Intel may announce management overhaul today: reports

New York
The Economic Times
Intel is expected to announce a management shake-up on Monday that will see its core chip business-head Patrick Gelsinger leave the company after 30 years, says a media report.

Attributing to people briefed on the company, The New York Times said, Intel is expected to reveal a sweeping management change on Monday.

Among other changes, the chipmaker would announce that Pat Gelsinger, the senior vice president in charge of Intel's enterprise group, is leaving the company after 30 years performing a variety of roles, the report said citing these people.

Another media report, The Wall Street Journal, said 48-year-old Gelsinger would run computer-storage giant EMC's storage-products operations and some smaller software units, effective immediately.

As Gelsinger departs, Sean Maloney, Intel's head of sales and marketing, would take on an even larger role at the company, the NYT said citing the same people.

All of Intel's major chip businesses, including its PC, graphics and server chips would fall under Maloney, while Dadi Perlmutter, the head of Intel's laptop chips, would now oversee engineering for all the chip divisions.

Maloney, Intel's sales chief, is also considered to be one of the possible successor to Intel CEO Paul Otellini.

Canon to provide multifunction printers to HP

Tokyo
The Economic Times
Japan's Canon Inc said on Monday that together with Hewlett-Packard they have agreed to jointly market and distribute multifunction office systems.

Canon, which already supplies laser beam printers to HP on an original equipment manufacturer basis, will start providing advanced multifunctional printers to the US company later this year.

Software to help diagnose cardiac infections

The Times of India (Kolkata edition)
A teachable software, designed to mimic the human brain, may help diagnose cardiac infections in a non-invasive manner, suggests a new research. Endocarditis — an infection involving the valves and sometimes chambers of the heart — can be a problem in patients with implants. It is a serious condition and can be deadly. The mortality rate can be as high as one in five, even with aggressive treatment and removal of the device.

Apple probes iPhone explosion reports, eu says

Brussels
The Economic Times
Apple Inc is investigating media reports that one or more of the company's iPhones have exploded in Europe, a European Commission spokeswoman said on Tuesday. The spokeswoman for the EU executive, which oversees the safety of consumer products sold in the 27-country bloc, said Apple had described the reported incidents as isolated.

Apple said it was aware of the media reports, which include a case in which a teenager in France said he was slightly injured when his iPhone made a hissing noise and shattered, but did not comment on any contacts with the Commission.

"Apple have come back to us ... and what they've said to us is that they consider these are isolated incidents. They don't consider that there's a general problem," Commission spokeswoman Helen Kearns said.

Microsoft's bing wins share from Google, Yahoo

Seattle
The Economic Times
Microsoft Corp's Bing search engine continued to make small gains on rivals Google Inc and Yahoo Inc in the US Internet search market in July, according to the latest data from research firm ComScore.

Microsoft, which launched Bing in early June, racked up 8.9 percent of U.S. Internet searches in July, up 0.5 percentage points from June.

Google, the leader in the market, and Yahoo, the distant No. 2, both lost 0.3 percentage points of market share in July, to 64.7 percent and 19.3 percent, respectively.

Late last month Microsoft and Yahoo finally signed an agreement to cooperate on Internet search advertising, with Bing powering searches on both companies' sites and Yahoo handling the ad sales.

Blackberry is world's fastest growing company: fortune

Toronto
The Economic Times
BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) tops Fortune magazine's list of the world's 100 fastest-growing companies.

It is the first time that Fortune has opened its list of the top 100 fastest growing companies to businesses from around the world.

Apple, which is BlackBerry makers' main rival in the global smart phone market, is way down the list at 39th spot.

Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc, which is the world's biggest fertiliser company, is another Canadian firm among the top 10 in the Fortune list.

Among the top 10 are also two companies from China- Shanda Interactive Entertainment and a website.

Others in the top 10 are California-based Sigma Designs, Ebix of Atlanta, Texas-based DG Fastchannel, CF Industries of Illinois, Arena Resources of Oklahoma and Massachusetts-based Bruker Corp.

In a camera, two screens are better than one

Financial Chronicle
At last, a fresh and genuinely useful idea. Samsung has announced two cameras with an LCD screen on the front that helps snap-shooters put themselves in their photos. It also includes some nifty features for travellers and simpler ways to delete images inside the camera.

The DualView TL225 and DualView TL220 feature a 1.5-inch LCD screen on the front (in addition to a larger LCD screen on the back) that enables photographers to better frame shots of themselves alone or in groups. Simply tap the front screen and the camera enters portrait mode and will automatically snap a photo when it detects a smiling face — no need to press a shutter button.

