Category: News

Two chip companies in $40 billion merger

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyTwo chip companies have surprised the world by agreeing to merge.

While the tech press focused on Apple’s watch, and non-existent car, NXP Semiconductors, and Freescale Semiconductor hatched out a super-merger in comparative quiet.

TechCrunch’s excuse for its hacks not spotting the mega-merger was because “no-one has heard of the two companies anyway.”

In the interests of educating hacks – Freescale makes embedded chips, the Internet of Things, while NXP is best known for its chips headed for cars. They are both huge and were both expected to get bigger under the trend for mobile and automotive chips.

Under the deal the two companies announced a “definitive agreement” that will see Freescale shareholders pick up 0.3521 NXP shares and $6.26 in cash for each of their current shares.

Freescale made $1.10 billion in revenue, and $63 million in net profit last quarter. NXP is larger, recording $1.537 billion in revenue, and $149 million in net income in the quarter.

Either way, this deal is huge and could put the fear of god into companies that US tech hacks might have heard of, such as Intel and AMD who would really like to get their feet under the table of the embedded market.

Now they are now facing a rival who is not only comfortably been in the market for years, but now is big enough to play the sorts of games that they play in the x86 market.

It looks like the US tech press might have to make themselves a little more familiar with the new outfit – what ever it ends up being called.

Google retreats on Blogger smut

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

330ogleEarlier this week, Google’s Blogger service warned people that on the 23rd of March it would cull adult content from its users’ web pages.

But now Google has changed its mind after it said, it had received feedback that had convinced it to backtrack.

Google had said it would mark blogs that contained sexually explicit material as private.

Instead, it will now ask people to mark their web sites as “adult”, a flag which will mean a warning page pops up before redirecting people to the particular site.

A Blogger rep posted a message which said: “We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.”

No other changes need be made than for people to mark their sexually explicit pages as “adult”

China irritates tech firms

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

chinaflagA law set to be passed by Chinese authorities would make tech vendors provide the government with encryption keys and put backdoors in systems.

According to Reuters, the law relates to counter terrorism and the legislation is likely to be passed into law in the near future.

Other elements of the counter terrorism law include a reqirement for companies to locate their servers and user data in China, as well as forcing vendors to censor content that China believes is related to terrorism.

China already forces banks to buy from home grown vendors, rather than buying abroad.

Reuters said that the implications of this new piece of legislation would be to forbid secure VPNs, to send financial information securely, and to hide any detail of a commercial business.

Google might find itself thanking its lucky stars that it doesn’t do business in mainland China, but other vendors including Apple, Intel and Microsoft will certainly be hit by the legislation.

Ericsson sues Apple

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

EricssonSwedish company Ericsson has taken Apple to court and also complained to the US International Trade Commission (ITC), it said today.

Ericsson claims that Apple refused its offer to have a court decide fair licensing terms that would be binding on both companies. And because of that, it has filed a complaint with the ITC seeking to exclude its products for infringing patents directly linked to 2G and 4G LTE standards.

It filed a second complaint with a Eastern district Court in Texas asking for damages and injunctions for “infringement of patents that are critical to many other aspects of Apple’s devices”.

This second instance related to 41 patents which Ericsson claims covers not only 2G and 4G/LTE standards, but other patents related to semiconductors, user interface software, location services and application and the iOS operating system.

Ericsson claims that by refusing its reasonable licensing offer used in both Apple smartphones and tablets, “Apple harms the entire market”.

Apple’s global licence agreement for Ericsson mobile technology apparently expired last month.

HP joins the Internet of Things bandwagon

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

HPMajor vendors have convinced themselves that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big thing, and the latest to join the band is Hewlett Packard.

HP said its own version of IoT will allow organisations to manage different sets of IoT sensors, analyse data and use vertical applications on machine to machine devices.

It also claimed to have introduced the first vertical application called the HP Energy Management Pack.

