Category: News

Flash advertising starts to die out

Posted on August 24, 2015 by - News

additional-oxford-dodo-bookFlash advertising is starting to go the way of the dodo (pictured).

Amazon has decided to stop accepting Adobe Flash ads starting next month. The move affects not just the company’s website, but its whole advertising platform.

While one supplier, however big, giving up on a platform is not significant it is a wider sign that the buggy platform is dying and the industry is moving to HTML5.

Google began automatically converting Flash ads to HTML5 in February. At the start of 2015, YouTube ditched Flash for HTML5 video by default and last month, Twitch announced plans to do the same.

Amazon’s decision is primarily driven by browser makers stopping what Flash can do. Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox and Chrome have limited the plugin.

Writing on its bog a spokesAmazon said:

“Beginning September 1, 2015, Amazon no longer accepts Flash ads on Amazon.com, AAP, and various IAB standard placements across owned and operated domains. This is driven by recent browser setting updates from Google Chrome, and existing browser settings from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, that limits Flash content displayed on web pages. This change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience across Amazon and its affiliates, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance.”

In June, Google’s Chrome beta channel began automatically pausing less important Flash content to boost performance and battery life. The feature is enabled by default in Chrome beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Google expects to flip the switch for the Chrome stable channel in… you guessed it, September.

For most of the world the death of Flash is a good thing. However in some ways Adobe own management decisions killed the software off early.

In November 2011 the company could not be bothered researching improvements for Flash Player on mobile devices.  In fact it is surprising that after that Flash is still around and pretty important.

 

Lightning strikes four times in Google’s cloud

Posted on August 21, 2015 by - News

1404213168796_wps_18_M_rten_Eskil_Winge_Thor_sIn what is a cloud supplier’s nightmare, a lightning storm in Belgium knocked out Google’s St Ghislain data centre causing power loss and damage to disk storage, leaving some customers without access to data.

The facility was hit directly by four successive lightning strikes which immediately took down the centre’s operations from Thursday until Monday, according to Google.

The damage caused to Google Compute Engine’s primary storage persistent disks housed in the data centre resulted in a four-day data outage for some European customers.

Writing in its bog, Google said: “At 09:19 PDT on Thursday 13 August 2015, four successive lightning strikes on the electrical systems of a European data centre caused a brief loss of power to storage systems which host disk capacity for GCE instances in the europe-west1-b zone.”

It continued: “Although automatic auxiliary systems restored power quickly, and the storage systems are designed with battery backup, some recently written data was located on storage systems which were more susceptible to power failure from extended or repeated battery drain.

“In almost all cases the data was successfully committed to stable storage, although manual intervention was required in order to restore the systems to their normal serving state. However, in a very few cases [less than 0.000001% of PD space in europe-west1-b], recent writes were unrecoverable, leading to permanent data loss on the Persistent Disk.”

Google has accepted full responsibility for the blackout and is not blaming Zeus, Jupiter or Thor. However, it stressed to customers that “GCE instances and Persistent Disks within a zone exist in a single Google data centre and are therefore unavoidably vulnerable to data centre-scale disasters”.

Google has promised to upgrade its data centre storage hardware, increasing its resilience against power outages. According to the search giant, research is already underway to improve cache data retention and response procedures for system engineers.

Salesforce should have taken the money

Posted on August 20, 2015 by - News

Salesforce logoEarlier this year Microsoft offered $55 billion to acquire Salesforce only to be turned down by CEO Marc Benioff who countered with a $70 billion price tag.

It appears that Microsoft is not taking the snub lying down and is upping the competition against Salesforce’s most important product.

Beancounters at JP Morgan said that Microsoft is Salesforce’s biggest competitive threat in the cloud CRM market.

It surveyed vendors to ask what the biggest change you have seen in the competitive landscape facing Salesforce.com in recent months?

Of the 56 vendors that participated, 23 percent of them said Microsoft. That’s way ahead of number two Oracle, which was only named by 11 percent.

Microsoft becoming more visible and competitive in the Cloud arena while others are stagnating, cited by 23 per cent of partners.

One comment said that Microsoft was closing some ground in terms of retooling their platform to what is now becoming a cloud-dominant computing space.

The survey asked only 56 Salesforce partners, but the survey reflects how Microsoft may indeed be closing in on Salesforce in the CRM space.

