Tech Today: Intel Can Beat Street, GoPro Gloom, Expedia Rises

Here are some things going on today in your world of tech:

BlueFin Research Partners’s Steve Mullane writes that he estimates that Intel’s (INTC) chip production in the month of December “indicated no signs of slowing down even through the holiday period,” which “strongly suggests that INTC could guide March quarter revenues above the current Wall Street consensus of -7.8%.”

Intel shares are down 5 cents at $36.30.

Shares of chip maker Silicon Motion (SIMO) are up 69 cents, or 1.6%, at $44.35, after the company this morning announced it expects its Q4 revenue to decline less than the Street is expecting. The company had forecast a decline of 9% to 14% from Q3’s level, and now it says it looks like the drop will actually be “toward the 9% end,” which would be $144 million, above the $140 million the Street has been modeling.

Silicon Motion also said that its gross margin will come in toward the upper end of its projected range of 48.5% to 50.5%.

CES: Huawei Keynote Highlights Google, Amazon Agendas

Richard Yu, the head of the consumer business at Chinese telecommunications equipment giant Huawei, spent most of his keynote on Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show trying to convince everyone the company was worth taking seriously.

Despite being the number-three smartphone vendor in the world, behind Apple (AAPL) and Samsung Electronics (005930KS), the Huawei pitch to the audience at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas was like a rookie on the job begging for legitimacy.

And to help in the effort, Yu enlisted on-stage appearances by executives of Amazon.com (AMZN) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL), which tended to show off just how much these two cloud companies dominated the agenda here at the show, pretty much all week.

Yu, who has been with the company since 1993, when it was just selling telephone network equipment, put up numerous slides to document that Huawei is a substantial company, in case anyone didn’t already know. One of them said that the company’s R&D budget, $9.2 billion last year, placed it 9th among all companies in the world in investment.

NXP CEO Clemmer: No Significant Risk China Blocks Qualcomm Deal

Chip maker NXP Semiconductors (NXPI) was a subject of discussion on Thursday morning’s “Squawk Box” segment on CNBC, as anchor David Faber mused that there is some risk the company might not get approval for its proposed merger with Qualcomm (QCOM), which was first announced on October 27th.

Faber’s point was President-elect Donald Trump’s hard-line stance with respect to China during the camp raises the specter of a trade war, which could conceivable imperil anyone seeking China’s blessing. (Faber, you’ll recall, had broken word of the deal roughly a week before it was formally announced.)

NXP shares closed up 10 cents on Thursday, at $98.40, substantially below Qualcomm’s $110-per-share offer. (Qualcomm’s CEO, Steve Mollenkopf, will give a keynote at the show this morning, at 9 am, Pacific time.)

I met with NXP’s chief executive Rick Clemmer later in the day yesterday, inside the company’s booth in the parking lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the Consumer Electronics Show is taking place.

Clemmer seemed mildly amused by the speculation. He allowed there’s there’s a risk of a “delay,” but was fairly adamant the deal is unlikely to be blocked.

CES: China’s Huawei Says ‘Mate 9′ Comes to US Tomorrow

Chinese telecom giant and smartphone maker Huawei this afternoon said its “Mate 9” smartphone, introduced this fall, will go on sale in the U.S. starting tomorrow for $599.99, available through Amazon.com and other online outfits. The device is unlocked so you can set it up with a SIM from a U.S. carrier that supports the GSM standard.

This is the first time Huawei’s flagship phone has been made generally available in the U.S., said Richard Yu, the head of Huawei’s consumer business unit.

Huawei counts itself as one of the “top three” of smartphone makers. It is eager to show it can best either Apple (AAPL) or Samsung Electronics (005930KS), the number two and number one phone makers by sales volume globally. Yu told the audience during his keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday that the company “has a chance to enter the top-two in the next couple of years.”

CES: Energous, WiTricity Tech ‘Inefficient, Unsafe,’ Say the Qi

I had an interesting conversation this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with a gentleman by the name of Menno Treffers, who is more or less the public face of the Wireless Power Consortium, which backs the “Qi” wireless power standard.

Qi is in wide use around the world as a way to charge things like smartphones, but setting up a transceiver and placing a phone on top of it, what’s called generally “wireless charging.”

It’s been around for a while, and chip companies such as Integrated Device Technology (IDTI) have shipped millions of chips using the basic technology underlying it, “magnetic inductance.” Treffers is an independent consultant, his company being Treffers Alliance Management.

There is a roadmap to make Qi more and more powerful. Existing Qi systems provide a few watts, which is enough for a phone or wearable. Other devices require more power. Treffers says there are designs in the works by companies in the Consortium to provide 30 watts of through inductance, for things like power equipment. And there’s even the prospect of 2.4 kilowatts, for powering home appliances.

But some parties here at CES are challenging Qi with promises of sending power to devices with less need to align a phone or laptop to a charging “plate,” and perhaps without any contact at all, through the air.

