In an effort to threaten Apple’s hegemony in the premium market, Samsung Electronics launched its newest foldable smartphones on Wednesday while maintaining pricing at around the same level for the past three years.

The leading smartphone manufacturer in the world created the market in 2019, anticipating that it would appeal to users seeking a larger screen to view content while maintaining a small total phone size.
According to research firm Counterpoint, foldable phones are still a limited product category that only accounts for 5% of the worldwide premium smartphone market, despite having expanded significantly from 0.3% in 2019.

According to market analysts, Samsung, the market leader in the area with 63% of the market in the first quarter, wants to quicken the growth trajectory with aggressive pricing and a quicker rollout.

The company set the launch prices for the new clamshell Galaxy Z Flip5 at $999.99 and the large Galaxy Z Fold5 at $1,799.99 on Wednesday in the United States, respectively.

By enhancing the hinge, it was able to make the foldable Flip5 thinner than the model from the previous year. It also increased the cover screen’s size to 3.4 inches (8.64 cm), which added more capacity for interactions and enhanced the ability to capture a selfie with the top-tier main camera.

The 7.6-inch Samsung Fold5 has a wider vapour chamber for better heat management when gaming or multitasking and a 41% slimmer pen than the device from last year.

Both devices include Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipsets from Qualcomm.

Analysts believe that the early introduction of the newest models is an attempt to maintain the spotlight prior to the debut of the next iPhone for a longer period of time.

“Apple’s iPhone 15 series will inevitably face competition. In particular… in China and Western Europe, consumers of foldable gadgets are transitioning from early adopters to regular users, according to Counterpoint senior analyst Jene Park.

The largest barrier for a consumer may be pricing because foldable phones are “significantly more expensive than general smartphones” to produce because to the complex technology utilized for their foldable displays and hinges, according to Park.

According to Counterpoint, global shipments of foldable smartphones are anticipated to reach 19 million units in 2023, an increase of roughly 45% from 13.1 million in 2022.

In 2022, Apple held a 75% share compared to Samsung’s 16% of the market for premium smartphones costing $600 or more.

From August 11 onward, a few markets will have Samsung’s revolutionary foldable phones.

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Elon Musk, a billionaire, decided to rebrand Twitter as X, but it may be difficult legally because Microsoft and Meta already own the intellectual property rights to that letter.

X is a candidate for legal problems because it is used and quoted in trademarks so frequently. The business formerly known as Twitter may also have trouble in the future defending its X brand.

According to trademark lawyer Josh Gerben, there are already approximately 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that cover the letter X across a variety of businesses, therefore there is a "100% chance" that Twitter will be sued over this.

On Monday, Musk changed the name of the social media platform Twitter to X and introduced a new logo that features a stylised, black-and-white rendition of the letter.

If other branding may lead to customer confusion, trademark owners who protect things like brand names, logos, and slogans that identify suppliers of goods, may claim infringement. The options for relief include monetary damages and prohibiting use.

Since 2003, Microsoft has controlled the X trademark in connection with communications regarding their Xbox video-game system. A blue-and-white letter "X" is covered by a federal trademark owned by Meta Platforms, whose Threads platform is a new Twitter rival. The trademark was registered in 2019 and covers industries such as software and social media.

According to Gerben, Meta and Microsoft are unlikely to file a lawsuit unless they believe their brand equity has been violated by Twitter's X.

Requests for comments from the three businesses received no response.

When Meta changed its name from Facebook, it faced legal problems over intellectual property. It is facing trademark claims from virtual reality business MetaX and investment firm Metacapital from last year, and it has already settled one of those disputes over its new infinity-symbol emblem.

Other people could still claim the moniker "X" if Musk is successful in changing it.

"Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as 'X', Twitter's protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo," said Douglas Masters, a trademark lawyer at the law firm Loeb & Loeb.

"The protection will be very limited because the logo lacks much distinctiveness."

Earlier today, Insider claimed that Meta had registered an X trademark, and attorney Ed Timberlake claimed that Microsoft had done the same.

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Microsoft beat fourth-quarter revenue and profit expectations on Tuesday as its cloud division benefited from product updates utilizing fresh artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

However, when it constructed new data centers to serve AI, expenditures increased significantly from the prior quarter, and its shares decreased somewhat in after-hours trading.

Wall Street is examining how Microsoft, which took the lead early on with investments in OpenAI, owner of the well-known ChatGPT service, may profit from generative AI services.

The $30 a month “Copilot” for its Microsoft 365 service, which can condense a day’s worth of emails into a brief update, is one example of how Microsoft is incorporating AI into its own products. Additionally, it wants to sell cloud computing services that other businesses might use to develop AI products.

According to Microsoft’s financial data, significant investments in AI services have surpassed corresponding revenue growth.

Microsoft’s quarterly capital expenditures reached the highest single-quarter total since at least its fiscal 2016 year, despite the fact that the growth rate of its Azure sales was somewhat higher than anticipated by the market. The firm is competing with other cloud providers for a finite number of Nvidia Corp. chips, whose graphics processing units are necessary for developing AI goods and services.

The company’s spending reflects its projections for demand for AI services, according to Brett Iversen, vice president of investor relations at Microsoft, who spoke to Reuters.

“You’ve seen a ton of excitement and customer interest in our various AI offerings, and that informs the CapEx spend that we need to do to build out the capacity to deliver against all of that.”

In the fiscal fourth quarter that ended on June 30, revenue increased to $56.2 billion, exceeding the analysts’ consensus forecast of $55.5 billion, according to Refinitiv. Above expectations of $2.55 per share, net income was $2.69 per share.

