Apple Takes Back Title of World's Most Valuable Company
It was a volatile day for tech stocks.
Apple is back, baby.
A number of technology stocks had a disastrous day on Wednesday, another sign that jittery investors have recently become much less loyal to companies that were market darlings not long ago. But Apple AAPL 1.91% wasn’t among them. Shares of the consumer tech giant rallied as much of the rest of the sector slumped. Shares of Apple rose 2%. That edged its market capitalization up by $10 billion to $534 billion, making it once again the most valuable company in the world.
Shares of Google owner Alphabet GOOGL -4.03% , which briefly had taken that title from Apple, fell nearly 5%, taking its market cap down to just above $500 billion, and giving back some of its winnings from earlier in the week, when the search giant’s strong earnings report rocketed it past Apple. There was a similar selloff in Facebook FB -1.68% stock, which had soared for the past several days following its own earnings results, though it recovered somewhat in the mid-afternoon, finishing down nearly 2% at market close.
Even as the overall market rallied throughout the day, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising a little more than 1%, the tech-heavy Nasdaq remained down, as companies including Tesla TSLA -5.09% and Yahoo YHOO -4.75% each dropped by as much as 6% (they pared their losses towards the end of trading, closing the session down about 5% apiece). Internet companies including Facebook, Amazon AMZN -3.46% , Netflix NFLX -0.82% and Google (a.k.a. Alphabet)—a group nicknamed FANG stocks, which had been among last year’s best performers in the S&P 500—all plunged.
Shares of Amazon fell nearly 4%, adding to the company’s losses from last week when it reported results that disappointed investors. Netflix, for its part, had declined almost as much, but came back to end the day down less than 1%.
While it’s most definitely unrealistic to expect the same dazzling performance this year that the FANG stocks demonstrated in 2015 with as much as triple-digit returns—that bummer of an economic truism known as mean reversion, for one thing—there were signs Wednesday that the tech stock selloff would not turn into a bigger bloodbath or an all-out bear market. Most importantly, the Nasdaq and the FANG stocks in particular rallied powerfully in the late afternoon, stemming their steeper losses and coming back several percentage points from where they’d fallen earlier.
Why did the stocks apparently turn on a dime? Investors, realizing that many of the stocks had sold off for no good reason, saw an opportunity to buy them back at a cheaper price. And as long as investors react to selloffs by “buying the dip,” as the practice is called, bear markets stay at bay.
Rick Santorum Ends Campaign and Endorses Marco Rubio
He says Rubio shares his values
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum officially suspended his presidential campaign Wednesday night and endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination.
Santorum announced his decision on Fox News’ On The Record, telling host Greta Van Sustern that he felt his efforts were best served supporting a candidate who shared the same values—supporting the middle class at home and defeating the Islamic State abroad—and that candidate was Rubio.
“I think we could be better advocates for someone that shared those values by supporting someone in a better position to do that,” Santorum said. “Someone who has a real understanding of the threat of ISIS, fundamentalist Islam and has some experience in that area…That’s why we decided to support Marco Rubio.”
Rubio, who has served in the Senate since 2011, is a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and frequently touts his foreign policy experience, particularly as a solution to the ISIS threat, on the campaign trail. He came in third in the Iowa caucuses, placing just behind Donald Trump.
Other endorsements from GOP candidates who have dropped out of the race include former Texas Gov. Rick Perry endorsing Ted Cruz, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham supporting Jeb Bush and former New York Gov. George Pataki also endorsing Rubio.
This article was originally published on Time.com.
Can GoPro Bounce Back?
The action camera maker is reeling after yet another bad quarter.
GoPro’s latest quarterly results were anything but action packed.
Sales at the action camera maker fell 31% to $437 million compared to the same period last year as customers failed to materialize during the all-important holiday season, the company said Wednesday. And a weak revenue outlook of $160 million to $180 million, versus an expected $298 million, shows that things aren’t going to get better anytime soon.
So how does GoPro bounce back? It simplifies, at least according to CEO Nicholas Woodman.
“Our challenge is to make GoPro simple,” he told analysts during a conference call on Wednesday.
Starting in April, GoPro will stop selling its entry-level cameras, the Hero, Hero+, and Hero+ LCD. The decision cost the company $57 million in the quarter.
Overall, GoPro lost $34.5 million in the quarter, or 25 cents a share.
By streamlining the product lineup, GoPro will focus marketing efforts on the $199 Hero4 Session, $399 Hero4 Silver, and $499 Hero4 Black. That Hero line, intended to springboard the company from its roots with daredevil sports enthusiasts into a more mainstream market, has failed to gain traction.
To lure non-adventure seekers to test the waters, GoPro slashed the price of the Hero 4 Session by half over the course of a few months. According to former GoPro chief financial officer Jack Lazar, that decision helped to increase sales of the Session “three-fold” after the second price drop in December.
On Wednesday, following the disappointing quarter, GoPro said Lazar would step down. He is being replaced next month by Brian McGee, who joined GoPro last year from chipmaker Qualcomm.
Furthermore, Woodman said GoPro will make changes to the software on its products and the software used to edit photos and videos captured with its cameras. “The problem is it’s still too hard to offload, access, and edit GoPro content,” he said.