Salesforce is seeing much more competition from Microsoft Dynamics, which is going all cloud based and is significantly cheaper. Microsoft was winning some sizable CRM deals.

Microsoft only had 5.8 percent of the CRM market share last year, ranking fourth behind Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle. Salesforce was the leader with 16.3 percent market share.

Gartner has also said in its Magic Quadrant Survey that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is “experiencing renewed investment and focus within Microsoft,” and that it was the second most asked for CRM product in a global survey in the first quarter of 2015.

All this means that Microsoft is putting the thumbscrews on SalesForce by taking away its crown jewels. If it gets away with it, Salesforce might be forced back to the negotiating table. Either way, life is not going to be as good for Benioff as it has been.

OLED gets Korean government boost

Posted on August 19, 2015 by - News

SONY DSCLG is closely collaborating with the Korean government to promote local manufacturing of OLED displays in a move which could see the cost of the technology fall.

LG announced yesterday that it was investing $10 billion in its flexible OLED and big-screen TV manufacturing and hoped to create an ‘OLED Value Chain’ to lower the currently high price of OLED displays.

OLED TVs are only produced by LG because of that manufacturing cost, is so high it makes the incredible image quality too expensive.

However the Korean government is concerned that South Korea’s decades-long leadership in displays is being challenged by the rapid rise of Chinese companies,

LG Display’s CEO, Han Sang-beom, told delegates at an event in Paju that industry growth was flattening. Threats from China are urging the country to find something new.

“I believe OLEDs are the right solution to help the country lead its rivals in the battle for next-generation displays,” he said.

The Korean government has identified OLED as a key export item for the country and the Korean trade ministry is set to provide serious tax incentives when purchasing equipment for OLED production from local suppliers.

LG believes this expansion in OLED manufacturing will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide around $35bn worth of production.

Korean trade minister, Yoon Sang-jick said that the Korean government will be active in providing more supportive measures to help the country maintain continued leadership in the global display industry even in OLEDs.

Moose-sized SAP project mothballed in Alaska

Posted on August 18, 2015 by - News

mooseAlaskan natives are a little restless about a huge SAP project which is supposed to have been running since 2011.

The project, which said enterprise resource planning (ERP) software implementation, when they bought it was supposed to be state of the art. While it is unlikely that anyone really knew what the software did, they did know that it cost a lot of moose antlers to buy.

Now the City of Anchorage, Alaska has put the project on hold again and this time, its future is far from certain.

The project is tens of millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule and the local council is not happy about putting more money into it.

At the time of its launch, the project was intended to replace Anchorage’s legacy

PeopleSoft system with ERP software from SAP. It was originally planned to cost $9.8 million and to go live at the start of 2013.

However toward the end of last year officials began an independent review of the project, after it missed its second “go-live” date. It has spent $35 million so far and budgeted another $11 million for the project, but a further $20 million to $30 million is expected to be required to complete it.

The council is looking at proceeding with a scaled-down version, or scrapping the lot.

SAP software is used successfully by tens of thousands of government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, financial departments in the states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, and counties such as Howard County, Maryland, SAP said.

No one is sure quite how the project got to a 600 percent overrun, but it appears that the Alaskans did not have anyone who really understood the project or how it all worked.  But then they did buy SAP and anyone who knows what its business software does is worth their weight in HP printer ink and is as rare as a left wing politician in the US.

SAP boss alleged to have bribed Panama officials

Posted on August 17, 2015 by - News

PanamaHats1902The maker of expensive esoteric software, which no one knows what it truly does, has been involved in a conspiracy to bribe Panamanian officials in a bid to secure government contracts, it’s been alleged.

Vicente Eduardo Garcia was SAP’s vice president of global and strategic accounts for Latin America from February 2008 until April 2014, when he was fired. With the plea, he admitted to participating in a scheme to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribing foreign officials to obtain business.

He will be sentenced in December 16 before Senior District Court Judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California.

It seems that the company is denying it knew anything about the scheme and seems to be blaming Garcia.

SAP said it will continue to cooperate with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission on the investigation, a spokesman said.

Indeed there is some evidence that Garcia “circumvented SAP’s internal controls, falsified the company’s books and records, and made false statements to SAP in order to lower the price of SAP software to fund the bribery and kickback scheme.”

