Analyst says Surface could hurt Ultrabook, Windows 8 tablets
Taiwanese analyst outfit Trendforce thinks Microsoft’s forthcoming Surface devices will cannibalise the market for ultrabooks, put price pressure on Android tablets and confuse consumers.
The analysts’ WitsView service recently published a note in which research director Eric Chiou says that Surface devices’ 32GB of storage is a higher spec than that on most ten-inch Android tablets, justifying a higher price of US$599.
At that price Chiou feels Surface will “inevitably cannibalize ultrabook sales” and goes on to say that “Microsoft may not be pleased to see a competition between its own products.” Consumers may also be confused by the overlapping prices. Read more...
RMIT serves up video tagging at Olympics London sportfest
The Australian Olympic badminton team has been perfecting its moves using a video tagging and tracking platform developed by RMIT University.
The RMIT project team developed a statistical video tool that tags movements of players and provides comprehensive data analysis of the performance.
The performance videos provide tagging and analysis not only of the team itself but of their competitors, so that they can create pre-match tactics to counter opponents winning moves. The tool works by compiling actions of the players, and opponents that lead to certain outcomes , especially when the opponents are in a defensive or point-losing position.
The video data analysis and platform is delivered to each athlete on iPads. Read more...
6 London boroughs haul all their kit to 1 Oracle biz product
Six London boroughs intend to generate £6m savings from a plan to implement the same version of Oracle's E-Business Suite.
The boroughs - Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Lambeth, Lewisham, Havering and Croydon - will implement Oracle EBS Release 12 as part of a plan to support the introduction of HR, finance, payroll, pensions and procurement functionality as part of Project Athena. The project is aimed at implementing and converging IT and business processes across London to save costs.
The councils have jointly appointed Capgemini to implement Oracle R12, which is a single system that manages HR, finance, payroll and procurement functions.
Using EBS means that employees are able to request leave, pay for services and manage budgets though a single system instead of using several systems or spreadsheets. Read more...
Apple asks court to sanction Samsung by ordering in its favor
Apple has requested a court in California to sanction Samsung Electronics in a patent infringement dispute by granting judgment in favor of Apple, after the South Korean company released to the press documents including exhibits that were not allowed as evidence in the suit.
The exhibits that Samsung distributed include images meant to establish that Samsung developed a phone with several elements of the iPhone's design ahead of the introduction of the iPhone in January, 2007. Also included were documents that sought to prove that Apple allegedly used a prototype inspired by Sony designs to arrive at the design of the iPhone.
In a filing to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, Apple said the court should sanction Samsung by granting judgment in Apple's favor on its claim that Samsung infringes Apple's phone design patents, and by granting judgment that those patents are not invalid. Read more...
Microsoft calls Windows 8 complete, but concerns remain, say analysts
Microsoft today announced that it's wrapped up Windows 8 and declared that the operating system has met the "release to manufacturing" (RTM) milestone.
"A short while ago we started releasing Windows 8 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners," said Stephen Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft's Windows group, in a blog post Wednesday.
"Kudos to them for managing the process," said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "It's an important milestone, so congratulations. But it's just the first step."
As Cherry noted, RTM is a major mark in Microsoft's development process. It signals that the completed code is ready to send to computer makers, other hardware partners who need to test their device drivers and software, and to outside developers working on compatible programs. Read more...
Home Depot fights ‘abusive’ credit card fees with PayPal system
The Home Depot says its rollout of a PayPal in-store payment system to 1,976 U.S. stores in March has generally been a success, though it notes that the system still accounts for a very small percentage of overall transactions.
The retailer deployed the system in part to avoid what it calls "abusive" bank fees for credit card transactions.
Home Depot customers can use PayPal by simply typing their mobile phone number and a specific PayPal account PIN on an in-store terminal. A receipt for the purchase is sent to the customer's online PayPal account, which is accessible from a mobile phone.
PayPal is offering account holders a card with a magnetic stripe that can be swiped and read the same way credit cards are read. To date, however, more than 90% of customers use the mobile number and PIN to pay, Home Depot said. Read more...
Chrome up, Chrome down in browser share battle
Google's Chrome browser lost usage share for the fifth time in the last seven months, while Mozilla's Firefox gained share for the second consecutive month, a Web measurement company said Wednesday.
Net Applications, which calculates browser usage by tracking unique visitors to approximately 40,000 Web sites, pegged Chrome's share for July at 18.9%, a two-tenths of a percentage point decline from June. Chrome has been in decline this year: Of the six months in which Chrome went into the red since Net Applications began tracking the browser, five were in 2012.
Firefox's share grew by one-tenth of a point to end the month at 20.2%, Net Applications declared. The open-source browser is up nearly half a point since its four-year low of 19.7% in May 2012.
But Net Applications' numbers were again disputed by rival StatCounter, which tallies browser share differently, counting page views, not unique visitors, for about 3 million websites. And unlike Net Applications, StatCounter does not weight the results by each country's pool of online users. Read more...
Salesforce.com’s Benioff joins Cisco board
Cisco has added venerable and outspoken cloud computing executive Marc Benioff, founder and chairman of Salesforce.com, to its board of directors, the company announced today.
Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle before leaving to found Salesforcein 1999. Since then, the company has in many ways defined the SaaS (software as a service) cloud computing market, and continues to be a leader in both its CRM service and, increasingly in the PaaS (platform as a service) and social collaboration areas. The company's Force.com and Heroku services allow users to create applications that link in with the CRM application, while the company's Chatter feature is meant to be a social media-like platform for enterprise use. In addition to Benioff, Cisco also added Kristina Johnson, CEO of hydroelectric company Enduring Hydro and a former U.S. Department of Energy undersecretary. Read more...
Forecast for systems administrators: Cloudy
When Donald Roper found himself in the job market earlier this year, he quickly learned how high the bar had been raised in his profession.
A senior systems administrator with 28 years in IT, an MBA and seven certifications to his name -- including one in virtualization -- he discovered that wasn't always enough.
"A number of times, I'd go for an interview, and they'd ask, 'Do you have Citrix?'" recounts Roper. "I'd say, 'No -- I thought you were looking for a virtualization person.' And they'd say, 'Oh yes, you have to have that, too.' Nowadays, they want you to have everything."
In addition, Roper says, some employers also required a phone-based pre-screening stage, in which they'd ask technical questions such as, "What is VMware DRS?" and, "If you have five disks in RAID-5 array, how much disk space do you have?" Read more...
Apple breezes to PC sales’ top spot as Windows share decays
Apple sold more PCs worldwide last quarter -- 21 million -- than any rival, retaking the lead it lost the quarter before, U.K.-based Canalys said yesterday. And because Microsoft lacks a tablet operating system, sales of Windows-powered PCs fell to an all-time low as a percentage of total sales.
Unlike other research firms, Canalys counts tablets 7 inches or larger as PCs, figuring that they're used for many of the same purposes as a notebook or even a desktop. Using that definition, Apple, which sold 17 million iPads and 4 million Macs during the period that ended June 30 -- shot to the top of the chart.
Apple regained the No. 1 position in the second quarter after ceding it in the first to Hewlett-Packard. The Cupertino, Calif., maker of Macs and iPads had last been the world's top-selling PC seller in the fourth quarter of 2011. Read more...