a2z Information: 2013-01-20

Saturday, January 26, 2013

LG Display posts dollar 299 million profit

LG Display reported a $299 million profit for the fourth quarter thanks to mobile product launches by key customers including Apple but warned that earnings will decrease in the current quarter as demand for iPhones wanes.

The South Korean panel maker said its October-December net profit totaled 319.7 billion won ($299 million) compared with a loss of 6.3 billion won a year earlier when the European Union fined the company 215 million euros for price fixing. Sales rose 32 per cent to 8.74 trillion won.

Tech Mahindra, India's fifth-largest software services provider, will increase local hiring in the United States and Europe as it seeks to become a more international partner to its customers, Chief Executive C P Gurnani said.

"I strongly believe that any company that only depends on the India-centric outsourcing model is only counting days," Gurnani told Reuters in Davos on Tuesday.

One look at the news feed of Facebook will give you an indication of the huge amount of data that is flowing into the cyberworld. Earlier, it was mostly text, in the form of status messages. Now it's mostly images in the form of photographs and videos. It's not surprising, considering the availability of technology.

Thanks to good cameras on even basic phones and inexpensive data plans, it's now easy not only to shoot images and upload them to websites, but also to share them on various platforms like social networking sites or email them to friends.

A US trade panel that specializes in patent disputes will review a potentially key decision in the patent fight between Samsung Electronics and Apple over smartphones and tablets.

The panel, the International Trade Commission, also sent part of the dispute back to judge, who ruled in October that Samsung, the world's top maker of smartphones, infringed four Apple patents but did not violate two others.

German business software group SAP said its profit would grow faster than revenues from traditional software and related services, helped by new web software products like cloud-computing and data analysis.

SAP, based in Walldorf, southern Germany, is betting on faster growing, web-based software products that are less vulnerable to the economic downturn as there are no upfront costs for programme licences, hardware or installation.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion will launch BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, its latest smartphone management tool for organisations, in India as part of its first phase of the global launch in 20 countries. The high-end enterprise mobility management solution for the first time will go beyond managing BlackBerry and will allow companies to manage smartphones and tablets based on Android and iOS as well.

Excited about Samsung's upcoming rival to Apple iPad mini? Now you can also get a glance at the rumoured device. An image of the yet-to-be-unveiled tablet has been leaked online.

The photo has been tweeted by a user with Twitter handle @ClasificateArg. The image shows the front and rear views of Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0, along with a few hardware specifications. The design language of the tablet is similar to the introduced with Galaxy S III. The front camera is placed on the right side and the rear panel only has the camera, while the loudspeaker grille is missing.

British regulators fined Sony 250,000 pounds ($396,100) on Thursday for having insufficient security measures to prevent a cyber attack on its PlayStation Network.

The attack in April 2011 targeted credit card information through Sony's PlayStation Network and put millions of users' personal information - including names, addresses, birth dates and account passwords - at risk.

Search giant Google has revamped its image search feature. In a blog post, company's associate product manager, Hongyi Li, said that based on feedback from both users and webmasters, the company has redesigned Google Images.
The revamped Google Images page will be faster and more reliable than the current version, claims the post. The images will soon be displayed in an inline panel and will be accompanied by the associated metadata and key information.

Struggling Nokia turned a net profit of (euro) 202 million ($270 million) in the fourth quarter, compared with a loss of $1 billion a year earlier, but revenue fell 20 per cent as it failed to make gains in the fiercely competitive smartphone market.

The Finnish company said that revenue dropped to (euro) 8 billion ($10.6 billion) from (euro) 10 billion as smartphone sales plunged 55 per cent from a year earlier.

Global Internet hit 2012 speed bump, Study

Global Internet connection speeds around the world slowed in late 2012, according to a survey released Thursday that suggested a temporary stall in broadband gains.

Akamai Technologies' third quarter "State of the Internet" report also showed China remained the biggest source of computer attacks, and that Brazil and China appear to have the biggest surge in Web use.

The global average connection speed decreased by some seven percent between the second and third quarters of 2012 to 2.8 megabytes per second (Mbps).

