Latest news with #Krakow
Forbes
a day ago
- Automotive
- Forbes
The Weak Link: Hidden Chip Connections Crash Your Calls, Cars And Care
Invisible 'in‑between' links still sabotage modern tech. Specialist chipmakers are now racing to secure signals and restore reliability Every modern action, from tapping a phone to steering a car, relies on semiconductor muscle. Yet our video calls still freeze, medical images blur, driver‑assist alerts misfire, and everyday functions fail far too often. What consistently breaks is not the headline compute, it is the fragile 'in‑between' layer that ferries raw signals from sensor to processor and from board to board. It is the fragile 'in‑between' layer that ferries raw signals from sensor to processor and from ... More illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on July 19, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) 'It's often not your internet, it could be your USB cable maxing out its bandwidth, or a flaky connector dropping frames before they even hit your screen,' says Valens Semiconductor CEO Gideon Ben Zvi. "While we keep blaming 'the network,' the real fault often lies a few centimeters of copper away." Industry‑wide, only a minority of the roughly 600 U.S. chip firms keep dedicated signal‑integrity teams; most chase clock speeds and process nodes instead, and that leaves huge swaths of functionality exposed. Valens Semiconductor, public on the NYSE since a $1.1 billion SPAC merger in 2021, focuses specifically on these 'in‑between' layers, building chips that keep video, control, data, and power signals clean and synchronized over interference‑prone cables in cars, medical devices, industrial vision, and pro‑AV. "The 'in‑between' fragility ripples through critical domains. In a U.S. hospital network, intermittent, low‑resolution endoscope feeds were undermining confidence in minimally invasive procedures until the system migrated to a disposable‑scope architecture built on hardened long‑reach link," says Ben Zvi. 'Moving to a disposable‑endoscope architecture with our chipsets, would eliminate feed errors 98% of the time, giving doctors the real-time clarity they need to save lives." The same approach shows up elsewhere; for video calls, they collapse camera video, audio, control, USB (and often power) into a single long‑reach, interference‑robust cable so the 4K image actually arrives intact. In vehicles they move multi‑sensor ADAS data over resilient links that shrug off EMI bursts before those errors can silently erode perception. "solving the problems that show up in real‑world systems." Valens isn't alone. More suppliers are targeting the 'in‑between' layer. Texas Instruments' active EMI filter ICs inject counter‑phase currents to reduce conducted and common‑mode noise, helping designers shrink traditional filtering components. Samtec's Flyover® twinax assemblies lift high‑speed lanes off lossy PCB traces to extend reach while maintaining signal margin. Spectra7 integrates analog equalization into ultra‑thin VR/AR cables so high‑resolution, low‑latency video can traverse lighter, more flexible tethers. Alphawave provides power‑efficient high‑speed SerDes IP tuned for longer, noisier channels, helping complex SoCs meet bit‑error and latency targets without excessive board complexity. Different markets, same takeaway. As commodity performance plateaus in perceived user benefit, reliability and integrity in the 'in‑between' become sharper differentiators. 'We're not chasing headlines. We're solving the problems that show up in real‑world systems,' Ben Zvi says, and that stance illustrates a broader strategic shift. Fixing the 'in‑between' won't make benchmark splash, but it is what keeps surgeries sharp, cars safer, factories running, collaboration fluid, and without it, every layer of modern life remains vulnerable to silent, preventable failure.
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Buy or Sell EA Stock Ahead of Its Upcoming Earnings?
