Posts Tagged ‘Google’
Friday, July 22nd, 2011
Europe’s largest maker of portable navigation devices reported a surprise second-quarter loss after writing down the value of assets to reflect a declining market for those devices.
The company reported a net loss of 489 million euros compared with a profit of 34 million euros a year earlier. The average forecast of nine analysts surveyed by Bloomberg was net income of 10.7 million euros.
The company took an impairment charge of 512 million euros in the quarter “reflecting the reduced outlook” for the personal navigation device market. Of the charge, 473 million euros related to goodwill. Sales decreased 13 percent to 314 million euros.
Earlier on June 27, TomTom had reduced its full-year profit and sales forecasts, saying U.S. demand for its devices had declined faster than anticipated and that consumers were opting for cheaper navigation systems.
After the statement, TomTom’s stock plunged 27 percent the day after. Its shares have declined 54 percent this year, reducing the market value of the Amsterdam-based company value to 812 million euros. Its U.S. rival Garmin has gained 5.6 percent this year.
Maaike Noordhuis of Bloomberg reports that TomTom, which competes with Garmin and Google, aims to get more revenue from maps, services and built-in systems in cars amid a slowdown in sales of portable navigation devices.
Tags:Garmin, Google, GPS, maps, PND, TomTom
Posted in Figures, Gadgets, GPS, Tech news, TomTom | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
Microsoft is offering for the first time a full Internet-based version of Office 2010, in an attempt to counter Google’s Apps for Business – the latter’s equivalent office productivity software online.
Available today in 40 markets, the cloud-based Office 365 suite of programs will cost small businesses $6 per user per month for software that includes Office Web Apps and Exchange e-mail software. For an additional $12 a month, companies can add a full version of Office, including Word and Excel programs, reports Dina Bass in Seattle for Bloomberg. The full online version of Office is a follow-up to last year’s release of the more basic Office Web Apps.
Google charges companies an annual fee $50 per user for its office-productivity software – Apps for Business, and offers a free version for consumers.
Both Microsoft and Google are going after users who want to work on applications hosted on the Internet, rather than software installed on a local hard drive.
Microsoft claims that it has almost 50 million users for its consumer version of Office Web Apps, which are scaled-down versions of the Office applications. Google claims 30 million active users for it Google Apps. This includes some 3 million corporations and other organizations that use its Apps business software.
Work on your documents anytime, anywhere. Microsoft Office 365.
This update represents the first time Microsoft will sell a full version of Office through an Internet-based cloud service, and also marks the first time companies can license the programs on a per-user, per-month basis, said Wes Miller, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Washington.
For larger businesses, $2 is enough for just basic e-mail, whereas $24 a month will get a full copy of Office and other programs like social networking and videoconferencing. These software services are an update to an earlier product called Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS.
“Microsoft released Office 2010 a year ago, and said earlier this month that it’s being adopted by business customers five times faster than the previous version. Sales in the business division, which is mainly revenue from Office, rose to $5.27 billion last quarter, exceeding the $4.9 billion average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The unit is Microsoft’s biggest in terms of revenue,” reports Bass.
Tags:Apps, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft, Office, Office 365, Office Web Apps
Posted in Google, Microsoft, Office, Software | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
Akamai has announced that it will provide a real-time data visualization of IPv6 Web traffic served from its global platform on World IPv6 Day on 8 June 2011. The visualization will show the pattern of traffic served during the 24-hour period.
Hundreds of websites and Internet service providers around the world are joining Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai, and Limelight Networks as participants in World IPv6 Day for the first global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6, being organized by the Internet Society.
The need for IPv6
IPv4 has approximately four billion IP addresses (the sequence of numbers assigned to each Internet-connected device). The explosion in the number of people, devices and web services on the Internet means that IPv4 is running out of space.
IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol, which provides over four billion times more space, will connect the billions of people not connected today and will help ensure the Internet can continue its current growth rate.
During World IPv6 Day on 8 June 2011, more than 225 participating organizations from every part of the globe will enable IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours. With IPv4 addresses running out this year, the industry must act quickly to accelerate full IPv6 adoption or risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere.
World IPv6 Day participants are coming together to help motivate organizations across the industry—Internet service providers, hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors and other web companies—to prepare their services for the transition.
