Apple Scores A Victory

A court imposed a temporary ban on the sale of Samsung Electronics’ latest computer tablet in Australia on Thursday, delivering rival Apple another legal victory in the two firms’ global patent war.

Resolution of the case could take months — unless Samsung takes the potentially risky option of an expedited hearing — which, in the fast-moving industry, could mean the new Galaxy tablet is never launched in Australia. The Galaxy is the hottest competitor to Apple’s iPad, which dominates global tablet sales.

“The ruling could further extend Apple’s dominance in the tablet market as it widens a sales ban of Samsung’s latest product,” said Lee Seung-woo, an analyst at Shinyoung Securities in Seoul.

Whilst the ruling is a blow for Samsung, the Australian market is not large. A more important legal battle starts later on Thursday, when a Californian court begins hearing Apple’s bid to ban sales of Galaxy products in the United States.

The two technology firms have been locked in an acrimonious battle in 10 countries involving smartphones and tablets since April, with the Australian dispute centering on touch-screen technology used in Samsung’s new tablet.

The Federal Court in Sydney, in granting the temporary ban, ruled Samsung had a case to answer on at least two of Apple’s patents. The ban applies on sales of Samsung’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet until the same court rules on the core patent issue.

Source….

Lenovo Passes Dell, Becomes No. 2 PC Vendor

Lenovo surged past Dell to become the world’s second largest PC vendor at the end of the third quarter, according to research firms IDC and Gartner.

Top PC maker Hewlett-Packard also saw its worldwide PC shipments grow by 5.3 percent in the quarter, despite reports that the company may spin off its PC business.

Both research firms said growth for the quarter failed to reach earlier projections. IDC said at the end of the third quarter, worldwide PC shipments increased by 3.6 percent year-over-year, below its earlier 4.5 percent growth projection.

Gartner said PC shipments grew by 3.2 percent year-over-year, which was lower than the research firm’s original projection of 5.1 percent growth for the quarter.

Analysts have pointed to sluggish spending because of weak economic conditions as a key reason behind the slowdown in PC growth. The rise of tablets has also hurt shipments.

“For the moment, PCs have taken a backseat to a range of other devices competing for shrinking consumer and business budgets,” said IDC analyst Jay Chou in a statement.

Source….

Will AOL Merge With Yahoo?

AOL is trying to engineer a merger with Yahoo in order to lower costs.

AOL’s CEO Tom Armstrong reportedly has been working hard to generate support from shareholders for a deal with Yahoo. According to Reuters, Armstrong is presenting the deal as an alternative to going it alone as an internet media company in order to reap cost and advertising reach benefits.

Apparently Armstrong is claiming that a merger with Yahoo, which itself is at the centre of acquisition rumours, would bring in savings of between $1bn and $1.5bn by combining datacentres and consolidating content on areas such as news, sports, entertainment and finance.

Since AOL was spun out of its disastrous merger with Time Warner, the firm has been trying to remake itself into an internet media company by buying popular websites such as The Huffington Post and Techcrunch. While many question whether that is a workable plan, the financials can’t mask the deep trouble AOL is in, with the company reporting a $11.8m loss for the second quarter.

While talk of AOL being bought up has cooled considerably in the last few months, the firm still has a few worthwhile assets. According to Reuters’ sources, shareholders like the idea of merging with Yahoo but are not convinced that Armstrong can pull it off.

Source….

Will eBay Cozy Up With Facebook?

EBay Inc is attempting to strengthen its relationship with social network leader Facebook at a developer conference this week, a person familiar with the e-commerce company said on Tuesday.

EBay will also debut a new online identification service for shoppers named PayPal Access, the source added.

The company expects almost 4,000 people to attend its X.commerce conference in San Francisco on October 12, 13 and 14. The event marks the official launch of the company’s new X.commerce division, which will target e-commerce software developers.

EBay is trying to encourage outside developers to create applications for its e-commerce platforms and is making a particularly strong push in mobile commerce.

At the end of September, Katie Mitic, head of Platform and Mobile Marketing at Facebook, joined eBay’s board of directors, sparking speculation that the two companies were working on new partnerships.

Mitic is scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers at the X.commerce conference on Wednesday. Facebook Platform, which Mitic helps run, is the company’s developer unit, so any new partnership will focus on this area, the person said on condition of anonymity because the plans aren’t public yet.

Source…..

Microsoft Goes After Yahoo

Just three years after a failed attempt to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft may be considering whether to give it another shot, Reuters reported today.

According to the report, Microsoft executives are split on whether the company should bid for Yahoo. A final decision has not been reached, the report noted.

Citing an unnamed “high-ranking Microsoft executive,” the report said Microsoft is evaluating whether to pull in a partner for a joint effort to buy Yahoo.

Microsoft said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation. Yahoo didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.

