China’s Tencent To Restructure Into Six Groups, Here’s Why
China’s Internet juggernaut Tencent announced today that it would undergo a restructuring of its business units into six groups. Ren Yuxin was also named as the new chief operating officer and will head up the media and social-networking groups.
The six groups include:
TEG – Technology & Engineering Group, comprised of Tencent Research and operating divisions.
SNG – Social Networking Group, comprised of its Internet business lines and some divisions from Tencent Research.
CBG – Creative Business Group, formed by Tencent Guangdong R&D Center and its corporate development arm. Read more...
Windows 8 ARM tablets suffering pricing problems due to Microsoft fees, report claims
According to Digitimes, original equipment manufacturers are having a hard time meeting price targets for tablets that will run Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 RT operating system, which is coded for touch input.
This is no small matter. TNW has written on topic a host of times, fretting publicly that Windows 8 devices may be too expensive, and thus price themselves out of contention for mass market consumer dollars.
However, Digitimes has some encouraging figures, and some that sting. From its report [Edited and condensed by TNW]:
“[The tablets], based on estimated general BOM costs of US$300-350 for 10-inch tablet PCs and US$150-200 for 7-inch models, are struggling to meet vendors’ price targets [...] because of the additional US$90-100 fee for Windows 8.” Read more...
Want Facebook Shares? HK’s 8 Securities Offers $200 Worth If You Join Its Trading Platform
With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.
The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China. Read more...
Enterprise BI models undergo radical transformation
About two years ago, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield implemented a self-service business intelligence platform to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple repositories scattered throughout the company.
The technology, from Palo Alto, Calif.-based QlikTech, was brought in as a supplement to a project management product from CA Technologies. So far, it has saved CareFirst $10 million in project costs and helped the health insurer reduce the number of outside contractors it uses by 25%.
Activities that used to take up to 18 months are now accomplished in less than two days. Moreover, the project management office no longer has to depend on its centralized analytics team to run BI reports. Read more...
VMware puts on new vFabric suite, takes your database on a date
VMware pretty much owns the virtualization layer on X86 iron inside of enterprises, but it has a long way to go to get the same kind of uptake for its vFabric application framework.
Just as it did when it turned the bare-metal ESX Server hypervisor into a server virtualization stack and then a cloudy infrastructure ubertool, the company is transforming the Spring framework it acquired three years ago by rolling all kinds of components into it – to create the vFabric Suite.
The Spring framework is an open-source platform for running Java applications that VMware is beefing up, and it is not to be confused with Cloud Foundry, an open-source platform cloud that mixes up the RabbitMQ messaging service with MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB data services and frameworks for Java and Ruby applications. Read more...
Why it’s unlikely we’ll see multiple Nexus devices this year
Since the early days of Android, the loyalists in the Google ecosystem have hoped that one day Andy Rubin would descend from the Googleplex with a series of devices that were stock Android with unlocked bootloaders. In other words, the simultaneous release of multiple “Nexus” type devices is the dream of a large part of the Android community.
The core problem with the current Nexus system, in a nutshell, is that it is designed to be a reference device. It is the first device on the latest version of Android, and as such the rest of the Android OEMs will deliver vastly superior hardware to that product a month or two later. Take the recent Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which was recently thoroughly trounced by the Snapdragon S4-powered HTC One X in every way but the pure Android experience. Read more...
Microsoft anti-bloatware service to apply to Windows 8 PCs, too
A Microsoft in-store program that scrubs "bloatware" from Windows PCs will also be offered when Windows 8 machines reach the market later this year, a company representative said Wednesday.
The service, which is offered only in Microsoft's small chain of retail stores -- it now has 21 operating or in the works -- is dubbed "Signature Upgrade," and costs $99.
"We take off all the bloatware on the PC," said a Microsoft store employee Wednesday when asked about the service.
On Microsoft's website, the company described the Signature Upgrade this way: "We'll install everything you need and remove the things you don't, for a faster, more efficient, and secure PC experience." Read more...
Russia’s Twitter rival Futubra unleashes mobile apps
The Russian answer to Twitter, Futubra, just stepped up its game with the release of apps for iOS, Windows Phone and Android.
Using Futubra without being able to read Cyrillic is a bit tricky. On a desktop or laptop browser, you can rely on Google translate in chrome to help you along, on the mobile this won’t work. So, for now, best for those who can read the content to enjoy the mobile apps.
