Chinese iOS pirate Kuaiyong launches web app store
A Chinese group which has made it its mission to take a bite out of Apple’s iTunes revenue share is at it again, launching a full web version of its iOS app store jam-packed with pirated content.
Chinese language app Kuayiong was originally launched at the tail end of last year to fill the gap left by the equally dodgy jailbreak app Installous.
Its mission: to allow local fanbois to download and install pirated apps on their iDevices without jailbreaking them in a quick, easy and secure manner – which was bad news for both Apple and community of iOS developers. Read more...
Intel profit dives 25 percent amid PC market slump
Intel reported a drop in profits and revenue for the first quarter, as the biggest PC market slump in recent memory weighed on its business. Intel reported a profit of $2.05 billion for the quarter ended March 30, down 25 percent from a year earlier. Revenue was $12.6 billion, Intel said, a drop of 2.5 percent.
About two-thirds of Intel's revenue comes from its PC client group, which makes chips for laptops and desktops. Revenue from that division was down 6 percent year on year, to $8.0 billion.
Intel's Data Center Group, which sells server chips and other enterprise hardware, fared better. Quarterly revenue from that division was up 7.5 percent year-over-year, to $2.6 billion. Read more...
SAP reports its best year ever
SAP said Wednesday that it had exceeded its guidance for revenue and profit in 2011, its best year in its 40-year history, and was positioned to exceed its revenue target of €20 billion ($26 billion) in 2015.
The company said it expects full-year 2012 non-IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) software and software-related service revenue to grow in the range of 10 to 12 percent at constant currencies, with its proposed acquisition of SuccessFactors contributing up to two percentage points.
SAP said it had significant momentum going into 2012.
The $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, announced in December, will bring to SAP a range of cloud-based human resources software as well as expertise in the cloud market. The company expects to close the transaction in the first quarter. Read more...
Google expands revenue but misses forecast
Google's fourth-quarter revenue climbed 25% from a year earlier but was less than analysts had expected, pulling its stock price down 9% in after-hours trading.
Google's revenue for the three months to Dec. 31 came in at $10.58 billion, up from $8.44 billion a year earlier, the company announced Thursday. Subtracting commissions and fees paid to partners, revenue was $8.13 billion, below the consensus analyst forecast of $8.41 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
Its net income before one-time charges, at $9.50 a share, was also below the consensus estimate, which called for $10.50 a share.
Google's shares dipped 9% in after-hours trading, to $583.48 at the time of this report, as investors reacted to the news. Earlier, Google's stock ended the regular trading day up 1%, at $639.57. Read more...
Why Google needs Firefox now more than ever
If you thought that Google was going to stick a lump of coal in Firefox's stocking this holiday season, you weren't alone.
Although rumors of Firefox's imminent demise were premature at best -- and self-serving for more than a few -- the Mozilla Blog now brings happy news that "we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years."
Mozilla will continue to feature Google as the default search engine in Firefox, and Google will pay Mozilla an undisclosed amount in exchange for that placement. Definition of the term "significant" remains nebulous, but in 2008 Google provided 88 percent of Mozilla's revenue; in 2009 it was 86 percent; and in 2010 Google kicked in 84 percent, or about $103 million (PDF). Read more...
Red Hat swells sales and profits in fiscal Q2
Commercial Linux distributor and virtualization and cloud computing player Red Hat just continues to grow organically like a batch of yeast. Or an open source collective from outer space (well, North Carolina anyway) that feasts on Unix servers.
In the second quarter of fiscal 2012 ended August 31, Red Hat's revenues embiggened by 28 per cent, to $281.3m, and net income exploded by 69 per cent, to $40m. Support subscription contracts for its Linux, middleware, and other software were up by 28 per cent to $238.3m and training and services revenues kept pace, hitting $43m. Deferred revenue rose by 25 per cent in Q2, to $813m, and the company is sitting on $937.2m in cash and equivalents. That makes Red Hat the biggest and strongest open source company in the world and perhaps the only one that will ever grow to this size because of the difficulty of competing with Red Hat. Read more...
