Huawei dusts off US invasion plans

Posted on March 3, 2015 by - News

huawei-liveChinese phone maker Huawei is planning a campaign to win over US consumers, rolling out new mobile phones and wearable devices backed by a marketing effort.

It is a brave move considering that it was only two years ago that the company was branded a spy by US senators who knew at the time that there stance was a case of the kettle calling the pot black.

China’s second-largest smartphone maker, already with more than $40 billion in annual revenue from a wide range of telecom gear and products, is preparing to introduce Americans to several of its smartphones and wearable devices this year, including its youth-oriented “Honor” phone.

Huawei’s US spokesman Bill Plummer said the company’s 2015 US plans will include traditional advertising, online promotion and sports team sponsorships.

He said the company wanted to change its marketing approach to shed its image as a purveyor of cheap technology products.

In December, it touted its new Honor 6 Plus phone on a billboard in New York’s Times Square. Plummer said that was “a sign of things to come”.

He declined to say how much Huawei will spend on its new marketing campaign or what sports team, or teams, it had in mind. In the UK it already sponsors Arsenal, cricket teams in India and rugby clubs in Australia.

At the Mobile World Congress over the weekend in Barcelona, Huawei took the wraps off a smartwatch that will be sold in over 20 countries including the US.

Huawei now intends to appeal directly to consumers with several new phone models, both low end and high end. It hopes to secure deals with carriers, selling online through marketplaces, such as the one operated by Amazon.com, and on its own fledgling gethuawei.com US direct-sales website.
US senators are mostly concerned with Huawei’s networking equipment, but in consumer land, Huawei has a huge problem with brand recognition.

 

Intel ready to release the Atom

Posted on March 3, 2015 by - News

Intel Q4_14_ResultsIntel has announced details of its new family of Atom processors, and, as we predicted it has changed its naming strategy to mirror the Core series of processors.

Intel is renaming its Atom family with x3, x5, and x7 designations.

At the low end, the 28nm Atom x3, is basically a smartphone chip with Intel Architecture (SoFIA). The Atom x3 will be available in three distinct variants; all of which will come with integrated modems. All three are 64-bit capable.

The Atom x3-C3130 tops out at 1GHz, incorporates a Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and includes an integrated 3G (HSPA+) modem. The Atom x3-C3230RK has a clock speed of 1.2GHz and has a Mali 450 MP4 GPU, and a 3G modem. The Atom x3-C3440 clocks in at 1.4GHz, features a Mali T720 MP2 graphics core, incorporates a Category 6 LTE modem, and can optionally support NFC.
After looking at its own benchmarks, Intel said that the Atom x3-C3230RK can offer up to 1.8x the media editing performance of competing SoCs from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

The Atom x5 and x7 are Cherry Trail-based and the first Atom SoCs to be built using a 14nm manufacturing process. Both processor families support 64-bit processing, incorporate eighth generation Intel graphics, and support Windows and Android. They also support RealSense, True Key, and Pro WiDi. They don’t feature integrated modems but support Intel’s next generation XMM 726x and 7360 LTE modems.

Intel insists that the x7 offers two times the graphics performance of the existing Atom Z3795 in the GFXBench 2.7 T-Rex HD benchmark and 50 percent greater performance on the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark.
Intel has already announced that the Atom x3 and Bay Trail-based Atom x5 and x7 processors are shipping, and that products using the processors should be available during the first half of 2015.

Server 2003 nemesis looms

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

Microsoft campusMicrosoft abandons support for Windows Server 2003 on July the 14 this year and that means servergeddon for IT managers who don’t keep up with the upgrades.

In fact, according tech company Insight UK, there are five “power struggles” set to happen in enterprises and public organisations on Bastille Day – that’s the 14th of July.

Insight estimates that 24 million servers worldwide could well be affected – and nearly 40 percent of Server OSes are Windows 2003.

Microsoft wants people to use its Azure Data Centre Migration but many have left things too little and too late.

Insight thinks that migrating servers could take an estimated 18 months, and short term patches cause problems in the migration.

And another problem is lack of compatability and interoperability problems, while new environments will require time to get to grips sure.

Sure enough, this is leading Insight to one conclusion – it can help you out. “Panic is not an option,” said MD Emma de Sousa, after telling enterprises that they better had panic, and quickly.