“As long as Microsoft is committed to growing its online presence, this makes sense,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. “Yahoo has a large number of subscribers and regular visitors, many of whom are not considering going elsewhere. And that would be a good boost for Microsoft.”

He also noted that Yahoo Mail, Yahoo’s popular free email service, would combine well with Microsoft’s own Hotmail service to create a very large base of email users.

In 2008, Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo. Yahoo’s argument that the bid was tool low prompted Microsoft to finally give up.

Since then, Yahoo has been dealing with some significant problems.

No longer the high-flying Internet pioneer of its heyday, Yahoo last month fired Carol Bartz, who had joined the company as CEO with high hopes that she could return the company to its past glory.

Once Bartz was out the door, industry analysts began speculating that Yahoo’s board might be open to a solid acquisition offer.

Read More…

WebOS Lives

HP is aiming to keep WebOS alive by putting it on printers.

The firm has discontinued its WebOS devices such as the Touchpad tablet and Pre 3 smartphone but WebOS will appear on new products, according to Pocketlint. The operating system (OS) will come on the Designjet line of HP printers.

An HP spokesperson said, “HP is currently investigating using WebOS on its Designjet range of professional printers.”

It’s likely that the OS will come on consumer printers at some point in the future, too. The following statement also hints that it could appear on products other than printers.

“HP is 100 [per cent] committed to producing print solutions that meet our customer needs and we will continue to drive innovation to ensure our products and solutions meet market demand. We built our printing franchise based on being OS agnostic – we have been and will continue to be agnostic to meet our various customer needs. As webOS plans develop we will continue to evaluate how and if we incorporate it into our future products.”

Read More…..

HP’s PC Division Decision This Month

HP will decide on the future of its PC business this month, according to a statement from its newly installed CEO.

While it was under the Apotheker captaincy the firm announced rather shocking plans to dump the PC business. Okay, it didn’t explicitly say that, rather it said that it would consider selling it or spinning it off, which apparently meant something else to HP than it did to normal people.

According to Bloomberg, new HP CEO Meg Whitman sprinkled a little more colour into the HP PC business tapestry, and in a conference call said that the firm is almost ready to say what its plans are.

It’s likely that shareholders and the board are still reeling from the suggestion, but the extra time will give HP room to decide on what it wants to do with the still profitable, but boring hardware arm.

While it was under Leo Apotheker’s rule the firm had given itself the deadline of the end of the year for a decision, but presumably sick of people asking her, “what are we going to do with the PC business?”, Whitman has bought the decision forward.

Read More….

Will Oracle Buy HP?

Word on the street is that Oracle has threatened to buy its sworn enemy HP. According to the Times of India, HP directors are terrified that their falling shares would make the company vulnerable to a bid from Oracle. Apparently this was the reason for the sudden sacking of Leo Apotheker.

Oracle has considered informally whether to approach Hewlett-Packard, but it’s unlikely to make a bid any time soon. But to make sure HP has hired Goldman Sachs to help it prepare for any possible moves by activist investors, one person said.

If Oracle were to make a hostile takeover it would be with the sole aim of getting rid of a lot of people who have hacked Larry Ellison off. It might even result in Mark Hurd returning to the company.

Read More….

Will The FTC Block The Google?

The FTC has asked Google for more information about its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Google is buying the outfit as a defence against Apple and Microsoft patent law suits, however in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Motorola said it received a request for “additional information and documentary material” from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

According to Reuters, Motorola said Google also received a similar request and repeated its expectation the deal would close by the end of 2011 or early 2012. Writing in his bog, Google Senior Vice President Dennis Woodside said the DOJ’s “second request” was “pretty routine” and there was nothing to see here, move on please. Google usually gets a note from the FTC even if it buys lunch for a client. A similar one appeared when it bought ITA Software.

Read More…

Tool Created To Hack BlackBerry Passwords

A Russian security firm has upgraded a phone-password cracking software with the ability to figure out the master device password for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices.

Elcomsoft said on Thursday that before it developed the product, it was believed that there was no way to uncover a device password on a BlackBerry smartphone or PlayBook tablet. BlackBerry smartphones are configured to wipe all data on the phone if a password is typed incorrectly 10 times in a row, the company said.

Elcomsoft said it figured a way around the problem using a BlackBerry’s removable media card, but only if a user has configured their smartphone in a specific way. In order for Elcomsoft’s software to be successful, a user must have enabled the feature to encrypt data on the media card.

The feature is disabled by default, but Elcomsoft said around 30% of BlackBerry users have it enabled for extra security.

The company’s software can then analyze the encrypted media card and use a brute-force method to figure out a password, which involves trying millions of possible password combinations per second until one works.

Elcomsoft said it can recover a seven-character password in less than an hour if the password is all lower-case or all capital letters. The software does not need access to the actual BlackBerry device but just the encrypted media card.

Read More..

« Previous Page — Next Page »