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.

IBM brings in the clouds

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

Pic Mike MageeBig Blue said it has released or is just about to release a slew of cloud and Big Data analytics to the IT party.

It said that Cognos Business Intelligence, SPSS predictive analytics and Watson Analytics will soon be available on its Cloud marketplace. Currently the Cognos offering is in beta, and won’t be ready for action until the first quarter of next year.  And SPSS Modeller won’t be available for another 30 days.

What’s the Cloud marketplace?  It’s one place you can go to, or in IBM speak it’s “the digital front door to cloud innovation”.

Big Blue said that 25 percent of new business analytic installations will be as subscriptions to cloud analytic or application services by next year.

IBM wants a slice of that lucrative cake.

The giant said that it has five answers to five common problems for businesses including understanding customers, understanding operations, security, compliance and data warehouse modernisation.

IBM makes Ebola initiatives

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

ibm-officeGiant vendor IBM said it is offering a number of initiatives in a bid to help the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa.

It has donated IBM Connections technology to Nigera in a bid to help preparedness for future outbreaks of the disease and has created a global portal to share Ebola data.

IBM has worked with Sierra Leone’s Open Government initiative, Cambridge Uni’s Africa Voices project, telco Airtel and startup Echo Mobile.

The Sierra Leone system lets people report Ebola problems and worries using SMS or voice calls. That, it says, will help the government improve its strategies for containing the outbreak.

Using IBM supercomputers and analytics in the cloud, the system will identify correlations and emerging concerns across the entire data set of messages. SMS and voice data are location specific.

According to IBM, the system has already identified regions with growing numbers of suspected cases and helped provide faster response times for body collection and burials.

The system uses radio broadcasts to encourage people to get in touch with the project.  Cambridge Uni’s Dr Sharath Srinivasan said: “We are working with IBM to offer people across Sierra Leone a channel to voice  their opinions and to ensure the data is rapidly analysed and turned into insights about the effectiveness of public service announcements and public misconceptions about Ebola.”

Airtel has provided a toll free number for SMS messages and anonymised by Kenyan company Echo Mobile.

Meanwhile, Big Blue volunteers are calling on organisations worldwide to contribute data as it seeks to identify and classify open data sources.

Intel readies server shifts

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

intel_log_reversedRoadmaps seen by sources close to chip manufacturer Intel say there’s a series of sea changes for server chips to be released in the second quarter of 2015.

According to reporters at Taiwanese wire Digitimes, Intel will release processors for servers based on Haswell-EX  as it readies other products for workstations too.

It is scheduled to introduce Skylake Xeons in the third quarter as well as Broadwell Xeons during the third quarter of next year.

That means – as is the tradition at Intel – we’ll see several processors phased out including Xeon Phis, Itaniums and other microprocessors, according to the wire.

Meanwhile the same media says that Intel will manage to ship a milllion units of its so-called “Education Tablets” this year.  The machines are largely aimed at developing markets.  Shipments will exceed three million units in 2015.

Computers will be made of DNA

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

DNAScientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem claim to have made a breakthrough that may well lead to the development of computer circuits based on DNA.

Physics is preventing the development of silicon based CMOS technology in the future but molecular electronics have been touted as the way forward.

Now a group led by Professor Danny Porath and Professor Paul Schankerman clailm to have performed reproducible and quantitive measurements of electricity through long molecules made of four DNA strands.

Porath said that the research “paves the way for implementing DNA based programmable circuits for molecular electronics, a new generation of computer circuits that can be more sophisticated, cheaper and simpler to make.”

The announcement comes through a collaboration with other bodies such as Tel Aviv University and groups based in Denmark, Spain, the USA, Italy and Cyprus.

Gadget accessories become big business

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

smartphones-genericA staggering $51.1 billion will be spent by people buying accessories for their smartphones this year.

That’s according to ABI Research which said protective cases are responsible for the biggest chunk of revenues and shipments.

The other major accessories are extra charges and memory cards, said ABI.

People, said analyst Thomas McCourtie from ABI, want extr protection for their smartphones – particularly now as they come with larger screens and so are more susceptible to damage.

And there’s a fashion element to the trend too – with some cases aving compartments for debit and credit cards and people want to carry everything valuable together rather than in wallets and purses separately.

The market for Bluetooth accessories continues with sales jumping by 18 percent over the five years between 2014 to 2019.

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“Products such as the Beats by Dr Dre Pill and the Creative D200 have become some of the most sought after mobile accessories,” said McCourtnie.  “People are willing to pay for quality audio and highly visual brands.”

