Well to start this off, we should talk about the concept of Intellectual Property. The ownership of ideas, processes and technologies giving the ability to license said properties for a fee and the ability to sue anyone that appropriates those properties without licensing them first. Wi-LAN (TSX:WIN, Stock Forum) is a major player in the intellectual property sector, yes there’s actually a sector, when it controversially shifted from its original mandate of manufacturing high-speed wireless local area network devices.
Since 2005, the company has snapped up hundreds of patents from smaller entities and taken larger entities to court over patent infringement. This was seen as the business model of our technology-driven future, but ever since the company has laboured to maintain a strong market showing with one spike late in 2013. While sitting at a 52-week low, the company announced yesterday it had partnered with Adapt IP Ventures to monetize its communications and networking patent portfolio. With over 150 patents to defend and monetize, they should be doing better. I think they should re-examine their portfolio and hire a better legal team.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN, Stock Forum) is acting like an ADD-afflicted kid in a candy store as the company continues to grow too big for its corporate britches. It's doomed to fail Fire smartphone is a classic case of too little too late in a saturated market already dominated by giants Samsung and Apple. It didn't give the company any better press when it was speculated that the lackluster project was merely a gimmick-loaded Trojan horse designed to drive users to the company's portal.
Its expansion of its AWS segment was rated at 90% year-over-year and has outstripped the company's support mechanisms, calling for massive capital investment and driving the company into an expected operating loss between $410 million and $810 million for its Q3. So what does it do? It launched an online 3D printing service and went head to head with FlipKart, an India-based online commerce contender founded by former Amazon employees, by announcing a $2.0 billion investment package for its Indian operations. Somebody needs to take away the sugar and get the company to focus.
OpenText (TSX:OTC, Stock Forum) continues to make itself a major player in what the company has termed as enterprise information management in a world where companies manipulate mountains of information stored in databases but have little idea what to do with their unstructured information such as videos, images, documents, slides, etc. With YouTube becoming the largest search engine, second only to Google, video has become paramount in reaching your customer and if a company doesn't know how to access it, summarize it and categorize it, they will be fall behind this soon to be massive marketing wave.
Opentext made its move to become a major player in this explosive market apparent by announcing today it had upped its total revenue 42% year-over-year to $494.0 million as well as increased license revenue by 27% year-over-year to $99.7 million, not to mention grew cloud services revenue a whopping 255% year-over-year to $148.9 million. No sugar here, OpenText is focused and on a mission.
And now a snapshot of TSX Tech: