PreCentral: US Department of Justice now investigating HP's Autonomy acquisition
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By News Reporter
While every webOS device comes with some kind of speaker, the TouchPad is the only one whose speaker is adequate to fill a (smallish) room. On the phones, even the rear speaker struggles to put out enough volume to allow sharing of music or other audio in a space with moderate or higher background noise. Given that webOS phones all support both standard 3.5mm headphone/speaker jacks (the Veer admittedly needing an adapter) and Bluetooth speakers, there are numerous options for boosting the sound so others can enjoy it too. Unfortunately, most of those external speakers are far less portable than the phone itself. There are, though, some speakers that offer both powered amplification and portability. One of these is the Naztech N15 3.55 Mini Boom Speaker, which additionally operates as a standalone MP3/WMA player (it accepts microSD cards as removable storage, and has minimal controls for music playback and track navigation). While the Naztech's design and standalone player capabilities are pluses, however, its minimal amplification power makes it a poor choice for webOS devices.
Naztech has done a nice job with the design of the N15. It folds to the size and shape of a flattened golf ball, with a recess for storing the non-removable (and very short at 2-3 inches) 3.5mm audio cable. Along the periphery of the speaker are the standalone music player controls, a miniUSB (not microUSB, unfortunately, meaning it cannot share charger cables with a webOS device) port, and the microSD slot. The play/pause button doubles as the power button for the speaker, and a blue LED lights up when the unit is powered on. Note that although the track forward and reverse buttons double as volume controls for standalone play, they do not affect volume when the N15 is connected to an external sound source. According to Naztech, the N15 provides 2 watts of speaker output, and its 3.7 volt lithium ion battery charges (via a powered USB port or charger) in 4 hours. Naztech does not provide any play time details, and our testing did not extend to battery life.
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By News Reporter
It was a little over two years ago that
link hidden, please login to view. Apotheker came from a short tenure as CEO of , from which he'd been forced out after poor performance during an admittedly poor economic environment. At the time, we expressed our misgivings over the pick; , having spent twenty years at SAP (which is small in comparison to HP). Sure, , but HP also still had a massive and dominating consumer hardware enterprise and had just months prior completed its . We all know what happened next: within a year HP , announced a plan to , and purchased UK-based enterprise software company Autonomy for $10.2 billion. A month later, as he was dumped in favor of former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman, .
Today, in conjunction with announcing their fiscal year 2012 results, HP declared an $8.8 billion write-down loss related to the purchase of Autonomy. Specifically, the charge is related to the revelation that "members of Autonomy’s management team used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company" before HP's purchase. In other words, they lied about how much Autonomy was worth and how much money it could make for HP, leading to HP overpaying by billions of dollars for the company (The purchase price at the time was more than 80% higher than Autonomy's stock price; when HP bought Palm they paid a mere 23% premium over the trading price).
After writing down and related to a failure to actualize the value of their 2008 purchase of enterprise services company EDS, the last thing HP needed was another multi-billion write-down. But here we are, bringing the one-year write-down total to over $20 billion. Without the EDS and Autonomy write-downs, HP actually would have only suffered a loss of $600 million for the year, which while not great, looks downright rosy given the situation HP found itself in a year ago and the $12.7 billion paper loss now on the books.
Understandably, HP's not happy about this debacle, and make no mistake, this is a debacle. HP says that they have contacted both the US SEC Enforcement Division and the UK Serious Fraud Office for "civil and criminal investigation". And not wanting to leave it up to the feds, HP's also "preparing to seek redress against various parties in the appropriate civil courts to recoup what it can for its shareholders." In other words, "We'll see you in court."
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By News Reporter
We're sad to report that longtime friend of the site, webOS community activist, and webOS developer relations guru Lisa '
link hidden, please login to view' Brewster is leaving HP. Lisa joined HP in October of 2009 after organizing the PreDevCamp series, taking up a position in the Developer Relations department where she managed everything from app approval and developer technical support to actually creating the review policies and standards for the App Catalog. More recently, Lisa dodged the layoffs axe and transitioned over the the Enyo team in February 2012 where she took on the roll of Technical Marketing Manager, working on building developer support for the Enyo application framework. Said Lisa in her departure announcement:
As a friend who’s been ex-Palm for longer than I’ve worked here once told me, Palm DNA is strong. Employees will come and go like so many renewed cells in a body, and they will continue to make amazing products. Enyo 2 exited beta just last week, which marks a new beginning for web developers to bring this DNA beyond webOS, same as I’ll bring this DNA with me. I will always consider myself a friend of the Enyo project, and will continue to support and promote Enyo developers as I can.
While we don't expect Lisa to drop off the face of the Earth (or Twitter, for that matter), we are still sad to see her leaving webOS. Lisa was one of a handful of employees that had been with Palm through all its trials and stuck with it through thick, thin, and thinner. She's always a respected voice in the community, both on behalf of Palm and HP and as a mobile enthusiast in her own right. That's not to mention her work as part of the Developer Relations Team, where she was tireless in her support of those developers, even if it meant butting heads with the higher-ups to make things right. So revered and respected is Lisa that she got her own bobble head app (which she of course immediately approved and published to the App Catalog).
So where's Lisa off to now? She hasn't confirmed her next destination, but a source close to the situation has told us that Lisa Brewster's next stop is going to be at Mozilla, where she'll be in charge of the Firefox OS app store. They'll be lucky to have her.
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