Lenovo Eyes The U.S.

Lenovo hopes that computers made in its first U.S. manufacturing plant will draw more consumers, while also making the delivery of ThinkPad laptops and tablets faster to U.S. customers.

The company, which is based in China, earlier this month announced it would open a factory to make computers in Whitsett, N.C. — its first such facility in the U.S. Lenovo said the factory would create about 115 manufacturing jobs. A spokesman later added that the company may expand the facility in the future, which could create more jobs.

Manufacturing in the U.S. will help Lenovo get its products to customers more quickly, said Peter Hortensius, senior vice president of the product group at Lenovo, in an interview at a company event in New York on Tuesday evening.

The company will manufacture ThinkPad laptops and tablets starting early next year, and with the new factory, Lenovo hopes computers could reach customers within a week, or in some cases, overnight. But initial supplies of products like the ThinkPad Tablet 2, which will become available in October, will not be made in the U.S. factory.

Many Lenovo computer shipments originate from China and are supposed to reach customers in 10 days, but in some cases take weeks. The company also has factories in Japan, Brazil, Germany and Mexico.

The “Made in USA” tag on computers manufactured in North Carolina will resonate with some buyers, Hortensius said. Lenovo’s main U.S. operations are in that state, and the company also has a distribution center there.

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Will HP Be Broken Up?

HP has been urged by investment bank UBS to break itself up in order to boost its share price.

After years of mismanagement, HP’s stock price is far lower than it was during the heady dotcom bubble days when it pulled off one of the biggest mergers in recent years by buying Compaq. Now the firm’s stock price languishes around the $14 mark, a figure that could top $20 if HP were to break itself up, according to UBS.

UBS analysts including Steven Milunovich reported the firm could “realise greater value” by splitting itself up. The analysts added that each separate division of HP is big enough to stand on its own, claiming, “HP’s units are not minnows but rather they are whales packed into the same pond.”

HP spokesman Michael Thacker claimed the firm’s customers want a big HP, effectively allowing them to have one supplier for their IT needs, a message the firm has been playing up for a number of years now. Thacker said, “No matter how you look at it we are confident that HP is stronger together than apart. The company’s operations across business units are deeply integrated and our customers have told us that they want One HP.”

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RIM’s PlayBook Tablet Pulled

Models of Research in Motion’s PlayBook tablet have been yanked from online stores of some top retailers in the U.S. and Canada, a move one analyst said could mean that the company is gearing up for a successor tablet.

The PlayBook tablet is no longer listed on the online stores of consumer electronics retailers including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, RadioShack and Staples. The products are listed as being out of stock in Office Depot’s online store.

In the BlackBerry maker’s home country of Canada, only the 32GB model is available on the websites of retailers Futureshop and Best Buy Canada, at a discounted rate of C$149.99 ($153). The 16GB and 64GB PlayBook models are out of stock.

However, the tablets remain available on RIM’s own online store.

RIM did not respond to requests for comment.

The first PlayBook shipped in April 19, starting at $500 for a 16GB model, but has sold poorly since. PlayBook sales dropped to about 130,000 in RIM’s most recent fiscal quarter, which ended on Sept. 1.

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GM Adds IT Jobs

General Motors Co said on Monday it will add 1,500 jobs at a new software development center in Michigan as part of the U.S. automaker’s previously announced plan to move information technology work back into the company.

GM said it will hire the software developers, database experts, analysts and other IT positions over the next four years for the office in Warren, Michigan. It is the second of four software development centers GM plans to open, following one it announced last month in Austin, Texas.

In July, the Detroit automaker said it would reverse years of outsourcing IT work. GM now outsources about 90 percent of its IT services and provides the rest in-house, but it wants to flip those figures in the next three to five years.

The IT overhaul is spearheaded by GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott, who outlined the plan to GM’s 1,500 IT employees in June. The former Hewlett-Packard Co executive believes the moves will make GM more efficient and productive.

GM, which has not disclosed the cost or savings of its strategy, plans to cut the automaker’s sprawling list of IT applications by at least 40 percent and move to a more standardized platform. GM will also simplify the way it transmits data.

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AMD And Oracle Join Forces

AMD is taking part in the OpenJDK project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle.

The project aims to bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for servers and clouds. It will look at how the Java virtual machine, language and APIs, can be spruced up to allow applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD APUs.

Manju Hegde, corporate vice president heterogeneous applications and developer solutions at AMD said that the OpenJDK Project represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of Java developers. AMD has an established track record of collaboration with open-software development communities from OpenCL to the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) foundation, and with this initiative we will help further the development of graphics acceleration within the Java community, he said.

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Japan Goes After Online Piracy

Japan will enforce anti-’piracy’ laws that criminalize illegally downloading media files.

The penalties see downloaders running the risk of a two year stay in prison and a fine of up to about $25K, according to a BBC report.

The BBC reports that the enforcement proposal follows a lobbying campaign by the Japanese music industry, adding that the penalties could apply even if someone has downloaded only a single file. The laws were passed two years ago, but so far have not been implemented.

