Tsar Putin bans iPhone and iPad

Posted on November 5, 2014 by - News

Movie-Ivan-the-Terrible-by-Sergei-EisensteinApple will be banned from selling its iPhone and Apple iPad in Russia, from January as the Russian Orthodox Tsar Putin orders a crackdown on the cargo cult.

Initially appeared that Apple was being banned from Russia because it has a gay CEO and Putin is homophobic in such a way which caused a business group to dismantle a memorial to Steve Jobs in St. Petersburg. It turns out that the reason is a little more sensible.

The iCloud that has Russian authorities concerned because data saved in it is not stored locally and is wide open to any US spook who wants to have a look at it. It could also contain pictures of homosexual romps in the Kremlin which could be distributed on 4Chan for a laugh.

The law was not created to harm Apple specifically, as it applies to all online services including social networks which have their servers in the US. However, it will probably harm Apple more.

Apple could put up a server farm in the country, but that that would mean that the data could be sniffed by the Russian spooks, and Jobs’ Mob only gives its data to the Americans.

What will get sticky is when Russia enforces the ban at the retail level. Those in Russia who currently own an iPhone or iPad that supports iCloud, might have to put up with relentless searches from the authorities.

It is not a big problem for Apple. Unlike China where there are people prepared to sell a kidney to own one of its phones, Russians are a little more pragmatic about handing over two months’ salary for a gadget which will be out of date in a year. An iPad and iPhone ban will only extend to the Russian mafia who are the only ones who can afford them.

 

Government to force better mobile coverage

Posted on November 5, 2014 by - News

TortureRackThe British government launched a consultation on new legislation to force mobile operators to improve coverage around the country.

Sajid Javid, the government’s culture secretary, said the  consultation will complement the work industry is doing and allow the Government to hear from the wider telecoms sector, businesses and the public,”

Traditionally governments hope that private enterprise will undertake such work voluntarily.  They drop some broad hints, coupled with threats of legislation and private enterprises rushes to it.  But for some reason the concept of rural coverage has not been a starter for the big telcos, so now the government has to make its threats clearer.

One possible option to eliminate poor coverage, which affects about one fifth of the UK, may include a national roaming plan, where subscribers will be able to switch between operators offering the strongest signal, the government said.

The government said it is keen to have comprehensive mobile coverage across the country to boost productivity and help provide jobs and economic security.

While this makes sense, it is the sort of thing that gives telecoms companies nightmares.

EE, the country’s largest mobile operator, said in a separate statement it does not want to implement national roaming as that would deteriorate network reliability and may also lead to price rises.

Vodafone agrees saying implementation “would be technically far more complex, slow to implement and would cause serious problems with network resilience”.

However the consultation include infrastructure sharing, allowing mobile networks to put transmitters on each other’s masts, and obliging the networks to cover a certain percentage of the UK.

What might happen is a group of telecoms will finally give in and agree to provide the sort of coverage the government wants.

Virgin Media kits out 150 Tube stations with wi-fi

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

londonundergroundSince the London Olympics, Virgin Media has been adding wi-fi to stations on the London Underground.

And today it said it has now kiitted out its 160th station.  It said that over 2.5 million gadgets are now registered on its network with over 3TB (terabytes) of data downloaded every day.

It said the most used service are at the Waterloo & City Line at Waterloo station, Kings Cross and Oxford Circus.

The service lets you access Transport for London travel information and news and some other stuff at no charge for subscribers to Virgin Media broadband, EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three customers.

Virgin claims that represents around 95 percent of people in London.

If you’re one of the five percent, you can get a daily pass for £2, a weekly pass for £5 and a two monthly pass for £15.

Dance helps girls win at computing

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

Image courtesy of Clemson UniversityWomen are under represented in the computer industry and now scientists at Clemson University have devised a way for girls to engage with IT.

The scientists are offering something called Virtual Environment Interactions aimed at blending dancing and programming for fifth and sixth grade girls in the USA.

Alison Leonard, a professor of education at Clemson, said the research: “will help young learners bootstrap their intuitive knowledge in order to programme a three dimensional character to perform movements.”

The method uses educational 3D software called Alice, and Leonard believes that executing software code or consecutive movements exist in both programming and choreography. “Likewise, loops or repeating a set of steps also occur in both contexts,” she said.

Students use the Alice software to create virtual characters to perform, based on their own dance movements.

Google cuts out the server middlemen

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

HP-MicroServerA report said that Taiwanese original design manufacturer (ODM) Quanta will supply search engine giant Google with its servers in 2015.

Google has long abandoned the habit of using “brand name” servers from the likes of Dell, HP or IBM/Lenovo.

The news, reported in Digitimes, confirms a recent survey saying that the ODMs, which often build machines that are then subsequently branded, are taking market share from the brand names.

It’s not just Google that is following this path.  Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft also buy their servers direct.  Quanta has benefited more from these changes in buying patterns because it has been quicker to realise the money involved than rivals such as Taiwanese company Inventec.

Until comparatively recently, Quanta’s entire business was building notebook machines, subsequently branded by others.  But the bottom has somewhat fallen out of the notebook business with the rise of tablets and smartphones.

