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BlackBerry Reports $1.6B In Revenue And A $965M Loss In Q2 2014 Earnings
Things have been looking awfully bleak for BlackBerry lately, and today the company revealed just how bad things have gotten in its newest earnings release. In fiscal Q2 2014, BlackBerry raked in a measly $1.6 billion in revenue (down from $2.9 billion in the year-ago quarter) and reported an adjusted loss 248 million, which works out to $0.47 per share diluted.
To put that in perspective, Yahoo’s analyst consensus was that the company would report a loss of $0.49 per share on revenues of $1.62 billion. In the preceding quarter (in which the company also missed expectations) BlackBerry reported $3.1 billion in revenue and an adjusted net loss of $67 million.
“We are very disappointed with our operational and financial results this quarter and have announced a series of major changes to address the competitive hardware environment and our cost structure,” said CEO Thorsten Heins in a prepared statement.
The folks in Waterloo have already attempted to soften the blow of an especially dark quarter by announcing that it expected to post an operating loss of between $950 and $995 million last week. In this release, the company has finally put a firm number on that wound — the total GAAP loss from continuing operations came in at $965 million, right in the middle of the company’s forecasted range. The big culprit? A hefty writedown (think around $934 million) incurred thanks in large part a glut of unsold BlackBerry Z10s.
Sadly, those hoping for additional off-the-cuff insight from CEO Thorsten Heins will have to do without this time around — the company officially cancelled its quarterly earnings call because of its pending buyout deal with Fairfax Financial, which offered the ailing smartphone maker $9 per share.
Minubo Raises €1M From Seedcamp, Tola Capital, HTG, And Others, To Help Online Retailers Become More Data-Driven
As more and more retailers continue to set up shop online, producing a lot of customer and other actionable data along the way, it follows that those businesses that are able to become data-driven will likely develop a competitive advantage. Larger e-commerce companies have known this for a long time and have the internal IT muscle to build out their own Business Intelligence systems or buy in expensive off-the-shelf Enterprise solutions — an option that isn’t available to the majority of online shops.
Enter Hamburg-based Minubo, which offers what it calls Business Intelligence as a Service, a central “Data Hub” hosted in the cloud that pulls in an online retailer’s various data-points to present a holistic view of their analytics to enable them to make “better, data-driven decisions”.
Today the startup is announcing that it’s raised a €1 million seed round from a host of backers including the pan-European accelerator Seedcamp, and VCs Tola Capital, and High Tech Gruenderfonds, along with a group of prominent angel investors. The latter comprises of Stephan Schambach (founder of Demandware and Intershop), Alexander Brühl (former Senior Partner at Atlas Venture), Mirko Caspar, Dirk Graber and Christian Luhmann (founders of Mister Spex), Hubertus Bessau, Philipp Kraiss and Max Wittrock (founders of Mymuesli.com), and Dominik Gyllensvärd. These are people that have some serious e-commerce chops of their own.
Specifically, Minubo’s dashboard integrates web analytics, shop and ERP data in one place – data that is otherwise fragmented, making it near-impossible to get a holistic overview from which an online retailer can take action on. By consolidating this data in an intelligent way, data-driven decision making can happen to enable things like more efficient allocation of marketing budgets by identifying unprofitable channels over time, adjusting assortments by connecting sales margins with product placement on an online shop’s website, and understanding Customer Lifetime Values per online channel e.g. Facebook marketing versus traditional SEO.
In addition, along with an aggregated view, Minubo enables direct access to the raw data. The company is also talking up its on-boarding process for online stores, enabling them to be up and running “in minutes”. And conceding that many online retailers are not experts in e-commerce, the platform provides what it calls “contextual white papers” to help them get up to speed with best practice and understanding what data should impact business decisions.
Lastly, the other big sell is that Minubo operates entirely in the cloud, doing all of the IT heavy lifting for the online shops that make use of the service. To that end, the startup is utilising Amazon Cloud in order to scale gracefully. There’s a cost advantage, too, obviously. Minubo says that Enterprise Business Intelligence systems can cost anything between 50,000 – 300,000 Euros. In contrast, after a free 30-day trial, it charges a monthly fee between 200 and 4,000 Euro depending on required features and revenue size. Competitors are said to include RJMetrics, DOMO, Good Data, and Datapine.
Goldfinger 2: Asian Site Leaks Rumored Gold iPad Mini 2 With TouchID Sensor
It’s not that much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that Apple might unveil gold, or “space grey,” iPads in the upcoming month(s). That’s why it’s quite interesting that Chinese tech site DoNews has posted photos of a champagne iPad mini 2, complete with TouchID sensor.
Not enough evidence? Sonny Dickson, the same fellow who released the most accurate pre-release photos of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, has today tweeted out his own information regarding the inevitable iPad mini launch, as well as a photo of an unassembled iPad mini 2 in “space grey.”
From the unconfirmed photos, as well as Dickson’s predictions, it seems that there are quite a few similarities between the latest flagship iPhone and the forthcoming iPad mini. As you can see in the images above and below, the next-gen iPad minis will allegedly come in champagne gold and the same space grey we’ve seen with the iPhone 5s.
Dickson also tweeted, without revealing photos, that the iPad mini will be available in silver as well. Furthermore, we may see a TouchID fingerprint scanner on the Apple tablets, also shown in images.
No word yet on whether or not the iPad mini will sport a high-res Retina display.
As with any Apple leak, these images are far from confirmed, but Dickson has a solid track record and the details seem to make sense in terms of Apple’s evolution. After the iPhone 5 came out in the anodized aluminum black “slate”, so too did the iPad mini.
Dickson also mentioned that, according to his sources, the iPad mini 2 would include Apple’s new A7 64-bit chip, the M7 motion coprocessor we’re seeing in the iPhone 5s, along with 1GB of RAM. As for the 9.7-inch iPad 5, Dickson’s sources revealed that it will pack 2GB of RAM under the hood, presumably sporting the same specs as little brother.
Again, we haven’t even received an invitation to the iPad/iPad mini launch event (expected to go down sometime in October), so it’s far too early to tell the legitimacy of these claims and/or photos.
Still, these aren’t too far outside the realm of possibility.
[via PhoneArena]
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