Is Alcatel-Lucent Running Low?

Alcatel-Lucent, which was the combination of Lucent and French network equipment provider Alcatel, has been going through a tough few years as it battles against rivals such as Huawei, Nokia Siemens and Ericsson. Now the firm has reportedly looked to investment bank Goldman Sachs for a loan in return for the firm putting up some of its assets as collateral.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, the amount of the loan has yet to be disclosed and the firm even mooted the prospect of selling assets including its undersea cable and enterprise businesses. The sources said discussions about the sale were still at an early stage and claimed neither asset could fetch more than €1bn, highlighting just how far the firm has fallen in recent years.

Alcatel-Lucent needs to sort out its balance sheet because the firm needs to service more than €2bn debt in the next three years. The company might have to look at its vast patents portfolio, though whether it might sell them or merely license them is not clear at this stage.

With Huawei and ZTE winning business away from European vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens, it is not surprising that the firm is having to take drastic action in order to keep the lights on. However for Alcatel-Lucent it is a embarrassing situation for the firm.

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Android Apps To Run On Windows

Software firm Bluestacks is on a mission to close the gap between Microsoft’s Windows and Google’s Android OS with its App Player application, which was released in beta earlier this week.

App Player is an emulator that allows Android applications to run on Windows 7, Vista and XP OSes. Users can install the software in Windows and then run around 450,000 Android applications, including Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, the company said in a statement.

Beyond PCs, the App Player could also allow Windows tablets such as Hewlett-Packard’s Slate 2 and Dell’s Latitude ST to run Android applications. Bluestacks made headlines at last year’s Computex trade show in Taipei when Advanced Micro Devices showed off an x86 tablet with Android running on top of the Windows 7 software stack. Android applications are mostly written for the ARM instruction set, but the x86 tablet was able to switch between Android and Windows without any problems.

The emulator has new Layercake technology, which exploits hardware accelerators to improve the performance of Android games in Windows. The layer was not included in the previous Bluestacks alpha version. Android applications typically use hardware accelerators found in ARM’s Mali, Nvidia’s Tegra or Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics cores, but Layercake is able to take advantage of hardware accelerators from companies like AMD found in x86 chips.

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