The dual-LCD cameras also include a child mode that displays a cartoon animation on the front LCD screen to grab the attention of camera-unaware babies and toddlers. The animation looked a bit small but it should work well for close shots. (No babies participated in a demo by Samsung, so I don’t know for sure.)

For adults who need to know when to smile and not blink, the camera in self-timer mode, will display a preview of the image the front LCD and show a visual countdown to shutter snap. The camera can also take two consecutive shots in this mode.

The $350 TL225 has an expansive 3.5-inch touch-screen LCD on the back (the TL220 has a smaller 3-inch LCD) that enables users to take advantage of an intuitive new smart gesture interface. It’s easy: Draw an X on the screen to delete an image; to rotate, draw a circle. When in playback mode, swipe the screen to advance to the next image. Nice!

Both models have a 12.2-megapixel sensor fronted by a wide-angle 27mm lens with a 4.6X optical zoom. Samsung includes dual image stabilisation and face detection. The cameras can capture high-definition video (720p) at 30 frames a second using the H.264 video format. Samsung also introduced a very well-connected traveller, the $400 CL65, that lets on-the-go users e-mail and upload photos without a computer.

The CL65 connects to e-mail and the web using Wi-Fi. It includes an on-screen Qwerty keyboard to enter addresses for e-mail and uploading to sites like Facebook, YouTube and Picasa. Bluetooth 2.0 allows images to be swapped with cellphones.

It also includes geotagging, which records the latitude and longitude where each image is taken and displays the city name on the camera’s LCD.

The 12.2-megapixel CL65 packs 35mm lens with 5X zoom. It has the same 3.5-inch wide touch-screen LCD as the TL225 and incorporates the Smart Gesture user interface. Like the dual-LCD models, it records video in 720p at 30 frames a second in the H.264 format. All three models arrive in US stores in September.

China mobile opens online store for wireless software

Hong Kong
The Hindu Business Line
China Mobile Ltd., the world's biggest wireless carrier by users, opened an online software store for handset users to boost sales of non-voice services.

The Mobile Market Web site will let users purchase and download software provided by external developers, according to a statement faxed by the Beijing-based company today.

China Mobile, with more subscribers than the combined populations of the US and Japan, aims to promote demand for its third-generation service, which allows faster Web browsing and music downloads on mobile phones.

The company's customer growth has slowed this year as competition from China Telecom Corp. and China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. intensifies.

China Telecom and Unicom are both trying to target the higher-spending users with their 3G services, and China Mobile is trying to counter that, said Alex Lee, an analyst at Tai Fook Securities in Hong Kong, who rates the stock hold. The online applications store isn't going to turn into a big contributor immediately, as the 3G user base is still small.

China Mobile fell 5.4 percent to close at HK$84 in Hong Kong trading, trimming its advance this year to 8 percent. China Telecom's shares have jumped 35 percent in the period, while Unicom's stock has gained 15 percent.

4 Hyped technologies of 2009!

The Times of India
Research firm Gartner Inc recently published its annual `Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies’ report. Like earlier years, the 2009 Hype Cycle Special Report aims to chart out what's hot or not at the cutting edge of hi-tech jargon.

The report evaluates the maturity of 1,650 technologies and trends in 79 technology, topic and industry areas for how likely the terms are to make it into mainstream corporate parlance.

Below are four technologies and trends that are either at the Peak of Inflated Expectations or have just tipped Peak of Inflated Expectations.

Cloud Computing

As enterprises seek to consume their IT services in the most cost-effective way, interest is growing in drawing a broad range of services (for example, computational power, storage and business applications) from the "cloud," rather than from on-premises equipment.

The levels of hype around cloud computing in the IT industry are deafening, with every vendor expounding its cloud strategy and variations, such as private cloud computing and hybrid approaches, compounding the hype.

E-Book Readers

Sony's e-book reader and Amazon's Kindle have attracted a great deal of attention during 2009. However, the devices still suffer from proprietary file formats and digital rights management technologies, which along with price, are limiting their adoption and will drive them into the Trough of Disillusionment.

Social Software Suites

Awareness of social technology is high because of the popularity of related consumer social software and Web 2.0 services. Within businesses, there is strong and rapidly growing evidence of experimentation and early production deployments. The movement from point tools to integrated suites has brought broader adoption but also high expectations.

Disillusionment is beginning based on the realization that, even with a suite, much work must be done to build an effective social software deployment.

