A Window Into A Driverless Future: From Science Fiction To Reality

This article was first published by Seeking Alpha as Editor’s Pick on January 5, 2015

By Sarfaraz A. Khan. Research Asst. Adnan Mushtaq

Self-driving cars have captured the imagination of Hollywood for decades, but it could become a reality in the next five years, said Karl Brauer, senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book's KBB.com, in an email interview.

Samsung Seeking Growth in the Booming Tech 'Wearables' Market

This article was originally published  by TheStreet on July 17, 2014.

By Sarfaraz A. Khan

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Samsung (SSNLF_) -- the South Korean electronics giant that makes Galaxy, one of the world's most popular smartphones -- is looking to solidify its foothold in the market of wearable devices by teaming up with apparel and accessories maker Under Armour (UA_) .

South Korea's Yonhap news agency has reported that Lee Jay-yong, vice chairman of Samsung's electronics division and the heir apparent to the top job, met with Under Armour founder and CEO Kelvin Plank earlier this month. The meeting could be a response to the long-standing partnership between Samsung's biggest rival, Apple (AAPL_), and Under Amour competitor Nike (NKE_).

According to research firm IDC, the wearables market is expected to grow almost 80% per year through 2018. Samsung already dominates the smartwatch marketplace and is looking to expand beyond wrist-wearables. 

Google, Facebook Battle Over Exploding Online Video Ad Revenue

This article was originally published by TheStreet on July 7, 2014

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The online video advertisement market is growing fast -- and two of the biggest players in the digital ad marketplace, Google (GOOG_) (GOOGL_) and Facebook(FB_), want to be at the center of it all.

Last month, Google acquired the eight-year old video ad technology company mDialog for an undisclosed price. A few weeks later, on Wednesday, Facebook announced the acquisition of a seven-year old video-ad company LiveRail.

Both companies are trying to capitalize on the rise of the online video ad industry which could post higher growth rates than the traditional television ad market, according to Paul Ritter, chief research officer at Interactive Media Strategies.

Facebook: LiveRail Acquisition Is A Small Part Of A Bigger Trend

This article was originally published by Seeking Alpha on July 3, 2014

By Sarfaraz A. Khan.
 

Summary: Facebook has recently announced the acquisition of LiveRail for reportedly between $400mn and $500Mn.LiveRail is one of the biggest players in the online video space that offers its unique real time bidding platform ecosystem. This is part of a bigger trend fueled by the growth in advertising spending on online videos, as pointed out by online video research analyst Paul Ritter.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it has decided to acquire a seven-year-old video-ad company LiveRail in an effort to increase its foothold in the video ad business. Facebook did not disclose the terms of the deal but according to TechCrunch, the start-up came with a price tag of between $400 million and $500 million.

LiveRail calls itself the "leading monetization platform for publishers." The company helps its clients in selling their video ad inventory. Some of its leading customers include Univision, Major League Baseball (mlb.com), PBS, Condé Nast Digital, CBS Interactive and ABC Family.

Overall, the company has hundreds of customers and delivers more than 7 billion video ads per month. According to ComScore, in May 2014, LiveRail's video ads reached out to 37.2% of Americans, making LiveRail the third biggest player in the industry, ahead of AOL and Google and behind BrightRoll and Specific Media.

LiveRail's biggest strength is its real time bidding platform ecosystem through, which it selects the best-priced ads for marketers from the video ad inventory of its publishers. The company also offers …. Read full article at Seeking Alpha

 

Samsung Takes Aim At Google's Revenues

This article was originally published by Seeking Alpha on June 20, 2014.

By Sarfaraz A. Khan. Research Asst. Ali Ilahi

Summary: Samsung has played a crucial role in making Google’s Android the world’s most popular mobile platform.Samsung has finally launched its highly anticipated Tizen based smartphone, the first of its kind, in a bid to reduce its reliance on Android.This, however, is not just about one smartphone as Samsung’s move can have far reaching implications.
 
Samsung (OTC:SSNLF) (OTC:SSNGY) has been looking for an alternative to Google's (GOOG) (GOOGL) Android for the last couple of years. It has been working with Intel (INTC) to develop Tizen, a Linux- based open source operating system that, so far, has not gained any meaningful foothold in the industry.

