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(credit: Martin Abegglen)

British chip maker ARM boisterously brushed aside concerns about a slide in smartphone sales growth on Wednesday morning, when it reported a robust rise in revenues and pre-tax profit.

The Cambridge-based company told the City that its annual sales had jumped 22 percent to £968.3 million in 2015, while profit before tax hit £414.8 million, up 31 percent from £316.5 million a year earlier. ARM—which has seen its share price take a knock, after Apple recently confirmed that iPhone sales would decline for the first time—added that it had shipped four billion chips in 2015. That's a 16 percent climb compared with its performance in 2014.

ARM said that its strong results had been buoyed by its shift into "emerging market opportunities," such as connected devices. It had also benefited from a growth in royalty sales, particularly for chips based on its ARMv8-A tech.

Opera Software, which is best known for its browser of the same name, has urged its shareholders to accept a buyout offer from a Chinese consortium that values the Norway-based company at £820 million ($1.2 billion).

The acquisition bid comes from a number of Chinese tech firms, including Qihoo—a leading security software company—and mobile Internet provider Kunlun. Opera has been looking for what it calls "strategic opportunities" since August last year, and said that its decision to recommend the offer, led by the Golden Brick Silk Road Fund Management of China, came after "careful consideration of the various opportunities for the company and the proposals received."

Opera's board and shareholders in its management team unanimously accepted the offer. In addition, "larger shareholders representing approximately 33 percent of the Opera shares outstanding, have undertaken to accept the offer for their shares in the company." The Chinese consortium said it was offering 71 NOK (about £5.60) per share, a premium of around 50 percent compared to the recent value of shares, which makes it quite likely that the offer will be accepted by the 90 percent threshold of shareholders needed for the deal to go through.

Google has confirmed a number of changes to Gmail with the arrival of two new features that will let you know if the people you’re corresponding with aren’t hip with TLS encryption.

The alterations are fairly subtle: when you receive a message from, or are on the brink of sending a message to, someone using a service that doesn’t support encryption, you’ll see a broken lock in the top-right of the screen. Clicking on the icon will bring up a pop-up alert with an explanation and a warning to perhaps consider removing the offending recipient.

Likewise, if you receive a message that can’t be authenticated, you won’t be hit by klaxon alarms. Instead, Gmail will replace the sender's profile photo with an incriminating question mark, identifying them as potentially suspicious. What you do with that information after that, of course, is entirely up to you. Despite the advent of this new warning system, Google stresses that not all affected messages are necessarily harmful. It's just better to practice caution.

(credit: Google)

The US government has cleared the way for Google to create a self-driving car that doesn't also have a human driver inside the vehicle that can take over if necessary. In this setup, the autonomous driving software itself would be the vehicle's legal "driver"; none of the human passengers would require a driving licence.

In November last year, Google submitted a proposed design to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for a self-driving car that has "no need for a human driver." On February 4, as reported by Reuters, the NHTSA responded:

"NHTSA will interpret 'driver' in the context of Google's described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants. We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a 'driver' in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years."

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

In the connected fitness world, we have yet to see one truly all-purpose device. There are a number of high-end gadgets, including the Garmin Vivoactive and the Fitbit Surge, that have many important features for workout tracking. However, health is measured by much more than how many times you hit the gym. Under Armour wants to expand personal fitness tech from just one device to an entire ecosystem of hardware and software that works together to help you understand your body.

That's what HealthBox is—inside the physical box, you get a wristband tracker, a heart rate chest strap monitor, and a smart scale. On your smartphone, you have Under Armour Record for keeping track of all your health data, as well as other Under Armour-owned apps including MapMyRun and MyFitnessPal. HealthBox is basically your one-stop shop for connected fitness, giving you three essential devices you need to start reaching new health goals. However, at $400, it doesn't come cheap, and each device could use some fine-tuning. It's a big investment to make, and anyone thinking about it should be serious about fitness so none of the HealthBox items get left behind in a bedside drawer.