Microblogging

Microblogging, in general, and Twitter, in particular, have exploded in popularity during 2009 to the extent that the inevitable disillusionment around "channel pollution" is beginning.

As microblogging becomes a standard feature in enterprise social software platforms, it is earning its place alongside other channels (for example, e-mail, blogging and wikis), enabling new kinds of fast, witty, easy-to-assimilate exchanges

college e-textbooks go to class in iPhones

San Francisco
The Economic Times
US and Canadian college students can pack textbooks into their pockets instead of spine-bending backpacks courtesy of an iPhone application released by CourseSmart.

The northern California supplier of electronic textbooks on Tuesday released free software that makes digitized forms of college textbooks available on Apple's ubiquitous iPhone or iPod Touch devices.

"We've seen significant demand from student customers for the ability to get required textbook content in electronic form on an iPhone or iPod Touch," said CourseSmart executive vice president Frank Lyman.

"We see incredible potential for iPhone and iPod Touch applications in education." Students that buy "eTextbooks" from CourseSmart can view them from any Internet-linked computers and are able to print out pages or copy sections into custom study guides.

Instead of lugging old-fashioned ink and paper books to classes, students can use iPhones of iPod Touch devices to access textbooks online for reference during classes.

"It's important to students to be able to access textbook content in color with the same page layout as a printed textbook and now the eTextbooks App allows them to do that," Lyman said.

CourseSmart began offering eTextbooks in 2007 and as of Tuesday had reportedly sold copies to students in slightly more than 5,900 schools.

DELL unveils nickelodeon PC for kids

San Francisco
The Economic Times
Dell Inc on Tuesday unveiled a line of Nickelodeon co-branded personal computer for children, the first in a series of branding deals intended to galvanize its consumer business.

Dell's move is the latest example of PC makers using design and targeting particular demographies to stand apart from rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Acer Inc in an increasingly commoditized industry. The Dell Inspiron Mini Nickelodeon Edition will come clad in the Viacom Inc channel's trademark "green slime" design, with additional designs based on programs such as "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "iCarly."

The 10-inch netbook has wireless Internet access, weighs less than 3 pounds and comes loaded with entertainment and educational content. It will also feature a personalized user interface with Nickelodeon-branded desktop wallpaper and icons, and easy access to the channel's online content.

Michael Tatelman, vice president of global consumer sales and marketing for Dell, said the Nickelodeon netbook is just the start of its co-branding effort as it pushes into areas such as college students and pro sports. "The PC, like the smartphone, has become a 21st century symbol of self-expression. People are identified by what they carry, and people identify with what they carry," he said.

Leigh Anne Brodsky, president of Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer products, said the "sweet spot" for the PC was the so-called "tween" market. "This really is not a toy. This is the real deal," she said. The world's No. 2 PC maker did not announce pricing for the netbook, which will be available in October in the United States through Dell's online store, and at Wal-Mart Stores Inc outlets and Walmart.com. The Nickelodeon PC is based on Dell's Inspiron Mini 10v, which starts at $300.

Google working on new version

London
The Hindu Business Line
Google Inc is working on a new test version of its search engine, which the company claims will be faster and more relevant than before. The company has dubbed the new search engine Caffeine. The new search engine doesn't appear different, but its developers hope that the technology will noticeably index new content faster. Google engineers are said to have invited Web developers to test the new search engine and give feedback.

Matt Cutts, a principal engineer at Google, and Sitaram Iyer, a staff software engineer, have posted an entry on the company's webmaster central blog, appealing to developers to try the newly improved service and send them some feedback. ''The new infrastructure sits 'under the hood' of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback,'' they said.

Google CEO quits Apple board

Cupertino (California)
The Hindu Business Line
The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has resigned from Apple's board of directors as the Internet search leader increasingly develops products that compete with Apple's core businesses, including the popular iPhone.

The Apple Inc CEO, Steve Jobs, said Schmidt would have had to excuse himself from large portions of the company's board meetings to avoid potential conflicts of interest. ''Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board,'' Jobs said in a statement.

Yahoo to focus on display ad, content businesses: bartz

The Economic Times
Yahoo Inc, which last week announced a Web search deal with Microsoft Corp, will invest money from reduced marketing and infrastructure costs into its display ad, content and mobile services technology, its chief executive Carol Bartz told the New York Times in an interview.

Bartz told the paper she went ahead with the search deal as Yahoo found it difficult to match the level of investment that Google Inc and Microsoft were making in the search business.

"My first reaction when I got here was that I wouldn't even do a search deal," Bartz told the paper, "until I looked at our expense structure and our actual options and looked at what our prime job was, which is to grow audience."