3D printers reach tipping point

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

3dprinterOver 217,000 3D printers will ship in 2015, but this is only the start of a headlong rush for people buying the devices.

A report from the Gartner Group estimates that 108,151 3D printers will ship this year, but shipments will double between 2015 and 2018.  Worldwide shipments then will be around 2.3 million.

It’s 30 years since the first 3D printers were invented, surprisingly, but unit shipment growth rates were trifling.  Gartner thinks that the 2.3 millin shipments in 2018 are only the beginning of the matter.

Gartner said 3D printers which use material extrusion will be the dominant technology and drivers for 3D printers include models costing less than $1,000, improved quality and a wider range of materials used to  print.

The market will be worth about $6.9 billion in 2018, it predicts as vendors add features and improve performance.

British Queen uses Twitter

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Queen Elizabeth IIQueen Elizabeth II took advantage of opening a new technology gallery at the London Science Museum this morning by getting down and dirty and tweeting the world.

The first tweet by the Queen said: “It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.”

She sent the tweet via the Palace’s @BritishMonarchy account.

The new gallery at the Science Museum includes Sir Tim Berner-Lee’s NeXT computer – he’s the chap who invented the World Wide Web.

The main theme of the gallery is communications and includes old kit such as business computer Leo, how mobile phones work, and how the digital revolution is changing the world.

British sponsors of the exhibition include plucky chip designer ARM and BT.

Dell takes aim at HP business

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Andy Zollo, channel director Dell EMEAThe decision by HP to split itself into two will offer opportunities for Dell to take more business.

That’s according to Andy Zollo, director of channels at Dell EMEA, who said today that its own plans will allow it to sell software, services and hardware to a number of new customers.

Zollo said that Dell had embarked on a series of roadshows throughout Europe over the last several weeks to educate its partners on opportunities open to them.

Dell – formerly known primarily as a hardware company – now has a wide portfolio of products and has appointed partner development managers to offer one single “backside to kick”.

He said Dell now has a much closer relationship with a wide range of partners aimed at introducing them to enterprise customers.

Zollo said that any major change to an organisation – such as recently happened with HP – tends to have a disruptive effect, and Dell will feed on the changes that are bound to happen.

Networks compromised by Backoff malware

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Huntsman spider, Wikimedia CommonsSecurity company Damballa said it had recorded a 57 percent increase in Backoff Malware between August to September.

It compiles its reports from enterprise customers and global ISPs.

The biggest challenge for IT security teams is to find genuine attacks on networks from an avalanche of security alerts typically received.

During the third quarter of this year, Damballa noted the most affected enterprises received 138,000 events daily, up 32 percent from the second quarter. Enterprise customers said that’s an average of 37 infected devices per day.

But Damballa noted that Backoff, which is targeted POS (point of sales) malware infected 1,000 businesses.  The type of enterprises that suffered showed the malware had managed to bypass network prevention controls and while active, was hidden in networks.

Brian Foster, the CTO of Damballa, struck a pessimistic note saying the figures show prevention controls can’t stop malware infections.  “POS malware and other advanced threats can, and will, get through so we can’t completely build the walls around the network highter,” he said.

Enterprises need to look to build better better intelligence to idenify real threats.  “We’d advise enterprises to be prepared, to get ahead by assuming they will be compromised, and take proactive measures,” he added.

Intel revises its pay outs for vendors

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Intel-logoIt looks as if Intel will stop providing pay outs – in euphemistic terms – subsidies, for people making mobile phones using its technology.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, while Intel had an apparently sparkling set of financial results recently, it is going to restrict these payouts to all but the biggest players

It is significant that despite these sparkling results, Intel’s mobile unit, as we reported yesterday, was a loss making venture.  Intel beancounters don’t like making losses.

Digitimes said that Intel is concentrating on reducing costs for the bill of materials making up smartphones.  The writing on the wall for Intel has been clear to the chip giant for quite some time.  Vendors using ARM chips and non-Windows operating systems feel a little bit freer to pursue their own path.

According to the same report, Asustek, one of the bigger Taiwanese vendors, ordered over seven million Intel Atom processors but the level of rebates remains unclear.

Asustek will almost certainly continue getting pay offs from Intel because it’s estimated it will soak up at least fifteen million processors during the calendar year 2015.

Algorithms gouge online buyers

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

smartphone-shoppingA study by a team of researchers at the Northeastern University have discovered that online shops target people based on their profiles and charge some more than others for the same products.

