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Sony To Acquire Toshiba’s Sensor Business
November 4, 2015 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Toshiba Corp is offload its image sensor business to Sony Corp for around 20 billion yen ($164.68 million) as part of a restructuring plan laid out earlier this year, sources with knowledge of the deal said on Saturday.
Toshiba, whose businesses range from laptops to nuclear power, is undergoing a restructuring after revelations this year that it overstated earnings by $1.3 billion going back to fiscal 2008/09.
Image sensors, which are used in digital cameras and smartphones, are part of Toshiba’s system LSI semiconductor business. Toshiba plans to sell its image sensor manufacturing plant in Oita, southern Japan, and pull out of the sensor business altogether, said the sources, who declined to be identified.
The sale is likely to be finalized soon, the sources said.
Toshiba is considering several options for its system LSI semiconductor business and its discrete semiconductor business and that debate is ongoing, a Toshiba official said when contacted.
An official from Sony declined to comment.
Masashi Muromachi, who became Toshiba’s CEO following the accounting scandal, has promised to restructure lower-margin businesses.
The deal for the image sensor business would be the beginning of the restructuring, Nikkei reported earlier on Saturday.
Sony is already a dominant player in the image sensor market, with its products used in phones made by China’s Xiaomi and India’s Micromax Informatix Ltd.
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/sony-to-acquire-toshibas-sensor-business.html
Steve Ballmer Believes In Twitter
Ex Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has purchased a 4 percent stake in Twitter Inc, according to his spokesman, making him the third-biggest individual shareholder in the social media company.
Ballmer’s stake is worth more than $800 million based on Twitter’s $21 billion market value. Only co-founder Evan Williams and Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal have greater stakes among individual investors.
Friday Ballmer tweeted from a non-verified account that he built up his stake over the past several months.
His tweet lauded Twitter’s new ‘Moments’ feature, which curates the best tweets of the day, and Dorsey’s appointment as permanent CEO last week.
“Good job @twitter, @twittermoments innovation, @jack Ceo, leaner, more focused,” the tweet said. “Glad I bought 4% past few months.”
Twitter declined to comment. Ballmer himself did not return requests for comment.
Ballmer, who bought the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team after retiring as Microsoft CEO in February 2014, has a personal fortune of about $21.5 billion, making him the 35th richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
Ballmer now owns more of Twitter than co-founder and CEO Dorsey, who has a 3.2 percent stake, according to Thomson Reuters data. Williams is the largest individual shareholder with about 7.5 percent, followed by Alwaleed with about 5.2 percent.
Like @alwaleedbinT move too,” Ballmer’s tweet said. Alwaleed and his investment firm, Kingdom Holding Co 4280.SE, said earlier this month they had raised their stake in Twitter to more than 5 percent.
Ballmer’s investment is a sign that Twitter’s efforts to revive growth under Dorsey is being appreciated, Monness, Crespi, Hardt, & Co Inc analyst James Cakmak said.
“I think it’s just another point of evidence that the step that they are taking to redirect the business toward growth is resonating,” Cakmak said.
Twitter has made several new announcements since Dorsey, who also served as CEO in 2008, returned on a permanent basis last week. On Tuesday, Twitter said it will lay off about 8 percent of its workforce and on Wednesday, it hired Google Inc executive Omid Kordestani as executive chairman.
FBN Securities analyst Shebly Seyrafi said Ballmer’s stake could be indicative of widespread confidence in Dorsey and his strategy.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/steve-ballmer-believes-in-twitter.html
Is Canon Betting Its Future On IoT?
Canon has announced that it is joining the raft of technology companies attempting to take on the Internet of Things (IoT) through what it is calling the ‘Imaging of Things’.
Speaking at the firm’s EXPO 2015 event in Paris on Tuesday, Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai talked up the firm’s global vision for the future as the IoT becomes more pervasive.
“Canon is showing how the world of imaging is expanding rapidly in the age of the IoT,” said Mitarai.
“In the future nearly everything will be connected through smart devices. These rely on built-in cameras or sensors and the data they generate. As a result, Canon predicts that the IoT will largely depend on the ‘Imaging of Things’.”
To take on this future, Mitarai plans to overhaul Canon’s business structure to build a network of smaller Canon companies and thus create an “ecosystem of innovation”.
