Author: Eva Glass

Eva Glass first rose to prominence in The INQUIRER. She continues to work behind the scenes to dig out the best stories.

Smart bin market isn’t rubbish

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-01-21 at 10.38.45The growth of intelligent bins will grow at a 43 percent CAGR between now and 2020, with Western Europe and the USA leading the charge.
So says ABI Research, which estimates that efficient and operational smart bins will number hundreds of thousands over the next five years.
Right now, says ABI, BigBelly Solar has received the most attention but other firms like SmartBin and Enovo are making waves outside of the USA.
Analyst Eugenio Pasqua thinks that while 95 percent of smart bins connected to monitoring services by cellular links, there are other contenders.
Those include firms producing low power WWAN connection, such as SIFFOX and Weightless.

 

UK open to security abuse

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

ciscologoA report from networking giant Cisco revealed that only 41 percent of UK companies have good security processes in place.
That places it well below India at 54 percent, and below the US at 44 percent and Germany at 43 percent.
But the situation is worse in Asia.  Only 36 percent of Chinese enterprises have adequate security while Japan has only 24 percent.
Cisco’s annual security review reveals that hackers are moving from compromising servers and operating systems to target individual users’ browsers and emails.
Some of the favoured techniques are Snowshoe spam, which generates many spam emails from a large range of IP addresses to avoid detection.
Attackers are also taking advantage of the relatively weak security of JavaScript and Flash by attacking both at the same time.
According to the survey, less than 50 percent of firms patch and configure systems to ensure security.
The survey canvassed executives at 1,700 companies and it appears there is a gap in perception with 75 percent thinking their security tools are very effective, while the reality is quite different.

 

Microsoft to open Windows 10 kimono

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseAlthough Windows 10 won’t launch until the second half of this year, Microsoft is attempting to keep us interested by revealing more features of the operating system.
It will reveal those details later this week.
When Microsoft opened the kimono on Windows 10 last Autumn, it was trying to get the attention of corporate users of PCs, many of which voted with their feet by not buying Windows 8.x
But this week, Microsoft wants to tempt regular punters by showing off services and devices that will support the operating system.
Part of the disgruntlement was because Windows 8.x looked like the interface of a tablet, and lacked the traditional “start” button.
Microsoft is promising that a feature called Cortana will be able to detect what sort of device is running Windows 10 and will react accordingly.
Microsoft is also waving goodbye to the long despised Explorer browser, by replacing it with a browser called Spartan which is rumoured to be niftier than the browsers of yesteryear.
No one is sure exactly when Windows 10 will ship, how much it will cost or how many flavours it will come in.  Most pundits are predicting a launch probably in September.

 

European PC shipments rise

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCSales of PCs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) grew by two percent in the fourth quarter of last year.
Although that’s hardly a stellar figure, Western Europe showed better results with growth of 10.7 percent.
In all, shipments amounted to 93.3 million units.
IDC’s report said that the market grew because of healthier shipments to ordinary people in the quarter, with vendors stocking up for Christmas and January sales.
Next month, there will be Microsoft promotions which will bring prices down on notebooks with less than 15-inch screens.
HP, and Lenovo dominated the market place, with shares of 23.3 percent and 19.6 percent respectively.
Dell has 9.8 percent share in EMEA, followed by Acer, Asus and “others”.

 

1.167 billion smartphones sold last year

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - News

smartphones-genericChinese vendors managed to sell 453.4 million smartphones in 2014 – and total global shipments of the devices amounted to 1.167 billion units.
That’s a growth rate of 25.9 percent, according to market intelligence company Trendforce.
Samsung continued to be the global leader in smartphone market share in 2014, although its growth rate fell, eroded by the Chinese manufacturers at the lower and mid end of the market, and at the high end of the market by Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple managed to grow by 24.5 percent in 2014, shipping a total of 191.3 million units.
Combined, Apple and Samsung shipped 518 million units.
Apple’s success is attributed to the large size smartphone, the iPhone 6 Plus.
LG was the “dark horse”, making progress with its flagship smartphone the G3.

Nvidia graphics cards launch in March

Posted on January 19, 2015 by - News

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxReliable sources said Nvidia is to release a number of products in March this year, while the price of existing products drops this month.
The GeForce GT 930 2GB, the 940 2GB, the GTX 950 2GB and the GeForce GTX 950 Ti 2GB will all be released in March this year.
This month the price of existing GTX 950, 960 and 960 Ti drops 0 with the prices at amazon being £162, £160 and £270 respectively.
The new cards are expected to use the Nvidia “Maxwell” architecture.
The GTX 950 Ti 2GB supports a maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160 pixels, has 80 texture mapping units, takes 85 watts, has a memory speed of 1350MHz, a memory bandwidth of 86.4 GBsec and will be released on the 1st of March this year.  It will use 28 nanometre transistors.
While Nvidia still generates most of its revenues from graphics products, it is now making a serious attempt to diversity its business into different spheres,

 

Office warned over data hack

Posted on January 19, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerThe Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has warned high street retailer Office after a hacker gained access to over a million customer records.
The ICO said the hacker accessed contact details by cracking open an unencrypted database that was due to be phased out.
The information went undetected and the ICO has had Office sign an undertaking to ensure problems associated with the hack are resolved.
In that undertaking, Office CEO Brian McCluskey said that the firm made no reference to retention of data and didn’t give formal data protection training.  Both these are now being addressed.
The ICO said that there was no suggestion that the breach went further and no bank details were stored.

