Bitcoin Use Growing

Bitcoin is gaing greater acceptance at U.S. online merchants including Overstock.com and Expedia, as customers use a digital currency that just a few years ago was virtually unknown but is now showing some staying power.

Though sales paid for in bitcoin so far at vendors interviewed for this article have been a fraction of one percent, they expect that as acceptance grows, the online currency will one day be as ubiquitous as the internet.

“Bitcoin isn’t going anywhere; it’s here to stay,” said Michael Gulmann, vice president of global products at Expedia Inc. in Seattle, the largest online travel agent. “We want to be there from the beginning.” Expedia started accepting bitcoin payments for hotel bookings on July 11.

Until recently a niche alternative currency touted by a fervent group of followers, bitcoin has evolved into a software-based payment online system. Bitcoins are stored in a wallet with a unique identification number and companies like Coinbase and Blockchain can hold the currency for the user.

When buying an item from a merchant’s website, a customer simply clicks on the bitcoin option and a pop-in window appears where he can type in his wallet ID number.

Still, broad-based adoption of bitcoin is at least five years away because most consumers still prefer to use credit cards, analysts said.

“Bitcoin is a new way of making payments, but it’s not solving a problem that’s broken,” said George Peabody, payments consultant at Glenbrook Partners in Menlo Park, California. “Retail payments aren’t broken.”

There are also worries about bitcoin’s volatility: its price in U.S. dollars changes every day.

That risk is borne by the consumer and the bitcoin payment processor, such as Coinbase or Bitpay, not the retailer. The vendor doesn’t hold the bitcoin and is paid in U.S. dollars. As soon as a customer pays in bitcoin, the digital currency goes to the payment processor and the processor immediately pays the merchant, for a fee of less than 1 percent.

“We don’t have to deal with the actual holding of the bitcoin: it’s the payment processor that takes the currency risk for us,” said Bernie Han, chief operating officer at Dish Network Corp, in Englewood, Colorado. “That’s what makes it appealing for us and I guess for other merchants as well.”

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Intel And Oracle Team Up Again

Oracle has added systems to its enterprise-class x86 server line featuring elastic computing capabilities that dynamically adapt their configurations in response to workloads.

The Oracle Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8 are four-socket and eight-socket systems designed for data centre workloads such as virtualisation, Oracle databases and scale-up enterprise applications.

However, the two servers are fitted with a unique variant of Intel’s Xeon E7 v2 processor family that combines the capabilities of three different Xeon processors into one.

Oracle said it worked with Intel to create this chip, the Xeon E7-8895 v2, which can dynamically switch its core count, clock frequency and power consumption without the need for a system level reboot.

This chip is the heart of the elastic computing capability of the Sun Server X4-4 and Sun Server X4-8, enabling them to adapt to the requirements of different workloads based on its runtime configuration.

It might be configured for transaction processing at a high clock speed for one hour, then switched to higher core counts for the next hour for higher throughput computing, according to Oracle.

“Through close collaboration with Intel, we are the first to announce servers based on the new Xeon E7-8895 v2 processors and the first with unique capabilities that allow customers to dynamically address different workloads in real time,” said Ali Alasti, senior vice president for hardware development at Oracle.

Enhancements have also been made to the system firmware and to Oracle’s Solaris, and Oracle Linux operating systems to support the elastic computing features.

Oracle also said the new systems have a modular design that allows the processors to be upgraded to future Xeon chips, while all the disks are hot-swappable, plus there is hot-pluggable I/O support for industry-standard low-profile PCI Express cards via a dual PCIe card carrier.

The servers also feature a “glueless” architecture that removes the need for a node controller. As node controllers typically change from one processor generation to the next because of modifications to inter-processor communication and coherency protocols, the elimination enables Oracle to offer a future-proof chassis that will support future processor releases from Intel, the firm said.

The Sun Server X4-8 is touted by Oracle as ideal for running its Oracle Database, which has just been updated with an in-memory processing option. It supports 120 processor cores with up to 6TB of memory in its 5U rack-mount chassis, plus up to 9.6TB of hard drive or 3.2TB of solid state drive (SSD) storage.

Meanwhile, the Sun Server X4-4 is said to be well suited for applications requiring large memory footprint virtual machines and running real-time analytics software.

It can be configured with two or four of the Xeon E7-8895 v2 processors, with up to 3TB of memory and 4.8TB of PCIe flash plus 2.4TB of SSDs or 7.2TB of hard drives.