 

Lenovo goes tablet crazy

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News, Products

Screen Shot 2015-03-02 at 11.38.21Announcements from the Mobile World Congress (MWC) are as thick as blankets of snow this week, and Lenovo has joined in the chase for more business by announcing a range of three tablets.

Lenovo, according to market watchers, has been doing comparatively well in the tablet market.

Today it announced the A Series Android tablets, the Tab 2 A7 and A10-70 and a Windows tablet too.

The A10-70 has a 10.1-inch FHD screen, and Dolby Atmos. The machine runs Android 4.4, uses a MediaTek quad core processor, weighs 500 grams and is 8.9 millimetres thick. It will cost £180 and ships in April.
The Tab 2 A8 weighs in at 360 grams and comes with a dual SIM card slot, and costs £130 for the wi-fi model. It will ship in June.

The Windows Ideated MIIX 300, uses Windows 8.1, has an Intel Atom chip inside, and a media card reader. It will ship in July and will cost around £150.

 

HTC gets all virtual

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

smartphone-shoppingMany people find wearing virtual reality headsets gives them a headache or makes them feel sick, but that hasn’t stopped Taiwanese firm HTC by announcing it will sell a system later this year.

The company made its announcement at the Mobile World Congress, an annual shindig in Barcelona where vendors vie with each other to attract attention for forthcoming products.

HTC is cooperating with Valve, a US company that specialises in video games, to let you pretend you’re walking around virtual rooms and psychotically blasting virtual foes to cyber eternity.

The HTC unit, called the Vive, can show video at a whopping 90 frames a second, and has two 1200 x 1800 pixel screens. It includes a number of sensors including an accelerometer and a gyroscope.

HTC has had a somewhat troubled time in the last two years as its core mobile business suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous vendors like Apple and Samsung. A VR headset is a new departure for the company, which also used the MWC shining to launch an Android handset to not much enthusiasm.

Hitachi Data Systems targets telco big data

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

server-racksThe IT division of Hitachi said it has started to sell an analytics package aimed at telecom service providers.

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) said that its Live Insight for Telecom is aimed at giving providers real time information into networks, services and application level performance.

This, HDS claims, will let them predict network activity using both real time and historical data in parallel

Analytics is big business now – for example IBM is betting the farm on big data and the cloud.

So companies like HDS are claiming their products will reduce subscriber “churn”, lower the operational costs and give them new sources of revenue.

HDS claims that are close to seven billion mobile subscribers worldwide, with 78 percent of households in the developed world connected to the web.

But, it continues, even though telco providers can access tens o

LG and Samsung make iWatch screens

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

Samsung HQ Silicon Valley - MM picLG Display and Samsung Electronics are to supply screens for Apple smartwatches when the shiny toy finally hits the shops.

The Electronic Times reported that LG Display will be the sole supplier of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens for the Apple watches that go on sale in April.

Samsung Display will also become a supplier for the next version of the smartwatch that is expected to go on sale either sometime in the second half of this year or early 2016.

No-one is confirming the rumour, but it makes sense and is probably true.

Apple has scheduled a special event on March 9, where it is expected to showcase Apple Watch. To have got this far in the production process, Jobs’ Mob should have sorted out its display supplier months ago.

The watch, which will let consumers check their email, pay for goods at retail stores and monitor personal health information, represents Apple’s only product introduction since the 2010 launch of the iPad.

The watch is likely to sell millions, but only because of the Apple logo. It has been shipped so late and with half of the promised healthcare enhancements dropped, because Jobs’ Mob could not get them to go.

Oracle sues customer for suing

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

Oracle-Announces-X5Database outfit Oracle found itself in hot water over Oregon’s failed health exchange website and on the receiving end of a law suit complaining about breach of contract, has counter-sued.

Its case does not focus on the fact Oracle could not get the site working, but five former staff and campaign advisers to the state’s former governor, worked behind the scenes to kill the site for political reasons.

Oracle said it might file similar claims against former Governor John Kitzhaber and his former chief of staff, Mike Bonetto.

The new lawsuit by Oracle seeks about $33 million in damages it says the company lost from the fallout over the Cover Oregon program.

