a rise in global demand while maintaining price stability.

It’s the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers’ way of preparing for what it expects to be a banner year for exports to Asia due to surging demand from countries like Japan, China and South Korea…though Japan is facing a painful recovery from the tsunami and earthquakes that shook the country last month, the country’s demand for Canadian maple syrup is unlikely to take a hit, said Derek Burleton, deputy chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank.

“People need to eat, right? It’s that standard cliché. So we wouldn’t expect a major impact on the maple syrup industry as a result of the Japanese crisis,” Mr. Burleton said.

[Globe And Mail]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

T-Mobile just unveiled its LG G2x super phone, a smartphone with good computing performance and an Nvidia Tegra Zone app that connects users to high-quality games.

South Korea’s LG makes the phone, which is built for 4G speeds and has a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen display. With an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip as its brain, the phone is another example of a new class of devices that have the capabilities of a phone and the brawny power of a computer. These super phones could be the generation of devices that get a lot of people to do computing on their phones first, rather than on their laptops or desktops.

That’s the pitch, anyway. The LG G2x has front and rear-facing cameras and full 1080p high-definition capture and playback. Those are features of the Nvidia Tegra 2 chip, which is being designed into a number of other smartphones and tablets such as the Motorola Xoom and the Motorola Atrix.

The G2x is the first super phone to come preloaded with Nvidia’s Tegra Zone app, a free app on the Android Market that connects mobile gamers to high-quality HD games for Tegra devices. Games on the Tegra Zone include high-end titles with 3D graphics such as Dungeon Defenders: First Wave Deluxe HD, which uses the Unreal Engine 3 for 3D graphics. Other games include Samurai II: Vengeance, Fruit Ninja THD, Vendetta Online and Galaxy on Fire 2 HD. Nvidia is collecting premium Android games with impressive graphics and smoother game play.

The G2x and its companion tablet, the G-Slate, run on T-Mobile’s 4G network, which can transfer data at higher speeds than older 3G networks. Availability and pricing will be disclosed later.

The companies disclosed the app at the International CTIA Wireless 2011 show in Orlando, Fla.

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to the top 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. Request an invitation.

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

G-20 Delays Imbalance Deal (WSJ)
The U.S. and G-20 host South Korea ran into strong opposition from such exporting powers as China and Germany to a proposal to quantify limits on current-account surpluses and deficits. At the heart of the controversy are fundamental issues of how countries would need to restructure their economies. “These are not going to be easy issues to resolve,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “But I think we’ve got everyone talking the same language, everyone understanding longer-term what has to be done.”

Morgan Stanley May Shed Quantitative Trading Unit (NYT)
For nearly two decades, the mathematical whiz Peter Muller and his secretive band of traders have helped power Morgan Stanley to bigger profits. But now Morgan Stanley and Mr.Muller are in advanced talks about splitting up. Under the plan being discussed, Morgan Stanley would spin off Mr. Muller’s unit, called Process Driven Trading, and keep a minority stake. The Process Driven Trading unit generated an estimated $4 billion in profits in the 10 years through 2006, according to Scott Patterson’s book, “The Quants.” [Since 1992] Mr.Muller stocked the group with Ph.D.’s and housed them on their own floor, away from the hurly-burly excitement of Morgan Stanley’s mammoth stock trading floor. To stimulate productivity and cerebral thinking, he had ceiling lights installed that changed color every 15 seconds.

Even though he and his unit were minting money, Mr.Muller quit working full-time for Morgan Stanley in 2001, saying, according to a short biography on his Web site, that he realized he “can no longer find happiness in the corporate world.” Over the next several years, he traveled to Bhutan, New Zealand and Hawaii, hiking and kayaking, with his five-pound keyboard in tow. He took up yoga and began writing crossword puzzles, many of which appeared in The New York Times and other newspapers. He indulged his love of music, writing songs, releasing two albums under his own label and playing his guitar on the streets of Barcelona and in New York City subways. He also pursued his passion for poker, a favorite pastime of quantitative traders. He played in a few tournaments on the World Poker Tour. In his first tournament he came in fourth and took home nearly $100,000. In late 2006, Muller returned full time to Morgan Stanley.

Obama Assails China on Trade, Monetary Policy (AP)
“It wasn’t any easier to talk about currency when I was first elected and my poll numbers were at 65 percent,” Obama argued at the close of the G20 summit, after bluntly accusing Beijing of undervaluing its currency.

Exotic Cars Go ‘Green’ At $100,000 And Up (WSJ)
Next year, Volkswagen AG’s Bentley will sell its Continental GT Coupe with an optional V8 engine it says will emit up to 40% less carbon dioxide than the coupe’s standard 12-cylinder motor. Bentley already is in the midst of making all of its new models able to use ethanol fuel by 2012. Porsche AG plans to sell a plug-in hybrid car called the 918 Spyder that it says will yield up to 78 miles per gallon. Expected to arrive as early as 2013, it could carry a price tag close to €500,000 ($682,260), executives at the German car maker estimate. Porsche said it has already received roughly 2,300 informal order pledges from would-be customers.

