The FCC Wireline Bureau updated a report Monday on the legacy support for competitive eligible telecom carriers offering service to fixed locations to include AT&T in California. The amount of annual support is $38,340. The carrier was “inadvertently omitted from the previous version,” the bureau said in docket 10-90.
There are 23,522 cable and wireline subscribers without service due to the “Midwest Derecho” in the 24 Iowa counties covered by the current activation of the FCC’s disaster information reporting system, said Monday’s report. There were 38,088 subscribers without service Sunday. The affected areas also have outages at 2.4% of cellsites, a slight improvement over Sunday's 2.7%. Eight FM stations and one AM station are out of service, and no public safety answering point reported being down, the report said.
The Conference Board’s CEO confidence index had a 1-point uptick in Q3 to 45 points from the second quarter, it reported Thursday. A reading below 50 reflects more negative than positive responses. The board compiled the index in collaboration with The Business Council. About 38% of the CEOs canvassed expect to trim their workforces in the next 12 months, the survey found. With “uncertain economic conditions likely to persist,” more than a third also don't foresee raising pay in the next year, but 37% expressed little worry in attracting qualified talent, said the board: “Without substantial containment of COVID-19, widespread uncertainty will continue being the dominant cloud hanging over America’s CEO community.” CEOs remained pessimistic about current economic conditions, “though to a lesser extent than in the second quarter,” said the board. Nearly 90% said conditions were worse compared with six months earlier, down from 100% who said so in Q2. Only 8% said economic conditions were better. About three-quarters said conditions in their own industries were worse compared with six months earlier, down from 82% last quarter. About 17% said conditions were better in their own industries, up from 10% in Q2.
Astronomy interests raised concerns as the FCC looks at future use of the 70, 80 and 90 GHz bands. Comments on a June NPRM were posted in docket 20-133 Wednesday. Nokia and Qualcomm sought changes. The American Astronomical Society stressed the negative implications on “scientific exploration and discovery” if the NPRM is approved. “A process that gives significant weight to the input of experts from the scientific community is sorely needed,” the group said. A proposal for airborne use of the 70/80 GHz bands is particularly concerning, the society said: While “Aeronet mentions the need to protect radio astronomy in its proposal, there is no detail provided on how this will be done.” The National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Radio Frequencies raised similar issues. “There is no indication on the record of how the vitally important coordination task will take place for airplanes in the skies near Haystack,” said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Haystack Observatory. Nokia supports the lead proposal to increase the maximum beamwidth 3 dB points from 1.2 degrees to 2.2 degrees and to reduce minimum antenna gain from 43 dBi to 38 dBi. “This simple rule change will allow needed flexibility to deploy smaller, lighter backhaul antennas to facilitate 5G deployments in urban settings,” Nokia said. Other proposals require more study, the company said. “The inherent nature of 5G-based communications in this 70/80/90 GHz high band spectrum allows for multiple co-primary, co-located licensees to each deploy communications systems,” Qualcomm said.
Esports ad and sponsorship spending this year will top $1.5 billion, up 41% from 2017, Comscore reported Monday. Some 65% of U.S. households own a device for gaming; game content touches 80% of the digital population. Some 38 million U.S. households own a gaming console. In 2020, there were 210 million unique visitors in the overall gaming category.
The $38 million in Trade Act Section 301 tariff costs iRobot incurred in 2019 inflicted a hit of 3 percentage points on its gross margin for the year, said CEO Colin Angle. IRobot assumes the List 3 tariff exclusion that landed last month on the robotic vacuum cleaners it sources from China will expire at the end of 2020, he said. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer “made it quite explicit” in congressional testimony last month that any granted List 3 exemptions “would expire at the end of the year,” said Angle Wednesday after quarterly results. The company’s “cash position” improved when it recently started receiving “cash payments associated with our tariff refunds” from the Trump administration, said Chief Financial Officer Julie Zeiler. “We anticipate receiving the $57 million in tariff-related refunds owed to us over the next 12 months.” IRobot is “continuing to push with all energy to drive the diversification of our manufacturing base,” said Angle. Delay in shifting production to Malaysia and bringing it to scale “has been one of the impacts of COVID-19,” he said. “There’s travel bans in place” that inhibit “sending people into Malaysia, which has created a delay,” he said. The company is trying to get that work “back on track,” he said. “We do believe that by the end of 2021, we’ll be in a situation where we are effectively geographically diversified and U.S.-China trade policy does not substantially affect our business anymore.” Europe is the region most reliant on brick-and-mortar, and stores were shuttered for much of the quarter, he said. Europe’s e-commerce infrastructure also is less “mature” and the system buckled under the weight of demand for essential products during the pandemic, he said. E-commerce revenue grew about 50% in Q2 from the year-ago quarter and was more than 70% of total quarterly revenue, said Angle. IRobot stock closed $79.35, down 7.49%.