Yahoo! confirmed Tuesday that it bought Snip.it, a young San Francisco startup that lets people create scrapbooks with pictures, articles, videos and other content found online.
"The Snip.it team created an innovative technology that lets people share content in a social and fun way," Yahoo! vice president of product Mike Kerns said in a statement emailed to AFP.

"Reading and sharing content is a core daily habit for most of the world, and we can't wait to work with the Snip.it team to make that experience even more entertaining for our users."

IT czar Azim Premji has said his son Rishad will never be the chief executive of his company Wipro, but will represent promoter ownership on the company's board.

Rishad, 35, joined Wipro in 2007 as business head for special projects in the banking and financial services vertical and rose to become chief strategy officer three years later.

Premji, who founded Wipro, said becoming CEO was not the career path for the eldest of his two sons.

It's sad but true that the $2 billion Indian film industry, touted as one of the largest in the world, still treats animation as an orphaned child.

The Indian animation industry is pegged at $350 million and yet remains in the dark because of the size of our companies and the lack of creative storytellers, market intelligence and writers, feels Rudra Masta, CEO RME, a company, known for making Indian animation television series "Little Pandavas", "Baba" and "Garuda".

Although Google is scrambling to meet consumers as they flock to mobile devices, the question is whether it is moving fast enough.

When Google announced its fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday, investors were watching closely for positive signals of Google's progress in the evolution to a mobile world.

They received a disappointing sign: The price that advertisers paid Google each time someone clicked on an ad, known as cost per click, decreased 6 per cent from the year-ago quarter, falling for the fifth consecutive quarter, year over year. It has been declining in large part because mobile ads cost advertisers less, and more people are using Google on their mobile devices and fewer on their desktop computer.

Samsung Electronics has overtaken Apple as the biggest consumer of semiconductors across the world for 2012, according to a report by research house Gartner. As per the report, the total available market (TAM) for semiconductors is valued at $297.6 billion, wherein the top two buyers account for $45.3 billion or 15% of total demand.

While the semiconductor market contracted by 3% in 2012, Samsung's demand for the product increased by 28.9%. Likewise, Apple bought 13.6% more semiconductors last year than the one before it. Apart from Samsung and Apple, Sony and Lenovo were only two semiconductor customers in Gartner's report of top 10 buyers who saw purchases increase in 2012 over the preceding year.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that its business-oriented Surface Windows 8 Pro tablet computer will debut in the United States and Canada in February with a lofty starting price of $899.

Microsoft also said that the consumer-focused version of Surface released late last year here will soon be available in 13 new markets around the world.

The Surface Pro will be available on February 9 at Microsoft stores in the United States and Canada, at the online Microsoft store and at Staples and Best Buy and other retailers.

The software services industry whose frenetic hiring helped create a large slice of India's middle class in less than two decades may be nearing the end of a phase as the most prolific employer of college graduates, industry professionals and analysts said.

Hiring by India's top software exporters has been trending downwards in the past few quarters, a development which has been attributed to unfavourable market conditions. But alongside the crimped demand, experts believe there is a structural shift in the offshore outsourcing business which will mean that companies such as Infosys and HCL Technologies will no longer add software engineers in the numbers we are used to witnessing.

Three men from Russia, Romania and Latvia were in custody Wednesday in the U.S. on charges that they spread a computer virus to more than a million computers worldwide, including almost 200 of the U.S. space agency, siphoning off passwords andonline banking information that allowed hackers to steal tens of millions of dollars.

Their arrests were announced as federal authorities unsealed court documents accusing the men of participating in a conspiracy that began in 2005. NASA computers were among those infected by what was called the Gozi virus.

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The Uttar Pradesh government approved the purchase of 15 lakh laptops fromHP India at a unit cost of Rs.19,058, an official said.

The council of ministers approved the decision in a cabinet meeting here attended by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav after the recommendations made by the evaluation and technical committee of UP Electronics Corporation were reviewed by it.

A government spokesperson told IANS that the cost per unit will include all taxes and duty cost. The purchase cost of the 15 lakh laptops would total about Rs.2,858 crore.

Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.

And the situation is even worse than it appears.

Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What's more, these jobs aren't just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren't just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.

