digitalpercept.com » Entries tagged with "Technology blog"
Facebook buys e-book publisher, largest-ever state cyberattacks uncovered, and more
This article titled “Boot up: Facebook buys e-book publisher, largest-ever state cyberattacks uncovered, and more” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 3rd August 2011 13.00 Asia/Calcutta
A quick burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core >> Shifty Jelly’s blog of mystery
This is a big problem for Amazon: “Amazon’s biggest feature by far, has been their Free App Of The Day promotion. Publicly their terms say that they pay developers 20% of the asking price of an app, even when they give it away free. To both consumers and naive developers alike, this seems like a big chance to make something rare in the Android world: real money. But here’s the dirty secret Amazon don’t want you to know, they don’t pay developers a single cent.”
Biggest-ever series of cyber attacks uncovered, U.N. hit >> Reuters
“Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organizations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world.”
McAfee said there was just one state behind all of the attacks, but declined to point the finger. A security researcher apparently briefed on the study said that the evidence points to China. Over to you, China.
Why Did Facebook Buy an e-Book Publisher? >> NYTimes.com
The most plausible theory is, as ever, that it’s more about the talent behind the product than the product itself.
We’ve been acquired by Facebook >> Push Pop Press
“Although Facebook isn’t planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it’s going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.”
Zero-day vulnerability in many Wordpress themes >> Mark Maunder
“The Exec summary: An image resizing utility called timthumb.php is widely used by many WordPress themes. Google shows over 39 million results for the script name. If your WordPress theme is bundled with an unmodified timthumb.php as many commercial and free themes are, then you should immediately either remove it or edit it and set the $allowedSites array to be empty.”
Internet Explorer users have lower IQ says study >> BBC News
“The results suggested that Internet Explorer surfers had an average IQ in the low eighties. Chrome, Firefox and Safari rated over 100, while minority browsers Opera and Camino had an “exceptionally higher” score of over 120.
“AptiQuant stressed that using IE doesn’t mean you have low intelligence. “What it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer,” said AptiQuant CEO Leonard Howard.”
No, don’t ask him to explain it again.
Health warning: this turned out to be a bogus story.
Bing’s battle with Google: how long is “long term”? >> Search Engine Land
Points out that Microsoft’s protestations that it’s into Bing for the long term (a good thing, since it really started in 2005; all that’s happened since then has been two rebrandings) don’t mean much if you don’t define “success” or quite when you have entered the “long term”.
You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on delicious
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Boot up: white iPhone explained. RIM’s profit warning, Notion Ink reviewed and more
A burst of 12 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
BlackBerry maker RIM’s shares plunge on profit warning >> Financial Times
“RIM’s stock fell .17, or 11 per cent, to .43 in late trading on Thursday, after earlier closing at .59 on Nasdaq.
“Underscoring its problems, RIM said BlackBerry shipments would be at the lower end of the range of 13.5m-14.5m units it had projected last month and the mix of devices it sells would shift towards cheaper models.
”In a tense call with analysts after the profit warning was announced, Jim Basillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, insisted the company’s current problems were transitory rather than the start of a longer-term decline. “We all wish we could have got the new products out quicker,” he said, “but that just hasn’t happened.”
Not a call they’d have wanted to make just as BlackBerry World – the fiesta for developers and clients – is kicking off in Florida.
We thought ’sold out’ sounded better than ‘awaiting delivery’ >> AllThingsD
More tricks to play with sales channels, this time from Asus: “J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz’s informal survey of Best Buy and Target outletts… found that most hadn’t received any Transformer tablets yet. “All stores we spoke to had not even received the Transformer tablet,” Moskowitz says. “The general read was that supply would not reach most stores until mid-May. As a result, we ask how the Asus tablet can be sold out when it did not arrive in the first place.”
How the iPhone knows where you are >> Macworld
Read this and you will, finally, understand this whole saga.
The unedifying arrogance of PC journalists >> Ian Betteridge
“he reason that Barry [Collins] – and plenty of other tech journalists – call Apple arrogant is mainly because Apple doesn’t jump when the journalists tell them. Apple, in fact, has a very bad reputation amongst tech journalists for being one of the least responsive companies out there. And that reputation is, I can tell you from years of experience, entirely justified.”
Biggest Threat to Apple: Google Chrome OS >> TheStreet
“Starting some time around July or August, Google’s partners Samsung and Acer will launch laptops and perhaps also a desktop or two, based on Chrome OS. I am guessing laptops will start at 9 and “naked” desktops at 9. Given the superb performance of these Chrome OS PCs, with boot-up times (from cold) of less than even Apple’s MacBook Air, some consumers and enterprises will pick Chrome OS PCs over the much more expensive Apple PCs.”