One of them is WiTricity, a startup company. I wrote about them in a recent Barron’s magazine cover story. The company contends that a better approach is what’s called “magnetic resonance,” where there can be a distance between transceiver and device. The point is, as expressed to me by CEO Alex Gruzen, is that no one wants to drill a hole in their desk, which is one of the things the inductance folks tend to recommend that you do, if you want to use Qi for something like a laptop.

Another company, publicly traded Energous (WATT), says it will be able to transmit as much as five watts of power at distances of fifteen feet, to provide wireless charging around a room for smartphones and wearables to “top up.” That’s using something called “RF power.”

Both companies are here this week and I’m meeting with both, so I asked Treffers what he thought of both companies’ claims.

Treffers’s initial response was “they are not very efficient, and they are not very safe.”

He tells me such approaches might only provide “some hundreds of milliwatts” of power, not the watts of power they claim. And if WiTricity and Energous try to resolve that efficiency issue, they might end up doing so in such a way that they would cook anyone in the range of their transceivers.

When I counter that both companies have argued they can overcome these things — Energous even showed me their lab where they plan to demonstrate the safety of their technology — Treffers replies, “have them show you,” meaning, do a valid demonstration, which he implies neither has done so far.

They haven’t done any demonstrations? I suggest. Not to his satisfaction, he shakes his head.

I ask him if he thinks basically both companies are pursuing something that is “possible but not practical,” and he nods his agreement.

“You know, we’ve known for some time you can send power over a distance. Nikola Tesla showed it a hundred years ago. NASA in 1975 demonstrated sending 30 kilowatts of power over several kilometers.”

“Ever few years, some company re-discovers that you can send power over distance,” Treffers sums up. “And they get a company together, but what they actually have to show for it…” His voice trailed off. “Get investors and cash out?” I suggested. “Yes,” he nodded, with a grin.

Stay tuned!

Nvidia CEO Huang Reflects on ‘Destiny Meets Serendipity’

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

Thursday morning, Nvidia (NVDA) founder and chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang followed his keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show the night before with a breakfast Q&A for a few journalists and I was fortunate enough to be invited.

Huang’s most interesting statement about the big picture came at the end of the talk, when he reflected on Nvidia’s success at the moment in “machine learning” and artificial intelligence, characterizing it as “destiny meets serendipity“:

The destiny part is, we created a processor that is very good at data processing at high throughput. The serendipity part is that machine learning needs a great computational engine, and so when this elegant algorithm came together with the GPU, it was destiny meets some amount of serendipity.

Huang reiterated his three themes of the night before: the video game market is becoming more and more one of the dominant activities of the culture, and the PC is the best way to do it; the home is going to become a center of A.I.; and your car, using lots of Nvidia trips, is going to “become an A.I.,” including autonomous driving, but also the co-pilot functions of monitoring the behavior of the human driver, through things like lip-reading.

Among interesting tidbits Huang offered were that the co-pilot function in the car is harder to do, from a compute standpoint, than is the self-driving function.

“It takes a full Xavier,” he said, referring to the company’s octal-core driving compute chip.

As far as all the other entrants into the self-driving market, Huang boasted of the company’s work for Tesla (TSLA) (Huang himself drives a Model S), and said Nvidia would be ahead of the competition, ultimately, in terms of actual shipping volume of cars with advanced autonomous driving.

He was asked about small companies, and what they can do in this time of cloud computing giants.

“This is a great time for startups,” said Huang. “We are working with 1,500 startups today, we’ve never been able to work with this many in our company’s history.”

Huang predicted the rise of numerous small businesses, really startups, that have particular data, saying they will make a big business out of their data by using A.I. to process and analyze it. “This is a really good time for startups,” he repeated, likening such data-rich companies to micro-breweries.

Asked about how the company will build out the network of GPUs to support its “GeForce Now” gaming service, Huang said there were a number of ways to do it, including co-location of Nvidia’s own gear in data centers.

But, “there are so many cloud facilities around the world now,” that it was also possible for Nvidia to “use all the GPUs we already have out there” such as in Amazon‘s (AMZN) AWS, which runs Nvidia GPUs as a one of its many services.

My first question to Huang was what he thinks of reports of accidents in autonomous driving, and even a death, in the case of Tesla.

Said Huang, this is a reflection of just how hard A.I. is to do:

Yeah, really, really unfortunate, and there’s no question the technology has much to advance. The problem of self driving cars is an A.I. problem, and that’s a really hard one, and that’s why we’re working so hard on it.

Asked about the self-driving hype propounded by Nvidia itself, and Alphabet’s (GOOGL), and other companies, Haung quipped to the reporters in the room that “all of you can do something about that, just don’t write about it,” to much laughter.

Turning serious, Huang said the car will start with just the task of planning a route, and then it will perform tasks over and above that which it knows it can handle.But, even when the car is not driving, “it should be looking out for you.”

“I do believe there are two parts of this, there is the car driving for you, but there is also the car looking out for you,” he said, returning to the theme of the co-pilot.

Huang articulated the company’s competitive strategy in autos, and in other areas of machine learning, saying, “Our strategy is to create the platform for A.I.,” meaning, the underlying technology would be similar — presumably Nvidia’s chips — regardless of the superficial differences in A.I. functions from one auto maker to another.