Even Without Google, DigitalGlobe Will Continue to Grow

This article was originally published by TheStreet on June 13, 2014

By Sarfaraz A. Khan. Research Asst. Daniel L. 

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Google (GOOG) will be able to generate the images for Google Maps itself, thanks to the acquisition it announced this week. That should be bad news for DigitalGlobe (DGI) which supplies pictures for Google Maps, right? Wrong.

Google is not one of DigitalGlobe's major customers. The company gets more than 80% of its revenue from government agencies.

For the current year, DigitalGlobe has forecast revenue growth of between 3% and 8% from 2013. The company is aiming for Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margins of at least 50% in the fourth quarter, up from 39.4% in the first quarter.

Undervalued Apple Has 22.5% Upside Potential

This article was originally published by GuruFocus

By Sarfaraz A. Khan, Research Assistant: Gohar Yousuf

March 14, 2014

The shares of the world’s biggest technology company Apple Inc. (AAPL) are down 6% this year due to the disappointing guidance for the current quarter. Nonetheless, Apple is still confident about its future, and so is Carl Icahn (Trades, Portfolio) who now owns 1% of the company.

Its previous earnings alone caused a 7.25% drop in share prices on Jan. 27 as the shareholders were disappointed by the company’s lackluster guidance for the current quarter. Subsequently, Apple purchased around $14 billion of its stock which gave some confidence to investors. Apple’s shares however, have still not fully recovered and are still down 3.35% post-earnings.

With the recent buyback, Apple has now purchased a record $40 billion shares in just around 12 months amid pressure from Carl Icahn (Trades, Portfolio). The new buyback was one of the main reasons why Icahn dropped his $50 billion buyback proposal. The activist investor has purchased additional shares of the smartphone maker. According to data provided byGuruFocus, Icahn now owns $4.73 billion worth of shares, or 1% of the company.

Biggest Tech Company

As mentioned earlier, Apple is the biggest technology company on the planet in terms of market capitalization. On the other hand, in terms of enterprise value, Google (GOOG) is ahead of Apple.

Apple’s current market cap is $470.76 billion, whereas Google has a market cap of $404 billion. Considering that Apple has around $141 billion in net cash while Google has … read full article at GuruFocus
 

Google’s Move Will Spark a New Price War

Google (GOOG) has ramped up the competition in cloud computing through the announcement of the general availability of Compute Engine. Google’s Compute Engine was initially launched about one and a half years ago but it was only available to some of its clients. With this push with cloud computing, Google seems intent on drawing large corporate customers as it aims to broaden its revenue base in the long run. Through its powerful brand, aggressive pricing and attractive features, Google believes that it will be able to emerge as a new major player in this market.

Google, however, has a long way to go before it becomes a real threat to the total dominance of Amazon (AMZN). The Compute Engine comes with agreement of performance, which guarantees that through this, the high volume workload will continue working 99.95% of the time, which is significantly above what is generally considered as the industry standard. In addition to that, the company has also cut the prices of its most popular Standard Instances, where clients can use Google’s computing power, by 10% in all regions. Moreover, the prices for Persistence Disks service have also been reduced by a massive 60% per gigabyte.

Besides the price cuts, Google has also added some new features to lure customers such as …. read full article at GuruFocus

Tablet Wars: Changing Industry Dynamics Catch up With Microsoft

From The Motley Fool

One of the world’s leading tech companies, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), recently released quarterly results that disappointed investors. The company missed both top- and bottom-line estimates on the back of weakness in the global PC market and poor sales of its flagship tablet computer. The PC market has been in recession for more than a couple of years, but Microsoft was too late to react. It is now trying to make some room for itself in a market dominated by Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPads and Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android.

Earnings miss

Microsoft reported income of $0.59 per share, as opposed to a loss of $0.06 per share in the same quarter last year, which came on the back of a $6 billion write-down. During this period, its revenue rose 10% to $19.9 billion. This meant that the company ended up missing Wall Street’s expectations for a profit of $0.75 per share coming from revenue of $20.7 billion.