A good example of how price can blind you to why people buy computers. Would someone who buys a ChromeOS computer really have been in the market for an Apple device? Far more likely they’d have been looking at cheap PCs.
Don’t forget either that the first generation of netbooks running Linux had huge returns because people couldn’t make them work: they expected (and later got) Windows. Expect something similar for ChromeOS.
Microsoft net income vs Apple net income from 1980 >> Wolfram|Alpha
Interesting to compare, using the smart statistical search engine. Note how Apple’s profit falls well below zero in 1996-8.
The Great White iPhone: How Apple Spun A Tech Fail Into A PR Win >> Fast Company
Worth it for the illustration alone, but interesting analysis: “It didn’t arrive when the iPhone 4 went on sale in mid-2010 because Apple couldn’t get its hardware working properly–the white coloring, combined with the iPhone 4’s unusual glass frame meant the phone’s proximity sensor and camera unit didn’t function as they needed to. In other words, it was a big technological failure, from one of the world’s biggest companies on one of its market-defining products.”
Apple’s Not Spying on You; You’re Spying for Apple >> Gottabemobile
“Apple asks for diagnostic and usage information about your iPhone, which is fair enough to do. However, I don’t believe tracking tower and hotspot locations counts. That information is external to the device, not part of it. If Apple wanted to collect data on my iPhone’s location, I would consider that a fair part of that agreement. But instead they’re using my iPhone to collect tower and hotspot locations, and that’s not right. I only signed up to give info about my device, not those belonging to other people.
”The lack of transparency on that point is a serious problem, far more legitimate than the paranoia circulating. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reporting tower and hotspot locations back to Apple. I just think this falls outside the range of “diagnostic and usage information about your iPhone”. It’s about property that belongs to others. Therefore, it requires separate, specific permission, as well as a detailed explanation of the risk involved.
With iPhone’s secrets, Apple loses track of reality >> ZDNet UK
Rupert Goodwins: “Steve Jobs normally talks to the press about as often as the Earth gets visited by Halley’s Comet. And, like the comet, it’s usually a portent of doom.
”There have been three sightings in living memory: the iPhone 4’s Antennagate, the as-yet-unexplained rant against Android and tablets in last October’s earnings call, and yesterday’s response to the discovery of iOS 4’s unexpectedly good memory for location. Let’s call it Trackergate.
”Leaving aside the Android rant — perhaps Eric Schmidt ran over the family cat — the two other responses show strong similarities, and make a fascinating insight into how a company reacts when it’s backed into a corner and can’t ignore the flack.”
Suffice it to say, Goodwins ain’t buying it.
Notion Ink Adam review >> Engadget
“Notion Ink truly did come up with a number of fantastic ideas for the Adam tablet. They do show. But so little of their light shines through the muck of buggy software and touchy hardware that we’re afraid even the best of them will be completely dismissed and ignored…
”Features like USB host functionality, a desktop-class web browser, a sunlight-readable screen and a multitask-friendly interface aren’t just value-add bullet points that justify a higher price — they’re the difference between a tablet that can augment an existing computer, and one that can replace it altogether and thrust users into a new paradigm. We’re sad to see the Adam couldn’t make it happen, but there’s still an opportunity for other manufacturers to take up the torch.”
Free anti-virus for Mac named Best Anti-Malware solution at SC Awards >> Naked Security
Beating the Windows products. We’ve no idea what the criteria for winning actually were.
First Day PlayBook sales: is 50,000 too big a number? >> AllThingsD
“Jeffries analyst Peter Misek figures RIM sold about 45,000 PlayBooks Tuesday, with pre-orders accounting for about 25,000 of the total. RBC* analyst Mike Abramsky’s first day sales estimate is in the same range, but a bit higher: 50,000, including pre-sales.
”‘The launch appears to have been stronger than the launch of Motorola’s Xoom Tablet, or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, although it’s too early to judge sustainability,’ said RBC analyst Mike Abramsky in a note to clients, adding that, as of Wednesday, checks of 180 stores across 10 cities in the United States and Canada show rising PlayBook stockouts.
”But some analysts I’ve spoken with feel those estimates are overly bullish, given the device’s limited availability. 50,000 sold seems an awfully big number when even the Broadway Staples store in downtown New York City had just 10 PlayBooks on hand at launch and a clerk at the Bay Area Best Buy I called described inventory as ‘a handful.’”
You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on delicious
To suggest links, tag articles on delicious.com with “guardiantech”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
The Technology newsbucket: music tolls, Korean tablet wars, Facebook cash and more
Toll bridge sign in Romania. Photo by Austin Donisan on Flickr. Some rights reserved
A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Patent Troll Forces Online Music Sellers, Buyers to Pay a Toll >> The Legal Pulse
"Sharing Sound’s patent, and the litigation arising from it, are a sad commentary on the quality of federal patent examination. As one commentator noted, online selling of digital goods was well underway before the Patent Office issued the Sharing Sound patent."
