Tag: techeye

Larry Ellison quits

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

Larry EllisonMuch feared Oracle founder Larry Ellison has surprised everyone by stepping down as CEO and replacing himself with a two headed monster made from the bodies of Safra Catz and Mark Hurd.

Ellison will still be the executive chairman of Oracle’s board, as well as the company’s chief technology officer.

Catz has been at Oracle for 15 years, serving as an executive in a variety of roles. She has been a president since 2004. From 2005 to 2008, she was CFO. While Ellison has chewed up and spat out many executives, that has been fairly cool for Catz, who has not only survived but thrived.

Soft porn star fancier Mark Hurd has been at Oracle since 2010 and was previously CEO of HP. He was ousted after fudging his expense accounts while trying to pick up a b-movie starlet named Jodie Fisher.

Adam Lashinsky at Fortune revealed that Hurd was thrown out because he did not want to disclose publicly that Fisher, and her attorney Gloria Allred, were accusing him of sexual harassment. The board wanted Hurd to disclose the charge, because they knew it would eventually get out.

As Hurd fought over disclosure, the board gradually lost faith in Hurd. Hurd was not exactly popular at HP – he fired people and killed the company’s R&D budget.  This made him loved by Wall Street but unloved by HP.

It is not clear why Ellison wants out of Oracle which he founded in the late ’70s. The company’s software has become a key backbone for the internet and is widely used by the government and banking sectors.

Through aggressive sales methods, Ellison turned Oracle into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Its market cap is about $183 billion. It’s expected to do $40.2 billion in sales this year.

Ellison is the seventh richest man in the world, with a net worth of $46 billion.

But Ellison was, how do you say, a little aggressive. His motto for life comes from Genghis Khan: “It’s not sufficient I succeed. Everyone else must fail”. While Gates was spending his cash trying to save Africans from the mosquito,  Ellison was buying his own Hawaiian island, and many homes, yachts, and cars.  He was also investing huge wodges of cash to beat New Zealand in the America Cup.

All this makes his exit seem very strange indeed. In fact, we would not be surprised if he has to fend off rumours that he has some illness which prevents him from working.  It would have to be a nasty illness that stops Larry doing anything Larry does not want to do.  Of course his quitting could simply because he wants to build an iron man suit and save the world.

But Oracle Board’s Presiding Director, Michael Boskin said that Ellison had made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy.

 

SAP agrees to Concur

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSAP, the maker of expensive business software, which no one understands,  has written a cheque for expense management software maker Concur Technologies.

The all-stock deal is valued at $7.3 billion and will help SAP expand its esoteric presence in cloud computing.

SAP said in a statement it would offer $129 per share for the outfit and, while  this is 20 percent more than the September 17 closing price, it is lower than the $130.36 high Concur had at the beginning of the year.

SAP’s offer is rather generous. Concur is valued at $7.3 billion. Including debt, the offer represents an enterprise value of about $8.3 billion. However it will give SAP 12 million more cloud users.

In a statement SAP Chief Executive Bill McDermott said that buying Concur was consistent with SAPs focus on the business network.

Concur has 23,000 clients that include companies, governments and universities, with more than 25 million users of its business expense and travel management software and services.

More than a third of Concur users run SAP software and the southern-Germany based company expects to add Concur customers.

The Concur acquisition gives SAP deeper access to an area of corporate finance where it is not dominant. “SAP now has a business network that is 75 percent bigger than Amazon, eBay and Alibaba combined,” said CEO McDermott.

The company entered the cloud business quite late in 2012 after spending $7.7 billion on buying internet-based computing companies Ariba and SuccessFactors.

It wants to get 3 billion-3.5 billion euros in sales from cloud computing by 2017 out of a total of at least 22 billion. McDermott said that SAP will raise the outlook after completion of the Concur acquisition.

