Author: Nick Farrell

Paypal boss cashes in his chips

Posted on February 5, 2015 by - News

paypal-logoPaypal executive Don Kingsborough, who helped get the outfit to move into physical retail stores, stepped down in January.

Kingsborough was instrumental in PayPal’s attempts to push innovations such as in-store ordering and pickup and physical-checkout payment at chains.

His exit comes as the company competes with the likes of fast-growing startup Square to get its payments system adopted in more retail chains across the United States.

The company increasingly has had to contend with rivals such as Square, which is popular with smaller businesses, and the Tame Apple Press thinks that it will have to surrender ground to Apple Pay, even if take up from that is proving sluggish.

The thought is that Paypal is slowing. eBay said it enjoys “a strong foothold in offline retail,” but analysts say it has been difficult for the tech companies vying for checkout space to contend with the simple convenience of debit or credit cards.

No one is saying why Kingsborough is leaving.  It seems that he might have been frustrated that he could not so as much as he wanted.

One quote attributed to him was “!I think we were able to move the needle, but I have to say I leave a little frustrated in that I wish we as an executive team would have done more.”

eBay is also preparing to lay off some seven percent of its workforce, or 2,400 jobs, including PayPal employees, before the two companies split in the second half of 2015.

BT finalises EE take over

Posted on February 5, 2015 by - News

Kitten-Kong BT has finalised its deal to buy EE from Orange and Deutsche Telekom for £12.5 billion.

According to the International Business Times , the deal, is to be officially completed by the end of the year, will be settled in cash and shares.

While the deal has been rumoured for a while, it is now official.  It looks like once the agreement has been settled, the German Deutsche Telekom will have a 12 percent stake in the company and will be given the right to appoint one board member.

Orange will also get a four percent stake.

BT will raise £1 billion of the deal through issuing new shares and debt financing, with the view of making £360 million of capital expenditure in four years savings as a result of the deal.

BT CEO Gavin Patterson said: “This is a major milestone for BT as it will allow us to accelerate our mobility plans and increase our investment in them. The UK’s leading 4G network will now dovetail with the UK’s biggest fibre network, helping to create the leading converged communications provider in the UK. Consumers and businesses will benefit from new products and services as well as from increased investment and innovation.”

The deal comes after broadband providers have started to offer quad-play packages, providing customers with TV, broadband, landline and mobile services in one bundle.

BT will now join Virgin Media and TalkTalk, who already offer these deals to UK consumers.

CEO of EE, Olaf Swantee added: “Joining BT represents an exciting next stage for our company, customer, and people. In the last few years alone, we have built the UK’s biggest, fastest and best 4G network, significantly advancing the digital communications infrastructure for people and businesses across Britain.”

Following in BT’s footsteps is Sky, who struck a deal with Three Mobile last week to offer similar quad-play deals in 2016.

Sony stumbling away from doom

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

doom_sprite_wallpaper_by_bobspfhorever78-d6lij4oElectronics giant Sony appears to be pulling out of its  death spiral.

The consumer electronics firm said on Wednesday preliminary results showed that operating profit had doubled to $1.52 billion in the October-December quarter, while sales rose 6 percent.

This was well ahead of what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected and they rushed from their expensive loos screaming “buy, buy, buy.”

To be fair, the company is not home and hosed yet.  In fact it could not even be said to be at the front gate contemplating a nice hot bath and a rigorous toweling down.

Sony also forecast a preliminary full-year net loss of $1,44,841,1900 but since this was better than the  than its forecast last October estimating a net loss of $ 1,959,616,100 for the year no one appears to be quibbling.

The company had said it would delay announcing the official results for the third quarter as its Hollywood studio struggled to recover from a massive hacking of its computer systems. The company, in the midst of a restructuring, said on Wednesday its Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai would announce a “new business strategy” on February 18.

The company will cut 2,100 jobs in the unit by the end of the next fiscal year through March 2016, including around 1,000 cuts already announced.

Sony’s image sensors have emerged as one of its best performing product lines in recent quarters.

Comodo teams up with British partner VCW

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

lizardCertificate Authority and Internet Security outfit Comodo has signed a deal up with UK distributor VCW Security.

