Is China Mobile Good For Apple?

The tame Apple Press has enthusiastically been running storied about how well Apple is doing in China. Reuters for example has been saying that the one million pre-orders that Jobs’ Mob has just collected is a triumph for Tim Cook’s negotiating ability. Getting a deal out of China Mobile was something the sainted Steve Jobs could not manage.

However saner heads are urging caution, While it is true that launching its iPhone on China Mobile vast network on Friday, opening the door to the world’s largest carrier’s 763 million subscribers and giving its China sales a short-term jolt, it is not likely to last. For a start the deal could start a war which China Mobile would not want. Some analysts predicting a costly subsidy war as rival carriers compete to lure customers. If China Mobile does not make its targets on sales for these phones, they are going to increase the subsidies.

China Mobile’s iPhone sales are expected to reach 12 million in its 2014 fiscal year, but its subsidies will leap 57 percent to $7 billion. In addition, the prices are still really high for the Chinese market. For the basic 16GB iPhone 5S, with no subscriber contract, China Mobile is charging $870.

China Unicom and China Telecom slashed their iPhone prices by as much as $210 following the announcement that a deal had been struck between Apple and China Mobile. The pair have also offered a range of cut-price deals on contracts. But there are also some problems with the pre-orders. Reuters checks showed that there were multiple registrations using fake ID numbers which means that people are buying up hoping to make a swift buck on resales.

All this is the least of Apple’s Chinese worries. The outfit has fallen out of favour with consumers who are increasingly opting for domestic products. Those who want an iPhone do not need to pay excessively to get one through China mobile either. In China, you can buy handsets typically smuggled from Hong Kong and then sign up for a China Mobile contract. This is a swings and roundabouts for Apple. If people buy from China Mobile, they will not buy from Hong Kong so it will lose sales there. If they don’t then the China Mobile contract is rubbish.

Source

Chip Makers Going After Cars

Chip makers including Broadcom and Renesas Electronics are putting more focus on in-car entertainment with faster processors and networks for wireless HD movies and navigation, aiming to keep drivers informed and passengers entertained.

With PC sales slipping and the mobile device market proving highly competitive, chip makers are looking for greener pastures in other sectors like in-car entertainment and information.

From Renesas comes the R-Car M2 automotive SoC (System-on-a-Chip), which has enough power to handle simultaneous high-definition navigation, video and voice-controlled browsing.

The SoC is meant for use in mid-range systems. It features two ARM Cortex A-15 cores running at up to 1.5GHz and Renesas’ own SH-4A processor plus the PowerVR SGX544MP2 from Imagination Technologies for 3D graphics. This combination helps the M2 exceed the previous R-Car H1 with more than three times the CPU capacity and approximately six times better graphics performance.

Car makers that want to put a more advanced entertainment system in their upcoming models should go for the eight core R-Car H2 SoC, which was announced earlier this year. It is based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, and uses four Cortex-A15 cores and another four Cortex-A7 cores.

The H2 will be able to handle four streams of 1080p video, including Blu-Ray at 60 frames per second, according to Renesas. Mass production is scheduled for the middle of next year, while the M2 won’t arrive in larger volumes until June 2015.

Broadcom on the other hand is seeking to drive better networking on the road. The company’s latest line of wireless chipsets for in-car connectivity uses the fast 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless standard, which offers enough bandwidth for multiple displays and screen resolution of up to 1080p. Use of the 5GHz band for video allows it to coexist with Bluetooth hands-free calls on 2.4GHz, according Broadcom.

Broadcom has also implemented Wi-Fi Direct and Miracast. Wi-Fi Direct lets products such as smartphones, cameras and in this case in-car computers connect to one another without joining a traditional hotspot network, while Miracast lets users stream videos and share photos between smartphones, tablets and displays.

The BCM89335 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Smart Ready combo chip and the BCM89071 Bluetooth and Bluetooth Smart Ready chip are now shipping in small volumes.

Source

Phishing Attacks Increasing

Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have reported significant growth in phishing attacks over the last year.

In a study entitled “The Evolution of Phishing Attacks”, Kaspersky said it found 37.3 million out of its 50 million customers running its security products that were at risk of being phished from 2012 to the present, an 87 percent increase over the same period between 2011 and 2012.

“The nature of phishing attacks is such that the simplest types can be launched without any major infrastructure investments or in-depth technological research,” Kaspersky said in the report.

“This situation has led to its own form of ‘commercialization’ of these types of attacks, and phishing is now being almost industrialized, both by cybercriminals with professional technological skills and IT dilettantes.”

The security firm explained that overall, the effectiveness of phishing, combined with its profitability for criminals and how simple the process is to undertake has led to a steadily rising number of these types of incidents.

Kaspersky noted that most of the victims in 2012-2013 were located in just ten countries, that is, Russia, the US, India, Germany, Vietnam, the UK, France, Italy, China and Ukraine. These 10 countries were home to 64 percent of all phishing attack victims during this time.

In addition to a rise in the number of users attacked, the number of servers involved in phishing attacks also increased, Kaspersky said, without giving any exact numbers. Though the firm did reveal that internet giants like Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon are the top targets of malicious users.

“Online game services, online payment systems, and the websites of banks and other credit and financial organizations are also common targets,” the firm added, warning users to stay vigilant when entering personal data.

Source

Is This A Mobile First World?

Judging from the number of people engrossed in activities with their smartphones on the sidewalk, in their cars and in public places, mobile seems to have stolen our attention away from the wired Internet and traditional TV.

However, there is a ways to go before mobile platforms become the primary place where consumers turn for entertainment and getting things done, players at  CTIA Wireless trade show said.

Nokia Siemens Networks announced new capabilities in its network software to make video streams run more smoothly over mobile networks. Among other things, the enhancements can reduce video stalling by 90 percent, according to the company. But even Sandro Tavares, head of marketing for NSN’s Mobile Core business, sees “mobile-first” viewing habits as part of the future.

“Now that the networks are providing a better capacity, a better experience with mobile broadband, mobile-first will come,” Tavares said. “Because the experiences they have with the devices are so good, these devices … start to be their preferred screen, their first screen.

“This is a trend, and this is something that will not change,” Tavares said. But he thinks it’s too early to build networks assuming consumers will turn to tablets and phones as their primary sources of entertainment. “Do you have to be prepared for mobile-first now? Probably not. You have to be able to keep the pace.”

For AT&T, mobile-first is a top priority for its own internal apps, ensuring employees can do their jobs wherever they are, said Kris Rinne, the carrier’s senior vice president of network technologies. But to make it possible over the network, a range of new technologies and relationships may have to come together, she said.

For example, giving the best possible performance for streaming video and other uses of mobile may require steering traffic to the right network if both cellular and Wi-Fi are available. AT&T is developing an “intelligent network selection” capability to do this, Rinne said. When AT&T starts to deliver voice over LTE, it will stay on the cellular network — at least in the early days — because the carrier has more control over quality of service on that system, she said.

Other issues raised by mobile-first include security of packets going over the air and rights for content that subscribers are consuming primarily on mobile devices instead of through TV and other traditional channels, Rinne said.

Source

Will Zynga Survive?

Nobody expected Zynga’s results for this quarter to be great, so nobody was exactly surprised when the company announced a decline in almost every number that matters. It turned a small profit, but that’s a bright spot in an otherwise deeply unimpressive set of results. The really important figures – the number of people playing and, crucially, the number of people paying – are all down. Zynga’s business may not be hemorrhaging money, but it’s losing audience, and in a business so heavily focused on scale, that’s a really bad thing.

The company likes to present itself as being on the cusp of a turnaround, or perhaps already embarked upon a slow but steady turn. If so, it’s the oddest turnaround imaginable. The firm’s MAUs – Monthly Active Users – dropped from 292 million to 253 million year on year, so nearly 40 million people have simply stopped logging in to a Zynga game even once a month. Worse still, though, is the disproportionate fall in the number of Monthly Unique Payers – those who make at least one transaction during a month-long period. This number fell from 3.5 million to 2.5 million, a precipitous year-on-year drop of almost 30%.