“We see this test flight as an important step towards ensuring the global Internet can continue to grow and evolve so that it can connect billions of new users and devices,” said Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society.One of the goals of World IPv6 Day is to expose potential issues under controlled conditions and address them as soon as possible. Given the diversity of technology that powers the Internet, the global nature of the trial is crucial to identify unforeseen problems.
The vast majority of users should be able to access services as usual, but in rare cases, misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment, particularly in home networks, may impair access to participating websites during the trial.
“We’ve been working to make Google services publicly accessible over IPv6 since 2008, because we believe it’s critical to the long-term prosperity of the open Internet,” said Erik Kline, IPv6 Software Engineer at Google.
Current estimates are that 99.95% of users will experience no problems connecting to web services on IPv6 Day, and participating organizations will be working together with operating system manufacturers, home router vendors and ISPs to minimize the number of users affected.
The Internet Society is supporting World IPv6 Day as part of its efforts to accelerate IPv6 deployment. IPv6, the successor to the protocol currently used on the Internet, was designed in the late 1990s but has not seen deployment on a global scale. With IPv4 address space running out, the industry cannot afford to wait much longer.
Tags:Akamai, Facebook, Google, IPv6, Yahoo
Posted in Cloud, Enterprise IT, Events, Facebook, Google, Internet, Tech news, Technology, Yahoo | No Comments »
Monday, May 30th, 2011
The 5-day annual trade show in Taipei will see more tablet models based on Google’s Android and a preview of Microsoft’s next Windows platform for tablets – one year after Apple’s game changing iPads grab the lion’s share of the tablet market.
COMPUTEX Taipei, or Taipei International Information Technology Show (台北國際電腦展), will be held from May 31 to June 4, 2011 in Taipei. Taiwan based Acer and Asustek had first showed off their low-cost but trend-setting netbooks at the Computex in 2007 and 2008.
Investors and analysts will be watching to see if new Android based tablets can challenge Apple’s iPad. Non-iPad tablet competitors are expected to halve Apple’s 100 percent dominance of the tablet market to 50 percent next year, iSuppli predicted on April 21. The iPad had cordoned off the entire tablet market when it was first launched in June last year because of the absence of competitors.
Computex Taipei 2011 from May 31 to June 4, 2011.
Both Google and Microsoft will send executives to the event to brief the media on their plans. Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, and ARM, whose chip designs are licensed by Qualcomm and Nvidia to power tablets, will also be vying for tablet manufacturers to select their chips.
Global shipments of tablets will increase almost twelve times to 215 million units in 2015 from 17 million last year, Toni Sacconaghi, a New York-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., wrote in a May 26 report.
Computer sales growth will be reduced by 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015, Sacconaghi wrote, because fifteen percent of all tablets will cannibalize the sale of consumer PCs.
Bloomberg reports that Microsoft will “preview its operating system designed for tablets this week, using hardware with ARM-based chips”. The current Windows 7 operating system from Microsoft is not compatible with the ARM chips used in tablets from manufacturers such as Samsung and Motorola.
Tags:Apple, ARM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Samsung
Posted in Android, Apple, ARM, Events, Gadgets, Google, Intel, iOS, iPad, Microsoft, Motorola, Samsung, Tablets, Tech news | No Comments »
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
Google has unveiled its first two Chrome-based notebooks from Acer and Samsung at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. They will be available for order online from June 15.
Acer’s Wi-Fi only Chromebook will cost $349, while the Samsung Chromebook will cost $429 for the Wi-Fi only version and $499 for the 3G version.
The Acer Chromebook is a netbook running Google’s Chrome OS. It has an 11.6 inch display, 1.66 GHz dual-core Intel Atom N570 processor, 16 GB SSD drive and 2 GB RAM, with 6 hours battery life. It is available in black.
Acer Chromebook
The price of $349 is for the Wi-Fi only version. 3G will be an additional optional configuration.
Chromebooks will be available online June 15 in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. In the U.S., Chromebooks will be available from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from leading retailers.
Tags:Acer, Chrome, Chromebook, Google, netbooks
Posted in Acer, Chrome, Chrome OS, Gadgets, Google, Notebooks, Operating Systems, Prices, Samsung, Specifications | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
Google has unveiled today its first Chrome-based notebooks from Acer and Samsung at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. They will be available for order online from June 15.