Tech start ups becoming new face of Indian IT

It is unlikely that Gramener, Anaxee and Stelling are companies that most people would have even heard about, but these and others like them could represent the new frontiers of India's software industry.

Over more than two decades, India earned a reputation as the global leader in software outsourcing, but product companies - perceived as the mark of a true technology powerhouse - have been few and far between. With Gramener and technology product companies of its ilk coming up in large numbers across India, that anomaly is on its way to being set right.

Billionaire co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, was spotted travelling on a downtown train in New York late on Sunday night wearing the company's yet to be released Google Glasses, which is worth 1,500 dollars a pair.

Straphanger Noah Zerkin spotted Brin riding a downtown train on Sunday evening, holding a plastic bag and sporting a winter hat.

In a Twitter message, Serkin said he couldn't believe his eyes after seeing Brin in the train.

Video game maker Atari's US operations have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in an effort to separate from their French parent company, which is filing a similar motion separately in France.

In a statement, Atari says the move is necessary to secure investments it needs to grow in mobile and downloadable video games.

Atari's US operations have shifted to focus on digital games and licensing, including developing mobile games, and have become a growth engine for its owner. France's Infogrames Entertainment first took a stake in Atari in 2000. It acquired the remaining stake in 2008 and changed its name to Atari S.A.

Concerned over the proposed steep upward revision of property tax on them, IT companies here are expected to meet senior state government officials within a couple of days over the issue.

The Chennai Corporation Council passed a resolution yesterday seeking to increase theproperty tax for IT companies ranging between 50 to 200 per cent hike.

"We have been getting calls from several IT firms and agencies since morning. We are planning to meet the Government and discuss the matter during the next two days..", a senior official of an IT industry body told PTI.

With the concept of bring your own device (BYOD) gaining momentum, Bharti Airtel launched a mobile data security solution for corporates that allows employees to access enterprise data on device of their choice in a secure manner.

"Airtel Dynamic Mobile Exchange (DME) allows workforce to access enterprise data from anywhere on a device of their choice, in a secure manner- thus enhancing the business productivity while meeting mobile data security requirements of the enterprise," the company said in a statement.

Facebook may make you envious, dissatisfied, Study

Social networking site Facebook can make you feel envious of your "successful" friends, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction, a new German study has found.

Researchers led by Dr Hanna Krasnova of the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin surveyed Facebook members regarding their feelings after using the platform.

More than one-third of respondents reported predominantly negative feelings, such as frustration. The researchers identified that envying their "Facebook friends" is the major reason for this result.

Samsung India has launched Galaxy Grand Duos with dual-sim functionality, bringing another phablet to the market just a day after Micromax announced its Canvas HD with 5-inch screen. The company said it will retail the device with a flip cover in the box and price it at Rs 21,500.

The all-new Galaxy Grand Duos has a 5-inch WVGA TFT screen and is powered by Android4.1 (Jelly Bean). This smartphone runs on a dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and has 1GB RAM. Samsung has continued with the design language it introduced in the Galaxy S III in this smartphone as well.

Search giant Google is set to kill off passwords and is experimenting with USB keys, mobile phones and even jewelry that can act as a physical 'key' to give users access to their account.

The firm's security experts including an Indian are set to publish their findings next month, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

In the upcoming issue of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, Google Vice President of Security Eric Grosse and engineer Mayank Upadhyay will detail what is basically a physical key with a 'smart chip' embedded inside it.

If your computer seems to be running slowly and acting as if it does not have enough memory installed, you can use software that comes with the operating system to see what is going on under the hood.

On a Windows system, open the Task Manager program by right-clicking on the Windows task bar and choosing Start Task Manager. (You can also use the keyboard shortcuts of Control-Alt-Delete or Control-Shift-Escape to summon the Task Manager.)

There is a common gripe with Windows 8. Though it's really good on touch devices, it's not so good on devices where you use the good old mouse. For example, to close an application on Windows 8, you have to swipe down the screen from the top. While the gesture works fine on a tablet, it feels a bit counter-intuitive on a desktop or a laptop.

