HP sells off webOS

HP's sell-off of webOS, and the significant cut issued by a judge in the Apple versus Samsung trial, were the main news stories of the international ICT scene last week.

At home, it was another quiet week, with the main news being Telkom's proposed rebranding of 8ta as Telkom Mobile. The company has since said 8ta will not be discontinued, but rather shifted into specific market segments.

* Good interim figures from Metrofile, with revenue up 11.5% and profit up 20.5%.
* Poor interim numbers from Silverbridge Holdings, with revenue down 12.3% and profit down 77.4%.
* Mixed interim figures from Digicore, with revenue up 12.1% and profit down 50%.
* Morvest Business Group acquired the majority stake (60%) in iSolve Business Solutions and SQLDB Technology Solutions, for R16.2 million.
* The BSA said unlicensed software cost South African businesses over R5.7 million in 2012.
* John Holdsworth, former CEO of ECN Telecommunications, has been granted leave to appeal in his legal battle with Reunert.
* A renewed JSE cautionary by Huge Group.

* The shareholders of Econet Wireless have approved a 10:1 share split.
* Maroc Telecom's user base in 2012 rose to 17.86 million and it increased its overall group customer base of 13.5% to 33 million last year, with a strong presence in Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Gabon.
* Canon Middle East has established a subsidiary in Kenya.

8ta is to be rebranded Telkom Mobile.

* BSkyB acquired Telefonica's UK broadband business for £180 million.
* Corning purchased Bargoa, a Brazilian provider of telecommunications components.
* Facebook bought Microsoft's Atlas Advertiser Suite, an advertisement management and measurement platform that Microsoft acquired when it bought aQuantive in 2007. At the time, it paid $6.3 billion.
* Genesys acquired MicroStrategy's Angel.com, its cloud-based customer experience management unit serving interactive voice response and contact centres. The deal was worth $110 million.
* LG Electronics purchased HP's webOS operating system, which the latter acquired through a $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010. LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its smart or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on webOS before offering to buy it outright. Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software's source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated Web sites, and licences under HP's intellectual property, including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology. HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS.
* Rackspace bought ObjectRocket, a MongoDB database as a service provider.
* Symantec made a small passive investment in LifeLock, an identity theft protection company.
* Russian billionaire, Alisher Usmanov, sold off some of his stake in Mail.ru, a company in which Naspers has an interest. After the transaction, Usmanov will still hold about 7.4%.
* The following patent and lawsuit activity:
* Apple will settle its lawsuit regarding inadvertent app purchases by kids.
* A district court has upheld a previous patent infringement ruling against Apple and denied the iPhone maker's motion to reduce the $368 million in damages that are due to VirnetX Holding, an Internet security software company.
* Samsung lost a patent lawsuit involving Apple, in Japan.
* David Einhorn has dropped his lawsuit against Apple.
* A judge has cut Apple's $1.05 billion award against Samsung significantly and ordered a new damages trial to determine the actual amount.
* Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has purchased Hawaii's Island Air.
* Max Levchin, co-founder of online payment giant PayPal (which is now owned by eBay), has launched a rival business on called Affirm, which will compete in the crowded but fast-growing mobile payments business.
* Excellent quarterly results from OmniVision Technologies.
* Good quarterly numbers from MegaFon, Sykes Enterprises and Verisk Analytics.
* Satisfactory quarterly results from Autodesk and Avago Technologies.
* Mediocre quarterly results from TDS and Telefonica.
* Mixed quarterly figures from American Tower, with revenue up but profit down; Deutsche Telekom, with revenue down but back in the black; Iron Mountain, with revenue up but profit down; and MetroPCS, with revenue up but profit down.
* Quarterly losses from Groupon, Palo Alto Networks (although revenue up over 50%), Salesforce.com and Splunk (although revenues up over 50%).
* The appointments of Shawn Farshchi as interim CEO of Saba Software; Bill Russell as non-executive chairman of Saba Software; Norio Sasaki as vice-chairman of Toshiba (was CEO); and Hisao Tanaka as CEO of Toshiba (as of 30 June).
* The dismissal of Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon.
* The resignation of Bobby Yazdani as chairman and CEO of Saba Software.

* International:
* The acquisition by Vodafone of Spain's smallest mobile operator, Yoigo, currently owned by TeliaSonera.
* An acceleration in the effort by Siemens to exit or lower its exposure to a telecoms equipment joint venture with Nokia, which has long been a burden on the German engineering company. In April, Siemens and Nokia will become free to take action regarding Nokia Siemens Networks when a six-year-old shareholder agreement comes to an end.
* A fine by the EU on Microsoft over the choice of browsers in a case that is tied in with the anti-trust battle of more than a decade ago.
* South Africa:
* The outcome of the investigation by Parliament's ethics committee into alleged conflict of interest involving the minister of communications.

* The Middle East and Africa IT infrastructure market, comprising servers, storage and networking equipment, is forecast to reach US$3.9 billion in 2013, a 4% increase from 2012, according to Gartner.
* IT spending remained broadly strong throughout a difficult end to 2012, according to IDC, as business confidence waned in the shadow of the fiscal cliff, economic growth declined in much of Europe, and economies in Asia struggled to cope with reduced exports. In spite of these headwinds, worldwide IT spending recorded annual growth of 5.9% in 2012 in constant currency terms, keeping pace with the 5.8% growth recorded in 2011. Total IT spending on hardware, software and IT services reached $2 trillion, while ICT spending (including telecoms services) increased by 4.8% to $3.6 trillion.
* The worldwide mobile device market will reach 2.6 billion units by 2016 from 1.9 billion units in 2012, with tablets the fastest growing category, according to Canalys.
* The worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18.5% in 2013 to reach $131 billion, according to Gartner.
* The worldwide spending on hosted private cloud services will surpass $24 billion in 2016, according to IDC.
* By 2016, 70% of the most profitable companies will manage their business processes using real-time predictive analytics or extreme collaboration, according to Gartner.
* Worldwide server shipments declined in Q4 2012, although revenue grew for the first time in over a year, according to both Gartner and IDC. There were no changes in the top five positions, although IBM widened the gap between it at number one and HP at number two.

* JSE All share index: Up 1.2%
* Nasdaq: Up 0.25%
* Top SA share movements: Amecor (+11.3%), Digicor (+37.4%), EOH (+10%), Labat Africa (+23.1%), Metrofile (+9.9%), MICROmega Holdings (-10.3%), Muvoni (+23.1%), Net 1 UEPS Technologies (-17.9%), Poynting (-10.7%) and Stella Vista (-50%)

Bloomberg Businessweek has published its BBW 50 - the top performing S&P companies. It's not good news for the technology industry, as only a few make it onto the list. The following are those that are included:

* 2: Salesforce.com
* 4: Amazon.com
* 6: American Tower
* 9: Apple
* 15: Comcast
* 17: eBay
* 24: Equifax
* 46: Red Hat

With a couple of exceptions, the list is not the one most would expect to see; however, there are a few pointers as to some of the trends that are emerging globally. These include the advent of cloud computing; the progressive adoption of open source; and the success associated with the outsourcing of mobile infrastructures by many of the mobile operators.