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.

Apple iWatch to arrive in March

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

two-applesA report said that Apple will start selling its much hyped iWatch in March.
That’s according to 9to5mac, which said the wearable gizmo will first be trialled in Apple stores in the USA – with training for staff slated for mid February.
The site said that Apple has been improving battery life on the product and intensively testing it.
But sources in Taiwan late last year said that there had been delays in producing the device as quickly as people would have liked.
And 9to5mac said that there could still be delays in developing software and in manufacturing the rather expensive machine.
The iWatch is set to be released in three versions, with the standard metal and glass model costing around $350.
No one is entirely sure whether the wearable market will ever take off.  Many young people don’t bother with watches in the West anymore, relying on their smartphone to tell them the time.

 

Quantum theory may help net security

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

National-Security-Agency--008Scientists at the Griffith University in Queensland claim quantum physics will help protect data on the internet.
The researchers said that so-called “quantum steering” can be used to improve data security over long distances.
Project leader Professor Geoff Pryde boasts that the method his team are engineering promises “absolutely secure information transfer”.
He said: “Your credit card details or other personal data sent over the internet could be completely isolated from hackers.”
The scientists used special photon quantum states to program a measurement device at each step of sending code.
He said that quantum systems would secure long distance comms by generating random and uncrackable code.
But that would rely on both parties sharing systems.  But his team has invented something called quantum steering, which is used to maintain communication security and removing trust in third party devices.

 

German government sites hacked

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerA number of official Gernan government sites have been hacked by a group that claims affinity with the Russian government’s moves in Ukraine.
According to Reuters, the websites hacked include the pages of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A spokesman for Merkel told reporters that her site was inaccessible from around 09:00 GMT today.
The data centre that hosts the page had come under attack from hackers who are in sympathy with Russia’s views on Ukraine.
A group that described itself as CyberBerkut claimed responsibility for the hacks.
In addition to attacking Merkel’s site, the group also said that it had attacked Bundestag websites too.
Angela Merkel is in London this afternoon to meet British prime minister David Cameron.

 

Server makers cut out the middlemen

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

server-racksManufacturers of X86 based servers are taking market share from intermediary companies such as Dell and HP.
And, according to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, that trend is sure to increase.
It reports that Taiwanese manufacturers Quanta and Wiwynn will sell more servers to big users during 2015.
The main motivation for the move away from companies like HP is that the boxes are cheaper to source from manufacturers than through middlemen.
And as the trend to data centres continues to grow, companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Google will seek to cut costs and establish cloud data centres by directly sourcing product.
Digitimes claims that Quanta’s direct business for servers now represents 90 percent of its business, while only 10 percent are shipped to third parties.

Journo sues US over hacking

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerA former news writer at CBS has started a law suit, accusing the US Justice Department of illegally hacking into her computers.
Sharyl Attkisson discovered that two of her machines had been accessed to both monitor her stories and delete files during 2011 and 2013.
That’s an allegation that’s been consistently denied by the Justice Department.
She claims that she and the lawyers representing her have strong evidence that’s not the case.  She wants $35 million in damages from the government if a court finds her claims are justified.
Attkinson filed a US freedom of information request and said the FBI had opened a case in May 2013, although she said that she hasn’t been contacted by the bureau.
She claims that the hackers used software to steal work and get access to her passwords.

 

Samsung aims at internet of things

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - News

Samsung HQ Silicon Valley - MM picThe CEO of Samsung has made a bid for his company to become an active player in the internet of things (IoT) by putting uo funding for developers.
In a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, BK Yoon said Samsung will provide $100 million in funding while pledging to keep access to devices open rather than proprietary.
He said all Samsung devices will be open and connect to other devices on the matrix, with 90 percent of Samsung devices have IoT inteconnectivity by 2017.
Soon said that the industry required an open system with collaboration across different industry sectors.
While analysts predict that by the end of the decade there will be 10s of billions of devices from lights to kitchen sinks with IP (internet protocol) abilities, problems not only include connectivity and open standards but also security.
Other vendors, including chip giant Intel want to jump on the IoT bandwagon and so far there is little sign of the whole caboodle agreeing on open standards.

