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Today’s topics include the continued decline of Yahoo’s desktop advertising revenue, Intel’s strong quarterly revenue report masks weaker prospects, hyperconverged data center products from Dell EMC, and Google’s new support for Firebase Cloud Messaging.
Yahoo canceled its quarterly conference call with analysts this week, leaving questions about its financial wellbeing and data security unanswered. While its reported earnings exceeded expectations, the company’s primary source of revenue—desktop advertising—dropped for the seventh time in the past eight quarters.
According to Yahoo, it canceled the talk because of the pending offer in July from Verizon Communications to buy the web company for $4.8 billion.
While a recent 14 percent drop in core ad revenue was a likely topic, Yahoo is also avoiding questions about last month’s news that hackers broke into its data stores and stole about 500 million personal account information packages.
Intel saw a strong Q3 in most of its business segments, but the outlook might not be as positive.
The chip-making company’s most recent quarterly financial numbers showed record revenue of $15.8 billion—a 9 percent increase over the same 2015 period. Profits also grew 9 percent, with growth not only in Intel’s data center and internet of things divisions, but even in the slower PC business.
However, the global PC market is continuing to contract as mobile devices rise in popularity, and analysts with both IDC and Gartner say that worldwide shipments for PCs fell significantly in the third quarter. As a result, Intel’s overall business growth is projected to slow in the coming quarters.
Ten months ago, Dell announced it would buy data storage vendor EMC for more than $60 billion. The deal closed in September, and now the two tech vendors have revealed the groundwork for how they’re merging their respective product portfolios. The highlight of their work, revealed at Dell EMC World 2016, has been the hyperconverged infrastructure offerings.
The Dell PowerEdge servers have been integrated into the VxRail and VxRack systems inherited in the EMC deal. Hyperconverged systems like these offer compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software resources in an appliance that’s easy to manage.
Starting this week, Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging technology can be used to push notifications from software applications and services to browsers outside Chrome, including Firefox and Opera, all through a JavaScript library Google recently implemented.
Software developers push notifications to build engaging experiences—offering updates or special offers—but they can be difficult to implement on the web. The FCM web support aims to address those challenges directly.
FCM had previously been limited to Android, iOS and Chrome browser apps.