GCHQ head hits out at IT companies

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

GCHQ buildingThe newly appointed head of spy outfit GCHQ has said computer companies like Facebook and Twitter are not doing enough to help security services catch criminals and terrorists.

Robert Hannigan went a little further than that and accused technology outfits of being “command and control networks for terrorists and criminals”.

The Islamic State, for example, used the web as a channel to promote itself, frighten people and radicalise new recruits.

Hannigan said: “But increasingly their services not only host the material of violent extremism or child exploitation, but are the routes for the facilitation of crime and terrorism.”

He also criticised the security of communications saying that encryption methods which were once the domain of nation states are now commonplace.  For example, Apple and Google include encryption in their mobile operating systems as a way of protecting people’s security and privacy.

He wants the tech companies to provide more support.

Internet of things spurs semiconductor growth

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

Internet of ThingsA research paper from Gartner said that devices used for processing, sensing and communications will grow by 36.2 percent next year, speeding ahead of the overall semi market that will grow by 5.7 percent.

Processors will be the largest slice of the revenue cake, worth $7.58 billion in 2015.

Alfonso Velosa, a research analyst at Gartner, said: “The demand for billions of things will ripple throughout the entire value chain, from software and services to semiconductor devices.  These things will drive huge demand for individual chips.”  He said the growth would cover industries including consumer, industrial, medical, automotive and others.

He said LED lighting will grow in volume and that will lower costs and allow new services to be provided through connecting, networking and sensing the environment.

iot
He predicts smart glasses and smartwatches will also see .

Gartner forecasts nearly 30 percent growth up to 2020 for semiconductor revenues related to the internet of things.  “The truth is that inexpensive devices are one of the biggest enablers of the internet of things.”

Russians destroy shrine to Steve Jobs

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

Church fireThe Fruity Cargo Cult Apple’s attempts to spread the worship of its founder Steve Jobs has fallen foul of Russia’s backward homophobia.

This week Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed the badly kept secret that he was gay, and while that was well received in most of the world it has created a backlash in Russia.

The two-metre-high monument, in the shape of an iPhone, was erected outside a St Petersburg college in January 2013 by the West European Financial Union companies called ZEFS.

But Russia has strict laws against “gay propaganda” and ZEFS said that the memorial had been removed from the courtyard of the Techno Park in St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo.

“In Russia, gay propaganda and other sexual perversions among minors are prohibited by law,” ZEFS said, noting the memorial had been “in an area of direct access for young students and scholars.”

“After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values.”

The move is clearly an attempt to butter up Tsar Vladimir Putin who considers homosexuality a moral issue. Putin insists that there is no discrimination against gay people in Russia and the law was needed only to protect young people. It has also encouraged those of a less intelligent disposition to beat up and lynch young gay people.

But Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, was not gay and it is not clear what  Maxim Dolgopolov, the head of ZEFS who ordered the removal of the monument

“Sin should not become the norm. There is nothing to do in Russia for whose who intend to violate our laws,” he said.

Dolgopolov’s implication is that Apple is a gay cult lead by its founder and ruled by its immoral boss and is working to subvert the children of Russia with its homosexual ways. The whole concept is silly, and if Apple were big in Russia it could have seriously damaged its business reputation.

Google is too grown up to “do no evil”

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

 darth-vaderGoogle thinks that it has matured as a company and it no longer needs its “do no evil” mantra.

Google’s chief executive Larry Page said that the company needs a new statement about its corporate ambitions but denies that he has joined the dark side.

He thinks Google is in uncharted territory and ‘trying to figure it out’ a new mission statement for the next 100 years.

Google’s chief executive Larry Page has admitted that the company has outgrown its mission statement to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” from the launch of the company in 1998, but has said he does not yet know how to redefine it.

However, Page thinks that in getting bigger, Google does not need to dump the altruistic principles that it was founded on in 1998. He and co-founder Sergey Brin were aiming big with “societal goals” to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Over the years, Google has been accused of doing evil by wielding too much influence over the internet.

It has faced anti-monopoly probes by the European commission and most recently pressure from Europe over the “right to be forgotten” forced to remove search listings to information deemed to be outdated and not in the public interest which saw Britons request over 60,000 links be deleted by October.

 

Intel releases Core M for OEMs

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

bendIntel has hit the market with a range of faster Core M chips which are hitting the shops just a few months after its first Core M lineup was announced.

Intel has added four more Core M’s to its list. Like the launch chips, these four are dual-core designs that support HyperThreading. Like the earlier chips, these are spec’d with a TDP of 4.5W.

However, these are faster than the launch models, with a base clock speed of 1.2GHz, which is burstable through Turbo up to 2.9GHz.

What really sets these chips apart from the initial Core M models is that their TDP is scalable, based on what the builder wants to do with it. For example if the chip is set to be used in a notebook with very little free space, the OEM could opt to drop the chip down to 3.5W and lose 600MHz in the process. A bulkier notebook could handle a hotter chip better, so a higher TDP can be used. Any one of these new chips could be tweaked to peak at 6W and add 200MHz to the clock. That would put a chip like the M-5Y71 at 1.4GHz, rather than 1.2GHz.

