US credit firms in breach warning
30 March 2012
Last updated at 21:11
The card companies said customers would not be responsible for fraudulent purchases
Visa, Mastercard and Discover have warned that credit card holders’ personal information could be at risk after a security breach.
The firms said there had been “no breach” of its own system, instead blaming a third party.
Security blog KrebsOnSecurity, which first reported the story, said industry sources believed more than 10 million cards may have been compromised.
Reports suggested the stolen details had been obtained in New York.
The Wall Street Journal quoted its own industry sources as saying card-processing firm Global Payments was the company that suffered the breach. Shares in the company fell by more than 9% on Friday.
Global Payments has not responded to requests for comment.
Concern
None of the three companies, which are the three of the largest credit card processors would confirm how many customers were affected.
Visa and Mastercard, also used for debit cards of major US banks, said they had notified banks of the breach.
Discover Financial Services said it was monitoring accounts and would reissue cards if necessary.
In a statement, Mastercard said: “[We are] concerned whenever there is any possibility that cardholders could be inconvenienced and we continue to both monitor this event and take steps to safeguard account information.
“If cardholders have any concerns about their individual accounts, they should contact their issuing financial institution.”
Visa echoed Mastercard’s statement, emphasising that its customers are not responsible for fraudulent purchases.
Gartner analyst Avivah Litan said she believed the breach was related to a taxi garage in New York City.
“So if you’ve paid a NYC cab in the last few months with your credit or debit card – be sure to check your card statements for possible fraud,” she said.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-17569336
RIM’s core strengths are weaknesses now
There’s a Canadian mobile phone executive who is probably humming a happy tune right now and has a little extra spring in his step this morning. However he doesn’t work for Research In Motion (RIM), the BlackBerry maker which last night announced a $125m quarterly loss as it saw revenues fall by almost 25% (and drop in real terms by $1bn) to $4.19bn, below even pessimistic Wall Street analyst forecasts.
No, the happy man will be Stephen Elop, the Canadian in charge of Finland’s Nokia, who will have read the news that RIM is “withdrawing from consumer markets” with, one expects, delight.
Update: RIM insists that it is not “withdrawing” from consumer markets but that it is instead “refocussing on core strengths”.
For Nokia, which has been trying for the past year to talk up the prospects of its new smartphone range running Microsoft’s Windows Phone – and which sees a crucial launch next month in the US of its new Lumia 900 device – the news that it will only have to fight against two entrenched ecosystems, in the form of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android is the best possible.
Bleak future
Meanwhile for RIM, the future abruptly looks bleak. If Thorsten Heins, its chief executive for only ten weeks (though he was previously its chief operating officer, and has been with the company since 2007) is serious about abandoning the consumer business and focussing instead on businesses, RIM doesn’t have long to live.
Update: RIM says Heins is going to “focus on the core” – that is, the business sector.
But even that won’t necessarily save it. Here’s why. It has already seen its share in businesses eroded: companies have discovered that they can lock down employees’ smartphones from central systems far better now than they could in 2007/2008, when RIM had its heyday. Then, the iPhone truly was a consumer-only device which you really wouldn’t trust in a corporate environment. And Android hadn’t even been released.
Now, though, back-end servers in enterprises can enforce PIN locks on devices and wipe them remotely. Good Technology, one company which provides that back-end enforcement (but not on BlackBerrys) is seeing gigantic growth. RIM might want to go back to the enterprise, but it will find the iPhone and Android phones such as Samsung’s hit Galaxy SII waiting for it.
RIM’s key problem is that enterprises now don’t need its encryption on email, because device security can effectively enforce that, and secure connections (such as Google’s) make online conversations untappable.
Its core strengths, in other words, have fizzled out. They don’t exist in the same way any more. Government services in the US are abandoning RIM for the iPhone. Android wins will follow.
That means that the only thing it has left is its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service – which appeals to exactly those consumers who it is abandoning. But even they are finding new cross-platform solutions: WhatsApp, which works across multiple smartphone platforms, is one of the most-downloaded applications for the iPhone and Android.
Exploring possibilities
Heins has said that he is exploring possibilities. RIM would be a cheap purchase – but who would want it? Microsoft doesn’t want a phone maker – it has in effect thrown in its lot with Nokia.
