Technology

Hardware tech for a large-scale communications contractor comes out of his manager's office looking pretty unhappy, and this pilot fish asks what's got him down.

"It seems he did a service call the day before on a suspected-bad T1 modem," says fish.

"He got onsite to troubleshoot and, sure enough, it was a bad modem.

"So he took out his mini pocket screwdriver, undid the modem cable and replaced it.

"As it turned out, this was a union shop and he was required to call an electrician to undo the modem cable and wait till they could schedule him in.

"He just thought this would be faster and easier, but it seems he was mistaken. Management said if he did anything like that again, he wouldn't be allowed back on site."

Move over stickers and games: Japanese messaging app firm Line has announced itraising around148.1 billion yen ($1.33BN) through convertible bonds to fund aggressive expansion into the financial services business, Reuters reports.

Line said it plans to spend most of the money on promoting its Line Pay serviceand for other new financial services by the end of 2021.

The messaging platform has been involved in payment offerings for some years, launching Line Pay at the end of 2014— to let users make payments through the app at affiliated online and offline stores by registering their credit cards.

Line Pay also supports p2p payments between users of the platform, which has some 164M monthly active users in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.

While popular in parts of Asia, the messaging platform has failed to grow usage beyond its core regions — unsurprisingly given how fiercely competitive the space is — with the likes of ChinaWeChat and Facebook owned WhatsApp standing in its way. But while user growth has stalled, Line has managed to grow revenue from its existing user base. And doubling down on financial services looks to be its growth strategy going forward.

It has recently startedexperimenting with crypto — announcing the forthcoming launch of a cryptocurrency token (called Link) late last month, and developing its own blockchain to power it, in what looks to be a bid to drive user engagement on its platform. Though it has long used a digital currency (Line Coins) on its platform.

Earlier this year Line also announced the launch of a Singapore-basedcrypto exchange, called BitBox.

Itnot doing an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for the Link token launch, presumably to side-step the legal questions around token sales. So the convertible bond sale looks to be its alternative (traditional) route for raise funds for the push to grow its financial services business.

In a statement today Line said it would issue zero coupon convertible bonds maturing in 2023 and 2025.

Reuters reports that aportion of the bonds will be issued to its South Korea-based parent Naver Corp to maintain its ownership above a certain level.

It added that Naverstake would fall to 70.42 percent from the current 72.86 percent when all the bonds are converted into stock.

It's official, after months of speculation Apple has sent out invites to its annual special event, and they're dated September 12. We're fully expecting Apple to lift the lid on the new iPhone XS, and potentially even iPhone XS Plus.

There's also a good chance the Apple Watch 4 will be revealed at the same time and a recently filed Apple patent reve