A gamepad and EA Sports logo displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken ... More in Krakow, Poland on May 11, 2022. EA Sports has announced that it will rename it's football video game from FIFA to EA Sports FC. (Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) NurPhoto via Getty Images Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:EA) is set to release its earnings on Tuesday, July 29, 2025. Analyzing the previous five years of data, EA stock tends to have positive one-day returns following earnings announcements, occurring in 55% of cases. The median one-day gain was 2.2%, and the largest increase in a single day reached 8.0%. While the actual results in comparison to consensus estimates will be significant, recognizing these historical trends can offer a benefit for event-driven traders. There are two primary strategies to utilize this information: Pre-Earnings Positioning: Traders might opt to position themselves ahead of the earnings announcement, based on the historical probabilities. Traders might opt to position themselves ahead of the earnings announcement, based on the historical probabilities. Post-Earnings Analysis: Conversely, traders can evaluate the relationship between immediate and medium-term returns after the earnings are released to guide their positioning. Analysts' consensus estimates for the upcoming quarter predict earnings of $0.64 per share on sales of $1.23 billion. This marks a projected decline compared to the earnings from the same quarter last year of $1.01 per share on sales of $1.26 billion. From a fundamental standpoint, Electronic Arts has a current market cap of approximately $39 billion. Over the past twelve months, the company achieved $7.5 billion in revenue , and was operationally profitable with $1.6 billion in operating profits and a net income of $1.1 billion . That said, if you are looking for upside with lower volatility compared to individual stocks, the Trefis High Quality portfolio offers an alternative—having outperformed the S&P 500 and delivered returns surpassing 91% since its inception. View earnings reaction history of all stocks Electronic Arts' Historical Odds Of Positive Post-Earnings Return Here are some insights regarding one-day (1D) post-earnings returns: There are 20 earnings data points noted over the last five years, with 11 positive and 9 negative one-day (1D) returns recorded. In total, positive 1D returns were observed around 55% of the time. and one-day (1D) returns recorded. In total, positive 1D returns were observed around 55% of the time. Interestingly, this percentage rises to 58% if we analyze data from the last 3 years instead of 5. The median of the 11 positive returns is 2.2%, while the median of the 9 negative returns is -5.5% Additional information for the observed 5-Day (5D) and 21-Day (21D) returns post earnings is compiled along with the statistics in the table shown below. EA 1D, 5D, and 21D Post Earnings Return Trefis A relatively lower-risk strategy (although not useful if the correlation is weak) is to understand the relationship between short-term and medium-term returns after earnings, identify a pair exhibiting the highest correlation, and implement the suitable trade. For instance, if 1D and 5D exhibit the greatest correlation, a trader can position themselves 'long' for the following 5 days if the 1D post-earnings return is positive. Here is some correlation data derived from 5-year and 3-year (more recent) history. Please note that the correlation 1D_5D refers to the correlation between 1D post-earnings returns and the following 5D returns. EA Correlation Between 1D, 5D and 21D Historical Returns Trefis Discover more about Trefis RV strategy that has outperformed its all-cap stocks benchmark (a combination of all 3: the S&P 500, S&P mid-cap, and Russell 2000), generating substantial returns for investors. In addition, if you're looking for upside with a smoother experience than investing in an individual stock like Electronic Arts, consider the High Quality portfolio , which has surpassed the S&P and achieved >91% returns since its inception.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Science
- Forbes
From the ENIAC to the Cerebras chip, looking clear-eyed at hardware innovation is frankly amazing.
Microchip and Nvidia logo displayed on a phone screen are seen in this multiple exposure ... More illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on April 10, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) For anybody who did any kind of computing in the 1950s or 1960s, (or for that matter, in the 1970s or the 1980s), the advances that we've made in hardware are staggering. But if you do track them to Moore's law and really analyze how incremental doubling works, it all sort of makes sense. If you remember the story about the smartie (in some versions of the tale, the inventor of the game of chess) who asked a king to double a grain of rice 64 times, you get some sense of how this works – an exponential advance that starts out small and reasonable, and ends up in the realm of what people would have originally thought to be fantasy. It's all basic math, but it still seems like a magic trick – you're moving along: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 – and then you wind up with a number bigger than you can visualize! I also found this aside from Wikipedia, describing the original contriver of this trick, to be riotously funny: 'Versions (of the story) differ as to whether the inventor becomes a high-ranking advisor or is executed.' This idea, too, has been applied to our new AI gold rush - in fact, for students of artificial intelligence minutia, none other than Ray Kurzweil talks about the 'second half of the chessboard' phenomenon that goes right to the heart of what I'm trying to articulate – that the first numbers start out seeming very reasonable, until you get about halfway into the series, and then the real exponential change happens. In other words, there's a slow rise, and then a break point where that line spirals up into the stratosphere. If you double the grains of rice on a chessboard and come up with 18 quintillion, 446 quadrillion, 744 trillion and change, you get a powerful visual example of how this works. Well, not a visual example, exactly, because you can't fit all of those grains of rice into a single image, but a conceptual idea of how it works. The Frenetic Pace of Hardware Engineering I previously wrote about the Cerebras WSE chip that's about the size of a dinner plate, and has some 90,000 