The Samsung Chromebook will cost $429 for the Wi-Fi only version and $499 for the 3G version, while Acer’s Wi-Fi only Chromebook will cost $349.
Samsung Series 5 Chromebook
The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is a netbook running Google’s Chrome OS. It has a 12.1 inch display, 1.66 GHz dual-core Intel Atom N570 processor, 16 GB SSD drive and 2 GB RAM, with 8.5 hours battery life.
Looking similar to the CR-48 prototype, the Series 5 is available either in white or “Titan Silver”.
Chromebooks will be available online June 15 in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. In the U.S., Chromebooks will be available from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from leading retailers.
Here are the main specifications:
- A 12.1-inch (1280×800) SuperBright display at 300 nits, with a 16:10 aspect
- 1.66 GHz dual-core Intel Atom N570 processor
2GB RAM- 16GB SSD drive
- 8.5 hours battery life
- Stereo speakers
- Two USB 2.0 ports
- SD/SDHC/MMC/SDXC card slot
Mini-VGA port- 11.6 x 8.6 x 0.79 inches
- 3.26 lbs / 1.48 kg
- A full-size keyboard
- Multitouch touch pad
- Built-in dual-band Wi-Fi and World-mode 3G (optional)
- HD Webcam with noise cancelling microphone
- Instant-on from standby, and an 8-second boot time
Tags:Acer, Chrome, Chromebook, Google, netbooks, Samsung, Series 5
Posted in Acer, Chrome, Chrome OS, Events, Gadgets, Google, Launch, Notebooks, Operating Systems, Prices, Samsung, Specifications | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
Google will reveal its first Chrome-based notebooks from Acer and Samsung at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. They will be available for order online from June 15.
The Samsung Chromebook will cost $429 for the Wi-Fi only version and $499 for the 3G version, while Acer’s Wi-Fi only Chromebook will cost $349.
It’ll be interesting whether consumers will bite, considering that you can buy a decent Netbook or an iPad the $499 price-tag for the 3G Samsung Chromebook.
Acer Chromebook
Chromebooks will be available online June 15 in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. In the U.S., Chromebooks will be available from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from leading retailers.
Equipped with dual-core processors from Intel, the Chromebooks boast all-day battery life, and instant-on ability and built-in Net connectivity. Chromebooks will get updates and patches automatically every few weeks, like its browser cousin Chrome.
A special pricing is available for schools – Google will charge $20 a month for each Chromebook. The price will include hardware, administrative support, hardware upgrades, and warranty.
With this long awaited foray, Chromebooks will be taking on the tablet market dominated by Apple’s iPads, and the PC market dominated by both Microsoft and Apple.
Samsung Chromebook
The Chromebooks will run a new new bare-bones operating system that is basically a web browser that allows users to access applications like email, wordprocessors and spreadsheets directly on the web, instead of installing software such as Outlook or Office directly on the computer’s harddisks.
Users can also store their music and documents in the cloud for access from other computers as long as there is an Internet connection. Naturally, that means that a lot of the functionality may likely be unavailable or crippled offline.
Google has been touting Chrome as an alternative to Microsoft Windows for some two years now, but it has encountered delays producing computers designed to use the software.
Tags:Acer, Adobe, Chrome, Chromebook, Google, Microsoft, Samsung
Posted in Acer, Apple, Chrome, Events, Gadgets, Google, Launch, Microsoft, Notebooks, Operating Systems, Samsung, Tablets, Tech news, Technology | 2 Comments »
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011
Having had only 25,000 apps in BlackBerry App World, RIM’s PlayBook will tap the 150,000 apps in the Android Market to give it a headstart, while ramping up the number of PlayBook specific apps to stand against the staggering 350,000 apps in Apple’s App Store.
RIM will be opening the PlayBook to Android apps to provide customers a wider choice of apps.
Software tools for making Android apps work on the PlayBook will be available this summer, Tyler Lessard, head of RIM’s developer relations told Bloomberg in an interview.