Mizuho To Buy $500 Million BlackRock Stake (WSJ)
Mizuho Financial Group Inc. said Friday it will pay $500 million for a 2% stake in BlackRock, a deal designed to help Japan’s second-largest bank by assets ramp up its asset-management operations.

Private banks keep hiring as rich get richer (Reuters)
Hiring sprees this year have taken some firms beyond their pre-crisis staffing levels, as banks believe growth in Asia, and robust revenues elsewhere, will support the expansion. Citi for instance plans to add between 100 and 200 senior staff to its private bank over the next few years, Dena Brumpton, chief operating officer at its private bank, told Reuters.

Seeking Guidance on Dodd-Frank’s Diversity Clause (Dealbook)
As Wall Street scrambles to comply with the regulations of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, one little-noticed provision has executives scratching their heads. The statute, included in Section 342 of the bill, creates 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion at the various regulatory agencies, including the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the 12 Federal Reserve banks and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Once established, the offices are charged with monitoring the diversity at the agencies as well as at any contractors or subcontractors, including law firms, accounting firms and investment banks. These contracts, totaling in the billions a year, are typically awarded to private firms for services like debt issuances and sales of government assets, as well as more general advisory services. Section 342 was proposed by Representative Maxine Waters.

Barclays to Reimburse Gay Workers for Taxes on U.S. Benefits (Bloomberg)
The aim is to offset the tax on benefits for same-sex partners that doesn’t apply to spouses in heterosexual marriages because same-sex partnerships aren’t recognized as marriages under U.S. law, the London-based bank said today in a statement.

Moscow vows revenge on top double agent (FT)
A Russian official said: “We know who he is and where he is. Do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already.” The comment was an apparent reference to Ramón Mercader, the Soviet-picked assassin who in 1940 murdered Leon Trotsky, the exiled communist leader, with an ice pick in Mexico. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, had alluded to the existence of a mole within the SVR espionage agency after a meeting with the 10 returned spies, who were traded in July for four accused US and British agents in Russia. “This was the result of treason and traitors always meet a bad end,” Mr Putin said. “The special services live by their own laws and everyone knows what these laws are.”

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Fed Easing Seen As Ineffective By 75% In Global Poll Favoring ECB (Bloomberg)
Global investors doubt the Federal Reserve’s plan to buy more Treasury securities will boost the U.S. economy or bring down unemployment and say they believe the government is pursuing a weak-dollar policy, a poll shows. Three-quarters of those surveyed say the central bank’s securities purchases — or quantitative easing — will have little or no effect on joblessness, according to the latest quarterly Bloomberg Global Poll of 1,030 investors, analysts and traders who are Bloomberg subscribers. More than half say the Fed’s action won’t increase U.S. growth over the next year. Lower unemployment “is a long way off,” Jonathan Mackay, a poll participant and senior fixed-income strategist for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC in New York, said in an e-mail. Global investors do think the Fed will have some success in lifting inflation, another goal. Half expect inflation to rise modestly as a result of the central bank’s actions. One in five say the Fed will get more than it’s hoping for and that inflation will increase to dangerous levels.

EU ‘Ready To Help’ Amid Bond Sell-Off (WSJ)
“We have all the necessary instruments,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told reporters in South Korea, where he was attending the summit of the Group of 20 industrialized and emerging nations. “The EU is ready to support Ireland.” He declined to speculate on whether the EU’s new €440 billion sovereign rescue fund would be needed.

Jeremy Grantham: Be In Cash, Wait For Stocks To Fall (CNBC)
“Cash has a virtue that people don’t appreciate fully, and that is its ‘optionality,’ ” said Grantham, who is chairman of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, a Boston-based asset management firm, and a respected voice in the financial world. “If anything crashes and burns in value—say the US stock market—if you have no resources, it doesn’t help you,” he explained. “If the bond market crashes, and you have not resources, it doesn’t help you. What cash is is an available resource.”

Talks With Banks Begin for Troubled Assets (NYT)
“You’re going to see over the next five years, more financial asset liquidations than you’ve seen in the sum total of the last 100 years,” said Peter L. Briger Jr., who oversees $12.7 billion of credit-related private equity and hedge fund investments as co-chairman of the Fortress Investment Group. “If you’re in the market for financial services garbage collection, there’s plenty to do right now.”

Geithner: We Won’t Weaken The Dollar To Spur Growth (Reuters)
“The U.S. will never do that,” Geithner said in response to a suggestion by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan that Washington was pursuing a policy of weakening the dollar. “We will never seek to weaken our currency as a tool to gain competitive advantage or to grow the economy,” he said, adding that it was “not an effective strategy” for any country.