 

 

Mozilla closes its labs

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

scilence-will-fall-doctor-who-21732985-1152-792Open Sauce Mozilla Labs has been closed and the shutdown was either kept under wraps for months, or just forgotten about.

When Google Labs closed there was much fuming – after all it meant that the search engine outfit had also closed many projects.  But Google announced it, while Mozilla, which is supposed to be open saucy and transparent didn’t.

In fact the organisation even left the Mozilla Labs Website still accessible, even if the last post was December 2013. Justin Scott, who wrote the last blog post left Mozilla in March 2014.

For those who came in late, March 2014 was the month in which Brendan Eich become CEO of Mozilla, only to resign within a couple of weeks on account of his views on gay marriage which was seen as counter to Mozilla’s ethos of inclusiveness.

Ian Elliot thinks that the removal of Mozilla Labs had obviously happened before this furore.

David Ascher, who was Head of Mozilla Labs, is now VP of Product at Mozilla Foundation,  Aaron Druck, a designer at Mozilla Labs is now with Google.

 

There’s a billion websites on the internet

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

sir timThe number of websites has gone above one billion for the first time and is still growing.

According to figures updated in real time by online tracker Internet Live Stats and tweeted by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the World Wide Web, more than a billion companies and individuals have their own page.

The news comes as the agency responsible for managing addresses on the internet expands choices far beyond “.com” and “.net” to provide more online real estate for the booming ranks of websites.

That sort of growth is not back for a technology which turned 25 in April this year.  The WWW was born from a technical paper from Sir Tim, then an obscure, young computer scientist at a CERN lab in Switzerland. Sir Tim outlined a way to easily access files on linked computers.

More than 40 percent of the world’s population now has an Internet connection, and the number of Internet users in the world is quickly approaching three billion with almost 50 percent of them coming from Asia.

This means 2,334,479 emails are sent in one second, some of them are not for get rich schemes, or penis enlargement.

More than 75 percent of websites today aren’t active but are “parked domains or similar.” More than 88,670 YouTube videos are viewed in a second. It is not clear how many of these are cat related.

The number of new websites more than doubled between 2011 and 2012, but it decreased by more than 20 million in 2013.

On the downside more than 25,000 websites have been hacked and are probably serving up some of the emails we mentioned earlier.

 

 

Apple’s iPhone6 will be tricky to fix

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

maxresdefaultGadget repair firm iFixit has voided the warranty on an iPhone 6 to see what was under the bonnet and found that it would be a major headache to repair.

Apparently to get inside you have to extract two proprietary Pentalobe screws, and then lever the entire front display assembly away from the rest of the body with a suction cup, being careful not to rip the TouchID sensor wire clean off. Apple clearly does not want anyone looking inside or fixing it themselves.

The battery is bigger than previous iPhones — it has a 2915mAh battery, which is nearly double the 1560mAh cell in the iPhone 5S. However, it smaller than most Phablets, which means that it lacks the juice of its rivals. The Galaxy Note 3 has a 3200mAh up its sleeve.

The iPhone 6 also has a disappointing 1GB of RAM. Most high-end Android phones have 2-3GB.

iFixit technicians also discovered a Murata (6981.T) wifi module, a Broadcom touchscreen controller, and chips from Skyworks, Avago and TriQuint.

The phones are Apple’s first to include NFC radio chips used for the new Apple Pay mobile payment platform. The NFC chip in the iPhone 6 Plus comes from NXP Semiconductors (NXPI.O).

NXP also supplies a motion co-processor, key to making the iPhone’s sensors work without draining its battery.

As in other iPhones, Apple has designed its own main processor with technology licensed from ARMand in this device it is the A8 chip.

The iPhone 6 Plus opened by iFixit also included a NAND flash memory chip, used for storing music and photos, made by SK Hynix.  Apple in the past has depended on multiple companies to supply its memory chips.

 

Big data ready for the big time

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

Godzilla: Big DataEnterprises have got off the fence about adoption in big data technologies with 73 percent of those surveyed saying they either have invest or will invest in big data in the next 24 years.

