Will Twitter IPO Shares Reach $20?

Twitter has decided to price its IPO shares between $17 and $20 when it lists on the New York Stock Exchange, the company said in its filing.

Based on an assumed initial public offering price of $18.50 — the midpoint of the range — Twitter estimates the net proceeds from the sale of shares of common stock will be roughly $1.25 billion, the company said in documentsfiled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Some 80.5 million shares of common stock will be registered, according to the filing.

Releasing its IPO price range positions Twitter to begin its “road show,” seeking to raise funds from investors across the country. In documents filed last week, the company said it would list its shares under the ticker symbol TWTR on the New York Stock Exchange, representing a big win for the market over rival Nasdaq.

Twitter has yet to determine a date for the listing, though one report suggested Nov. 15 could be the day.

Twitter’s IPO is likely to be one of the hottest of the year and the most prominent in social media since Facebook went public last year. Twitter’s share price range will be markedly lower than Facebook’s, which priced its IPO at $38 per share.

Twitter filed for its highly anticipated public offering earlier last  month.

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U.S. Cloud Vendors Hurt By NSA

Edward Snowden’s public unveiling of the National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance program could cause U.S. providers of cloud-based services to lose 10% to 20% of the foreign market — a slice of business valued at up to $35 billion.

A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) concludes that European cloud computing companies, in particular, might successfully exploit users’ fears about the secret data collection program to challenge U.S. leadership in the hosted services business.

Daniel Castro, author of the report, acknowledges that the conclusions are based, so far, on thin data, but nonetheless argues that the risks to U.S. cloud vendors are real.

Indeed, a month prior, the Cloud Security Alliance reported that in a survey of 207 officials of non-U.S. companies, 10% of the respondents said that they had canceled contracts with U.S. service providers after Snowden’s leak of NSA Prism documents earlier this year.

“If U.S. companies lose market share in the short term, it will have long-term implications on their competitive advantage in this new industry,” said Castro in the ITIF report. “Rival countries have noted this opportunity and will try to exploit it.”

To counter such efforts, the U.S. must challenge overstated claims about the program by foreign companies and governments, said Jason Weinstein, a partner in the Washington office of law firm Steptoe & Johnson and a former federal prosecutor and deputy assistant attorney general specializing in computer crime.

“There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about just how significant those consequences will be,” Weinstein said. “The effort by European governments and European cloud providers to cloud the truth about data protection in the U.S. was going on well before anyone knew who Edward Snowden was. It just picked up new momentum once the Prism disclosures came out.”

Weinstein contends that European countries have fewer data protection rules than the U.S.

For example, he said that in the U.K. and France, a wiretap to get content can be issued by a government official without court authority, but that can’t happen in the U.S.

“U.S. providers have done nothing other than comply with their legal obligations,” he said. But because of Snowden’s leaks, “they are facing potentially significant economic consequences.”

Gartner analyst Ed Anderson said his firm has yet to see any revenue impact on cloud providers since the Prism disclosures, but added, “I don’t think Prism does U.S. providers any favors, that’s for sure.”

Nonetheless, Anderson added, “I think the reality is [the controversy] is likely to die down over time, and we expect adoption to probably continue on the path that it has been on.”

One reason why U.S. providers may not suffer is because “the alternatives aren’t great if you are a European company looking for a cloud service,” he said.

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Xerox Moving Into IT Services

Printer and copier maker Xerox Corp forecast current-quarter earnings below estimates as it quickens efforts to transform itself into a technology services provider.

Xerox, whose shares were little changed at midday, also offers services such as managing toll systems and healthcare programs to counter sluggish growth in its printers and copiers business, which accounts for about 40 percent of its revenue.

Services is now the larger part of the company’s business and lower margins in IT and business process outsourcing is dragging overall margins.

The company said it expects second-quarter revenue from its document technology business, which includes printers and copiers, to decline in the mid-single digits. Revenue fell 9 percent to $2.14 billion in the business in the first quarter.

Based in Norwalk, Connecticut, Xerox moved into business services with its purchase of Affiliated Computer Services Inc (ACS) for $5.5 billion in 2009 – the company’s biggest deal in its 106-year history.

Xerox said it plans to quicken the pace of a restructuring plan kicked off in the last quarter of 2012 and included a 2-cent restructuring charge in its second-quarter forecast.

Xerox said it expects flattish revenue for the full year, compared with previous expectations of up to a 2 percent growth, it said on a conference call with analysts.

The company said it was on track to reach its target of adjusted EPS of $1.09 to $1.15 for the full year and to generate operating cash flow of $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion.