Here’s what Patrick Spence, RIM’s managing director for Global Sales Regional Marketing, said in a statement this morning: “The claim that RIM has said it will withdraw from the consumer market is wholly misleading. Whilst we announced plans to re-focus our efforts on our core strengths, and on our enterprise customer base, we were very explicit that we will continue to build on our strengths to go after targeted consumer segments. We listed BBM, as well as the security and manageability of our platform, amongst our strengths.”
Thorsten Heins RIM CEO confirmed on the conference call after the results were announced: “Whilst we announced we would refocus on the enterprise business, we also stated part of competing in the ‘bring your own device’ segment is to create a compelling consumer offering.
“Ahead of the BlackBerry 10 launch and throughout the remainder of our FY13, it is critical that we drive BlackBerry 7 sales to sustain the subscriber base. To do this we plan to aggressively incentivize sales of BlackBerry 7 smartphones to both drive upgrades from older BlackBerry products to BlackBerry 7 and to attract feature phone customers to BlackBerry 7 for their first smartphone experience.
“We have new BlackBerry 7 devices scheduled to come out in the next few months to reinvigorate our position in the key entry level smartphone segment, to support our efforts to continue growing our subscriber base by upgrading feature phone customers to smartphones.
“We will seek partnerships to deliver those consumer features and content that are not central to the BlackBerry value proposition, for example media consumption applications.”
Media consumption aside (though look at how valuable having the iTunes Store has been to Apple, and how well Google’s Android Market – now renamed Play – ties in users – one possibility is to license BBM to other companies. That could be popular – but WhatsApp is there first, and the carriers want to develop their own “over the top” systems too. Why would you want BBM?
Though it’s easy to think that it’s the iPhone which undermined RIM, it only skimmed off a top level of business user. RIM’s real decline began with the introduction of Android at the end of 2008. As multiple manufacturers began making cheap phones that appealed to consumers, offering apps for touch screens, the consumer business in the US began to close off to RIM, even while the proportion of people using smartphones grew – so that now Nielsen says that a shade under 50% of US mobile users have a smartphone, but in the past three months only 5% of buyers have been getting a BlackBerry – compared to 43% buying an iPhone and 48% buying a phone that runs Android. (Windows Phone was even less. Nokia has a long way to go.)
RIM’s problem is that in the US it can’t persuade people to buy. Its touch-screen phones haven’t impressed: the apps haven’t been good enough and the touch-screen experience not enticing. That has meant a collapse in average selling price (ASP) of devices – but a decline too in the number of handsets people buy. When you ship fewer handsets and their price declines, you’re entering a death spiral.
RIM overall device average selling price. Estimated from RIM results.
The surprising point though is that RIM has actually done well in the consumer market – but only outside the US. It is one of the most popular smartphones in the UK. In Indonesia there was a near-riot as people queued for the new models. In certain Middle East countries, teenagers of opposite sexes love being able to contact each other in a way that would be banned face-to-face. People who love BlackBerry really love it; although the bankers who originally used it dubbed it the “CrackBerry”, everyone else who adores its keyboard and no-frills functions will wonder what they’ve done to offend Heins.
Meanwhile the enterprise is being invaded by the iPhone, with Android coming up fast, and Nokia keen to emphasise the enterprise credentials that Windows Phone gives it. What’s left for RIM?
Phone sales are down:
RIM phone shipments growth, year-on-year. Source: RIM
And so are revenues and profits.
RIM revenue and profit, by quarter. Source: RIM
And just to emphasise how bad the spiral is, Heins wrote off $267m on the value of its older BlackBerry 7 handsets. The market doesn’t want them.
That brings the total value of writeoffs in its annus horribilis to $931m, including $485m in the previous quarter on the value of an estimated 2m PlayBook tablets, which were launched a year ago amid much fanfare with the intention of riding on the iPad’s coattails while also being a proving ground for the new QNX software that will power the new BlackBerry 10 phones expected later this year.
The tension shows in RIM’s inventory figure – which, after spiking due to a surplus of PlayBooks (since written down) has now begun climbing again.
RIM value of inventory, by quarter Dec 2002- Feb 2012. Source: RIM
As a percentage of revenue, inventory is also up:
RIM: value of inventory as percentage of revenue and of hardware sales, Dec 2002-2012
So far RIM has managed to get 1.35m Playbooks into the channel. Nobody knows quite how many have sold. But they’ve been a source of financial pain for the company.