 

Organic semiconductor problem solved

Posted on January 19, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-01-19 at 14.47.29Scientists at Berkeley National Laboratory claim to have solved a problem associated with organic semiconductors.
Organic semiconductors include light emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs) and photovoltaic cells used in solar panels.
Researchers know that performance problems occur within organic semiconductor thin films but were unsure of the cause.
Now they appear to have figured it out, using a type of microscopy to study interfaces in a solution organic semiconductor.
Naomi Ginsberg at Berkeley and her colleagues said that random nanocristallites get trapped in the interface during solution casting, hindering charge carriers “a bit like debris on a motorway”.
The methodology will help manufacturers to predict affordable solution processing and maximise charge carrier mobility.
The end result will be better performance of products based on organic semiconductor processes.

 

UK police end Autonomy investigation

Posted on January 19, 2015 by - News

HPThe Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has abandoned its probe of an inquiry into Autonomy, taken over by Hewlett Packard.
In a statement, it said there was insufficient evidence for any chance of a realistic prospect of conviction.
HP had accused Autonomy founder and CEO Mike Lynch of fraud related to the sale – an allegation that Lynch has consistently denied.
However, US authorities continue to investigate the acquisition of Autonomy by HP.
The SFO said: “On application of well established principles, jurisdiction over the investigation has been ceded to the US authorities, whose investigation is ongoing.”
HP bought Autonomy for $11.1 billion but then claimed it was worth $8 billion less than it had paid a year later.

 

Indian cloud services worth close to a billion

Posted on January 19, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeA report from Gartner said cloud services in the subcontinent will be worth $838 by the end of this year.
That figure will be up by almost a third – revenues last year totalled $632 million.
The revenues are being generated by cloud infrastructure as a service (Iaa), management and security, and infrastructure platform as a service (PaaS).
The market will be worth $1.9 billion by 2018, Gartner predicts.
Ed Anderson, a research VP at the market analysis firm, said Indian organisations looking to outsource their IT are turning to public cloud services.
“Cloud services are not only being used for low value or transient workloads, but also increasingly for production workloads, including some mission critical initiatives,” he said.
While business process as a service (BPaas) was worth $130 million in 2014, it will be with $351 million in 2018, while SaaS will grow from $246 million last year to $707 million in 2018.

 

Hedge fund bets against Intel

Posted on January 16, 2015 by - News

Intel-logoThe founder of hedge fund Kynikos Associates is betting against Intel’s share price and has done so for the last six months.
Intel turned in quarterly results that disappointed Wall Street late last night.
According to Reuters, Kynikos Associates founder Jim Chanos said he’d shorted Intel’s share for six months.
He believes that despite bullish talk from Intel about its future, the semiconductor giant faces similar challenges as companies HP and IBM did.
Intel’s mainstream business is selling X86 microprocessors used in PC, but as we reported earlier today, revenues from those devices fell in its financial fourth quarter.
Intel shares fell in after hours trading on Wall Street.

 

Notebook sales flat

Posted on January 16, 2015 by - News

notebooksSales of notebooks during the fourth quarter of 2014 amounted to 46 million units.
That’s according to Digitimes Research, which said in a report that shipments were flat compared to the same quarter in 2013.
Of the notebooks shipped, Taiwanese original design manufacturers (ODMs) shipped 36.6 million, representing nearly 80 percent of the total marketplace.
ODMs make notebooks which are then rebranded by multinationals or sold as so called “white boxes”.
The chief ODMs were Quanta with 33 percent, Compal with 31.4 percent, Wistron with 15.8 percent, Inventec with 7.5 percent and Pegatron with 6.9 percent.
Digitimes Research said HP was the number one vendor in the quarter with 23 percent market share, Lenovo second, Dell third, Asustek fourth, Acer fifth, Apple sixth, Toshiba seventh, Samsung eighth and Fujitsu ninth.

 

Scots executive leaves AMD

Posted on January 16, 2015 by - News

Scottish senior executive John Byrne said he is to leave AMD.
He had been with AMD and formerly ATI for around eight years.
He made the announcement in a Facebook posting, saying: “After eight years there and after the birth of our two beautiful daughters, I just decided it was time to do something else”.

Youth arrested over console hack

Posted on January 16, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerA British youth has been arrested over the hack that brought down the Playstation network and Xbox Live over the holiday period.
UK police are working in tandem with the FBI to track down the perpetrators, who identified themselves as the Lizard Squad.
In addition to arresting the 16 year old youth, the police from the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SERCO) seized computer equipment, which they will now scrutinise.
SERCO said it is working with both business and the academic world to create specialist tools to protect the public.
The Sony and Microsoft hacks happened on Christmas Day, using a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.
The police said they were still in the early stages of its investigation.

 

Insurers to spend, spend, spend on IT

Posted on January 15, 2015 by - News

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyInsurers with a worldwide presence are set to spend over $100 billion this year on IT. That will gladden the hearts of vendors.
This is the view of IDC Financial Investments, which says that the number is an increase of 4.4 percent compared to 2014.
The global insurers want to spend this money to boost “efficiencies”, meaning that they will invest in data warehousing, claims and policy administration systems.
Li-May Chew, lead director for IDC’s Financial Insights division, said that the insurers need to act.
She said: “Replacements or refreshes are required as legacy IT systems become increasingly complex, inflexible and archaic, to the point of negatively affecting technology integration and interoperability.”
In other words, they’re out of date.
The insurers want to modernise their systems and use the cloud to cut costs – and customers want the insurers to do that too.
They want to make sure their customers use PCs, mobile devices and social networks.
They need to protect themselves against fraud.
Li-May didn’t say which vendors would benefit from the increased spend – but the emphasis is on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking and big data analytics.
So the usual suspects – that is to say IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle and others will be sitting patiently waiting for the phone to ring so they can pick up the orders.