Um auf dem Smartphone-Markt gegen die Platzhirsche Apple und Samsung anzukommen, setzt sich Sony ambitionierte Ziele. Im Jahr 2014 wollen die Japaner 65 Millionen Smartphones verkaufen.
Der US-Grossinvester Carl Icahn will von steigenden Kursen der Apple-Papiere bei Rückkäufen profitieren. Der Druck auf Apple steigt, noch mehr Geld an seine Aktionäre auszuschütten. "Hatte vergangene Nacht ein nettes Abendessen mit Tim Cook", schrieb Icahn am Dienstag beim Kurznachrichtendienst Twitter. "Wir haben auf einen 150-Milliarden-Rückkauf gedrängt."
YouTube will zum ersten Mal eigene Musikpreise verleihen, die YouTube Music Awards. Die Videoplattform ist nicht zuletzt durch Musikvideos bekannt geworden und hat inzwischen zahlreiche Musikstars hervorgebracht. Die YouTube Music Awards werden laut offiziellem Blog am 3. November in New York stattfinden und sollen als Live-Stream übertragen werden; Nominierungen für verschiedene Kategorieren will YouTube am 17. Oktober bekanntgeben.
Der jahrelange Wettbewerbsstreit zwischen dem Internetkonzern Google und der EU-Kommission nähert sich einer Lösung. EU-Wettbewerbskommissar Joaquín Almunia sagte am Dienstag im Europaparlament, Google habe die Zugeständnisse zu seinem Suchmaschinen-Geschäft "wesentlich nachgebessert", um die Angebote von Konkurrenten prominenter anzuzeigen.
Microsoft Schweiz holt drei neue Manager in die Geschäftsleitung und besetzt damit auch die Vakanzen nach. Laut Communiqué übernimmt Roger Altorfer per 1. Oktober als Services Lead die Aufgaben von Mathias Henkel, der den Bereich in den letzten sechs Jahren geleitet hat. Caroline Rogge ersetzt per 1. November Nicole Gassler Schwengeler als HR Lead und Tom Kleiber wird per 1. Januar 2014 als neuer Public Sector Lead Einsitz in die Geschäftsleitung der Microsoft Schweiz nehmen.
Zu einem plötzlichen Wechsel kommt es an der Spitze der Systemintegratorin Connectis. Matthias Täubl ist laut Mitteilung per sofort zum neuen CEO berufen worden. Grund dafür ist, dass der bisherige CEO, Tom Kleiber, per 1. Januar 2014 als neuer "Public Sector Lead" Einsitz in die Geschäftsleitung von Microsoft Schweiz nehmen wird.
Der Social-Networking-Gigant Facebook erweitert seine Social-Suchfunktion Graph Search um weitere Parameter. Nutzer können nunmehr über Graph Search nach weiteren Inhalten in Posts und Status-Updates suchen, teilt das Unternehmen mit.
Mit einer Reihe von Technik-Innovationen ist am Dienstag die japanische Elektronik-Messe Ceatec in Chiba bei Tokio eröffnet worden. Der japanische Mobilfunkriese NTT DoCoMo präsentierte den Prototyp einer Übersetzungsbrille. Mit dem Modell können Nutzer in Echtzeit Wörter verschiedener asiatischer Sprachen mit einem Live-Kamerabild auf Englisch übersetzen. Sharp zeigte eine Erweiterung seiner Display-Technologie IGZO, dank der künftig Tablet-Computer deutlich längere Batterielaufzeiten erreichen könnten.
Die Werbe- und Marketingbranche sieht in der Einführung neuer Top-Level-Domains grosses Geschäfts- und damit Wachstumspotenzial. Obwohl 54 Prozent der Verantwortlichen in dem Bereich noch nichts von der Einführung gehört haben oder Genaueres dazu wissen, sehen 64 Prozent gute Chancen durch die neuen Endungen für die Entwicklung wirksamer Marketing-Kampagnen.
Der langjährige Verwaltungsratspräsident der Also Holding, Thomas C. Weissmann, will sich aus persönlichen Gründen auf das Datum der Generalversammlung 2014 hin aus dem Verwaltungsrat des Emmener Unternehmung zurückziehen. Dies teilt Also in einem am heutigen Dienstag veröffentlichtem Communiqué mit.