"Normally, as a Windows user, you would still look for a close button," says Moorthy DS, managing director of Hi-Tech Solutions. The company has developed a handy little device that can transform your non-touch Windows 8 desktops and laptops into a touch device via a stylus called the e-Touch Pen.

There's a software category, an important one, where there's no standard design or set of features: calendar. Each one seems to have evolved on its own Galapagos island.

Take the new calendar app in Windows 8. So much of Windows 8's touchscreen mode is modern, updated and fresh — colour, gestures, typography — that you'd expect an equally modernized calendar app at its heart. Wow, would you be wrong.

At 6:48 a.m. local time Sunday, the Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom opened his new file-storage website to the public - one year to the minute after the police raided the mansion he rents in New Zealand.

The raid was part of a coordinated operation with the FBI that also shut down Megaupload, the file-sharing business he had founded.

Dotcom faces charges in the United States of pirating copyrighted material and money laundering and is awaiting an extradition hearing in New Zealand. But on Sunday, he said his focus was on the new site, which was already straining under heavy traffic within two hours of its introduction. In the first 14 hours of the site's operation, more than half a million people registered to use it, Dotcom said.

Research In Motion, the beleaguered manufacturer of BlackBerry phones, has renamed its app marketplace. Now, the marketplace will be called BlackBerry World instead of BlackBerry App World and will have content like videos and music, along with apps.

According to RIM, this revamped marketplace will take care of all entertainment needs of BlackBerry users. Consumers will be able to browse, download and update content via their BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, as well as computers.

The average for the year 2012 stood at 72.1 percent - 8.2 percentage points less than in 2011. Kaspersky said that such a prolonged and substantial decrease in spam levels is unprecedented.

The main reason behind the decrease in spam volume is the overall heightened level of anti-spam protection. Spam filters are now in place on just about every email system, even free ones. Also, many email providers have introduced mandatory DKIM signature policies (digital signatures that verify the domain from which emails are sent). Another factor behind the falling levels of spam is inexpensive advertising on legal platforms.

Between 10 and 11 on any given day, the time when the railway tatkal bookings open, 40,000-45,000 tickets are sold online through the IRCTC portal. People logging on to this site often find themselves staring at screens which take ages to open.

With complaints getting shriller about slow response time, IRCTC has kicked-off a Rs 10 crore drive to make servers more robust by upgrading them from dual-core to hexa-core ones. By February end, the upgraded servers would be able to process 60,000-65,000 tatkal tickets, says Pradip Kundu, joint general manager, (PR), IRCTC. With the servers to be upgraded to 64GB RAM, around 80 lakh concurrent connections can be enabled in place of 10 lakh right now, he says.

The government said it will auction spectrum in 700 Mhz band, which is used for offering high-speed internet services through fourth generation technologies, in 2014.

"We are going to auction the 700 band in any case by 2014," Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said during the commissioning of country's first lab for measuring specific absorption rate (SAR) for mobile handsets.

The 700-Mhz spectrum band ranges from 698 Mhz to 806 Mhz and has been identified by the International Telecommunication Union for telecom services.

Not all, but majority of Twitter and Facebook accounts of big brands have more number of fake followers than real followers. Most brand conversations that happen in social media sphere too are messages sent out by micro-blogging robots, created on the behest of some digital service agencies or even internal corporate communication departments that are hard pressed to show results on social media investment.

However, alongside, we also hear of amazing success stories of how brands are able to build a true fans and crowd source different types of business value: from market reach to product innovation.

A Malaysian student has invented a sling bag with a built-in device for charging electrical gadgets using solar energy.

The PhD student Noor Shah Iwan Ismail ofUniversiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) says that the solar bag would benefit those on the go who needs to charge numerous gadgets quickly, the Star Online reported.

The 25-year-old student explained that the invention would reduce dependence on static electrical sockets to charge gadgets with fast-depleting batteries.

Micromax has claimed that it shipped more phablets - the Android phones with a screen size of over 5 inches - than Samsung in the last three months in India.

At an event, where the company announced a new phablet called Canvas HD, Micromax said that it imported over 1.98 lakh phablets in India in the months of October, November and December. In comparison, the company claimed that Samsung imported around 1.89 lakh Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note II tablets during the same period. Other players brought in over 38,000 phablets.