The packages are aimed at communications service providers (CSPs) and is essentially remote management to discover devices, configure the devices and control IoT traffic.

The HP Energy Management Pack is intended to allow the CSPs to give secure home automation and energy control to people, to industries and to councils.

For example, Oxford City Council might want to remotely manage public lights based on profiles, emergencies and on weather conditions. And the pack might let “smart cities” manage parking using sensors.

 

Apple copies Intel and drinks milk and honey

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

Apple's Tim CookFruity cargo cult Apple is set to copy Intel’s success by shifting an ever increasing amount of development work to Israel.

Chief Executive Tim Cook was in Israel on Thursday to visit the company’s new research and development offices in Herzlyia.

Jobs’ Mob also has an R&D center in Haifa, in the country’s north, which is Apple’s second largest research and development hub outside of the US.

Jobs’ Mob recently bought two Israel outfits – Anobit Technologies and PrimeSense which both make microprocessor chip designs.

Apple has also hired most of the Israeli employees of a chip-design division that Texas Instruments decided to shut down in 2013 in Ra’anana, some 10 miles north of Tel Aviv and has been hiring like crazy for its chip design center in Haifa.

On its current jobs posting site for Israel, Apple is advertising for a range of hardware and software positions, including silicon and semiconductor design and testing engineers who will be required to work in labs.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Shlomo Gradman, chairman of the Israeli Semiconductor Club as saying that Apple’s Israeli acquisitions and its expanding local workforce show that the company is becoming more and more independent on the chip level, where it once had to rely on external suppliers.

Cook said in the meeting with Israeli president Reuven Rivlin that Israel and Apple have got much closer together over the last three years than ever before

AMD does not think Chromebooks are worth it

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

AMD, SunnyvaleAMD chief technical officer Mark Papermaster has dismissed Chromebooks as “not worth it” and explained why his outfit is not behind the technology.

He said that it was important to look at Chromebook and what Google’s grand plan with it is.

“For us, it’s just a business decision, when you need our type of CPU and graphics technology that can make a difference.”

Chromebook sales are tiny. IDC estimated that 4.6 million Chromebooks were sold in 2014, compared to 304 million PCs for the year.

Intel has come to dominate Chromebook sales with Celeron and Atom chips, although some models also feature third-party ARM chips inside.

But Chromebooks are generally considered low-cost productivity machines and AMD is trying to place itself as a graphics and media chipmaker. Carrizo, dedicates four “Excavator” CPU cores against eight Radeon graphics cores and16 percent of the die is dedicated to CPU cores.
“For us, it’s when do you need our CPU and graphics capability that can make a difference,” Papermaster said. “Again, you’ll see that there’s these rock-bottom markets… so those don’t have our value proposition.”

“We play in the whole range of the market. We’ll play in the low-cost value” market, Papermaster added. “You have to at least get paid for that value when you’re working on graphics. You go below that, and you’re looking at $7 chips.”

Intel buying its way into China

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

Intel Q4_14_ResultsMegachip maker Intel has decided that the only way to get around the inscrutable Chinese is to invest in shed loads of scrute and buy its way into the market.

Intel is pouring billions of dollars into expanding its influence in China, where fewer than half the country’s roughly 500 million mobile phone users have smartphones and the market is ruled by Qualcomm.

Intel is apparently trying to use its relationship with PC clients in China as a foot in the door to mobile devices. It is chummy with Lenovo, the No. 1 global PC seller, and its hardware powers a handful of Lenovo smartphones. It is also mates with Chinese internet giant Tencent, which includes a joint research centre, helps ensure that the WeChat maker’s software works smoothly with Intel chips.

Intel paid $1.5 billion in September for a 20 percent stake in state-run Tsinghua Unigroup, which controls two domestic mobile chipmakers. It did not need to spend that much, in some observers thought that it was double the outfit’s value. In December, Intel said it would pay $1.6 billion to upgrade its factory in the central Chinese city of Chengdu, which cost $300 million to build a decade ago. The plant, designed for back-end testing, will absorb some of the work previously done in a shuttered Costa Rican facility.

