Japanese electronics manufacturing company Sharp Corporation has recently reported their Q3 results. The company hit an operating profit of 2.6 billion yen (around $28.5 million) for the quarter, but they hit a net loss of 36.7 billion yen ($398 million).
Heyzap is a company that has built a social platform for mobile games that has raised $4.3 million in Series B funding. This round of funding was from Union Square Ventures and Qualcomm. Union Square is an existing investor in Heyzap.
Qualcomm will be investing up to 9.9 billion yen ($120 million) in Sharp to jointly develop display panels. Sharp will be issuing new shares to Qualcomm and Qualcomm subsidiary Pixtronix to develop low-power Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) displays using Sharp’s Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) technology according to statements from Sharp and Qualcomm today.
Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility has acquired Viewdle, an image recognition company. This is what a Motorola spokesperson said about the acquisition: “Motorola Mobility today announced that it has acquired Viewdle, a leading imaging & gesture recognition company. Motorola and Viewdle have an existing commercial agreement and have been collaborating for some time. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.”
Apple and Qualcomm have both put in investment bids that topped at around $1 billion in an effort to secure exclusive access to chip supplies from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), but the bids have been declined since the company wanted to retain flexibility for their production. Apple is clearly trying to lessen their dependence on Samsung for their product supplies.
Qualcomm has built the most powerful Android tablets on the market that money can buy. For $1,300, consumers can buy the Qualcomm S4 Pro, which uses the S4 Snapdragon quad-core processor. Each core runs at 1.5GHz each. It has the Adreno 320 GPU, 10-inch 720p display, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, and it runs on Android 4.0.4. You can buy the tablet from the BSquare’s store now.
Acer Inc., Toshiba Corporation, and Asustek Computer Inc. is rumored to be unveiling tablets that will run on Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system next week according to sources with Bloomberg. Acer will be displaying a tablet based on Microsoft Windows 8 at the Computex show in Taipei and Toshiba will showcase a tablet and notebook-style device said Bloomberg’s sources. Asustek will show tablets that have detachable keyboards that are similar to their Transformer computers.
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Qualcomm has worked closely with Sesame Street to develop augmented reality technology with these Sesame Street dolls. After placing the dolls and the setting in front of the tablet, the dolls came to life on the screen. No release date is available for this yet. [The Next Web]
