Category: News

Peak Google is the latest daft rumour

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Google's Eric "Google Glass" SchmidtThe US tech press is full of a bizarre story that Google might have hit its peak.

According to NPR, some tech industry observers aren’t sure that Google will be ready for the next big thing and there is talk of something called “Peak Google”.

Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times:  “Technology giants often meet their end not with a bang but a whimper, a slow, imperceptible descent into irrelevancy.”

Now apparently Google is having trouble mastering mobile. When you look at the fact that most of the world uses Google Android this one might be a little hard to swallow, but apparently it is all because smartphones and mobile computing have killed off the PC and no one wants to buy adverts.

In a world cantered on a fragmented mobile advertising market, Google could suffer.

Google has also not had much luck with getting its innovations into the market. Resources have been directed toward lots of flashy ideas that, in many cases, ultimately lack in financial follow-through.  Google Glass was a case in point.

Other reasons include the normal esoteric decline which always follows businesses which get too big. It is normal among technology companies for a dominant company to be unable to dominate the next big thing. Industry giants lack the manoeuvrability of a younger company.

However there is are some reasons to believe that all this is total rubbish. Google has so much money sitting in the bank it can just buy the new technology it needs. It bought Android in 2006 and Nest in 2014. There is no reason that it just can’t buy its way into the next big thing.

In addition, it is curious that few people are saying the same thing about a tech empire with even less ability to adapt – Apple. If Google goes then surely Apple will be long gone before the search engines demise.  After all tablets are tanking, ipods have long vanished, the smartphone market is saturated, and Apple, unlike Google, is out of ideas.

Freescale warns of insecure Internet of Things

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsChip company Freescale said that people are facing “the most dire challenge” the internet of things (IoT) has faced so far – the lack of guidelines for security.

Freescale said that US agency DARPA had managed to hack into a car manufacturers braking system, while the US Federal Trade Commission raised concerns about the security of interconnected systems and devices.

So what is Freescale doing about it?

The company said that it teaming with an industry body called the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmarking Consortium (EEMBC) to help IoT manufacturers and system designers bring better security to transactions and endpoints for the IoT.

It also said that it was establishing a series of security labs worldwide to work on making more secure technologies from the cloud to the end point. Freescale said it will allocate up to 10 percent of its annual R&D budgets on the Internet of Things.

It is also starting a programme to educate startups on best practices on IoT security.

 

Chinese net users amount to 648 million

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

chinaflagMainland China’s Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) released figures of the number of people on the internet in the country, as well as the devices used to access the web.

By the end of 2014, 648.75 million people using both cable and mobile were able to access the web, that’s practically 50 percent of the population.

The overwhelming majority of people used mobile access – 85.82 percent of the net population. and people spent an average of over 26 hours a week on the web.

CNNIC, according to Digitimes, also released information on the age and gender of users. Males represented 56.4 percent, while the largest group at 31.5 percent were between the ages of 20 and 29. Those over 50 only represented 7.9 percent of the net population.

Most people accessed the internet from home (90.7%), at the work place, at school or at internet cafes.

Google’s blog platform acts to block porn

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

Google the OgleSearch giant Google said that after March 23rd this year, people using its Blogger platform won’t be able to show images or videos that are sexually explicit.

However, in a statement it said that Blogger will allow nudity “if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary or scientific contexts”.

Existing blogs that do have sexually explicit material will be made private after that date, and while no content will be deleted, “private content can only be seen by the owner or admins of the blog and the people who the owner shared the blog with”.

People that have material like this can remove the sexually explicit material to avoid being deleted or marked private.

Blogger did not say the reasons for it changing its terms and conditions.

 

Enterprises fail to act on cybersecurity

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

William Blake: War - WIkimedia CommonsIt won’t be until 2018 that large enterprises will have proper plans to protect themselves from cyber attacks causing business disruption.

And, even then, only 40 percent of these organisations will have such plans.

That’s what a report from Gartner says, which warns that chief information security officers need to set their priorities/

Gartner thinks the frequency of a cyber attack on a large scale is low, but if it does happen, the implications are sever.

