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Sharp Electronics Gets Downgraded
Sharp has had its credit rating cut to junk status by the Standard and Poor’s rating agency.
Sharp, which invested heavily during the LCD television boom in the mid 2000s, is now paying the price as demand for televisions slumps across the board. Now Standard and Poor’s has bestowed the ignominy of lowering Sharp’s credit rating to BB+, putting it into what’s called junk status.
Standard and Poor’s also warned that Sharp has weak cash flow and is facing worsening market conditions, two things that will not endear it to investors. It said, “Sharp’s liquidity position has weakened, and the company is highly dependent on short-term borrowings in light of weak internal cash flow and a less favourable funding environment.”
Sharp has had a troubled year and earlier this week announced that it will lay off 2,000 employees in Japan, as its LCD business simply cannot support itself. Standard and Poor’s said that unless Sharp’s fortunes improve, the firm could be hit with another credit rating downgrade.
Standard and Poor’s said, “We may consider lowering the ratings if Sharp’s earnings in (the year to March 2013) and prospects for its recovery deteriorate even further or the company’s financing environment and relationships with credit banks and strategic partners worsen.”
Intel Partners With WMware
Intel has teamed up with Microsoft’s rival VMware to deliver a platform for “trusted cloud.”
The technology will mix Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and VMware’s vSphere 5.1, platform for building cloud infrastructures. Intel said its hardware-enhanced security capabilities integrated directly into the processor combined with vSphere 5.1 would provide a hardened and high-integrity platform to run business-critical applications in private and public cloud environments.
Intel thinks that the biggest barrier to cloud adoption is the fact that companies are worried about security. Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s Cloud Infrastructure Group, in a statement that Intel TXT provides hardware enforcement to help overcome some of the most challenging aspects of cloud security, including detection and prevention of bios attacks and evolving forms of stealthy malware, such as rootkits.
Will Facebook Go Lower?
September 6, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Facebook is still overvalued and analysts are starting to agree with us that the company could fall to about $13 a share.
SmartMoney’s Jack Hough is being quoted by Forbes as saying that Facebook should be worth about half what is now – about $29.52 billion, or just a tad over $13 per share. Hough compares Facebook to Google which trades at 3.6 times its projected revenues for 2014. Analysts expect Facebook to have $8.2 billion in sales that year which means you just multiply this figure by about three.
All makes sense and is a similar view to what I said when Facebook issued its daft IPO and people lost their shirts and underpants on the deal. Part of the problem is still that Facebook has not worked out a good way to make money from advertising and it has not got an effective mobile strategy.
Microsoft Silent On Windows 8 Pricing
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With just two months remaining before the retail launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has yet to provide pricing on its new OS.
Analysts today blamed Microsoft’s attempt to accommodate both desktops and tablets with Windows 8 for the lack of information.
“The delay in releasing pricing is all about uncertainty around the PC market and competition from Apple,” argued Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. “Microsoft needs to price Windows in a way that looks smart versus Apple’s OS X, doesn’t leave money on the table with commercial PC customers, and enables OEMs to compete better with the iPad.”
The delay in pricing Windows 8 is real: During the Windows Vista and Windows 7 cycles, Microsoft unveiled retail prices weeks before each OS made the RTM, or “release to manufacturing,” milestone, and four or more months before retail sales started.
Microsoft disclosed Vista prices 58 days before that edition’s RTM, and 148 days before retail availability. Windows 7′s prices were made public 28 days before RTM and 120 days before its on-sale date.
Does 4G Pose A Security Threat?
Could 4G Networks give way for more high-risk mobile security implications; Symantec is warning of such a wave of threats.
“We could see a move to the sort of threats that we already see on the wireless and fixed connected network,” John said. “Malware that you usually have on fixed networks, like botnets.
“There aren’t many botnets on mobile devices because the bandwidth’s not there to support it, once you go on to 4G [hackers] could start infecting systems.”
To ensure that enterprises avoid these these security threats, John advised that businesses need to be on their toes more than ever, look closely at everything that’s coming into the network, and not trust anything.
“Companies need to make sure that where traditionally it’s been a firewall with a perimeter with everything in a timeline environment,” John said. “What they need to look at is ‘what are my employees doing’, ‘what information is being shared’ and ‘how do we ensure our information is being protected no matter where it may be’, whether its mobile device, across networks or sitting in a cloud service.”