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Will MasterCard Sell Big Data?

MasterCard Inc, the world’s second-largest credit card association, sees business booming from selling data to retailers, banks and governments on spending patterns found in the payments it processes, a top executive told Reuters.

MasterCard, which handles payments for 2 billion cardholders and tens of millions of merchants, uses that information to generate real-time data on consumer trends, available more quickly that regular government statistics.

“It is an incredibly fast growing area for us,” Ann Cairns, who heads MasterCard’s business outside North America, said in an interview, stressing that the company respects cardholder privacy, using anonymous data rather than personal information.

MasterCard does not give figures for its information services products but “other revenues”, which include the sale of data, grew 22 percent in the first quarter of 2014 to $341 million, outpacing the growth of total revenue dominated by payments processing, which rose 14 percent to $2.177 billion.

Cairns said clients for the data include retailers, banks and governments, with MasterCard tailoring it to their needs.

“Retailers are fantastic at using the data they have available about how people shop in their store, how their inventory turns over, but what they don’t know is what happens outside their store,” she said. “The data we’ve got is ubiquitous across the whole market. We can help retailers see what they need to do to capture more sales.”

Cairns, 57, a statistician by training who joined MasterCard in 2011 after helping manage the disposal of Lehman Brothers assets in Europe, revels in the insights real-time card data can provide, such as London’s popularity as the world’s top travel destination and a rise in spending on experiences such as eating out or going on holiday rather than shopping in stores.

MasterCard has recorded a spike in spending in Brazil on groceries and a drop in spending on luxury goods as the price of food has risen ahead of the World Cup, she said, the kind of insight valued by companies such as Nike and Adidas that are hoping to sell $300 soccer boots during the competition.

While MasterCard expands in “big data”, Cairns sees no slowdown in its traditional business of processing payments, with plenty of potential for growth as 85 percent of consumer transactions are still made by cash or check.

“Moving money and doing it safely and securely is so deeply cared about by so many people around the world that it will be a business that has fantastic value now and for years to come,” said Cairns, who previously worked at Citigroup and ABN Amro.

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Will Intel Drop Itanium?

Intel has scaled back plans for its next Itanium chip, prompting observers the question Intel’s commitment to the chip.Intel said the next version of Itanium, codenamed Kittson, will be a 32nm part. It will not migrate to a more advanced process. The new chips will use the same socket as the existing Itanium 9300 and 9500 chips.

Analyst Nathan Brookwood said the move is Intel’s idea of an exit strategy.

“It may very well be that Itanium’s time has come and gone,” he said.

Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds told Computerworld that Itanium might see a new process in the future, if it proves successful enough to make the investment worthwhile. However, he does not expect any more major updates to the architecture.

Itanium launched in 2001 and it quickly became a running joke in the industry. It never achieved the volumes expected by Intel and AMD seized the opportunity to take on Intel with 64-bit Opterons. However, Itanium soldiered on for years, although many vendors stopped developing software for the chip.

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Oracle Agrees To Support Itanium

Oracle has committed to supporting the Intel Itanium processor on servers, ending what has been a long running feud with HP.

Oracle’s announcement is well timed because it was just a few weeks ago that a court ordered it to do just that. It did say however, that it will appeal the court’s judgment.

This should put an end to what has been a rather grubby row between Oracle and HP that centered around whether or not the two firms have an agreement about developing software for the IA-64 architecture.

The row, which was not helped by former HP CEO Mark Hurd’s abrupt firing from HP and hiring at Oracle, pulled in Intel and saw Oracle force HP into admitting that it had a secretive deal with Intel for development.

Upon hearing the court’s decision in August, Oracle couldn’t resist taking another dig at HP and its insistence that Oracle continue supporting a processor that as far as it was concerned could die.

“We know that Oracle did not give up its fundamental right to make platform engineering decisions in the 27 words HP cites from the settlement of an unrelated employment agreement. HP’s argument turns the concept of Silicon Valley ‘partnerships’ upside down,” said Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger then. “We plan to appeal the Court’s ruling while fully litigating our cross claims that HP misled both its partners and customers.”

It looks like Oracle has no choice however, and in a statement it said that it will abide by the decision of the court.

“Previously, Oracle announced that it would stop developing new versions of its software on Itanium microprocessors. For example, that meant version 12c of the Oracle database due out in early 2013 would not be available on Itanium,” it said.

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HP Wants The Court To Bully Oracle

HP has asked California Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg to order Oracle to continue developing software for its Itanium servers.

