Samsung Group freezes salaries

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

Samsung rules the roostSouth Korea’s lead chaebol, Samsung Group, announced on Thursday that it has decided to freeze salaries for its executives next year in an attempt to reduce costs, the first time since the 2009 global financial crisis. The income of approximately 2,000 executives at the business group, which includes Samsung Electronics Co. will remain fixed throughout 2015. Incentive pay will continue and will depend on each division’s profit performance.

The main culprit for the corporate belt tightening is Samsung Electronics unit, which has seen consecutive quarterly earning falls as the company continues to lose market share to Apple and aggressive low cost Chinese rivals. Samsung Electronics has seen its market share drop 7.7% to 24.4% of the global market according to Gartner Inc. Meanwhile major Chinese brands including Huawei, Xiami and Lenovo expanded their global market share to 15.5% in the third quarter – up 4.1% year-on-year.

Samsung Electronics took other cost-saving reduction earlier in the year, which include executive travel in economy class on flights under 10 hour durations and encouraging employees to take vacations instead of receiving pay for unused time off.

Techeye Take

Samsung has been warning for some time now that the profitability of its mobile phone division would be under duress – in fact they earlier declared that the chaebol’s main profit centre would be the semiconductor division which has been reporting good results. The fact that all the group’s executives will share in the discomfort will not be lost on those deemed responsible for their lack of expected Korean management skills…,

Dell sells web scale converged devices

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Dell logoDell said it has introduced the second series of of its XC Series web scale converged devices.

The units are aimed at data centre customers and Dell claimed they have now over 50 percent more storage capacity and twice the rack densities.

They’re intended to support many different kinds of workloads including private cloud, big data and virtual desktop infrastructures.

The appliances are based on Dell PowerEdge server technology with Nutanix software and bundled with Dell global services and support.

The appliances now offer additional drive options including for both flash and conventional hard drives. Each rack unit can support up to 16 terabytes per rack unit, and a number of options for multiple drives, memory and microprocessors.

Dell is now offering a compact 1U form factor with the XC630 model, while the XC730xd will support up to 32 terabytes of memory.

The units will be up for sale in early March.

 

Tablets slow right down

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

cheap-tabletsOnly 221.4 million tablets will ship worldwide this year – a drop of 11.9 percent compared to 2014.

That’s according to Digitimes Research (DR), which predicts that Apple will continue to take the lead, managing to ship over 54 million units this year. While this sounds healthy, that’s a predicted decline of 16/6 percent.

The so-called “white box” market will see the biggest decline, with a drop of 20 percent. Margins on these products are super slim.

DR gives estimates for the different vendors’ shares of the market – with Apple accounting for 24.5 percent, Samsung 16.3 percent, Lenovo 5.3 percent, Asustek 4.2 percent, Google 1.7 percent, Acer 1.7 percent, and Amazon only 1.6 percent.

Meanwhile, a report in Chinese language Economic Daily News said that Amazon has cut orders of tablets, sourced by Compal and Quanta by as much as 30 percent.

Compaq has the lion’s share of Amazon tablet business, churning out 80 percent of them compared to Quanta’s 20 percent, the Economic Daily News said.

 

Virtual reality market set to soar

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-25 at 14.19.20While virtual reality (VR) has been around for a good old while, a market research firm now predicts massive growth in the marketplace.

ABI Research said it expects to see three million VR units ship this year, but that will soar to 55 million by 2020.

It believes that head mounted displays will be the winning form factor for both augmented reality (AR) and VR.

The reason for the growth is that mobile reliant devices such as the Samsung Gear VR will be successful, while “tethered defices” and stand alone devices are likely to need more time to mature.

One of the reasons is that existing software, like CAD (computer aided design) software, can be easily modified to support VR devices.

Sports networks and video makers will also start supporting these type of devices.

ABI believes that it won’t be until next year before this market really starts to fly.

IBM strikes further deals with Juniper

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Juniper and IBM have decided to work together in a bid to provide customers with improved mobile facilities, look at Internet of Things (IoT) applications and plumb the world of big data.

IBM said that the two companies will work together to deliver high performance network analytics to speed up enterprises, reduce costs, and provide better end user applications.

IBM logoIBM and Juniper have worked together for a while, but are now devising the integration of Juniper’s MX Router Service Control Gateway with IBM Now Factory analytics.

Other future developments will include providing visibility of subscribers and the ability of CSPs offer automated services based on data. Juniper will use IBM Analytics to understand data flows and self configure and optimise network operations.

Juniper will also integrate IBM Analytics features into its own Cloud Analytic Engine.

Bob Picciano, a senior VP at IBM, said: “Integrating predictive analytics directly into the stream of data processing – and embedding into the network of CSPs – will help to ensure the reliability of the network.”

 

Banks offer data centre storage

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-25 at 14.02.45After Santander said a couple of weeks ago that it would offer its data centre for storage, IDC is speculating whether this is going to become a trend.

According to Lawrence Freeborn, a senior research analyst at IDC, this could be the start of a trend, as banks have already invested money in their data centres.

But he does wonder if it’s likely. Banks, he said, have so far only offered storage to ordinary people rather than businesses, although one or two banks offer online cloud storage using Dropbox, or Google Drive and the like.

Banks, he said, are tending to drop safe box products while Barclays provides storage of paper documents rather than safe boxes.

Barclays already offers personal and business customers a cloud storage service for documents such as deeds and the like.

Freeborn said: “Focusing on delivering core offerings well… rather than moving into essentially unrelated services, should always be the guiding principle of any bank. This is the surest way to ensure that a bank can protect its business from the tech companies that are looking to move into banking: much better than trying to move the other way.”

