Samsung claims jury misconduct, demands retrial against Apple
The foreman of the jury that recently handed Apple a $1 billion patent victory over Samsung Electronics was untruthful and biased, the South Korean company alleged in a filing with a U.S. court. Samsung wants a retrial of the case, in which Apple made patent infringement claims against a number of its smartphones and tablets.
Jury foreman Velvin Hogan, "failed to answer truthfully during 'voir dire,'" Samsung's lawyers said in a document filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California on Tuesday.
Voir dire is a legal term that refers to the court procedure of questioning prospective jurors to determine whether they may be biased before they are allowed to take part in the jury. According to Samsung, Hogan was biased and failed to mention important details during the voir dire hearing. 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...
Apple’s Siri-ous mistake
One thing that Apple has been known for is anticipating what consumers want in a device before they even realize it. It's what they did with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad -- all devices that sparked high demand in categories that had been either dormant or fairly static.
Then came Siri.
Siri was around as a stand-alone app before Apple acquired it; and other apps such as Vlingo responded to voice commands -- including Google's voice actions on Android. But it was Apple's version of Siri that ratcheted up interest in mobile-device "personal assistants" that could help users organize appointments, send messages and fetch information. Read more...
ChangeWave: Apple iPhone 5 ‘biggest demand yet’, Samsung also shines
Wake up! Apple [AAPL] has put its iPhone 5 (equipped with a 19-pin new Dock connector) into production and the new smartphone seems set to break its own sales records once again when it hits the shops in Fall, the latest survey results explain.
iRider on the storm
Perhaps it is no surprise that the world's biggest-selling smartphone will remain the world's biggest-selling smartphone, despite five years of increasingly vicious competition in the rapidly-expanding space.
Interest in smartphones among consumers is at an all time high, the latest ChangeWave Research claims claim. And Apple's iPhone 5 will be at the top of the tree in market share terms, while sitting under many trees this coming Christmas season as Apple wrests the "Market Leader For The Quarter" award from the only other real beneficiary of the smartphone surges, Samsung. Read more...
Qualcomm sees smartphones pushing demand toward end of year
Qualcomm has lowered its forecast of global cellular device shipments for 2012 due to a gloomy economic outlook, though it expects device sales to surge in the fourth quarter because of upcoming products, a likely reference to Apple's iPhone and Microsoft's Windows 8 tablets.
The mobile chip company reported results for its fiscal third quarter on Wednesday, posting revenue and profit up significantly from a year earlier but down from the previous quarter. Revenue hit US$4.63 billion, up 28 percent year over year and down 6 percent sequentially, while earnings per share were $0.69, up 13 percent from a year earlier and down 46 percent from the previous quarter.
Citing more cautious forecasts by economists, Qualcomm said it was lowering its forecast for global shipments of 3G and 4G devices in the current calendar year to between 875 million and 935 million. But that outcome would still represent an increase of 14 percent from 2011, assuming the results come in at the midpoint of the forecast, the company said. Read more...
New York leads in H-1B demand
The New York metropolitan area has the highest demand for H-1B workers in the United States, according to a new study that examines regional use of the work visa.
That's followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Washington metropolitan areas, according to a Brookings Institution study that maps H-1B visa usage around the country.
The study's broader mission is to explain how H-1B workers are used, where they are used, and what companies use them in 106 metropolitan areas.
Take the Columbus, Ind., metro area, for instance. That area had 629 H-1B visa requests in 2010 and 2011. The top visa employer in Columbus is Cummins Inc., an engine manufacturing company.
As part of the study, Neil Ruiz, a senior policy analyst at Brookings and co-author of the report, interviewed officials at Cummings who told him that they need skilled workers to help develop clean technologies for engines. "They are really struggling to fill a lot of their positions," said Ruiz. Read more...
Game on: 3 high-performance laptops duke it out
Whether it's killing zombies or pitching a perfect baseball game, top-notch gaming has always demanded the fastest systems and best graphics. You want a high-end computer? Look at what gamers are buying and you'll have it.
Once the exclusive preserve of desktop computers or stationary gaming consoles, a new generation of notebooks is now offering enough speed and power to satisfy the inner gamer in all of us.
But what is the current state of the art? To find out, I gathered together three of the hottest gaming laptops on the market today: the Eurocom Panther 4.0, Hewlett-Packard's Envy 17 and the MSI GT783.
Each comes with a high-resolution 17.3-in. screen, a performance-oriented graphics engine with at least 1GB of dedicated video memory, a Core i7 processor and a minimum of 12GB of RAM. Read more...
Facebook, senator fire back at password snooping employers
Password snooping employers demanding access to Facebook accounts got an earful from Facebook Friday when it issued a harsh statement condemning the practice. Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, wrote on a company blog: "We don’t think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their passwords because we don’t think it’s right the thing to do."