The chips also offer the same flexibility for graphics. The IGP in the initial Core M chips were clocked at 100MHz base, while these new CPUs start at 300MHz. The top-end clock for the top two models can reach 900MHz, whereas some of the launch models peak at 850MHz.

All four of these new models have officially launched, but it is likely that they will not hit the market until early 2015.

Xiaomi gets into TV content

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - News

tv58China’s Xiaomi, the world’s third-largest smartphone manufacturer, is stepping sideways and getting into television.

Writing in its official Weibo microblog the company said it will invest $1 billion in building television content.

The big idea is that providing TV content will help enrich the company’s content and becoming a ‘leading bellwether for the industry.’

Details of the move are sketchy at the moment, but Xiaomi is entering a rocky sea where many leading bellwethers, including Microsoft, Intel and Apple have run aground.

It most likely that the content that the company is thinking of creating will be for the Chinese market, and might provide a different sort of service to what has been attempted in the West.

However, the company’s business model does require it to provide more content. The company sells their phones at cost, stating that the hardware is the delivery vehicle for the software. It has its own ecommerce platform, which is the third largest in China and pushes itself as a form of social media.

IBM reshuffles its deck

Posted on November 4, 2014 by - Moving People, News

vov24k_mediumIBM has reshuffled its senior management in a bid to turn around the outfit’s flagging fortunes.

Martin Jetter, who was credited with fixing Biggish Blue’s  Japanese operation has been shifted to senior vice president and head of its global technology services unit.

Jetter, who currently heads IBM’s operations in Japan, will initially report to Erich Clemanti and will succeed him as head of the services unit on January 1, when Clemanti will move to another unnamed senior leadership role.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said that Jetter was Big Blue’s Mr Fixit and led a remarkable transformation of IBM Japan, returning it to growth. Previously he did the same thing with  IBM Germany and GBS in Europe. “In each case, he and his team have moved quickly to embrace new approaches and new thinking,” Rometty said.

IBM has been falling behind as it struggles to keep up with shifts in the industry as hardware becomes increasingly commoditized. Lately, the outfit which was once best known for mainframe computers, has been moving to higher-margin businesses such as security software and cloud services, but growth in those areas has failed to offset other company weaknesses.

Last month, IBM paid $1.5 billion to Globalfoundries to take its loss-making semiconductor unit off its hands.

Smart light bulbs strike a light

Posted on November 3, 2014 by - News

lightsonLight bulbs using LED technology that know where they are and can be programmed are still in an early stage of development.

But that is about to change, said ABI Research – suggesting that while shipments were less than 2.5 million units in 2013, by 2020 the installed base is likely to be over 400 million.

LEDs using 802.15.4 protocols – that’s wi-fi – are likely to be the winners representing a three quarter share of the market.  ZigBee Light Link will be the preferred way of connection.

Prices of LED bulbs are continuing to fall and the market is likely to be saturated pretty quickly because of their typically longer life.

There is quite a gaggle of players in the market already including Philips, GE, Osram, Belin, Insteaon, LG and Samsung.

Malik Saadi, director at ABI Research said that smart lighting will be fuelled by customer lifestyle patterns including automation and high energy efficiency.

Philips already sells light bulbs and lighting strips that can be programmed to turn on or off as people arrive at or leave their houses, and can be switched off and on remotely using the internet.

Public IT cloud service spending to soar

Posted on November 3, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeBy 2018, spending on public IT cloud services is set to be worth $127 billion.

That’s according to research from IDC, which indicates a five year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 percent – six times the rate for the IT market overall.

The spending is a result of the conjunction of IT vendors offering more services and buyers wanting to buy more kit.

IDC thinks much of the growth is likely to be industry platforms with their own communities.

The news is good for developers, as their numbers will triple and create as many as a 10 time increase of new cloud offerings.

And the offerings will be strategic rather than tactical.

IDC expects a great deal of consolidation in the cloud services industry as a result of increased competition.

Software as a service (SaaS) will dominate public IT cloud services spending – accounting for as much as 70 percent of expenditure this year.  That’s because customer demand is chiefly at the application level, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Digital marketing budgets set to grow

Posted on November 3, 2014 by - News

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyIt looks like firms will spend more on digital marketing than ever before.

That’s according to research company Gartner that said digital marketing budgets will rise by eight percent in 2015.

Gartner surveyed 315 firms in the UK, Canada and the USA from all types of sectors including high tech, manufacturing, media, retail, financial services and hospitality.

It found that digital marketing was a quarter of these firms’ marketing budgets in 2014 and of the 51 percent of companies planning to increase digital marketing in 2015, the average increase will be 17 percent.

Laura McLellan, a VP at Gartner, said that the line between traditional and digital marketing continues to blur.

Sixty eight percent of respondents indicated they had separate digital marketing budgets and digital advertising takes the top spot. But programmatic media is continuing to grow, as well as automated bidding for ads.