VCW Security now offers a range of Comodo’s endpoint security products including Endpoint Security Manager, Anti-Spam Gateway, UTM (Unified Threat Management) and Mobile Device Management (MDM).

Comodo’s Endpoint Security Manager provides security antivirus, firewall, host intrusion prevention, auto-sandbox and file rating to the desktop.

Simon Jackson, Commercial Director at VCW Security, said: “Comodo represents an opportunity for our valued partner network to offer a set of products that are genuinely innovative in the antivirus market – a market with virtually no innovation in the last years. The unique technology offered by Comodo is supported by its warranty – giving all users complete peace of mind.”

James Tomlinson, Channel Manager, Northern Europe at Comodo, added: “VCW Security has a wide range of experience in value added services through their extensive reseller networks. Comodo has a strong record of accomplishment of providing the best breed of high-tech products to the UK security industry. We are looking forward to working with them.”

 

ARM shows off new mobile chip

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

arm-wrestlingBritish chip designer ARM Holdings unveiled a new processor aimed at better computing performance and beefed-up graphics for smartphones and tablets.

We will not see the new Cortex-A72 processor hit the streets until next year but it is being touted as saving ARM’s bacon.

Investors are concerned about lower royalty rates for ARM as growth in the smartphone market shifts to China, where consumers typically buy devices priced at $200 or less, compared with more than $600 in the United States.

ARM licenses its processor technology to other semiconductor companies and receives its cash based on the selling prices of chips shipped by its partners.

On the technical side,  ARM claims the new processor has 3.5 times the performance of comparable chips from 2014.

The chip design will also deliver a 75 percent reduction in energy use, helping reduce battery drain on smartphones, they claimed.

However, most of the advances depend on contract manufacturers like TSMC getting its 16nm process technology to higher yields.

Nandan Nayampally, ARM’s vice president of marketing, said with the Cortex-A72’s increased computing horsepower, smartphones and tablets will be able to handle complex computing like voice analysis without having to connect to the Internet.

Many compute-heavy tasks on smartphones today are handled remotely in data centres owned by Internet heavyweights like Amazon, Google and Facebook In instead of by the smartphone’s processor, with results instantly sent to the device.

Ten companies have licensed the new technology, including China’s Rockchip and Taiwan’s MediaTek, ARM said.

Samsung kicked in India

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

India_flagSamsung is being pushed out of its key Indian market by a local budget smartphone maker Micromax.

Micromax has become the leading supplier in India’s booming smartphone market for the first time in the fourth quarter.

According to beancounters at research firm Canalys, New Delhi based Micromax accounted for 22 percent of smartphone sales in India in the October-December quarter, ahead of Samsung’s 20 percent. In total, 21.6 million smartphones were sold in India in the period, a 90 percent surge from a year earlier.

India, which has the world’s second-highest number of mobile phone accounts after China, is the third-biggest market by number of smartphones sold. Low-priced smartphones are the top sellers in a country where many buyers are upgrading from feature phones.

Micromax’s performance was partly due to its “continuing appeal to mobile phone users upgrading to smartphones,” Canalys said.

It estimated nearly a quarter of smartphones sold in India in the fourth quarter were devices priced under $100, while 41 percent of devices sold were in the $100-$200 range.

Micromax and Samsung were followed by two other Indian budget smartphone brands, Karbonn and Lava, by number of handsets sold in fourth quarter. Japan’s Sony Corp said its net annual loss will likely be smaller than previously forecast after cost cuts and higher-than-expected sales of its image sensors and PlayStation video game consoles helped its third-quarter profit beat estimates.

 

IBM is still planning huge lay-offs

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCDespite denials from IBM that it is laying off more than 110,000 IBM employees, the hack who revealed the story for Forbes is standing by it.

Rober Cringely ran a story that 110,000 IBM employees laid off and the ever shrinking Big Blue said it would be more like 8,000.  However writing in his bog  Cringely said that Big Blue is spinning.

