Month: April 2019

Enlarge / Here, have some antibiotics. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Last week, the biotech company Achaogen announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. That might not seem like much news: businesses crash and burn all the time. But Achaogen, founded in 2002, was an antibiotics company. Its first drug, Zemdri (plazomicin), was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last June.

The world is running out of useful antibiotics because the rise of antibiotic resistance in bacteria is undermining them, and big firms are disinclined to make more. In 2018 alone, three large legacy pharma firms closed their antibiotic research programs. So the collapse of even a small business that stepped up to make a new antibiotic is a blow.

Achaogen hit all the marks that should have signaled success. It recruited experienced developers, targeted an infection that the World Health Organization considers a critical unmet need, stuck with its compound through 15 years of testing, scored several rounds of public investment and private philanthropy, and got its drug approved. Yet the market didn’t reward the company for producing a new antibiotic: on the day the FDA announced its decision, its stock price actually dropped by 20 percent. Almost a year later, it has earned less than $1 million on the drug, not enough to stay alive.

Enlarge / Elon Musk exits federal court on April 4, 2019 in New York City. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Elon Musk has reached a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the two parties said in a legal filing on Friday. The new agreement provides much more detailed guidance about when tweets and other public statements by Musk must be approved by Tesla lawyers.

Musk's original deal with the SEC was announced last September. It required Musk to obtain pre-approval for tweets that "contain or could contain" information that's material—legal jargon for information that's significant to shareholders. While the SEC expected Musk to begin regularly clearing tweets with lawyers, Musk interpreted this language as giving him significant discretion to decide for himself which tweets contained material information. As a result, he didn't seek legal review for any tweets in the first few months the agreement was in effect.

In February, Musk tweeted that Tesla "will make around 500k in 2019." Hours later, he followed up with a clarifying tweet, stating that he "meant to say annualized production rate at end of 2019 probably around 500k." Musk didn't get this tweet cleared by Tesla lawyers. The SEC viewed that as a violation of the agreement and asked Judge Nathan to hold Musk in contempt.

Intel Skylake die shot, built using the 14nm process. (credit: Intel)

In its earnings conference call, Intel has warned that chip shortages are set to continue into the third quarter of the year, However, the company has also said that its 10nm manufacturing process is improving faster than anticipated and that it will be able to sell more 10nm chips this year than previously predicted.

Intel's troubled migration to its 10nm manufacturing process has had many consequences in the wider computing industry. Gartner and IDC both say that some of the shrinkage of the PC market is due to a lack of processors, and companies such as Microsoft have stated that their financial performance would have been better were it not for the shortages. Intel was expected to be building a wide range of mainstream processors on its 10nm at this point, reducing the pressure on its 14nm facilities. The delay to 10nm has prevented this.

So great is the demand for 14nm manufacturing capacity that in some areas the company has even had to go backwards. Most 300-series chipsets, introduced with Coffee Lake processors, are built on 14nm. In December last year, Intel released a new chipset, B365, aimed at mainstream consumer and corporate desktops. This chipset is built on the previous generation 22nm process to free up 14nm capacity. It's also believed that the company has issued a 22nm version of the H310 chipset, called H310C. These moves both enable the company to use its limited 14nm manufacturing capacity for chips with a higher margin than these chipsets. The company has also invested $1.5 billion on machinery to increase its 14nm output.

Enlarge / A controversial tweet by President Trump was the subject of a phone call between Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Rep. Ilhan Omar, according to the Washington Post.

Just after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey paid a visit to the White House on April 23, he called Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar about a somewhat related topic—death threats that had been made against her on Twitter following a post by President Trump himself.

According to a Washington Post report, Dorsey defended the decision not to pull Trump's tweet—a video that combined a single phrase from Omar's speech at a Council on Islamic Relations banquet with footage of the attacks on the Twin Towers. Trump captioned it all: "NEVER FORGET."  The post remains up.

Omar has been the target of a stream of hateful content on Twitter. As she said in a statement posted on Twitter, "Since the President's tweet… I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life—many directly referencing or replying to the President's video."

Enlarge / A Comcast van in Sunnyvale, California, in November 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Andrei Stanescu)

Comcast said its customers' monthly Internet data usage increased 34 percent between Q1 2018 and Q1 2019, rising to a median of 200GB. The rise is being driven by streaming video, and, in particular, 4K video, Comcast said.

"Our customers' demand for speed and data usage keeps increasing," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a call with investors yesterday (transcript). "Our median broadband home now uses over 200 gigabytes of data per month, an increase of 34 percent year-over-year, which accelerated from the fourth quarter." (Stop the Cap reported on Comcast's remarks earlier.)

The median customer is using only about 20 percent of Comcast's 1TB data cap, which is enforced in 27 of Comcast's 39 states. But the rise in usage almost certainly means that more Comcast customers are exceeding the 1TB cap.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Apple and Intel have talked about a possible business deal between the two companies that would have Apple acquiring parts of Intel's smartphone-modem chip business, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, the talks began last summer but stopped recently around the time that Apple and Qualcomm settled their patent dispute.

Intel gained more of Apple's business when it began supplying smartphone-modem chips while the iPhone maker feuded with Qualcomm. That legal battle over patent royalties raged on for years until Apple and Qualcomm were set to meet in court earlier this month. On the first day of the trial, the two companies announced they reached a deal "to dismiss all litigation between the two companies worldwide."

Qualcomm agreed to continue to supply Apple with smartphone chips under the deal, and Apple agreed to pay an undisclosed sum for the six-year licensing agreement. On the same day, Intel announced it would discontinue its 5G chipmaking efforts, an operation that Apple encouraged it to pursue for use in future iPhones. It's unclear which decision came first—Apple's and Qualcomm's decision to settle or Intel's abandonment of 5G modems—but it's likely that the two were in some way related.