In 2009 SAP hoped to obtain a multimillion-dollar contract to provide a Panamanian state agency with a technology upgrade package.

Garcia admitted that he conspired with others, including advisors and consultants to SAP, to pay bribes, disguised as sham contracts and false invoices, to Panamanian government officials.

SAP’s Panamanian channel partner secured the contract for $14.5 million, which included $2.1 million in SAP licences. Not long after, the Panamanian government awarded the channel partner additional contracts involving SAP products, the DoJ said.

The SEC said that it had settled with Garcia for enabling SAP to sell software to a partner in Panama at discounts of up to 82 percent while also receiving kickbacks himself.

Garcia has agreed to pay $85,965, the total amount of kickbacks he received, plus prejudgment interest, amounting to a total of $92,395.

All roads lead to Chrome – at least in schools

Posted on August 14, 2015 by - News

chromebookPeople mocked when Google’s high-priced Chromebook Pixel laptop was released. 

After all who would buy a $999 Chromebook Pixel 2 which seemed to do most of its work on the internet running lite services like Google Docs and Facebook but not traditional PC software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.

The Dell Chromebook 13 starts at $399 for a laptop with a metal exterior, carbon fibre cover, 13-inch 1,920×1,080 screen, Intel Celeron processor, 2 gigabytes of memory and 16GB of storage. Prices range up to $899 for models with touch screens.

However it did rather well and Dell was so impressed that it designed a much cheaper version of its own.

Google’s Rajen Sheth told CNet the schools market was driving a move to Chromebooks.

They accounted for 8.1 percent of portable computer shipments in the first quarter of 2015 in the United States. That figure is predicted to rise to 10.6 percent for the full year and rise further to 12.4 percent for 2016.

Schools like Chromebooks because the hardware is cheap and teachers can control what they provide to the kids and restrict what kids can access.

Chromebooks have low management costs and are centrally managed so teachers don’t waste time handling tech support, he said.

The devices are easily shared, with students’ data and settings stored in the cloud and retrieved when they log in. And Google Apps for Education, free to schools and now with more than 45 million students using it daily, offers low-cost software for word processing, email, file sharing, presentations and chatting.

Now, Google hopes to push Chrome OS more into businesses, too. The low purchasing and management costs are a big part of the sales pitch there, too.

“There are 4 billion working adults in the world, but only about 750 million PCs,” Sheth said. “With the Chromebook, companies are able to expand the population of users who have access to those devices.”

There is “no reason to believe” in tablets

Posted on August 13, 2015 by - News

Dodo-birdTablets have gone the way of the Dodo and the hula hoop according to bean counters at Canalys.

The analyst said that in Q2 of this year, global shipments slumped 11 percent annually to 42.5 million units. Shipments in all global regions fell annually in the quarter, and the outlook for the months ahead is not positive.

There is “no reason to believe that growth will return in the short term,” the analyst said.

The market has been killed off by a move to large-screen mobiles and the fact that larger devices will have to compete against a range of two-in-one devices optimised for Windows 10.

Canalys’ senior analyst Tim Coulling insists that the market may not be dead, but might just be resting. He suggests nailing it to its perch in case it goes Vrooom.

“Despite the sudden downturn in shipments, tablets are certainly here to stay,” he said. “Yes, they have matured and commoditised quickly, but there are still opportunities for vendors to profit from the category.

“Unlike consumers, businesses have been slow when it comes to mass adoption of tablets. They are willing to spend more on products that satisfy a specific need and meet key requirements, around durability for example. In the consumer space, demand for premium tablets in established markets has noticeably slowed but is not going to disappear.”

Amazon kills off pay-per-click advertising programme

Posted on August 12, 2015 by - News

amazonAmazon has pulled the plug on a pay-per-click advertising programme that allowed businesses to divert traffic from the retailer’s platform to their own websites.

The programme allowed businesses that were not sellers on Amazon’s online marketplace to buy ad space on the website. Targeted ads for specific items would pop up on Amazon’s website and drive shoppers to the retailer or manufacturer’s own site.

Scot Wingo, the executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor told Reuters that customers liked it because it provided a middle ground of being able to partner with Amazon but also not allowing them to see all their transaction data.

Wingo said the programme was known for its high conversion rate and said advertisers were surprised when they received an email from Amazon notifying them of the change this week.