Bartz told the paper that the core of the company was intact. "We haven't eviscerated the company."

Yahoo and Microsoft signed a 10-year pact last week under which Microsoft will power search queries on Yahoo's sites and Yahoo's sales force will be responsible for selling premium search ads to big buyers for both companies.

For some pc users, move to windows 7 will be tough

Mint
On October 22, Microsoft will finally release a new version of Windows that will be as good as the deeply disappointing Windows Vista should have been when it came out in January 2007. The new edition, called Windows 7, is a big improvement over both Vista and the sturdy, 2001-vintage Windows XP still widely in use. It will give Apple's longsuperior Mac OS X operating system a run for its money (though Apple might maintain its edge with a new version, called Snow Leopard, due in September).

But how will Windows users transition their current computers to the new Windows 7?

While this latest operating system stresses simplicity, the upgrade process will be anything but simple for the huge base of average consumers still using XP, who likely outnumber Vista users. It will be frustrating, tedious and labor-intensive.

In fact, the process will be so painful that, for many XP users, the easiest solution may be to buy a new PC preloaded with Windows 7, if they can afford such a purchase in these dire economic times. In fact, that's the option Microsoft recommends for XP users. (Conveniently, this option also helps Microsoft's partners that make PCs.) By contrast, if you're using Vista, the upgrade to Windows 7 should be a fairly easy, straightforward process. Because the new version shares most of the underlying guts of Vista, it installs itself on your current machine relatively quickly and smoothly, preserving all your files, folders, settings and programs. In a test of this process earlier this year, using a pre-release version of Windows 7, I upgraded a Vista laptop with no problems and little effort in about an hour.

But Windows XP users, including the millions who have recently snapped up cheap, XP-powered netbooks, will first have to wipe out everything on their hard disks in order to install Windows 7. on their current machines. In fact, Microsoft doesn't even call migrating to Windows 7 from XP an "upgrade." It refers to it as a "clean install," or a "custom installation." This disk wipeout can be performed manually, or automatically during the Windows 7 installation process.

Can Mozilla face the browser onslaught from Google, Microsoft

Mountain View
The Economic Times
Boxes lined the cubicles and hallways in the offices of Mozilla on a recent afternoon, and its chief executive, John Lilly, seemed a bit disoriented as he looked for a place to sit. Mozilla, which makes the Firefox Web browser, had just moved from one end of this city to the other, mainly to gain more space for its growing work force.

Yet it was hard not to read symbolism into the move. Mozilla’s old offices were next door to Google’s sprawling headquarters. For several years, Google has been Mozilla’s biggest ally and patron. But in September, it also became Mozilla’s competitor when it unveiled its own Web browser, Chrome.

So it seemed only natural for Mozilla to move out from under Google’s shadow.

"We’ve learned how to compete with Microsoft and Apple," says Lilly, a soft-spoken, earnest 38-year-old. "Google is a giant, of course, and competing with them means we are competing with another giant, which is a little tiring."

Those big companies weren’t giving much thought to browsers when Firefox was released in 2004, and neither were most ordinary Web users. A browser was just a window onto the Web, and people often used whatever was already installed on a computer. Usually that meant Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Since then, Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation. Its success is all the more remarkable because it was built and marketed by a far-flung community of programmers, testers and fans - mostly volunteers - coordinated by a nonprofit foundation. It is a shining example of the potential of open-source software, which anyone can modify and improve, and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s most unusual success stories. In short, Mozilla showed the world that browsers matter. Now the challenge is to keep proving that Mozilla matters.

The rise of Firefox unleashed a new wave of innovation and competition among browser makers. Microsoft, which make Internet Explorer, and Apple, which makes the Safari browser, have narrowed the gap with recent upgrades. That makes it less likely that people will take the trouble to seek out and install Firefox.

At the same time, the Web has been expanding accessibility from PCs to powerful mobile phones like the iPhone. Firefox won’t have a mobile version ready until later this year.

And then there is Google. After introducing Chrome, a lightning-fast browser designed to run increasingly complex Web applications, Google upped the ante. This month it said it would put Chrome at the center of a new operating system - the software that handles the most basic functions of a PC.

"Google, Apple and Microsoft can all throw a lot of resources toward improving their browsers. Mozilla, not so much," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "When it was them against Microsoft, it wasn’t such a big problem. Now that there are other alternatives, it becomes harder for them to retain relevance."