“I think IBM is dissembling, fixating on the term 110,000 layoffs, which by the way I never used. Whatever the word, what counts is how many fewer people will be paid by IBM on March 1 compared to today,” he said.

He said his sources tell him that IBM has other ways of getting its workforce down rather than ordinary layoff.  He claimed that IBM is pushing some people out using poor performance rathings.

This includes people who were on IBM’s “bridge to retirement’ program that took that option, thinking it kept them ‘safe’ from layoffs/firings.

“There is a loophole that says they can be dismissed for ‘performance’ reasons, which is exactly why many of my long-time, devoted, hardworking peers are suddenly getting the worst rating, a 3. It’s so they can be dismissed without any separation package and no hit to the RA, or workforce rebalancing, fund,” Cringely said.

It used to be something like 10 percent of employees ‘had’ to be labeled 3s, but recently IBM required an increase in number of 3s.

Cringely said IBM got rid of some employees by ‘stuffing’ them into the Lenovo x86 acquisition, shipping tons of people over there that never even worked on x86 stuff.

Lenovo has discovered this and has given some of them a way better package – year salary and benefits, and taking it up quietly with IBM, he added.

Still it would be hard to fire a quarter of your staff by the back-door in this way, but as Cringely said the 110,000 figure was not suggested in his original story.

 

Lenovo cleans up

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

clean_up_after_yourselfDespite a miserable year for the smartphone industry, Lenovo managed to do rather well and saw its third quarter revenue rise 31 percent to $14.1 billion.

This beat what the cocaine nose-jobs of Wall Street expected as its mobile division sales more than doubled following its acquisition of Motorola.

Lenovo wrote a cheque for  $2.91 billion for Motorola, the US handset brand with a long sales history in the United States and Europe, as part of an effort to diversify away from the shrinking PC market.

These results took into account two months of Motorola’s performance and Lenovo said Motorola sold more than 10 million handsets during the quarter for the first time.

This is good news as Lenovo has been having trouble in its home market of China. Xiaomi swept aside Lenovo in China but has largely avoided Western markets due to fears of intellectual property challenges.

The company is expected to make a comeback against Xiaomi in China by adopting its rival’s Internet distribution model. Lenovo in May signed a deal with e-commerce site JD.com and announced a subsidiary last month to sell smartphones and wearables exclusively online.

Under Lenovo, Motorola will re-enter the Chinese market and be distributed primarily online, Yang said.

Total sales from the mobile division leapt 109 percent to $3.39 billion, or a quarter of the company’s sales.

Lenovo said net profit was $253 million, down from $265 million a year prior due to ballooning expenses associated with closing two major acquisitions. The Beijing-based company also acquired IBM’s low-end server unit for $2.1 billion.

The results beat expectations of $13.71 billion in revenue and $200 million in net profit.

Lenovo continued to consolidate its hold on the PC market, reaching a record 20 percent share during the quarter with sales of $9.15 billion. Shipments rose five  percent compared with a three percent decline in the broader industry, with growth particularly strong in Eastern Europe.

AT&T gets out off of its cloud

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

cloudWhile everyone seems to be rushing to get on the cloud, AT&T is downsizing its data centre operations.

The telco is apparently selling some of its data centres worth about $2 billion as it continues its streak of asset sales.

Apparently, AT&T is keen to get its debt loads down and pay off its credit card bill from last Christmas.  It is all a rumour of course, and the story is based on leaks to The Wall Street Journal 

Part of AT&T’s debt problems came because it had to bid high prices for spectrum.  The company said it had spent close to half of the total bids in the record-setting $44.9 billion spectrum sale that concluded last week.

AT&T bagged 251 licences in the  AWS-3 spectrum auction worth $18.2 billion. The company has also been investing to expand its footprint in Mexico to grow its business, as the US wireless market reaches saturation. It said last month it would buy bankrupt NII Holdings wireless business in Mexico for $1.875 billion.

IT industry back to bubble days

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

Ggb_in_soap_bubble_1The IT industry seems to be back to the heady days of 2000, according to beancounters at EY (Ernst & Young).

EY counted 3,512 mergers or acquisitions in the tech sector in 2014, for a total value of $237.6 billion, the highest figure since 2000. The report said the outlook for deals in 2015 remains “robust”.

