Ellison is up to something with Kurian

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - Gossip, News

 Larry EllisonThe appointment of Safra Catz and Mark Hurd as co-CEOs at Oracle made considerable sense to Wall Street, but sources in the database firm were surprised that Thomas Kurian did not come out of it as well as they expected.

This indicates that Chairman Larry Ellision is up to something.

Kurian was appointed president of software development, but that seems to underplay his importance at Oracle.

Reuters points out that Ellison often turns to Kurian for a second opinion and affirmation on product decisions and conversations.

A former executive told Reuters that Ellison always looks back at Thomas and asks him what he thinks.

This has led many to believe that Kurian, not Herd or Catz will end up replacing Ellison when the 70 year old retires.

After Hurd and Catz were promoted, top executives worried about keeping Kurian motivated and happy. He continued to report directly to Ellison, now executive chairman of the board, along with Hurd, Catz and two others.

Ellison seems to be in no hurry to leave and was appointed Oracle’s chief technology officer in September, but he has in recent years spent an increasing amount of time on other interests, including his sailing team, and as he develops the Hawaiian island he largely controls into an eco-tourism destination.

When Ellison does eventually hand over the reins, he will want to entrust Oracle to someone who lives and breathes technology, and Kurian is seen fitting that job description best among the top executives.

However outside Oracle Kurian is an unknown. He is seen as a technologist who understands Oracle’s products inside out, works long hours, executes Ellison’s vision and is pants at small talk.

He is the man behind Oracle’s middleware business developing into a substantial enterprise and  Oracle’s vast and still rapidly evolving suite of products, from business software applications to servers and databases.

Ellison has put him in charge of the company’s move to the cloud and if he manages it, it will be difficult for his detractors to deny him the top spot.

What stands against him is his tendency not to delegate and he likes to get involved in a minutia.

However the same applies to Ellison, and it would appear that he has plans for Kurian, which should worry the Herd of Katz he has placed as joint CEOs.

AMD shuns the Internet of Things

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - News

1-AMD-s-New-Steamroller-Architecture-to-Bring-Significant-PerformanceWhile Intel is pinning its future on the Internet of Things (IoT), AMD appears to be spurning it as if it were a rabid dog.

Its senior vice president and general manager of the computing and graphics business group John Byrne thinks that it is much wiser to keep pushing into the PC market, which is still a $40-billion-a-year opportunity.

Talking to Venture Beat  he said that AMD has to execute on its upcoming Carrizo family of accelerated processing units (APUs), which will be focused on the mobile computing market. About 300 million PC processors and 90 million graphics chips are sold each year, and Byrne wants AMD to get its fair share of those sales.

Byrne thinks that setting up a chip making operation for the Internet of Things is just an invitation to lose money.

Byrne said while it concentrated on the IoT, Intel it was missing opportunities in the classic PC market.

“There’s still 300 million PCs, still 90 million graphics chips. If I look at Intel, Nvidia, and my revenue, that’s still a $40 billion market — even before you get to the IoT. If you look at the gross margin profile of that business, it’s still significantly more than AMD as a company’s average. There’s still significant market opportunities in the classic PC space,” Byrne said.

He said that AMD still had work to do in the PC chip market. It had to work on its x86 performance, ensuring that each product it bought to market is better x86. There needed to be improvements in graphics, notebooks needed to improve battery life.

Byrne said that it all meant that AMD could push into the commercial market a long more. He pointed out that AMD won the industry’s largest single tender in commercial 18 months ago in India and Elitebook with HP last year.

“Wait until you see the lineup of commercial platforms I have with Carrizo. It allows us to continue to attack that i3, attack that i5 consumer, and really get to penetrate the commercial market space. We’ll attack graphics. That’s going to be my strategy next, he said.

While he said that the Internet of Things is important there are two ways to make cash from it. Intel is concentrating on the silicon inside the wearable. However, that will cost under $10 and not make huge amounts of cash.

“You’re seeing that with Quark and some of the other investments our competitors are making. I’m not in business to lose money. Share and revenue is nice but so is profitability,” he said.

