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Is Apple Doomed?
August 22, 2013 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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The necromancy department of Apple has been summoning the spirit of Steve Jobs in the hope of turning around its current dismal growth figures. For a while now, even amongst Apple fanboys, there has been a belief that Jobs’ Mob has gone done the tubes since Jobs croaked.
It is a myth of course, Jobs’ specialty was not innovation but to market a working ideas as if it were his own. But either way Apple is attempting to try and convince everyone that the new iPhone was personally designed by its former CEO. Even after being dead for a while now, and having no impact over the disasters the company has since suffered, Jobs apparently was on board for the iPhone 5S.
According to Apple’s government liaison Michael Foulkes, Jobs oversaw the design of two models of iPhone to go on sale after his death. We suspect that it will take full resurrection before anyone takes this particular spin seriously. If Jobs could really see into the future and predict where his toys would be three years after he died, we would have thought he would have also seen that was a stupid idea not to accept conventional medical treatment for his cancer until it was too late.
Apple Squashes Rumors
February 21, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Apple will not develop a new, inexpensive iPhone just for the sake of offering a cheaper alternative, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a speech on Tuesday.
The company’s focus is on creating great products, and it will not make a smartphone that does not past the quality test, Cook said during a webcast from the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference, which is being held in San Francisco.
“There are other companies that do that, that’s not who we are,” Cook said. “Our North Star is great products.”
Instead, the company is now dropping prices on the older iPhone models. That has been successful, and the demand for iPhone 4 models in December was greater than supply, Cook said.
“It surprised us as to the level of demand we have for it,” Cook said.
Lowering the price on older models is just one of the approaches Apple is taking to reach out to price-sensitive buyers. It’s not easy to balance quality and price, and that’s when innovation comes into play and new products could be created to meet consumer demand, Cook said.
“Sometimes you can take the issue … and you can solve it in different ways,” Cook said.
For example, the first iPod that shipped in 2001 was priced at $399, and now users can buy an iPod Shuffle for $49. There was also a big demand in the past to drop the price of Macs to under $500, and Apple tried and couldn’t do it, so it created the iPad tablet.
Will Cisco Boot Linksys?
Cisco reportedly has hired Barclays to find a buyer for its Linksys business.
Cisco bought Linksys back in 2003 to get into the consumer networking business and the firm has put out some good products, most notably the WRT54G wireless router that was a favourite with technology savvy punters. Now Cisco is looking to offload Linksys as it continues to pull back from the consumer networking market.
Cisco has been cutting jobs and products such as the Flip video camera, as it wants to get back to the high margin enterprise networking business. Back in 2003, Cisco paid $500m for Linksys and got access to an established business that focused on producing consumer network equipment.
A decade later, it is being reported that Cisco will be lucky to get its $500m back. Cisco has been pulling out of its failed attempt to get into the consumer market and is now focusing on flogging both network infrastructure hardware and servers, though it is widely expected to be hit hard as software defined networks become more popular.
Unlike Cisco’s core enterprise business, Linksys products typically have low margins, and with its parent firm’s slowing sales growth, it is not surprising Cisco wants to offload it. Bloomberg’s sources said Cisco might find interest in buying Linksys from television makers, though they wouldn’t provide any more details.
Did Huawei Steal From Cisco?
Huawei has replied to US rival Cisco after the networking firm made allegations about the Chinese company relating to a lawsuit between the two firms.
The case dates back to 2003 and relates to the alleged theft of source code by Huawei from Cisco for use in its networking products. The case was settled confidentially out of court.
Cisco complained about what it saw as a willful distortion of the facts of the case after Huawei’s chief representative in the US, Charles Ding, claimed the outcome was that Cisco stood down over its allegations.
In response, Cisco released excerpts from a report by an independent analyst that was used to form the basis of a settlement, which Cisco said proved Huawei had used its source code in its products.
However, in a statement sent to The INQUIRER, Huawei said it was “disappointed with the continued rhetoric from Cisco” and claimed there was no basis to its argument.
“With respect to the lawsuit which took place about 10 years ago, the fact is the court dismissed the case, upon a joint stipulation of the parties, after the neutral expert’s review. This shows Cisco’s present allegations have no merit,” it said.
Furthermore, the firm also said it didn’t believe Cisco had the right to report elements of the review.
“We don’t think Ding violated the agreement between Cisco and Huawei, which had a negotiated confidentiality provision in it,” it said. “Cisco’s general counsel’s selective and misleading cropping of a confidential report from the Neutral Expert may have violated that provision.”
Huawei added that it would consider releasing more information on the case, though, in an effort to paint a more complete picture of the case.
“However, since Cisco has put selected snippets into the public domain, the truth may require that more than carefully selected quotes be put in the public record. Huawei is exploring the best way to accomplish that goal,” it said.
Cisco Gives Employees The Boot
Network equipment maker Cisco Systems said on Monday that it plans to eliminate about 1,300 jobs as part of ongoing efforts to restructure the company.