“This is a change we are going through, but 4G is going to push the need for that change even more so,” she added.
According to John, 4G will also be detrimental to businesses in the way it will add a greater burden for them to ensure that cloud services and mobility – what she calls “two of the biggest security challenges for enterprises and their employees” – are up to scratch.
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.
Rambus Makes Cuts
Technology licensing firm Rambus Inc said it has reorganized its businesses into three divisions and will slash its workforce by 15 percent as part of its efforts to cut costs.
The company, which has posted a loss for the last three consecutive quarters, appointed a new Chief Executive in June.
Rambus expects to save between $30 million and $35 million in cash annually, most of it from cuts in its general and administrative expenses.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company said the reductions in expense and related workforce will begin in the coming weeks and are expected to be completed during the fourth quarter.
It will take a related charge of $6 million over the next two quarters.
As of December 2011, the company had 456 employees.
Rambus said it now operates three business units — Memory and Interfaces, Cryptography Research Inc and Lighting and Display Technologies. It also named Martin Scott as the new role of chief technology officer.
Windows 8 ‘Grace Period’ Ends
Microsoft has halted the 30-day grace period, a trademark of Windows 7, in the retail copies of Windows 8, requiring that users provide a product key during setup.
The change runs counter to previous practice by the Redmond, Wash. developer. With Windows 7, for example, users could run the OS for 30 days before activating the copy by providing a legitimate key.
That “grace period” was used by some to evaluate the software prior to purchasing, to save up to $100 by using an “upgrade” license to install the OS on a newly-formatted hard drive, and to create physical partitions or virtual machines for quick testing purposes.
Because Windows 8 handles activation differently, the grace period has been eliminated.
As several blogs have noted, customers must enter a unique product key — a 25-character alpha-numeric string — to proceed during Windows 8 setup. Failure to do so stops the process in its tracks. The Consumer Preview and Release Preview used this technique too, although Microsoft provided users a generic key for those sneak peeks.
Once Windows 8 is installed — assuming the machine is connected to the Internet — it automatically seeks out a Microsoft server to verify that the key is valid and then activates the OS. “If the licensed computer is connected to the Internet, the software will automatically connect to Microsoft for activation,” states the end-user licensing agreement, or EULA, for Windows 8 Pro.
Chase Building 1/2 Billion Dollar Data Center
August 24, 2012 by admin
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The enthusiastic backer of Enron and serial over charger of mortgage payers, JPMorgan Chase has just splashed out on a new $500 million data center.
CEO Jamie Dimon announced the move which practically everyone in the IT industry finds a bit strange. While Chase is the US’s largest bank, the new facilities are a little big by anyone’s standard. It is about the same about of money that Google and Microsoft in their largest data centres for their cloud networks.
Dimon cited the figure as one of the advantages of being a big size. It can afford to invest cash in this way. Size lets Chase build a $500 million data centre that speeds up transactions and invest billions of dollars in products like ATMs and apps that allow your iPhone to deposit cheques, he enthused.
JPMorgan Chase operates two large data centres in Delaware and a 400,000 square foot facility. It also acquired data centres in its deals for distressed rivals Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in the early days of the 2008 financial crisis. So why it needs a huge new one is anyone’s guess.
Will Microsoft Sell The Surface RT For $199?
August 23, 2012 by admin
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Microsoft’s Surface for Windows RT tablet will sell for $199 when it ships on Oct. 26, according to an unidentified source in an Engadget story.
At that price, Microsoft would surely be selling below its costs, analysts said. However, Microsoft could take the loss in hopes of making up revenues on apps and media sales for the device.
Also, Microsoft would be trying to make an impact against the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire sold at the same $199 price, since Microsoft arrived arrived late to the tablet game.
Engadget said it learned the price from an inside source at Microsoft’s recent Tech Ready15 conference, where launch details for Surface were announced.
Microsoft said the Surface tablet would be priced in-line with Windows RT tablets from other makers such as Asus, which hasn’t announced a price. However, given the components in the Surface and other Windows RT tablets, analysts have suggested it could cost more than $600.