But all of those devices have to be connected and it is those higher end devices that AMD will be targeting.

eBay heads into the enterprise

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

Amazon-Cloud-OutageWhile Amazon is known to many for delivering CDs, books and foot spas, not many are aware that it has grabbed a sizeable chunk of the enterprise market too.
And now it seems eBay wants a slice of that enterprise action too.  The company said today it has introduced a global programme that will pull in companies selling retail, business consultancies, system integrators and digital agencies.
It said it wants its partners to advise, design and integrate “omnichannel” commerce using eBay Enterprise elements including Magento, Retail Order Management, Store and Warehouse fulfilment and customer care.
eBay said it will extend facilities in the future and wants to provide retailers with the opportunities to grow their businesses internationally – indeed globally.
It has already recruited a number of partners including Gorilla Group, Bridge Solutions, AOE, and Vamio.  These companies all have a multi-national presence.
Craig Hayman, CEO of eBay Enterprise, said: “This is just the beginning as we set the stage for future programme enhancements that create mutual opportunities for growth with our key partners.”

 

Facebook buys into video

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

thumb-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-pro-4566In a bid to outdo Google’s YouTube, Facebook said yesterday it had bought San Diego company QuickFire.
QuickFire is a private company so financial details of the deal are unavailable.
The company makes technology that reduces the bandwidth to look at films online without compromising on quality.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook said in a prepared statement that video was an “essential part” of Facebook which currently has 1.3 billion people online which use it.
The 20 strong team will move into Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park, California.
According to Facebook itself, more people now upload videos to the social networking site. Facebook is looking for advertising dollars – YouTube turns in a pretty penny for its owner Google by leveraging video ads as lead ins to music and videos.

 

Future dim for Wintel in 2015

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseThe arrival of Windows 10 and the introduction of 14 nanometre microprocessors are unlikely to stimulate much demand for PCs in 2015.
That’s the view of Digitimes – which has interviewed sources in the supply chain that make kit using the software and components.
Windows 10 is delayed – it’s not now expected to ship until the August at the earliest, and will make use of a future 14 nanometre CPU from Intel which is codenamed “Skylake”.
But the wire thinks that in 2015 only 200 million PCs will ship this year – with smartphones and tablets continuing to erode market share.
The manufacturers in Taiwan are more update about Apple based PCs rather than their Windows based cousins and are anticipating that while enterprises may decide to upgrade.
Windows 8 has triggered a distinct lack of excitement in the marketplace, with many enterprises hanging on to Windows 7 systems for dear life.
Windows 10 is expected to look a lot more like Windows 7 than Windows 8.x.

 

Integrated infrastructure booms in EMEA

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

server-racksA report said that integrated infrastructure and platforms – that is to say vendor systems containing servers, disk storage, networking kit and systems management software – grew by 38 percent in the third quarter of last year.
IDC said vendors turned in revenues of $616 million in the quarter, a year on year growth of 38.2 percent for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) in the quarter.
Eckhardt Fisher, research analyst at IDC, said the growth is linked to fast spreading adoption of business intelligence systems and the perceived benefit to enterprises that brings.
The market leader for the integrated infrastructure division saw VCE as the leader, followed by Cisco-Netapp, and then HP.
Cisco grew its share by close to 163 percent for the quarter, compared to the same quarter in 2013.
VCE also took prime position in the integrated platforms sector, followed by Cisco-Netapp and HP.  But here HP belonged strongly – growing by 271 percent in the quarter.
The entire market for the third quarter shipped 238 terabytes – up 63.5 percent compared to Q3 2013.

 

Scientists investigate online avatars

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

AJ21D2 Goldfish swimming in bowl. Image shot 2004. Exact date unknown.A group of researchers at York University is looking at what online avatars reveal about the personality of the people who choose them.
Katrina Fong, lead researcher at the university, said that avatars let people express or suppress different physical or psychological traits in cyberspace.
And, she said, previous research has shown that people choose avatars which they think as similar to themselves.
The study involved participants creating avatars on their own and then a different set of people looked and rated avatars on five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
Some of the results are extremely unsurprising.  Avatars that had open eyes, a grin, an oval face and a sweater indicated friendship.  Those wearing sunglasses and a neutral expression weren’t considered to be very agreeable.
Fong claimed the study showed that avatars offered accurate information about a person’s nature.

 

AMD warns virtual reality is a long way away

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

 virtual-realityA true virtual reality machine is a lot longer away than many believe, warns AMD.