The CEO said that these companies have been designed to “harness innovation and creative talents from across the regions”, and will include more investment in what Canon does but on a more local level in different regions across the world, as opposed to all of the innovation being created in Tokyo, as it is at the moment.
This will allow “regional independence and international collaboration [to be] put into practice”, Mitarai said.
In this new “network of companies”, Mitarai explained that each regional headquarters will manage local R&D and manufacturing, as well as service and support customised to its market.
In Europe, the smaller Canon companies will focus on printing and network video surveillance, and the firm has already brought in specialists in these business areas such as Océ, Axis and Milestone Systems.
Mitarai said that, along with its global reputation for cameras, this will make Canon the largest printing and network video surveillance company in the world.
On a B2B level, the move is also about helping other firms build new competitive advantages and improve services for their own customers.
“We are changing our own operation model and go to market structure to build more expertise in these areas and connect with our customers,” said Jeppe Frandsen, head of the Production Printing Group at Canon Europe.
“Our customers are changing so we are now looking at a way customers are changing to what their customers want – new ways to do business together.”
Canon’s EXPO 2015 event was also an opportunity for the company to show off many of the latest projects from its R&D centre in Tokyo for the first time in Europe.
These tie in with the firm’s new focus as it launches smaller companies in more regional areas, and include a range of innovative practices such as responding to society’s monitoring needs, 3D printing as part of a partnership with 3D Systems in Europe, and graphic arts via investment in digital print technologies.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/technology-2/is-canon-betting-its-future-on-iot.html
Microsoft, Google Cease Fire In Global Patent Deal
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Microsoft has been pursuing a more collaborative approach under CEO Satya Nadella, engaging longtime rivals like Salesforce, VMware and Apple. There hasn’t been much love between Microsoft and Google, but an announcement on Wednesday points towards an easing of those tensions.
Google and Microsoft have reached a broad agreement on patent matters, with a legal settlement ending some 20 lawsuits between the companies in the U.S. and Germany. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the deal brings a laundry list of lawsuits to a close.
“Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues,” they said in a joint statement. “As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility.”
They also agreed to collaborate on patent matters and work together “to benefit our customers.”
The suits that have been settled include those related to mobile phones, video encoding and Wi-Fi technologies. That doesn’t mean Microsoft has given up its campaign to collect royalties from Android device makers for the mobile operating system’s alleged infringement of Microsoft patents.
It’s not clear from the statement what patent matters the companies will be working on together in the future, but changes have already begun. The two companies agreed earlier this month to work together (alongside other firms like Netflix and Mozilla) on a royalty-free video codec.
It remains to be seen if the settlement will lead to more work between Microsoft and Google in other areas. A major sticking point for consumers has been the lack of a Google-made YouTube app for smartphones and tablets running Windows.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/microsoft-google-cease-fire-in-global-patent-deal.html
Google Upgrades Voice Search
October 8, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Google said it has constructed a better neural network that is making its voice search work faster and better in noisy environments.
“We are happy to announce that our new acoustic models are now used for voice searches and commands in the Google app (on Android and iOS), and for dictation on Android devices,” Google’s Speech Team wrote in a recent blog post . “In addition to requiring much lower computational resources, the new models are more accurate, robust to noise, and faster to respond to voice search queries.”
In 2013, Google brought the same voice recognition tools that had been working in Google Now to Google Search.
Along with being able to find information on the Internet, Google Voice Search also was able to find information for users in their Gmail, Google Calendar and Google+ accounts.
At the 2013 Google I/O developers conference, Amit Singhai, today a senior vice president and Google Fellow, said the future of search is in voice. For Google, he said, future searches will be more like conversations with your computer or device, which also will be able to give you information before you even ask for it.
The company went on to make it clear that it would continue to focus on voice search.
And this week’s announcement backs that up.
Google explained in its blog post that it has updated the neural network it’s using for voice search. A neural network is a computer system based on the way the human brain and nervous system work. It generally uses many processors operating in parallel.
The improved neural network is able to consume the incoming audio in larger chunks than conventional models without performing as many calculations.
“With this, we drastically reduced computations and made the recognizer much faster,” the team wrote. “We also added artificial noise and reverberation to the training data, making the recognizer more robust to ambient noise.”