 

Chip sales up in 2014

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - News

Sales of semiconductors rose by 7.9 percent in 2013, with Intel continuing to rule the chip roost.
intel_log_reversedA report from Gartner said the top 25 vendors revenues rose by 11.7 percent, with those vendors grabbing 72.1 percent of the entire market revenues.
But it was DRAM sales that really shone last year.  Gartner said the market grew by 31.7 percent during the year and undersupply and stable pricing continued to be the order of the day.
Andrew Norwood, a VP at Gartner, said all device categories grew in 2014 but the memory market outstripped them all.
Norwood said Intel saw a return of growth in 2014 after two years of seeing its revenues decline.
Intel’s Datacenter Group was the most stable of its different business units.
While Intel will reach its target of selling 40 million tablet microprocessors in 2014, they’re being sold at big discounts and with subsidies for vendors buying them.
Intel’s been the number one chip company for the last 23 years and owns 15 percent of the 2014 semiconductor market.
The next four top semi companies are Samsung, Qualcomm, Micron and SK Hynix.

 

Flash arrays capture market by storm

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - News

storageSales of flash memory array units were more than robust last year, amounting to a market worth $11.3 billion in 2014.
IDC said in a market report that the reason is there are better offerings that handle a wide range of more complicated workloads.
Flash based units in data centres include encryption, clones, replication, and storage efficiency.
And the fact that enterprises like the flexibility of flash based products means that enterprise storage vendors like Dell, EMC, HP, IBM and Oracle are jumping on the bandwagon.
Flash arrays are showing better performance, longer lives, better reliability and an improved cost per gigabyte, IDC said.
Startups in the arena include Nible Storage, Pure Storage and Solidfire.
IDC said enterprises should consider flash based arrays when they are considering replacing traditional storage units.

 

Tablet sales will continue to slow down

Posted on January 6, 2015 by - News

cheap-tabletsGartner said that sales of tablets in 2015 will continue to slow down.
While sales of tablets will reach 233 million units this year – which is an increase of eight percent compared to last year – the trend is downwards.
Ranjit Atwal, research analyst at Gartner, said that in the last two years global sales grew by numbers in the double digits.
He said: “The steep drop can be explained by several factors.  One is that the lifetime of tablets is being extended – they are shared out amongst family members and software upgrades, especially for [Apple] iOS devices, keep the tablets current. Another factor includes the lack of innovation in hardware which prevents people from upgrading.”
Apps could help grow the market, he said. And that will be helped by advanced in the personal cloud.
Garner figures show that traditional PCs will show a decline over the next two years.
He estimated the smartphone business will grow by 3.7 percent this year, and is being polarised between high and low end market price points.
The Android OS continues to rule the roost, and units expected to ship in thousands of units in 2015 amount to 1,454,760, compared t 279,415 for the Apple operating system.

Belkin goes big on the internet of things

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsComms company Belkin is using the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week to demonstrate a range of products that promise to make peoples’ homes more secure.
According to Cnet, the company will introduce four new sensors this year, all based on the firm’s WeMo technology.
WeMo devices require a plug in hub that currently comes with lighting starter kits to communicate with your home wi-fi and let you access the products from anywhere you can get an internet connection.
WeMo is based on the Zigbee language, which is also used by Philips with its Hue systems.
Cnet says that the devices it will introduce include a wireless motion sensor with a 30 foot range which won’t respond to false alarms from your pussy cat or dog because it also includes a heat sensor.
Belkin will also introduce an alarm sensor that responds to smoke or burglar alarms and triggers push notifications so you know something’s up.
It will also include a keyring sensor that can attach to a pet collar so you know whether your dog is comng or going.  The company will also launch a door and window sensor to let you know which apertures have been opened.

