22 Established 1961 Technology Thursday, October 5, 2017 Panasonic’s business solutions to open new frontiers at GITEX 2017 Japanese technology leader creates immersive experience

DUBAI: Panasonic Marketing Middle East and Africa products, savvy gadgets and unique services in the tech ucts and solutions that cater to projects of all magnitudes. (PMMAF) will introduce its latest range of business industry, and Panasonic, through a variety of innovation Panasonic has also been dedicated in showcasing next solutions at GITEX 2017, which will run from October led demos will be hosting interactive sessions of immersive generation technology solutions which are vertical specif- 8th to 12th, 2017, at Dubai World Trade Centre. technology experience directly from the show floor. ic. Our customers will be amazed to discover new frontiers Panasonic’s path-break- Yasuo Yamasaki - of solutions at our GITEX booth.” ing solutions at GITEX Director, System Solutions GITEX provides a platform for technology players to will attract diverse audi- & Communications put their best foot forward in a bid to showcase the lat- ences and deliver immer- Division, PMMAF com- est B2B technology products for businesses across sive and interactive visi- Better quality, mented, “For all these industries. Panasonic will exhibit its full end-to-end tor experiences. years, GITEX Technology business portfolio at the show, covering corporate The Japanese manu- innovative Week has been inspiring office space, education, leisure, transportation, retail facturer will be showcas- visionaries and tech pio- and hospitality. ing their innovative dis- future on show neers, to showcase and Nearly every vertical suite will comprise of innovative play solutions that will be witness first-hand tech- display solutions, visual solutions, and communication cached with a selection of nology that impacts the solutions that will come together to amplify business out- revolutionary products future. With Panasonic’s comes and meet business requirements, such as securing like Stadium Mapping, commitment of Japanese enterprise operations or making the in-store experience Dome Mapping, 360 degree Camera, Transparent screen quality and innovation, this year we will be showcasing come alive for customers. and much more. GITEX, one of the most influential, excit- solutions for a connected smart digital future. The busi- Panasonic will have its presence at GITEX Technology Yasuo Yamasaki - director, System Solutions ing and high-energy technology event opens the mind to nesses in the region have always been responsive to inno- Week at Dubai World Trade Center in Hall 3-Stand # B3-1 & Communications Division, PMMAF. experience some of the latest global trends, cutting-edge vation, which further drives us to create advanced prod- from October 8th to 12th, 2017. EU hammers Amazon, Uber board Apple over taxes reaches peace BRUSSELS: The EU turned the screw on US tech giants yesterday, ordering Amazon with SoftBank, to repay Luxembourg 250 million euros in back taxes and taking Ireland to court for failing to collect billions from Apple. governance deal Europe’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager accused tiny Luxembourg of an illegal deal with internet shopping giant SAN FRANCISCO: Uber Technologies Inc’s fractured Amazon to pay less tax than other busi- board declared peace on Tuesday, attempting to put nesses. months of strife behind it by unanimously passing a The two cases are part of a wider series of measures to shore up corporate governance, offensive by the EU on Silicon Valley behe- bring in major investor SoftBank and diminish the pow- moths as Europe seeks ways to regulate er of former Chief Executive Travis Kalanick. The them more tightly on issues ranging from BRUSSELS: EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial agreement could shore up Uber’s reputation after a privacy to taxation. Affairs, Taxation and Customs Pierre Moscovici addresses a series of scandals and a legal battle between Kalanick “Luxembourg gave illegal tax benefits press conference in Brussels yesterday. The EU turned the and an Uber investor group led by Silicon Valley’s to Amazon. As a result, almost three quar- was “extremely disappointing”, calling the screw on US tech giants, ordering Amazon to repay Benchmark Capital. The deal could be subject to a law- ters of Amazon’s profits were not taxed,” decision “wholly unnecessary”. For its part, Luxembourg 250 million euros in back taxes.—AFP suit and is contingent on the multi-billion dollar invest- Vestager said in a statement. The tax Amazon sharply rejected the allegations, ment by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp closing in the demand comes a year after the hard- arguing that it employs 1,500 people in coming weeks. charging Vestager ordered tech icon Apple Luxembourg and that its business remains shell” with no employees, no offices and no shocked Washington. The iPhone maker, as The terms preserve Uber’s $69-billion valuation, to repay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in unprofitable in Europe. business activities, the commission said. well as Ireland, have appealed the decision. highest among the world’s venture-backed startups, as back-taxes to Ireland in a decision that “We believe