August, 2018

• 13 August

  California wildfire smoke dims solar power output

  Bloomberg The smoke billowing from California’s wildfires is dimming output from solar farms. First Solar Inc., which operates more than two gigawatts of solar farms in the state — that’s equivalent to about two nuclear reactors — has seen production dip at installations near fires, according to spokesman Steve Krum. The slumps in generation have been “very minimal,” he said, ...

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• 13 August

  SoftBank to shun Tesla deal as it focuses on other car bets

  

  Bloomberg Speculation about who may or may not finance Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk’s audacious plan to take the carmaker private is distracting dealmakers from a normally quiet August spent in the Hamptons or Southern France. As the intrigue enters a second week, with pressure increasing on the billionaire founder to explain how a deal would be funded, one of ...

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• 13 August

  WeWork China rival raises $120 million

  

  Bloomberg Beijing MyDreamPlus Technology Co. Ltd. raised $120 million in a funding round led by Hillhouse Capital and General Atlantic as competition in China’s co-working market heats up. The money will be used to fuel expansion as the three-year-old startup targets more than doubling its floor space in the next 12 months. The financing comes just weeks after the Chinese ...

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• 13 August

  Chinese tech-obsessed insurer may cast a long shadow over Asia

  

  Bloomberg Tencent Holdings Ltd. took another hit to its gaming business, after regulators told the social media giant to remove Monster Hunter: Worldfrom its PC downloads service just days after the action title’s debut. Parts of the Capcom Co. hit failed to meet regulatory standards and the relevant authorities received a “significant amount of complaints,” which in turn spurred the ...

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• 13 August

  Sony’s new super-fast cameras winning over the pros

  

  Bloomberg Nikon and Canon face a threat at the top end of the market Eight seconds. That’s how long a cowboy needs to stay on a bucking bronco to qualify for a rodeo score. For photographers, that’s barely enough time to take just a few blurry, often unusable pictures. “In the past, these images would have been made by pre-focusing ...

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• 13 August

  The age of malware

  

  Welcome to the Age of Malware. It promises to be a huge downer and, possibly, a great tragedy. For years, we have regarded personal computers, the internet, smartphones and various digital devices as evidence that America continues to dominate the central new technology of our time. Just last week, Apple attained a stock market value of $1 trillion — the ...

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• 13 August

  Zuckerberg is totally out of his depth

  

  I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, all those Google nerds: They’re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the monsters they have created. The way I see it, these guys — and they are mostly guys — were arbitrarily ...

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• 13 August

  Now maybe Taiwan will take cybersecurity seriously

  

  I was at a hackers conference in Taipei a few years ago when I got talking to one of the country’s leading cybersecurity experts. I wanted to know the state of play in the ongoing cyber war between Taiwan and China. “There’s no war,” came the response. I was flummoxed. All day, stories had been flowing about attacks from China ...

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• 13 August

  Donald Trump’s border wall is a boondoggle

  By the scandalous standards of recent policy on immigration, it may seem like small potatoes. With a federal court demanding that separated parents and young children be reunited, and the Trump administration saying it doesn’t know where all of them are, instances of ordinary incompetence might seem hardly worth mentioning. Even so, the findings of a new Government Accountability Office ...

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• 13 August

  China-US trade spat is just a start to economic cold war

  

  China is not just another front in President Donald Trump’s war on trade. Unlike Mexico, Canada, Europe and other targets of the president, China will be a source of economic conflict for years to come, long after the tariff level on soybeans has been settled. Like the rivalry with the Soviet Union, economic competition with China may form a cold ...

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