The world’s biggest online retailer, which has laid out plans to start using drones for deliveries by 2017, said a cross-government team supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority had provided it with the permissions necessary to explore the process.

Amazon unveiled a video last year showcasing how an unmanned drone could deliver packages, narrated by former Top Gear TV host Jeremy Clarkson.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said last month the use of drones for deliveries will require separate regulation from their general use.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc said last month it was six to nine months from beginning to use drones to check warehouse inventories in the United States.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/u-k-regulators-give-amazon-permission-to-explore-drone-deliveries.html

Google announced this week that it released an Android update to patch shedloads of vulnerabilities, but the advisory mentioned an information disclosure vulnerability in the Qualcomm tethering controller (CVE-2016-2060) that allows a malicious application to access user information.

FireEye said that this vulnerablity is “high severity,” but Google noted that it does not affect Nexus devices. The patch for the issue is not in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository but might make it in the  latest driver updates for affected devices.

The security outfit said that researchers informed Qualcomm about the vulnerability in January and the vendor developed a fix by early March, when it started reaching out to OEMs to let them know about the issue. Now it’s up to the device manufacturers to push out the patch to customers. So probably a long time then.

The flaw exists in an open source software package maintained by Qualcomm and is related to the Android network daemon (netd).

“The vulnerability was introduced when Qualcomm provided new APIs as part of the ‘network_manager’ system service, and subsequently the ‘netd’ daemon, that allow additional tethering capabilities, possibly among other things,” FireEye said.

The flaw has been confirmed to affect devices running Android 5.0 Lollipop and earlier, which currently account for roughly three-quarters of Android devices. Researchers noted that the affected Qualcomm software package is used in a variety of projects, including the popular CyanogenMod, and the vulnerable APIs appear to have been around since at least 2011.

The vulnerability can be exploited to escalate privileges to the built-in “radio” user, which has permissions that are normally not available to a third-party app. The most efficient way to exploit CVE-2016-2060 is via a malicious application that is granted the “ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE” permission.

Courtesy-Fud

Groupon filed its lawsuit on Monday with the federal court in its hometown of Chicago, two months after IBM accused Groupon of patent infringement in a separate lawsuit.

“IBM is trying to shed its status as a dial-up-era dinosaur” by infringing the rights of “current” technology companies such as Groupon, according to Groupon spokesman Bill Roberts.

The latest lawsuit concerns IBM’s WebSphere Commerce platform, which Groupon said lets merchants send messages to customers with GPS-enabled devices based on their real-time locations, and their use of social media including Facebook.

Groupon said the platform infringes a December 2010 patent, and that it deserves royalties based on the “billions of dollars” of revenue that Armonk, New York-based IBM has received through its infringement.

“IBM, a relic of once-great 20th Century technology firms, has now resorted to usurping the intellectual property of companies born this millennium,” Groupon said in its lawsuit.

On March 2, IBM accused Groupon in a federal lawsuit in Delaware of infringing four patents, including two related to Prodigy, a late-1980s forerunner to the Internet.

“Over the past three years, IBM has attempted to conclude a fair and reasonable patent license agreement with Groupon, and we are disappointed that Groupon is seeking to divert attention from its patent infringement by suing,” Shelton said.

The Chicago case is Groupon Inc v International Business Machines Corp, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 16-05064. The Delaware case is International Business Machines Corp v Groupon Inc, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware, No. 16-00122.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/groupon-gets-into-patent-fight-with-ibm.html

Mya Le Thai, a PhD candidate at the university, explained in a paper published this week that she and her colleagues used nanowires, a material that is several thousand times thinner than a human hair, extremely conductive and has a surface area large enough to support the storage and transfer of electrons.

Nanowires are extremely fragile and don’t usually hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. They expand and grow brittle in a typical lithium-ion battery, but Le Thai’s team fixed this by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and then placing it in a Plexiglas-like gel to improve its reliability. All by accident.

The breakthrough could lead to laptop, smartphone and tablet batteries that last forever.

Reginald Penner, chairman of UCI’s chemistry department, said: “Mya was playing around and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it.

“She discovered that just by using this gel she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity. That was crazy, because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.”

The battery-like structure was tested more than 200,000 times over a three-month span, and the researchers reported no loss of capacity or power.

