
Twitter Teams With Foursquare; Intel Takes on Nvidia; Brexit Crushes U.S. Tech Stocks
Here's a look at noteworthy Friday tech stories. For earlier coverage, click here.
Twitter teams with Foursquare to show tweets from a specific location
A new Twitter (TWTR) - Get Report feature -- it's first rolling out on the iOS app, but will arrive on other platforms later -- will allow users to view feeds containing the latest tweets published from a either a city or a specific location such as a business, park or stadium. The former will be powered by Twitter's location-tagging feature, which many users leave on by default, and the latter by location check-in service Foursquare's place-identification data.
It's a useful feature that should've probably arrived some time ago, given how often Twitter is used to follow events going on in specific places. However, Twitter, which has had its share of challenges executing on interesting ideas over the years, will need to make the feature more accessible: Users need to tap on a tweet and then on its location line to pull up a location-specific feed, and it's not easy to search for location feeds.
Location-specific Twitter feeds. Source: TechCrunch.
TechCrunch observes the feature could strengthen Twitter's Moments service -- it launched last fall to much hype, but hasn't lived up to hopes it would provide a big lift to user growth -- by enabling location-specific Moments feeds. It could also boost a data licensing businesses that accounted for 11% of first-quarter revenue, given businesses and marketers are bound to have interest in better analyzing Twitter content and sentiment by location. And in the event Twitter is open to a sale, it might increase the company's appeal to a firm like Google, which has made big investments in providing location-based content to its users via search results and Google Now.
But in the meantime, Twitter might want to make sure its everyday users are able to find the feature.
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Intel wants to sell over 100,000 Xeon Phi processors in 2016
Intel's (INTC) - Get Report Xeon Phi processors are deployed within servers, and used in parallel to handle demanding high-performance computing (HPC), big data/analytics and (more recently) artificial intelligence tasks. An Intel exec says the company is looking to sell over 100,000 of the processors, whose prices tend to run well into four figures, this year, and has sold 30,000 in 2016 to date.
The remarks shortly follow the launch of Intel's Knights Landing Xeon Phi line. Whereas the company's older Knights Corner Xeon Phi parts could only function as co-processors complementing Intel's regular Xeon server CPUs, Knights Landing can work either as a co-processor of a system's primary processor. The most powerful Knights Landing solution, known as the Xeon Phi 7290, features 72 (relatively small) cores and sells for a steep $6,254. In September, Knights Landing will add support for Intel's high-speed Omni-Path fabric for connecting HPC servers.
Intel is hoping Knights Landing will help it grab share from Nvidia (NVDA) - Get Report , whose Tesla graphics cards have been dominant in the server accelerator market for some time. Tesla cards are found in 70 of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers, according to a 2015 list, and are also increasingly used by Facebook (FB) - Get Report , Amazon.com (AMZN) - Get Report , Baidu (BIDU) - Get Report , and other Internet giants to handle AI-related applications that get smarter at handling tasks as they take in more and more data. Soaring demand from the Internet giants fueled a 63% annual increase in Nvidia's data center revenue during the company's April quarter.
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Nvidia has a healthy lead on Intel when it comes to creating AI-optimized accelerators, and with the recent launch of its Tesla P100 card - Nvidia claims it delivers more than a 12x increase in neural networking training performance relative to its predecessor - the company isn't taking its foot off the pedal. But with Knights Landing, Intel is starting to bring its large manufacturing and server platform investments to bear in the accelerator market, and that could help it gain ground within the HPC segment.
Additional Brexit tech casualties: Online travel stocks, enterprise tech stocks, eBay
In addition to European tech companies (discussed previously), many U.S.-based tech firms with strong European exposure saw outsized losses following the Brexit vote. Online travel giants Priceline (PCLN) and Expedia (EXPE) - Get Report were among the casualties, respectively declining 11.4% and 7.4%. Thanks to its Amsterdam-based Booking.com unit, a giant portion of Priceline's travel bookings are related to Europe.
Various Euro-exposed enterprise tech firms were also crushed. IT giants HP Enterprise (HPE) - Get Reportand IBM (IBM) - Get Report respectively fell 7.6% and 5.6%; and IT outsourcing firms Cognizant (CTSH) - Get Report and Luxoft respectively fell 7.5% and 10.5%. CAD software giant Autodesk (ADSK) - Get Report fell 8.5% and point-of-sale hardware provider NCR (NCR) - Get Report fell 8.7%. And eBay (EBAY) - Get Report, whose Marketplace and Classifieds businesses depend heavily on Europe, fell 6.9%.
Piper Jaffray's Michael Olson
the selloff in online travel names spells a buying opportunity. Among his arguments: It'll likely take several years for the U.K. to leave the EU, thus limiting its near-term impact on consumer sentiment; and the European Central Bank is already implementing stabilization measures. He also notes just 16% of Expedia's bookings are tied to the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. On the other hand, about half of Priceline's bookings are made by Europeans.
See full coverage of the Brexit debate here.