Paul Proctor, a VP at Gartner warns that servers can be downed, data wiped, and digital intellectual property published to the internet – as happened with Sony late last year.

“Employees may not be able to fully function normally in the workplace for months. These attacks may expose embarrassing internal data via social media channels and could have a longer media cycle than a breach of credit card or personal data,” he said.

He also pointed out that avoiding a compromise in a large computer enterprise “is just not possible”. Instead, those responsible should concentrate on firewalls, antivirus and vulnerability management, as well as increasing detection and response capabilities.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will expand the attack surface so enterprises need to pay better attention, and spend more money on preventing attacks.

IBM throws more money at clouds

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 11.33.09IBM has already invested $1.2 billion in cloud services and has now announced it will open two cloud centres in Sydney and Montreal in the next 30 days.

In addition, Big Blue said it will build similar cloud centres in Milan, and in Chennai before the end of 2015 while it will announce further centres later on in the year.

The cloud centres are part of the company’s SoftLayer plans – it already has centres in Frankfurt, in Mexico and in Tokyo.

The idea of the cloud centres is to give its customers options to create public, private or hybrid cloud environments. It has to offer different locations because enterprises have to conform to local regulations about where data resides, as well as providing levels of security.

Jim Comfort, general managed of IBM Cloud Services, said: “With each new location, we’re not only adding more computer capacity… we’re enabling enterprises to move to the cloud at the speed and in a way that makes the most sense for them.”

In a related announcement, IBM said it had extended its partnership with CSC to speed moving their businesses to the cloud. IBM thinks that there will be a 10 fold increase in the number of cloud applications in the next four or five years, meaning the number of developers specialising in the field will triple.

US leans on Indonesia over smartphone law

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

page_detail_zoom_3315The US government is leaning on Indonesia to daring to set up laws that forbid foreign smartphone makers from coming into the country.

The country is one of the few where smartphone makers have not been able to penetrate, and Indonesia has insisted that companies make 40 percent of their phones locally.

This of course destroys the US model of making cheap phones in China and having them shipped to foreign parts.

From January 1, 2017, smartphone makers that sell smartphones and tablets in the fast-growing economy of 250 million people to produce 40 percent of their content locally.

We are not sure why the US Trade Representative (USTR), is involved in strong arming Indonesia to have a change of heart. If he wins, it is not as if he is protecting US jobs.  He is in fact protecting Chinese jobs and the bottom lines of big multinationals who do not pay much tax in the US.

Apparently critics of the “made in Indonesia” rule, including an influential US business group, say it could increase costs and restrict access to technology.

“The United States shares these concerns, and strongly supports ensuring that information and communications technology, which can be instrumental to economic development, be openly available in Indonesia,” said a USTR spokesman in Washington.

Less than a third of Indonesians own a smartphone, a much lower rate than China’s almost 80 percent, according to figures from research firm Canalys.

Samsung has already begun producing phones in Indonesia after opening a factory near Jakarta last year, but Apple’s supplier Foxconn has been dragging its feet as it negotiates with the Indonesian government over a proposed investment that would include manufacturing smartphones.

Microsoft used Cortina to predict the Oscars

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

motoring-graphics-g_844446aThis years’ Oscars were a reasonably successful test bed for Microsoft’s new predictive technology — Cortina.

Microsoft predicted 20 of the 24 Oscar winners which is not a bad average and follows its accurate prediction of almost all of the World Cup’s knockout matches – a little better than the octopus.

Cortina could not work out who would win the original screenplay, original score, animated feature and film editing categories. It got all the rest.

The software uses Bing-analysed historical data and Vole told us in advance who it thought would win.

Microsoft uses a prediction model for the Oscars that is managed by Microsoft researcher David Rothschild at the company’s New York City research lab. Rothschild correctly predicted 21 of 24 Oscar winners last year, and 19 of 24 winners in 2013.

In comparison, Vegas odds from the Wynn casino weren’t nearly as good. The Wynn predicted best picture, best actress, best actor, best supporting actress, best supporting actor, and best director, but only managed to guess four of six correctly. Microsoft predicted all six accurately.

