Category: News

British firm promises flexible displays

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

FlexEnable's prototype fabA company based in Cambridge claimed that by the end of this year it will produce properly flexible displays by the end of this year.
FlexEnable is aiming to position its OLED displays into mobile products, wearables, surface displays and imaging systems.
On its website it says that the display could be used on smartphones with wraparound displays that can open out into tablet size.  The material is flexible enough to be folded in half.
It also envisages including screens that are so flexible they can be built into clothes and follow the curves of the body.
It also sees its displays being built into both cars and aircraft designs, using complex curves and irregular shapes.
The technology also has medical uses, creating flexible x-ray sensors. The technology can be as thin as 25 nanometres. It provides reference kits to its clients so they can make their own products. The company also claims to have created graphene based displays.
FlexEnable is a spin off of Plastic Logic and believes its technology will become an element of the internet of things.

 

Silicon chips to be one atom thin

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

SiliconScientists have created transistors using a form of silicon which are only one atom thick.
The researchers, based at the University of Texas at Austin said the breakthrough promises “dramatically faster, smaller and more efficient computer chips”.
The silicon is called silicene and the team demonstrated that it could be made into transistors, the basic building block of a central processing unit (CPU) in a computer.
According to lead researcher Li Tao, until a few years back silicene was a purely theoretical material but by studying graphene, which is also one atom thick, scientists theorised that a similar material could be based on the element silicon.
However, silicene is unstable and to fix this problem, scientists created a new method for fabricating it.
They allowed a hot vapour of silicon atoms to condense on a crystalline block of silver in a vacuum chamber, then forming a silicene sheet and adding a nanometre thick layer of alumina on the top.  They could then scrape some silver to leave behind two islands of metals as electrodes with silicone between them.
Although the work is in its early stages, the team believes that the discovery will lead to low energy, high speed computer chips.

 

Apple PCs make a dent in the marketplace

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseWhile the conventional Windows PC market continues to decline, it appears to be losing market share to Apple’s range of PCs.
That’s the conclusion of Taiwanese vendors who have told local wire Digitimes that global PC shipments are expected to fall by over three percent during 2015.
Apple, on the other hand, is set to do much better, with growth of between 10 and 15 percent during 2015, amounting to shipments of between 20 and 23 million worldwide.
Apple is gaining additional traction from more competitive prices and Digitimes said it expects the company to drop prices on its 11 inch and 13 inch notebooks when it launches a 12-inch Macbook Air this year.
While traditional PC sales have been hit by smartphones and tablets to some extent, Microsoft’s delays in shipping Windows 10 will also not help sales.
Microsoft is responding to vendors’ complaints about the excessive price of licensing its operating system by introducing aggressive pricing in a bid to boost the market during 2015.

 

Organisations anticipate internet of things

Posted on February 4, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsAlthough there’s still a clear lack of standards with different vendors vying to take the lead, many organisations are getting ready for the internet of things (IoT).
Companies including Intel, Qualcomm, Google and others want to have a big stake in the future of IOT.
And there’s no doubt the hype is generating interest.
That’s the conclusion of market research company Gartner which said in a study that 40 percent of businesses think the IoT will have a “significant” impact in the next three years.
Nick Jones, a senior analyst at Gartner, said: “Only a small minority has deployed solutions in a production environment. However, the falling costs of networking and processing mean that there are few economic inhibitors to adding sensing and communications to products costing as little as a few tens of dollars”.
But even though many organisations are anticipating the IoT, few have put executives in leadership roles.
The main concerns of the  people surveyed are security and privacy.  And there is a shortage of people with the relevant skills to plot the future.

 

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.