AMD’s chief gaming scientist Richard Huddy said that getting photorealism in games is impossible in the  current virtual reality hardware.

Talking to Develop, Huddy said that virtual reality was a staggeringly exciting field.

“But hardware companies need to produce something 100 or 200 times more powerful than current hardware if we’re going to get to the stage where we have complete photorealism in virtual reality headsets. It starts with the facts that, for a person with 20:20 vision, they will need a screen with a resolution of about 8k-by-6k to enjoy photorealism.”

This sort of statement flies in the face of many of the claims of the tech press who have been looking at the current generations of virtual headset.

Huddy predicts about 35 million pixels per eye should suffice for VR photorealism. That’s still 75 million pixels, taking us to a 35-fold increase compared to a standard 1080p monitor.

To get an indication about how far you have to go to get close to that Huddy you will need to get a 400x-to-1000x increase in horsepower to engender true, convincing VR photorealism that is indistinguishable from the real world.

 

Apple defective motherboard case temporarily thrown out

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

apple-disney-dreams-snow-white-Favim.com-142405Lawyers from Apple are celebrating after they managed to convince a judge to throw out a case which accused it of defrauding consumers by selling MacBook laptop computers that contained “logic boards” it knew were defective, and which routinely failed within two years.

US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said the plaintiffs, Uriel Marcus and Benedict Verceles, failed to show that Apple made “affirmative misrepresentations,” despite citing online complaints and Apple marketing statements calling the laptops “state of the art” or the “most advanced” on the market.

“Plaintiffs have failed to allege that Apple’s logic boards were unfit for their ordinary purposes or lacked a minimal level of quality,” Alsup wrote. “Both plaintiffs were able to adequately use their computers for approximately 18 months and two years, respectively.”

However, Alsup did not chuck out the case completely. He gave the plaintiffs until January 22 to amend their lawsuit, which sought class-action status. It is not clear how they are going to proceed next.

The plaintiffs claimed that Apple’s sale of MacBooks since May 20, 2010, violated consumer protection laws in California and Texas, where the lawsuit began last May before being moved.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook was told about the defective logic boards in 2011, but did nothing.

A separate and still pending lawsuit in California accuses Apple of defrauding consumers by selling MacBook Pro laptops in 2011 that contained defective graphic cards, causing screen distortions and system failures. Still you get what you pay for.

Infosys beats Wall Street predictions

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

Workers are pictured beneath clocks displaying time zones in various parts of the world at an outsourcing centre in BangaloreIndian outsourcers Infosys have business results which were much better than the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted.

Infosys posted a 13 percent rise in quarterly net profit, as it won more outsourcing contracts from Western clients than many thought possible.

Infosys, which provides IT services to clients including Apple, Wal-mart, and Volkswagen, said profit in the quarter ended December 31 rose to $520.9 million. Analysts, on average, were expecting a profit of   $498.8 million.

It has been a tough year for Infosys.  It has lost ground to competition and staff have been leaving the building so fast they have had to keep the doors open all the time.

The company has been boosting growth by focusing on high-margin services including artificial intelligence and automation.

The company won 59 new clients in the December quarter, it said in a statement.

 

 

Only 10 percent of cloud apps are secure

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

Every silver has a cloudy liningNew research has found that only one in ten cloud apps are secure enough for enterprise use.

According to a report from cloud experts Netskope, organisations are employing an average of over 600 business cloud apps, despite the majority of software posing a high risk of data leak.

More than 15 percent of logins for business cloud apps used by organisations had been breached by hackers.

One in five businesses in the Netskope cloud actively used more than 1,000 cloud apps, and over eight per cent of files in corporate-sanctioned cloud storage apps were in violation of DLP policies, source code, and other policies surrounding confidential and sensitive data.

A quarter of all files are shared with one or more people outside of the organisation, and of external users with links to shared content, almost 12 percent have access to 100 or more files.

Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri said that 2014 left an indelible mark on security – between ongoing high-profile breaches and the onslaught of vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Heartbleed, CSOs and CISOs had more on their plate than ever.

“These events underscore the sobering reality that many in the workforce have been impacted by data breaches and will subsequently use compromised accounts in their work lives, putting sensitive information at risk,” he added.

