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Office 365 Subscription Slows Signficantly
August 1, 2016 by admin
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Microsoft said that consumer subscriptions to Office 365 topped 23 million, signaling that the segment’s once quite large year-over-year growth had slowed significantly.
The Redmond, Wash. company regularly talks up the latest subscription numbers for the consumer-grade Office 365 plans — the $100 a year Home and the $70 Personal — and did so again this week during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts.
“We also see momentum amongst consumers, with now more than 23 million Office 365 subscribers,” CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday.
But analysis of Microsoft’s consumer Office 365 numbers showed that the rate of growth — or as Nadella put it, “momentum” — has slowed.
For the June quarter, the 23.1 million cited by Microsoft in its filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) represented a 52% increase over the same period the year prior. Although most companies would give their eye teeth — or maybe a few executives — to boast of a rate of increase that size, it was the smallest since Microsoft began providing subscription data in early 2013.
A year before, the June 2015 quarter sported a consumer Office 365 subscription growth rate of 171% over the same three-month span in 2014.
The subscription increase also was small in absolute terms: Microsoft added approximately 900,000 to the rolls during the June quarter, down from 2.8 million the year before and also less than the 1.6 million accumulated in 2016′s March quarter.
The 900,000 additional subscribers added in the June quarter were the smallest number in more than two years.
While Microsoft did not directly address the slowing of growth in the consumer Office 365 market, it did attribute a similar trend among corporate subscriptions to the difficulty of maintaining huge year-over-year percentage gains as the raw numbers of subscriptions increased.
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/microsofts-office-365-subscription-slows-signficantly.html
Apple Rolls Out A Revamped Store
June 21, 2016 by admin
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Apple Inc announced a series of long anticipated enhancements to its App Store, but the new features may not ease concerns of developers and analysts who say that the App Store model – and the very idea of the single-purpose app – has seen its best days.
The revamped App Store will let developers advertise their wares in search results and give developers a bigger cut of revenues on subscription apps, while Apple said it has already dramatically sped up its app-approval process.
The goal is to sustain the virtuous cycle at the heart of the hugely lucrative iPhone business. Software developers make apps for the iPhone because its customers are willing to pay, and those customers, in turn, pay a premium for the device because it has the best apps.
The store is now more strategically important than ever for Apple as sales of the iPhone begin to level off and the company looks to software and services to fill the gap. Apple CEO Tim Cook said on a recent conference call that App Store revenues were up 35 percent over last year.
But the store is also a victim of its own success. Eight years after its launch, it is packed with more than 1.9 million apps, according to analytics firm App Annie, making it almost impossible for developers to find an audience – and increasingly difficult for customers to find what they need, as some 14,000 new apps arrive in the store each week.
“The app space has grown out of control,” said Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the internet and now a vice president at Alphabet Inc’s Google, who was speaking at a San Francisco conference on the future of the web on Wednesday. “We need to move away from having an individual app for every individual thing you want to do.”
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/apple-rolls-out-a-revamped-app-store.html
FCC Approves Use Of BYOCB
February 11, 2016 by admin
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In a sweeping change of course directed at a tightly controlled television industry, cable and satellite operators in the United States will now be obligated to let their customers freely choose which set-top boxes they can use, according to a proposal announced by the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday.
The move is expected to have wide-ranging implications for large technology companies looking to get their brand names into every consumer’s living room. For example, under the new rules, Google, Amazon and Apple would now be allowed to create entertainment room devices that blend Internet and cable programming in a way the television industry has until now resisted. Next-generation media players, including the Chromecast, Fire TV and Apple TV, would now be granted permission to line the backs of their devices with coaxial inputs and internal “smart access card” equivalents integrated right into device firmware with a simple subscription activation process.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, Senators Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut investigated the cable set-top box market last summer and found that the cable industry generates roughly $19.1 billion in annual revenue from cable box rentals alone.
Meanwhile, the cost of cable set-top boxes has risen 185 percent since 1995, while the cost of PCs, televisions and smartphones has dropped by 90 percent. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler admits that these economies of scale don’t need to remain so unbalanced any longer.
The FCC says its focus will be primarily on improving day-to-day television experience. In the past, the burdensome requirements of long-term contracts tethered to clunky, unsightly cable and satellite boxes has been a major source of customer complaints.
Wheeler has also said that access to specific video content shouldn’t be frustrating to the average consumer in an age where we are constantly surrounded by a breadth of information to sift through. “Improved search functions [can] lead consumers to a variety of video content that is buried behind guides or available on video services you can’t access with your set-top box today,” Wheeler says.
The FCC is expected to vote on the proposal on Thursday, February 18th. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s full statement on the commission’s new proposal can be found here.