How Apple will kill cable TV
I have a new theory about Apple. No, it's really a reverse engineering of their larger mission, a unified theory of Apple that explains everything the company does.
Here it is: Apple's mission is to replace old-and-busted content-consumption products and services with new-hotness Apple solutions.
The company is like a shark in the water, seeking out weak and wounded content-delivery systems.
The reason Apple focuses on the content experience is because there's just so much money in it. Apple can make money on hardware, on software, on cloud services, on providing content, on allowing others to provide content and on advertising. The content focus is why, for example, the revenue Apple earns from the iPhone is twice as high as the combined revenue of all other phone makers. Read more...
IBM shines in strong Q2 server market
IBM's worldwide server revenue jumped a healthy 24.5 percent in the second quarter, putting it neck and neck with Hewlett-Packard for the top spot, IDC reported Tuesday.
Helped by a surge in mainframe sales, IBM's revenue climbed to just over US$4 billion in the quarter, giving it 30.5 percent of the overall market. HP's sales climbed a more modest 9.3 percent, to $3.9 billion, for 29.8 percent of the market. IBM crowed that it had recaptured the server crown, but IDC declared it "a statistical tie."
Server sales were strong overall, with worldwide revenue climbing 18 percent from a year earlier to $13.2 billion, IDC said. Unit shipments were 2.1 million, the second-highest total ever reported for a June quarter. The highest was in 2008, just before the economy went south. Read more...
HP’s fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you’re No 2
After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple's 30-year-old personal computer division. It's almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than doing anything uniquely iPad-ish, it takes lots of "ends" a laptop (or Kindle, or smartphone) gets you to, and just gets you there slightly more conveniently. PCs are going to be around a long time; the iPad will be right there alongside them.
I've had a long weekend with HP's rival, which is probably the best of the challengers. Our Reg Hardware review hits several nails firmly on the head – I won't repeat too much of it below.
But what a dilemma the iPad poses for its rivals. Read more...
Yahoo revenue drops as display ad business slows
Yahoo's total revenue took a steep dive in the second quarter as it struggled in display advertising, a core market where it has historically been a leader. The company managed to increase its profit by 11 percent, however.
Total revenue for the three months ending June 30 declined 23 percent year on year to $1.22 billion, Yahoo announced Tuesday. Subtracting the advertising commissions and fees it pays to partners, net revenue came in at $1.07 billion, down 5 percent from 2010's second quarter and below the $1.11 billion consensus estimate from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Read more...
Ballmer’s new chant: Numbers, numbers, numbers
Microsoft lost its title as the world's biggest tech company this year with Apple surging ahead in market cap, profit and revenue.
Yet Microsoft still has ammo in the numbers department to take shots at its biggest rival, and many others, besides.
CEO Steve Ballmer focused heavily on numbers proving rapid adoption of Microsoft technology -- with the exception of Windows Phone 7 -- on Monday as the company's Worldwide Partner Conference kicked off in Los Angeles.
Windows 7 has sold 400 million licenses in less than two years, Office 2010 has sold more than 100 million licenses, 50,000 businesses have trialed Office 365 since the cloud service's launch two weeks ago, Windows Server locked up 75% of quarterly hardware shipments, and usage of the Bing search engine has tripled in the past year. Read more...
Oracle Q4 net income rises 36 percent
Oracle's net income for the fourth quarter ended May 31 rose 36 percent to $3.2 billion over the same period last year, results that reflect growth in software sales but a slight dip in hardware revenue, the company reported Thursday. Total revenue for the quarter grew 13 percent to $10.8 billion.
New software license sales, which are considered a key indicator of growth and customers' attitude toward IT spending, rose 19 percent to $3.7 billion.
Hardware systems products revenue fell 6 percent to $1.2 billion.
For the full year, net income jumped 39 percent to $8.5 billion on $35.6 billion in revenue, a rise of 33 percent. Read more...