An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the change and said the advertising programme will no longer be available after  October.

Amazon offers other advertising options for third-party sellers to differentiate their products like its sponsored ads program.

Angela Hsu, vice president of Internet business and marketing at Lamps Plus, a home decor company that used the product ads programme told Reuters she was disappointed.

The company was featured in an Amazon case study in May and said the programme increased its sales by more than 80 percent.

People are increasingly starting their product searches on e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon before looking on an individual retailer’s website.

 

Adobe and PageFair moan about adblocking

Posted on August 11, 2015 by - News

StoneWall-1Ad-blocking will lead to almost $22 billion of lost advertising revenue this year, according to a  report put together by Adobe and PageFair.

For those who came in late, PageFair is a Dublin-based start-up that helps companies and advertisers recoup some of this lost revenue.

If the pair’s figures are right, then the use of adblocking software has increased by 41 percent during the last year. Levels of ad-blocking activity now top more than a third of all internet users in some countries, particularly in Europe, the report said.

Gaming, social network and other tech-related websites were most affected by ad-blocking software, the report added.

While companies spend billions of dollars each year on these internet marketing efforts, analysts say people often overlook them while looking at online content.

Campbell Foster, director of product marketing at Adobe, said that what was causing grave concern for broadcasters and advertisers is video advertising, which is some of their most valuable content, is starting to be blocked. Whoopee, Campbell.

Almost 200 million people worldwide now regularly use ad-blocking software, the report said. About 45 million of them are in the United States, with almost 15 percent of people in states like New York and California relying on these services. The figures are even higher in Europe, where 77 million people use versions of the software. In Poland, more than a third of people regularly block online ads.

Recently, the focus on ad-blocking software has turned to mobile devices. Smartphones and other internet-connected devices are driving breakneck internet use, particularly in emerging markets, and the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system will allow people to download some form of ad-blocking software.

Currently, only a small fraction of ad-blocking comes from mobile devices, according to the Adobe/PageFair report. But analysts say developers are working on plug-ins for smartphone Web browsers that will allow people to block advertising on their mobiles and tablets.

 

Carphone Warehouse snuffled by watchdog over hack

Posted on August 10, 2015 by - News

watchdogThe UK’s data watchdog is “making inquiries” after Carphone Warehouse admitted that personal details of up to 2.4 million of its customers may have been accessed in a cyber-attack.

The attack was discovered on Wednesday, and made public on Saturday.
The encrypted credit card details of up to 90,000 people may have been accessed, the mobile phone firm said.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, which examines data breaches, confirmed it was aware of the incident.

Carphone Warehouse says the data could include names, addresses, dates of birth and bank details and it is contacting all those affected.

Carphone Warehouse claims it was the victim of a “sophisticated” cyber-attack, which was stopped “straight away” after it was discovered on Wednesday.

The affected division of the company operates the websites OneStopPhoneShop.com, e2save.com and Mobiles.co.uk, and provides services to iD Mobile, TalkTalk Mobile, Talk Mobile and some Carphone Warehouse customers.

The retailer’s owner, Dixons Carphone, has apologised for the attack and said additional security measures have been brought in. It has also taken the affected websites down.

The Information Commissioner will work out if Carphone Warehouse had done enough to protect customer data from hackers.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “We have been made aware of an incident at Carphone Warehouse and are making enquiries.”

The Metropolitan Police said its Cyber Crime Unit had been notified of the breach by Carphone Warehouse but no formal allegation of a crime had been made.

The Met said it had not had any reports of fraudulent banking activity.

Cisco redesigns its UK channel

Posted on August 7, 2015 by - Moving People, News

Cisco Kid Cisco is making changes to its UK channel infrastructure and bringing all its partner teams together.

Writing in his bog, managing director of commercial & partner sales in the UK, Richard Roberts, said the changes were part of the rapidly evolving marketplace.

“All elements of our Partner team will be brought together in one organisation to drive synergies and focus, The Commercial team will also be consolidated into a single, focused, centre of sales excellence.”

Angela Whitty is taking over the UK Partner organisation. She has been working with Cisco’s UK&I Services business for almost two decades.

The current director of UKI partner and commercial sales, Sean Collins, has joined Roberts’ team to focus only on UK commercial customers.