Local rightsholders will be hoping that from now on the criminal penalties will be enforced, and in spades. They are the kind of sanctions that rightsholders dream of and are much stricter than the three-strikes policy in the US.

Anyone caught uploading is also treated more sternly, and could be jailed for as long as ten years.

Japan has a large market for media material, and its government apparently is bowing to protect the interests of rightsholders.

This past Summer the Japanese government ratified the draconian Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), despite it being rejected elsewhere.

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RIM Says Subscriber Base Grew

Research in Motion offered investors a glimmer of hope on Tuesday, announcing a surprise jump in subscriber numbers that sent its shares up 5 percent, even as the embattled BlackBerry maker worked hard to drum up enthusiasm for its new BB10 devices.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM, once a pioneer in the smartphone arena, has rapidly lost market share in North America to Apple’s snazzier iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices.

RIM is now attempting to reinvent itself through the launch of new line of totally revamped smartphones that will run on the new BlackBerry 10, or BB10, operating system. In an attempt to create a buzz around the new devices, RIM gave developers at a gathering Tuesday in San Jose, California, a sneak peek at the smartphone and its features.

At the event, the company also announced that its BlackBerry subscriber base has risen to 80 million from the 78 million it reported earlier this year, surprising many on Wall Street and sparking a jump in the company’s beleaguered share price.

In recent months, RIM has been completely focused on the launch its new line of revamped devices. In the meantime, its aging line-up of smartphones in the market have struggled to compete against the recently launched iPhone 5 and a slew of new Android devices. Most analysts had expected RIM to begin losing subscribers in the recently ended quarter, for the first time in its history.

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Will Intel Bring Medfield To The US?

An Intel powered phone powered by a 2GHz Medfield processor is a huge leap forward for Intel. After few tries they finally got a significant design win.

Still many want to see an Intel design win the US market and we were told that this can be expected at 2013 as the USA network providers demand a LTE capability for all their new phones. Now even the iPhone has LTE and it was getting hard even for Apple to convince people in the US that LTE is not relevant.

Intel is aware of that and it is expected that Intel can finish its LTE modem in 2013 and that it will have a LTE enabled chip with its next generation. It’s interesting that this is the same timing for Nvidia LTE while Qualcomm already stunned the market with its S4 LTE enabled chip that everyone wants.

The new Intel-based RAZR doesn’t have LTE support, but even in the US only major cities and metropolitan areas have it decent LTE coverage. Even the suburbs in Silicon valley and surrounding towns have weak and intermittent LTE coverage, while 3G has been almost everywhere you can have a cell signal.

Intel got its first major designs out, and it plans to continue winning the major manufacturers with Intel inside powered phones.

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RIM, Microsoft Sign Patent Licensing Deal

Research In Motion’s shares jumped on Tuesday after it inked a patent licensing deal with Microsoft Corp to use one of the technology company’s file storage systems.

Microsoft said the patent being licensed by RIM greatly expands the size of files that flash memory devices can handle and increases the speed at which those files can be accessed. The technology also provides the ability to seamlessly transfer data between a variety of different devices.

“This is potentially money out of RIM’s coffers for the right to use the ex-FAT patent in its technology. But what it does for investors and others is provide a glimpse into what the BlackBerry 10 devices can do,” said Kevin Restivo, a mobile device analyst at global research firm IDC.

RIM has seen its once dominant position in the smartphone market slip away to Apple Inc, Samsung and other competitors, and the company’s fate may depend on the success of its new line of devices, the BlackBerry 10, which is set to hit the market early in 2013.

RIM hopes the BlackBerry 10 will help it regain market share that has been ceded to snazzier devices such as Apple’s iPhone and others that run on Google Inc’s Android operating system.

“I think there is some anticipation and speculation around the devices that RIM will launch as a result of the announcement today,” Restivo said.

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Google Acquires Instagram’s Rival

Google Inc said it purchased Instagram rival Nik Software, which makes award-winning photo editing application Snapseed, for an undisclosed amount.

Google and Facebook Inc are locked in a battle for social network followers that has increasingly shifted to mobile applications, such as photo editing.

While not as famous as Instagram, available for free on Apple’s mobile devices, Snapseed has won a following for its editing prowess among photographers, despite a $4.99 price tag.

Nik Software says Snapseed has more than 9 million users while Instagram says it has more than 100 million.

“We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president, engineering, said on a Google+ post.

Facebook this year bought Instagram, which made an app for users to add filters and effects to pictures taken on their smartphones, for a cool $1 billion.

“Google’s playing chase up in social,” BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said. “It’s yet another tuck in they have done, trying to boost their Google+ offering.”

Snapseed won Apple Inc’s “iPad App Of The Year” award in 2011 for its multitouch photo editing interface.

“We’ve always aspired to share our passion for photography with everyone, and with Google’s support we hope to be able to help many millions more people create awesome pictures,” Nik Software said on its Website.

Google’s Gundotra also said that Google+ had hit over 400 million users this week and had just crossed 100 million

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