Activision Blizzard Inc. reported earnings and revenue that missed analysts' estimates just weeks after Microsoft Corp. announced its $69 billion acquisition of the video game publisher. Adjusted revenue fell 18% to $2.49 billion in the fourth quarter, Activision Blizzard said in a statement Thursday. Analysts had expected $2.84 billion, according to an average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Adjusted earnings per share were $1.25, compared with analysts' forecasts for $1.31. The company cited "lower than expected performance" in its Activision division, which produces Call of Duty. Microsoft swooped in at a crucial time for Activision Blizzard, which is behind hit games such as Candy Crush and World of Warcraft.

While companies are not required to hold earnings calls, it's rare for a major tech or gaming company to cancel its call ahead of an acquisition when "the ink is still wet" on the deal, according to Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer on the business of games at the New York University Stern School of Business. For example, Glu Mobile held earnings calls throughout 2020, ahead of its completed acquisition by Electronic Arts last April. However, last December, Slack canceled its earnings call after announcing Salesforce would acquire it. In 2016, Yahoo skipped its earnings call ahead of being bought by Verizon, in the midst of dealing with fallout from its data breach. Activision Blizzard is currently facing multiple lawsuits from employees, California's state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, shareholders and investigations from federal regulators over how management handled allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and other corporate workplace issues.

Electric vehicles are no longer the main way to compare carmakers, with self-driving cars now the main race over the coming years, according to JPMorgan. The investment bank reckons Daimler (ETR:DAI), Stellantis NV (NYSE:STLA, EPA:STLA), Renault and Volkswagen Group (XETRA:VOW) "will benefit the most from this trend" and they are its key picks among the traditional automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), a group that also includes BMW, Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F), General Motors Company (NYSE:GM), Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai and Kia. "Electrification is no longer a differentiating factor amongst OEMs, in our view," the US investment bank said. "Rather, cash generation and the race into autonomous driving will be over the coming years," JPM said in a note to clients on Monday. Looking at the auto market in the past year, the analysts said it was becoming "increasingly evident" that the traditional OEMs are using their strong free cash flow to "speed their way into electrification and autonomous driving to compete against new start-ups".

In industries from healthcare to education to finance to manufacturing, quarantine and extended work-from-home forced companies to use technology to reimagine nearly every facet of their operations. As the world reopens in fits and starts, we analyze the industries poised to thrive in a post-Covid world. As the Covid-19 pandemic has charted its unprecedented path around the world, it's carried with it the question: What will Covid-19's legacy be? From healthcare to education to entertainment to manufacturing, technology innovators are stepping forward to help answer that question. "Crisis can be… a catalyst or can speed up changes that are on the way -- it almost can serve as an accelerant." In the wake of the outbreak, everything from doctors appointments to schooling to workouts went online. As more people have worked, learned, banked, exercised, relaxed, and even sought medical care from home during Covid-19, they have gotten a crash course in just how much can be accomplished at ...

Washington, DC (CNN)Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that he believes the company's goal of a humanoid robot is the most important thing it's working on. The electric vehicle manufacturer first announced its robot plans at its AI Day last year. Instead of showing off any sort of prototype, a person in a robot suit walked stiffly on stage and proceeded to dance, spin and pretend to jump rope. "Obviously that was not real," Musk told the audience, after thanking the person for their robot performance. On the company's earnings call Wednesday, Musk said of its planned robot, "This I think has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time."

I could spend hours discussing early-stage startup operations and community-based marketing, but deal flow is my blind spot. But when investment banking firm UBS picked up financial robot-advisor Wealthfront for $1.4 billion in an all-cash deal this week, I noticed. "At those prices, the company's exit price is a win in that it represents a 2x or greater multiple on its final private valuations," wrote Alex Wilhelm in The Exchange. "But its exit value is also parsable from a number of alternative perspectives: AUM, customers and revenue," he added. Examining each of those factors in turn, Alex found that the deal is more than just a "next-gen push" intended "to reach rich young Americans," as some headlines suggested.

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is on the rise. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 55 per cent of companies use artificial intelligence in at least one function, and 27 per cent attribute at least 5 per cent of earnings before interest and taxes to AI, much of that in the form of cost savings. As AI will dramatically transform nearly every industry it touches, it's no surprise that vendors and enterprises are looking for opportunities to deploy AI everywhere they can. But not every project can benefit from AI and attempting to apply AI inappropriately can not only cost time and money but also sour employees, customers, and corporate leaders on future AI projects. The key factors for determining whether a project is suitable for AI are business value, availability of training data, and cultural readiness for change.

Atlassian today announced that it has acquired Percept.AI, an AI company from Y Combinator's summer 2017 batch, that offers an automated virtual agent support solution -- a chatbot, basically -- based on a proprietary AI engine for natural language understanding. Atlassian plans to integrate this virtual agent technology into Jira Service Management, its tool for helping IT teams provide better service to employees and customers. Ahead of today's acquisition, Percept had raised a seed round for an undisclosed amount from the likes of Hike Ventures, Builders VC, Cherubic Ventures, Amino Captial, Tribe Capital and Y Combinator, according to Crunchbase. The two companies did not disclose the financial details of today's acquisition. There can be little doubt that Atlassian is investing heavily in Jira Service Management.

Elon Musk has described Tesla's humanoid robot as the most important product it is developing in 2022, with the potential to be "more significant" than the company's car business. The as-yet unreleased Optimus robot is being built to serve as a general purpose robot, though early versions will have more limited factory-based applications. Mr Musk said during an earnings call on Wednesday that a working prototype of the Tesla bot will be unveiled at some point this year. The world's most valuable auto manufacturer is designing Optimus in a humanoid form in order for it to carry out everyday human tasks, such as shopping in a supermarket. "Essentially in the future, physical work will be a choice. If you want to do it you can, but you won't need to do it," Mr Musk said during the Tesla AI Day last August.

Microsoft beat market expectations Tuesday with strong quarterly performance in cloud computing and software, still benefitting from the pandemic's online shifting of work, play, shopping and learning. The US tech colossus, which announced last week a blockbuster deal to buy gaming giant Activision Blizzard, said profit jumped to $18.8 billion in the final three months of last year. "Digital technology is the most malleable resource at the world's disposal to overcome constraints and reimagine everyday work and life," CEO Satya Nadella said, in announcing revenue of $51.7 billion. Microsoft investments include pouring money into the booming video game market and by extension the metaverse, the virtual reality vision for the internet's future. On an earnings call, Nadella pointed to the tens of millions of people playing games such as Forza, Halo and Minecraft, many investing in "avatar" proxies for online worlds, saying that the metaverse is a natural extension.