It bears emphasising just how bad that actually is. For a social gaming business, MUPs are the real customers. There is huge value to having a large audience (MAUs), of course, and companies need to be very careful about not trying to force players into becoming paying customers before they’re good and ready – but ultimately, non-paying users are like footfall in a store. They’re not customers, in a strict business sense. Zynga’s not-quite-so-bad loss of 13% of its players (MAUs) is a side-show compared to the fact that it’s lost 30% of its paying customers (MUPs). Imagine, by comparison, a shop loudly announcing that the number of people walking past its window had fallen 13%, distracting from the fact that the number who came in and bought something had fallen 30%.

Of course, the two figures are related, and the disproportionately large drop in MUPs figures into that relationship to some degree. The process of encouraging players of a social game to spend money is focused around a number of principles, but the key temptation lies in buying items or currency that will give you the ability to match or overtake your friends’ progress, or to create a fantastic character, farm, castle or whatever which will “impress” the many friends who are also playing the same game.

For that psychology to work, of course, you actually need to have lots of friends playing the game. Most social games, as the name suggests, don’t work terribly well if you don’t have friends active in the game. “Active” is a key aspect here too – if you see that your friends are losing interest, logging in less often or spending less time tending to their farm, castle, town or whatever, then you also tend to lose interest rapidly. Hence, a game that gives the impression of being “in decline” – with players losing interest in some visible manner – will likely experience a precipitous decline in revenue, because even though lots of people are still playing, the sense of decline removes the key psychological drive to spend money on the game. (It doesn’t help, of course, that social game operators have established a pattern of shutting down unsuccessful games rapidly, which creates a feedback loop in which players are unwilling to spend money on a game they think might be in commercial trouble.)

The psychology of what Zynga is experiencing is clear enough, then, but the figures on the bottom line are still pretty dreadful. Whatever the reasons or the mechanism, the company is losing paying customers, and that kind of damage is extremely hard to recover from.

A stark contrast to Zynga’s woes can be found on the other side of the Pacific, where mobile developer GungHo this week topped a $9 billion valuation on the Osaka Stock Exchange, making it into a larger mobile gaming company than even fellow Japanese giants GREE and DeNA. GungHo’s valuation is ridiculous, a bubble that will inevitably pop in relatively short order, but there’s a genuine success driving the excitement – a single game, Puzzle and Dragons, which is the most successful mobile game in Japan (and is launching in other territories as well). Puzzle and Dragons reportedly makes about $2 million a day; it certainly makes enough to justify prime-time adverts in evening slots on Japanese TV.

GungHo is an extreme example of a phenomenon which is completely unavoidable in the social and casual game sphere. Mobile utterly dominates this sphere. Facebook, it turns out, was a flash in the pan in gaming terms. Smartphones, and to some extent tablets (though they’re arguably more “midcore”), are the social gaming platforms of today. Zynga, for all its cash (the company still has plenty of liquid assets), its clout and its former dominance, still hasn’t made a successful transition to being a mobile-first company. Clinging to the wreckage of the Facebook social gaming model which it so successful exploited (in doing so, perhaps hastening the downfall), Zynga is being overtaken time and again by smaller companies who have mobile gaming in their DNA from the outset. With this week’s results came a fresh claim that the company will be focusing more heavily on mobile, but a good, nimble firm would have accomplished that focus shift 12 months ago, at least. Zynga right now feels like it’s plodding along in everyone else’s wake.

The other great white hope for the company, of course, is gambling. It has cautiously launched gambling services – what it calls “real money gaming” – in the UK, and wants to expand into other territories. Plenty of pundits like to tap their noses sagely and suggest that Zynga will become a gambling giant down the line – although in doing so, they’re just following in the well-worn footsteps of a large number of video games industry pundits, executives and even developers who have regarded the gambling industry with something like the avaricious wonder of wannabe prospectors hearing about a new gold rush.

I don’t see any gold rush for Zynga in “real money gaming”. Investors and executives consistently overstate the allure and possibilities of this kind of gaming, because by dint of being investors and executives, they tend to be exactly the sort of person who is very attracted to gambling risks (you wouldn’t have an investment, or a career, anywhere within spitting distance of tech stocks otherwise). Moreover, by moving into the online gambling arena, Zynga is entering a market that’s already incredibly crowded with companies who are deeply, deeply expert in this field – not just in the customer-facing psychology of the casino, but also in the legal and regulatory minefield of operating a gambling enterprise online. Many major markets simply aren’t open to this kind of business; most others require you to jump through all manner of hoops simply in order to set up shop. The notion of Zynga having an open goal in “real money gaming” is born either from complete naivety or utter desperation – it could make money in the gambling business, but it has its work cut out for it.

