Called Portal (and the larger Portal+), the device comes with a touchscreen and has a user detection system that follows the user anywhere they move across a room, allowing one-to-one/group video chats and providing voice assistant features.While the camera itself doesn't move, it is equipped with a 140-degree purview including panning and zooming softwares. Having faced major privacy issues in recent times – including the Cambridge Analytica scandal and this month’s hacking of 50 million accounts on its social networking site – Facebook is trying to assure that the Portal has privacy build into "every layer" (according to Facebook's VP of hardware Rafa Camargo’s comments to CNN Business). For Portal, Facebook is also integrating third-party features such as Amazon's Alexa voice assistant for playing music and controlling connected devices.

A federal magistrate who reviewed a test-case of the class action suit though which thousands of municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in damages has deemed that the injuries claimed by the plaintiffs cannot be ignored without a further hearing. Among the many companies named in the suit are Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Purdue Pharma Inc., McKesson (MCK), and AmerisourceBergen Corp (ABC), some of whom make drugs and some of whom distribute them.The suit alleges that the companies understated the risks of the drugs, overstated the benefits, and ignored suspiciously high volumes of the drugs being ordered. President Trump and other officials have taken action to stamp out the opioid epidemic which has escalated to ghastly proportions, claiming around 100 American lives every day.  Parallels exist between the current lawsuit and the Big Tobacco case of the 1990s, in which governments were able to extract a $246 Billion settlement from tobacco companies.

The Danish Bank’s Estonian branches appear to have been used to launder over $200 billion between 2007-2014 while third-party auditors failed to report any issues. Additional details have continued to surface in recent weeks while shareholders have sold off in droves and the CEO of the bank has resigned in shame.The stock price is down to $26.35 from its 52-week high of $41.13 as of the time of this writing. Ernst & Young, an international accounting firm who played the role of the Impartial Third-Party Auditor in the screen-worthy story, is the subject of an investigation by Denmark’s business regulator.  E&Y have been admonished in the press for a lack of diligence, since observers seem surprised that an auditor would not have noticed the long series of red flag transactions.

The decentralized public transaction ledger has seen increased adoption for a variety of use cases by different sectors, each intrigued by blockchain’s transparency, speed, and security (as well as cost-cutting potential).Now a Japanese city has introduced a blockchain-powered online voting system – an area of increasing interest for blockchain application. The Japan Times reported that Tsukuba, a hub of scientific research in Japan, declared themselves the “first in the country” to use a blockchain-based voting system – in this case, voters were choosing which social contribution projects to support.

At one point in the day, the rupee crossed  74 against the US dollar (for the first time ever), following the Indian central bank's stance to hold off  an interest rate hike  – a decision that went against the general expectation. So far, the Indian rupee has plunged around -15% against the dollar this year.This happened even as the Indian government made efforts to ease foreign purchase of rupee bonds and also increased tariffs on imported goods.

Sears Holdings announced that it will close six more Sears stores alongwith  five Kmart stores, mostly in November and December. In late August, it said that it will shutter more than 13 Kmart stores, following 2017’s closing down of 45.  This is happening as the company faces challenges with its debt repayment schedules.Sears Holdings CEO Eddie Lampert is trying to get creditors to allow a restructuring of roughly $1.1 billion of the company's debt coming due in the next two years.

Elon Musk might have stirred a controversy again, by yet another tweet – this time calling the SEC the  “Shortseller Enrichment Commission”. Per last weekend’s settlement, Tesla agreed to pay $20 million in fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) while Musk would step down as chairman but continue as the company’s CEO.Apparently, there were some claims/allegations at the time that short-sellers - who try to profit by borrowing shares and selling them to buy them back at expected lower prices - lost millions due to Musk's August 7 tweet. On Thursday, District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan asked Elon Musk and the SEC to justify that the settlement deal they had made was fair and would not hurt the public interest.

Snap Inc. shares increased +3.2% in pre-market trading , following reports of CEO Evan Spiegel’s profitability projection for 2019 along with his plans to avoid past mistakes for the company. In a leaked 15-page memo, reported by online news service Cheddar, Spiegel indicated to employees that Snapchat  is on track to achieve targets at a “sustainable pace “ and would avoid overly aggressive strategies of the past.The company will now take “time to rest and reassess.” He also said, “We improved goal-setting across our teams with OKR processes that provide share visibility into the progress we are making against our priorities.

Had Unilever gone ahead with the plan, it would have been designated as a Dutch company and therefore could potentially have gotten removed from London's FTSE 100 index.  However, Unilever announced the abandonment of that plan on Friday, since major shareholders did not give the go-ahead on moving headquarters out of the U.K.  

Investors are fleeing a major U.S. real-estate fund, as recent interest rate increases are apparently being viewed as potential headwinds for housing demand/real estate business. The $3.8 billion iShares U.S. Real Estate ETF experienced $530 million outflows between Monday and Wednesday.The U.S. 10-year Treasury yields climbed to around 3.2% on Wednesday (its highest level since 2011), and 30-year bonds and 2-year notes posted record high yields as well.

