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.

NAND flash prices to fall

Posted on December 16, 2014 by - News

memoryfutureThe price of NAND flash is flat or showing a slight fall, and prices are expected to drop significantly in 2015.

Trendforce reported that manufacturers are overstocked and that means prices will stay flat until the end of this year.

But prices are expeted to drop because sales of PCs, smartphones and tablets will fall by 10 percent in the first quarter.

These price drops will apply to the contract market rather than the spot market – the contract market is largely made up of manufacturers who commit themselves to volume amounts rather than scrabble around in the spot market.

And that means that in order to cut costs and reduce losses, the buyers of contract NAND will adopt more conservative buying strategies.

That, in turn, will mean the US and Asian manufacturers of NAND flash will keep prices down or even reduce them in the first quarter of next year.

Web throws copyright rules into confusion

Posted on December 16, 2014 by - News

Wikimedia CommonsPeople are having trouble figuring out how their online content can be protected in this internet age.

Casey Fiesler, a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech, surveyed a dataset of 100,000 public forum posts from websites dedicated to video, writing, art and music.

She and her colleagues discovered that copyright is widely discussed on public threads.  She said that “at any given point, an estimated 13 percent of the posts in Youtube help forums are about copyright”.

And most of those threads were dedicated to questions about copyright as none of the sites she looked at gave copyright advice.

“Over and over again, the prevalence of problems related to copyright was expressed by creators in the conversations. Most of the posts in our dataset could be labelled as expressing some sort of problem,” she said.

The researchers found the five most challenging areas were avoiding trouble, dealing with consequences, fear of infringement, dealing with infringement and not enough information for people for them to make informed decisions on copyright.

The researchers concluded that sites should have clear information about copyright, and having website owners answer copyright related questions.

Amazon faces strike action

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

Amazon-Cloud-OutageGerman workers at Amazon warehouses have staged a three day strike – starting today.

They want better pay and conditions and are being backed by trade union Verdi. Reuters said the union expected 2,000 workers to walk out with five of Amazon’s nine distribution centres in Germany affected.

But Amazon claims only a tiny number of workers had taken strike action and 19,000 people in Germany continue to pack their boxes, ahead of the Christmas holidays.

The trade union has staged previous strikes because it wants Amazon to up pay along with collective bargaining agreements in Germany, Reuters said.

But Amazon claims that the people working in warehouses earn more than average pay compared to other people packing boxes and shifting stuff around the massive warehouses.

Germany is Amazon’s second biggest market after the USA.

Sales of smartphones soar

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

android-china-communistEmerging markets worldwide have accounted for the growth of smartphones in the third quarter of this year, growing by 20 percent.

Gartner said Samsung lost market share, but Chinese manufacturers are showing positive growth.

Altogether, sales of smartphones accounted for 301 million units shipping in the third quarter.

Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner, said in the third quarter smartphones represented 66 percent of the total mobile phone market.  She thinks that by 2018 nine out of 10 phones will be smartphones.

Western Europe saw a decline in growth of 5.2 percent, but the USA saw high growth of 18.9 percent, fuelled by the launch of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

In terms of market share, Samsung holds 24.4 percent of the market, Apple holds 12.7, Huawei holds 5.3 percent, Xiaomi has 5.2 percent of the market and Lenovo five percent.

As far as operating systems are concerned, Android ruled the roost in the third quarter (83.1%), Apple was next with 12.7 percent, Windows only held three percent and Blackberry 0.8 percent.

Cozza said: “The smartphone market is more than ever in flux as more players step up their game in this space.  With the ability to undercut cost and offer top specs, Chinese brands are well positioned to expand in the premium phone market too.”

Security appliance market continues to blossom

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

Cisco FirewallUnit shipments of security appliances grew 10 percent in the third quarter over this year, accounting for revenues of close to $2.4 billion.

And this is the 20th consecutive quarter of positive growth, according to analysts at  the International Data Corporation (IDC).

IDC said shipments were up in the quarter, compared to the same quarter in 2013 by 7.3 percent, amounting to 520,752 units.

The market is growing mostly by cyber security products intended to perform a number of different security problem in one box.

Cisco is the leader of the security pack, with 15.9 percent of the market, followed by Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and McAfee.

Unified threat management (UTM) is the dominant leader of the pack in both revenue and sales volumes, said IDC.

Asian servers threaten US hegemony

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

lenovo-logoA report said that increased production by major Chinese vendors will topple US players from their grip on the server market.

