Weekly Roundup: Verizon buys Yahoo, WikiLeaks publishes DNC emails and Skully crashes

Yahoo finally found a buyer, Mobileye and Tesla broke up, and some of the largest tech companies reported quarterly earnings. These are the biggest tech stories of the week. You can now get the Weekly Roundup sent straight to your inbox, delivered Saturday mornings.

1. Verizon (which owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch) announced it is acquiring Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion in cash. This includes Yahoo’s advertising, content, search and mobile activities. It’s crazy to think that in 2000, Yahoo was worth a whopping $125 billion. If you won the last computing platform and are on the cusp of the next one you’re not built for, you might want to sell your company. It’s easier to pivot than make a comeback, after all.

2. Major tech companies reported earnings this week, and the highlights are as follows.Facebook smashed its Q2 earnings, hitting 1.7 billion users and a record share price. Apple’s stock jumped 7% after the company reported solid earnings. Verizon missed on declining sales of $30.5 billion. Twitter stock dove after a mixed report, and poor user growth continued. GoPro sales beat investor expectations but are still in steep decline. Alphabet beat expectations, boosting its shares by 5%. Amazon shattered expectations with $30.4 billion in revenue.

3. Once promising AR motorcycle helmet startup Skully is no longer. We discovered that the company’s shutdown will leave several vendors and Skully’s manufacturer Flextronics with unpaid bills and at least 50 full-time employees out of a job. It’s unclear if any of the vendors will be paid.

4. Oracle made a $9.3 billion acquisition of cloud services company NetSuite. It’s clear now that Oracle is serious about growing cloud computing revenue, but this wasn’t always the case.

5. WikiLeaks published a searchable database of 19,252 DNC-related emails packed with personal and financial information. Following the leak, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she will be stepping down from her role as the head of the Democratic National Committee after the end of the event.

6. Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump participated in a Reddit AMA, managing to answer 13 questions on topics ranging from NASA to media bias. In a separate facepalm-inducing moment, Trump invited Russia (yes, the entire country of Russia) to hack into Hillary Clinton’s inbox and release “the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” Yikes.

7. During their earnings call, MobileEye announced that it will no longer provide Tesla with its self-driving automotive tech beyond EyeQ3, the processor currently used in Tesla vehicles. It is unclear whether Tesla or Mobileye ended the relationship, but Mobileye investors aren’t happy about the split.

8. Upthere, a new company from Apple and Oracle vets, came out of beta with $77 million in funding. The company believes that cloud storage should be your primary storage and not just a place for keeping backups. It’s now generally available for OS X/MacOS, Android and iOS.

9. Xiaomi announced its first laptop, and it sure does look familiar. The Mi Notebook Air comes in two sizes — 13.3-inch and 12.5-inch — running Windows with a full-HD display, full-metal body and type-C USB charging and two USB slots. The Macbook Air rival will come as cheap as $540.

10. Amazon debuted a dedicated shop for Kickstarter projects. Amazon is now hosting 300 successful Kickstarter products across a variety of categories, now all available for purchase.

11. Uber cofounder and CEO of Expa Studios Garrett Camp unveiled Expa’s latest project, Haus. Haus is a real estate play that focuses on digitizing the discovery, buying and selling of residential property.

Mobileye anti-collision tech becoming the go-to standard?

Though fully autonomous vehicles won’t be rolling out for another decade or two, equities analysts are already finding investment potential in Mobileye, the makers of new collision avoidance technology that is slated to become standard in most new cars.

As reported by CNBC, Morgan Stanley’s lead automobile sector analyst was bullish on buying stock in Mobileye which specializes improving driver safety with collision detection technology. Such technology is a component of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which he says will soon become standard in new automobiles long before fully autonomous cars hit the road.

“Toyota has already said that pretty much every car that they sell in the U.S. is going to have ADAS by 2017, 70 percent of cars they sell in Europe by 2015. Volkswagen said something similar a few years out,” he said.

“Nissan is already making an automatic braking standard in Japan by the fall of this year. If you assume roughly 100 million cars sold by the end of this decade, we say 40 percent will have ADAS options by 2020 and that goes up to 70 percent by 2029,” said Shanker. He raised his Mobileye price target from $65 to $68 and held his overweight rating on its shares.

A similar play happened a few years ago in hybrid vehicle technologies, where some typically hybrid systems were rolled out across entire model classes and platforms that were not “classic” hybrids.

Mobileye does have some skeptics

But not all analysts were as bullish on Mobileye stock, which is facing more driverless automobile technology competition from companies like Google.

Steve Grasso, Director of Institutional Sales with Stuart Frankel, also raised concerns that Mobileye’s collision prevention technology relies primarily on cameras, compared to competitors who use radars and cameras.

“If you start to see these little companies start to build, it’s radar that they have to start building on, not just camera base so I think that’s more accurate and I think with driverless cars you’re going to see that type of technology overtake Mobileye,” Grasso said.