“Sean’s team will be totally focused upon further quickening our growth in this critical market alongside our Partners,” he wrote.

Adam Grennan the country leader for Ireland, will be brought into the UK fold.

Cisco has been cutting staff. More than 400 employees from its Nexus 7000 data centre have gone and there are rumours that half the staff at Ubiquisys may be axed, and there are now rumours the Intucell acquisition may be facing an uncertain future

 

Facebook wants to be a business tool

Posted on August 6, 2015 by - News

thumb-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-pro-4566The social notworking site Facebook has decided that its users really want to talk to businesses through its site.

Facebook rolled out features yesterday that let  businesses privately communicate with customers through messages as the Messenger app.

Businesses can now include a “send message” button in ads that appear in Newsfeed that allow Facebook users to click a button and send messages, which are private. If users post a comment on a business’ Facebook page, then the business can privately message that person

The features are part of Facebook’s efforts to convince more small and medium-sized businesses – especially those in emerging markets, such as India, Brazil and Indonesia – to advertise on its platform.

By giving them direct access to customers, the world’s largest social network hopes to show that advertising on Facebook directly leads to increased sales.

To encourage quick responses, Facebook will award “very responsive to messages” badges on business pages that respond to 90 percent of messages and respond on average within five minutes. People will, however, still be able to block private messages from businesses.

The features will be especially valuable in Southeast Asia, Facebook wrote in a blog post. About twice as many Thai and Singaporean users use Facebook messages to communicate with businesses each month and most Southeast Asia users follow some company pages.

Facebook hosts more than 40 million active small and medium business pages, it said, with more than 1 billion page visits each month.

 

Epson abandons expensive printer ink rip-off model

Posted on August 5, 2015 by - News

history-of-print-16th-century-printing-companyAfter decades of flogging cheap printers that have expensive ink cartridges, Epson is coming up with a different business model.

From September the outfit will offer a new line of consumer printers in the US, each with enough ink to print at least 4,000 documents. When the well finally runs dry, customers can fill it with a bottle.

John Lang, Epson’s chief executive officer for North America, said the move is good news for the consumer.

“That anxiety and that fear of running out of ink—it’s amazing to me that that was so prevalent.”

Epson’s home and small business models come with enough ink to rip off only 220 or so documents. What’s more, they don’t play nice with third party cartridges, and the whole range of colours needs replacing when one runs dry.

The strategy of having a low initial price for the unit does a nice job of hooking consumers and the model provides a consistent and predictable stream of profit. The only real problem is that customers hate it with a passion normally only reserved for serial killers of children.

For years, Epson grappled with a number of large class actions from customers who noticed their cartridges still had ink in them when the printer demanded they be replaced. Epson argued that the reserve was needed to make a smooth transition, but in 2006 it settled the grievances, awarding customers a $45 credit per printer.

Now Epson plans to make its money on the front end. The cheapest of its five new printers starts at about $379, compared with the $60 required to get Epson’s current no frills model. And the company’s hoping to benefit from being the first mover on this front.

Lang thinks that in a few years, one quarter of printer revenue will be flowing into giant inkwell models, although it will continue to offer machines that take cartridges as well.

Lang, the Epson chief, says the company didn’t offer inkwell units sooner because it was afraid people would balk at the higher initial price. But actually Epson has been flogging similar versions for years in Asia and South America, territories where ink pirates are particularly aggressive.

Business process management. Who needs it?

Posted on August 4, 2015 by - News

snake oilMarket research company Gartner appears to believe that every company in the known cosmos is gagging for business process management (BPM).

To that end, it is going to tell people between September the 9th and September the 11th all about how BPM works at the Gaylord convention centre in National Harbor, MD.

So what is BPM? Gartner believes it is all about improving things for your business to bring high performance results. Gartner thinks its four tracks that feature sessions from analysts, problem solving workshops and “peer interaction” will help businesswomen and businessmen that much better.

But a keynote about “Digital Humanism” delivered by Brian Prentice, catches our attention, if only because its sub title is “Swinging the pendulum of digital business”. This sounds more like Kant than cant.

Gartner is also pulling in Michael Massimino, a NASA astronaut, to give “views from space” about obstacles and challenges that business faces.

Keith Ferrazzi, the author of Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone will probably be joining you for lunch so you never eat alone.

It’s all very compelling stuff.