That’s according to some data from Gartner, which says the pack is being led by North America, with 47 percent of organisations saying they’d invested in 2014.

But while these organisations might be ready for the big data big time, IDC says that most work is in strategy and starting pilots and experimental projects.

Lisa Kart, a research director at IDC, said: “The most dramatic changes are in enhancing customer experience, especially in transportation, healthcare, insurance, media and communications, retail, and banking. Another area where we see an increase is using big data to develop information products, where organisations are looking to monetise their data. This is especially true among IT vendors, government and manufacturing.”

What is big data, though? It appears that some are still trying to understand what big data is.  Gartner says increasing data volume is understandable because it’s just a massive amount of data, and volume is easy because you just add storage and computing capacity.

Getting value is more difficult because of the variety of data and sources including social media feeds, machine and sensor data and free form text which all require analysing.

Desktop 3D printer upgraded

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News, Products

Tiertime 3D printerTiertime said it has launched a new desktop 3D printer, called UP BOX.

It costs $1,900 and is aimed at both professional and educational market.

The machine will churn out larger units with a max size of 10x8x8 inches, while the print resolution is now 0.1mm and printing speed 30 percent faster than its predecessor.

Other features include automatic calibration, an air filtration system that cuts down noise and making sure no noxious fumes escape. Perhaps most important to some is  LED based “mood lighting” that tells you where you are on the printing front.

The unit comes with software, a build platform for warp free ABS printing and a one year limited guarantee and service.

The unit will be available in November, through Amazon and other shops, worldwide.

Online holiday sales to burgeon

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

fatherchristmasHoliday sales in 2014 look set to bring a bumper harvest for online vendors.

Channel Advisor, a cloud company,  surveyed over 200 online shops in the UK and US with each averaging out $3 million to $5 million in 2013.

Redshift Research, which conducted the survey, said 86 percent of those surveyed expected to increase those sales this year.

Over a quarter of those  surveyed expect an 11 to 15 percent while half expect an increase between one and 10 percent.  Not one forecast a decline in their online sales.

And Christmas gets earlier by the year.  Many plan to push sales in September but 20 percent already started their holiday season promotions in August.

The online shops claim customer services are important to drive sales.  41 percent will offer free shipping and returns.  Most – 67 percent – said offering free shipping increases sales.

And there’s a push towards the companies increasing their digital marketing and advertising budgets this year.

Dell rules the PC monitor roost

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News, Products

Dell logoPC monitor unit shipments amounted to 32.5 million units in the second quarter of this year – and that’s a fall of 2.9 percent compared to the year before.

IDC released findings on the quarter, said that tendency will continue over the next three years.

But LCD technology had a 93 percent market share in the second quarter, an increase of 10.5 percent compared to the same quarter a year before.

The favoured screen size is 21.x-inches, and had a market share of 22.5 percent in the quarter.

While touch screen monitors continue to hold only a tiny part of the total PC monitor share of 0.4 percent, there was stronger growth in the USA than in other markets.

Dell managed to stay number one in the quarter, with market share of 15.4 percent, representing five million units.

Samsung, at number two, had a 17.9 percent share in market value. In revenue terms, it was number one, shipping $1.04 billion wrth of units in the quarter.

HP is the number three worldwide, but held the number one position in Western Europe, and the number two position in the US.

Gartner talks up smart watches

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

fobwatchThe jury is still very much out on whether people will want to have a smart watch on their wrists, but a report from Gartner appears to favour the “yes” rather than the “no” vote.

Gartner’s notion is that Chinese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) will drive the price of smart watches down – with Android devices averaging $150 a throw. That will mean that by 2016 smart watches will account for 40 percent of wrist worn devices, Gartner predicts.

Apple’s iWatch starts at $350 and won’t be available until next year.