The team said that people regularly receive personalised content, such as specific offers from Amazon.  That, the study shows, can be to a person’s advantage but e-commerce sites manipulate search results and customise prices without anyone knowing.

The researchers looked at 16 popular e-commerce sites, including 10 general shops and six hotel and car rental sites,to measure price discrimination and price steering.

“We have found numerous instances of price steering and discrimination on a variety of top e-commerce site,” they said in a report.

Some sites altered prices by hundreds of dollars and travel sites showed inconsistencies in a higher percentage of cases.

They said Expedia and hotels,com “steered a subset of users towards more expensive hotels”.

The team said that price differences were significant in some of the cases. Amazon and Ebay were excluded from the study and so too were firms like Apple.

Although the researchers said they contacted the sites they surveyed, they did not say how or if the companies replied.

Amazon invests in German datacentres

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

amazonsMany people might think that Amazon is where you buy your books, your Hue lights and your CDs but behind the scenes it is  becoming a major player in the datacentre business.

And now, according to the Financial Times, Amazon will build several datacentres in Frankfurt in a bid to allay customers’ fears that their data is housed in places where security and privacy are not as high a priority as in Germany.

The FT reports that the EU has much stricter data protection laws than other territories.  And, of the EU countries, Germany has the best privacy control.

A senior VP of Amazon Web Services told the FT that many of its German customers would prefer to have their data held locally. Although a figure hasn’t been placed on the German infrastructure investment, it’s believed that such a project will require a multimillion dollar investment.

US providers like Google, Rackspace and others compete with Amazon but are based in the USA.  Amazon is believed to generate revenues from its cloud business amounting to over $5 billion during 2014.

Move your datacentres to Scandinavia!

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

datacenterWhile many multinational and pan-European businesses have their co-location centres in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London or Paris, IT managers should think about moving their datacentres to Norway or Sweden.

That’s according to analysts at the Gartner Group and there’s a number of reasons why Sweden and Norway are attractive.

Tiny Haynes, a research director at Gartner, said that power costs in Norway and Sweden have fallen by five percent since 2010. That contrasts with the EU average power costs that have risen 13 percent in the same period.

Also it’s cold in Norway and Sweden and that can give datacentres efficiencies by using outside air cooling.

Gartner believes that managers can save up to 50 percent by moving their infrastructure lock, stock and barrel.

Haynes said: “It’s likely that most organisations will find some workloads that can be moved to a lower cost location without impacting performance.”

Chromebooks put pressure on Microsoft

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

winbookThe success of Chromebooks has forced Microsoft to drop its licensing fees on Windows 8.1 notebooks, in a move that is forcing down prices on the products and is good news for buyers.

According to financial analysts at Seeking Alpha, Samsung has decided to use an X86 processor for its Chromebook 2 – a win for Intel in the X86 stakes.

HP and Acer are already selling Windows 8.1 notebooks for less than $200 and that is likely to create something of a frenzy in the run up to the holiday period.

Seeking Alpha points out that Intel’s mobile chip unit posted an $1.04 billion operating loss for its financial third quarter, despite selling chips for 15 million tablets during that quarter.

Intel is attempting to make “significant reductions in contra revenues next year”, but the financial analysts say X86 mobile chips will carry on losing money.

Samsung has dropped using ARM based processors for its Chromebook in favour of Intel, but the bad news is that most market research shows that sales of tablets are slowing, particularly in mature markets.

Seeking Alpha said: “Intel is losing big money in its quest to sell 40 million tablet chips this year.”

Moore’s Law offered glimmer of hope

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

Intel-logoResearchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have thrown Intel a lifeline in the shape of self assembling molecules.

Alexander Liddle, a materials scientist at NIST pointed out that Intel has just gone into production on a 14 nanometre generation of chips.

Liddle explained that at these sizes the problem is creating multiple masking layers and optical lithography “is simply not capable of reliably reproducing the extremely small extremely densie patterns. There are tricks you can use such as creating multiple, overlapping masks, but they are very expensive,” he said.

He said two pieces of research by NIST, by IBM and by MIT show a way to deposit thin films of a polymer on a template so that it self-assembles into precise even rows 10 nanometres wide.

“The problem in semiconductor lithography is not really making small features – you can do that but you can’t pack them together,” he said.  “Block co-polymers take advantage of the fact that if you make small features relatively far apart, you can put the block co-polymer on those guiding patterns and fill in the small details,” he said.

He’s optimistic that the NIST model will give him accurate results.