Apple’s 64-bit A7 processor in the iPhone 5s is more a marketing stunt than a technical enhancement and though it will not deliver any immediate benefits to smartphone users, there are other reasons to move to 64-bit, a Qualcomm executive said on Tuesday. “I know there’s a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Qualcomm, in an interview. “I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There’s zero benefit a consumer gets from that.” A benefit of 64-bit is more memory addressability, but that is not relevant in today’s smartphones or tablets, Chandrasekher said. The iPhone 5s has only 1GB of DRAM.
Splunk continues to enhance its flagship machine data search engine so it can be used by business analysts and managers, in addition to its typical audience of system and network administrators. The newly released Splunks Enterprise 6 includes new capabilities to easily visualize data, as well as a framework to build Web applications based on Splunk data, said Sanjay Mehta, the company’s vice president of product marketing. General business managers may also have a lot to learn from machine data, Mehta explained. For instance, for marketing executives, Splunk could provide a list of what types of smartphones are being using to access an organization’s Web application, giving a manager a better idea of which phones to optimize for. The Splunk search engine for being able to easily search through log files and other forms of machine-generated data, allowing administrators to more easily pinpoint trouble spots or detect operational trends.
The company once again proves why benchmark numbers are pointless.
HP wasn’t the first to embrace near-filed communications (NFC) as a way for printers to keep up with the mobile world—Brother gets that prize—but it’s catching up fast. On Tuesday, the company announced the 1200w Mobile Printing Accessory, a little box that attaches to a printer’s USB port to bring NFC capability. The 1200w works with 2008-era and later LaserJet and Officejet printers (and it assumes that the rear USB port is free, because most business printers use ethernet or another connection). When it ships in early December, the 1200w Mobile Printing Accessory will have a promotional price of $40, a nice discount from its regular price of $50. The idea is that you just plug in the device and print. The reality may take a little more doing. HP says it’s worked closely with Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung to embed a printing app into the companies’ mobile operating systems. In the case of Microsoft, the embedded app is for Windows 8, but not Windows Phone. If your mobile device is not one of the anointed, you can still use HP’s ePrint mobile app—hardly a shabby fallback, though not quite as gee-whiz easy as touch-and-print. Ready or not, businesses have to deal with employees and clients who walk up with their smartphone or tablet and want to print from it. It’s still not always easy to do—you can get tangled up in needing an app or needing to connect to a specific wireless network.
The U.S. National Security Agency’s efforts to defeat encryption will backfire by eroding trust in U.S.-based Internet services and in the agency’s own efforts to aid U.S. companies with cybersecurity, a group of privacy advocates said Tuesday. , said Kevin Bankston, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. The NSA has defeated encryption through a variety of means, including through reported backdoors in online services and covert compromises in encryption standards, according to news reports last month. Those reports followed revelations in June by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about massive data-collection programs at the agency. The NSA says the data-collection efforts, which include monitoring U.S. phones and overseas Internet communications, are necessary to counter the threat of terrorism. For U.S. technology companies, it is “terribly debilitating and undermining to have the rest of world thinking there have been backdoors built into their systems to help the U.S. government,” said Alan Davidson, a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former public policy director at Google.
Silicon Graphics International has acquired storage company Filetek as the server maker looks to provide customers with better control over petabytes of stored data in high-performance computing environments. SGI did not disclose the amount it paid for Filetek. The deal closed Tuesday. SGI is best known for high-performance computing systems, and Filetek’s software offerings will help better analyze, manage and provision storage resources depending on application needs, said Bruce Elder, general manager of storage at SGI. SGI has been in the storage business for 20 years and offers the InfiniteStorage Gateway systems for HPC environments (shown above). Filetek’s offerings will work with those systems to manage large pools of data in primary and long-term storage.
vs. this time last year. . In Great Britain, Windows Phone now has a surprising 12 percent share (vs. 4.5 percent in 2012), along with a 10.8 percent share in France. In Germany, Windows Phone’s market share now stands just 0.7 percent shy of second-place. Kantar’s research paints a battle in Europe that is now fully focused on just three mobile operating system competitors. Android’s 70 percent market share dominates (and is rising), with iOS and Windows Phone consuming almost the entirety of the remainder. Both BlackBerry and “other” operating systems have been decimated in Europe in the last 12 months, losing 7.4 percent of their collective market share to drop to a minuscule 4.5 percent share of the market. These are likely to further erode over the next 12 months as BlackBerry essentially takes its leave from the industry.
Driver monitoring systems. 360-degree short-range radar. Infotainment that can personalize audio and video. Future cars are as alert and attentive as nannies—all in the interests of safety as well as happiness.
A new partnership between SemaConnect and Recargo aims to fix one big hassle of using public charging stations: figuring out how to pay. A new mobile app lets your phone be the authenticator, rather than a payment card or a bothersome phone call.
Here's how to say goodbye to sepia filters and walk away from Instagram, leaving no trace behind.
To help operators virtualize their infrastructures, Alcatel-Lucent has opened up to third party vendors an internal cloud platform that will run features such as DNS and firewalls. Operators have to move away from the proprietary equipment they use today and instead adopt a more cloud-based infrastructure that allows them to be more flexible and use commodity hardware, according to Sue White, senior director of IP platforms marketing at Alcatel-Lucent. Just like enterprises today can roll out new applications and services faster using hosted services, so too will operators, and that should be a boon for users, Alcatel-Lucent said. “What we are going to see is operators innovate with services much faster and be able to work with third parties a lot better ... Today operators take a long, long time to deliver new services,” White said.
Don’t call it a Steam Machine! While Valve’s itty-bitty, living room-focused computers have been , Nvidia’s going big with its new ‘Battlebox’ initiative. The graphics gurus have joined forces with a bevy of top-notch boutique builders to unleash a line of hulking, fire-breathing gaming PCs designed to play the latest and greatest shooters at whopping 4K resolutions without batting an eye. Each entry in the Battlebox line rocks a pair of Nvidia’s high-end GeForce Titan or GTX 780 video cards running in SLI, paired with overclocked Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, and abundant amounts of RAM. (Hey, it takes powerful hardware to push all the pixels processed at 4K resolutions.) .
An exploit for a vulnerability that affects all versions of Internet Explorer and has yet to be patched by Microsoft has been integrated into the open-source Metasploit penetration testing tool, a move that might spur an increasing number of attacks targeting the flaw. that customers can download and install to address the flaw, but no permanent patch has been released through Windows Update. The vulnerability affects all versions of Internet Explorer and can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on computers when IE users visit a specially crafted Web page hosted on a malicious or compromised website. since late August or even July, according to some reports.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it will unlock its Xbox Live Gold service this weekend for most regions of the world, hoping gamers will get hooked again. . Normally, Xbox Live Gold costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 annually. While the offer isn’t available to the entire world, most of them are. The available regions include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam. If you live in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, don’t worry: the free Xbox Live Gold offer will be made available between Oct. 11 and Oct. 14, and Japanese gamers will receive the offer on Nov. 7 through Nov. 10.
Maybe it's time to ditch your cellphone carrier.
Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Gear smartwatch is seen as an extension of the smartphone, but research is under way to see how the wearable device could work with electronics such as TVs.
If you ordered a phone this past weekend and were able to hold on to your unlimited data, you're in luck.
Hewlett-Packard is taking the heft and bulk out of its EliteBook and ProBook business laptops, and powering them with the latest processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The company said its EliteBook 800 laptop models are 40 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than previous models. The other new business laptops include the ProBook 400 and 600 models, which have a lower starting price than previous models. Optional touchscreens are being offered with some laptops. The laptops come with either Intel’s fourth-generation Core processors code-named Haswell or AMD’s A-series processors codenamed Kabini. The chips provide a longer battery life and better performance. The EliteBook 820 G1 has a 12-inch screen and is 35 percent thinner and 18 percent lighter compared to its predecessor, HP said. The other new models also include the 14-inch EliteBook 840 G1 and the 15.6-inch EliteBook 850 G1, which are designed to Intel’s thin-and-light Ultrabook specifications. The laptops start at $799 and are now available in the U.S.
Expanding its portfolio of data analysis services to better accommodate the mobile market, IBM is acquiring Dublin-based Now Factory, which offers customer usage analysis services and software for wireless telecommunications providers. the amount of data their customers consume. It claims at least 40 service providers among its customers. IBM will fold Now Factory into its software group, and Now Factory’s software will be placed in IBM MobileFirst Analytics portfolio, which is designed to help businesses improve their customer experiences through the use of data analysis. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. can ingest a carrier’s operational data, alerting it of outages or outbreaks of negative sentiment, giving them the opportunity to quickly fix problems.
SAP may build a second data center in Australia in order to meet customer demand for locally delivered cloud services in the wake of revelations over the U.S. National Security Agency's Prism surveillance program. about the agency's spying programs have changed the game for tech vendors, Snabe told the AFR. "I think the stakes have moved up," Snabe said. "People have realized that you need to manage the data center in a physical location where the jurisdiction fits your assumptions."
Customers of French ISP Free will soon see their fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections upgraded from 100Mbps to 1Gbps, with no change to the monthly fee of €36 ($50) including tax. The service includes 197 free TV channels, nationwide Wi-Fi access, free national and international phone calls and rental of a set-top box containing a network fileserver, a digital video recorder and a Blu-ray Disc player. Download speed is 1Gbps and upload speed 200Mbps. Free said those speeds are guaranteed because the necessary bandwidth is dedicated to each customer, while other companies using shared bandwidth can only offer speeds "up to" a certain amount. Last month, rival French ISP SFR said it would increase speeds for some fiber customers on request to 300Mbps, and that it is testing 1Gbps transmission in some areas. Fiber customers are not the only ones being offered free upgrades: Free also said it would increase speeds for VDSL customers to 36-100Mbps downstream, depending on their distance from the switch. Customers need to be within 1.2 kilometers of the switch to benefit from such speeds. Upload speeds vary from 1.6Mbps for those 1.2km away to 24Mbps or more for those within 300 meters.
popularity with music fans and transform the site into an authority on what the world is listening to. To further that quest, Google announced that the world’s most popular video site will hold its first YouTube Music Awards on Sunday, November 3—a glitzy, globe-trotting ceremony packed with pop stars and spanning four continents. In true Google style, nominees for the awards will be based on the music videos people have been watching and sharing on YouTube over the past year. The company didn’t say whether it will count all music videos on the site, or only official versions on popular YouTube channels such as Vevo, however. . The awards show itself will take place in New York City, with satellite events happening in Seoul, Moscow, London, and Rio. In a play to attract the hipster demographic, Google has tapped Spike Jonze to direct the awards and actor Jason Schwartzman will host.
It took 11 months, but Microsoft's Windows 8 has passed Apple's OS X in market share, according to StatCounter. StatCounter's show 7.46 percent market share for Windows 8, an increase of 0.44 percent over the previous month. That was enough to surpass Mac market share, which dropped 0.2 percentage points to 6.98 percent. Meanwhile, older versions of Windows are holding somewhat steady. Windows 7 saw a 0.03 drop to 51.98 percent share, Windows XP rose by 0.01 points to 20.59 percent and Windows Vista somehow gained 0.09 points, bringing it to 5.3 percent market share. So while Windows 8's market share is steadily rising, previous versions aren't going away. If this news sounds familiar, it's because last month, rival measurement firm NetMarketShare found that Windows 8 market share had , with Windows 8 rising to 8.02 percent, compared to 7.54 percent for OS X.
When you sit in the car of the future, you won't need to worry about keys or adjusting your seat and you'll even get a quick health check when you sit in the driver's seat.
Putting a futuristic spin on the basic elements of a health check-up, Japan's Sharp has developed a sort of healthcare pod that allows people to look cool while their vital signs are measured.
Japan's Mitsubishi Electric has developed a prototype projector that could give car interior designers a lot more freedom in the way they model the dashboards of cars.
The third annual celebration of all cars electric included events in about 100 cities, a few international.
, isn’t just for online piracy anymore. The company’s latest product tease is a new instant messaging service predictably dubbed BitTorrent Chat. to receive notifications about BitTorrent Chat and when it will be available to try out. The new service will of course rely on the BitTorrent protocol to deliver messages over an encrypted peer-to-peer network. As part of its marketing hype, BitTorrent is pointing out that its peer-to-peer chat won’t need to store your chats on a third-party’s servers like the chat platforms from Facebook or Google do. “Our goal is to ensure that your messages stay yours: private, secure, and free,” the company said in a recent blog post announcing BitTorrent Chat.