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.

Salesforce strikes with lightning

Posted on October 14, 2014 by - News

Salesforce logoMajor CRM company Salesforce said it has introduced a version of Salesforce1 called Lightning, intended to help customers build mobile apps.

According to the company, developers and users can create purpose built apps for screens of every type of shape and size, including tablets, laptops, smartphones and wearables.

Lightning has a new interface and Salesforce claims is optimised for any device.

Salesforce dubs this tehnique as Platform as a Service (PaaS).  People can use pre-built components such as feed, list chart, search navigation or build their own Lightning Components.

The Lightning Process Builder lets people create enterprise workflows and visually automate complex operations including follow up emails, vendor porcurement and order fulfilment.

Lightning Framewrk and Schema Builder are now generally available, while Lightning Components is in beta test and likely to appear in February 2015, along with other elements of the product.

Boffins unveil sort of cloak of invisibility

Posted on October 14, 2014 by - News

invisibleScientists at Penn State university believe they have made considerable process in developing what they describe as a sort of cloak of invisibility. It’s not that, of course.

Postdoctoral fellow Zhi Hao said: “Previous attempts at cloaking using a single metasurface layer were restricted to very small sized objects. Also the act of cloaking would prevent an enclosed antenna or sensor from communicating with the otuside world.

So a group of scientists in the electrical engineering faculty at Penn say it’s developed a thin metamaterial coating that lets objects to function normally even though they don’t seem what they are.

The so called “illusing coatings” use a thin flexible substrate with copper patterns. When a device is probed by a radio frequency (RF) source, the scattered signature seems to be a dielectric material like silicon.

How does it work? The researchers take the object and surround it with either air or foam and then apply the ultrathin layer of dielectric with copper patterns designed for wavelengths they wish to cloak.

The practical benefits of the research could improve the way RF ID tags work or redistribute energy make things more rather than less visible.

UK high on Google purge lists

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

OgleThe European Court of Justice told Google that it had to remove information under its so-called “right to be forgotten” law and now it has emerged that one in 10 requests came from the UK.

According to the BBC, Google has taken down nearly 500,000 links from its search engine since May.  And, of those, 63,616 were UK requests.

Google doesn’t have to take down sites on requests, but people have a right to appeal if it decides not to.

Out of the 498,737 URLs it looked at, based on 146,357 requests, France accounted for the most requests, followed by Germany and then the UK.  Of the requests it received, Google removed 41.8 percent, and left 58.2 percent of them online.

Google said it gt a request from a defrocked vicar to remove two links covering an investigation of sexual abuse accusations.  It didn’t remove the pages.

Facebook accounted for most requests to remove references, followed by profileengine.com

IT vendors expect cash bonanza from India

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

Narendra Modi, India's PM - picture Wikimedia CommonsNext year the Indian government is likely to spend a staggering $7.2 billion on information technology, promising rich pickings for vendors that can surf the wave.

According to market research firm Gartner, that figure will be a five percent increase over this year and the $7.2 billion cake includes plums that cover hardware, software, IT services and telecomms.

Anurag Gupta, a research director on the subcontinent for Gartner, reckons IT services will be worth $1.8 billion in 2015, and the business process outsourcing segment will grow by 22 percent during this year.

Government spending on software is likely to be worth $910 million in 2015 – much of that being on vertical software.

Gupta said the new government’s aims are only able to be achieved by using technology and digital government, in particular broadband penetration, cloud initiatives, and public private partnership.

Intel suffers from industry nervousness

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

Intel-logoChip giant Intel puts out its quarterly results tomorrow but its shares dropped last Friday after Microchip issued a revenue warning.

Microchip said it was ready for another industry correction and, according to financial analysts at Seekingalpha.com, “the entire semiconductor space was reeling on Friday”.  That applied particularly to behemoths like Intel.

But other things may help Intel’s share price, according to the financial analysts.  There were reports that Apple will delay its 12.9-inch iPad to 2015 and that will give Intel a window of opportunity to steal market share on its chips, if the reports are true.

Intel will report its third quarter earnings tomorrow afternoon, US time.

Analyst Bill Maurer at Seeking Alpha said the fact that Intel planned to buy back a cool $4 billion worth of shares will have an impact on its bottom line – a positive one, that is.

As a result of Microchip’s revenue warning on Friday, Intel (ticker: INTC) lost over five percent on the stock exchange.  Intel still makes huge gross margins and had predicted when it released its second quarter earnings that gross margins would be 66 percent, and revenues $14.4 billion or so.

