FASHION FORWARD April 25, 2012 If the UK had more businesses like Burberry, we’d be rolling in gold. Happiness. Success. No double-dip recession for us. Oh no. Although Burberry’s not the only global fashion mega-hit to come from these isles, it’s certainly the brightest right now, reporting an 18 per cent increase in revenues over the last six months. As [...]
Blue sky thinking April 25, 2012 GOOGLE DRIVE COST: 5GB: free; 25GB: $2.49 a month; 100GB: $4.99 a month; 1TB: $49.99 a month; 16TB: $799.99 a month PROS: It’s cheap, compared to rivals (the free part is twice the size of Dropbox’s offering). It allows users to create, sync, store and share files across platforms. It also syncs with Google’s other [...]
Google has yet again arrived fashionably late to the party April 25, 2012 The ice in the bath has already melted, Dropbox has left with the pretty girl and Microsoft is throwing up out of the upstairs window. Google is once again late to the party. Yesterday it launched its cloud service, Google Drive, promising mind-boggling amounts of intangible storage space. The highest option is 16TB. It’s just [...]
THEY DID THINGS DIFFERENTLY, BACK THEN April 25, 2012 The magnetic drum | 1932 Not the most practical device, the magnetic drum (like the IBM 650, above) featured a revolving cylinder. Individual words could only be recalled when the drum was in the right part of its cycle. It held around 10KB. The selectron tube | 1946 It may look like a torture device, [...]
HSBC to cut 2,000 UK jobs April 25, 2012 HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, is set to cut about 2,000 jobs in Britain as part of its drive to slash costs and boost profitability in the face of a changing banking landscape, a source told Reuters. The cuts are part of chief executive Stuart Gulliver’s global revamp to cut 30,000 jobs by the end of [...]
FTSE rise aided by banks April 25, 2012 The FTSE 100 opened on the front foot this morning as the tech sector was given a boost by stellar sales from Apple in the US while banks also nudged up. But UK GDP figures showing that the country had plunged back into recession cast a shadow.The UK economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in [...]
UK in double dip recession April 25, 2012 The UK economy is back in recession the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said. It shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first three months of 2012 following a 0.3 per cent dip in the last three months of 2011. The two consecutive drop spell recession but today’s figure is subject to revisions.
Premier Foods sales rise April 25, 2012 Premier Foods, Britain’s biggest food manufacturer, said first-quarter sales rose slightly and its cost cut and restructuring programme was on track. The maker of Bisto gravy and Hovis bread, which has been working to turn its business around, said the consumer environment would be less challenging than 2011, and it would continue to divest some [...]
BAA profit rise triggered by Heathrow growth April 25, 2012 Airport operator BAA posted a 15 per cent rise in first-quarter profit as it squeezed more growth from its capacity-constrained London Heathrow hub. BAA, which is part owned by Spanish infrastructure group Ferrovial, reported earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of £231.2m in the three months to the end of March on sales 11.5 [...]
Credit Suisse profit falls April 25, 2012 Credit Suisse’s first-quarter net profit shrank, as a 1.5bn Swiss franc (£1bn) loss on its own debt ate into profits. In a statement the Swiss bank didn’t add to ongoing job cuts of seven percent of its workforce, or roughly 3,500 staff, as some analysts had expected. Credit Suisse posted a net profit of 44m [...]
