While the Federal Communications Commission opened a brief comment period on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint merger, it will end on Dec. 4 and the shot clock, which is an informal period for consideration of mergers, will begin counting again.
The FCC typically pauses merger considerations when the applicants submit a substantial quantity of new information that the FCC staff needs to study. In this case, T-Mobile and Sprint submitted new economic and engineering models on Sept. 5.
A merger as significant as the one between T-Mobile and Spring gets a 180-day shot clock, within which the commission plans to make a decision. Currently, the two major reviews that remain are the FCC’s and a review by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Reuters reported that T-Mobile CFO J. Braxton Carter thinks the deal could close as early as the first quarter 2019, but the second quarter is more likely.
On Nov. 14, Arun Ulag, the general manager of engineering for Power BI, announced that Microsoft’s latest preview version of its Power BI business analytics suite now includes expanded artificial intelligence capabilities, including image recognition, text analytics and integration with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning.
AI finds insights by combing through the massive volumes of data generated by businesses to automatically find patterns and help users understand what the data means, while also predicting outcomes to help businesses drive results, he said.
Other new capabilities in Power BI, none of which require coding, include key driver analysis to help users understand what factors can influence key business metrics, as well as the ability to create machine learning models directly in Power BI using automated machine learning.