Microsoft rolls out $29 phone

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

microsoft-in-chinaTech giant Microsoft started the New Year by announcing it was releasing a feature phone which will be priced at $29.
The Nokia 215 is aimed at emerging markets and for people who want a second phone and don’t have very much money.
The phone can connect to the internet but only at speeds of 237 kbps but the big selling point is its battery life which has nearly a month’s stand by time.
In addition, the Nokia 215 comes with a camera and has a screen about two and a half inches in size.  The camera’s resolution is 0.3 megapixels.
Software included is Bing Search, Opera, Facebook and Twitter.
The phone comes with either one or two SIM slots and is expected to be released across the world during the first quarter of this year.
While there is still considerable demand in poorer countries for affordable phones, Microsoft cannot expect to make that much money out of this market.
And, in addition, it faces competition from Chinese companies who have started delivering phones with far more sophisticated features for not that much more money.

 

Chinese phone company revenues soar

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

android-china-communistXiaomi Technology, which is beginning to challenge smartphone players including Samsung and Apple, turned over close to $12 billion in 2014, according to its CEO.
Lei Jun, the CEO of the company, said the revenues rose 135 percent compared to 2013, in a blog on the company’s website.
The company isn’t public but that hasn’t stopped it denting sales of the global giants as well as having an impact on another Chinese manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, Huawei.
Lei claimed that Xiaomi shipped over 60 million phones in 2014, an increase of 227 percent compared to 2013.
But while Xiaomi might well be making waves and causing its competitors some alarm, it’s doing so using a model which doesn’t yield big profits. Estimates are that its margins are in the low single digits.
Although Xiaomi remains a private firm, it is receiving investment from a number of big names in Asia and Reuters claimed the market value of the company is as much as $45 billion.

 

Utilities start spending on IT

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

server-racksRestructuring and mergers are creating something of a boom in IT spending for utility companies in Western Europe.
That’s the conclusion of market research company IDC, which said a survey showed that the move demonstrates optimism in the sector.
Western European utility companies are taking steps to improve their maintenance and run operations, said IDC.  That in turn is allowing them to make cost savings and to use some of these cost savings to increase their IT budgets.
The utility companies are also outsourcing their IT, with 41 percent of their spending spent outside of their own organisations.
Close to two thirds of those budgets are decided by internal IT departments but the remainder of the spend is directed by separate business units.
Customer service, support and services are largely used as the criteria for their IT budget spends, said IDC.

 

Nvidia takes the licensing route

Posted on January 5, 2015 by - News

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxIn a bid to generate more revenues, graphics firm Nvidia is to start licensing its GPU designs to other companies.
Nvidia has already started licensing its “Kepler” graphics processor and, according to Digitimes Research, it will do the same for its future processor Maxwell.
The move is not entirely unexpected – Nvidia is following in the footsteps of British chip company ARM.  ARM’s business is essentially rooted in licensing – its engineers design cores which are then fabricated by its customers.
The research house claims that although Nvidia has, in principle, been ready to license its intellectual property since June 2013, the big leap forward will come with the release of its Maxwell processor.
It believes Maxwell will show a performance boost of as much as 160 percent and that will be a revenue generator for the company.
Nvidia has a collection of something over 7,000 patents and has recently been increasingly litigious, filing lawsuits against giants Samsung and Qualcomm for allegedly infringing its patents.  It may find that these two companies will not necessarily become customers unless courts find in Nvidia’s favour.

LCD TVs on the rebound

Posted on January 2, 2015 by - News

lgscreensWhile times were slack for LCD TVs during 2013, the market swung sharply upwards in 2014 and times ahead look rosy too.

That’s the prediction market research company Displaysearch makes, saying that total units shot up by 10 percent in the third quarter of 2014.  It estimates that total shipmets for 2014 will amount to 223 million units, a rise of seven percent over the year before.

Sales were particularly strong in North America and Asia Pacific, according to senior research analyst Paul Gagnon.  He said growth was fuelled by people replacing older flat panel TVs while in Asia many had moved away from CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs to LCD TVs.

Larger screen sizes apears to be the name of the game, as vendors seek to encourage people to upgrade.  And there’s increasingly strong demand for 4K LCD units – Displaysearch estimates that the market for these will grow by over 50 percent in 2015, amounting to 32 million units.

But there’s a warning to manufacturers too – Gagnon said that they have to be careful they don’t end up with too much stock during the first quarter of this year.

That might be bad news for them, but it’s likely to make the price of units cheaper for the common man and woman if there is an overstock crisis.