Category: News

Google increases targeted advertising power

Posted on October 6, 2015 by - News

 

google-ICGoogle has released a new advertising project called Customer Match, lets advertisers upload their customer and promotional email address lists into AdWords.

The new targeting capability extends beyond search to include both YouTube Trueview ads and the newly launched native ads in Gmail.

It is the first time Google has allowed advertisers to target ads against customer-owned data in Adwords. Google matches the email addresses against those of signed-in users on Google. Individual addresses are hashed and anonymized. Advertisers can set bids and create ads specifically geared to audiences built from their email lists.

In the past Advertisers could serve ads to site visitors and customers with display ads using retargeting lists captured in Google Analytics. Another product, Retargeting Lists for Search Ads (RLSA), allows users to bid on and serve ads tailored to audiences when they search on Google. Retargeting lists are built with cookies, which users can delete or block and aren’t suited for mobile. Email addresses and user sign-ins, on the other hand, are more stable across devices.

The Customer Match offering brings Google into line with those available from both Facebook and Twitter. Enabling CRM uploads and targeting has been incredibly successful for Facebook, and Twitter and advertisers have been pushing for Google to do the same.

In addition to reaching existing segments such as newsletter subscribers, recent buyers or loyalty program participants, advertisers can target new prospects with an expansion of Similar Audiences.

To get started with Customer Match, advertisers upload their email lists to Audiences within AdWords either manually or via the API. There is no limit to the number of lists.

Fiorina’s attempts to dig up Jobs fails

Posted on October 5, 2015 by - News

carlyfiorinaFormer HP CEO turned US presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina has been targeting the Apple fanboy vote by claiming she was friends with late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Iit appears that if they ever were friends, that did not stop the self-serving megalomaniac from getting one over on her. Fiorina has forgotten the sad story of the HP/Apple deal which went sour.

Apple wanted HP to stop installing Windows Media Store on its PCs and replace it with iTunes Music store. Jobs basically offered Fiorina the chance to sell iPods branded with HP’s name if she did this.
Fiorina nodded and the deal went through. However Apple upgraded the iPod, making HP’s version outdated and HP was still stuck with iTunes.

It got worse for HP. After it purged Fiorina in 2005, HP ended the iPod deal in July that year, but because of Fiorina’s deal HP was banned from selling its own music player until August 2006.

All’s fair in love and business, but it does seem odd that Fiorina would suggest that she was a “good friend” with a bloke who mugged her and HP’s shareholders for his own evil cunning plan.

Jobs had effectively got his software installed on millions of computers for free, stifled his main competitor, and got a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was superior.

Fiorina seems to think that Jobs was her mate because he rang her to say he was sorry she got canned. Of course, that could have just meant that Jobs was upset because he did not think he would get another deal like that past a different HP CEO.

EU denies it is “anti-American”

Posted on October 2, 2015 by - News

euThe EU has denied US corporate claims that it is “anti-American” in its recent wave of litigation against top American tech companies.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s accusations of anti-US bias over her decision to go after Google for abusing its internet search dominance and Apple over an Irish tax deal, saying such talk was a fallacy.

The US media fails to understand why all the cases on Vestager’s agenda all happen to be big companies from the Land of the Free – Google, Apple, Amazon and Starbucks. The feeling is that regulation is for non-American companies and the US should be allowed to do what it likes in its colonies.

Vestager told the Foreign Policy Association in New York that the nationality of companies played no role in her assessment.

“Yes, US companies are often involved when we investigate the digital industry. But you will also see many Japanese firms in our car-part cartel cases,” she said.

The European Commission is now studying Google’s response to antitrust charges of favouring its Google Shopping service over rivals. It is also investigating the company’s popular Android operating system for smartphones.

Amazon is in the EU’s crosshairs for a Luxembourg tax deal and Starbucks for a Dutch tax arrangement.

The EU is also wondering if it should ban cloud connections to the the US while its intelligence agencies insist that they have the right to steal it.

Redcentric appoints Fraser Fisher as CEO

Posted on October 1, 2015 by - Moving People, News

businessdesk__1443597204_Fraser_FisherRedcentric has announced chief operating officer Fraser Fisher has been appointed as the companies CEO replacing Tony Weaver who will be a non-executive director.

Weaver has been the CEO of Redcentric since 2013 when it was created by combining parts of Redstone and Maxima. Fisher gets the keys to the executive drinks cabinet in November.

Coincidentally this is when the outfit is expected to announce its results. However it does not appear that these will be bad.

Chris Cole, chairman of Redcentric, said he was happy with the company’s position.
“Redcentric is trading strongly,” he said. “The high level of recurring revenue, increasing traction in the £1m-plus contract market, and the successful integration of Calyx all combine to give the board confidence in the company’s prospects.