The lawsuit claims Kitzhaber’s staffers and advisers, who did not work for Cover Oregon, “improperly influenced” the decision to shutter the site and then blamed Oracle to defuse the political consequences.

Named in the lawsuit are Kitzhaber’s former campaign manager Patricia McCaig, consultants Kevin Looper and Mark Wiener, former business policy director Scott Nelson and former spokesman Tim Raphael.

Oracle argues the website was ready to go before the state decided to switch to the federal exchange in April.

However it claims that going live with the website and providing a means for all Oregonians to sign up for health insurance coverage didn’t match the former Governor’s re-election strategy to ‘go after’ Oracle,”

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said in a statement said that political operatives Patricia McCaig, Kevin Looper, Scott Nelson, Tim Raphael, and Mark Wiener acted in the shadows and took actions to undermine the ability of Oregonians to receive health coverage; create a false narrative blaming Oracle for the state’s failures; and ultimately interfere with Oracle’s business.

It seems that Oracle’s strategy is to say the site worked, when the State said it didn’t, and rely on the fact that Kitzhaber is not exactly popular any more.

Kitzhaber resigned last week after criminal probes into an influence-peddling scandal involving allegations that his fiancée used her position in his office for personal gain.

Foxconn presses for the end of human zoo

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

foxconn-tvFoxconn has confirmed that it is pressing ahead with its plan to replace its increasingly tricky staff with robots.

After all, robots will always work, and will not get depressed, kill themselves, or moan to western news media that they are being exploited.

CEO Terry Gou who once famously described his staff as animals, and he was the zoo keeper said that in three years, Foxconn will probably use robots and automation to complete 70 percent of its assembly line work.

Previously Gou said he hoped to one day deploy a ”robot army” at the company’s factories, as a way to offset labor costs and improve manufacturing.

This will be great news for Apple, which is Foxconn’s biggest customer, and found that its image was a little tarnished by the fact that its main supplier was installing nets to catch people who threw themselves off buildings.

Labour watchdog groups have complained that Foxconn workers have in the past faced long hours and harsh treatment from management.

Last year, Gou said that the company already had a fully automated factory in the Chinese city of Chengdu that can run 24 hours a day with the lights off.

Gou declined to say more about the factory, or what it produced, but Foxconn has been adding 30,000 industrial robots to its facilities each year, he said in June.

Gou said his company needed to adopt more automation, due to the potential for labor shortages. Young people won’t do this kind of work, and won’t enter the factories, he moaned.

ISIS aiming for social media heads

Posted on March 2, 2015 by - News

o-ANONYMOUS-facebookTerrorist outfit the Islamic State has decided to take out the heads of the major social media companies for daring to take on the outfit.

On Sunday, an image circulated showing Islamic State supporters allegedly threatening Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, in retaliation for the social network engaging an escalating war against the militant group.

ISIS relied heavily on American-built social media to provide a megaphone. Lately, however, the networks have fought back and shut down its access.

Now the social media that enabled ISIS to become the most famous terrorists on the planet—Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook is at war against them.

Twitter has gone through numerous waves in which tens of thousands of ISIS accounts have been banned in an attack designed to lessen their influence.

ISIS tried to arrange a cyberprotest in favor of a right to free speech in order to gain the attention of the world.

At noon ET on Feb. 26, the full might of ISIS’s social media operation was supposed to get #IslamicStateMedia and #الحملة_العالمية_لنصرة_الدولة_الإسلامية trending everywhere and squarely in the spotlight.

However it was taken to the cleaners by Kurds and conservative American activists who rhetorically attacked their common enemy so that neither the Arabic- nor English-language campaign had any success whatsoever.

ISIS social media jihadists were outnumbered and outdone during their own highly publicised campaign.

It turned out that Twitter made it impossible for ISIS to win by setting in motion the biggest strike against the Islamic State that social media has yet seen.

Some accounts were suspended three to seven times within one single day. But the incentive of the campaign kept these Islamic State supporters coming back again and again.

ISIS is now spending more time and effort than ever before to maintain their social media.

Apparently they are wanting blood with threats calling for the killing or harming of social media bosses appearing on the accounts they can still use. But it is looking like this is a rear guard action.

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.