The interface for the apps is still nice and bright, with neon coloured icons show you where to upload images or follow updates. Read more...
Lenovo packs ‘thinnest’ ThinkPad ultrabook with 4G LTE
Lenovo on Tuesday announced a range of new ThinkPads with Intel's latest third-generation Core processors, including a ThinkPad ultrabook that the company claims is the "thinnest ultrabook in the world."
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon ultrabook has a 14-in. screen, weighs under 1.8 kilograms (3.9 pounds) and is 18.8-mm (.74 inches) thick. It will have the latest Intel ultrabook processors, code-named Ivy Bridge, which are expected to be officially announced next month.
Lenovo also updated the popular ThinkPad T-series and X-series lineups, making them faster while adding more battery life to the models. The company also has new connectivity and multimedia capabilities that could be helpful for business users. The laptops will be available on June 5. Read more...
Red Hat preps RHEL 7 for second half of 2013
The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), version 7, is targeted for release in the second half of 2013, Red Hat said on Tuesday, as it also celebrated the 10th anniversary of its enterprise OS.
Red Hat aims to release a major new version of its OS every three years and updates about every six months, according to Jim Totten, vice president and general manager at Red Hat's Platform business unit.
"While we are not at a place where we are making announcements ... our general target is the second half of 2013 to see RHEL 7 enter the marketplace," Totten said in a webcast.
Red Hat is keeping details of the release close to its chest, but Totten said the OS will have improvements across its more than 2,000 packages and that key focus areas are supporting new hardware, file systems, security and performance, he said. Read more...
Why Are People Resigning Before The Copyright Industries’ Will?
Defeat in a single battle in the war over net liberty doesn’t concern me too much. I know that the net freedom forces have the strategic and intellectual upper hand in this war over our freedom, but there is something else that concerns me gravely. Why are people seriously thinking that the copyright industries have the final say in shaping society?
In a discussion thread concerning a recent book from myself and Christian Engström, Member of European Parliament, people were concerned. The book is titled “The Case For Copyright Reform”, and is a collection of the most relevant essays over the past year, as well as reproducing contributions from Mike Masnick, Ernesto and Michael Geist. (Did I mention it’s available for free download? Copy and seed.) Read more...
Revolving door: Yahoo ushers out another CEO
Yahoo still has credibility issues, even after casting aside CEO Scott Thompson because his official biography included a college degree that he never received.
The troubled Internet company's next challenge will be convincing its restless shareholders and demoralized employees that the turnaround work started during Thompson's tumultuous four-month stint as CEO won't be wasted.
It won't be an easy task, given that Yahoo Inc. has now gone through four full-time CEOs in a five-year stretch marked by broken promises of better times ahead. Instead, Yahoo's revenue and stock price have sagged during a time when rivals such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. as advertisers spend more money online. Read more...
Senate to look at Mozilla’s browser competition allegations
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will look into accusations by Mozilla that Microsoft is restricting access to important programming tools for browsers that will run in Windows RT, a political blog reported Friday.
The Hill cited unnamed aides to Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, as the source for its report.
Last week, Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, said Microsoft was withholding access to APIs -- application programming interfaces -- that Mozilla considers crucial for building a browser that can compete with Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) on ARM devices. Read more...
Upcoming Microsoft deal: Buy a Windows 7 PC, upgrade to Windows 8 for a mere $15
Microsoft, in a bid to keep Windows 7 PC sales strong through to the end of the operating system’s lifecycle, has a plan: offer people a dead cheap Windows 8 upgrade , thus making the option of waiting for the upcoming operating system to drop a poor decision.
How cheap will the deal be? According to Paul Thurrott, the bump to Windows 8 will cost a mere $15. Of course, this sort of promotion is hardly new – Microsoft does something similar every time it releases a new operating system. It helps people get onto the new code quickly, and ensures that Windows revenue doesn’t take a massive dive in the quarter preceding the new operating system’s release. Read more...
Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM
Mozilla and Google are crying foul over Microsoft restrictions blocking rivals from Windows 8 on ARM, due later this year.
Firefox-shop Mozilla has branded Microsoft's restrictions a return to the digital dark ages "where users and developers didn't have browser choices".
Harvey Anderson, Mozilla general counsel, accused Microsoft of restricting user choice, reducing competition and chilling innovation by only allowing Internet Explorer to run on Windows RT – unveiled last month by Microsoft as the new name for Windows on ARM (WOA). He said:
Only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security to which users have grown accustomed. Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can't do the same. Read more...