A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years >> The Globe and Mail
Ah. Douglas Coupland, with these 45 predictions and guides to how to live, you make us feel… uneasy.
Tablet war is about to begin in Korea >> CNET Asia Blogs
"Two local giant carriers KT and SKT will introduce their latest flagship tablets, the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab, in Korea by mid-October. KT is known as a partner of Apple with distributorship for the iPhone 3GS and 4. SKT is focusing on Samsung’s Galaxy series to match up with KT’s Apple."
It’ll be interesting to see how sales and prices compare.
What’s Wrong with "HTML5? >> Katz Got Your Tongue?
Yehuda Katz, a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, says: "The thing is, the core problem isn’t that the name is too fuzzy. It’s what the name implies. HTML5 sounds like a technology which goes through a beta period and is finally complete. Instead, what the tech press calls "HTML5? is really a continual process of improving the web browsers that people use. And honestly, that’s how I’d like to see the tech press cover us. Not as group of people working towards a singular milestone that will change the web as we know it, but as a group that has gotten our groove back."
Stuxnet >> Schneier on Security
Bruce Schneier offers his alternative theories about what the worm was looking to do, which include: "A message. It’s hard to speculate any further, because we don’t know who the message is for, or its context. Presumably the intended recipient would know. Maybe it’s a "look what we can do" message. Or an "if you don’t listen to us, we’ll do worse next time" message. Again, it’s a very expensive message, but maybe one of the pieces of the message is "we have so many resources that we can burn four or five man-years of effort and four zero-day vulnerabilities just for the fun of it." If that message were for me, I’d be impressed."
Testing Videos on Cellphones — With Flash >> David Pogue
"I didn’t conduct battery tests, but Adobe notes with pride that Flash for Mobile is one of the most popular downloads from the Android Market, and it’s highly rated. Adobe’s engineers estimate that you can get 3 to 3.5 hours of video-watching time before your phone is dead (assuming, of course, that you do nothing else).
"Over all, it’s much better to have Flash than not to have it. O.K., it may accelerate battery drain, and mouse/keyboard games are clumsy, and it doesn’t work on absolutely all sites. Even so, shouldn’t it be available for us to use now and then when we need it?"
Couldn’t you have tested the battery life too, David?
The Facebook Money Machine >> Monday Note
‘This year, Facebook will make about .5bn in advertising revenue. On average, this is about three dollars per registered user, a figure that is significantly higher for the 50% of the social network’s population that logs in at least once a day.’
Can the iPhone Thrive in Apple’s Closed Ecosystem? >> NYTimes.com
Usually when a headline ends in a questionmark, the answer is "No", but this one is cleverly twirled round so that the correct answer is actually yes. As the article acknowledges if you persevere to the end: smartphones are not, and can’t be, commoditised in the same way as PCs.
You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on delicious
To suggest links, tag articles on delicious.com with "guardiantech"
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Microsoft to spend billions on Windows Phone 7: what chance of payback?
While everyone has been focussing on Apple, RIM and Android phones, it’s been easy to overlook the company that has a lot at stake in the mobile market. (Chorus: Nokia!) No, not Nokia, which is still selling lots of phones (though we’ll come to quite what’s going on with Nokia in the near future).
No, we meant Microsoft. Remember them? And Windows Phone 7? It’s now moving towards the launch stage – which means advertising budgets, handset manufacturers, carriers, all having to be brought into line.
As the table (from Windows Phone 7 Central) shows [apologies for the overspill], the early players in this are the companies that have previously been Microsoft’s mobile BFFs. Though Dell has made very little impact in the smartphone market, HTC was (is?) the company which bought the most Windows Mobile licences, while Samsung and LG have been big WM licencees too. Notably absent from the list (so far) are HP, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba, who were among those mooted by Microsoft in February.)
But now let’s discuss the price. At Techcrunch Kim Cutler suggests the price of launching Windows Phone – in terms of marketing costs, payments to developers and handset makers – will be more than half a billion dollars. She quotes Jonathan Goldberg, a telecomms analyst at Deutsche Bank, who reckons Microsoft will spend 0m just on marketing the launch.
She has an interesting quote from him:
"This is make-or-break for them. They need to do whatever it takes to stay in the game," says Goldberg. "It’s still wide open. They don’t have to take share from Android or Apple, so long as they can attract enough consumers switching from feature phones."
The idea that in an expanding market it’s always OK just to take a niche is one that you’ll hear repeatedly from companies that are trying to catch up. (Of course Microsoft’s not saying this. But it’s the analysis being offered.) The reality though is that that is never the way to make sufficient impact on the market; it’s expensive and you’ll stay in a niche. Going back some time, I recall Ed Colligan, then chief executive of Handspring, saying it about the PDA market. Handspring couldn’t make any headway, though, and got bought by Palm.
