Apple Finally Drops iCloud Storage Plan Prices

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.

Dell Goes Bitcoin

Want to purchase a laptop with bitcoins? Dell is now accepting the digital currency as a form of payment.

Consumer and business shoppers can pay for products directly via bitcoins or through Coinbase, a third-party payment processing company, Dell said.

Buyers can pay for products through Bitcoin wallets or by scanning a QR code with a smartphone.

The volatile Bitcoin has had its share of controversies and exchange shutdowns as the currency matures. Companies like Overstock.com, Newegg, Expedia and some Amazon storefronts accept Bitcoin as a form of payment. But major retailers like Walmart and eBay have not warmed up to the idea. The value of one bitcoin was around $630 as of Friday, according to multiple cryptocurrency website.

There are some advantages to paying via Bitcoin. The form of currency is accepted around the world, and for Dell, the payment-processing cost is less than with credit cards.

But the form of payment has its quirks.

“Due to the nature of the Bitcoin network, once you initiate a Bitcoin transaction you cannot change or cancel it,” Dell said on a terms and conditions page.

Customers could seek refunds in the case of canceled transactions or product returns.

“For a qualifying return of product paid for in Bitcoin, any refund due will be remitted to the purchaser via check in U.S. Dollars for the full amount of the purchase price paid at the time of the original transaction, less any applicable restocking fees,” Dell said.

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Dell Goes Plastic

Dell is manufacturing a line of PCs using plastics obtained by expanding its recycling program.

The company has expanded the hardware take-back program to more places worldwide, aiming to collect and reuse more extracted plastic and metals in PCs, monitors, hardware panels and other products.

Dell’s OptiPlex 3030 all-in-one, which will ship next month, will be the first product of that effort. Starting next year, more laptops, desktops and monitor back-panels will be made using recycled plastic, said Scott O’Connell, director of environmental affairs at Dell. The products will be certified as sustainable by UL (Underwriters Laboratories).

Dell will save money by reusing plastic, but O’Connell did not say whether the savings will be passed on to customers through lower prices. But it will be easier for more people to recycle electronics and Dell will also provide a PC mail-back option, O’Connell said.

Dell’s plan to establish a recycling chain internally could reduce the need for “virgin” plastics, which can be environmentally damaging to make, said Gary Cook, senior IT analyst at Greenpeace International.

Incineration of plastic from disposed computers can be toxic and reusing plastics in new computers or other parts reduces “dirty energy,” Cook said.

“We need to see plastics last longer,” Cook said.

Companies like Apple have helped raise expectations of sustainability in computers and others are following suit, Cook said. PC makers are using more metals in computer chassis and handset makers are using more nonpetroleum plastics.

Dell was criticized last year by Greenpeace for veering away from its carbon-neutral goals and sustainability advocacy. The company ranked 14th among most green IT companies, behind Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Wipro, Fujitsu and Google, among others.

Dell curbed its sustainability strategy when it was trying to go private last year, but has now reinvigorated that effort.

“They are trying to show some initiative,” Cook said.

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Amazon, Microsoft Cut Cloud Storage Prices

Last April, Microsoft agreed that it would match Amazon’s Web Services’ (AWS’) prices for compute, storage and bandwidth.

So when Amazon announced last Thursday  that it would cut its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) prices by up to 22%, Microsoft followed suit the very next day.

“We are matching AWS’ lowest prices (US East Region) for S3 and EBS, reducing prices by up to 20% and making the lower prices available in all regions worldwide,” Microsoft posted in its official blog.

For Microsoft’s “Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage,” the company is reducing prices by up to 28%. It is also reducing the price of Azure Storage service by 50%.

Amazon’s new prices take effect Feb. 1. Microsoft’s price cuts begin March 13.

“We’re also making the new prices effective worldwide, which means that Azure storage will be less expensive than AWS in many regions,” Microsoft said.

Amazon said it dropped its prices for its S3 storage by 22% and its EBS standard volume storage and I/O operations by up to 50%.

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3D Printer Goes Retail

MakerBot, a 3D printer maker which opened two new retail stores last week, is among the companies trying to bring the cutting-edge digital manufacturing technology to Main Street consumers, but skeptics say the debut may be premature.

MakerBot, a unit of Stratasys Ltd, opened retail stores this week in Boston and in Greenwich, Connecticut, both of which are twice the size of MakerBot’s first store, 1,500 square feet in downtown Manhattan.