Fisher previously worked with Weaver at Redstone, where he was managing director, before the Redcentric demerger.

In April Redcentric acquired Calyx MS from MXC Capital for £12m and the firm said the integration “has progressed to plan”.

“The financial benefits of the acquisition will be felt in full in the second half of the year,” a statement said.

“I will be delighted to welcome Fisher as our new CEO. Fraser has a wealth of operational experience and has already made a significant contribution to the business.

Touchscreen prices are falling

Posted on September 30, 2015 by - News

fingerprintPrices for smartphone-use touchscreen controller ICs have been falling thanks to an increase in the numbers of suppliers and a price war.

Digitimes  claims that touchscreen controller and fingerprint sensor bundle suppliers have been vying for more orders from brand-name smartphone vendors and this has caused the prices to fall lower.

Prices for high-end 10-finger solutions have already fallen below $1, while prices for 2-finger ones for entry-level smartphones have dropped to $0.20-0.30.

Synaptics, Elan, FocalTech and Goodix offer both touchscreen controllers and fingerprint sensors.
Touchscreens sized 19-inch and above have reached a new all-time low of US$4 recently from more than US$5 due to an increasing number of suppliers in the market.

Interactive whiteboards, all-in-one computers and industrial electronics, is where the cheaper screens are headed and these markets are experiencing a bit of a boom.

Prices for touchscreen controllers for large-size applications are expected to go even lower in the next few months.

Imation retreats to Europe, expands Tiered Storage and Security

Posted on September 29, 2015 by - News

 

imationhq600Imation is to wind down the non-European operations of the Company’s legacy tape media business and Consumer Storage and Accessories segment.

It will also kill off its long-term license agreement with TDK Corporation and use  cash from the wind down to reinvest in its Tiered Storage and Security.

Barry Kasoff, interim President and Member of the Board of Directors said that the steps were important milestones in our efforts to re-establish Imation as a more competitive company.

“These wind downs are critical in our ongoing effort to create a leaner, more focused Imation. Our TSS segment is the foundation for the Company’s profitable growth over the long term. The Board, together with management, remains intensely focused on building that business and driving efficiencies throughout the organisation to enhance performance.”

The thinking is that getting out of certain legacy businesses will improve the company’s short term financial performance and position the Company for profitable growth.

Imation reached a definitive agreement with TDK under which TDK will relinquish substantially all of its investor rights.  Imation’s will give up its license rights to the TDK Life on Record trademark and TDK will transfer to Imation approximately 6.7 million shares of Imation common stock.

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2015. To facilitate these transitions, the Company plans to execute Transition Service Agreements with customers to provide for an orderly transition and inventory replenishment through the end of 2015.

The Company expects that once the wind downs are complete, the streamlined business will operate at break-even on a run-rate basis in 2016.

There was no mention in the announcement about staffing loses.

 

Autodesk’s cloud move gets thumbs up from investors

Posted on September 28, 2015 by - News

IMG_04911Autodesk shares could jump 50 percent in the next 18 months as investors get more comfortable with the company’s transition to a cloud-based business model.

By the middle of next year, Autodesk will give up on selling “perpetual licences” and move to subscriptions to buy products on the cloud.

In the short term this will cause shares to tank. Shares of Autodesk have lost almost a quarter of their value in 2015, with investors grappling with the fact that the shift to the cloud will hurt earnings temporarily as the company’s revenue model shifts from one-time software purchases to smaller recurring payments.

But Barrons thinks that five years from now Autodesk could be earning over $4 a share, double its fiscal 2013 peak. The stock could benefit much sooner.

The thought is that a move to a cloud-based subscription model lowers upfront costs, which could help attract new customers.

However it is all a risky business. While many companies have moved to subscription based models, the results have been mixed.  A move to the better is by no means guaranteed.  Still, it is nice that the people who invest in the company think it will do well.

IoT needs to be sold to enterprises

Posted on September 25, 2015 by - News

map-of-internetBeancounters at IDC think that the Internet of Things is an important strategic move for companies and resellers need to convince them.

IDC said that the Internet of Things (IoT) was gaining traction in a number of verticals and is now seen as “strategic to the enterprise.”

The analyst asked  2,350 IT and business decision makers in 15 countries such as Brazil, China and Germany, and found that 73 percent of respondents have deployed or are planning on deploying IoT solutions in the next 12 months.

The survey found that 58 per cent of respondents believe IoT is “a strategic initiative”; while 24 percent see it as “transformative”. Healthcare is ahead of the overall awareness, with 72 percent of those surveyed seeing it as strategic in this field. Transportation and manufacturing followed with 67 percent and 66 percent respectively.