 

Authentication market value to soar

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-03 at 16.35.17By the end of this year, mobile multi-factor authentication software and services will be worth $1.6 billion by the end of this year.
The reason is that user names and passwords to identify people aren’t secure enough, according to ABI Research.
And attacks against organisations, of whatever size, continue to flourish with many breaches made because of weak passwords.
That means there’s considerable market demand for authentication technology that gives an additional layer of security.
ABI thinks that one time passwords and tokens are emerging as the favourite way of authentication.
They offer better security because passwords generated only work for a single session or transaction.
Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter already use two factor authentication methods. And one type of two factor authentication uses hardware based security tokens.
Companies like MobileIron, Gemalto, Entrust,, Centrify, CA, Symantec and others are competing for market share.
ABI believes the market is so ready for this kind of secure technology that by 2020 the authentication market will be worth $13.2 billion.

 

UCL claims optical fibre breakthrough

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

Jeremy Bentham auto icon at University College London - Wikimedia CommonsResearchers at University College London (UCL) claim to have discovered a new method of processing fibre optic signals.
And that, they say, could double the distance of data travelling error free through transatlantic cables.
Signals right now need to be boosted which can be difficult if the cables are 20,000 leagues beneath the sea.
But the technique, say the UCL boffins, mean that costs will be lower and will correct transmitted data if they’re corrupted or distorted on their way.
The scientists have eliminated interactions between optical channels and believe they can transmit error free data from 3,190 kilometres to 5,890 kilometres.
The researchers created a so-called “super channel”which consists of a set of frequencies that can be encoded using amplitude, phase and frequency. They coupled this with a high speed super receiver plus signal processing techniques they developed.
The next step is for the researchers to test this method on denser super channels used in digital cable TV, cable modems, and Ethernet connections.

 

Cisco makes bold wearable claims

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

ciscologoNetworking giant Cisco believes that by the 2019 there will be half a billion people using wearable devices.
Cisco said that 2.8 million wearables shipped last year and by 2019 there will be 16.4 million of us wearing gadgets of one sort or another.
The Daily Telegraph reports Cisco’s belief that each gizmo will churn out 569MB of data a month.
By 2019, according to Cisco, 4G networks will represent 88.2 percent of data traffic.  Last year, 4G traffic amounted to 42.2 percent,
Cisco believes too that there will be 5.2 billion mobile users in 2019.  It estimates last year there were 4.3 billion mobile users.
Where does Cisco get these figures from?  No doubt it gazes into its crystal ball and extrapolates current figures using an abacus.
The jury is still well and truly out on wearable devices however – not everyone is totally convinced that having a gizmo built into your clothes is necessarily the flavour of the day.

 

China internet users number 649 million

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

chinaflagThere are now 649 million Chinese people with internet access, according to a government report.
And, significantly, a large percentage of those people use smartphones or mobile phones to access the net.
At the end of 2012, there were only 564 million people able to access the web, said the China Internet Network Information Centre.
While the 2014 figures showed a modest growth, there is still room for vendors because internet penetration is only 47.9 percent of the population – with many of those people living in rural areas.
Reuters reports that smartphone sales aren’t doing so well.  It quotes government figures that showed 389 smartphones shipped in China in 2014, a drop from 423 million in 2013.
Some players like Google, Facebook and Twitter have practically no presence in mainland China.
The authorities there routinely censor many web sites and keep a sharp eye for blogs related to politics or to pornography.

 

Lenovo pips Amazon at the tablet game

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

cheap-tabletsApple continued to be the market leader for tablets in 2014 but it, in common with other vendors, showed a drop in sales.
A report from Trendforce said that the tablet industry has no reached the maturity point with shipments globally totalling 192 million units. That’s a fall of 2.2 percent compared to 2013.
Apple fared rather worse, it shipped 63.4 million units, a drop of 13.6 percent.
Number two in the pack was Samsung, but its shipments at 41 million units dropped only 2.5 percent.
Lenovo beat Amazon to take third place, and now has 5.6 percent market share.
Both Amazon and Google trailed behind, and Microsoft hasn’t really hit the numbers with its Surface Pro 3.

 

Some analysts believe that not only has the market reached maturity, but it’s hard to persuade people to upgrade.  Others think that tablets are being squeezed on the one hand by larger screen size smartphones and others by low cost notebook PCs.

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.