Google has given its chairman Eric Schmidt $100 million worth of restricted stock and a $6 million cash bonus because of the company's performance in 2013, according to an SEC filing.
Schmidt will get the $6 million cash bonus on February 14, which should make for a very nice Valentine's Day.
He gets the stock on February 5 and it will vest over four years starting in May 2015.
Sony is apparently looking to shed the dead weight that is its PC business. According to Reuters, relaying a report by Nikkei, Sony is in talks to sell its personal computer business to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners for up to 50 billion yen ($490 million).
A new company would be formed to sell the computers, with Sony retaining a small stake in venture, the report states.
Just last week, another report surfaced stating that Sony was talking to Lenovo over a joint venture. Sony flat-out denied this report. Still, when there's smoke, there's often fire. And Sony's VAIO brand is burning a hole in Sony's ledger.
This move shouldn't come as a surprise. Sony's PC division has long been a weak link in Sony's chain. Besides, when Kazuo Hirai took over Sony in 2012, he didn't list personal computers as one of Sony's cornerstones. Instead, Kaz pointed to digital imaging, gaming, and mobile on which rebuild Sony, a strategy clearly present as of late.
Sony has released innovative and, frankly, killer products in the three aforementioned categories. Still, despite making amazing products, Sony is trailing others in those spaces. By ridding itself of a forgotten appendage, perhaps Sony can better compete -- For more information read the original article here.
Today, a report from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Minority Committee offered an overview of the fed's current state of cybersecurity. And how is the government with which we entrust our most sensitive and private information looking? In short—bad. Very, very bad.
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-- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.
It's not just the skiers, skaters and biathletes out to prove themselves at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Microsoft is betting that Windows Azure Media Services will also prove its mettle (medal?) at the games which kick off this week.
Olympics broadcaster NBC Sports has used Windows Azure for previous events, but this time out the heavy-duty video encoding, in fact the whole live-streaming process — will take place in the cloud, Scott Guthrie, corporate VP of Windows Azure, said in an interview.
Live events in general, and the Olympics in particular, are ideal test beds for cloud computing since there tend to be huge bursts of demand and then nada. For NBC Sports, and other broadcasters, the ability to spin up the encoding workloads fast and pay for them just when they run is an attractive alternative to what they had to do in the past, which was to build out all the compute capability and pay for it all even when they only need it for a few weeks.
“The real story for us is scale and reliability — Azure buys us multi-region failover and multiple encoders to handle the volume of these events,” said Eric Black, VP of -- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.