This time the deal making is mobile tech, security and cloud computing. Startups like Uber and Snapchat meanwhile have seen their values soar with new capital inflows.

Last year 38 tech companies entered the billion-dollar club last year, including 25 in the US.

The consultancy PwC said 2014 was the “best year of the decade for global technology IPOs.”

The only thing which has not touched its March 2000 highs is the Nasdaq stock index in New York City, which is seen as an indicator of the tech sector.

There are also some concerned that some of the deals are overvalued – such as Facebook’s $22 billion deal to buy the messaging service WhatsApp.

The EY report says insists that this time, values are grounded in reality as if people expect a bubble to burst later on.

“Unlike 2000, it was no bubble,” the report said. “Despite the occasional ‘moonshot’ from a handful of deep-pocketed buyers, the vast majority of deals were measured in reality-based multiples of good-old-fashioned revenue, profit or cash flow.”

 

Help! My Mini needs a patch

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

350350000patch37As a sign of a 21st century problem, car maker BMW has rolled out a patch for a security flaw that could have allowed hackers to open the doors of some 2.2 million vehicles.

The problem affects BMW, Mini and Rolls Royce models that come equipped with ConnectedDrive – a technology that allows car owners to access internet, navigation and other services via a SIM card installed directly into vehicles.

Security experts were able to create a fake mobile phone base station to intercept network traffic from the car, and use that information to send commands to the car telling it to lower windows or open the doors.

Other boffins working for German automobile association ADAC discovered the security vulnerabilities and the potential for vehicles to be broken into last summer, but kept quiet about them until now to give BMW a chance to produce a fix.

Hackers would only need a few minutes to open a car from outside, without leaving any physical trace of unauthorised entry – which is a lot better than a brick through the window or a bent coat hanger.

ConnectedDrive appBMW issued a statement to the press congratulating itself on its rapid response, how it is “increasing the security of data transmission in its vehicles” in response to what it describes as the “potential security gap” in ConnectedDrive.

The vulnerability revolved around the insecure transmission of data, as the patch rolled out by BMW appears to have enabled HTTPS.  Since HTTPS is the minimal sort of security you would expect from an online transition, you would have thought that BMW’s have thought to install it.

The fact BMW still took half a year to work out a fix and roll it out, indicates that they have not really thought this whole security thing through yet.

Still it is likely that we will see a lot more of these sorts of patches being rolled out for cars. In the old days you could open a mini with a fork.

 

 

Apple transforms sapphire plant into a cloud

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

1338_16131017563Fruity cargo cult Apple wants to invest $2 billion to convert a failed sapphire glass plant in Arizona into a data centre.

Apple set up the plant with GT Advanced Technologies in Mesa in 2013 to manufacture scratch-resistant sapphire screens for Apple’s shiny toys.

However, GT Advanced filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October and closed the plant, after what appears to be a case of Apple shafting its partner by leaving sapphire glass was left out of Apple’s newest iPhones.

Since Apple owned the plant, it wants to turn it into something more useful. The $2 billion investment will stretch over 10 years with a 30 year commitment from Apple to keep the facility running.

But Apple does not really need another data centre. We have written before that it is hugely over capacity now. Jobs’ Mob said that the facility will be a data centre as well as a command centre for managing Apple’s other data centres and networks, which handle traffic from services like iTunes, iCloud and Siri.

It claims it will create 600 engineering and construction jobs at the data centre and the whole lot will be powered by solar energy.

As it wound down its Sapphire production in October, GT Advanced said it was laying off about 650 employees at the plant.

BT goes on hybrid fibre diet

Posted on February 2, 2015 by - News

Fruit-and-fibreBT has surprised everyone by announcing that it is deploying next generation hybrid-fibre across the United Kingdom from 2016/17.

Dubbed G.fast broadband technology, it will provide “most homes” with speeds of ‘up to’ 500Mbps  and there’s also a “premium” option for up to 1000Mbps.