“Europe remains weak. US remains stable, but weak. We have not seen a pickup in the US,” Xerox CEO Ursula Burns said on a conference call with analysts.

“We did see a slowdown, a bit of a slowdown, in some developing market economies. But our business model is fairly resilient in the developing markets,” she said.

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LinkedIn Beefs Up

LinkedIn has re-tooled its search engine with changes designed to make it easier for members to find information on the business networking site, whose volume of content has increased and grown more diverse in recent years.

Launched in 2003, LinkedIn initially focused on giving professionals a place to feature their resumes and career bios, as well as connect with peers and colleagues, but the site has progressively become more interactive and houses a much larger repository of data beyond individual profiles.

For example, almost 3 million companies have set up corporate pages, more than 1.5 million groups have been created, the site features a jobs section, and individuals and publishers are able to post and share comments and links to articles.

So it’s not surprising for LinkedIn to focus on improving its search engine, which fielded 5.7 billion queries last year.

LinkedIn members have until now had to run separate queries for groups, companies, jobs and other professionals, but that’s changing with the upgraded search engine.

“Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies,” Johnathan Podemsky, a LinkedIn product manager, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Users can still segment results, so as to see only job results, for example.

The LinkedIn search engine is also gaining auto-complete and suggested-searches functionalities to help people fine-tune query terms. In addition, the search engine will log members’ search queries and “learn” from them in order to deliver more relevant results.

It will also be possible for users to save search queries and be alerted about new or changed search results. The advanced search option has also gained more search filters, including location, company and school.

However, the search engine still doesn’t include content from the company’s SlideShare site, which about 60 million monthly visitors use to upload, share, rate and comment on primarily slide presentations, but also documents, videos and webinars.

Also, the search improvements are being applied to the main site, not to the mobile apps, although doing so is something the company is looking into, according to a spokeswoman.

LinkedIn started to roll out the new search features on Monday, and expects to finish delivering them to every member worldwide in the coming weeks.

As of the end of 2012, LinkedIn had topped 200 million registered members located in more than 200 countries.

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Is Windows 8 In High Demand?

Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Monday demand for the company’s new Windows 8 operating system, that went on sale last Friday, was running at a higher rate than its last release, Windows 7.

“We’re seeing preliminary demand well above where we were with Windows 7, which is gratifying,” Ballmer said at an event launching new Windows phones.

Windows 7 is the best-selling version of Windows so far, selling more than 670 million licenses in three years since release in 2009.

“Over the weekend we saw an incredible response around the globe to Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface,” said Ballmer, referring to Microsoft’s first own-brand tablet, designed to challenge Apple Inc’s iPad. He did not give out any sales figures.

On Friday, there were moderate lines at Microsoft’s 60 or so stores across the United States for the Surface.

Ballmer was in San Francisco speaking at an event showcasing phones running its new Windows Phone 8 software, which go on sale this weekend.

Microsoft has struggled to make headway in the smartphone market, holding just 3.5 percent of the worldwide market, compared to 68 percent for Google Inc’s Android devices and 17 percent for Apple’s iPhone, according to tech research firm IDC.

The company highlighted how the new phones make use of Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service, enabling users to sync and transfer music, documents and photos between PCs, tablets and the Xbox game console. Microsoft added that it now has 120,000 apps in its online store for phones, still far fewer than the number available for iPhone and Android users.

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Google Defends New Privacy Policy

In a letter sent to eight members of Congress, Google yesterday defended its decision to consolidate its privacy policies and users’ personal information.

The 13-page letter explains Google’s decision to change its privacy policies and answers specific questions from the legislators. In sum, Google contended that its approach to privacy remains the same, that users still have control over how they use the company’s various online services, and that private information stays private.

“Some have expressed concern about whether consumer can opt out of ourupdated privacy policy,” wrote Pablo Chavez, Google’s director of public policy, in the letter.

“We understand the question at the heart of this concern. We believe the relevant issue is whether users have choices about how their data is collected and used. Google’s privacy policy – like that of other companies – is a document that applies to all consumers using our products and services. However, we have built meaningful privacy controls into our products, and we are committed to continue offering those choices in the future,” he added.

Google stirred up something of a privacy firestorm last week when company executives disclosed plans to rewrite privacy policies and to meld user information across its various products and services.

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Symantec’s Virus Code Hacked

Symantec is looking into an Indian hacking group’s claims that it accessed source code used in the company’s flagship Norton Antivirus program.

A spokesman for the company on Thursday said that one claim by the group was false, while another is still being investigated.

Meanwhile, the Indian group, which calls itself Lords of Dharmaraja, has threatened to publicly disclose the source code very soon.

