Apple looked to Sony for iPhone design inspiration, court documents show
Apple looked in part to Sony for inspiration in designing its first iPhone, even having an internal designer produce "Sony-like" mock-ups of cell phones that carried the name of the Japanese electronics company, according to internal Apple documents submitted to a federal court in California on Wednesday.
The documents were filed to the U.S. District Court in San Jose by lawyers for Samsung as part of an ongoing lawsuit with Apple over patent infringement. After months of in-court discussion and fighting, the two sides are scheduled to begin arguing their case in front of a jury on Monday.
A big part of the case revolves around allegations that some of Samsung's cell phones and tablet computers are too closely styled after Apple's products. With the recently filed documents, Samsung appears to be preparing to argue that Apple looked to other companies in designing its first cell phone and that such a practice is common in the consumer electronics marketplace. Read more...
Symantec president and CEO replaced by company’s chairman
Security software vendor Symantec said Wednesday that Enrique Salem, its president and CEO, had stepped down effective immediately, after the company reported that its revenue for the quarter ended June 29 grew just 1% year-over-year to $1.7 billion, while its profits sagged by 10%, falling to $172 million.
Symantec said its board of directors appointed Steve Bennett, the board chairman, to also hold the posts of president and CEO.
The board's decision to make a leadership change was not based on any particular event or impropriety but was instead made after ongoing consideration and a deliberative process, said Dan Schulman, Symantec's newly appointed lead director, in a statement.
Bennett said "Symantec's assets are strong and yet the company is underperforming against the opportunity."
Bennett will take three to four months to outline a new strategy for Symantec, he said during a conference call discussing the quarterly results on Wednesday. The first thing that Symantec needs to do is sort through the way the market is evolving and then place its chips, Bennett said. Read more...
Nicira: A classic Silicon Valley story, complete with big payday
Nicira is a start-up right out of the Silicon Valley playbook with a $1.26 billion ending, in just five years.
VMware's decision, announced Monday, to buy this network virtualization company will likely be cited as a starring example of why Silicon Valley remains the world's engine of innovation.
The sale has all the classic elements of a Silicon Valley start-up. Whether Nicira can deliver on its promise is now up to VMware, which must make its new technology work with everything else it sells, say analysts. But for the Nicira's founders and investors, their big day has arrived.
Networking virtualization technology is to virtualization what server virtualization was to servers seven or more years ago. It's still new, its market size is still small, but it will grow rapidly because this technology is needed, say analysts. Nicira seemed perfectly timed for it. Read more...
Indian outsourcers Infosys outsource to WISCONSIN
Indian outsourcing company Infosys has set up a new software centre in Wisconsin, and a much bigger one in Bangalore. The new American office will service a Harley Davidson contract and will house 125 staffers in the MidWest. The new Bangalore office will be the base of 1,400 software engineers and developers purported to be working solely on iOS kit, although neither Infosys nor Apple would confirm this.
A Times of India report says the new centre is essentially an "Apple centre", where workers will be building iOS infrastructure, servicing the iCloud and working on application development and maintenance. Read more...
Devs can’t be bothered with Nokia’s Windows Phone – report
Interest in building applications for the current generation of Windows phones from Nokia has plummeted among developers.
Just a quarter of developers are very interested in developing apps for Windows Phone 7 devices compared to 37 per cent in the second quarter of this year, according to the latest Mobile Developer Report from IDC and Appcelerator.
The drop is blamed on "somewhat disappointing" sales of Windows Phone 7 handsets and Nokia's "widely reported competitive challenges".
Nokia sold four million Lumias in the second quarter of 2012, down 20 per cent from the year before. Read more...
Mac malware Crisis as Apple lets slip its Mountain Lion
Miscreants have developed a sophisticated multi-platform attack dog designed to maul Windows and Mac OS X computers.
The malware comes bundled in an Java Archive file which pretends to be Adobe Flash Player, named AdobeFlashPlayer.jar. Inside the malicious archive is a .class file named WebEnhancer, and two files named win and mac. The WebEnhancer applet decides if a user opening the file is running either Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X before pushing the corresponding software nastie.
If run on an OS X system the malware drops multiple components, reconfigures system settings and installs a backdoor and rootkit combination onto infected machines. The Mac OS X component of the malware – called Crisis or Morcut – arrives on the eve of Apple's release of Mac OS X Mountain Lion, but this is probably a coincidence. The new operating system build goes on sale today. Read more...
Oracle hopes to poach Microsoft SQL Server users with MySQL migration tool
Oracle is going after users of Microsoft's SQL Server with a new tool for migrating data from SQL Server to its own MySQL database, the vendor announced Wednesday.
The tool has been built into Oracle's MySQL Workbench administration console, and with it, applications written for SQL Server can be easily tweaked for MySQL, Oracle said in a statement.
Oracle is also releasing an improved version of the MySQL Installer for Windows environments, as well as a new MySQL Notifier for Windows tool that "helps developers and DBAs to easily monitor, start and stop their MySQL database instances, with the Microsoft SQL Server look and feel," Oracle said. Read more...
Google establishes partner program for cloud services
Following the best marketing practices of traditional IT firms, Google has launched a partner program to help third-party vendors use and sell Google cloud services.
The Google Cloud Platform Partner Program will provide "our partners with the tools, training, and resources they need to successfully address your business' IT needs," wrote Eric Morse, who is Google's head of sales and business development for the Google Cloud Platform, in a blog entry announcing the program.
Google will offer resources around its cloud offerings, such as the Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Storage. Google did not detail what specific tools, training and resources it would offer, nor what the qualifications are for becoming a partner. Read more...
Oracle NetBeans equipped with static analysis
For the newest release of NetBeans, Oracle has equipped the open-source IDE (integrated development environment) to continuously run a static analysis tool, which could point out possible coding errors to developers as they write their programs.
NetBeans 7.2, released Tuesday, also includes performance improvements and support for the latest languages and associated technologies.
For this release, NetBeans includes FindBugs, a static analysis tool for Java programs. Static analysis inspects program code for possible errors or defects, reporting errors and suggesting possible fixes to the developer. A popular debugger, FindBugs has been downloaded more than 2 million times, its creators estimate. Developers will be able to scan their applications to identify coding problems, getting the results directly within the IDE. FindBugs has long been offered as a plug-in, but this is the first version of NetBeans to include the software as part of its core package, according to Oracle. Read more...
Fate of U.S. may hang on winner of iPhone-Android war
The mobile operating system you choose may determine the fate of the U.S. presidency in the November election. Certainly, it's likely to dictate whether you're bombarded with pro-Barack Obama ads or pro-Mitt Romney ads as you browse the mobile Internet this year. A new study from Localytics found that 70 percent of the states with the most active iPhone users vote Democratic, 70 percent of the states with the most active Android lean Republican, and critical swing states are clustered in the middle.
The presidential candidates' respective campaigns may use those nuggets of information as we head toward Election Day, Localytics predicts: "With the Obama and Romney campaigns seeking every advantage, targeted smartphone advertising will be useful when trying to reach Democratic and Republican voters and volunteers in swing states, which cluster around the average iPhone and Android distribution." Read more...