By Eve Fan

A year after being acquired by Lenovo, the Beijing-based technology firm has placed its faith in Motorola Mobility to lead a turnaround in its smartphone division and become profitable in 2016.

The iconic mobile device company that has, in four short years, been spun off from Motorola Inc., acquired by Google Inc. and then sold to Lenovo for nearly $3 billion, faces significant challenges.

According to International Data Corp., Lenovo dropped to fifth place in smartphone market share in China during the second quarter, behind Samsung, Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi. Continue reading →

By Eve Fan

Consumer confidence in the U.S. declined unexpectedly in November to the lowest level in a year, as Americans became gloomier about jobs and the labor market.

The non-profit Conference Board said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index fell to 90.4 from 99.1 in October, missing the economists’ consensus estimate of 99.5, according to Bloomberg LP.
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By Eve Fan

Rose Afriyie still remembers the day she spent more than two hours waiting outside a community service center on the South Side of Chicago, only to find out that she was ineligible for food stamps.

That experience was the inspiration for mRelief, a web and texting tool for social services eligibility screening that Afriyie hopes will make life a little easier for those experiencing poverty and hunger.
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By Eve Fan

Xerox Corp. reported its first quarterly loss since 2010 and a worse drop in revenue than had been expected, sending shares down 9 percent on Tuesday.

Xerox CEO Ursula Burn also said in a statement late Monday that the company has authorized a “comprehensive review of structural options” for the company as it struggles with declining revenue for its traditional copier and printing machines.

“We are reviewing structural options for the company’s business portfolio and capital allocation with the goal of enhancing shareholder value,” Burns said.

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By Eve Fan

IBM Corp.‘s stock plummeted by nearly 6 percent Tuesday after the company reported a 14 percent decline in both revenue and earnings for the third quarter and lowered its profit forecast for all of 2015.

The company said the decline in earnings and revenue was a result of costs associated with IBM’s transition to cloud- and mobile-based businesses, from its traditional large-scale management software business.

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By Eve Fan

Shares of chip maker Linear Technology Corp. surged more than 6 percent Wednesday despite reporting a 13 percent drop in profit for its first fiscal quarter, after the company forecasted rising revenue in its second quarter.

Net income dropped to $112.0 million in the first quarter ended Sept. 27, or 46 cents per share, from $129.5 million, or 53 cents per share, a year ago. The results matched the analysts’ consensus earnings estimate, according to Bloomberg LP.
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By Eve Fan

As the threat of cyber attacks escalate, it’s only a matter of time before companies start bringing chief security officers into the boardroom, according to a panel of experts speaking at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs event at tech startup incubator 1871.

“I think in a lot of cases, the chief information security officer was buried many levels below, so I think structure and where we report to is very important,” said Linsey Rubenstein, vice president of information technology at The Boeing Corp, at the Monday event, “Cybersecurity and the C-suite.”

Putting more top security executives in the same office suite as the CEO, known as the “C-suite,” and on the board of directors, would underscore that cybersecurity is not just an information technology matter but an enterprise-wide risk issue.

Among the list of companies hit by cyber attacks, Trump Hotel Collection said late last month that a data breach to its payment system from May 2014 to June of this year may have affected its customers at seven locations, including Trump International Chicago. Continue reading →