The analyst found that government is behind the overall awareness, and “often needs clarification around the IoT basics”.

Vernon Turner, senior vice president of IoT at IDC, said: “IoT momentum continues to grow and our survey shows that it is seen as strategic to the enterprise.”

IDC’s survey found that security was a key problem for IoT, as “upfront and ongoing costs have become the top challenges”.

Google partners have another Cloud product

Posted on September 24, 2015 by - News

LOD_Cloud_Diagram_as_of_September_2011Google is adding another product in its range of big data services on the Google Cloud Platform today.

Dubbed the Cloud Dataproc service, the product is in beta, but Google Beta products normally stay that way for years.

The service sits between managing the Spark data processing engine or Hadoop framework directly on virtual machines and a fully managed service like Cloud Dataflow.

This allows the partner to orchestrate data pipelines on Google’s platform.

Dataproc users can create a Hadoop cluster in under 90 seconds and Google will only charge 1 cent per virtual CPU/hour in the cluster. It is top of the usual cost of running virtual machines and data storage, but you can add Google’s cheaper preemptible instances to your cluster to save a bit on compute costs. Billing is per-minute, with a 10-minute minimum.

Users can set up ad-hoc clusters when needed and because it is managed, Google will handle the administration for them.

It is compatible with all existing Hadoop-based products, and it should be a doddle to port existing workloads over to Google’s new service.

Some punters want total control over their data pipeline and processing architecture and are more likely to want to run and manage their own virtual machines. Dataproc users won’t have to make any real tradeoffs when compared to setting up their own infrastructure.

Cloud no panacea as Citrix tries to sell itself

Posted on September 23, 2015 by - News, Products

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudIt would appear that tacking “cloud” onto your product list is not proving to be a panacea for IT company woes.

Citrix, a US cloud computing company, is making a final attempt to sell itself as a whole before it embarks on asset sales, according to people familiar with the matter.

Citrix, which had attracted the interest of private equity investors before it agreed in July to give a man called Elliott a seat on its board of directors, is having new conversations with buyout firms.

Apparently the outfit is looking to hardware makers like Dell who might want to create a product and cloud package.

Citrix announced in July it would explore strategic alternatives for its GoTo family of products, including videoconferencing and desktop sharing service GoToMeeting. However, a sale process for these assets has not started yet because Citrix wants to see if it can still sell itself at a satisfactory valuation, according to the sources.

If Citrix does not sell itself it will sell or spin off its GoTo products, and other methods to asset strip itself.

Citrix provides communications software and networking solutions for businesses. It reported net income of $251.7 million in 2014, down from $339.5 million in 2013.

Earlier this year, Elliott called on Citrix to sell some units, cut costs and buy back shares to make up for six years of underperformance. In addition to the GoTo business, Elliott has called for Citrix to explore the sale of NetScaler, which helps speed up Web-based applications.

Elliott clinched a deal with Citrix in July that gave Jesse Cohn, one of its senior partners, a seat on the company’s board. Citrix also said it would start a search for an independent board member, mutually agreeable to Citrix and Elliott.

It also said at the time that Chief Executive Mark Templeton was retiring and that it would search for a new CEO.

Earlier this month, Citrix said it would repurchase up to an additional $500 million of its common stock.

 

 

 

HP sued over decade old failed project

Posted on September 22, 2015 by - News

courtroom_1_lgThe maker of expensive printer ink HP is in hot water over a new lawsuit over a $49 million project a US state said is still not finished after 10 years.

The contract – filed by the state of Michigan –  dates back to 2005 and called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe based system built in the 1960s that is used by more than 130 Secretary of State offices.

The job was supposed to have finished by 2010, but HP could not manage it. This means that Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget and SOS staff dependent on the old technology for functions such as vehicle registration.
Michigan has paid HP a total of roughly $33 million.

In the suit filed in Kent County Circuit Court, the state seeks $11 million in damages along with attorney’s fees and the funds needed to rebid the contract.

Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said in a press release that she inherited a stalled project when she came into office in 2011 and, despite her aggressive approach to hold HP accountable and ensure HP delivered, it didn’t.

The state wants the source code for an online services portal HP delivered as part of the project.
HP said that it was unfortunate that Michigan chose to terminate the contract, but HP looks forward to a favourable resolution in court.

HP’s VSI is still running

Posted on September 21, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1While it has been scaled back because many in the Channel hate it, HP’s daft Value System Integrator sales programme is still running.

The brilliant idea was started as a way to beat Dell on pricing by removing distributors from the supply chain and using that margin to give customers discounts.