American Express Co. is increasing reward points for its premium credit card customers. AmEx Gold Card holders will now earn 4 points per dollar spent at U.S. restaurants and supermarkets, up from 2 points previously.Additionally, they get a yearly $120 credit by using their cards to make payments to the Cheesecake Factory, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, certain Shake Shack locations, GrubHub and Seamless.

With the U.S.-China trade war flaring up, some strategists at JPMorgan have lowering their recommendation on Chinese stocks to neutral from overweight. With the two nations slapping tariffs on  goods imported from each other, Chinese manufacturers’ profit margins might be getting hurt – something that's a potential headwind for the nation’s investment and growth.In the latest round of the tariff battle, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 10 percent tariff on an additional $200 billion of Chinese goods, to which the Chinese government responded with levies on $60 billion of U.S. products. JPMorgan reduced its target and earnings estimates for the MSCI China Index, but the strategists still expect the index to rebound to 85 points by the end of the year.

Credit-rating agency Moody's upgraded semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Wednesday. Recently, AMD’s stock price plunged following Tuesday’s reports that rival Intel Corp. might be able to solve problems in its 10-nanometer chip production sooner than expected.Nevertheless, Moody’s upgraded AMD's ‘creditworthiness’, citing several factors related to market potential of the latter's products. According to Moody’s, AMD is currently sampling a 7nm datacenter GPU  and 7 nanometer server processors, expected to be launched in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

Softbank and Toyota are joining hands for developing driverless technology-based transportation businesses. In a joint venture called Monet, the two Japanese companies will offer services including mobile convenience stores, delivery vehicles, transportation for the elderly, hospital shuttles and mobile offices – all via autonomous vehicles.For instance, by the second half of the 2020s, the venture will start an on-demand mobility service using Toyota's self-driving electric vehicle called e-Palette for meal deliveries and hospital shuttles. The companies said that the joint venture will start at 2 billion yen ($17.49 million), and will be raised to 10 billion yen in future.

The defense giant has just been awarded a $26.7 MM contract to provide maintenance and technical support for the Trident II D5 missile over the next two years at its facilities in Huntington Beach, CA and Heath, OH. The Trident II (D5) is a long range missile equipped on submarines since the early 1990s.Its guidance and delivery systems are constantly upgraded as technology evolves, and the missiles are intended to remain in service for at least another decade. The United States defense budget has been approved for an increase of 5% in 2019, totaling $717 billion, which could contribute to strong years for Beoing (BA), Lockheed Martin (LMT), Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) and other defense contractors.

Xilinx Inc. launched Alveo, a portfolio of  accelerator cards expected to increase productivity of industry-standard servers across cloud and on-premise data centers. Alveo U200 and Alveo U250 will help customers optimize their productivity according to changing workloads and algorithms, without additional replacement costs. Xilinx has also unveiled Versal, the industry's first adaptive compute acceleration platform.This will cater to AI inference capabilities for various industries, and will be available next year.   The company already enjoys a 58% market share in the field-programmable gate array (FPGA ) market, while competitor Intel holds 42% as of April 2018.

Honda is investing $2 billion over 12 years in General Motors's self-driving cars.  Honda and GM's autonomous vehicle subsidiary Cruise have been collaborating in the development of self-driving versions of GM's Chevrolet Bolt EV electric car, which are expected to be available for public use next year.But what could potentially put the two companies in the fast lane is their latest partnership where they plan to build an apparently one-of-a-kind vehicle that might not require human controls at all.  Additionally, Honda has bought a $750 million equity stake in Cruise, which also received $2.25 billion funding from Japanese investment bank Softbank. Earlier there were rumors of Honda in talks with Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent company Alphabet, to build a self-driving delivery car.

Microsoft unveiled its lineup of new devices including a desktop computer, its first pair of smart headphones and new laptop models. The Surface Studio 2 PC will offer faster performance and improved graphics compared to the first Surface version.Starting at $899, it will come in black and platinum.  Microsoft also announced its Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which aims to enhance productivity, such as allowing the Your Phone App to pull up texts and photos from your Android phone onto your PC.

Facebook announced that it has not found any evidence (as yet) of its cyber attackers accessing third party sites via Facebook Login. This follow’s Friday’s revelations by the company that hackers exploited a loophole in the “View As” feature on the social networking platform and as a result got access to information of over 50 million of users.Many apps including Tinder, Spotify and Airbnb let people access their services through Facebook Login credentials. Hackers might not have misused other apps while infiltrating Facebook data, but the attack potentially puts the users of the third-party apps at risk.

  President Trump imposed an October 1 deadline which precipitated the lengthy meeting, and made repeated public statements that the United States would be willing to leave Canada out of the deal if they weren’t willing to negotiate the terms of the agreement in a timely manner.Such an eventuality would have left Canada without the protections of a then-defunct NAFTA, although the legality of such a move was seen as highly questionable by some. The resulting agreement preserves the panel review system as in Chapter 19 of NAFTA, despite threats by Trump to scrap it, wherein each member is given a venue through which to challenge the trade policies of other members.