G-20 Nations Wrangle Over Strengthening Vow on Currencies (Bloomberg)
Obama and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao spent “the bulk” of an 80-minute meeting in Seoul discussing exchange rates before sitting down with other leaders to begin their summit tonight. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he’s “not so sure” an agreement will be reached by the end of proceedings in the South Korean capital tomorrow.

Deficit Panel Pushes Cuts (WSJ)
The preliminary plan in its current form would end or cap a wide range of breaks relied on by the middle class—including the deduction for home-mortgage interest. It would tax capital gains and dividends at the higher rates now levied on wage income. To compensate, one version of the plan would dramatically lower and simplify individual rates, to 9%, 15% and 24%. For businesses, the controversial plan would significantly lower the corporate tax rate—from a current top rate of 35% to as low as 26%—but also eliminate a number of deductions. It would make permanent the research and development tax credit.

RBC Expands Hong Kong Presence (WSJ)
The bank has doubled the size of its Hong Kong trading floor, a top executive at its investment banking arm said, the latest step in an expansion by Canada’s largest bank by assets outside of its home market. Earlier this week RBC said it had acquired 50 professionals from Fortis Wealth Management Hong Kong Ltd. Last month RBC bought British fund manager BlueBay Asset Management for £963 million ($1.55 billion).

Blackstone’s Schwarzman Renews Criticism of Banking Rules (Dealbook)
“When you have an access that goes up and down” and “it’s money good in any case,” he said, “to have that market, sometimes it’s not a deep market, crash that asset, and destroy the capital of the banking system and create a panic, seems to me to be on its face completely unwise, but we’re still doing it.”

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Research In Motion (RIMM) plans to start selling its BlackBerry Playbook tablet computer in the first quarter, with price under $500, Bloomberg reports.
“The product will be very competitively priced,” Co-CEO Jim Balsillie told the wire service in an interview in Seoul, South Korea, while declining to be more specific. The [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

NHN, which operates South Korea’s largest Internet search engine, will stop using Yahoo (YHOO) online search ad services and instead use its own technology, Bloomberg reports.
The news wire says NHN will use its in-house Click Choice service for search ads after its deal with Yahoo’s Overture unit expires in the [...]

Article courtesy of BARRONS.com: Tech Trader Daily

Hewlett-Packard has teamed up with Hynix Semiconductor to make a new kind of fundamental circuit for semiconductor chips. The alliance is a sign that HP’s breakthrough designs for memory circuits could see the light of day as finished products in the form of new memory chips.

The two companies will jointly develop the materials and manufacturing process to create the memristor, which could prove to be very useful in future memory chips. HP Labs designed the memristor after years of research. South Korea’s Hynix is one of the world’s biggest memory chip manufacturers.

Their name for the new kind of chip is ReRAM, short for Resistive Random Access Memory. This kind of memory is non-volatile, storing data while the power is on or off. It has low power consumption and could potentially replace flash memory, which is a huge multibillion-dollar market today. Flash is used in everything from cell phones to music players.

Memristance is a property of an electronic component within a silicon chip. If a charge flows in one direction through a circuit, the resistance of that component will increase. If the charge flows the other way, the resistance will decrease. If the flow is stopped, the component will remember the last resistance that it had. When the flow starts again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was less active. Since it is a fundamental circuit, it gives chip designers more options as they face the increasingly difficult task of designing chips with tiny dimensions.

Eventually, memristor-based processors might replace the chips in the smart display screens found in electronic book readers, such as the Amazon Kindle. Or they could serve as an ‘artificial synapse’ in building artificial intelligence and neural computers that mimic the functions of the brain. ReRAM chips could potentially be a universal storage medium, replacing not only flash but hard drives and dynamic random access memory (DRAMs).

The memristor name is short for memory resistor, which was postulated as the fourth basic electronic circuit (in addition to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor) by professor Leon Chua at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971. HP took Chua’s idea and, in 2006, created the first working memristor chips. Earlier this year, HP also said that it had figured out how to get memristor chips to handle processing functions, much like a PC microprocessor. One day, if it pans out, the technology might be used to get a single chip to perform computation and store data at the same time.

“The memristor has storage capacity abilities many times greater than what competing technologies offer,” said S.W. Park, executive president and chief technology officer at Hynix. By adopting HP’s memristor technology we can deliver new, energy-efficient products to our customers more quickly.”

Stan Williams senior fellow at HP and director of the lab that created the memristor, said, “This agreement brings together HP’s core intellectual property and a first-rate supplier with the capacity to bring this innovation to market in world-class memory on a mass scale. ”

In another development, HP and Rice University researchers said they had succeeded in crafting reliable small digital switches on a scale that could allow chip miniaturization to continue unabated in the coming years. As reported in the journal Nano Letters, the researchers used silicon oxide technology to make the smaller switches. That technology is already in common use in chip making, so commercializing that breakthrough will be easier.

Tags: memristor

Companies: Hewlett Packard, Hp, Hynix

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More