BlackBerry to be acquired by Prem Watsa-led Fairfax group

Hyderabad-born Prem Watsa is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings, based in Toronto. Often called the “Canadian Warren Buffett” he is an alumnus of the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet and a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology with a degree in Chemical Engineering.

The letter of intent contemplates a transaction in which BlackBerry shareholders would receive $9 in cash for each share of BlackBerry they hold, in a transaction valued at approximately $4.7 billion. The consortium would acquire for cash all of the outstanding shares of BlackBerry not held by Fairfax. Fairfax, which owns approximately 10 percent of BlackBerry’s common shares, intends to contribute the shares of BlackBerry it currently holds into the transaction.

The BlackBerry Board of Directors, acting on the recommendation of a special committee of the board of directors, approved the terms of the LOI under which the consortium, which is seeking financing from BofA Merrill Lynch and BMO Capital Markets, would acquire BlackBerry and take the company private subject to a number of conditions, including due diligence, negotiation and execution of a definitive agreement and customary regulatory approvals.

The Special Committee, chaired by Director Tim Dattels, was formed in August 2013 to review strategic alternatives for the company. J.P. Morgan and Perella Weinberg are acting as financial advisors and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Torys LLP are acting as legal advisors.

Diligence is expected to be complete by November 4, 2013. The agreement is on a non-exclusive basis. If BlackBerry enters into any agreement providing for an alternative transaction with a person with whom discussions were held before or during the diligence period, then BlackBerry shall pay Fairfax a fee of $0.30 per BlackBerry share, provided, however, that no such fee shall be payable if the consortium shall have reduced the price offered below $9.00 per share without the approval of the board of directors of BlackBerry. In the event that a definitive agreement is signed with Fairfax the termination fee will increase to $0.50 per share.

Barbara Stymiest, Chair of BlackBerry’s Board of Directors, said: “The Special Committee is seeking the best available outcome for the Company's constituents, including for shareholders. Importantly, the go-shop process provides an opportunity to determine if there are alternatives superior to the present proposal from the Fairfax consortium.”

Prem Watsa, Chairman and CEO of Fairfax, said: “We believe this transaction will open an exciting new private chapter for BlackBerry, its customers, carriers and employees. We can deliver immediate value to shareholders, while we continue the execution of a long-term strategy in a private company with a focus on delivering superior and secure enterprise solutions to BlackBerry customers around the world.”

Microsoft will Buy Nokia's Devices and Services Business

Microsoft will buy Nokia's devices and services business and license Nokia's patents and mapping services in a deal the companies valued at $5.44 billion euros, or about $7.2 billion, the companies announced late Monday.

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters file

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop unveils Nokia's Lumia 1020 smartphone July 11, 2013, in New York. Elop will join Microsoft once the deal between the two companies is completed.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, who was hired away from Microsoft by the Finnish company in 2010, will rejoin Microsoft after the deal is completed, the companies said, perhaps putting him in position to succeed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who has announced he plans to retire.

In a joint news release from the two companies, Ballmer said the deal will bring Nokia's capabilities in hardware design, engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing and distribution to Microsoft.

"For Microsoft, this transaction is the key next step in furthering the company's transition to a devices and services company," the statement said.

When the deal closes, expected to be in early 2014, about 32,000 Nokia employees will transfer to Microsoft. Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa will take over CEO duties while the Espoo, Finland-based company looks for a new CEO.

Ballmer surprised the technology world Aug. 23 by announcing he would step down as CEO of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft within 12 months, ending a tenure marked by the software giant's declining dominance and struggles to keep pace with its competitors.

Microsoft said then that Ballmer would retire "upon the completion of a process to choose his successor. In the meantime, Ballmer will continue as CEO and will lead Microsoft through the next steps of its transformation to a devices and services company."

Huawei Launches World's Slimmest Smartphone

Huawei says the device, at 6.18 mm thick, is the world's slimmest. It features a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, Android 4.2.2 operating system, 2000mAh battery, 4.7-inch HD in-cell LCD screen.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Launced in India

Samsung has officially announced its Galaxy S4 mini smartphone, a compact version of Samsung's flagship smartphone.

Samsung Galaxy S4 mini is powered by a 1.7GHz dual-core processor along with 1.5GB of RAM. It packs in 8GB of internal storage of which 5GB is user accessible. The internal storage can be further expanded by up to 64GB with the help of a microSD card.