Practically this goes beyond fortune telling for vacuous entertainment events. This is Microsoft’s chance to prove the company’s abilities to manipulate data sets is better than anyone else’s.
Its main goal is to show that Bing algorithms and data itself is pretty powerful. These things are an interesting way to show users that Bing has a lot of horsepower beyond just providing good search results, a spokesVole said.

 

Apple Air gets Broadwell

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

27151_1_intel_rejects_the_idea_that_they_are_going_bga_only_fullIntel’s disappointingly delayed Broadwell chips have found a customer in the fruity cargo cult in the shape of Apple’s MacBook Air.

From Intel’s perspective this is great news.  Not only will it get a customer for its silicon, the Tame Apple Press will start chanting that the chips are brilliant, innovative and state of the art.

Sure enough ITPro talks about how the “silicon giant’s fifth Generation Core processor” promises 90 minutes extra battery life compared to Intel’s fourth generation.

What appears to be happening is that Apple will use Intel’s new Broadwell-Y Core M processors. Apple thinks that the fact they have 4.5W performance and fanless.

However Apple is not the only one to use this chip. Panasonic is also set to use the chipmaker’s latest release, revealing that the Broadwell processor powers its Toughbook 54 laptop, so has HP.  Toshiba has used the fifth generation Broadwell processors to improve the battery life of its Kira Ultrabook laptops, claiming they now have a 13 hour battery life.

What is a little odd is that the Core M is more of a business chip, being designed for Intel’s wireless offices rather than Apple’s normal consumer users.

It is also very late into the shops as Intel wrestled with the production process.  Apparently, the process took ages to fix the yields. But Intel is into high yields now, and in production on more than one product, with many more to come later this year.

 

AMD claims impressive power savings for Carrizo

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

AMD-Technician-Poses-With-Chip-WaferAMD has been talking up its upcoming Carrizo chip for notebooks and low-power desktops claiming that it will cut power significantly over Kaveri.

Although AMD still is not saying what the actual power consumption or the performance of the Carrizo chip will be it hinted that will offer double-digit improvements in performance and battery life compared to Kaveri.

Since AMD positioned it as competitive to Intel’s midrange Core i5 chips in January 2014 it is likely that Carrizo will be heading towards the same place.

This has led some people to suggest that AMD is skipping on performance improvements to improve battery life – which is a good way to reduce battery consumption without having to make many changes.

Sam Naffziger, an AMD fellow claimed AMD was just as concerned with performance, it was just that it was more interested in performance per watt. “But most of the form factors that are in the market today are power constrained.”

AMD is expected to release a Carrizo paper to International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week.

AMD’s Carrizo APU is made up of an undisclosed number of “Excavator” CPU cores and eight AMD Radeon cores that serve as an integrated graphics chip.

It measures 250.04 square mm. AMD said and the Excavator cores execute five percent more instructions per clock than  Kaveri, consuming 40 percent less power across 23 percent less die area—3.1 billion transistors in all.

Most of Carrizo’s power savings are due to optimising the chip’s voltage, using adaptive voltage and tuning the GPU portion for low power.

The voltage optimisations eliminated the need to overcompensate for unexpected voltage drops in the chip. Adaptive voltage and frequency scaling (AVFS), also includes proprietary speed sensors, that allows each APU to “adapt” to its own environment, and scale power accordingly.

Carrizo will be fully HSA 1.0 compliant, meaning that it will deliver on the Heterogenous Systems Architecture that AMD has talked about for some time.

Using HSA, the GPU can also be used to perform compute functions, which the company claims will deliver far more performance than the speed increases from moving to finer CPU manufacturing technologies alone.

HSA integration will help the chip reach 3.5 times the transcode performance of Kaveri, AMD said. It will support H.265 video encoding.

LG fights to make OLED more mainstream

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

tvLG will partner with Chinese and Japanese firms in a bid to make organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display televisions more acceptable to the great unwashed.