In contrast to forecasts of $23.8 billion, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud division, which houses the Azure cloud computing platform, saw an increase in revenue to $24 billion.

Revenue from Azure increased 26%, above Visible Alpha’s prediction of 25.2% growth.

The portion of Microsoft’s business that is most positioned to benefit from the increasing interest in AI is Azure, although the company does not break out the absolute sales figure for Azure.

Sales of the company’s Windows operating system fell to $13.9 billion as a result of the ongoing PC market downturn. According to Refinitiv, this contrasts with the experts’ consensus forecast of $13.6 billion.

According to Refinitiv statistics, the Microsoft division that includes the LinkedIn social network and its Office productivity software saw growth to $18.3 billion, exceeding analysts’ consensus estimates of $18.1 billion.

After the corporation informed investors that spending would increase as it built out data centers for AI work, capital expenditures increased to $10.7 billion from $7.8 billion in the fiscal third quarter.

In a statement releasing the findings, Chief Executive Satya Nadella remarked, “We remain focused on leading the new AI platform shift.”

Microsoft has begun incorporating AI capabilities into a variety of its products, including Azure, Microsoft 365, GitHub, and a number of developer tools.

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In the latest effort by a social media company to capitalize on the unrest at Twitter following Elon Musk’s purchase of the microblogging service last year, the Chinese short-video app TikTok now allows users to create postings that are purely text-based.

The change, which was revealed on Monday, would give TikTok users a choice of backdrops for their text messages so they can include hashtags and tag other users.

The posts, which feature an Instagram Stories-like format, are limited to 1,000 characters, according to the tech news website the Verge.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms (META.O), introduced Threads in July, a new text-only software that might compete with Twitter from Elon Musk.

On Monday, Musk changed the name of Twitter to X and got rid of the recognizable blue bird emblem in an effort to build “an everything app,” Musk rebranded Twitter to X on Monday and got rid with the well-known blue bird emblem.In an effort to build “an everything app,” Musk rebranded Twitter to X on Monday and got rid with the well-known blue bird emblem.

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People are having their eyes scanned all over the world in exchange for a digital ID and the promise of free cryptocurrency, dispelling worries from privacy advocates and data regulators.

The Worldcoin project was started by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT. It claims to aim to build a new “identity and financial network” and that its digital ID will enable users to show online that they are human and not a robot, among other things.

On Tuesday, attendees of a crypto conference in Tokyo lined up in front of a shining silver globe that was accompanied by signs reading “Orbs are here.” Before waiting for the 25 free Worldcoin tokens the corporation says verified users can collect, applicants lined up to have their irises scanned by the equipment.

Users told Reuters that they balanced their privacy worries against their interest in the initiative, which claims to have provided IDs for more than two million people in 120 countries, primarily during a test phase over the past two years.

The risk of allowing a firm to gather information from your own eyes is present, but Saeki Sasaki, 33, enjoys keeping up with the most recent cryptocurrency developments.

“I was a little afraid, but now that I’ve done it, I can’t go back.”
Data collected by Worldcoin is a “potential privacy nightmare,” according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group in the United States.

Inquiries from Reuters on Worldcoin’s privacy practices were submitted to the company through email on Tuesday. According to the company’s website, the initiative is “completely private” and customers can choose to have their biometric data destroyed or encrypted before it is saved.

FREED MONEY PROMISED
On Monday, two Worldcoin reps demonstrated to a small crowd how to download the app and get scanned while also giving away free t-shirts and stickers that read “verified human” in the foyer of an east London co-working space.

The 34-year-old graphic designer Christian claimed that he was “intrigued” by the opportunity to participate. He purchases cryptocurrencies “just for fun” and keeps up with developments in both artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency.

He remarked, declining to offer his full name out of respect for his privacy, “I think going forward AI will be hard to distinguish from human and I think this potentially solves that problem and that’s pretty amazing.”

On Tuesday, Worldcoin tokens were trading at about $2.30 on Binance, the biggest market in the world. The prospect of financial benefit from cryptocurrency was enough to persuade many people to provide personal information.

The 25 free tokens might be sold for between $70 and $80 at the present price, according to Ali, a 22-year-old chemical engineering student who has put some of his student loan money into cryptocurrencies.

“I mentioned it to my brother this morning. I asked him, “You want to come with me to get the free money? ”

Christian and Ali both said they had not read Worldcoin’s privacy statement, which states that data may be sent to contractors and may be accessible by governments and authorities, while it also states that steps are taken to reduce risks and that encryption is used to prevent unauthorized access.

Ali stated, “It’s quite worrying, because I believe a lot of companies have our data at this point.

Big Brother Watch, a UK privacy advocacy group, warned that there was a chance that biometric data may be compromised or misused.

Senior advocacy officer Madeleine Stone stated that “digital ID systems rarely live up to the extraordinary benefits technocrats tend to attribute to them” and instead increase state and corporate control over people’s lives.

Regulators were also interested in the idea; the British data authority revealed to Reuters that it was looking into the Worldcoin debut in the UK.

On Tuesday, orb-operators approached onlookers in a mall in Bengaluru, India, and instructed them on how to sign up. The majority of those questioned by Reuters claimed they had no privacy concerns.

Sujith, an 18-year-old business student who is a new user, claimed he did not read the tiny print and had no actual privacy concerns. He claimed that he uses the meager pocket money from his family to invest in cryptocurrencies.

“While I was walking by, someone asked if I wanted any free coins. So, I figured, why not?” he asked.

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