At present most of BT’s national deployment is dominated by its  hybrid Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) broadband technology, which delivers download speeds of up to 80Mbps by running a fibre optic cable to your local street cabinet and then using VDSL2 over the remaining / existing copper line from the cabinet to your home.

This works for properties that exist up to 400 metres away from their street cabinet, although the service has been known to reach 2,000 metres at a slower speed.

G.fast is similar technology but it requires more radio spectrum and needs to run over much less than 250 metres of copper. As a result the high capacity fibre optic line has to be taken even closer to homes, usually as far as a smaller remote node that can be built on top of a telegraph pole, inside a street cabinet or underground.

This is expensive, although BT should not need to dig up your garden or run a new physical line into homes.

BT conducted a field trial of mock-up G.fast technology earlier this year and on the shortest 19 metre copper line it managed to achieve aggregated speeds of around 1000Mbps or 231Mbps upload and 786Mbps download. By comparison the “long” 66 metre line produced 200Mbps upload and 696Mbps download.

There will be two pilots which will start this summer in Huntingdon and Gosforth with 4,000 homes and businesses participating to see if the technology scales up.

BT will set up G.fast from different points of its network, with the pilots allowing it to assess various rollout options. It is also planning to develop a premium fibre broadband service for those residential and business customers who want even faster broadband, of up to 1Gbps.

 

British army gets its own social networking unit

Posted on February 2, 2015 by - News

article-2630396-1DE5D1E700000578-447_470x721The British Army is setting up a psy-ops unit that will fight its battles on social media “in the information age”.

Head of the Army General Sir Nick Carter said the move was about trying to operate “smarter”.

Dubbed the 77th Brigade, the unit will be made up of reservists and regular troops and based in Hermitage, Berkshire.

Apparently, it has been inspired by the Chindits who fought in Burma in World War Two and seeks “new ways of allowing civilians with bespoke skills to serve alongside their military counterparts”.

Chindits was the name given to the Long Range Penetration (LRP) groups that operated in the Burmese jungle behind enemy lines, targeting Japanese communications.

The new unit will also use the old Chindit insignia of a Chinthe, a mythical Burmese creature which is half-lion and half-dragon.

The unit recognises that the actions of others in a modern battlefield can be affected in ways that are not necessarily violent and it draws heavily on important lessons from our commitments to operations in Afghanistan amongst others.

Recruitment for the brigade, 42 percent of whose personnel will be reservists, will begin this spring.

Its members will come from the Royal Navy and RAF as well as from the Army.

 

 

Dell releases new Linux XPS 13

Posted on February 2, 2015 by - News

Dell-XPS-13-2015-14Tin box shifter Dell  is bringing the latest version of Ubuntu to its top-of-the-line Precision M3800 workstation laptop and the latest model of the Dell XPS 13 .

Dell’s top-of-the-line Precision M3800 workstation laptop is available with Ubuntu Linux 14.04.

Dell’s Director of Developer Programmes Barton George wrote in his blog that programmers had been asking for a bigger, better officially supported Ubuntu Linux developer laptop.

The Precision M3800 came about from a combination of the efforts of Dell software engineer Jared Dominguez and enthusiastic user support.

George stated that the Ubuntu-powered Precision M3800 developer edition’s comes with preloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the next generation of the world’s thinnest and lightest true 15-inch mobile workstation a starting weight of 1.88kg and a form factor that is less than 0.71 inches thick

The lap top comes with a fourth generation Intel Core i7 quad-core processor, professional grade NVIDIA Quadro K1100M graphics, and up to 16GB of memory.  It will have a 4K Ultra HD (3840×2160) screen option

The only thing that Dell could not shove under the machine’s bonnet was Thunderbolt 2 which could not be supported out of the box.

This was because Dell’s Ubuntu factory only ships Ubuntu LTS releases it could not ship with official Thunderbolt support.

“However, thanks to the hardware-enablement stack in Ubuntu, starting with upcoming Ubuntu 14.04.2, you will be able to upgrade your kernel to add some Thunderbolt support. We plan to be working with Canonical to re-certify the Precision M3800 with official Thunderbolt support,” he wrote.

It will be $50 less than the corresponding Windows configuration.