That appears to suggest that Chipzilla is shifting a lot of its tech to China. The idea being that it will intergrate itself into the local supply chain and impress the Chinese officials, who are having a few problems with Qualcomm. Intel may be more favorably treated by Chinese regulators because of its stake in Tsinghua Unigroup—as well as its willingness to build high-end local labs. So far, Intel hasn’t been touched in China’s crackdown on foreign companies.

The next battle is believed to be for wearable tech and if Intel has invested in Chinese start-ups it might have a leg-up and a way to make these as cheap as possible.

Google reorganises in EU

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

330ogleThe search engine also known as Google is restructuring its European businesses to cope with the fact that the EU might want it to be a little more reasonable on privacy and anti-trust issues.

Google merged its two European regional divisions claiming it needed to “meet the challenges of tougher regulation across the continent”,

The internet giant is merging its northern and western European division with the unit covering southern and eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The move will simplify the organisation, both for commercial reasons as well as to work more effectively with business partners and policy makers.

The tax-friendly Dublin will still remain as Google’s Euro-base, and the reorganisation will not result in job losses, the source said.

Google has been given a good kicking by European Commisioners for its tax avoidance antics and tendency towards what the EU considers playing fast and loose on privacy matters.

In response, Google has argued that for Europe to remain competitive in global markets, it needs to form a single digital market instead of relying on national regulations in its 28-member states that often act to protect local industries.

It appears that Google is pinning its hopes on former British Olympic rower Matt Brittin to sort out the mess. Brittin led Google’s northern and western European division and will head up the combined Europe, Middle East and Africa operation while Carlo d’Asaro Biondo, formerly head of the other regional unit, will take on a strategy role.

D’Asaro Biondo is a former media suit who worked for Lagardère, AOL Europe and computer services company Unisys, will continue to work from Paris.

He will manage Google’s strategic partnerships in the region, which include working to deepen ties with newspaper publishers, telecom operators and carmakers.

Brittin has packed his executive bag and headed to Brussels to argue the company’s case that it serves as a growth engine for European business, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, because the Internet helps create a level playing field. But then again so do monopolies only the bloke owning the level playing field makes a fortune renting it out for others to play on.

IBM wants cloud killing

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeBig Blue thinks it can restore itself to its former suited glory by pushing heavily into cloud and big data.

Apparently the outfit has set itself a target of making $40 billion a year from cloud, big data, security and other growth areas by 2018.

The target was mentioned at the company’s annual investor meeting in New York yesterday and is the first hint of a serious “cunning plan” since IBM moved away from its previous strongholds in hardware and servers.

The $40 billion will come from areas which IBM calls its “strategic imperatives,” namely cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security software.

That would represent about 44 percent of $90 billion in total revenue that analysts expect from IBM in 2018.

Those businesses generated $25 billion in revenue for IBM last year, or 27 percent of its total $93 billion in sales.

The company said it would shift $4 billion in spending to its “strategic imperatives” this year.

Revenue at IBM has gradually shrunk over the past three years as it sold off its unprofitable units in businesses such as low-end servers, semiconductors and cash registers.

IBM Chief Executive Virginia Rometty has said she was happy to jettison revenue from such unprofitable businesses, which she dubs “empty calories.” Although we would have thought that empty calories would be a good thing, because they would fill you up without meaning you put on weight.

IBM revenue has now fallen for the past 11 quarters, while earnings growth has been sporadic.

The company says its long-term plan is to hit “low single-digit” revenue growth and “high single-digit” growth in operating earnings per share. Last year IBM withdrew its long-term plan to hit $20 per share in operating earnings for 2015.

Things have not been going that well for IBM of late. It gets more than half of its cash from foreign parts, and the strong US dollar has hurt its sales by more than six per cent this year.

