Author: Deep

As technology becomes more central to businesses’ strategies, companies invest in new products even during market volatility, Cisco’s CEO told CNBC on Thursday. Cisco Systems stock was up more than 9 percent midday Thursday after the company reported better-than-expected quarterly profit late Wednesday, helped by higher demand for its routers and security products. It also added $15 billion to its share buyback program. Cisco posted fiscal second-quarter earnings of 57 cents per share on $11.8 billion in revenue. Analysts had expected the networking equipment giant to report earnings per share of 54 cents a share on $11.75 billion in revenue,…

Seagate is facing a class action lawsuit over its 3TB consumer hard drives, which by some accounts have suffered unusually high failure rates. The lawsuit, filed on February 1 in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, primarily cites reliability data from Backblaze, a cloud backup provider that builds its own storage pods from consumer hard drives. In Backblaze’s experience, Seagate’s 3TB HDDs failed at much higher rates than other drives, prompting the storage provider to phase out those drives by mid-2015. “In terms of raw percentages, approximately 32 percent of the [Seagate] Drives deployed in 2012 failed by early…

The U.S. dollar is retreating from a multiyear bull market in 2016 as expectations for a Federal Reserve rate increase get pushed further and further out. Fed Chair Janet Yellen commented to Congress on Wednesday about the economic problems associated with the greenback moving higher too quickly. If the dollar continues to pull back, some asset classes could be ready to take off, if history is any guide. Since reaching a multiyear high in early December, the U.S. Dollar Index, a measure of the greenback’s strength against a basket of foreign currencies, is down nearly 5 percent. Using data from…

Windows 10 usage might be growing among regular users, but it’s downrightskyrocketing with gamers. Steam’s monthly hardware and software survey for January shows that Windows 10 usage stood around 34 percent—more than one-third of the platform’s Windows user base. (Just over 95 percent of all Steam users use Windows operating systems.) The majority of those users, 32.77 percent, were rocking the 64-bit build of Microsoft’s latest operating system. Combined with the 32-bit version, Windows 10 usage grew by nearly 1.6 percent compared to the previous month. That’s not a huge jump by any means, but Windows 10 is getting closer to overtaking…

With the meltdown in stocks sending investors scurrying to safety in gold, JPMorgan Asset Management’s Robert Michele said Thursday it’s a matter of faith in the metal, or the lack thereof in other assets. “Gold at $1,200 an ounce, what does that tell you?” he asked rhetorically in a CNBC “Squawk Box” interview. “It tells you that in a flight to quality and a safe haven, people have more confidence in gold than in bank deposits or paper money. I think things have gotten out of control.” Read More’I hate to say’ selling going to continue: Gartman In early trading,…

Some of the more popular sports wearables don’t just let you track your fitness, they let other people track you. That’s what Canadian researchers found when they studied fitness-tracking devices from eight manufacturers, along with their companion mobile apps. All the devices studied except for the Apple Watch transmitted a persistent, unique Bluetooth identifier, allowing them to be tracked by the beacons increasingly being used by retail stores and shopping malls to recognize and profile their customers. The revealing devices, the Basis Peak, Fitbit Charge HR, Garmin Vivosmart, Jawbone Up 2, Mio Fuse, Withings Pulse O2 and Xiaomi Mi Band,…

The yen’s surge to 15-month highs against the dollar Thursday reveals deep problems in global markets, according to Steven Englander, global head of currency and G-10 strategy at Citigroup. “It’s rallying because it’s a safe haven currency and the world’s falling apart,” Englander told CNBC’s “Worldwide Exchange.” “It’s not rallying because there are negative interest rates.” The Bank of Japan and other central banks are working to ease investor doubt that monetary easing is still a reliable backstop. “The perception is that they’re ineffective,” Englander said. “I think central banks are going to need more time to actually come up…

Begone, noisy stock coolers. On Tuesday morning, AMD announced that the whisper-quiet new Wraith CPU cooler revealed at CES is now available, albeit only with a single processor. But at the same time, AMD introduced another new “near-silent 95 watt thermal solution” being bundled with six additional chips, including two new ones: a powerful new A10 APU, and a CPU that heralds the debut of AMD’s “Excavator” architecture on the desktop. The 125W Wraith (pictured above and below) is larger than the previous AMD stock cooler, with a larger fan that spins continuously at low speed in order to keep…

The U.S. consumer is relatively financially healthy, despite turmoil in stock markets — at least if you measure in gas station snacks, according to one PepsiCo executive. “The U.S. consumer is doing just fine,” Hugh Johnston, Pepsi’s vice chairman and chief financial officer, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Thursday. Thanks in part to lower gas prices and improved employment, Pepsi saw convenience store sales, a bellwether of consumer spending, pop 6 percent in its latest quarter, Johnston said. ‹ From Pepsi to Target: Bet on these leaders Is this the future of entertainment? Pepsi says so Indra Nooyi: The…

Verizon is still the LTE king among U.S. mobile carriers, but T-Mobile wants to be the heir apparent. That’s the main takeaway from the latest State of Mobile Networks: USA reportfrom OpenSignal. The crowd-sourced mobile data company found that T-Mobile is closing in on AT&T in terms of nationwide coverage, and the “Un-carrier” is tied with Verizon for the 4G speed crown. OpenSignal’s report pulls data from 180,000 people nationwide who have the company’s mobile app installed on their smartphone. Can you hear T-Mobile now? OPENSIGNALOpenSignal’s data says that T-Mobile’s 4G coverage is now at 81 percent. That means that…