 

Geeks chase women out of game conference

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

frankenstein-villagersLeading women game designers have been chased away from the PAX East convention in Boston with threats of rape and death.

Brianna Wu, cofounder of the Boston video game studio Giant Spacekat, has pulled her company off the exhibition floor at next month’s event because of safety concerns for the five other women who work with her.

Last week, Wu said in a blog post that PAX organisers had refused her repeated attempts over several weeks to discuss security measures.

Wu said that she had not backed down in the face of threats but “if something happened to my team, God forbid, that would be on me”.

Other developers have said that gaming culture is male and they want a frat-house environment where women appear only as pixellated sex objects. PAX East is a celebration of this culture and it was silly for women to want to be there in the first place.

However executives at Penny Arcade, the group that stages the expo have been behaving oddly.  Instead of issuing a general statement stressing that “the safety of our attendees, panelists, and exhibitors is the number one priority for PAX” which is normal in such cases it has clammed up completely.  This has given the impression that it refused to protect women developers who showed up at its event.

Nina Huntemann, a professor of media studies at Suffolk University and cofounder of Women in Games Boston told the Boston Globe that the organises needed to make a stronger statement.  Its current stance is that there are not taking seriously the concerns of women while preserving a male-dominated culture that they’ve allowed to fester.

On message boards and at meetings of women gamers, some continued to question whether Penny Arcade founders Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik are serious about gender equality after they posted a comic on their website in 2010 that appeared to make light of rape.

The comic featured monsters that were serial rapists, and Holkins and Krahulik later began selling T-shirts based on the cartoon. They ultimately axed the shirts, but Krahulik said at a PAX event in Seattle in 2013 that pulling the merchandise “was a mistake.”

 

Samsung starts trading in Chinese currency

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

samsung-hqSamsung Electronics has announced that it will start trading the Chinese currency directly with the South Korean won.

The news came as the South Korean government announced that it hoped to sign a final free trade agreement with China within the first half of the year, in a further sign of strengthening relations between the countries.

South Korea is the third country in the world to begin direct trading of the yuan for a local currency in December under the aim of grabbing a larger share of the growing business opportunities involving the yuan outside China.

With a big player like Samsung taking part, the thought is that other big companies will join in.

Samsung said in a statement it was “looking into starting won-yuan direct trading”. It did not elaborate, but traders said such a move would be a big boost for the market, which until now has been in operation led by banks.

“The fact that there’s real demand and supply for commercial purposes carries a big significance even though the amount is small,” said one currency dealer at a local bank.

South Korea has been encouraging companies trading with China to settle transactions with the yuan or the won instead of the US dollar, but actual use of the local currencies in trade deals remains very low.

Samsung uses the currency market to settle direct transactions between its headquarters and its foreign subsidiaries, and it is not clear how much influence it can make on the market on its own.

Apple has to pay troll toll for use of iTunes

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

trollFruity cargo cult Apple has gone up against the Troll Gods of East Texas and ended up having to pay $532.9 million.

A federal jury found Apple’s iTunes software infringed three patents owned by Texas-based patent licensing company Smartflash. Smartflash wanted $852 million in damages.

The jury deliberated for eight hours and said that Apple not only used the Smartflash patents without permission, but also did so wilfully.

Apple claimed the outcome was another reason why reform is needed in the patent system to curb litigation by companies that do not make products themselves, such as Smartflash.  Although it has done rather well itself by patenting the rounded rectangle, which it did not really invent.

“We refused to pay off this company for the ideas our employees spent years innovating and unfortunately we have been left with no choice but to take this fight up through the court system,” an Apple spokeswoman said in a statement to Reuters.

Smartflash sued Apple in May 2013 alleging the Cupertino, California-based company’s iTunes software infringed its patents related to accessing and storing downloaded songs, videos and games.

The trial was held in Tyler, the hub of the East Texas region, which over the past decade has become a focus for patent litigation in the United States. Some of the biggest jury verdicts have been awarded in the district. Smartflash is also based in Tyler.

Apple tried to avoid a trial by having the lawsuit thrown out. But earlier this month U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who presided over the case, ruled that the Smartflash’s technology was not too basic to deserve the patents.

Apple argued that it did not infringe the patents and asked the jury to find they were invalid because previously patented inventions covered the same technology.

Smartflash’s suit said that in 2000, the co-inventor of its patents, Patrick Racz, met with a man named Augustin Farrugia to discuss the patents’ technology. Farrugia, the complaint said, later joined Apple and became a senior director there.

5G boffins break 1Tbps speed limit

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

speed University of Surrey researchers working on  5G mobile broadband claim to have broken the transfer speed limit of 1Tbps (Terabits per second).

Normally when people talk about 5G they are happen to hint at speeds of 10Gbps to 50Gbps (Gigabits per second). Samsung managed 7.5Gbps in a car moving at 60MPH over a distance of 4.35km and using the 28GHz radio spectrum band.

The Surrey test said that its performance was managed over 100 metres via new transmitters and receivers.

The plan is to take the technology outside of the lab for testing between 2016 and 2017, which would be followed by a public demo in early 2018.

Professor Rahim Tafazolli, who leads the project said that the technique is independent of centre frequency whether mm wave or below 6GHz.

“It is a new detector that works really well in environments where there is a lot of interference I.e dense cells (for example cells of ~100m) and cells with lots of interfering antennas like massive MIMO. The indicated rate was measured in 100MHz of bandwidth.”

 

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.