Flash drives still have problems

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

flash_gordon (1)Kroll Ontrack, a company which specialises in data recovery, claimed that while nearly 90 percent of the people they surveyed used solid state drives (SSD), a third claimed they had some malfunctions.

Obviously Kroll has something of an axe to grind here, but it has surveyed over 2,000 people in the survey.

Of the SSDs which showed a malfunction, over 60 percent lost data and less than 20 percent managed to recover their data.

The reason it’s difficult to recover data is because it’s scattered on the drive, compared to hard disk drives, where the information is stored linearly, according to Paul Le Messier, operations manager at Kroll.

SSDs, however, are steadily become more popular both for enterprises and individuals. Of those surveyed, three quarters use flash drives in laptops and mobiles, 60 percent in desktop PCs, and 20 percent in servers.

The main attractions are performance and speed.

With the increasing usage of SDDs however, Kroll has averaged a 100 percent increase in recovery requests year on year from 2011 to 2014.

 

Juniper extends deal with Canonical

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

Pic Mike MageeUbuntu provider Canonical and Juniper Networks said they have extended their relationship to provide OpenStack based cloud offerings.

The deal is intended for use by the telecommunications industry.

The OpenStack software lets service providers virtualise core networks and network functions and is claimed to give better performance, scale and reliability.

Juniper said it will also provide complete service support for Canonical’s Ubuntu server operating system.

OpenStack is an open source cloud management platform with a large community of users, developers and founders, and Jupiter said over half of OpenStack instances run Ubuntu.

Both Juniper and Canonical have created Contral Cloud Platform which is a carrier grade OpenStack offering. Both companies will work on joint product development and marketing, and will work with their customers to include service provider needs in the cloud.

Healthcare systems are subject to hacking

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerHospitals, clinics, trusts and insurers are under a barrage of cyberattacks but the healthcare section does not seem to be spending enough money to protect itself.

According to ABI Research, cybersecurity for healthcare protection will only be worth $10 billion by 2020, while other sectors such as financial and defence are coping.

ABI said “the healthcare industry is drowning” because of attacks from malicious online agents and a lot of companies and organisations in the sector are failing to modernise to take account of current threats.

Michelle Menting, a practice director at ABI, said: “Cybersecurity for healthcare is still a small fragmented market but the potential opportunities for expansion are large and will continue to grow as healthcare organisations increasingly come under cyberfire.”

She said a few startups such as TrueVault and FireHost are targeting the healthcare sector and building a niche for themselves. There are also managed services and cloud apps from companies like NetFortris and ID Experts.

Hardcopy peripherals value grew

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

HPA report from IDC said that values of hardcopy peripherals worldwide increased in the fourth quarter by 1.7 percent, bringing in revenues of $15.2 billion.

But although the value figure was up, unit shipments fell by 2.6 percent during the quarter, amounting to 30.8 million inits.

The laser segment grew for the whole year by 0.8 percent, and colour laser shipments grew, at the expense of monochrome lasers, where shipments fell.

Canon was number one during the fourth quarter, with most of its shipment growth coming from the US, Canada, Japan and Western Europe.

HP also saw shipments grow in the Canadian and Western European regions.

When the market is divided out, the fourth quarter shows that inkjet printers fell by 3.9 percent, while laser shipments increased by 0.2 percent.

A4 printers remain the dominant type with 78.4 percent unit share, compared to A3 printers with 21.6 percent unit share.

Lenovo gets hacked

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

lenovo-logoA cyberattack by a hacking group called Lizard Squad brought down Lenovo’s web site yesterday.

That’s following the revelation that Lenovo shipped adware called Superfish on some of its notebook devices.

Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for downing the Sony site at the end of last year.

Lenovo managed to get its site up and running after people that went to its site were redirected to other web sites.

Lenovo has stopped including Superfish shipping on its machine and offered people that had encountered it a software fix to remove it.

Lizard Squad managed to use a vulnerability to Lenovo’s name registrar to divert people away from the Lenovo web site.