Apple, Samsung want your dabs

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

fingerprintFingerprint sensing technology has been with us for some time. But it seems that smartphone and tablet giants Samsung and Apple want to promote it a little bit more.

Research outfit IHS said the fingerprint sensor market will grow to be worth $1.7 billion by 2020.

The number of handsets and tablets using fingerprint sensors will total 1.4 billion units – four times the number of the 317 million units that will ship by the end of this year.

While Apple has been at the forefront of fingerprint sensing to date, other vendors are going to pick up the baton, said IHS. Samsung hasn’t yet got to the starting gate but is expectedto do so as soon as it finds a smaller rectangular sensor.

But while fingerprint sensors will have their vogue, swipe sensors will continue to exist, particularly in lower end smartphones.

One important element that will push adoption of fingerprint sensors are financial companies – companies like Mastercard, Visa and Paypal think they will be ideal for mobile payments.

Fingerprint sensing was first pioneered by Japanese banks but saw the sunset when there were several incidents of gangsters chopping off the fingers of victims to access accounts at ATMs.

Quantum silicon computer gets accurate

Posted on October 13, 2014 by - News

Scientists at the University of New South WalesTwo teams working at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) claim to have an answer to problems creating quantum supercomputers.

Quantum bits – qubits – are building blocks for quantum computers and the teams now say they’ve come up with qubits that process data with an accuracy above 99 percent.

Quantum computers won’t become a reality until very low error rates are achieved, said Professor Andrew Dzurak, director of the Aussie fabrication unit at UNSW.

The teams claim to have arrived at two parallel pathways for building a quantum computer in silicon.

Dzurak said that the teams have created a so-called artificial atom that is very similar to silicon transistors used in MOSFETs. He said the experiments are the earliest using solid state devices and the first in silicon.

How far off is an effective quantum supercomputer?  The answer to that question is unclear but the next step is to create pairs of qubits, with the real thing containing thousands of millions of qubits, perhaps using thousands of millions of artificial and natural atoms.

Plastic promises hope for batteries

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

plasticsA University of Stanford team is outlining the future of batteries and solar cells – and it’s plastic that will lead the way.

The university said that there’s an emerging class of electrically conductive plastics called radical polymers that promise low cost solar cells, flexible and lightweight batteries and antistatic coatings for electronics and for aircraft.

Essentially, according to professor Bryan Boudouris, a polymer called PTMA is 10 times more electrically conductive than convential semiconductor based polymers.

Plus, he explained, it’s as easy to manufacture as Plexigas with the difference that it has electronic properties.

Nevertheless, although these polymers are used in new types of batteries, it will be necessary to increase the conductivity by 100s or 1,000s of times.

The polymers are created by replacing a specific hydrogen atom with an oxygen atom.

The research is funded by the US National Science Foundation, the US air force, and DARPA – the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Internet of things: it’s trouble

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

Internet of ThingsThe much touted internet of things will bring a world where just about everything has microcircuitry from lightbulbs to coffee machines.

But, according to a report from ABI Research, there are enormous security and other risks associated with its implementation.

Those include safety, consumer privacy and data protection, the firm said.

Further, this type of network has risks in all of its core layers and when manufacturers create devices they are cost conscious and may not implement the safeguards that are the ideal.

“Manufacturers are still trying to find their feet and justify investment in secure design, development, and product lifecycle,” according to Michela Menting, a director at ABI Research.

Nevertheless she cites some companies that are taking the lead in making the internet of things safe rather than sorry.

Those include Arrayent, Hewlett Packard, Microchp, NXP Semi, Sonatype and Wind River.

Datacentres get cold corridors

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

corridorDutch company Minkels said it has started selling the free standing Cold Corridor.

What’s a Cold Corridor?  Minkels said that unlike the normal for the datacentre market, it lets you create isolated corridors without datacentre racks.

The reason for this it is modular and allows the optimisation of air flow, fire safety, and access security.

Minkels said that these days storage is often delivered as complete rack systems in different sizes.  But using its Cold Corridor lets datacentre managers fit other styles and sizes of racks later, meaning that it gives greater flexibility for future needs.

Minkels claims that using this product is much simpler and more cost efficient than customised projects. It’s a way of upgrading existing datacentres.

Minkels, a subsidiary of Legrand is a supplier of modular datacentre products and boasts large corporations as its clients.

Apple sued by sapphire firm

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

blue-appleStyle company Apple has had a writ from Taiwanese firm Tera Xtal, claiming it has infringed its patents.

According to the Taipei Times, Apple used patented technology to put sapphire substrates into cameras used in iPhones. Apple, of course, doesn’t manufacture these things but uses a supply chain to make them.

