Cisco

Some, especially governments, live by a "tit for tat" philosophy so it's really no surprise that China wants to hit the US back. The latter has not only extended Huawei's fate as part of the government's entity list, the US Department of Commerce has also made moves to deprive the phone maker of much-needed access to semiconductors for its processors. Since negotiations seem to have broken down, China is now threatening to respond in kind and put US companies on its own upcoming "unreliable entity list".

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This week the Alliance for Open Media was launched in hopes of bringing a single open format to video streaming services worldwide. This single format would be adoptable by all, and given the members of the alliance that've announced their allegiance so far, this Alliance is going to be adopted by the biggest of the big. Founding members of the Alliance include Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix. If there were a group of technology leaders able to make this format happen, it's this one.

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iOS is one of if not the best mobile operating system, but so far its primary focus has been consumers. But some of those consumers are also employees, business men and women, enterprise workers, and the such. And that is one market where Apple is trying to make some headway. Strengthening its push towards the enterprise, Apple has struck up a deal with Cisco, one of the industry's leading networking and collaborative services provider to integrate iPhones and iPads more deeply into users' enterprise lives and workflows.

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During its fourth-quarter earnings conference call yesterday, Cisco revealed that it will be laying off up to 8-percent of its workforce, which amounts to about 6,000 workers. The job cuts are expected to happen "in the coming months", but when exactly wasn't detailed.

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It would appear that Kim Dotcom does not trust United States-made electronics. He suggests this week that the world should "never trust US tech", using #NSA to point out a Cisco listing of lawful intercept architecture. He calls these systems "interception backdoors", suggesting that Cisco is amongst the companies that willingly allow the NSA to take hold of their data at any given time - but that's just not true.

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iRobot's Ava 500 smart telepresence robot has gone on sale, autonomously mapping out your office, industrial facility, or anywhere else, and then allowing you to remotely log in and wander around it chatting to those physically there. Announced last year, Ava 500 blends Cisco's video conferencing with iRobot's autonomous robotic base; unfortunately, that sort of remote intelligence doesn't come cheap.

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Courts all around the country are deluged with patent infringement suits with many of them coming from the largest firms in the technology realm. Google is one of the companies that has been involved in more than a few patent infringement suits. Google has announced that it has entered into a new patent agreement.

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We've been covering the NSA and other spy agencies pretty faithfully here at SlashGear, and while all that cloak-and-dagger, hack-and-spy, Big-Brother-Is-Watching-You drama can be provocative, that's not why we cover it. We cover it because it affects the tech industry and, by extension, the gadgets we obsess over. The reverberations of mass data surveillance by governments do eventually make their way down to consumer tech. Today we're seeing one way spying has chilled the industry that underpins our toys. Take the recent decline in US tech sales in China and yesterday's statements by executives from Qualcomm and Cisco, for example.

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Cisco has announced a new desk phone for your office that takes a standard videoconferencing capable phone for the office and crams Android goodness inside. The phone is called the DX650 and it leverages Android for business needs such as videoconferencing. The DX650 has a built-in webcam supporting full HD resolution video calls at 30 frames per second.

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Facebook and Cisco have teamed up to offer free WiFi in select stores, restaurants, and other public locations, aiming to get weary shoppers online in return for a Facebook check-in and some anonymized demographic data. The Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) for Facebook Wi-Fi may have an unwieldy name, but it could get you online in a pinch if the social site and networking company have their way, with the promise of participating locations spreading between now and the holidays.

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Despite everything Apple is expected to unveil at WWDC today, a corridor-mapping human scale telepresence robot probably won't be on the agenda; for that, we'll have to wait for iRobot and Cisco's Ava 500. Built on the iRobot modular Ava platform, the video collaboration 'bot mounts a Cisco EX60 telepresence screen - complete with HD webcam - on top of a semi-autonomous robotic stand, which can navigate the office and bring remote workers into meeting rooms.

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Cisco is the world's largest maker of networking equipment. The company has been embroiled in a lawsuit with a patent licensing company called XpertUniverse. The case has been heard in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware and has to do not only with the failed partnership, but patent infringement as well.

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