More women are “entering and staying active” in the U.S. patent system “than ever,” reported the Patent and Trademark Office Tuesday. Patents listing at least one woman inventor were 21.9% of those granted in 2019, up from 20.7% in 2016, said PTO. The “women inventor rate” share of females among all U.S. “inventor-patentees” grew to 12.8% from 12.1%, it said. New women inventor-patentees increased to 17.3% from 16.6%. There’s a decreasing “gender gap” in inventor-patentees that stay active by patenting again, it said. Of women who landed patents in 2014, 46% patented again within five years, compared with 52% for men, said PTO. The gap in 1980 was 28% women, 38% men. The share of women among all new inventor-patentees increased 17.3% by the end of 2019 from 5% in 1980, said PTO. In the five years ended 2014, the number of new women inventor-patentees grew by an average of 10.8% yearly, said the agency. Though yearly growth in the five years ended 2019 “slackened” to 4%, it's higher than males' 2.5%, the office said.
COVID-19's supply chain disruptions and sharply lower demand sent Volvo’s Q2 revenue plunging 38%, including a 46% decline in vehicle sales, said CEO Martin Lundstedt on a Friday investor call. Volvo also incurred a 15% revenue decline in services, he said. “We are still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Lundstedt. “Even if we see positive signs in utilization of installed fleet and the demand of equipment and services, we also must be clear that numerous uncertainties remain,” he said. “The risks for further and repetitive lockdowns are still relatively high.”
COVID-19 stay-at-home mandates are a “once-in-a-generation catalyst” for over-the-top streaming, said Cinedigm CEO Chris McGurk on a fiscal Q4 investor call. It’s “vastly accelerating the dramatic and permanent cord-cutting consumer shift to streaming that was already underway,” he said. Cinedigm will phase out its “legacy” digital cinema business over the next two fiscal years, he said. “We are moving to become a pure streaming company with sustainable profitability.” Ad-backed viewership went from virtually zero 15 months ago to 9.7 million viewers in March, he said. Viewership March 31 to May 31, during the peak of the lockdowns, increased to 13.2 million, up 38%, he said Monday. The smart TV has emerged as the “next major battleground in the streaming wars,” said Cinedigm Networks President Erick Opeka, whom McGurk called the “architect” of Cinedigm’s OTT transition. “Just a few years ago, smart TV’s were not very smart, with outdated user interfaces, limited content and apps and very high prices.” More modern smart TVs “have become usable, fast and cheap with fantastic content options,” said Opeka. “With more than 250 million sets shipping annually worldwide, it is easy to see how this business scales.” The quarter ended March 31.
BlackBerry CEO John Chen acknowledges it was “a rough year for our share price and our equity value,” but he and the board are “extremely bullish about our going-forward plan,” he told the company’s annual shareholder meeting virtually Tuesday. The ambition is to become the “must-have software provider for endpoints,” said Chen. BlackBerry sees a $38 billion market opportunity in helping “people that build devices” for the smart home or smart city, he said. The compound annual growth rate of the software business has been about 20% the past four years, said Chen. “We're pretty pleased with that number,” but “we're working very hard to make it higher than that,” he said. The “technology lab” was created about a year ago, he said. “We’ve done a lot of good stuff,” including the automotive cybersecurity tech it demonstrated at CES to “predict certain fault conditions in the car,” he said. Shares closed 3.5% lower Wednesday at $4.92.