News

Qualcomm subsidiary Qualcomm Atheros announced a new NFC chip labeled QCA1990 which is half the size of the current NFC chip and can supposedly work with an 8 times smaller antenna. According to Qualcomm's assessment, installation of this chip would be more cost effective than the installation of the current chips in use by smartphone manufacturers. They believe that the installation of QCA1990 into the lower tier smartphones would also be cost effective.

Although we have not written about Apple in a while there is some news about them that just begs to be talked about and to have some of the myths about it cleared up. In today’s news there were quite a few articles about Apple coming back to the US to make products. Most of this was fluff, but it did contain some truth in it. Apple will invest $100 Million in an unnamed east coast manufacturing plant with the first installments of this investment to start in 2013. What most of the articles missed is that compared to what they dump into China and South America this is nothing.

According to Reuters, the United Kingdom and Germany have reportedly lost billions of dollars in revenue from taxes because of sales on eBay. The reason for the loss is that eBay chose Luxembourg as its headquarters for operations in Europe.

Facebook is negotiating over the purchase of the company behind the  IM application WhatsApp. Details of the agreement are not known so far, but it is known that Facebook sees this mobile technology as the "next big thing". The rise of smartphones certainly was the best possible thing for applications like WhatsApp and Viber due to increasing pularity of mobile internet.