Digitimes said that Lenovo, Huawei and Inspur are likely to ship a total of two million units in 2015, knocking Dell off the number two slot.

Earlier this year, Lenovo bought IBM’s X86 business and that means the company is likely to ship a million server boxes in 2015.

Meanwhile HP, the market intelligence firm said, will show a decline in server shipments of 10 percent this year.

By the end of next year, the combined shipments worldwide from Chinese vendors is likely to amount to nearly 20 percent.

Meanwhile, the multinationals are threatened by ODMs (original design manufacturers) like Quanta, which are squeezing the Dells and HPs of this world by selling units direct at a knockdown price.

Team builds high rise semiconductor

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

The image depicts today's single-story electronic circuit cards, where logic and memory chips exist as separate structures, connected by wires. Like city streets, those wires can get jammed with digital traffic going back and forth between logic and memory. On the right, Stanford engineers envision building layers of logic and memory to create skyscraper chips. Data would move up and down on nanoscale "elevators" to avoid traffic jams.Researchers from Stanford said they have successfully demonstrated the ability to build semiconductors that combine logic and memory chips in a “high rise” configuration.

The engineers said they have created a new technology to produce transistors, a new type of memory that is ideal for multiple levels and a different way of building the high rise structures.

Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford professor, claimed the design and fabrication techniques are scalable.  “With further  development this architecture could lead to computing performance that is much, much grater than anything available today,” h said.

Heat generated by silicon chips has been a problem for decades and leakage drains batteries.  The team uses carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and solved the big problem of putting enough of these into a small area to make a useful chip.

The engineers grow CNTs on round quartz wafer and created a metal film allowing them to lift a heap of CNTs off the quartz base and put it into a silicon wafer.

The new type of memory uses titanium nitride, hafnium oxide and platinum to create metal-oxide-metal “sandwich” and use electrical switches to make conductive/resistive zeroes and ones. The researches dub this resistive random access memory (RRAM). It can be made at much lower temperatures than silicon memory.

New VAT rules to cripple UK digital sales

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

hmrcRegulations to be introduced on the 1st of January 2015 mean that small UK businesses supplying digital services to EU countries will face an administrative nightmare.

If a UK company supplies digital services of any kind to the EU, it will be forced to either register for VAT in each EU country it trades with or use HMRC’s VAT mini one stop shop.

Digital services include broadcasting, telecomms, or services including video on demand, applications, eb00ks, gaming, AV software and online auctions.

HMRC administers payments to every one of the EU’s tax authorities.

VAT rates in Europe vary widely and HMRC also warns that the list of digital services it provides is far from exhaustive.

One company creating web pages for EU customers described the changes as ludicrous.  He told TechEye that rather than signing up to either the HMRC service or registering for VAT in the countries he trades with, he has told his European customers he simply isn’t going to supply them anymore.

Facebook thinks about dislike button

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

Mark Zuckerberg - WikimedaPeople have asked for a dislike button on Facebook for quite some time, but now it looks as if founder Mark Zuckerberg has given the thumbs up to the idea.

The BBC reports that Zuckerberg, speaking in a conference at California, said the thumbs down feature was the most requested feature that Facebook gets.

If Facebook implements it, that means that when somebody is going through a tough patch they won’t have to “like” iit, like they currently do.

But Zuckerberg has some concerns and doesn’t want people to use it to diss people’s posts, the BBC said.

Zuckerberg wants Facebook users to be able to express a wider range of emotions.

One of the obstacles is that Facebooks revenue model is based on advertising. Large brand names mostly have Facebook pages and the last think Zuckerberg would want to see is tens of thousands of people disliking soda or candy.

Europe continues its anti-Google campaign

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

euroflagzThe European Commissioner in charge of antitrust matters is to meet up with the companies that complained about Google’s behaviour in Europe.

According to a report in Reuters, the new commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, wants to gather more information on the case.

To that end she is to meet companies with a beef – those include Microsoft, Hotmaps, Expedia, TripAdvisor and a gaggle of publishers.  They all believe that Google is abusing its dominance in the European sphere.

Late last month the European Parliament voted to break up Google – that vote however lacks teeth.

Vestager has teeth and has the ability to impose swingeing fines on Google if it’s shown it has antitrust tendencies.

Meanwhile, Reuters also reports that a German company is suing Google and Youtube for allegedly infrong a patent for video compression it own.

Margins rise on desktop monitors

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

LCDscreenAverage selling prices (ASPs) of desktop monitors rose by 10 percent in the third quarter of 2014.