Android is the world’s fastest-growing smartphone platform and is also gaining market share for tablet computers, based on data on global shipments from Strategy Analytics below.
| Percentage of global shipments |
Android |
iPad |
| Oct to Dec 2010 |
22 % |
75% |
| Jul to Sep 2010 |
2.3 % |
95 % |
Although developers can port Android apps for the PlayBook, Lessard states that developers should still create programs specifically for the PlayBook to make the most of its multimedia performance and ensure their apps work as well as possible.
Bloomberg reports that “Dozens” of games for the PlayBook will be released this year through Unity Technologies’s Union game development tool.
Tags:Android, Apple, Apps, BlackBerry, Google, iPad, RIM
Posted in Android, Apple, Figures, Gadgets, Google, iOS, iPad, PlayBook, RIM, Tablets, Technology | No Comments »
Friday, April 1st, 2011
RIM positions PlayBook to capture market share from its Apple and Android tablet rivals from the consumer market, even as it opens up for Android app compatibility and ramps up on building its own ecosystem of PlayBook specific apps.
Research In Motion (RIM) whose BlackBerry smartphone was a hit with corporate customers, is also targeting developers of consumer applications, including games and magazines.
The 7-inch tablet will be preloaded with applications such as Tetris – my favourite game on an Apple Macintosh during my college days, and the Kobo e-book reader.
An online version of Pro Football Weekly magazine will also be available for sports aficionados.
The PlayBook goes on sale in the US on April 19 and will feature a new operating system, a dual-core processor, and the capability to play applications for Google’s Android platform.
I had the chance to play with a beta release version of the PlayBook when it was first brought to Singapore three weeks ago and the display not only looked great, the processor was lightning fast, multi-tasking 8-10 CPU/graphics-intensive apps without showing any latency.
Although RIM has not been as successful as Apple or Google in attracting independent developers to write consumer apps for the BlackBerry, it is trying to rectify this with the PlayBook.
Hugo Miller from Bloomberg quoted Travis Boatman, senior vice president at Electronic Arts as being impressed with the PlayBook.
“It’s one of the fastest devices out there … You take a good software environment and great hardware, you’ve got a device that designers and developers can create great content on.”
The Redwood City, California-based company will release “Tetris” and “Need for Speed Undercover,” a car racing game, on the PlayBook.
RIM will be opening the PlayBook to Android apps to provide customers a wider choice of apps. There are more than 150,000 apps in the Android Market, compared with more than 25,000 in BlackBerry App World and more than 350,000 in Apple’s App Store.
“We are absolutely targeting the consumer, personal apps market as much if not more because there is such a vast market out there,” Tyler Lessard, head of RIM’s developer relations told Bloomberg in an interview.
Polar Mobile, a Toronto-based developer of apps for magazines including Time, GQ and Sports Illustrated, is building over 100 PlayBook apps including Pro Football Weekly, that will be ready in July, said Polar CEO Kunal Gupta.
Like other newcomers to the tablet scene, the PlayBook will be hoping to chip away at the market share of Apple, the market leader who has enjoyed little competition since the launch of its iPad in April 2010.
Analysts estimate that Apple has shipped more than 15 million iPads so far, and sold about 500,000 of the newly launched iPad 2, over its March 11 debut weekend.
Tags:Android, Apple, Apps, Google, iPad, iPad2, Playbook, RIM
Posted in Android, BlackBerry, Gadgets, iOS, iPad, PlayBook, RIM, Tablets | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
Amazon launches the service ahead of rivals Apple and Google who are both preparing to release similar services.
Amazon unveiled Cloud Player – its music streaming service that allows users to buy tracks, store them on the company’s servers and play them on Android smartphones and browsers on computers.
Music libraries can be uploaded to Amazon’s new Cloud Drive, which provides 5 gigabytes of free memory space. Users who purchase an album from Amazon.com will have their Cloud Drive space upgraded to 20 gigabytes. This can can be used to store music, photos, videos and other digital files.
The service targets users who find it a hassle to download music to their work computer or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices.
It is unlikely that the service will win over existing customers of iTunes since Apple’s own music streaming service will likely be launched soon.
Observers believe Amazon’s sights are well beyond the music arena. It is hoping to capture market share of users storing their data online. They want to get – not just music – but the user’s entire hard drives on its cloud.
Tags:Amazon, Apple, Google, iTunes, music
Posted in Amazon, Android, Apple, Google | 1 Comment »