The research also found that the most insecure apps were primarily linked with marketing, finance and human resource software, while cloud storage, social and IT/app management programmes had the lowest proportion of insecure apps.

“Employees today have shifted from thinking of apps as a nice-to-have to a must-have, and CISOs must continue to adapt to that trend to secure their sensitive corporate and customer data across all cloud apps, including those unsanctioned by IT,” Beri continued.

Google Drive, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Gmail were among the apps investigated.

Do you want electricity with that?

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

mcdonalds-hospitalPurveyor of meat themed products McDonalds is installing 600 charging hotspots in 50 of its British restaurants.

The move means that anyone with a compatible smartphone or tablet can simply sit it on the counter to start automatically charging its batteries. They will have to be quick of course, it does not take long to eat at McDonalds, something seems to propel you from the building after five minutes.

The setup is part of a deal with wireless charging technology company Air Charge which will provide  the charging pads, which operate on the Qi standard.

Air Charge made the announcement during this week’s International CES in Las Vegas but it has been trailed in some UK McDonald’s already.

The charging plates, which will be integrated into tables and counters, are water resistant and wipe clean and offer native support to 70 different smartphone handsets currently on sale.

Nokia Lumia handsets support the Qi wireless charging standard, either out of the box or via an optional back plate.

Starbucks has been named as rolling out wireless charging points across its US operation. However, rather than the Qi standard, backed by the Wireless Power Consortium, Starbucks has opted for the Power Matters Alliance standard instead.

There were three competing wireless charging standards all attempting to become the global standard, but two of them the Power Matters Alliance (which counts Google as a member) merged with the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), which is backed by Dell and Microsoft to integrate the two standards in future devices and chargers.

Tablet users to exceed one billion

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

tesco-hudl-tabletA report claimed that over a billion people in the world will use a tablet this year – that’s 15 percent of the world’s population.
eMarketer said that by 2018, 1.43 billion worldwide will use tablets but that doesn’t mean that sales of tablets will increase exponentially.
While the number of tablet users will increase by just over 17 percent in 2015, eMarketer says that growth was 53.1 percent in 2013 and 29.1 percent in  2014.
In 2018 the growth figure will be just under eight percent, and there are a few reasons for that, the study suggests.
One is that tablets are seen as luxury items, and they are facing competition from ever larger smartphones and other devices.  The last reason eMarketer gives is that the use of tablets is not always that clear.
By 2018, Chinese tablets will be used by around 435.5 million people, USA people will account for 172.6 million, India for 60.2 million people and the UK for 38.4 million people.
The survey predicts that Indonesia will enter the top five in 2016, and by 2018 nearly a fifth of the world’s population will be tablet users.

 

Apple hikes prices in Europe

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

blue-applePrices in Apple’s App Store within the European Union are set to rise in the next day or so.
According to AppleInsider, which has seen an email sent by the company to its developers, the email said prices in the App Store are to rise “for all territories in the European Union”.
Other countries are also set to see price changes, with Canada and Norway facing rises, while Iceland prices are set to fall.
Changes may affect Russia too, but they’re less clear because of the fluctuations of the price of the ruble against other currencies.
Apple said the changes were being made as a result of “adjustments” in the EU and changes in foreign exchange rates.
AppleInsider said the changes are probably because the Euro weakened against the US dollar during the course of this week.

 

Scientists improve quantum hard drive

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

crystalThe Australian National University (ANU) claimed that a prototype quantum hard drive it’s developing has improved storage times by as much as 100 times.
The goal of the scientists are to use quantum physics to develop a highly secure data encryption network using quantum information, with applications in banking and other internet functions.
As we reported earlier this week, other scientists are working to achieve higher internet security using quantum physics.
The scientists said they stored quantum information in atoms of Europium embedded in a crystal.
They claim that the solid state technique offers advantages over using laser beams in optical fibres.  The team’s record storage time is now six hours.
Manjin Zhong from ANU, said: “Our storage times are now so long that it means people need to rethink what is the best way to distribute quantum data.  Even transporting our crystals at pedestrian speeds we have less loss than laser systems for a given distance.”
She said that the team’s goal is store light in separate crystals and transport them to different parts of networks thousands of kilometres apart.  “We are thinking of our crystals as portable optical hard drives for quantum entanglement,” she said.