Gartner’s Angela McIntyre, a research director at Gartner, said: “Apple has finally unveiled its watch, which we expect to trigger more consumer interest once it starts shipping in 2015.”

Another research director, Annette Zimmermann, said that the latest smart watches show imprvements in design and Android Wear will include voice search, turn-by-turn navigation, contextual reminders and taking notes via voice output.

One of the obstacles to acceptance, however, is the sheer proliferation of devices that need charging, Gartner thinks.

US confirms Chinese government behind hacks

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

1220aA US Senate panel has ruled that hackers associated with the Chinese government have repeatedly infiltrated the computer systems of US airlines, technology companies and other contractors involved in the movement of US troops and military equipment.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s year-long probe found the military’s US Transportation Command, or Transcom, was aware of only two out of at 20 such cyber intrusions within a single year.

It found gaps in reporting requirements and a lack of information sharing among US government bodies which left the US military oblivious to the computer compromises of its contractors.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s chairman was keen to focus on the Chinese hackers rather that the big defence industry’s cock-ups.

He said that the peacetime intrusions into the networks of key defence contractors are more evidence of China’s aggressive actions in cyberspace.

But cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer with the security firm Crowdstrike, said that China had for years shown a keen interest in the logistical patterns of the U.S. military.

While its military uses secret or top-secret networks that are not on the Internet, but the US private companies hired by the US do not.

In the year beginning June 1, 2012, there were about 50 intrusions or other cyber events into the computer networks of Transcom contractors, the 52-page report stated.

At least 20 of those were successful intrusions attributed to an “advanced persistent threat,” a term used to designate sophisticated threats commonly associated with attacks against governments. All of those intrusions were attributed to China.

Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the committee’s top Republican, called for a “central clearinghouse” that makes it easy for contractors to report suspicious cyber activity.

 

Apple to release two new iPads

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

eye-pads

Two new eye pads

Of course Apple itself has not announced it, it has leaked it as an official rumour to its favourite journalists who have lovingly published it.

The company plans to unveil the sixth generation of its iPad and the third edition of the iPad mini, as well as its operating system OS X Yosemite.  It appears that Yosemite is the same as previous versions with some cosmetic changes to excite the punters so they believe they are getting something different.

The iPad is expected to have a 9.7 inch screen, while the new version of the iPad mini will have a 7.9 inch screen.

They will be in the shops as part of Apple’s drive to sell goods during the holiday season.

Apple needs to do a lot better if it is going to keep its high share price. The outfit sold 13.3 million iPads in the quarter ended June, falling short of analysts’ projections for more than 14 million.

Radio Shack likely to close

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

1980-radio-shack-catalogOn paper, the electronics giant Radio Shack should have been one of the success stories of the electronics industry – however this week it announced its latest quarterly loss, $119.4 million, and that might mean that it is going to have to shut.

The company has been trying for nearly 20 years to turn itself around and has not made money for the last ten years.

But Radio Shack should have been a poster child for success. It sat at the heart of the electronics revolution and while it could have done really well, it didn’t.

The company was founded in 1921 and sold radio parts and surplus supplies by outlet and catalogue.  It was out of cash when in 1963 it was bought by Tandy, a leather retailer.

It expanded until Radio Shack became the place for all things related to electronics, during the CB radio craze of the 1970s it was the leading retailer of CBs. In 1977, the company had introduced one of the first mass-produced computers, the TRS-80, and initially outsold Apple using the power of its retail channel and its thousands of locations.

As the 1980s arrived it should have been king of the computer revolution but it was killed off as IBM and Dell delivered more powerful computers through different channels.

It phased out its computer business in 1993 along with its circuit board business, then its mobile phone business was shuttered.

The company tried new stores like Computer City to sell computers, Energy Express Plus to sell batteries, Famous Brand Electronics for refurbished electronics, McDuff and Video Concepts for  audio and video.  All tanked and had to be closed or flogged by the late 1990s.