It did not work very well and miffed the hell out of the channel. The cunning plan was that HP would not pay resellers any soft margin or marketing funds, just a one per cent rebate, and allow them to boost their coffers by wrapping products in their own tech services.

The model expanded to the private sector, and saw HP competing against its trusted channel allies.
VSI was one of two decisions which killed off HP’s business. The other one was to ask account managers in the Enterprise Group to manage PC resellers to build direct sales.

The move was great for Lenovo who suddenly had SCC, Softcat, Kelway and other big resellers wanting to work with them.

Apparently though HP has now re-purposed so that it is only used in the public sector again. Even that is less of a focus.

HP CEO Meg Whitman promised to remove channel conflict when she started, setting out rules to govern the behaviour of internal sales reps; and passed some enterprise accounts that were directly managed to channel types.

Lenovo to merge server brands

Posted on September 17, 2015 by - News

lenovo2Lenovo is planning to merge its two server brands into one and use the unified brand to release products in 2017.

The outfit has just written a cheque for IBM’s server division and is already developing new products for 2017

Lenovo’s Taipei server R&D Centeoduct marketing director, Andrew Huang told Digitimes  that  y, Lenovo has two product brands under its server business, ThinkServer and System X, and Lenovo is no longer using the IBM name to sell System X servers.

The outfit’s share in worldwide server market rose to seven percent in the second quarter of 2015 to become the fourth largest vendor. It has recently landed orders from Alibaba for 50,000 servers.

The move has been expected, but it is surprising that Lenovo kept its own product name rather than the Biggish Blue equivalent.

AMD forms new graphics business group

Posted on September 16, 2015 by - Moving People, News

AMD-Technician-Poses-With-Chip-WaferAMD has formed a new business group dedicated to the company’s graphics chip business.

Raja Koduri will head the new Radeon Technologies group as its senior vice president and chief architect. Koduri will report to AMD president and CEO Lisa Su and assume responsibility for all aspects of AMD’s graphics technologies, the company said.

Su said through a statement that the company was creating the new business group to put in a place “a more agile, vertically-integrated graphics organization focused on solidifying our position as the graphics industry leader” and recapturing market share across graphics markets while going after new markets such as virtual and augmented reality.

In July, rumours swirled that AMD was considering the spinoff of its graphics chip business. AMD issued a denial after the Reuters news service reported that AMD was at the initial stage of reviewing whether to split up the company and had engaged a consulting firm to help it review such options.

Koduri, a 20-year industry vet, was most recently responsible for driving AMD’s visual and accelerated computing technology, including the development of the industry’s first graphics chip with integrated high-bandwidth memory. He has also been responsible for leading AMD’s LiquidVR virtual reality initiative.

Koduri joined AMD from Apple, where he was director of graphics architecture. Prior to joining Apple, Koduri served in graphics leadership roles at AMD and ATI.

“AMD is one of the few companies with the engineering talent and IP to make emerging immersive computing opportunities a reality. Now, with the Radeon Technologies group, we have a dedicated team focused on growing our business as we create a unique environment for the best and brightest minds in graphics to be a part of the team re-defining the industry,” he said in a statement.

Koduri, Burke and Chris Hook, director of global marketing for computing and graphics, would provide strong leadership for the new group.

Exertis becomes Kaspersky B2B distributor

Posted on September 15, 2015 by - News

40153923-1-kaspersky1Anti-virus outfit Kaspersky has named Exertis UK as its new B2B channel distributor.

Exertis will offer its reseller base Kaspersky’s range of value-add B2B products, including anti-virus, malware detection and firewalls.

Kaspersky said that the appointment followed a substantial growth in the UK B2B space over the last year.  It now has 250 new resellers registering as a partner, giving 582 in total.

The two firms already have an existing partnership in the consumer space space (B2C) but now Exertis can offer the security companies products to business-to-business resellers.

Kaspersky UK and Ireland MD Kirill Slavin said: “Protection is not just about patching on basic security for businesses today, it is about building cyber-resilience into the very heart of operations. There is an immense opportunity for the channel and we’re delighted to use Exertis  to bolster sales.

“Exertis brings two  distinct approaches to the market. Its value added distribution offering encompasses technical excellence and experience in the security arena. It can also help our business get further reach into the mass reseller community, a move which is invaluable for resellers and customers alike.”

Exertis VAD Solutions MD Grahame Smee said: “We’re looking forward to working with Kaspersky as it enters an exciting stage of growth in the channel.

“The cyber-threat landscape is evolving and this relationship will help us to deliver a value-add proposition for businesses from a company that is globally renowned for its knowledge and expertise in the cybersecurity arena.”