geekosystem

How the mighty have fallen. Credit rating agency Moody's has dropped their rating on long-term bonds issued by Sony to it's lowest investment grade, marking them just one notch above junk bonds. For the couple of you that might not be investment bankers out there, this means that the agency believes there is a very, very good chance that the Japanese tech giant is in real trouble and may not be able to pay off its long-term debt.

The trick to being a drug dealer, or so I'm told, is understanding that one must build a clientele. The key to financial success is to offer a taste for free in order to hook folks. You're want to provide a service, after all, not just score a single sale. This mindset is also apparently shared by Amazon, as they make no profit on the sales of their Kindle Fire HD or Paperwhite. Amazon's profits instead come from the odds and ends purchased via these platforms.

Zynga isn't doing so well these days. Their quarterly performance has been abysmal of late, and they've just announced that they'll be writing off between $85 and $95 million in association with the acquisition of OMGPOP. Considering that Zynga shelled out between $180 and $210 million for the company, that's a rather massive nosedive. What goes up must come down, after all, and Draw Something didn't have much of a revenue model. Looks like the Zynga is finding that out the hard way.

There's no good way to explain the sudden spike in the share price of Korean semiconductor manufacturer DI. Over three weeks, the company has rocketed from around $1.80 to $5.12 a share. The shift is baffling, considering that there's been no change financially for the company otherwise. It's not like they unveiled some amazing contraption that might drive such growth. DI's main shareholder, however, just so happens to be Park Won-ho. He's the father of Park Jae-sang -- as in PSY, the performer behind the immensely popular "Gangnam Style" song.

Microsoft has finally had to abdicate its throne to Google; the Internet giant has surpassed Microsoft's market capitalization to take second place among technology companies. Only Apple sits above the two, though it has more market capitalization than Google and Microsoft combined. If nothing else, this finally does confirm that the Internet is serious business, especially for a company in the technology sector.

The eBook pricing dispute between Amazon and pretty much every other provider has had some nasty repercussions. In general, though, the traditional brick and mortar businesses aren't a big fan of the way Amazon operates, with promotions where they specifically suggest folks shop in stores and then buy from their online portal instead. Wal-Mart has now made the call to stop stocking Amazon's Kindle tablet.

In their continuing bid to remain relevant, Yahoo! is apparently going to replace the corporate phones of all their employees. The old mainstays, BlackBerry devices, will be replaced by their much cooler cousins -- like the iPhone 5 and Nokia Lumia 920. Sure, this might come off as another stab at RIM, but really it's just Yahoo! attempting to get with the times.

The announcement of new corporate logos are often a dull affair. It's often meant to signal some kind of shift in business strategy, but more often than not it feels like a self-masturbatory maneuver. Yes, we see that you've grown, and it's great that you're doing well, but using a new font doesn't actually mean your company intends to go about things any differently than they have. This is the kind of environment that eBay's announcement that they have a new logo exists within. So, huzzah for them.

Nothing invokes consumer confidence quite like a company having to mortgage nearly everything they own just to pay the bills. Sharp has done just that with most of its offices and factories, striking a deal with two financial groups to secure up to 150 billion yen, or $1.92 billion, in credit. Should Sharp default on their loan, these buildings would be used to cover their debt. As Sharp struggles to stay afloat, this cash infusion might last them until they can cut a more lucrative deal elsewhere, or it might be their undoing.

Yesterday was just a giant roller coaster ride for for video game streaming service OnLive. After rumors that the company would be shutting its doors for good, a company statement revealed that it's been bought out by an unknown company. Details remain scarce, but the entire situation is interesting.

Best Buy's founder, Richard Schulze, resigned as chairman of the company just this past June after it was revealed he'd mishandled allegations against the CEO. At the time, he was considering his options in regards to the 20% stake he had in the company, and it looks like he's finally made a decision. In a letter sent to the board, Schulze has offered to take the company private for $24 to $26 a share -- which roughly translates to $8.5 billion at the midpoint.

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Regardless of how it gets to you, somebody paid for it. Paying is no longer a concern for Yahoo! employees in Silicon Valley as their new CEO, Marissa Mayer, has revealed that their cafe will be offering food to them free of charge. This kind of service was already a staple at Google and isn't unheard of in the professional world these days. A free lunch isn't the only thing Mayer's brought with her, though.

Looks like even Apple can manage to fail to meet expectations from time to time. The company is reporting quarterly earnings of $9.32 per share -- to the tune of $8,800,000,000 total -- on $35,000,000,000 in revenue. That certainly seems like quite a bit of money, but if the numbers are correct, it means they actually missed analysts' estimates by nearly a billion dollars.

Most financial stories you hear about bonuses are written in disgust. "Someone somewhere is pocketing yet more money whilst the workers under them toil ceaselessly for little," is how they tend to read. Not this time. When Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing received an added $3,000,000 personal bonus after the company had its best fiscal year, he distributed it amongst 10,000 junior employees. That's awfully generous considering he could have just pocketed it.

Dude: Dell's global head of marketing Andy Lark has Apple fans in a furor over his recent dismissive remarks about Apple's future in the tablet market that it more or less created. Lark, speaking to CIO.com: "Apple is great if you’ve got a lot of money and live on an island. It’s not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things become quite complex." Per Lark, Dell is the company that is poised to win the enterprise market in the long run because "the majority of [Dell's] business isn’t in the consumer space." Apple fans might laugh this away, but it's plausible enough: