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Samsung And Yahoo Ink A Deal
November 14, 2012 by admin
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Yahoo announced a deal on Tuesday with Samsung to integrate its Broadcast Interactivity service into the company’s Smart TVs.
The agreement will allow Yahoo to push real-time content alongside TV shows and advertisements on Samsung TVs, such as “subtle, on-screen prompts” that inform viewers of additional content that they can watch.
“With the touch of a remote, connected tablet or phone, Samsung Smart TV viewers can easily surface content or offers related to the TV shows and commercials they are watching,” Samsung said.
TV programmers can use the integration feature to provide Samsung TV customers with “complementary content” such as trivia, additional information about the show being watched and interactive gaming.
Showtime Networks and National Geographic Channel are two of the first TV programming partners that will take advantage of the agreement, Yahoo said.
If TV ads aren’t annoying enough, Yahoo said the partnership also creates new forms of advertising by “extending traditional 30-second commercials into immediate actions”.
In other words, with broadcast interactivity enabled commercials, advertisers can embed “calls-to-action” for downloading apps or digital media, providing coupons, ordering samples, reading reviews or viewing product information. Just in case you really want to know more about that Mr Muscle sink unblocker, or the next JML cleaning gadget that is set to transform your home life forever.
Is Nokia Sitting On A Gold Mine?
August 31, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Mobile phone company Nokia might be suffering, but the big technology companies are hoping that it does not wake up to the fact it is sitting on a troll’s gold mine.
Recently Nokia flexed its muscles and orderied Apple to pay Nokia a royalty fee for each iPhone sold. Logically it could clean up if it hit Google with something similar over its Android operating system. According to IP expert Florian Mueller, Nokia holds the most patents relating to the cutting-edge 4G/LTE technology.
This puts it in a position similar to what Microsoft had with its 2G/3G technology which allowed them to collect half of all the profits of each Android device sold. This gave Microsoft more than $3.2 billion per year so this indicates that Nokia will make triple this amount in the future. Nokia has sued HTC, RIM and View-sonic and their defence against Nokia is weak.
To make matters worse Nokia signed a 2010 cross-licensing agreement with Motorola which precludes Google from transferring the numerous patents it recently acquired from Motorola Mobility. This means that any protection that Google might have gained from owning Motorola Mobility are not counted. But this is only the tip of any iceburg and indicates how the entire mobile phone industry can be stuffed up by patents.
Recently a Google executive claimed that a standard smartphone contains more than 250,000 separate patented technologies. All of these have to be paid before a product can be released. What is worrying is that Nokia own a vast majority of this patented technology.
Is Iridium A Friend Of Cellular Phones?
June 13, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Cellular phones squashed Iridium once, but in its second coming the satellite phone maker and owner of the biggest satellite fleet is relying on them to resurrect their business.
For all their seeming ubiquity, cellular services cover only about 8 percent of the globe, leaving large regions where the only way to communicate is to use a satphone made by Iridium Communications Inc or one of its smaller competitors.
“The need for communication devices and services where terrestrial can’t be there is rising, and as bandwidth needs increase it’s surely helping Iridium,” Macquarie Research analyst Amy Yong said.
Investors have taken notice, pushing up the stock of the company nearly 50 percent over the past eight months.
“It’s a different company, with a prudent and successful financial model,” Raymond James analyst Chris Quilty said.
“They’re growing, they have extraordinarily high barriers to entry and some of the end markets and applications they’re targeting are vast and untapped,” he said.
Unlike its competitors, Iridium’s satellite constellation covers the entire globe, including the poles, and its array of 66 satellites dwarfs the fleets of its rivals. Inmarsat Plc has 11; GlobalStar has eight and is aiming to have 32 in orbit by the year-end; Thuraya has three, with one planned.
Dell Intros Ivy Bridge Xeon Servers
Dell has become the first to announce servers using Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge Xeon E3 processors.
Intel launched its single socket Ivy Bridge Xeon E3 processors a month after it wowed everyone with its dual-core Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 processors, and it has taken Dell only another month to announce the first servers to make use of Intel’s latest nearline server chip. Dell’s Poweredge C5220 microserver uses Xeon E3 1200 series processors that have thermal design power (TDP) down to 17W.
Dell is pitching its Poweredge C5220 servers towards high performance computing, cloud deployments and content delivery networks. While Dell calls the Poweredge C5220 a microserver, that really isn’t a reference to its size or density, but rather the fact that it is a single socket server.
Dell offers the Poweredge C5220 with either 17W or 45W TDP Intel processors supporting DDR3-1600 memory. The firm claims close to double the performance over previous generation single socket servers, mainly due to a 50 per cent increase in density.
at&t Vows To Continue Quest
December 14, 2011 by admin
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AT&T Inc plans to forge ahead with its deal to acquire Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. wireless unit despite regulatory opposition, and it has the financial resources to close the acquisition quickly, a top executive said on Wednesday.
“We continue to move forward with our efforts to complete the T-Mobile transaction…and we will continue to pursue the sale,” AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said at the UBS media conference in New York.
Apple Loses Court Case
Apple has lost a patent lawsuit against a small Spanish company, allowing the firm to continue selling its tablet computer.
Apple filed the case a year ago when it obtained an injunction from a local court to ban imports of the NT-K tablet into Spain. However, according to court documents, the Spanish court has vacated the injunction, saying that there are no legal grounds to block sales of the device.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the NT-K tablet is made in China and sold in Europe by Nuevas Tecnologias y Energias Catala, based in the eastern Spanish region of Valencia.
The NT-K tablet runs a Spanish language version of Android written by Nuevas Tecnologias’ programmers.
PayPal Unveils New Payment System
PayPal has unveiled a mobile payment product for customers that doesn’t require near-field communication (NFC) technology inside smartphones.
The system relies instead on using smartphones and other mobile devices to scan product bar codes and to authorize payments through PayPal mobile accounts. Shoppers will also be able to use credit-card scanning terminals commonly seen in grocery stores: The user inputs a phone number and PIN on the terminal’s keypad instead of swiping a credit or debit card.
PayPal President Scott Thompson laid out the basics of the plan in a blog posted Wednesday. In the blog, he also took a swipe at competitors, including Google, MasterCard, Visa and others, who are working with NFC in smartphones for a mobile wallet.
“Let’s be clear about something — we’re not just shoving a credit card on a phone,” Thompson said in his blog.
PayPal is already a major global force in online payments, with 100 million customers. While PayPal’s new payment technologies don’t rely on NFC, they do propose making in-store payments possible from any device and support GPS-based offers, according to Thompson’s blog. PayPal will even allow for customers to set up payments on credit after they’ve checked out.
Dozens of merchants got a sneak peak of the technology Wednesday at an event PayPal sponsored. The event was covered by All Things D, which was not allowed to take photographs, but posted a story. In addition to the payment methods shown in the PayPal video, that story said PayPal will allow customers to continue using plastic cards, issued by PayPal, for payment.
In an interview posted on AllThingsD, Thompson said the PayPal approach doesn’t require merchants to install new terminals, nor does it require customers to buy a new smartphone.
Google SEARCH Goes SSL
Google is finally taking privacy seriously to a degree by offering its users a secure form of searching while using Google Search. Moving forward users will have the opportunity to enable SSL (Secure Socket Layer) for added security. Be advised, the service will only cover the Google search and clicks made through Google to other non-secured sites will be visible.
Dell To Unleash Microservers
Dell is apparently in the process to debut two new microservers that are equipped with low-power consumption efficient processors from AMD and Intel.Representatives from Dell stated that the PowerEdge C5125 and C5220 were built for businesses that want to set up cloud computing infrastructures. Dell’s Barton George wrote in his blog that the C5125 will utilize AMD processors and will ship next month and the C5220 which will have an Intel processor will ship in May. The PowerEdge eco-friendly servers will have a dense 3U infrastructure that has 12 one-socket servers that can be used for running one application. These types of servers use four times less rack space and cabling which makes data centers more efficient.
Japan’s Earthquake Will Not Impact PC Supply
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According to Scott Lin, President of Acer Taiwan has said the PC supply chain still has at least three months worth of stock. That said, Lin stated that the Japan earthquake should not have an immediate will on impact on the PC market.
With PC manufacturers, brick and mortar each having at least one month’s worth of inventory, the supply should be fine for up to three months. Nevertheless, Lin did caution that Japan’s power infrastructure is an important factor and taking it online sooner rather than later will be crucial to whether the shortages become more serious. Read More…..