cores. Sources including IEEE Spectrum show that the WSE‑2 (Cerebras CS‑2) delivers approximately 7,500 trillion FP16 operations per second (7.5 petaFLOPS), while the WSE‑3 gets up to 125 petaFLOPS. This is a powerful thing to hold in your hand, and it demonstrates the power of parallel processing. It wasn't too many years ago that we were using single core chips, then dual core, then quad core. Well, you get the idea. Now we have things like the Huawei Cloudmatrix, where they keep some of these numbers under wraps, but you know intuitively that the hardware power is unreal. Hardware as a Habitat There was an interesting TED talk given by Caleb Sirak that I attended recently where the young innovator talked about hardware as a 'silicon prison.' He went over the history of hardware acceleration from early systems, measured in millions of operations per second, to then trillions, and even quadrillions. He pointed out that in some ways, this process was driven by gaming, but it quickly made its way past that single use case with Nvidia Cuda and other designs. Now, he suggested, it's time to change with the times. 'It's time to rethink the whole system,' Sirak said. Winning the Hardware Lottery One tool in pioneering new kinds of GPUs, Sirak added, is quantization. For example, a 4-bit multiplier is orders of magnitude more efficient than a 32 bit multiplier. He talked about innovations like the Cerebras chip (in this context,) and how you can reduce the trajectory of data transfers to drive efficiencies with AI. 'When each parameter is smaller, we can put more of them across the system per second, and this decreases bottlenecks across memory and network interconnects,' he said. He talked about xAI's Colossus, with what he called a 'road map' to a million GPUs. And then, back to efficiencies: 'You can take a flexible city street grid with a lot of different cars,' he explained,'or you can have an f1 track, and if you have an f1 track, that f1 card goes pretty damn fast.' He covers the work of various companies in designing smart swarms of hardware pieces, which he referred to as 'intelligent colonies.' 'The power that we're unlocking through these AI chips and these advancements has profound implications,' he added, 'and increasingly accessible and globally shared innovation is crucial. At the heart of this revolution lies a supply chain of remarkable complexity, from rare earth minerals combined on one continent, to chemicals on another, and chips on the third.' As another example of an interconnected world, he noted that a single chip can cross dozens of national boundaries before being ultimately put into production. That makes abundant sense to anyone who knows that Taiwan Semiconductor provides the lion's share of chip fabs worldwide. In any case, we really are in the hockey stick curve of a hardware acceleration for the ages. Stay tuned.
Forbes
21-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Peacock Streaming Service Increasing Subscription Prices This Week
TV remote control is seen with Peacock logo displayed on a screen in this illustration photo taken ... More in Krakow, Poland on February 6, 2022. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) NBC Universal's Peacock streaming service is boosting the prices of its monthly and yearly streaming packages this week. Peacock launched on April 15, 2020, and primarily contains content from the NBC Universal library, which includes NBC-TV programming and Universal Pictures releases (Wicked, Nosferatu, etc.) . In addition to library content, Peacock also produces original TV programming and movies, and features sports programming including the NFL's Sunday Night Football, NBA Basketball and the Olympics. Currently, Peacock costs $7.99 per month or $79.99 per month for Peacock Premium, which includes ad-based programming or $13.99 per month or $139.99 per year for Peacock Premium Plus, which has ad-free programming. Peacock recently announced, however, that on Wednesday, July 23, the ad-based tier, which is known as Peacock Premium, will be increased to $10.99 per month to $109.99 per year, while ad-free programming on the Peacock Premium Plus tier will increase to $16.99 per month to $169.99 per year. Depending on when they are billed, some current Peacock subscribers may not see the subscription bill until as late as Aug. 22. With the price increases, Peacock's ad-based and ad-free tiers will be more expensive than its main competitors — Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and Paramount+ — Variety reported. KANSAS CITY, MO - JANUARY 13: A view of the Peacock logo before an AFC Wild Card playoff game ... More between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs on Jan 13, 2024 at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, MO. (Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) The Upcoming Peacock Price Increase Is The Third For The Streamer In 5 years When Peacock launched in 2020, the NBC Universal streaming service cost $4.99 per month for the ad-based Peacock Premium tier and $9.99 per month for Peacock Premium Plus. The streaming service maintained the pricing until July 18, 2023, when Peacock increased its monthly subscription pricing to $5.99 monthly and $59.99 yearly for Peacock Premium and $11.99 monthly and $119.99 yearly for Peacock Premium Plus. Then, in July of 2024, Peacock hiked its prices again to $7.99 per month or $79.99 per month for Peacock Premium and $13.99 per month or $139.99 for Peacock Premium Plus. With the new price increases, Peacock will also be offering a cheaper alternative with its Peacock Select tier, which will cost $7.99 per month or $79.99 per year. Per Variety, the tier includes current seasons of NBC-TV and Bravo programming, as well as some library titles. According to Variety, Peacock announced earlier in 2025 that the service has 41 million subscribers, which increased from 36 million subscribers in 2024.
Vogue
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
‘Kiki Ballroom Culture in Poland' by Michał Korta
"Ballroom culture is a vibrant, inclusive space where anyone—regardless of sexual orientation, race, political beliefs, or background—can freely explore their identity. Originating in 1970s New York, ballroom was created by trans women of color as a response to systemic exclusion, offering a safe haven and sense of belonging. This culture is built around more than just LGBTQ+ balls and competitions; it fosters a sense of community, with 'houses' that often become chosen families. Kiki Ballroom in Krakow Michal Korta Copyriqht 2023
