Samsung boss sued by his brother over stock inheritance
Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-hee is being sued by his brother over stocks inherited from their father, the Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-chull.
Lee Maeng-hee has filed the suit in Seoul, alleging that his younger brother secretly incorporated a huge amount of Samsung stocks into his assets, Korean news agency Yonhap reported.
Maeng-hee wants the court to order the chairman to return 8.24 million shares in Samsung Life Insurance – worth 716.9 billion won ($636m, £404m) according to today's closing price – and 20 stocks in Samsung Electronics, along with 100 million won ($88,800, £56,427).
He claims that their father put these shares in a trust under the names of a number of Samsung Group executives, but Kun-hee transferred the stocks to himself after their father's death in 1987. Read more...
HP gives sysadmins a little mobility
HP is embracing mobility with apps to allow sysadmins to receive alerts, manage systems and even shut down servers, all from the comfort of their booth seats at the pub.
HP already provides SiteScope, with which one can monitor servers and receive alerts on Android and iOS devices. But in a presentation at the HP Global Partner event in Las Vegas the company promised a good deal more functionality would be coming to mobile clients. Read more...
Mozilla throws ‘freedom’ at Microsoft, Google, Apple tanks
The Mozilla Foundation is coming to the rescue of Tim Berners-Lee's sanity.
The Firefox shop is this year throwing itself at walled gardens from Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft: armed with a device-neutral and API-neutral app store and a "web platform".
Mozilla's building a Marketplace for Apps that will open in June and serve web-ified apps to smartphones, tables and desktops regardless of hardware, operating system or maker.
That's the promise at least.
Announcing its 2012 roadmap, here, Mozilla said: "Through this Marketplace, developers will be able to distribute and monetize their apps. Users will be able to find, install and use their Apps across all of their devices, regardless of the underlying device/OS platforms." Read more...
Audits begin at Apple’s Chinese supplier plants
Apple today said that auditors from a labor rights group have begun inspections at Chinese factories that manufacture its iPad and iPhone.
The audits were the first since Apple joined the Fair Labor Association (FLA) last month after acknowledging that aluminum dust was responsible for explosions at two of its Chinese suppliers last year that resulted in four deaths and injuries to another 77 workers.
Apple was the first technology company to join the FLA as a participating member, the organization said in mid-January.
The FLA investigations began Monday at Foxconn facilities in Shenzhen, China, a major center of electronics assembly in the southern part of the country that abuts Hong Kong. Read more...
Apple takes a stand on iPhone factory worker rights
With the iPad 3 already in production and iPhone 5 assembly lines in development, you wouldn't believe it if you looked at the headlines, but Apple [AAPL] has taken another big step toward improving working conditions in factories across its supply chain. And now's the time to demand other firms in the consumer electronics industry also do the right thing, if you really want to change the way things are.
Be the change
In a Monday press release, Apple announced that the Washington-based Fair Labor Association (FLA) has been called in to conduct special voluntary audits of Apple's final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China.
Apple can argue that it is leading the industry in the move to police and ensure decent working conditions. In January, Apple became the first technology company admitted to the FLA. The organization began in 1999 in an initiative begun my former US President, Bill Clinton. Other firms on the books include Nike and Nestle.
The first inspections began yesterday morning at the facility in Shenzhen known as Foxconn City, with a team led by FLA president Auret van Heerden. That workers want things to get better is obvious, after all, 150 Foxconn employees threatened to leap from a three-story building last month in protest at poor pay and highly-pressured working conditions. Read more...
Intel targets networking market with new chipset
Intel on Tuesday introduced the Crystal Forest chipset, which the company hopes will fill a networking gap as it tries to build an integrated technology stack for data centers.
The chipset has specific hardware and software-driven features that could speed up data processing on a network, said Steve Price, director of marketing for Intel's Communications Infrastructure Division. The chipset could aggregate network data quicker from servers inside data centers without compromising performance or security.
Intel is trying to make a mark in the network processor market with the new chipset, where it could compete with companies such as Cavium, AppliedMicro and Tilera. Intel previously offered ARM-based network processors as part of its communications unit, which it sold to Marvell for US$600 million in 2006. Read more...
Office for Windows on ARM: Free or not?
Microsoft's announcement last week that it will "include" four Office apps with Windows on ARM has analysts parsing the news like intelligence agencies that once tried to figure out what went on inside the Kremlin by poring over photos of who stood where on the Red Square reviewing stand.
Some analysts say that Office will be bundled along with Windows on ARM (WOA) sans a separate price tag. Others believe Microsoft would never give away one of its most precious possessions.
All acknowledged that Microsoft has not provided enough information, and that details may not emerge until just weeks before the company wraps up development.
Microsoft, meanwhile, declined to answer questions about Office apps on WOA, or to clarify what Steven Sinofsky, the head of the Windows group, meant in an 8,600-word missive published last week.
"What we know is that there will be some level of capability to those Office apps, but what we don't know is who pays for it," said Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC who was briefed by Microsoft last week.
Hilwa and fellow IDC analyst Al Gillen interpreted Microsoft's announcement as confirming that the Office apps included with WOA -- touch-enabled versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that run in the operating system's limited desktop mode -- would be bundled with the operating system, free to users. Read more...
LibreOffice 3.5 arrives
LibreOffice is backed by companies such as Red Hat and Google. The Document Foundation was formed in September 2010 by some OpenOffice.org community members after they had a falling out with Oracle, which acquired the software through the purchase of Sun Microsystems. Oracle later stopped selling a commercial version of the suite and then submitted the code to the Apache Software Foundation.
The Document Foundation overcame significant obstacles on the way to version 3.5, "the best free office suite ever," it said in an official blog post on Tuesday. Read more...
Alcatel-Lucent integrates Wi-Fi with mobile networks
Alcatel-Lucent is integrating Wi-Fi with mobile networks with its lightRadio architecture, allowing users to move seamlessly between the two networks and authenticate using the SIM card, the company said on Tuesday.
As mobile data demands have increased, mobile operators have increasingly turned to Wi-Fi as a means to handle growing traffic volumes. It has now come to the point where many operators no longer have a choice, but have to use Wi-Fi, according to Parker Moss, vice president of Wireless Marketing at Alcatel-Lucent.
Wi-Fi is already used by many operators, but a new specification called Hotspot 2.0 -- which is being developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance -- aims to take the use of technology to the next level. Alcatel-Lucent's implementation is called lightRadio Wi-Fi, and it allows users to authenticate using the SIM card on their smartphones and move between two networks without interruptions, according to Moss. Read more...