The company offers designs for more than 100,000 items through its “Thingiverse” online user community. The products range from knick-knacks like zombie sculptures to jewelry, sink drains and even medical devices. They are printed using its line of corn-based plastic fibers in more than a dozen colors.

“For most people 3D printing is futuristic science fiction. We’re here to make it real,” said CEO Bre Pettis, who cut the ribbon at the store on Boston’s fashionable Newbury Street using scissors made on one of MakerBot’s Replicator printers which start at $2,199.

Pettis, who has purchased splashy magazine ads to promote 3D printers as holiday gifts, believes there could soon be a 3D printer on every block in America.

Yet some technology experts say 3D printers may not be ready for prime time because they are still much less user friendly than most modern consumer electronics.

“There is so much hype,” said Pete Basiliere, an analyst at technology research firm Gartner. “People are getting a little bit misled as to how easy it is,” he said.

Some investors also are skeptical of 3D printing’s readiness for the market. Short-seller Citron this week published an article questioning the earnings of Germany’s voxeljet AG’s, and shares in the sector fell, including those of MakerBot parent Stratasys and rivals 3D Systems Corp and ExOne Co.

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Africa To Lead Global Bandwidth Demand

Africa’s demand for Internet access to the rest of the world will grow by an average of 51 percent every year until 2019, ahead of all other regions, according to a forecast by research company Telegeography.

Rapid economic growth and wider Internet use will drive the increase in demand, which will be met mostly by turning on unused capacity in existing cables, according to Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt. Terrestrial links are in demand partly because much of Africa still relies on satellite, which is far more expensive per bit than wired broadband, he said.

Most Internet bandwidth between continents is provided by undersea cables built and financed by groups of service providers. From Africa, most of those links go to Europe. Other carriers pay to tap into those cables and link their customers to the Internet. In some parts of Africa, running cables from coastal areas to the interior is a challenge so satellite remains the major Internet source, Kreifeldt said.

The capacity of international cables landing on African shores is just a fraction of the bandwidth available between Europe, the U.S. and Asia. After seven years of the growth that Telegeography forecasts, from 2012 through 2019, Africa will have 17.2Tbps (bits per second) of links to the outside world. That’s up from just 957Gbps in 2012 but will still be only about one-quarter of the international capacity of Latin America and less than that of Canada, according to Telegeography.

The hunger for the Internet varies among African countries. Through 2019, bandwidth demand is expected to grow fastest in Angola, at 71 percent per year; Tanzania, at 68 percent; and Gabon, at 67 percent.

Many new cables have been built to Africa and around the continent in the past several years, giving service providers excess fiber capacity that can be turned on when needed, Kreifeldt said. As that fiber gets lit up and supply rises, prices should fall for enterprises and other users in African countries, he said. However, due to relative scarcity, a given amount of bandwidth between Africa and Europe costs about 10 times as much as the same size connection between Europe and North America, he said. Africa’s bandwidth gains aren’t expected to shrink that gap.

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Baidu Acquires App Maker

Baidu Inc, China’s top search engine, plans to purchase app store 91 Wireless for $1.9 billion to strengthen its position in the country’s highly competitive mobile computing sector.

Baidu will buy a 57.4 percent stake in 91 Wireless, one of China’s earliest appstores, from NetDragon Websoft Inc for $1.09 billion, and the remainder from other shareholders, both companies said on Tuesday.

“It’s good for Baidu because if you look at mobile, currently apps are more popular than mobile sites because Internet download speeds are slow. So with the acquisition of this appstore, Baidu can work more closely with the apps developer and be able to enhance further their search capabilities,” said Elinor Leung, an analyst with CLSA in Hong Kong.

China’s mobile Internet market is expected to double to about 300 billion yuan ($48 billion) in 2014 from 150 billion yuan in 2012, with the number of active mobile Internet users rising to 749 million from 521 million during the same period, according to research firm Analysys International.

NetDragon’s shares lost as much as a fifth of their value on Tuesday and were down 18 percent at HK$19.74 at 0305 GMT (11.05 p.m ET)

NetDragon also said in a statement that it would scrap the planned spinoff and listing of 91 Wireless on Hong Kong’s secondary Growth Enterprise Market if the acquisition is finalized.