“The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai said. “This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”

The breakthrough also paves the way for commercial batteries that could last a lifetime in appliances, cars and spacecraft.

British fuel-cell maker Intelligent Energy Holdings announced earlier this year that it is working on a smartphone battery that will need to be charged only once a week.

Groupon has built its business model on the use of IBM’s patents, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in the federal court for the District of Delaware. “Despite IBM’s repeated attempts to negotiate, Groupon refuses to take a license, but continues to use IBM’s property,” according to the computing giant, which is asking the court to order Groupon to halt further infringement and pay damages.

IBM alleges that websites under Groupon’s control and its mobile applications use the technology claimed by the patents-in-suit for online local commerce marketplaces to connect merchants to consumers by offering goods and services at a discount.

About a year ago, IBM filed a similar lawsuit around the same patents against online travel company Priceline and three subsidiaries.

To develop the Prodigy online service that IBM launched with partners in the 1980s, the inventors of U.S. patents 5,796,967 and 7,072,849 developed new methods for presenting applications and advertisements in an interactive service that would take advantage of the computing power of each user’s PC and reduce demand on host servers, such as those used by Prodigy, IBM said in its complaint against Groupon.

“The inventors recognized that if applications were structured to be comprised of ‘objects’ of data and program code capable of being processed by a user’s PC, the Prodigy system would be more efficient than conventional systems,” it added.

Groupon is also accused of infringing U.S. Patent No.5,961,601, which was developed to find a better way of preserving state information in Internet communications, such as between an online merchant and a customer, according to IBM. Online merchants can use the state information to keep track of a client’s product and service selections while the client is shopping and then use that information when the client decides to make a purchase, something that stateless Internet communications protocols like HTTP cannot offer, it added.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/ibm-files-patent-infringement-lawsuit-against-groupon.html 

The chip is designed for in-car navigation and infotainment systems running QNX, Linux, and Android.  It has wireless capabilities and can connected to your phone.  The LTE version will link to the Internet.

They can manage multiple displays to run the screen in your dashboard  and an infotainment screen in the back seat. It also offers support for high-resolution 4K displays for when some company inevitably decides to cram a high-res, high-density screen into one of its cars.

The 820A chips are close cousins ofthe the Snapdragon 820 SoCs that will start shipping in phones later this year and use Qualcomm’s custom-made 64-bit Kryo CPU cores, an Adreno 530 GPU, a  Hexagon 680 DSP all cooked up with a 14nm manufacturing process. They will also use the Snapdragon X12 LTE which can manage 600Mbps down and  150Mbps up when the wind is behind it and it is going downhill. There are all the usual 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other features.

Qualcomm said that it used a “modular approach” in designing the chip, which  means that the cars infotainment system can be upgraded with hardware and software updates, thereby enabling vehicles to be easily upgraded with the latest technology.

Car makers could theoretically swap out the chip or the entire package without needing to worry about software changes. Qualcomm specifically mentions upgrading LTE connectivity over the lifetime of the car to keep up with the capabilities of cellular networks.

Qualcomm says the 820A family will begin sampling in Q1 of 2016.

Courtesy-Fud

The next generation SoC from Qualcomm, let’s call it Snapdragon 8×0, will use ARM Cortex cores. Our industry sources are confident that company’s leadership has put a great deal of pressure on Qualcomm QTI to reduce the cost of R&D and custom CPU core costs an arm and a leg. Using Cortex Cores is cheaper than developing a custom ARM based CPU such as Kyro.

Creating a custom ARM based CPU core is intensive too and Qualcom still has to build a Modem, GPU, DSP, camera ISP, Video processing unit as well connectivity inside of the SoC to provide the differentiating factor to the competition. It just appears that the Core itself probably does not need looking at.

But the move will hardly help Qualcomm compete in hostile and aggressive mobile SoC manufacturers’ competition.

Apple and Samsung have their own CPU cores. Huawei uses Cortex architecture but has its own SoCs for the 100 million phones it sold this year. These are businesses that are either very hard or impossible for Qualcomm QTI SoCs to get. Every Samsung SoC manufactured and sold in Samsung phones is one less for Qualcomm.