HP and Oracle have been locked in a bitter legal dispute over Oracle’s decision to stop supporting Intel’s IA-64 architecture used in Itanium processors. Now HP has asked Judge Kleinberg to order Oracle to continue developing software for its Itanium servers until it stops selling them or the contract term expires.

Oracle claims its decision to stop developing for Intel’s IA-64 architecture was spurred on by Intel having made it clear that it intended to focus on its x86 Xeon processors. Intel has said that its Xeon processors are being edged into the market presently occupied by its Itanic chips.

HP disputed Oracle’s claims of Itanium reaching the end of its life and it emerged that HP had a contract with Intel to support the chip. However, and perhaps most damaging for HP, was a release of emails between Intel and HP that seemed to suggest that Intel had enough of Itanium and that HP was having to all but strong-arm Intel into continuing to produce Itanium processors.

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WebOS Lives

HP is aiming to keep WebOS alive by putting it on printers.

The firm has discontinued its WebOS devices such as the Touchpad tablet and Pre 3 smartphone but WebOS will appear on new products, according to Pocketlint. The operating system (OS) will come on the Designjet line of HP printers.

An HP spokesperson said, “HP is currently investigating using WebOS on its Designjet range of professional printers.”

It’s likely that the OS will come on consumer printers at some point in the future, too. The following statement also hints that it could appear on products other than printers.

“HP is 100 [per cent] committed to producing print solutions that meet our customer needs and we will continue to drive innovation to ensure our products and solutions meet market demand. We built our printing franchise based on being OS agnostic – we have been and will continue to be agnostic to meet our various customer needs. As webOS plans develop we will continue to evaluate how and if we incorporate it into our future products.”

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Will Oracle Buy HP?

Word on the street is that Oracle has threatened to buy its sworn enemy HP. According to the Times of India, HP directors are terrified that their falling shares would make the company vulnerable to a bid from Oracle. Apparently this was the reason for the sudden sacking of Leo Apotheker.

Oracle has considered informally whether to approach Hewlett-Packard, but it’s unlikely to make a bid any time soon. But to make sure HP has hired Goldman Sachs to help it prepare for any possible moves by activist investors, one person said.

If Oracle were to make a hostile takeover it would be with the sole aim of getting rid of a lot of people who have hacked Larry Ellison off. It might even result in Mark Hurd returning to the company.

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Is HP Going To Court?

HP and its top executives have been accused of misleading investors before a slump in its stock price.

HP is facing a class action lawsuit filed by Robbins Geller Rudman and Down alleging that CEO Leo Apotheker and CFO Cathie Lesjak misled investors before making announcements that included the possible spin-off of its PC business, dumping WebOS devices and the purchase of British software outfit Autonomy.

Those announcements, all made in one afternoon, led to a 20 per cent drop in HP’s share price the following day. That, according to Reuters, was the largest one day decline in HP’s share price since 1987.

The lawsuit against HP does not specify damages but it serves to highlight the growing concern at the way Apotheker is leading HP. The firm’s announcement that it was considering leaving the PC business was a shock to many, but its decision to dump its WebOS devices was perhaps the biggest shock of the lot.

While HP’s PC business was always seen as a low margin operation, WebOS was viewed as a core part of HP’s future strategy. The firm kept banging on about slipping WebOS into as many devices as possible, however all that talk evaporated, just like HP’s Touchpads when it sold them off at fire sale prices for a massive loss.

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Should HP Reconsider The TouchPad?

Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) should re-think its decision to dump its TouchPad tablet since the device could double the value of the PC division HP plans to spin off, technology research firm Canalys said in a statement to clients.

HP stunned markets in August by saying it may shed its PC business — the world’s largest after the $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002 — while at the same time killing webOS-based phones and the TouchPad tablet which was launched only six weeks earlier.

HP slashed the price of its tablet to $99 the weekend after announcing the TouchPad’s demise, igniting an online frenzy and prompting long lines to form at retailers as bargain-hunters chased down a gadget that had thus far failed to excite consumers.

“The TouchPad was overpriced at launch and did not sell. This led HP to draw a premature conclusion that the product category had failed,” Canalys analysts said in a research note.

Canalys said the price cut had helped make TouchPad the hottest brand in HP’s entire portfolio, gathering more interest than anything from HP in more than 10 years.

“The TouchPad has become the ‘must-have’ technology product of 2011. Perhaps no other technology vendor, apart from Apple, has ever created such hype for a technology product,” the research note said.

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