Animated Film works the net

The Financial Express
And the Oscar for the best-animated short film goes to ... an Internet community? That teaser, posted last fall on Facebook by the upstart company Mass Animation, kicked off a project many people in Hollywood thought was laughable: making a five-minute animated film using the Wikipedia model, with animators from around the world contributing shots, and Facebook users voting on their favourites.

But it worked. The completed short, “Live Music,” has been deemed of high enough quality by Sony Pictures Entertainment to warrant a theatrical run.

Sony will bring the tale of star-crossed love involving an electric guitar and a violin to the multiplex masses on November 20 as an opener for its animated feature “Planet 51.”

“Social networks can operate like automated talent scouts, helping the cream rise more quickly to the top, and that’s what happened with ‘Live Music,”’ said Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony’s entertainment division. “While creativity has been pretty evenly distributed in society, it hasn’t always been easy to tap.”

Few expect “Live Music” to win an Academy Award or even be nominated for one. But even Pixar started somewhere, and Sony’s enthusiasm for the short underscores the potential power of social networking in creating high-quality content.

The marketplace—advertising, gaming and, of course, Hollywood —is hungry for content, animated in particular, that is done in a faster, cheaper way. “Live Music” was made for about $1 million and took about six months to complete. Intel, hoping to peddle its new Core i7 processor to animation geeks, was the principal backer.

The finished film is made up of scenes submitted by 51 people, who received $500 per scene and a film credit for their efforts.

Ericsson to buy Nortel's wireless biz for $1.13 billion

Toronto, July 26, 2009
Business Standard
Ericsson is all set to acquire a major part of Nortel's North American wireless business for $1.13 billion, after the Swedish firm emerged as the successful bidder for the bankrupt Canadian company's CDMA and LTE technologies.

The purchase is structured as an asset sale at a cash purchase price of $1.13 billion on a cash and debt free basis, the two companies said in separate statements.

The acquisition significantly expands Ericsson's footprint in North America and also provides Nortel's customers with a strong and reliable supplier for the future, many of which have expressed support for this acquisition.

"Acquiring Nortel's North American CDMA business allows us to serve this important region better as we build relationships for the future migration to LTE," Ericsson President and CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said.

Svanberg further said, "By adding some 2,500 highly skilled employees, of which about 400 are focused on LTE research and development, Ericsson reinforces and expands a long-term commitment to North America."

On July 25, Ericsson entered into an asset purchase agreement to acquire the parts of the Carrier Networks division of Nortel relating to CDMA and LTE technology in North America.

As part of this agreement, a minimum of 2,500 Nortel employees supporting the CDMA and LTE Access business will receive offers of employment from Ericsson.

Internet 2.0 will drive productivity growth

California, July 27, 2009
Mint
John Chambers/CISCO The crash has hit Silicon Valley as hard as anywhere else. The only consolation is that this time, at least, it didn't start here. But while other firms are hunkering down and trying to survive, networking giant Cisco Systems ($130 billion market value, $40 billion in annual sales) continues to stride forward.

"Even in this downturn," says chairman and CEO John Chambers, sitting at the table in his modest, mementocrammed office, "We intend to be the most aggressive we've ever been."

A decade ago Cisco was known for building the switching systems (called routers) that find the most efficient path for information on the Internet. These days it has a presence in just about every corner of the Web's infrastructure--from networking hardware (switches, gateways and the like) to network management software (CiscoWorks) to the Linksys router that runs the wireless network in your home.

As much as three-quarters of the world's digital data now passes through Cisco equipment, the company estimates.

This massive expansion has come not merely by internal growth, but through one of the biggest (and most successful) merger-and-acquisition programs in high-tech history.

Despite taking the same hit as the rest of the computer industry earlier this year, Cisco's stock is climbing (up 17% to more than $21.50 in the last month), the company has cut an incredible $1.5 billion in operating expenses, and earned an upgrade this week to "outperform" from Credit Suisse. It has also announced a major sponsorship of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

How deleted email can come back

Washington, July 27, 2009
The Times of India
Beware, emails or Facebook posts or pictures can resurface months after they are deleted -- in the wrong hands or at the wrong time, according to researchers.

"If you care about privacy, the internet today is a very scary place," said University of Washington (UW) computer scientist Tadayoshi Kohno. "If people understood the implications of where and how their email is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often."

For instance, a lost cell phone can expose personal photos or text messages. A legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating, inconvenient or just embarrassing details from the past.

The team of UW computer scientists developed a prototype system called Vanish that can place a time limit on text uploaded to any web service through a web browser. After a set time text written using Vanish will, in essence, self-destruct.