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IBM Buys SoftLayer

IBM has signed an agreement to purchase SoftLayer Technologies, as it looks to accelerate the build-out of its public cloud infrastructure. The company is also forming a services division to back up the push.

The financial details of the deal were not announced, but SoftLayer is the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider, according to IBM.

IBM already has an offering that includes private, public and hybrid cloud platforms. The acquisition of SoftLayer will give it a more complete in-house offering, as enterprises look to keep some applications in the data center, while others are moved to public clouds.

SoftLayer has about 21,000 customers and an infrastructure that includes 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe, according to IBM. SoftLayer allows enterprises to buy compute power on either dedicated or shared servers.

Following the close of the acquisition of SoftLayer, which is expected in the third quarter, a new division will combine its services with IBM’s SmartCloud. IBM expects to reach $7 billion annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015, it said.

Success is far from certain: The public cloud market is becoming increasingly competitive as dedicated cloud providers, telecom operators and IT vendors such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard all want a piece. The growing competition should be a good thing for customers if it drives down prices. For example, Microsoft has already committed to matching Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as computing, storage and bandwidth.

Not all hardware vendors feel it’s necessary to have their own public cloud. Last month, Dell changed strategy and said it would work with partners including Joyent, instead of having its own cloud.

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Apple Raising Prices In Japan

Apple Inc increased prices of iPads and iPods in Japan on Friday, becoming the highest-profile brand to join a growing list of foreign companies asking Japanese consumers to pay more as a weakening yen squeezes profit.

Some U.S. companies have inoculated themselves at least temporarily against the yen’s fall through financial hedging instruments, while others are charging customers more.

The yen has fallen more than 20 percent against the U.S. dollar since mid-November when then-opposition leader Shinzo Abe, who is now prime minister, prescribed a dose of radical monetary easing to reverse years of sliding consumer prices as part of a deflation-fighting policy, dubbed “Abenomics.”

The Bank of Japan, under a new Abe-backed governor, in April promised to inject $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years to achieve 2 percent inflation in roughly two years.

Price rises are rare in Japan, which has suffered 15 years of low-grade deflation. A few other foreign brands have also raised prices on products, providing an early sign of inflation for Abe and an indication that these companies feel consumer demand is strong enough to withstand the increases.

Still, price rises would have to spread much more widely, especially to lower-end discretionary goods, to show that Abe’s aggressive policies are helping reinvigorate the economy.

Apple, one of the most visible foreign companies in Japan, raised the price of iPads by up to 13,000 yen ($130) at its local stores. The 64-gigabyte iPad will now cost 69,800 yen, up from 58,800 yen a day ago, an Apple store employee said. The 128-gigabyte model will cost 79,800 yen compared with 66,800 yen.

Apple also upped prices of its iPod music players by as much as 6,000 yen and its iPad Mini by 8,000 yen.

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MS Surface Pro Headed To Europe

Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet will be offered for sale Europe in the second quarter priced approximately at $1,170, while a local telco is now reselling the latest editions of its Office 365 hosted productivity suite, the company announced ahead of the Cebit trade show on Monday.

Microsoft Germany’s CEO Christian Illek didn’t give the Surface Pro’s exact price in euros, but the number will be around the same as the U.S. price in dollars, he said in a news conference at the company’s booth on the show floor in Hanover.

While an $1170 price tag appears significantly higher that the Surface Pro’s U.S. price of $899, a 30% mark-up is not unusual for electronics devices in Europe, where prices are typically displayed inclusive of value-added tax at around 20%. U.S. prices typically exclude local sales taxes. When setting international prices, vendors also tend to allow an additional margin in case exchange rates shift unfavorably.

In addition to Germany, Surface Pro will also go on sale in Australia, China, France, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the U.K. in the coming months, Microsoft said.

Illek also announced a new sales channel for two recent editions of Office 365: Deutsche Telekom.

Office 365 Small Business Premium and Office 365 Midsize Business are now on sale through Deutsche Telekom’s Business Marketplace online app store, said the German telecommunications operator’s head of marketing, Michael Hagspihl.

The Small Business Premium edition, with 25GB of storage, shared calendars, Office Web Apps, Office Professional Plus Desktop Version and support from Deutsche Telekom will sell for $14.90 per user per month for up to 25 users.

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