Displaysearch, which tracks such things and has now been taken over by HIS, said worldwide shipments in the quarter fell by over three percent and accounted for 34 million units.

Manufacturers will try and reverse that trend by offering bigger sizes and better features.  Those features will include better performance, higher quality displays and better resolutions.

PC display sizes have steadily increases with market share for 20-inch and greater units rising from 60 percent in the third quarter of 2013 to 64 percent in the third quarter of this year.

And monitors with full high definition (FHD) and better resolutions grew from 48 percent in Q3 last year to 56 percent this last third quarter.

Other features that have shown an increase include wide viewing angle technology.

Displaysearch said that the average selling price of monitors was $171 in Q3 2014, compared to $155 in Q3 2013.

Another report from Taiwanese analysts earlier this week predicted prices will decline in 2015 as manufacturing volumes increase.

5G still some way away

Posted on December 12, 2014 by - News

handsetFollowing up on its report earlier this week on 5G standardisation, market intelligence company ABI Research has firmed up what it believes will be the subscriber base.

It predicts it will take between five and 10 years for 5G to get to 100 million subscribers – that’s two years longer than 4G subscriber.

Take up of 4G has been fast because of the availability of 4G devices and more powerful smartphones.

By 2025, ABI estimates that the top countries to take up the 5G baton will be the US, China, Japan, South Korea and the UK.

There’s some technicalities to take care of – 5G will use high grequency spectra and your device will link to numerous cells for good connectivity.

ABI said a 5G network will consist of a network of small cells and practical for both industrial and urban environments.

Windows 10 is delayed again

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

Microsoft campusPeople eager to throw off the shackles of Windows 8.x look like they’ll have some time to wait before they’re free at last.

According to PC Advisor, a “consumer preview2 will be released in January so you’ll be able to see what you’re missing for quite a long time.  Windows 10 isn’t now expected until the second half of next year.

Reuters, quoting Microsoft’s chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, said the launch was likely to be the early Autumn.

Reports suggest that Windows 10 may well be free of charge to existing Windows 8.x users.  Microsoft isn’t giving any details of prices yet and so no one is clear what the upgrade paths are likely to be.

The operating system is likely to look more like Windows 7 than Windows 8.x – the latter was Microsoft’s ill fated attempt to resemble other tablet operating systems like iOS and Android.

Even Microsoft insiders wondered what the company was doing with such a hybrid.

Microsoft’s decision to skip the number nine and jump straight to Windows 10 seems to be some kind of weird marketing move – as usual, it is describing the future OS as the “best OS yet”.

AMD, Intel in tablet spat

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

tweedledummBitter semiconductor rivals Intel and AMD are set to up the stakes in 2015 with a fresh assault on the tablet market.

Both companies are often seen as the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the chip market, continually foraying into battles where no one actually gets hurt.

But Digitimes, which is privy to both companies’ future roadmaps, said that they’ll foray out once more in an attempt to capture some slice of the tablet pie – estimated to represent 200 million units in 2015.

Intel has been forced to provide subsidies to companies in an attempt to bolster its rather feeble market share in the tablet and mobile markets.

It will kick off the show by releasing a system-on-a-chip (SoC) device codenamed Cherry Trail, which will be built using a 14 nanometre process and may be with the world as early as March next year.  The chip will have lower power consumption and support Windows and Android operating systems, said the wire.

But AMD is not going to stand still after receiving that SoC on the jaw.  It will introduce an X86 device dubbed Nolan, and an ARM device called Amur in the second half of next year.

Expect cheaper LCD monitors next year

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

LCDscreenWhile supplies of panels for LCD monitors failed to meet demand during this year, there will be a glut next year.

That’s because of the entry of Chinese manufacturers into the market, according to analysts at market intelligence company Trendforce.

In 2015, two Chinese companies, BOE and CEC-Panda will ramp up their generation 8.5 production lines, and in turn that will allow branded vendors to drop costs, resulting in cheaper monitors for us all.

According to analyst Anita Wang, there’s also greater demand for wide viewing angle monitors and they might represent as slightly less than a third in 2014.  Penetration in 2015 could be as much as 40 to 45 percent next year, said Wang.

Vendors are also seeking to push monitor sales by introducing more curved angle monitors.  However, such monitors still cost an arm and a leg and their availability is limited.

Overall, shipments are expected to fall by 1.3 percent in 2015, amounting to 148 million units.