Regarding the company’s work on using Google Assistant for the home, Huang said that the problem of natural language recognition is “really hard to do,” and so, again, it’s a task for brawny compute like Nvidia’s.

Someone asked Huang simply “how do you feel,” with his company having “grown so fast,” to the point where Huang displaced Intel‘s (INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich as the CES headliner.Rather than responding personally, Huang reflected on the history of the industry:

Tableau: Cloud Competition Rising, Says Wunderlich

Data visualization and analytics software maker Tableau Software (DATA) is at risk of what Wunderlich Securities‘s Bill Choi this morning warns is a “fast-evolving competitive landscape.”

Choi, cutting his rating on the stock to Hold from Buy, and cutting his price target to $50 from $58, writes that “While DATA boasts a strong front-end visualization functionality, we have heard complaints from customers’ IT organizations regarding DATA’s integration on the back end with difficulty pulling in data from a number of different data storage and warehousing source.”

More important, given the fact most of Tableau’s software sales are “on-premise,” so to speak, Choi is concerned about the rise of competition in cloud computing services, specifically Amazon (AMZN), and Microsoft (MSFT):

Within the business intelligence platform stack, we believe DATA provides the market’s best visualization and analytics layer, but the company does not provide a data collection/storage/access layer and is still improving its data preparation/modeling layer. Not being tied to any one data source or platform has been to Tableau’s benefit in the past, but could be a disadvantage in the near term as nearly every enterprise software company is currently investing in some form of analytics and visualization tool within its own platform. In particular, the emergence of AWS and Microsoft Power BI could create daunting competition for DATA moving forward as both companies have scale and pricing power advantages over DATA, despite DATA being a technology leader. We question DATA’s ability to effective land and, more important, expand with enterprise customers given AWS and MSFT’s footprint. These products are not comparable to DATA from a feature and usability perspective, but are much cheaper. AWS Quickshift is $9/month/user for standard and $18/mos/user for enterprise; Power BI is $0/month/user and $10/mos/user for Power BI Pro; while Tableau online is $500/year/user or effectively $41.67/month/user.

Tableau shares today are down 13 cents at $44.93.

Tech Today: NPD Sees Tech Growth, Nvidia’s Development, Buy the Cloud?

Here are some things going on today in your world of tech:

Good news! Growth is on! Market research firm NPD yesterday issued a press release saying the “tech industry will return to growth for the first time since 2010.”

The firm sees the who tech industry’s sales rising by 2% in 2017.

The firm sees “growth overall” in the existing things like TVs and PCs, but the most growth is in “categories based on exciting, innovative technology, such as drones, home automation products and virtual reality, accounting for a growing percentage of industry sales.”

Shares of Nvidia (NVDA) are down 75 cents, or 0.6%, at $103.64, after founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s keynote address last night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

RBC’s Mitch Steves early this morning was impressed with Huang’s discussion of bringing advanced self-driving capabilities to Audi automobiles.

Straight Outta Pepcom: Vuzix Touts Sleek; Meditation Bands, Endless OS

Ah, Las Vegas. It’s the kind of place, during this week, when the Consumer Electronics Show is in town, that the hotel lobbies have insane recordings, such as Morgan Freeman’s voice babbling on about some crazy machine that weighs as much as “20 fully-grown African elephants,” followed by an over-the-top soundtrack.

And Wednesday evening, ground zero was at the Mirage Hotel, where tons of little card tables were set up for all manner of companies, large and small, showing off their tech wares.

I was buttonholed almost immediately to listen to Vuzix (VUZI), the makers of smart eyewear. CEO Paul Trevers was manning the booth, and he tried on a pair the company’s latest, the “Blade 3000,” which are due out later this year, and expected to retails for “under $1,000,” going to less than $500 next year.

Nvidia’s Huang Points the Way to Autos as Next Growth Angle, Says RBC

Nvidia’s (NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun Huang kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Wednesday evening with a keynote presentation that covered new uses for his company’s chips, and his first review comes from RBC Capital‘s Mitch Steves, who has an Outperform rating on the stock.

He notes in particular Huang’s announcement that the company is partnering with auto maker Audi to bring a high degree of driverless autonomy to cars by the year 2020.

“Importantly, the primary goal is to have Audis with ‘Level 4′ which refers to fully driverless vehicles outside of extreme conditions by ~2020,” writes Steves.

Steves thinks Nvidia’s automotive opportunity is set to outshine its traditional video game market:

While the focus has remained on Gaming from the investment community for the past two months, we think the Automotive segment could outperform relative to expectations and view the new Audi announcement as a material positive. Overall, NVIDIA views their SAM opportunity as follows: 1) Digital Cockpit – 20M cars or $2B; 2) Self-Driving Cars – 15M cars or $2B; and 3) Transportation as a Service – ~2M cars or $2-6B. While there are regulatory hurdles to overcome with regard to self driving cars, we think the space should see notable growth once they are made mainstream.

Nvidia shares on Wednesday closed up $2.38, or 2%, at $104.39.