To improve the user experience, GoPro is releasing a new editing program in March. Woodman said GoPro for Desktop will bring a “breakthrough in convenience” to the platform. New features will include the ability to trim videos and share them directly to Facebook or YouTube.
For more on what GoPro watch:
Woodman promised that the company will release “an entirely new” editing experience later this year. Anyone who has used GoPro’s editing tools will appreciate the company’s effort to reevaluate and simplify.
The company will also make it easier to connect its products to smartphones and “the cloud.” With the latter part of Woodman’s promise presumably indicating GoPro’s software will gain the ability to directly upload to services such as Dropbox or YouTube.
Furthermore GoPro will release what Woodman described as “the most connected and convenient GoPro ever made later this year,” under the Hero5 brand name. However, his optimistic sale pitches have often failed to live up to the hype.
For more read GoPro cameras aren’t just for adrenaline junkies anymore
Shortly before announcing the firms fourth quarter results, GoPro posted another video captured by Karma, its upcoming drone. The flying camera follows a group of skiers and snowboarders down the slopes, and if you try hard enough you can possibly catch a glimpse of the unreleased product reflected in a helmet visor at the 35 second mark.
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For GoPro, the new drone is a sort of lifeline. If it does well, the company may be able to stop the hemorrhaging. If not, it could be a huge blow. The drone is expected to premiere sometime in the first half of 2016.
Woodman went on to ask investors to judge the company’s 2016 performance by its ability to meet the challenge of simplifying its products.
But investors didn’t seem so optimistic about the new simplify philosophy. The company’s shares GPRO 4.59% tumbled nearly 10% in after-hours trading to $9.72, nearly 90% lower than their peak just 15 months ago.
You Can Airbnb a Carolina Panther's Home During Super Bowl 50
And it’s all for charity
For Panthers fans, there might be a worthy alternative to going to the Super Bowl 50 game in the San Francisco Bay Area: renting out Panthers safety Roman Harper’s home in Charlotte, N.C. while he’s away.
The player has listed his apartment on home-sharing service Airbnb for February 7, the day of the game, and will donate the proceeds (it’s currently listed at $5,000 per night) to his charity: Harper’s Hope 41 Foundation. Airbnb says it will match the proceeds.
The lucky guest will get to enjoy a slew of luxury amenities, including a junior Olympic pool, a backyard, a health club, a 70-inch television to watch the game, and a signed football, among other perks.
While Harper’s home listing was obviously planned for the Super Bowl and to help his charity, it wouldn’t be surprising if fans from Denver and North Carolina were also renting out their homes while they travel to California for the game. For the duration of the Super Bowl 50 festivities, the company estimates that a total of 15,000 total guests will stay at Airbnb listings.
Cisco Just Bought This Hot Startup For Over $1 Billion
The money is in the Internet of Things
Cisco’s made its first acquisition in 2016, and it was a big one.
The networking titan said on Wednesday that it had bought a Silicon Valley startup called Jasper Technologies for $1.4 billion. Jasper specializes in software that helps manage wireless connections for Internet-connected equipment.
It counts a number of big companies as customers, including Nissan, Coca-Cola KO 0.66% , and Starbucks SBUX -1.92% . Coca-Cola, for example, uses Jasper’s software to connect its vending machines online so that the company knows when the machines need to be refilled.
The company is seen as a big player in the Internet of things, the burgeoning sector of connected gear. Jasper was also a Fortune unicorn, tech jargon for a startup worth $1 billion or more.
In 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was planning a possible initial public offering. But it chose to sell instead, at around the price of its latest private valuation.
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Cisco CSCO 1.18% has made it clear that it views the Internet of things as an area it wants to dominate as the technology progresses. In a conference call about the announcement, Rowan Trollope, who leads the Cisco group that includes the Internet of things, explained that more of the company’s customers are looking to connect to devices that, until recently, were impossible to connect, like pacemakers and automobiles.
The problem is that connecting these devices can be challenging without the appropriate technology, which is what Jasper focuses on, he said.
“Companies are sprinting toward this future but they are hobbling by the challenges,” Trollope said.
Cisco’s plan is to use Jasper’s technology as the glue that hooks together a company’s multiple connected devices, and from there provide network management and data analytics services on top of it, Trollope explained. Jasper also has a number of mobile service provider customers, including AT&T T 1.83% and Telefónica.
Cisco has been trying to accommodate the technological needs of telecommunication companies like AT&T that are seeing an explosion of data on their wireless networks due partly to people watching video on their phones. That’s why it signed a blockbuster partnership with telecommunication gear maker Ericsson in November to provide the gear and services that Cisco lacked for managing mobile networks.
For more on Cisco, watch:
By buying Jasper, Trollope said that Cisco now has more services to accommodate those mobile service providers. When asked by an analyst whether some of Ericsson’s technology competes with Jasper’s technology, Trollope dismissed the notion by saying, “This is a really big market, and no one company will solve across every single use case and service provider.”
He said that the deal with Jasper was “well received by the executive leadership” of Ericsson.
As part of the acquisition, Cisco will add 385 employees.
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