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Intel Invests In Tablet Business
Intel has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for restaurants.
Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s investment arm, has bought into in all sorts of companies outside of semiconductors in a bid to diversify the firm’s income. Now the chipmaker has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for use in restaurants.
E La Carte raised a total of $13.5m in second round funding for its niche tablet business, with Intel Capital leading the investment. The firm said it would use the capital injection to grow the firm and to try to increase the number of restaurants that use its tablets.
Christine Herron, director of Intel Capital said, “E La Carte offers the most innovative and reliable guest tablet solution in the industry. We’re thrilled to further accelerate the company’s growth with not only capital, but also our significant resources and expertise in manufacturing, operations, and media.
“As E La Carte transforms the dining experience, we are creating a new market for both restaurant and guest services.”
E La Carte claims to have sold thousands of tablets to restaurants and cites a month on month growth rate of 35 percent. For Intel it is one way of getting a foothold in the tablet market, even if its Clovertrail+ tablets have yet to take the market by storm.
Rajat Suri, CEO of E La Carte said, “We are excited to work with Intel to grow our footprint to more restaurants across the country. With more than 200,000 casual-dining restaurants in the US, we see an enormous opportunity to make full service and fast casual restaurant experiences more enjoyable for guests, and more profitable for restaurant operators.”
Aside from the cash, Intel Capital will also provide advice in manufacturing, operations and media to E La Carte, presumably with the hope of taking the firm public in the future.
Phishing Attacks Increasing
Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have reported significant growth in phishing attacks over the last year.
In a study entitled “The Evolution of Phishing Attacks”, Kaspersky said it found 37.3 million out of its 50 million customers running its security products that were at risk of being phished from 2012 to the present, an 87 percent increase over the same period between 2011 and 2012.
“The nature of phishing attacks is such that the simplest types can be launched without any major infrastructure investments or in-depth technological research,” Kaspersky said in the report.
“This situation has led to its own form of ‘commercialization’ of these types of attacks, and phishing is now being almost industrialized, both by cybercriminals with professional technological skills and IT dilettantes.”
The security firm explained that overall, the effectiveness of phishing, combined with its profitability for criminals and how simple the process is to undertake has led to a steadily rising number of these types of incidents.
Kaspersky noted that most of the victims in 2012-2013 were located in just ten countries, that is, Russia, the US, India, Germany, Vietnam, the UK, France, Italy, China and Ukraine. These 10 countries were home to 64 percent of all phishing attack victims during this time.
In addition to a rise in the number of users attacked, the number of servers involved in phishing attacks also increased, Kaspersky said, without giving any exact numbers. Though the firm did reveal that internet giants like Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon are the top targets of malicious users.
“Online game services, online payment systems, and the websites of banks and other credit and financial organizations are also common targets,” the firm added, warning users to stay vigilant when entering personal data.
Support Calls To Help Desks Are On The Rise
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At a time when technology is supposed to be getting simpler, less complex and easier to manage, more people are calling help desks for assistance than ever before, according to a new report. That’s one of the findings that HDI, formerly known as the Help Desk Institute, revealed in its recently released 2010 study of help desk trends.
What HDI found is that the number of incidents reported to help desks via chat, e-mail, telephone, self-help systems, social media, the Web and walk-ins is rising, with 67% of all help desk operations experiencing increases in 2010. That’s roughly the same percentage who reported an increase in 2009.
In recent years, many organizations have moved to centralize their help desk operations and establish a single point of contact for workers, said Roy Atkinson, an analyst at HDI, whose members represent a help desk community of about 50,000 people.
Those centralization efforts have improved incident data collection, which helps to explain the spike in reports. Moreover, creating a single point of contact, and offering multiple ways for people to reach the help desk, encourages users to seek assistance, Atkinson said.
While centralization and better record-keeping may explain much of the increase in reported calls, it doesn’t completely explain it. Atkinson said another part of the explanation could be the fact that IT complexity is actually increasing, especially as users seek to connect multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops to corporate networks. Read More…….