Tag: SoftBank

Truss wants ARM to list in the UK

Posted on September 21, 2022 by - News

Prime Minister Liz Truss wants British chip maker ARM to list the company in the UK.

Japanese company SoftBank has been preparing to take ARM public after plans to sell the company to Nvidia fell through due to “significant regulatory challenges”.

But SoftBank wants to put the company on the NASDAQ exchange in New York instead of London.

In May, it was reported former PM Boris Johnson wrote to SoftBank while ministers and executives from the London Stock Exchange would try and persuade them to rethink. Talks broke down in the summer when Johnson had to rethink himself.

ARM has warned that it could cut up to 15 percent of its workforce as it prepares to go public.

Most of the proposed job cuts would be in the US and the UK, ARM added.

Robots drive the AI market

Posted on March 25, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-25 at 11.52.02Softbank sold 300 Pepper robots in February and that’s going to drive the artificial intelligence and app market to develop faster than most people think.

According to market research company Trendforce, while the Pepper robot (pictured) is primarily available now to the commercial market, later this year Softbank and French startup Aldebaran will sell it to the general public, fuelled by third party apps people are currently creating.

Pepper is a versatile robot and it’s claimed it can recognise peoples’ emotions, something that some people have trouble doing. The machine costs Y198,000 but coupled to that is a cloud service that costs Y24,600 per month. The inventors, Aldebaran, describe Pepper as the first social robot.

Application developers can be programmed with extra emotions and as it does so, it will react faster to its owner’s desires.

Trendforce is really bullish about this because it imagines that the arrival of Pepper the robot to the marketplace will create a market comparable to computers, to the internet and to smartphones.

The market size for service robots has already exceeded five million units and will grow by 20 percent this year, the analysts think.

 

Huawei loses out on US contracts

Posted on May 31, 2013 by - News

huawei-liveHuawei, which sparked unwanted publicity yesterday when its chief security exec told reporters it was standard practice for governments to spy on each other, has apparently been pushed out in the planned acquisition of Sprint by SotfBank.

The £20.1 billion deal, which has been cleared by the US Committee on Foreign Investment, and is now awaiting the nod from one more US regulation body, has had a restriction on  third-party supplier over allegations of Chinese spying.

According to Bloomberg this means that the pair involved in the deal had to reassure those above that they would limit the use of telecommunications gear made by Huawei as well as ZTE.

They also had to agree that they would remove “certain equipment” by Huawei and allow all American vendors to provide the tech instead.

The US is fearful that Huawei and ZTE use their gear for snooping.

Yesterday Huawei’s head of security operations and ex British government CIO John Suffolk claimed that governments had always embarked on such practices.

His comments followed claims that the company had gained access to secret designs of US weapons, which it had managed to steal from Australia’s new intelligence agency headquarters.