Daily Video: Comcast Drops $45B Bid to Merge With Time Warner Cable

Today’s topics include Comcast dropping its bid to merge with Time Warner, a new partnership between Microsoft and Temboo, new licensing from ARM related to automotive safety and a positive report on malware and mobile devices from security firm Damballa

Comcast scrapped its $45 billion proposal to merge with Time Warner Cable after being faced with potential roadblocks from federal regulators who had concerns about unfair competition and harm to industry innovation.

The ending of the merger proposal came in a terse statement on April 24 from Brian L. Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast Corp., who back in February 2014 had announced the then-newly-proposed deal as an exciting opportunity for the company, its customers and for its shareholders,

Microsoft and Temboo, a New York-based Internet of things programming specialist, have teamed to help businesses keep an eye on their Internet of things sensors.

Power BI, Microsoft’s cloud-based business intelligence platform, supports the Temboo Streaming service, which dynamically generates the code required to link sensor data to cloud services.

Now, in addition to analyzing business metrics, enterprises can use Power BI’s real-time visualization capabilities to monitor their Internet of things deployments and extract insights.

The discussion around automotive safety is shifting away from physical features—such as crumple zones—to computer systems that can do things like apply the brakes before a collision occurs, according to Richard York, vice president of embedded marketing at chip designer ARM.

In line with this shift, ARM announced it is licensing functional safety support across several processor families—Cortex-A, Cortex-R and Cortex-M. This will help chip and system makers meet the automotive industry’s growing demand for more compute capabilities, particularly in the area of safety.

A combination of gated mobile app stores, significant controls, vetting by Apple and Google, and a lack of good monetization strategies has made malware a rare occurrence on mobile devices in North America. This is according to a new report from network security firm Damballa.

Working with anonymous data captured from the large cellular providers that use its services, Damballa identified traffic that came from more than 152 million mobile devices in a given week, which contacted nearly 2.8 million Internet sites. Of those devices, only 64 out of every million devices, or 0.0064 percent, contacted a malicious mobile Website.

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