Or it could be bigger:
"On a visit earlier this month to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Goldberg says company executives told him that Microsoft, along with its carrier and manufacturing partners, would likely spend "billions" of dollars in the first year for marketing and development. Another source familiar with Microsoft’s manufacturer and carrier agreements says the company will spend billion on the launch, half on marketing and half on other development costs."
Eee-yikes. Billions of dollars so that you can catch up to get back to the place where you used to be, but aren’t because you competely took your eye off the mobile ball? For any company other than Microsoft, that would be scary. For Microsoft though, that’s just a cost of doing business, at least in the mobile market.
Mary Jo Foley meanwhile thinks that the cost is easily going to be north of a billion dollars:
"Think this through: Microsoft easily spent over a billion dollars over three years to develop and launch the now-defunct Kin phones, which were a tiny subset of its Windows Phone base. Microsoft spent an estimated 0 million to buy Danger; at least two to three years worth of salaries for the Pink team; however much it cost them to survey the tens of thousands of potential Kin customers/testers via "Project Muse"; and 0 million to write off the failed Kins.
"Windows Phone 7 is of far more importance to Microsoft than the Kin phones were. And Microsoft has been working on its Windows Mobile 6.x successor for two-plus years so far. We’ve heard from the Softies that they’ve reassigned many of their "best and brightest" to develop the Windows Phone 7 operating system, reference designs, user interface and developer ecosystem. So that’s two-plus years of salaries for thousands of Softies."
She concludes:
"I’d say it’s safe to say we’re easily at or over billion at this point. Microsoft made .5 billion in fiscal 2010. One of the company’s biggest black eyes at this point is its lack of a credible and coherent answer to the iPhone and Android. A billion dollars would be a small price to pay to achieve this. Do you agree?"
Actually, I don’t agree that Microsoft "made" .5bn in fiscal 2010; those were its revenues. Its profits for FY2010 were bn. And it’s sitting on a cash pile of bn. So it’s really not going to notice the odd billion going missing, especially in the market that so many think is so important for mobiles – smartphones.
Yes, you could certainly argue that all the momentum is with Android at the moment, the mobile OS platform which is selling more phones than Apple, and might soon overtake RIM. You could argue that that’s because the Android code is open-source, and hence costs "nothing" to use in a mobile handset.
But over at Business Insider, there’s a Microsoftie who has emailed them (anonymously) to suggest that the cost of incorporating Android into handsets is actually much greater than "free". As he puts it:
• Lawsuits over disputed Android IP have been costly for Android OEMs. (See Apple/HTC, as just one example.) Microsoft indemnifies OEMs who license Windows Phone 7 against IP issues with the product. That is, legal disputes over the IP in Windows Phone 7 directed at OEMs will be handled by Microsoft. This goes a long way toward controlling legal costs at the OEM level.
• Android’s laissez faire hardware landscape is a fragmented mess for device drivers. (For background, just like PCs, mobile devices need drivers for their various components—screen, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G radio, accelerometer, etc.) Android OEMs have to put engineering resources into developing these drivers to get their devices working. The Windows Phone 7 "chassis strategy" allows devices to be created faster, saving significant engineering cost. It’s essentially plug and play, with device drivers authored by Microsoft.
• [At Microsoft] We’ve seen the delays due to Android OEMs having to sink engineering resources into each and every Android update. Some Android OEMs skip updates or stop updating their less popular devices. Because of the unique update architecture, Windows Phone 7 OEMs don’t need to roll their own updates based on the stock build. Costs are reduced significantly.
• Android OEMs need to pay for licenses for many must-have features that are standard in Windows Phone 7. For example, software to edit Office documents, audio/video codecs (see some costs here), or improved location services (for this, Moto licenses from Skyhook, just as Apple once did). Of course, all of these license fees add up.
As Cutler points out, "Even at per device, 100 million Windows 7 phones will have to ship before it recoups billion in marketing and engineering subsidies, not counting revenues from search advertising or its cut of app sales)."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Recent Comments
- jailbreak untethered on Amazon outage hits Quora and others
"After study a few of the blog posts on your website now, and I truly like your w…" - Lamay on WikiLeaks: look before you leak…
"Hello there, This net web page is really exciting and enjoyment to go through. I…" - Benziger on HTML5 facts and myths: a Javascript expert and Opera evangelist explain
"Good day, This net site is really enjoyable and enjoyment to examine. I’m a hu…" - Babitsch on The digital reading revolution
"most of the time i listen to audiobooks while surfing the net, i love to multita…" - admin on The Technology newsbucket: music tolls, Korean tablet wars, Facebook cash and more
"Nice story how brilliant idea can spread into the huge project. I realized that …"