MediaTek might be the winner in this case, as MediaTek makes rather unique processors that are designed to compete well against those who use close-to-reference Cortex ARM solutions. MediaTek is the only deca core in three cluster architecture but we still have to see it in action before we pronounce anyone winner or loser.

Qualcomm will have to focus on its strengths of its late 2016 successor to Snapdragon 810. The strengths of Qualcomm lay in superior modem performance and a great Adreno GPU. However they will lose an advantage of a custom core that might bring a bigger difference from the competition.

This is certainly not something we expected but it is happening.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-qualcomm-dropping-kryo.html

The lab was used by Qualcomm to develop Interferometric Modulator Display and Apple Insider claims it is now being used to develop thinner, lighter, brighter and more energy-efficient screens.

The lab employs at least 50 engineers and has recruited talent from display maker AU Optronics and Qualcomm. Outside the lab there is no signage or much to indicate that the Fruity Cargo Cult has assumed control.

Government records show that the building is registered to Apple Taiwan, and a staff in the building were observed wearing Apple ID badges.

Bloomberg thinks Apple wants to “reduce reliance on the technology developed by suppliers such as Samsung, LG, Sharp and Japan and instead “develop the production processes in-house and outsource to smaller manufacturers such as Taiwan’s AU Optronics or Innolux.

Apple currently uses LCD screens in its Macs and iOS devices and an OLED display for Apple Watch and the new lab was where Qualcomm tried to develop to develop its own Mirasol displays.

Mirasol use a different technology to backlit LCDs or OLED. It uses an array of microscopic mirror-like elements that can reflect light of a specific colour. It does not need a backlight and only uses energy when being switched on or off, like E-Ink.

The downside to IMOD has historically been that it reproduces flat, unsaturated colours, a problem that may be possible to fix. Qualcomm introduced a Toq smartwatch with an IMOD screen, but the device flopped.

Qualcomm took a $142 million charge on its Mirasol display business and a year ago there were rumours Qualcomm was selling off its Longtan Mirasol panel plant to TSMC.

What appears to have happened is that Jobs Mob might have bought more than just the facility, and instead has some interest in using Mirasol IMOD technology which could offer an advanced technological breakthrough in enabling a new class of low-power displays for use in phones, tablets or wearables.

Courtesy-Fud

While large tablets like the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and its expensive Apple knock-off the Apple iPad Pro, IDC thinks that tablet shipments will continue to decline this quarter.

But IDC also predicts a change in trends, with the market transitioning from standalone tablets over to detachable hybrids.

Users are demanding that tablets actually do something and the boundaries between laptops and tablets with keyboards are starting to blur.  Once just keyboardless netbooks, tablets are becoming netbooks with touchscreens.

IDC predicts that hybrids will be the tablets of the future and that this segment will grow by as much as 75 per cent in 2016 compared to this year.

These devices will be used more and more for productivity purposes more than just consumption. This productivity trend also has an impact on which tablets sizes and platforms will dominate the market.

Tablets are useless for this and these will start to die out. Sizes between 9 and 13 inches are almost perfect, while 13 to 16 inches, though unwieldy, will also more than double its share, IDC said.

IDC predicts Windows will snatch a bigger market share by 2019, almost 20 per cent. These growths will come at the expense of Android, however, who will continue to see a decline in its market share in the next few years.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/will-declining-tablet-sales-hurt-android.html

A new report from ChosunBiz said that Samsung originally aimed to house around 10,000 personnel on the site. However the majority of the decreases will be applied to Samsung’s Digital Media & Communication (DMC) and Media Solutions Centre (MSC).

The campus will instead house about 3,500 staff who have master and PhD degrees and specialise in software, design and digital media development.

The move is odd as it is coming at a time when Samsung is really desperate for killer innovation to steal the march on the competition. However reading between the lines it looks like it is reducing work in its content creation side.

We are surprised that it is doing anything with its Media Solutions centre. Originally, it was established to operate as a Korean version of the App Store. But the company announced on December 10 last year that it was dissolves the organisation.

At the time it was admitted that the content business has not been as successful as the hardware business. Moreover, the worsening performance of the smartphone business arising from the increasingly saturated market forced the company to speed up the break-up process.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/samsung-boots-two-thirds-of-its-rd-staff.html