A company representative told the newspaper that it had taken action against Apple because of its large sales volume, but that this won’t be the end of the matter.

She said that it’s entirely possible that lawyers may be put on other manufacturers’ cases, including giant Korean companies Samsung and LG.

Tera Xtal wants to extract $9.88 million in damages if it’s proved that Apple has in fact breached its patents.

The company is also contemplating taking legal action against firms in other jurisdictions.

Notebook players change their focus

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

server-racksA few weeks back we reported that the lucrative datacentre market could well be the target for new vendors to enter the fray.

Now there’s some hard evidence for that. Taiwanese firm Quanta Computer, which previously played in the original design manufacturer (ODM) game, and made notebooks for the major brands, has branched out into the server market.

Digitimes reports that Quanta has completely re-invented itself and is positioning itself to sell into the European datacentre market.

It is offering servers and services to European datacentres and has hired a sales team specifically for the territory.

It faces stiff competition from the likes of HP and Dell. But the advantage it has is that it has its own manufacturing and further has played the very slim margin game when it made notebooks for multinational brands like HP and Dell.

The move is likely to be good value for the datacentre buyers because there’s no doubt such moves will prompt something of a price war in the sector.

Assassins bemoan poor console chip performance

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

assassins-creedAssassin’s Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has waded into AMD’s console performance saying that his new game’s 900p frame rate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance.

He said that while the GPUs on the machines are really powerful and the graphics look good, the game was technically CPU-bound and the CPU has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen. All these systems running in parallel.

Speaking to Hot Hardware, Pontbriand  said game designers were quickly bottlenecked and it was a bit frustrating.

“We thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard. It’s not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we’re still limited to 30 frames per second,” he said.

The comments are being seen as damning AMD’s APU. The Jaguar CPU inside both the Sony PS4 and Xbox One has a relatively low clock speed and, while both consoles may offer eight threads on paper, but it appears that games can’t access them.

Pontbriand said that one thread is reserved for the OS and several more cores will be used for processing the 3D pipeline. Between the two, Ubisoft may have only had 4-5 cores for AI and other calculations. This means that the performance is about the same as the last generation of Xbox 360 and PS3 CPUs.  In fact these were clocked much faster than the 1.6 / 1.73GHz frequencies of their replacements.

To be fair it is hardly AMD’s fault. Microsoft or Sony could’ve specced out a variant of the core clocked at 2-2.4GHz and boosted total CPU throughput, but they didn’t. The programmable nature of the GCN architecture inside the Xbone and PS4 is meant to compensate for the relatively lightweight core, but AI calculations may simply be beyond this.  GPU calculations tend to be high latency, and AI typically requires fast response times.

SMEs held back by poor networks

Posted on October 9, 2014 by - News

whiffyA survey said that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are worried about poor networking and security.

The survey, commissioned by Netgear which has something of an axe to grind, chose 500 companies with between one and 250 employees showed the SMEs’ concerns.

Three quarters of the firms said having a wireless network is essential to their business.  That figure rises to 84 percent for firms hiring more than 100 people.

A large number rely on wireless networks with 74 percent saying it makes the company more productive, and 75 percent saying it improves customer services.

But one in three firms surveyed said they had struggled to install an effective and secure wireless service.

And 31 percent thought about dropping all their IT wireless plans after they’d had bad experience with quality and reliability. A third worried about data security while a quarter weren’t sure how to introduce wi-fi into existing IT infrastructure.

HP faces problems in its two way split

Posted on October 9, 2014 by - News

Tenniel's illustration of Tweedledum and Tweedledee - Wikimedia CommonsThe decision by HP to split itself into two will have implications for its business in Europe.

That’s according to a number of analysts at the International Data Corporation (IDC).

Earlier this week HP said it would divide itself into HP Enterprise, focusing on the corporate market, and HP Inc, selling PCs and printers.  Both companies will generate revenues of around $57 billion each.

The changes in Europe will impact the two HPs in between six to 18 months and affect channel, volumes, and SME (small to medium enterprises) sectors.

Giorgi Nebuloni, manager of Datacentres at IDC said: “HP will have extra work to do to align its massive customer base between client/printing devices and low end server and storage to keep a coherent approach on discounting and pricing, especially for SME customers.”

Competitors Lenovo and Dell are likely to take advantage of the changes to drag smaller resellers and distributors away from HP products to their own. IDC thinks that in the mid term the split could end up being costly for HP and both HPs will need to keep their eyes peeled in brand new markets like 3D printing and Big Data analytics.