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Microsoft Attempting To Attract Mobile Users
February 10, 2015 by admin
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Microsoft Corp made its popular Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications available,free of charge, on Android tablets, further signifying its drive to attract as many mobile customers as possible using its software.
It also released an app for its popular Outlook email program to run on Apple Inc’s iPhone and iPad, hoping to attract the millions of users familiar with Outlook from their work desktops.
The new releases are the latest gambits in Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s attempt to wrest back the initiative in the battle for mobile users, where Microsoft has fallen behind Apple and Google Inc.
Nadella broke with decades of tradition last March by releasing a free, touch-friendly version of Office for Apple’s iPad, before such software was even available for Microsoft’s Windows devices.
By giving away its industry-standard Office apps on Apple’s popular iOS and Google’s Android operating systems, Microsoft is looking to build up a base of users which it can later persuade to sign up for Office 365, the full, Internet-based version of Office starting at $7 a month for personal users.
Microsoft has been offering test versions of the Office apps on Android for almost three months, but Thursday marks the first day they are available as finished products from the online Google Play app store.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the key elements of Microsoft’s top-selling Office suite of applications, have been a hit on Apple’s mobile devices, with 80 million downloads since last March, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft plans to release new, touch-friendly versions of its Office apps for Windows devices later this year when it releases the Windows 10 operating system.
The new Outlook app, based on a popular app made by Acompli, which Microsoft bought in December, will allow iPhone and iPad users much easier ways of linking email to calendars and working with file attachments. Microsoft is also releasing a test version of the Outlook app for Android users.
Acers To Launh Cheap Tablets
September 17, 2014 by admin
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Acer’s latest low-cost 8-inch tablets will come to market in both Android and Windows flavors.
The Iconia Tab 8 W runs Windows on an Intel Atom Z3735G quad-core processor. It offers 8 hours of battery life, weighs 370 grams and is 9.75 millimeters thick. The 8-inch screen has a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels.
For the $149 price tag, Acer includes a one-year subscription to the Personal version of Office 365, which includes access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook.
Android fans will prefer the Iconia One 8, running Android 4.4. It has the same Intel processor and screen dimensions as its Windows cousin, but is slightly lighter at 340 grams and only 8.5 millimeters thick.
Buyers can choose between 10 colors, including red, green, blue, purple and pink.
Acer also took the covers off the Iconia 10, an Android-based 10-inch tablet. The device has a quad-core processor from MediaTek. The screen is protected using Gorilla glass and has Full HD resolution. Using Dolby Digital Plus, surround sound is simulated from two-channel stereo audio headphones.
Available in black or white and with a price of $199, the Iconia Tab 10 includes a micro HDMI port and Wireless Display support for showing photos and videos on a bigger TV.
The first of the new tablets to start shipping will be the Iconia 10, available this month in the Americas and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
The Iconia Tab 8 W will go on sale in October in EMEA and in November in the Americas.
Oracle Takes A Fall
Oracle posted fiscal fourth-quarter results that were just horrible for investors looking for more progress in web-based services, sending its shares lower.
The company had been expected to report a pickup in its software business and progress in cloud computing, shares of Oracle had gained 10 percent over the past three months. However yesterday it was clear that Oracle is getting a kicking from the competition like Salesforce.com and Workday which have been offering competitive software and Internet-based products at prices that often undercut Oracle.
Tech spending is likely to fall as more companies move to the cloud. Oracle has been rolling out its own cloud-based products but they remain under five percent of its overall revenue. For the fiscal first quarter, Oracle expects software and cloud revenue to grow between 6 percent and 8 percent. That forecast includes expectations for software- and platform-related cloud services to grow between 25 percent and 35 percent.
Oracle said it expects its hardware system revenue to be in a range of down 1 percent to up 3 percent.
For its latest fourth quarter, Oracle said overall revenue rose 3 percent to $11.3 billion. That was less than the $11.48 billion analysts had expected on average. Net income fell 4 percent to $3.6 billion.
Revenue from Oracle’s hardware systems products grew 2 percent to $870 million.
Oracle Updates NoSQL
Oracle has announced the availability of the latest edition of its NoSQL datatabase.
NoSQL is Oracle’s distributed key-value database. Now in it’s third version, the enhancements this time are heavily centred around security and business continuity.
Oracle NoSQL 3.0 features improvements in security with cluster-wide password based user authentication and integration with Oracle Wallet. Session level Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and network port restriction are also included.
For disaster recovery and prevention, there’s automatic fail-over to metro-area secondary data centres, while secondary server zones can be used to offload read-only workloads to take the pressure off primary servers under stress.
For developers, there is added support for tabular data models that Oracle claims will simplify application design and improve integration with SQL based applications, while secondary indexing improves query performance.