It was still the place to go for gear until Best Buy began to capture the bulk of the electronics business. RadioShack remained largely your local stop for electronics gear. The problem was that most of the equipment became cables and ancillary things to make the computers go.

It failed to enter the mobile business and any hope were killed off when smartphones arrived.

In what was seen as a last gasp RadioShack tried to rebrand itself in February with a slick $4 million Super Bowl commercial. But it is still a company without a real purpose.

A plan to close about 1,100 stores was halted by RadioShack’s current lenders. And while RadioShack’s biggest shareholder, the hedge fund Standard General, is rumoured to be in talks to provide new financing, the question would then become whether RadioShack’s latest attempt to leverage its name by adopting cleaner and brighter stores could be pulled off.

What went wrong according to the New York Times  was that RadioShack suffered from poor, often overpaid, leadership, which could not focus on a single plan.

Radio Shack tried lots of different things but never really committed to one long enough. Radio Shack has branded itself well but could not do anything with that.

Malaysian IT uses forced labour

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

oliverMalaysian electronics companies are routinely using forced labour systems to get products to market, a human rights group claims.

The report is the result of a two-year study funded by the US Department of Labour and undertaken by Verité, a nonprofit organisation focused on labour issues.

More than 500 migrant workers at around 200 companies in Malaysia’s IT manufacturing sector were surveyed and one in three were working under conditions of forced labour.

Dan Viederman, CEO of Verité, said workers were lured to the company using deceptive adverts. The job looks good enough that they pay a broker to apply, often borrowing money from friends and family to do so.

When they arrive, their passport is taken by their employer and they’re threatened with deportation if they don’t work overtime. Since they are broke, and do not have a passport and with little knowledge of the legal process, they accept the increased workload.

The fees paid to brokers to obtain the overseas work are crippling and more than 90 per cent say that they pay them. Three quarters said they borrowed money to do so. More than half said it took more than a year of work to clear the debt, and they cannot leave Malaysia until it was paid.

Many of the factories were operated by subcontractors or suppliers to major brand-name companies, and Viederman said that all companies sourcing from Malaysia should audit their supply chain.

Companies should amend their codes of conduct for suppliers to ban the payment of fees to brokers and ensure workers are allowed to keep their identity documents when they arrive, he said.

The US Department of State said the situation in Malaysia had worsened in its annual report on human trafficking. The government there made “limited efforts to improve its flawed victim protection regime” despite assurances it would work to solve the problem.

Scientists twist to get more radio bandwidth

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

twistScientists from three international universities have twisted again, like they did last summer, and  managed to transfer data at the speed of 32 gigabits per second.

This is 30 times faster than 4G LTE wireless technology.

The team, led by Alan Willner, of the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, successfully demonstrated data transmission rates of 32 gigabits per second across 2.5m of free space in his basement.

He pointed out that this is one of the fastest data transmission via radio waves that has been demonstrated.

Dubbed “High-capacity millimetre-wave communications with orbital angular momentum multiplexing” is published in the latest issue of journal Nature Communications.

This speed can only be eclipsed by twisting light, Willner did this two years ago, and achieved data transmission speeds of 2.56 terabits per second. But radio is more reliable because it uses wider, more robust beams. Wider beams are better able to cope with obstacles between the transmitter and the receiver, and radio is not as affected by atmospheric turbulence as optics.

Millimetre waves occupy the 30GHz to 300GHz frequency bands.. They are found in the spectrum between microwaves, which take up the 1GHz to 30GHz bands, and infrared waves, which are sometimes known as extremely high frequency (EHF).

Mobile operators are becoming interested in millimetre waves as they seek to create faster 4G LTE networks and beat congestion from too many users accessing the internet on their phones at one time.

The next plan is to extend the twisted radio beams’ transmission range and capabilities. The technology could have potential applications in data centres, where large bandwidth links between computer clusters are required.