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.

AT&T gets out off of its cloud

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

cloudWhile everyone seems to be rushing to get on the cloud, AT&T is downsizing its data centre operations.

The telco is apparently selling some of its data centres worth about $2 billion as it continues its streak of asset sales.

Apparently, AT&T is keen to get its debt loads down and pay off its credit card bill from last Christmas.  It is all a rumour of course, and the story is based on leaks to The Wall Street Journal 

Part of AT&T’s debt problems came because it had to bid high prices for spectrum.  The company said it had spent close to half of the total bids in the record-setting $44.9 billion spectrum sale that concluded last week.

AT&T bagged 251 licences in the  AWS-3 spectrum auction worth $18.2 billion. The company has also been investing to expand its footprint in Mexico to grow its business, as the US wireless market reaches saturation. It said last month it would buy bankrupt NII Holdings wireless business in Mexico for $1.875 billion.

IT industry back to bubble days

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

Ggb_in_soap_bubble_1The IT industry seems to be back to the heady days of 2000, according to beancounters at EY (Ernst & Young).

EY counted 3,512 mergers or acquisitions in the tech sector in 2014, for a total value of $237.6 billion, the highest figure since 2000. The report said the outlook for deals in 2015 remains “robust”.

This time the deal making is mobile tech, security and cloud computing. Startups like Uber and Snapchat meanwhile have seen their values soar with new capital inflows.

Last year 38 tech companies entered the billion-dollar club last year, including 25 in the US.

The consultancy PwC said 2014 was the “best year of the decade for global technology IPOs.”

The only thing which has not touched its March 2000 highs is the Nasdaq stock index in New York City, which is seen as an indicator of the tech sector.

There are also some concerned that some of the deals are overvalued – such as Facebook’s $22 billion deal to buy the messaging service WhatsApp.

The EY report says insists that this time, values are grounded in reality as if people expect a bubble to burst later on.

“Unlike 2000, it was no bubble,” the report said. “Despite the occasional ‘moonshot’ from a handful of deep-pocketed buyers, the vast majority of deals were measured in reality-based multiples of good-old-fashioned revenue, profit or cash flow.”

 

Help! My Mini needs a patch

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

350350000patch37As a sign of a 21st century problem, car maker BMW has rolled out a patch for a security flaw that could have allowed hackers to open the doors of some 2.2 million vehicles.

The problem affects BMW, Mini and Rolls Royce models that come equipped with ConnectedDrive – a technology that allows car owners to access internet, navigation and other services via a SIM card installed directly into vehicles.

Security experts were able to create a fake mobile phone base station to intercept network traffic from the car, and use that information to send commands to the car telling it to lower windows or open the doors.

Other boffins working for German automobile association ADAC discovered the security vulnerabilities and the potential for vehicles to be broken into last summer, but kept quiet about them until now to give BMW a chance to produce a fix.

Hackers would only need a few minutes to open a car from outside, without leaving any physical trace of unauthorised entry – which is a lot better than a brick through the window or a bent coat hanger.

ConnectedDrive appBMW issued a statement to the press congratulating itself on its rapid response, how it is “increasing the security of data transmission in its vehicles” in response to what it describes as the “potential security gap” in ConnectedDrive.

The vulnerability revolved around the insecure transmission of data, as the patch rolled out by BMW appears to have enabled HTTPS.  Since HTTPS is the minimal sort of security you would expect from an online transition, you would have thought that BMW’s have thought to install it.

The fact BMW still took half a year to work out a fix and roll it out, indicates that they have not really thought this whole security thing through yet.

Still it is likely that we will see a lot more of these sorts of patches being rolled out for cars. In the old days you could open a mini with a fork.

 

 

Apple transforms sapphire plant into a cloud

Posted on February 3, 2015 by - News

1338_16131017563Fruity cargo cult Apple wants to invest $2 billion to convert a failed sapphire glass plant in Arizona into a data centre.

Apple set up the plant with GT Advanced Technologies in Mesa in 2013 to manufacture scratch-resistant sapphire screens for Apple’s shiny toys.

However, GT Advanced filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October and closed the plant, after what appears to be a case of Apple shafting its partner by leaving sapphire glass was left out of Apple’s newest iPhones.

Since Apple owned the plant, it wants to turn it into something more useful. The $2 billion investment will stretch over 10 years with a 30 year commitment from Apple to keep the facility running.

But Apple does not really need another data centre. We have written before that it is hugely over capacity now. Jobs’ Mob said that the facility will be a data centre as well as a command centre for managing Apple’s other data centres and networks, which handle traffic from services like iTunes, iCloud and Siri.

It claims it will create 600 engineering and construction jobs at the data centre and the whole lot will be powered by solar energy.

As it wound down its Sapphire production in October, GT Advanced said it was laying off about 650 employees at the plant.

Microsoft reveals cloud roadmap

Posted on February 2, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSoftware company Microsoft said it has introduced a web site that reveals details of its roadmap for its Cloud Platform.
Microsoft has been aiming to move to the cloud as fast as it can and now offers cloud services including Azure, Intone, Visual Studio and server platforms including Windows Server, SQL Server.  It also has covered system appliance offerings including Analytics and Stor System.
Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of the cloud and enterprise marketing group at Microsoft said the company wanted to be transparent about its cloud strategy.
He said that the web site, which you can find here, is intended to show what technology it’s developing and what’s coming in the next few months.
It also will include products in public preview.
Microsoft isn’t the only company struggling to re-invent itself as a cloud player.  Others in the game include SAP, Oracle and IBM.
Analysts predict that over the next few years the majority of enterprise IT users will use cloud computing and services more and more.