Research in Motion will look into strategic alliances with other technology companies once it has launched its new BlackBerry 10 models, its chief executive told a German newspaper.

German-born CEO Thorsten Heins told daily Die Welt in an interview published on Monday that the group's strategic review could lead to the sale of RIM's hardware production or the sale of licences to its software, among other options.

STMicroelectronics has revealed the latest generation of its switch ICs for vehicle electronics such as lights and body modules, which it said provide enhanced intelligent features, improve protection and reliability, and are up to 40% smaller than competing alternatives.

Pioneered by ST, intelligent high-side switches*provide a more reliable and efficient replacement for conventional relays. For several generations, ST’s VIPower family has offered advantages such as a common package style for many devices in the range. This allows tier-one suppliers to build several module variants using the same basic hardware and software so car makers can address differing requirements in international markets and offer various model specifications and options cost-effectively. The common-package approach has become widely adopted among high-side switch vendors.

India is in the process of setting up a national cyber security architecture with the aim to prevent sabotage, espionage and other forms of attack that could hurt the country, National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon said today.

He said the architecture, to protect critical information infrastructure and other networks, will involve monitoring, certification and assurance of India's networks by designated agencies and bodies in accordance with the law.

Last week on Pro, social networks, mobile and a guide to cloud adoption

This weekly post took a brief winter break, but now we’re back – and what a week. On Tuesday, Facebook announced its new Graph Search product, and on Wednesday released free calls for iPhone users through the Facebook Messenger app. Over on GigaOM Pro, our analysts look past the latest news coming from team Zuckerberg, presenting quantitative data on the social network landscape at large, a recap of the biggest trends and disruptors in mobile, and more.

Motorola X Phone With Edge-to-Edge Display Rumored for Google I/O Debut is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Gotta Be Mobile.

Google usually announces new Nexus hardware in collaboration with its hardware partners at its annual Google I/O developer conference every year, and this year, Google-owned Motorola is expected to debut its X Phone at the same conference according to the latest leaks. Motorola’s X Phone, unlike the unlocked Nexus, will be carrier-targeted, so hopefully Motorola can get cross-carrier support for its X Phone brand beyond the successful Droid collaboration with U.S.

When Research In Motion’s new BlackBerry 10 operating system launches at the end of this month, it will do so with its own mobile payment system. RIM said this week that Visa has approved its Secure Element Manager (SEM), a soup-to-nuts system that enables wireless payments on any mobile device that supports near field communication (NFC).

Visa’s endorsement of RIM’s SEM system is a big win for the company, and one that could make it a player in the mobile payments space. RIM has a great reputation for security, which will no doubt lend some appeal to its NFC platform. With the BlackBerry maker managing the back end and Visa vetting the payments itself, SEM could do much to bolster confidence in NFC payments, particularly in places like the U.S. that have been slow to embrace the technology.

Social networking giant Facebook has opened registration for its third annual Hacker Cup, set to begin from January 25.

The top prize will be $ 10,000 (approx. Rs 5.5 lakh) as against $ 5,000 (Rs 2.75 lakh) last year and as many 25 of the best hackers will be taken to Facebook's headquarter in USA, a statement said.

The Facebook Hacker Cup is an annual worldwide programming competition where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the coveted Hacker Cup.

Social gaming pioneer Zynga hasn’t exactly been killing it in the earnings department since going public, but a new database system might help change that. At the very least, it could let the company do some things previously out of its reach, such as serve real-time recommendations and ads, and create advanced multi-player games. Building a better product is usually a good first step toward turning things around.

Authoritarian regimes around the world are using technology from a Silicon Valley firm for Internet surveillance, filtering and censorship, according to a report by Canadian researchers.

The report this week from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab said devices from California-based security firm Blue Coat Systems were being used in China, Russia, Venezuela and other countries with "a history of concerns over human rights."

"Our findings support the need for national and international scrutiny of Blue Coat implementations in the countries we have identified, and a closer look at the global proliferation of 'dual-use' information and communication technologies," said the report.

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