Nvidia posts $141 million loss, blames weak market + Delta to allow passengers to book flights through Facebook

Nvidia has posted a worse-than-expected $141 million loss for its second fiscal quarter ending August 1, a further decline on the $105 million loss reported in the year-ago quarter. The GPU firm has had a rough stretch this year with its GF100-based products being both late and relatively unsuccessful.

However, it partly blames the deficit on increased memory costs, a weakening demand for consumer graphics chips, along with poor economic conditions in Europe and China steering customers to budget goods. Nvidia, as you well know, pays more attention to the costly performance segment.

The company's bottom line was also dented by the $193.9 million it set aside to continue repairing and replacing the faulty GPUs that plagued systems from HP, Dell, Apple and others a couple years back. The total on that fiasco is now $475.9 million, but CEO Jen-Hsun Huang believes it's just about over.

Nvidia is still blocked from making chipsets for Intel's latest processors, and although that can't help things financially, Huang believes the damage has already been done. Even if the matter were resolved, Nvidia doesn't plan to "ramp back up" the thousand engineers it had working on chipsets.

Going forward, the company claims to have a long-term CPU strategy, and that will heavily focus on ARM-based smartphone and tablet chips. "ARM is the fastest growing processor architecture in the world today," Huang said. "ARM supports Android best. And Android is the fastest growing OS..."

=============================================================

Delta to allow passengers to book flights through Facebook



Airlines such as Virgin and Jetblue are known for their savvy use of social media, and although all major airlines have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon for promotions, Delta will be the first to offer booking flights through Facebook.

Delta has launched its "Ticket Window" implementation on the social networking giant that will allow travelers to book their flight directly from the app. Delta isn't limiting "Ticket Window" just to Facebook however, as it plans to expand into banner advertisements and other websites, all with direct booking.

Delta and other major airlines have been a little slower on the social media train(flight) than others such as Virgin, Jetblue, Southwest and Westjet. These "discount" airlines have been noted for their innovation for some time so although unsurprising, it is refreshing to see the major players finally catching up. Delta is also taking a page out of Air Canada's playbook and implementing website and kiosk changes as well as an iPhone application that will support electronic boarding passes.

If you have never used an EBP, it is as simple as a barcode displayed on your phone (sent in an SMS) and then shown to a reader at check in. Although not available everywhere, Canadian cities like Toronto (via Air Canada) and many American cities have been utilizing the technology for some time. Delta, and others, are now only streamlining the entire process into simple one step applications, which is a definite plus for frequent fliers.