The smartphone comes with 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display. For camera, there is an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and 1.9-megapixel HD front-facing camera. The camera of Samsung Galaxy S4 mini also supports additional features like Sound&Shot. Apart from this, the images clicked through the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini are automatically gathered and saved according to the user's timeline, geo-tagging information, or a specific event to create a photo album.

Samsung Galaxy S4 mini runs on Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) and has a 1,900mAh battery. It also supports Group Play feature, S Translator and S Health, all found in Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4. Samsung Galaxy S4 mini had leaked extensively over the past couple of months and there were speculations being made that this smartphone will be unveiled at the June 20 event being held in London along with other Galaxy and Ativ devices.

Samsung will be offering the Galaxy S4 mini smartphone in two colours options - White Frost and Black Mist. As per the company, the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini will support either 4G LTE, or 3G HSPA+ or 3G Dual-SIM. The connectivity option will vary across different regions.

Samsung had officially launched Galaxy S4 smartphone at a gala event on March 14, 2013. It has been recently introduced in India for Rs. 41, 500. The company recently announced that it has managed to ship over 10 million units of the smartphone.

Yahoo Acquires Tumblr in $1.1B Deal

Yahoo is buying online blogging forum Tumblr for $1.1 billion as CEO Marissa Mayer tries to rejuvenate an Internet icon that had fallen behind the times.

The deal announced on Monday represents Mayer’s boldest move yet since she left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo’s latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo’s most expensive acquisition since the Sunnyvale, California, company bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.

Yahoo is paying all cash for Tumblr, dipping into some of its remaining stash from a $7.6 billion windfall reaped last year from selling about half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Holdings Group. Taking over Tumblr will devour about one-fifth of the $5.4 billion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.

Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.

Tumblr emerged has a trendy online hangout by providing a service that makes it easy to share blog posts, photos, video and other content in an enthralling mosaic. The service says it has amassed more than 50 billion posts from 108 million blogs. Tumblr users rely on a dashboard to pinpoint the kinds of blogs that they want to track and also have tools to pass along the posts that interest them.

Yahoo’s acquisition will deliver a jackpot to Mr. Karp, who dropped out of high school to concentrate on computer programming. He ended up being home schooled while taking classes in Japanese and working on gambling software. Later, he became a product executive at a parenting website called UrbanBaby. After CNet bought the site in 2006, Mr. Karp set up his own a development service called “Davidville” before deciding to create an outlet for personal expression an endeavour that hatched Tumblr.

Google Plus Takes On Facebook With New 41 Features

Google is digging deeper into its technology toolkit to turn its social networking service into a more formidable threat to Facebook, sprucing up its photo features at a time when sharing snapshots online and on mobile gadgets is growing more popular.

Many of the 41 new features being added to Google Plus beginning Wednesday will draw upon the computing power, machine learning, algorithms, semantics analysis and other innovations that established Google's search engine as the most influential force on the Internet.
"All of these features collectively put more of 'the Google' into Google Plus," said Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice-president of engineering, in an interview. "This will give people a powerful reason to come to Google Plus."
But the most compelling new attraction may be a new photo-management tool that promises to test how much control people want to cede to computers. It will also further blur the lines between a real moment in time and augmented reality.

Google promises the feature will pick out the best shots from a wide assortment of photos. The automatic photo selection is done by calling upon Google's knowledge of the elements that make up a visually pleasing picture, coupled with facial recognition technology and a vast database that helps tie together the relationships of people appearing in a photo. Google says its computers will recognize the best photos featuring family members or close friends of a person who uploads a bunch of pictures to Plus.
"You have amazing images of the most precious image of your life," Gundotra told a software developers conference Wednesday as he discussed the additions to Google Plus. "But if we are honest with each other photos are very labor intensive."

If the photos don't look quite right, Google is promising to enhance them, taking over a job that typically requires people to buy and master special photo editing software such as Adobe System Inc.'s Photoshop, Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picasa. Computer-controlled editing tools will automatically remove red eyes, soften skin tones, sharpen colors and adjust contrast. Google offers something similar through an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Picasa.

In an effort to get more photos onto the Plus network, Google is offering to back up all pictures taken on a mobile device, as soon as they're snapped. To accommodate the increased volume, Google Plus will now provide each account holder with up to 15 gigabytes of storage for full-resolution photos.
Gundotra believes Plus' management tools will be compelling because they are designed to save people the time and trouble of choosing and editing photos. Google Plus users will be able to compare all original photos with the versions altered by computers. The auto-enhancement tool can also be turned off.

