Chips Ahoy!!

In Aug 2007 LSI Logic Corp. announced it would sell off its mobility products business unit to Infineon Technologies AG, and in September of the same year the number of baseband suppliers was further reduced when MediaTek Inc. purchased Analog Devices Inc.'s baseband chip product line.

Infineon now has the main stake in this business with 25% of the revenues coming from it.

In the rankings in the baseband market the main players were QCOM, MediaTek, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies, Broadcom, Renesas, Marvell Technology Group and Spreadtrum Communications, according to iSuppli.

Data Visualization Tools

1) Ruby -- for data munging;
2) Postgres -- for database management;
3) World Programming System (WPS) -- for SAS legacy data programming;
4) Tibco -- for data visualization;
5) R -- for predictive modeling/data mining.

The developing interface between Tibco and R is very promising. 

http://www.tableausoftware.com/ 
http://www.panopticon.com/ 
http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/products

WEKA

http://www.gapminder.org/ 

http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/

When does an acquisition work?

The strategic rationale for an acquisition that creates value typically conforms to at least one of the following five archetypes: improving the performance of the target company, removing excess capacity from an industry, creating market access for products, acquiring skills or technologies more quickly or at lower cost than they could be built in-house, and picking winners early and helping them develop their businesses. If an acquisition does not fit one or more of these archetypes, it's unlikely to create value. (Source McKQ)