that Amazon did not Once found at fault, a country must Under Vestager, the European Commission SoftBank and others invest about $10 billion. shocked the world. receive any special treatment from recover the amount granted in illegal state has taken the lead in questioning the domi- “SoftBank’s interest is an incredible vote of confidence In a sign that it was not letting up, the Luxembourg and that we paid tax in full aid, potentially a huge amount of money nance of US tech giants. in Uber’s business and long-term potential,” the board EU yesterday referred Ireland to the EU’s accordance with both Luxembourg and given that some of the tax deals date back In June, the EU slapped Google with a said in statement. highest court for failing to collect the bill. international tax law,” it said in a statement, many years. record 2.4-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) fine Benchmark General Partner Bill Gurley, who was “The European Commission has decided to adding that it would study its legal options. for illegally favoring its shopping service in replaced by a colleague on Uber’s board in June, said refer Ireland to the European Court of Launched in 2014, the European Juncker questions search results. But there are signs politi- by email, “It was a good day for Uber, a good day for Justice for failing to recover from Apple Commission’s probe into Amazon’s deals Many of the Brussels probes came in cians are now following her lead, with Uber’s employees, and good day for Uber’s new CEO.” illegal state aid,” the EU’s anti-trust regula- with Luxembourg was part of several the wake of the “Luxleaks” scandal which Macron leading the charge in a landmark Kalanick described Tuesday’s actions as “a major step tor said in a statement. revealed details of tax breaks given by the speech last month on his vision for the investigations into sweetheart tax arrange- forward in Uber’s journey to becoming a world class Vestager’s announcement comes days wealthy duchy to dozens of major US firms. future of Europe after Brexit. ments between major companies and sev- public company.” He added that the governance after the EU said at a special digital summit The revelations came as a particular Macron called for a new type of tax on eral EU countries. The Amazon case hinges changes should serve Uber well under Dara that it was drawing up a special tax target- embarrassment for European Commission technology giants like Facebook and Khosrowshahi, who is a month into the chief executive ing Google and Facebook, a policy cham- on the belief that a tax deal between President Jean-Claude Juncker, who was Google based on how much value they Luxembourg and Amazon in 2003 consti- officer job since leaving the same post at Expedia Inc . pioned by French President Emmanuel prime minister of Luxembourg at the time create in a country rather than the profits, Governance policies adopted by the board would Macron. Vestager denied that the cases tuted illegal “state aid”, giving the compa- when the tax deals were made. and has also proposed a single corporate ny an unfair advantage over competitors. make it difficult for Kalanick to return as CEO. He singled out tech giants from the US. In similar cases against tax deals for tax band for all EU countries by 2020. resigned in June under pressure from the Benchmark- “It’s not about the nationality of the The arrangement, which has since been coffee-shop chain Starbucks in the Juncker announced at the EU digital discontinued, “enabled Amazon to shift the led investor group over employee sexual harassment companies. I take it very seriously. No bias, Netherlands and Italian automaker Fiat in summit in Tallinn last week that he investigations, a trade-secrets misappropriation law- no matter your flag,” she said. vast majority of its profits from an Amazon Luxembourg Vestager ordered both com- would propose the new tax on internet group company that is subject to tax in suit by Waymo and efforts to interfere with govern- panies to pay roughly 30 million euros. giants next year, despite opposition by ment probes. ‘Extremely disappointing’ Luxembourg to a company which is not But Vestager’s biggest decision by far low-tax states like Ireland and A two-thirds majority vote of the board would be Ireland said the referral to the EU court subject to tax.” The latter was an “empty was against Apple in Ireland, which Luxembourg. —AFP required to hire a replacement for Khosrowshahi before the San Francisco start-up holds an initial public offering, according to a person familiar with the matter. The board set a deadline for an IPO of autumn 2019, Sputnik, the tiny the sources said. Uber’s board will expand from 11 directors, including a pair of Kalanick appointees seated on Monday, to 17 sphere that launched directors, the person and another source said. The increase would include four new independent directors for a total of seven. Five board seats would go the space race to company insiders or co-founders, and five would be representatives of investors. The chairperson would be MOSCOW: When the Soviet Union launched the first one of the independent directors. artificial satellite 60 years ago, it marked both the Two of the six new seats would go to SoftBank, the beginning of space exploration and the