Weekly Tech Highlights: Surprise Apple Event, HBO Spinoff Rumors And More

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Apple Inc. AAPL ended February as the dominant tech giant -- in the news, at least.

The company surprised consumers, investors and analysts when it announced it would be holding an event in March.

March 9 Event Means More Hype For Apple

Investors knew that Apple planned to release its long-awaited smartwatch sometime this spring, but they may not have expected the company to host an event right before its release. Now everyone wants to know: Will Apple introduce another new product?

"If you look at what is most likely, I think it could be Apple Watch only," Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry told Benzinga.

Other analysts expect a new MacBook or a new Apple TV set-top box.

Related Link: Did Apple Just Miss The M&A Deal Of A Lifetime?

Apple Also Announced New Data Centers In Europe

The Cupertino, California-based tech giant will spend €1.7 billion to build two data centers -- one in Ireland and another in Denmark.

Apple's Market Cap Could Jump By $100B If…

"[Apple is] set up to dominate the content subscription businesses of the future," Cody Willard, chairman of Scutify (a financial social network), told Benzinga.

"If you take the market caps and/or revenue of the cable industry, that's the potential market that Apple's trying to disrupt -- that Netflix is actually successfully starting to disrupt. There's about a trillion-dollar value that Apple can capture in video."

Willard doesn't expect Apple to control the market. "But if they can get 10 percent of it, it's $100 billion of market cap valuation, which at this point is a rounding error for the stock," he said.

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HBO Rumored To Leave Time Warner

The rumor mill never fails to churn out investing ideas. This week Carl Icahn was expected to take a position in Time Warner Inc TWX and push for an HBO spinoff.

"Really, they probably should spin it out," Sean Udall, CIO of Quantum Trading Strategies and author of The TechStrat Report, told Benzinga.

"I would make an argument that HBO is quite undervalued."

YouTube May Also Be Undervalued, Could Be Worth $40B In IPO

The HBO spinoff rumors inspired analysts to start looking at other video properties, such as YouTube. "To this day, there's no way it doesn't stand up as one of the most brilliant acquisitions ever done," Udall told Benzinga.

"I was a Google owner back when they bought YouTube. The minute I saw it, I thought, 'If they actually pull off the deal, it'll be the deal of the century.'"

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.

Image credit: Roger Jones, Wikimedia

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Posted In: RumorsTechAppleCody WillardGlobal Equities ResearchHBOScutifySean UdallTime WarnerTrip ChowdhryYouTube
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