Eyes are on Facebook’s first earnings report
After a disappointing Wall Street debut, all eyes will be on Facebook on Thursday when it makes its first quarterly earnings report as a public company.
The world's largest social network is under a lot of pressure to show strong numbers and, more importantly, to show that the company has strong business potential. Shareholders and Wall Street will be paying particular attention to this first earnings report since Facebook's initial public offering didn't go quite as planned.
When the company went public in May, the stock was first offered at $38 per share and was expected to shoot up to $50, $60 or even $90 per share. The stock didn't meet those expectations, and didn't hold its opening price.
At noon today, Facebook's stock was trading at $28.64 a share on the Nasdaq. Read more...
Alcatel-Lucent announces loss, plans to cut 5,000 jobs
French telecom equipment company Alcatel-Lucent plans to cut 5,000 jobs after reporting a net loss of $308 million in the second quarter, it said on Thursday. A performance program announced by the company will also involve exiting or restructuring markets, and managing its patent portfolio as an independent profit center.
Alcatel-Lucent said sales in its wireless and optic divisions had a double-digit decline in revenue because of moderate spending from service providers. Sales in its software, services and solution segment also declined, and the services business was almost flat, it added.
Revenue in North-America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region witnessed a double-digit decline, the company said, adding that the decline in Asia was mainly driven by China, where sales fell by 21%.
Competitive pricing was one of the main reasons that eroded profitability, the company said. Overall revenue was down 7.1% year-over-year. Read more...
Twitter crashes day before Olympics kick off
The day before the opening of the 2012 London Olympics that are expected to light up major social networks, Twitter crashed.
The micro-blogging site went down at approximately 11:45 a.m. EST Thursday, according to Twitter's Status page. The site was restored around 1:15 p.m.
Users from several different parts of the country reported that they were without Twitter service.
The crash came the day before the opening ceremonies for the Summer Olympics. Read more...
Well-funded Meteor poised to impact web development
The developers behind the Meteor open source project say they want to revolutionize how applications are built, and they've just been handed a whopping $11.2m in Series A funding to do it.
Meteor is an open source platform for building web applications with rich user interfaces that run on the client rather than the server – applications like Gmail, Twitter, Quora, or the Facebook photo viewer, for example. This is a style of software that Meteor's Matt DeBergalis says is becoming the new norm.
"Today's users expect and demand that quality of an app," DeBergalis tells The Reg, "but for the typical developer it's out of reach."
Meteor, he says, allows even "weekend coders" to build complete, functioning browser-based applications in a matter of days. Read more...
Oops: Nokia reinstates ‘terminated’ star app developer
You may think Nokia needs to keep all the app developers it can muster loyal to the company - but last week it terminated VIP privileges for a star Symbian programmer. Nokia has since changed its mind.
The brains behind the highly regarded Gravity application, Jan Ole Suhr, was one of a number of Symbian coders who discovered their membership of the Nokia Developer Champions programme had been terminated early. This is a scheme that recognises key programmers and gives them early access to tools and technical information.
But Symbian - the mobile phone operating system now officially known as "Nokia Belle" - is no more: there are no future handsets on the drawing board, and just a small fraction of the 3,000 Nokia engineers who worked on the platform are actively developing Symbian at Accenture. Nokia spun them out last year. Read more...
Tool released at Black Hat contains 150 ways to bypass Web application firewalls
A tool for testing if Web application firewalls (WAFs) are vulnerable to around 150 protocol-level ev asion techniques was released at the Black Hat USA 2010 security conference on Wednesday.
The tool and the research that went into its creation are the work of Ivan Ristic, director of engineering at security vendor Qualys and the original author of the popular ModSecurity Web application firewall.
Web application firewalls are designed to protect Web applications from known attacks, such as SQL injection attacks, that are commonly used to compromise websites. They do this by intercepting requests sent by clients and enforcing strict rules about their formatting and payload.
However, there are various methods for sneaking malicious requests that violate these rules past WAFs by modifying certain parts of their headers or the paths of requested URLs. These are known as protocol-level evasion techniques, and WAFs are not properly equipped to deal with them at the moment because the techniques are not very well documented, Ristic said. Read more...
Which do you trust less with your data, the U.S. government or Google?
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Black Hat Conference, a panel of experts got together to expound on what they see as the privacy and security mess of our times, and they had plenty to say about the U.S. government, cyber war, and Google.
The government really sucks at handling classified data, opined Marcus Ranum, CSO at Tenable Security. He said the vast WikiLeaks dumps of sensitive data from the U.S. government seen over the past few years shows that agencies such as the Department of State need to improve data custodianship.
As the panelists veered into the topic of who would you trust less with your data, the U.S. government or Google, ICANN CSO Jeff Moss answered that he feared Google more than the feds. That got Ranum to quip: thats because Google has a history of getting things done. Read more...
Apple will be the top chip buyer in 2012, says research firm
Apple will be the world's largest chip buyer this year because of the surge in demand for the company's products, enabling it to command lower prices and quicker delivery, IHS iSuppli said in research released on Wednesday.
The company's spending on chips will grow as competitors scale back or slow down spending on chips used in products such as computers, smartphones, tablets, and other electronics, the research firm said.
Apple will spend an estimated $28 billion on semiconductors this year, according to the numbers from iSuppli. That is much larger than second-place Samsung, which is expected to spend $14.9 billion, growing by 0.3 percent from last year.
There has been growing demand for Apple's iPad, iPhone, and Mac computer products. Earlier this week, Apple said it sold 17 million iPads during the most recent fiscal quarter, growing by 84 percent from the same period a year ago. Apple's iPhone sales went up by 28 percent year-over-year to 26 million, while Mac sales went up 2 percent. Read more...
Can Microsoft get SaaS right with Office 2013?
Microsoft's pushing hard to convince individuals and small organizations that they should rent instead of buy Office 2013. But unless it has learned from mistakes made with its Office XP rental experiment, the company could face an uphill battle convincing users.
The standard download for the Customer Preview version of Office 2013 comes emblazoned with the name and some of the accoutrements of Office 365. Microsoft clearly wants testers to associate Office 2013 with the online-only Office 365 package.
Microsoft rolled out Office 365 about a year ago as the successor to its BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard) hosted server package. The emphasis was on all of the server-side stuff Office 365 brought to the mix: Microsoft would host Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync servers for you and also rent Office 2010 as part of the package if you wanted it. Read more...