On Wednesday, the group posted on Pastebin what it claimed was confidential documentation related to Norton AntiVirus source code. A review of the material showed what appears to be a description of an application programming interface (API) for Symantec’s AV product.

The group also posted what it claimed was the complete source code tree file for Norton Antivirus. That document appears to have been taken down.

‘Yama Tough,’ the hacker who posted the documents, released at least two more on Google+ allegedly related to Symantec source code. One of the documents appears to be a detailed technical overview of Norton Anti-Virus, Quarantine Server Packaging API Specification, v1.0. The other document, from 2000, describes a Symantec Immune System Gateway Array Setup technology.

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IBM Goes Social

Responding to increased use of tablets within business settings, IBM will launch on Wednesday several mobile applications designed to let employees use IBM enterprise social collaboration software with iPads and other mobile devices.

The new applications, free to customers with active licenses of the IBM software, have been built specifically for tablet interfaces and have security, IT management and compliance features.

“The apps are very lightweight and talk directly back in a secure manner to the enterprise systems that people who don’t have these devices are using inside the company,” said Rob Ingram, senior manager of IBM’s Mobile Collaboration Strategy.

One of the applications lets employees use IBM Connections via iPads, while another one is for LotusLive Meeting users to participate in online meetings using iPhones or Android, BlackBerry or iPad tablets.

For IBM Sametime, another application lets employees engage in one-on-one or group instant messaging sessions on iPad and Android tablets. There is also one application for Lotus Symphony Viewer that lets users view ODF-based files, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations, on iPads, iPhones or Android devices.

There are also applications for managing telephony tasks within IBM Sametime from tablets and for Android device users to add widgets to home screens as shortcuts to their Lotus Notes mail and calendar.

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Nokia Puts Free M$ Apps On Symbian Phones

Several of Microsoft’s business productivity applications will be available free of charge on Nokia’s latest Symbian Belle smartphones later this year, Nokia stated Thursday.

The move comes at the same time Nokia is developing its first smartphone on the Windows “Mango” Phone platform. That phone is rumored to be scheduled for a November debut.

The free apps will run on Symbian Belle smartphones announced in August; they’re designed to keep customers buying Nokia products while Nokia ramps up to Windows Phone smartphones.

The free apps for Symbian Belle phones will include: Microsoft PowerPoint Broadcast for broadcasting presentations from a desktop to a smartphone;Microsoft OneNote for taking notes with images by syncing with Microsoft SkyDrive;And Microsoft Document Connection, which provides a single view of documents stored on a smartphone including email attachments and documents on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites.

Early next year, Nokia said it will provide OneNote synchronization with SharePoint and will add Word, Excel and PowerPoint as native applications for the first time outside the Windows platform.

Some critics of Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft wonder how successful Windows Phone Mango (version 7.5) will be and said the addition of Microsoft apps to Nokia’s older Symbian line is a way for Nokia to hedge its bets if the Microsoft partnership doesn’t pay off quickly.

The free productivity apps could also be a way to introduce a large number of Symbian users to Microsoft software. There are many more Symbian users outside the U.S. than inside and Symbian until this year had been the world’s largest smartphone platform.

Making the free apps available on the Symbian Belle phones doesn’t cost either company much and the Belle phone users “get something to sweeten the deal to stay with symbian,” Gold said.

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‘Ransomware’ Malware Threats Increasing

A particularly nasty type of attack named”ransomware” is on the rise, with antivirus vendor Symantec seeing at least three new variants appearing in recent months. Such attacks often use viruses to not only steal a person’s sensitive or financial information, but also to disable hard drives and demand money to restore them.

“Threats that use extortion can be some of the most aggressive and, in some cases, offensive viruses encountered,” said Symantec security researcher Gavin O Gorman in a blog post.

Unfortunately for computer owners, attackers continue increase the sophistication levels of their ransomware. For example, GPCoder.G, which first appeared in November 2010, is a small (only 11 kilobytes ) piece of malware which, if executed, searches a hard drive for files with specific extensions, relating to everything from videos and Microsoft Office files to images and music. It then encrypts the first half of all files found, using a symmetric RSA encryption algorithm and a random key. The random, private key is then encrypted using a public key. “Without the private key from this key pair, it is not possible to obtain the symmetric key in order to decrypt the files,” said O Gorman.

To get the private key, the ransomware victim must forward the encrypted symmetric key to attackers, who decrypt and return it. Unfortunately, aside from restoring the encrypted files from a backup, “there is no way to bypass this technique,” he said.   Read More….

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