Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, January 15

• Intel’s Earnings Fall; Despite Exceeding Investor Expectations, slowing data center revenue growth sends shares down 5%: Intel Corp's (INTC.O) strong quarterly profit beat was overshadowed by concerns about slowing revenue growth in its highly profitable data center business, sending its shares down about 5.6 percent in after-market trading. In quarterly earnings reported by Intel on Thursday, the company’s revenue was up slightly from the same period last year, but money from data center chips was up markedly. Intel reported that its net income in the fourth quarter of 2015 fell 1 percent to $3.6 billion, or 74 cents a share, from the year-earlier quarter. The company said revenue climbed 1 percent, to $14.9 billion. The net income was above the expectations of Wall Street analysts. They had anticipated 63 cents a share on revenue of $14.8 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters. For all of 2015, Intel revenue was $55.4 billion, down 1 percent from 2014. Net income was $11.4 billion, down 2 percent. Intel’s share price was down about 4 percent in after-hours trading Thursday evening. Intel still gets 59 percent of its revenue from chip sales to PC makers like HP Inc. and Dell, just as Microsoft and other makers of PC software count on the demand for new PCs to sell their products. Now PCs are a tough business: On Tuesday, the market research firm IDC said 276 million PCs were shipped worldwide in 2015, a drop of 10.4 percent from 2014. On Thursday, Intel said data center chip sales, not just to clouds but to older kinds of computing, rose 4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. Along with Intel’s much smaller businesses in memory and sensor chips for devices, data center chips accounted for than 60 percent of the company’s operating profit margin. Keeping up with Moore’s Law is increasingly expensive. In 2001 research and development, along with marketing and sales, cost Intel about $8 billion. In 2015, Intel said Thursday, it cost $20.1 billion. Last year, Intel scared many technologists when it announced that a critical next step in delivering on Moore’s Law would happen about a year later than expected. The company has since released numerous charts showing this was a temporary blip. If it was more than a blip, developers of those self-driving cars, connected drones and other new devices will also struggle to make improvements. Relax, said Stacy Smith, the chief financial officer of Intel. “Moore’s Law is the heartbeat of our company,” he said. “It is the core of our competitive advantage.”

• Amazon Can Now Ship Packages From China to the U.S. by Sea - Enters the Ocean Freight Business: Amazon's China subsidiary has registered in the U.S. to operate as an ocean freight forwarder, an entity that organizes the shipment of goods from a supplier or factory in one region — say, China — to a company or customer somewhere far away, like the U.S. The registration was unearthed by Flexport, a San Francisco-based logistics startup that published a blog post on the news today. “Amazon China now has the appropriate paperwork to provide ocean freight services for other companies,” the blog post read. “This is Amazon’s first step toward entering the $350 billion ocean freight market.” The move comes as Amazon continues to make inroads in controlling more of what happens after a customer clicks “Buy” to ultimately cut down on shipping costs and improve speed and reliability of deliveries. In the blog post, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen suggests that Amazon’s competitive advantage over old-school freight forwarders will be the automation of some steps of the shipment process through software, thus cutting labor costs along the way.

• You Already Knew Parents Post on Facebook More Than Others. Now Find Out How Much:  Its an old joke that moms and dads love to post photos of their kids on Facebook. But thanks to the social network's research with Ipsos Media—they surveyed 8,000 people in eight countries—and Facebook's internal data analysis, we now know just how true that idea is. Some of the more interesting findings came from its U.S.-based study. For instance, new American moms post 2.5 times more status updates, 3.5 times more photos and 4.2 times more videos than nonparents, per Facebook's internal stats. And hey, the updates work: New parents' posts (those from moms or dads) about their babies get 37 percent more interactions from family members and 47 percent more interactions from friends than their general posts. And more than most people, new moms and dads worldwide seem to be uploading posts from their smartphones. The global end of the research—which included 1,000 people from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Germany and Australia, respectively—found that new parents use Facebook mobile 1.3 times more often than nonparents, Facebook found.