“We are performing a focused set of limited restructurings that will collectively impact approximately 2 percent of our global employee population,” the company said in an emailed statement.
These actions are part of a continuous process to simplify the company and assess the economic environment in certain parts of the world, it said.
Cisco had 65,223 employees at the end of its fiscal third quarter, according to its website.
Cisco last year started a plan to cut expenses by $1 billion in an effort to make the company leaner and more efficient.
Experts Think iPad 3 Coming in March
February 18, 2012 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Apple will debut a new iPad some time in early March, and will start selling it the following week, according to reports and industry analyst expectations.
The March debut of the iPad 3, as some have called it, was first reported today by AllThingsD, the blog owned by Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Citing unnamed sources, the blog said Apple will host a launch event the first week of March, likely at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a regular venue for the company’s press announcements.
Last year, then-CEO Steve Jobs returned from medical leave to lead the launch event of the iPad 2 on March 2. Apple started selling the new tablet on March 11, 2011 via its online store.
If Apple follows the same timeline, it will probably conduct the event the week of March 5-9, and begin selling the new model the following week.
It’s possible that Apple will trot out a new iPad on one of the first two days of March — Thursday, March 1 or Friday, March 2 — but Apple usually hosts events earlier in the week.
Next month’s iPad introduction, if it does take place, will be the first without Jobs, who died last October at the age of 56 of complications from his long-running battle with pancreatic cancer.
The FCC Gives AT&T The OK
December 28, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones, Telecom
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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T’s US$1.9 billion buying of spectrum from Qualcomm on Thursday, allowing the carrier to salvage one ambitious deal to acquire more spectrum, after squashing its planned merger with T-Mobile USA.
AT&T announced its plan to buy the Qualcomm spectrum last December, a few months before it revealed the much larger proposal to merge with T-Mobile for $39 billion. It said both were motivated by the need for more radio spectrum to increase the coverage and capacity of its LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network. AT&T withdrew the T-Mobile plan on Monday after the FCC, the Department of Justice and others said it was not in the public interest.
With the Qualcomm purchase, AT&T will get 6MHz of spectrum across the country in the coveted 700MHz band, as well as another 6MHz of spectrum in five major metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to the FCC’s order released Thursday. Those five markets represent about 70 million potential subscribers. The carrier has said it plans to use it as a supplemental downlink for its LTE network, allowing for faster and more consistent mobile data service.
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Comcast Starts IPv6 Network Rollout
Comcast has begun the production rollout of its new IPv6 service, with 100 customers upgraded in San Francisco’s East Bay in one week.
IPv6 is an upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, which is called IPv4. IPv6 features an expanded addressing scheme that can support billions of devices connected directly to the Internet at faster speeds and lower cost than IPv4, which is running out of addresses.
Comcast began an IPv6 trial 18 months ago and is a leader in the deployment of IPv6-based services among U.S. ISPs.
The production rollout began on Oct. 31. It offers customers “native dual-stack service,” which means Comcast is supporting both IPv6 and IPv4 services.
The initial subscribers of Comcast’s production-quality IPv6 service have stand-alone computers running Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista or Apple Mac OS X that are connected directly to a Comcast cable modem. Comcast plans to support IPv6 for customers with home routers at a later date.
Will eBay Cozy Up With Facebook?
October 17, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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EBay Inc is attempting to strengthen its relationship with social network leader Facebook at a developer conference this week, a person familiar with the e-commerce company said on Tuesday.
EBay will also debut a new online identification service for shoppers named PayPal Access, the source added.
The company expects almost 4,000 people to attend its X.commerce conference in San Francisco on October 12, 13 and 14. The event marks the official launch of the company’s new X.commerce division, which will target e-commerce software developers.
EBay is trying to encourage outside developers to create applications for its e-commerce platforms and is making a particularly strong push in mobile commerce.
At the end of September, Katie Mitic, head of Platform and Mobile Marketing at Facebook, joined eBay’s board of directors, sparking speculation that the two companies were working on new partnerships.
Mitic is scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers at the X.commerce conference on Wednesday. Facebook Platform, which Mitic helps run, is the company’s developer unit, so any new partnership will focus on this area, the person said on condition of anonymity because the plans aren’t public yet.
Microsoft To Overhaul Hotmail
Microsoft will debut next month a major overhaul of its Hotmail webmail service, with upgrades across the board, including in areas like spam, security and performance.
“We listened. We learned. We reinvented Hotmail from the ground up,” reads an invitation sent on Friday to journalists for press events to be held on Oct. 3 simultaneously in New York and San Francisco.
“Forget everything you thought you knew about Hotmail. Just don’t forget this date,” reads the invitation.
Hotmail’s primary competitors are Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail. The last time the consumer webmail market got a product jolt was in 2004, when Google surprised the world with Gmail and its then-unprecedented amount of email storage.
At that point, innovation in webmail services had stagnated for years but Gmail shook Microsoft, Yahoo and other webmail providers like AOL out of their comfort zone, as they quickly responded by increasing the size of their email inboxes.