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/google-upgrades-voice-search.html
Apple Finally Drops iCloud Storage Plan Prices
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For the second time in as many years, Apple dropped prices for its expanded iCloud storage plans, putting costs in line with rivals like Google, Microsoft and Dropbox.
Apple announced changes to iCloud extra storage pricing earlier this month at the event where it unveiled new iPhones, the larger iPad Pro and a revamped Apple TV.
Although the Cupertino, Calif., company did not boost the amount of free storage space — as Computerworld speculated it might — and instead continued to provide just 5GB of iCloud space gratis, it bumped up the $0.99 per month plan from 20GB to 50GB, lowered the price of the 200GB plan by 25% to $2.99 monthly, and halved the 1TB plan’s price to $9.99.
Apple also ditched last year’s 500GB plan, which had cost $9.99 monthly.
The new prices are in line with the competition; in one case, Apple’s was lower.
Google, for example, hands out 15GB of cloud-based Google Drive storage for free — triple Apple’s allowance — and charges $1.99 monthly for 100GB and $9.99 each month for 1TB. The smaller-sized plan is 33% more per gigabyte than Apple’s 200GB deal, and Google’s 1TB plan is priced the same as Apple’s.
Microsoft also gives away 15GB. Additional storage costs $1.99 monthly for 100GB — the same price as Google Drive — while 200GB runs $3.99 per month, 33% higher than Apple’s same-sized plan.
Microsoft does not sell a separate 1TB OneDrive plan but instead directs customers to Office 365 Personal, the one-user subscription to the Office application suite. As part of the subscription, customers are given 1TB of OneDrive space. Office 365 Personal costs $6.99 monthly or $69.99 annually.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/apple-drops-icloud-storage-plan-prices.html
Is Russia Behind Recent US Malware Attacks?
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It would appear that while the US has been blaming China for all its cyber break-ins it appears to be ignoring Tsar Putin’s elite hacking team for the last seven years.
For the past seven years, a cyberespionage group operating out of Russia on the orders of Tsar Putin have been conducting a series of malware campaigns targeting governments, political think tanks and other organizations.
Researchers at F-Secure have been looking into the antics of an outfit called “the Dukes” which has been active since at least 2008. The group has evolved into a methodical developer of “zero-day” attacks, pulling together their own research with the published work of other security firms to provide a more detailed picture of the people behind a long-running family of malware.
The Dukes specialize in “smash and grab” attacks on networks, but have also used subtle, long-term intrusions that harvested massive amounts of data from their targets.
The group’s targets do include criminal organisations operating in the Russian Federation, which suggest there is some form of policing element to it. But they are mostly interested in Western governments and related organisations, such as government ministries and agencies, political think tanks and governmental subcontractors.
F-Secure team wrote. “Their targets have also included the governments of members of the Commonwealth of Independent States; Asian, African, and Middle Eastern governments; organisations associated with Chechen terrorism; and Russian speakers engaged in the illicit trade of controlled substances and drugs.”
The group was named after its earliest-detected malware, known as PinchDuke. Its targets were associated with the Chechen separatist movement. Later that year they were going after Western governments and organisations in search of information about the diplomatic activities of the United States and the NATO.
Most of the attacks used spear phishing emails as the means of injecting malware onto targeted systems, one of their attacks have spread malware through a malicious Tor exit node in Russia, targeting users of the anonymising network with malware injections into their downloads.
The targets have always followed Russian government interests. There are a number of Russian-language artifacts in some of the malware, including an error message in PinchDuke. GeminiDuke also used timestamps that were adjusted to match Moscow Standard time.
Before the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, the group began using a number of decoy documents in spear phishing attacks that were related to Ukraine. They included a letter undersigned by the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
However, after the crisis happened the attacks dropped off suggesting that it was an intelligence gathering operation. It is also a big operation, which, if operating in Russia would most likely require state acknowledgement, if not outright support.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-russia-behind-us-malware-attacks.html
Did Apple Have Issues With iOS 9
Apple has officially released iOS 9, but in the first hour users reported that they were unable to grab the 1GB download.
“Software Update Failed,” the message read on iPhones and iPads. “An error occurred downloading iOS 9.”Computerworld confirmed the problem, initially seeing it on multiple iOS 8 devices. But after several subsequent attempts, the download successfully started about an hour after Apple issued the upgrade.