Another new photo feature promises to stitch together a sequence of photos taken of the same group of people or a panoramic scene. This stitching system can be used to create a single photo that pulls the best shots of everyone featured in a series of pictures. It will also produce an animated clip featuring the motions of people captured in a succession of photos taken against the same background.

By appealing to people's photo fondness, Google is hoping to make Plus a more useful and fun place to hang out than Facebook. But Google Plus still hasn't proven it can become as much of a magnet as Facebook, largely because people had already established their online social circles at Facebook.
Google Plus has built up a broad swath of accountholders since its introduction nearly two years ago, mainly because so many people already had set up Google logins while using the company's Gmail or other services. Gundotra announced Wednesday that Google Plus now has 190 million users who interact on the service each month, up from 135 million in late December. About 390 million people log in to Google Plus each month, but that includes a large number who have tied their Gmail accounts to the social networking service. Facebook says it has about 1.1 billion active users.

As such, Google has a long way to go. Facebook has claimed the title of being the world's largest photo-sharing site for years, and with last year's purchase of Instagram only propelled it further ahead. Instagram has 100 million monthly active users, up from 22 million when Facebook agreed to buy it last spring. Rather than offer powerful editing tools or high-quality pictures, Facebook became the most popular way to share the photos online simply because it is the most popular place to hang out online. Today, users upload more than 350 million photos to Facebook each day.

Over the years, it enhanced the quality of the photos displayed, too, and has recently redesigned its site to make photos more pronounced. Instagram, meanwhile, offers an easy-to-use mobile app and playful filters users can apply to snapshots of friends, quirky buildings or plates of food.
Google Plus is getting a new look just two months after Facebook spruced up its news feed - the centerpiece of its service - to feature photos more prominently and generally make posts look more like articles in a magazine or newspaper. Unlike Facebook, Google says there are no current plans to show ads on the revamped Plus.

In another change aimed at attracting more traffic, Google Plus will start to display automatic hash tags to identify the main topic being discussed in a post or featured in a photo. Google is using its understanding of semantics and photo-scanning technology to figure out what is going on. Individuals will still have an option of editing or forbidding a hash tag from appearing if they don't agree with Google's automatic selection. Clicking on the hashtag will take Google Plus users to other posts and pictures bearing the same marker. Similar content being shared by family and friend is supposed to show up first, thanks to the same ranking system that Google's search engine uses to pick out the most relevant results. Facebook doesn't currently use hash tags, though there have been reports that it is working on incorporating them to its site, just as Twitter and Instagram already do.

Nexus 4 Launched in India

LG and Google announced that Nexus 4, the official Android phone, would be available in India in the coming days at an MRP of Rs 25,999. Yesterday, the device became available for pre-order on Flipkart, an e-commerce site, starting at a price of Rs 25,990. Sources said that the pre-order was part of an exclusive deal that Flipkart had struck with LG.










"LG Electronics is pleased to partner Google on the release of the Nexus 4 in India," shared Soon Kwon, managing director, LG Electronics India. "We added the best of our talent to our strength, and the result is a feature-packed smartphone that packs superb hardware under a slim hood."
For now, LG had announced details about only the model with 16GB internal storage and not about the 8GB one, which could be cheaper by at least a few thousands rupees.
Nexus 4 has a 4.7-inch screen with 720P resolution. The phone is powered by a quad-core processor and has 2GB RAM. It has a 8MP primary camera and a 1.3MP front camera. The phone doesn't support microSD card and has a battery that cannot be replaced by users.
The real appeal of the Nexus 4 lies in the software it runs. Like all Nexus devices, it is powered by an unmodified version of Android and is guaranteed to get quick updates whenever Google comes out with the new version of the OS.








This is in stark contrast to other devices that get updates several months after Google had introduced the new version of Android. In an interview to Wired, Sundar Pichai, Android division head at Google, acknowledged that the company was working to fix the update process.
Google usually sells Nexus devices online through its Play Store. But sources said that Nexus 4 would be sold only by LG and its retail partners.
The phone was launched in the global markets last year. At that time an LG executive claimed that it would be available in India in October. But the plans to launch it didn't materialize.
So far Google has made six Nexus phones and tablets. Nexus 4 is the third from the series to hit India. The other two are Nexus S and Nexus 7.