“Oracle NoSQL 3.0 helps organisations fill the gap in skills, security and performance by delivering […] enterprise-class NoSQL database that empowers database developers and DBAs to easily, intuitively and securely build and deploy next generation applications,” said Oracle’s EVP of Database Server Technologies, Andrew Mendelsohn.
It’s already been a big week for the SQL community with NoSQL arriving on MariaDB for the first time, courtesy of a tie-up between SkySQL, Google and IBM on Tuesday, while yesterday Fusion-IO announced the use of Non-volatile memory (NVM) compression in MySQL to increase the capacity of SSD storage.
Both the community and enterprise versions of Oracle NoSQL Database 3.0 are available for download now from the Oracle Technology Network.
Banks Join Instant Chat
October 16, 2013 by admin
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co and six other financial institutions have agreed to join a new instant messaging network from Markit and Thomson Reuters Corp to connect disparate messaging systems.
The network, called Markit Collaboration Services, launched on Monday and allows members to chat with one another regardless of the proprietary messaging technology that each firm uses.
This open platform differs Bloomberg LP’s messaging system, which is a closed network only for users of Bloomberg terminals.
Bloomberg messaging is the most popular form of chat on Wall Street, and often cited as one of the reasons banks are willing to pay around $20,000 a year for a subscription to a Bloomberg terminal.
Markit and Thomson Reuters said they hoped their open messaging network will attract banks that want to chat with their clients or other financial institutions but cannot currently do so because they are on different messaging systems.
The other banks that have joined the new network are Deutsche Bank, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, according to a statement from Markit.
The banks collectively employ more than 1 million people worldwide, though it was not immediately clear how many individuals will use the new Markit service.
David Craig, president of Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk division, said one of the challenges facing banks is that their messaging systems do not always talk to one another. “That creates costs and complexity,” he said.
Markit and Thomson Reuters said the messages on the new network are encrypted, and the system does not store them.
Representatives from Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were not immediately available to comment on the new messaging system. Representatives from Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan also declined to comment.
Does Intel Need Help?
As time runs out for Intel to bring its Internet-based TV service by the end of the year, the outfit has approached Samsung and Amazon to ask them to lend a hand. Intel has asked about providing funding and distribution for the service. It looks like the set-top box project could be scrapped if a strategic partner isn’t found soon.
OnCue was supposed to allow users to watch live TV, on demand, and other offerings. Intel said it would provide the hardware and services directly to consumers and that the box would come with a camera that can detect who is in front of the TV. More than 300 engineers are working on the project under Erik Huggers, the head of Intel Media. A version of the service running on Intel hardware is testing with 3,000 Intel employees. Goodness knows what content they are running. Intel is having difficulty getting content deals.
Intel has yet to announce any TV programming partners, and Time Warner Cable and other cable TV providers have been pressuring channel owners to shun pacts with Intel and other Internet-based TV providers. Samsung, which ships millions of smart TVs, could distribute the service as a bundle, while Amazon could provide access to its growing library of movies and TV shows.
HP To Support The iPad
September 30, 2013 by admin
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Is your iPad out of warranty? Hewlett-Packard to the rescue.
HP updated its SmartFriend support service and will now troubleshoot problems with Windows, Android, Chrome OS, OS X and iOS products, according to a fact sheet describing the service.
“HP is expanding its HP SmartFriend service to provide 1:1 expert support for any brand of PC or tablet,” the company said. The plan previously supported PCs from HP and other vendors, as well as Macs.
Users can avail of the service to address general hardware, software and malware issues. HP says its agents can “remove viruses, improve PC performance, solve software errors, and connect devices to a wireless network with enhanced security.” The support is provided by phone or over the Internet, so don’t expect a technician to trot in and fix your iPad in person. But HP notes it can save you from driving to a store.
Unlike Best Buy’s Geek Squad service, HP’s service does not include hardware repairs. It can be tricky to change the battery or storage in tablets, so for iPads, the Genius Bars at Apple Stores may still be the best option for some repairs.
HP didn’t immediately comment on exactly what support it will provide for the iPad. HP printers offer wireless printing from iPads and iPhones. HP sells primarily Windows PCs and Android tablets, though on last Thursday it announced the Pavilion 14 laptop with Google’s Chrome OS.
While SmartFriend includes support for iOS devices, the service seems focused mainly on Windows products. Its technicians include “Microsoft Application Trainers, Microsoft Product Specialists, A+/MCP/MCSE Certified Professionals, Network Administrators and HTML Developers,” according to the fact sheet.
The service starts at US$9.99 per month and users can sign up for a pre-paid, monthly or yearly support plan. A “Complete Plan” supports two devices, while a “Family Plan” supports up to four devices.