Earlier this week U.S. senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal also to pledged to file legislation to outlaw the practice. It's an unreasonable invasion of privacy and should be banned, Blumenthal told Politico in an interview earlier this week.
He vowed to file a bill to address the practice "in the very near future." Read more...
Prioritizing tech projects: How managers make a short list of long demands
As top technology dog at Aspen Skiing Co. for the last 16 years, Paul Major has honed the art of keeping multiple balls in the air.
With responsibility for all IT initiatives that support the Colorado resort's four mountains and extensive portfolio of hotels, retail and rental shops, Major has gotten pretty good at helping his staff of 20 field and prioritize requests to keep the company's 3,400 employees happy from a tech standpoint.
Lately, however, the juggling act has gotten far more intense, says Major, managing director of IT.
Thanks to the mania surrounding mobile and social technologies, Major's group is constantly being peppered with requests for new projects. A business-side executive reads about a cool mobile app in an in-flight magazine or Joe in operations overhears casual conversation about technology while on the slopes, and Major's email box starts to fill up. Read more...
Chairman, 3 others out in Yahoo board shake-up
Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and three longtime board members are stepping down, submitting to the demands of many frustrated shareholders who blame them for contributing to the follies that have dragged down the Internet company's revenue and stock price.
The shake-up announced Tuesday continues a drastic makeover of Yahoo's leadership during the past month as the company negotiates to sell its Asian assets in a complex deal that could help ignite a long-promised turnaround.
After Yahoo hired former PayPal executive Scott Thompson as its CEO a few days into the new year, co-founder Jerry Yang resigned from the board and severed all other ties with the company that he helped start in 1995. Read more...
Is the cloud really cheaper?
That there is growing company demand for cloud or software-as-a-service solutions should come as no surprise.
Finance and IT professionals, facing the need for greater computing power for everything from operational management to hedge accounting are understandably tempted by SaaS, given the cloud's relatively low startup costs and the fact they may lack the skills needed to build their own analytic solutions.
And the corporate migration to the cloud is in fact proceeding apace, with nearly one-third of organizations polled in a Gartner research study responding that they either already use or plan to use cloud SaaS offerings to augment their core business intelligence functions. Read more...
E-book library borrowing hits record pace
Holiday sales of new tablets and e-readers have catapulted e-book borrowing at many of the nation's libraries, raising the question of how libraries can keep up with demand -- especially when some publishers still balk at e-book lending.
The demand for e-books at some major public libraries more than doubled so far in December and January compared to a year ago, causing frustrations for e-book users and librarians alike.
"Demand for e-book borrowing has definitely gone up...dramatically recently," said Laura Irmscher, collection development manager for the Boston Public Library, the nation's oldest with a central library and 26 branches. She said e-book borrowing demand at the Boston libraries more than tripled in December, compared to December 2010. For the first half of January, more than 700 people a day tried to borrow an e-book, or added their name to a long waiting list for some of the more popular titles. Read more...
Apple Talk: Top 10 predictions for Apple in 2012
Prediction 1. $100bn in the bank?
Apple forecast monster revenues of $37bn for Q1 2012 at its last quarterly results call. Expect that lofty figure to be surpassed. The company has an $81bn cash stockpile, but could it pass $100bn in 2012?
Apple's coffers will be boosted by sales buoyed by huge pent-up demand for a new iPhone and strong sales of iOS devices over Christmas. Over 1.2 billion apps were downloaded in a single week in the last days of December, according to analytics firm Flurry, as millions of users tried out new iOS and Android devices.
Equally predictable is that despite the record-breaking revenues, Apple will forecast its traditionally conservative figures for the second quarter and the stock price will drop. Don't hold your breath for a special dividend for investors either.
Prediction 2. iPhone 5
Is a pattern emerging? iPhone 3G in 2008, iPhone 3GS in 2009, iPhone 4 in 2010 and iPhone 4S in 2011. It's possible to make a reasonably safe guess that the handset nomenclature goes through a major iteration every two years and a minor iteration every year in between.
Standard US mobile contracts are now two years long, which means 2012 will probably be the year of the iPhone 5. Will Apple revert to the summer release date it used for everything except the iPhone 4S or will it revert to an autumn release in September or October? Read more...
Extending the life of your data center
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the 1,200-square-foot data center at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering -- that means the facility has been operating three years longer than CIO and vice president of operations Joanne Kossuth had originally planned. Now, even though the school needs a facility with more capacity and better connectivity, Kossuth has been forced to back-burner the issue because of the iffy economic times.
"Demand has certainly increased over the years, pushing the data center to its limits, but the recession has tabled revamp discussions," she says.