Similar reports of early problems were posted on Apple’s own support forums and elsewhere on the Internet. “Not a very helpful error,” wrote someone identified as “yanic” on the former.
Others countered with snark. “Strangely, this is not a ‘limited time offer,’ said “stedman 1″ on the same thread, likely referring to Microsoft’s Windows 10 free upgrade offer, which is valid for one year. “The software will be available tomorrow, and the next day, and next week.”
Some advice ended up being more helpful. “You are facing an overloaded server which is pretty typical of the first day a software revision comes out,” contended “Ralph Landry1″ on a different discussion thread.
Several iPhone owners who had said that they were unable to download iOS 9 returned to the same forum threads to report they had gotten the upgrade later.
Apple’s track record with iOS releases has been mixed. Last year’s iOS 8 roll-out seemingly started off smoothly — there were few initial complaints about getting the upgrade — but many soon griped that 8′s large size forced them to wipe apps and content from their devices before they could install the new OS.
iOS 9′s size and the free space requirements for installation were both reduced to address that problem of last year. The free space demand for iOS 9 fell to 1.3GB to 1.8GB from last year’s 4.5GB to 5GB.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/users-reporting-problems-upgrading-to-apples-ios-9.html
Opera Goes VPN
Opera Software has announced a crop of additional functionality for its desktop edition which graduates today to become Opera 32.
The Norwegian browser firm has a relatively small but very loyal market share of 1.27 percent. It has benefited in recent years from increased compatibility owing to a change to the open source Chromium base, making it the biggest Chromium browser apart from Chrome itself.
Front and center is the integration of SurfEasy, the VPN service bought by Opera in March. Customers can now run completely anonymous browsing sessions from within Opera 32.
Other browsers offer ‘anonymous browsing’, but this does not protect your browsing of robot sex doll sites from your ISP or your search engine. With a VPN you can be sure that whatever you get up to is secret.
Opera product manager Zhenis Beisekov said in the Opera Blog: “Your security online has always been our highest concern. We want to move it another step forward, because we believe that privacy online is a universal right.”
Other new features include the addition of password syncing between browsers, which joins the existing shared tabs, bookmarks and data.
Bookmarks get a new tree-view designed to make it easier to find stuff in your bookmarks, and maybe give them the tidy up they’ve needed all these years.
Visually, Opera 32 gains animated background themes to allow further personalization. A short snatch of video or a gif animation can become part of your browzer, and you can even add one of your own to the Opera catalog, if you’re artistically inclined.
Opera recently announced a major update to its Mini browser for smaller devices, which offers a data compression option that maintains the integrity of the page content for the first time, making it ideal for roaming and low bandwidth areas.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/opera-browser-introduces-vpn-for-everyone.html
FCC Commits To 600 Mhz Wireless Spectrum Auction
September 21, 2015 by admin
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LAS VEGAS — Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has committed to a March 29 start date for an unprecedented auction of 600Mhz wireless spectrum currently under the control of the nation’s broadcasters.
The auction has already been delayed two years, but Wheeler was adamant it will move ahead on a timeline that allows input from broadcasters as well as from wireless providers that would be potential spectrum buyers.
The broadcast spectrum in the 600Mhz band offers the potential to wireless carriers to send data, including video and other multimedia at much faster speeds and with lower latency. Latency refers to the speed required to generate a response to a wireless signal.
“I’m supremely confident [the auction] starts March 29,” he said in keynote comments at CTIA Super Mobility Week 2015 here. Explaining the delays, he said the planned auction is like a “Swiss watch with so many moving parts.”
The FCC plans to issue a new public notice in October that will give further details on the planned schedule. Wheeler said that around Thanksgiving, broadcasters will be able to indicate whether they want to participate in offering up the spectrum they use today.
Once the FCC establishes pricing, the broadcasters can decide whether to move forward or withdraw from the process if the prices don’t meet their needs, Wheeler said. In January, wireless providers — including newcomers, possibly — will be prompted to express interest in joining the auction to buy spectrum.
Wheeler contended that the 600MHz spectrum auction shows the FCC is moving to free up spectrum that the cellular industry says it urgently needs.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/fcc-commits-to-600-mhz-wireless-spectrum-auction-in-march.html