It’s worth highlighting, all the same, that Zynga did make a small profit this quarter – it may only be one bright spot, but it’s bright all the same. The company’s scale still also arguably works in its favour, allowing it to buy talent and IP that smaller firms could never afford. Yet after several grim quarters, it’s also worth highlighting that talk of a “turnaround” is optimistic at best. Something about Zynga – its culture, its leadership or a combination of both – is blocking this company from moving in the agile, intelligent way a firm in its position desperately needs. Inventing fairy stories about the magical potential of gambling games or constantly reassuring the world that a pivot to mobile is definitely happening any day now won’t cover up the cracks for much longer. If Zynga wants the world to buy the “turnaround” story, it needs to start showing evidence; if not, it needs to start making big changes, starting right at the top.

Source

Bonets Attack U.S. Banks

Evidence collected from a website that was recently used to flood U.S. banks with junk traffic suggests that the responsible parties behind the ongoing DDoS attack campaign against U.S. financial institutions — thought by some to be the work of Iran — are using botnets for hire.

The compromised website contained a PHP-based backdoor script that was regularly instructed to send numerous HTTP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) requests to the websites of several U.S. banks, including PNC Bank, HSBC and Fifth Third Bank, Ronen Atias, a security analyst at Web security services provider Incapsula, said Tuesday in a blog post.

Atias described the compromised site as a “small and seemingly harmless general interest UK website” that recently signed up for Incapsula’s services.

An analysis of the site and the server logs revealed that attackers were instructing the rogue script to send junk traffic to U.S. banking sites for limited periods of time varying between seven minutes and one hour. The commands were being renewed as soon as the banking sites showed signs of recovery, Atias said.

During breaks from attacking financial websites the backdoor script was being instructed to attack unrelated commercial and e-commerce sites. “This all led us to believe that we were monitoring the activities of a Botnet for hire,” Atias said.

“The use of a Web Site as a Botnet zombie for hire did not surprise us,” the security analyst wrote. “After all, this is just a part of a growing trend we’re seeing in our DDoS prevention work.”

Source…

Yahoo To Release Secret Documents

Yahoo has ceased its efforts to keep documents related to Microsoft’s failed bid to buy the firm sealed.

Yahoo tried to keep documents relating to the failed 2008 buyout attempt by Microsoft sealed from investor Dan Loeb. Loeb, who runs the Third Point hedge fund with a five per cent stake in Yahoo led a shareholder’s revolt against Yahoo’s board and wanted to see documents related to Microsoft’s bid to buy the company.

Microsoft tried to take over Yahoo in 2008 with an offer of $31 a share, over double Yahoo’s share price now. According to Loeb, the documents will highlight the then Yahoo board’s “misjudgments and failures”.

Loeb is after documents that made up part of a shareholder lawsuit that was settled. According to Yahoo, its decision to cease efforts at keeping the documents sealed was due to the lawsuit being settled and unable to be reopened.

Loeb had tried to get his preferred board members onto Yahoo’s board or directors including himself, however the firm announced that it had appointed three new board members, none of which were on Loeb’s list.

Source…

Google Search To Add Default Encryption

Google is implementing over the next few weeks default encryption using SSL on searches for users signing in with their accounts, the company said Tuesday.

The move comes over a year after Google made SSL the default setting for Gmail, and also unveiled an encrypted search service.

“As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver,” Google’s product manager, Evelyn Kao said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The encryption is expected to be particularly useful for people using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a Wi-Fi hotspot in an Internet cafe, Kao added.

With Google search over SSL, users get an end-to-end encrypted search channel between their computer and Google. The secured channel helps protect search terms and search results pages from being intercepted by a third party, Google said in a description of SSL search.

Over the next few weeks, users will be redirected to a secure search site when they are signed in with their Google Account. The change encrypts search queries and Google’s
results page.

Users can also navigate directly to the secure search site if they are signed out or don’t have a Google Account.

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….

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…

« Previous Page — Next Page »