start of a race sources said. The other four would be selected by a between Moscow and Washington. nominating committee of the board. Kalanick and oth- Sputnik, the tiny silver sphere with four spider leg- er early shareholders also are sacrificing voting pow- like antennae, showed off Soviet technological prowess. er, as Uber adopts a one vote per share policy, the But German scientists-who had worked on Adolf Hitler’s sources said. rocket projects and had been brought to the USSR after the war-were the ones who stood at the forefront of Threat of lawsuit space achievement. Early Uber investors Shervin Pishevar and Steve The founder of the Soviet space program, Sergei Russell said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote that Korolyov, worked with German scientists and fragments they would sue to block the change, which cuts the of the German FAU rocket to develop a new military super-voting rights that give them 10 votes per share. If missile, said Nikolai Shiganov, one of the scientists successful, such a lawsuit could threaten the other behind Soviet rocket R-7 which put Sputnik into orbit. terms of the boardroom compromise. “The Korolyov bureau had to create an interconti- “Today’s action by the board was the culmination of nental rocket capable of carrying a hydrogen bomb to a blatant bait and switch, essentially robbing loyal any point on the planet,” Shiganov, now aged 97, told employees, including the more than 200 early founding AFP in an interview. As he worked for the military, Uber employees and advisors, of their hard earned Korolyov-who spent six years in the Gulag-dreamt of MOSCOW: Children walk past a full-scale replica of the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik, shareholder rights,” Pishevar and Russell said. space conquest. But time was running out: one of the launched by the Soviet Union from a testing range in Kazakhstan yesterday, at the Memorial For Kalanick, agreeing to drop his voting power principal German engineers, Wernher von Braun, was Museum of Cosmonautics (or Memorial Museum of Space Exploration) in Moscow.—AFP could enable him to resolve his dispute with already working for the Americans. After three years of Benchmark. The changes decided Tuesday would work and three rocket accidents, the fourth R-7 with a prompt Benchmark to end a lawsuit and arbitration dummy warhead successfully hit its target in ‘A tiny dot’ atmosphere. Several replicas are now on show in museums. proceedings against Kalanick, the two sources and Kamchatka, in the Far East, in August 1957. The test was Though the satellite captured imaginations, with radio Shiganov’s colleague Eduard Bolotov, 84, actually saw another said. hailed as successful although the rocket head disinte- amateurs tuning in around the world to hear its simple Sputnik as a young rocket trajectory engineer of 24, even Benchmark sees gains in the agreement, too. Should grated in flight. calls, Sputnik was secondary to its inventors, Shiganov gaining access to the depot where the rocket stood during Uber not go public by autumn 2019, the venture capital Creating a new rocket head would take six months, said. “The most important thing was that it proved the final preparations. firm and other large, early shareholders would be free much too long as the Soviets wanted to pre-empt the effectiveness of the R-7 rocket.” The secrecy around the The miniscule satellite sat atop the rocket and Bolotov, to divest shares without company approval, two of the launch of a US satellite in 1958. So Korolyov suggested project meant Shiganov didn’t learn of the actual launch with other young specialists, patted the rocket’s side and sources said. A consortium of SoftBank, Dragoneer creating a simple satellite made of two hemispheres until he heard on the radio that the first Earth satellite was signed his name on the inside of the nozzle. Investment Group and General Atlantic plan to invest containing sensors, a radio and a battery pack. put in orbit on October 4, 1957 from a testing range in “I watched the actual launch through a gap from my $1 billion to $1.25 billion at the valuation of $69 billion, In just two months, the apparatus measuring 58 cen- Kazakhstan, the future Baikonur cosmodrome. On a sunny post,” Bolotov said. Although workers were summoned to two of the people said. The investment firms also plan timeters (22 inches) in diameter and weighing 83.6 October Sunday, Shiganov was able to see the glint of the launchpad with secret letters, crowds of people also to buy 14 to 17 percent of existing Uber shares from kilograms (184.3 pounds) was ready, remembered Sputnik with his naked eye. “It was a tiny dot which shone turned up, he said. “Their relatives had told them about the employees and current investors at a discounted valua- Shiganov, whose lab created the aluminum alloy and in the sun because of its glossy surface,” he said. launch.” “Only at 3 am we found out that Sputnik was in tion, bringing the maximum value of the total package came up with a new welding technique used to make Sputnik was in orbit for 92 days, making 1,440 circles orbit, and radios all over the world started to register its to around $10 billion. —Reuters the Sputnik and the R-7. around Earth, before losing speed and burning up in the beeps.” —AFP