Apple’s secret outsource: ‘Even more software to be made in India’
A visit by Apple's CIO to India in January has resulted in some hefty software deals for two Bangalore-based firms, according to The Times of India.
Apple's top internal software guy, Niall O'Connor, met with executives from India-based Infosys and Wipro on a visit to Bangalore from 29 to 31 January – and apparently some juicy contracts have resulted, the English-language daily reports.
The Times reckons Apple currently outsources $100m worth of back-end software to India, but over the next few years will increase the investment to $400m. Read more...
Microsoft results yield unexpected good news
Microsoft's results for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2011, were pretty much in line with what industry observers expected. But two items caught my eye, and they both fall in the category of good news for Microsoft and its shareholders.
In a nutshell, Microsoft's reported record sales for the holiday quarter of just under $21 billion. Earnings hit $6.62 billion, down from $6.63 billion the previous year. Sales for the Business division (most prominently Office) were up 2.8 percent from the year-earlier quarter. Server and Tools sales were up a very healthy 11 percent from the year before, and Entertainment (primarily Xbox and Kinect) soared as expected, at 15 percent above the holiday season in 2010. Read more...
Black Friday E-Commerce Spending Up 26 Percent To A Record $816M; Amazon Most Visited Retailer
As we heard on Saturday, IBM reported a 24 percent increase in online sales for Black Friday this year. ComScore is announcing even stronger results for e-commerce, with Black Friday seeing $816 million in online sales, making it the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011 and representing a 26 percent increase versus Black Friday 2010 ($648 million spent).
That’s an impressive jump considering the 2009 to 2010 increase in Black Friday spending was only 9 percent. Thanksgiving Day saw an 18 percent increase in online spending to $479 million. U.S. consumers have spent $12.7 billion already in the first 25 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, up 15 percent from the corresponding days last year. Read more...
Rogue character space tripped Scottish exam results
A rogue space in the date field caused almost 30,000 Scottish students to get their exam results a day early, as Excel versions clashed and human checking fell down.
The texts telling students their Higher results (the Scottish equivalent of A-Levels) were supposed to go out Thursday morning, having been preloaded onto the automated systems at text-specialist AQL, as a CSV export of an Excel spreadsheet. The problem was a space which somehow got appended to the dates, causing Excel to export it as a text field, in quotes, which got rejected by the automated system which then substituted the default setting: the current date. Read more...