LG has not said who it is teaming up with or what its OLED partnership would mean for those signing up to it.

So far, its affiliate LG Display is the only panel maker that can mass-produce OLED TV panels, and Samsung and LG are the biggest proponents of the technology for the TV market.

The LG companies say OLED offers better picture quality and consumes less power than mainstream liquid crystal displays (LCD).

However, they are still more expensive than LCD televisions. Quantum dot technology, which has many of the advantages of OLED but costs less, could also undercut OLED TV sales.

Some Chinese TV makers like Skyworth Digital Holdings and Konka are using OLED, but analysts say the technology needs to be more widely used by manufacturers to take off.

Samsung has said it has no plans to make OLED TVs in the immediate future because the technology is not yet ready for mass consumption.

Sony said it would be open to using OLED displays for its televisions but nothing appears to have happened yet.

Enterprises will adopt internet of things

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsA report commissioned by Verizon looks today at enterprise adoption of the internet of things (IoT).

While only 10 percent of organisations currently are using IoT extensively, that picture will rapidly change.

Verizon said it saw a 45 percent increase in its IoT business last year, and a 135 percent increase in activations using 4G LTE, year on year.

The highest growth sector is manufacturing which saw a 204 percent increase in 2014, but other sectors are showing big growth figures too – finance and insurance experienced a 128 percent increase and media and entertainment 120 percent increase.

Verizon has a dedicated IoT VP. Mark Bartolomeo said: “IoT covers a multitude of solutions from wearable devices, to remote monitoring of energy management devices to industrial transportation.”

He said Verizon has seen a number of new entrants creating an IoT “roadmap”.

Currently, Verizon estimates that by 2020 there will be around 5.4 billion connections globally.

Nvidia takes lead in add in graphics

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

nvidia-shieldJon Peddie Research (JPR), which specialises in tracking the graphics and multimedia sectors, said that Nvidia took the lead in add in boards (AIBs) in the fourth quarter of 2014.

However, the overall shipments of AIBs fell by 17.52 percent, compared to the same quarter in 2013.

JPR puts the decline down to incursions from tablet sales and machines that use embedded graphics chips, rather than the discrete chips used in AIBs.

While there is still money to be made in the games market, JPR said AIBs tied to desktop PCs fell from 63 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to only 36 percent in this quarter.

AMD showed a drop of desktop AIBs of 16 percent, while it seems that Nvidia managed to grow its share by 5.5 percent. Nvidia now has 76 percent of this particular segment.

Total shipments in the quarter amounted to 12.4 million units.

 

Apple blows money on two data centres

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

Apple's CEO Tim Cook - shot from WikimediaApple has so much money swilling around in its bank account that it can easily afford to spend $2 billion on data centres in Europe.

And that’s just what it’s doing, according to a report from Reuters.

The centres will be based in Denmark and Ireland and will be powered by renewable energy and offer several hundred jobs.

The data centres will be used to support Apple’s online services such as iTunes and its App Store, and will open in 2017.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said in a statement that the investment is the company’s biggest in Europe to date.

The Irish centre will be based in Galway and will hire 300 people. Ireland is a favourite spot for US tech multinationals, largely because of the tax breaks it gives the company.

Mobile market set to change

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

smartphones-genericThe Mobile World Congress starts in Barcelona at the beginning of next month and Gartner has decided to give us its thoughts on changes that are afoot in this ever changing business.

What’s apparent is that it’s hard for the vendors to continue releasing phones that are very different from the competition. Gartner thinks that the smartphone manufacturers will continue to concentrate on the quality of photographs and video.

Apple, in particular, will find it hard to come up with anything that’s radically new, while so called “white box” vendors in mainland China will continue to undercut the market.

And the incumbents have more to contend with too – Wiko has entered the European market and is doing particularly well in Germany and Framce, selling its products at between 100 and 150 Euro.

Other players could well be Kodak which introduced an Android phone at a trade show in January. Kodak has expertise in the camera market, of course, but may find it hard to contend with other mid range vendors. Polaroid, too, is apparently venturing into the smartphone market.