For Heins, the problem now is where RIM can go. Its unique selling points that saw it through the early years of the smartphone explosion – corporate security and free messaging via BBM – have now been commoditised. Only its keyboard sets it apart – but the number of people who want that seems to be shrinking.
RIM worldwide subscribers, millions, March 2002 – Feb 2012
In the past three months, the number of global subscribers grew by only 2m to 77m- the first clear indication that growth is slowing. And contrast that to Apple – which in February announced that it had 100m users of its iCloud sharing service, and that that had gone up by 15m in just 21 days. Android, meanwhile, has an estimated 240m phones in peoples’ hands – all potential users of Google’s adverts and app services.
Simiarly, the number of handsets shipped compared to the growth in subscribers indicates that RIM is preaching to the already-converted: the proportion of handsets going to “new” subscribers is now lower than it has ever been. (This does not account for churn, where people leave the service while others join; RIM does not give the churn figure.)
RIM: new subscribers as a percentage of handset shipments, by quarter. Source: RIM data
RIM’s nightmare though is Nokia’s dream. The Finnish company is starting effectively from zero again in the US market with its Lumia 900, which will have a solid marketing push from the biggest carrier, ATT. It is quite possible that Nokia will pass RIM on the way up. The question now is how far RIM will go down. Horace Dediu, who runs the Asymco consultancy, has a rubric that the phone market doesn’t forgive failure: once a company makes a quarterly loss – even once – then customers and carriers never trust it the same way. For RIM, the only comfort is that Nokia has made a loss in the past year too. But the Finnish company definitely has the wind in its sails. It’s hard to say that of RIM, which reputedly turned down a buyout approach from Amazon last year. Its shareholders may come to regret that.
Update: we regret the error in suggesting that RIM was withdrawing from consumer markets. This appeared in the first version of this article, based on reports on the BBC which in turn were taken from wire services distributed to thousands of media outlets worldwide.
RIM said that it was correcting such reports “reactively” where it found they had appeared – rather than sending out a message proactively explaining the situation to the media what its strategy is. In a way, that’s a microcosm of its problem.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/30/rim-consumer-markets-blackberry
US credit firms in breach warning
30 March 2012
Last updated at 21:11
The card companies said customers would not be responsible for fraudulent purchases
Visa, Mastercard and Discover have warned that credit card holders’ personal information could be at risk after a security breach.
The firms said there had been “no breach” of its own system, instead blaming a third party.
Security blog KrebsOnSecurity, which first reported the story, said industry sources believed more than 10 million cards may have been compromised.
Reports suggested the stolen details had been obtained in New York.
The Wall Street Journal quoted its own industry sources as saying card-processing firm Global Payments was the company that suffered the breach. Shares in the company fell by more than 9% on Friday.
Global Payments has not responded to requests for comment.
Concern
None of the three companies, which are the three of the largest credit card processors would confirm how many customers were affected.
Visa and Mastercard, also used for debit cards of major US banks, said they had notified banks of the breach.
Discover Financial Services said it was monitoring accounts and would reissue cards if necessary.
In a statement, Mastercard said: “[We are] concerned whenever there is any possibility that cardholders could be inconvenienced and we continue to both monitor this event and take steps to safeguard account information.
“If cardholders have any concerns about their individual accounts, they should contact their issuing financial institution.”
Visa echoed Mastercard’s statement, emphasising that its customers are not responsible for fraudulent purchases.
Gartner analyst Avivah Litan said she believed the breach was related to a taxi garage in New York City.
“So if you’ve paid a NYC cab in the last few months with your credit or debit card – be sure to check your card statements for possible fraud,” she said.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-17569336
Workers worry about pay cuts from Apple, Foxconn pact
Labor-conditions activists and feel-good petitioners may be pleased with Apple’s agreement with contract-manufacturing giant Foxconn to cut back on workers’ overtime, but there’s another affected class that’s not as pleased with the outcome: the workers themselves.
“We are worried we will have less money to spend,” Foxconn worker Wu Jun told a Reuters reporter buttonholing employees outside the gates of Foxconn’s factory in Longhua, China. “Of course, if we work less overtime, it would mean less money.”
Foxconn has said that it will reduce overtime to 36 hours per month – as required by Chinese labor law – but that it would take until July of next year to implement that move, considering that it will need to construct more workers’ dormitories and related amenities to add the employees it will need to keep production levels up with fewer hours per worker.
“We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said four-year Foxconn employee Chen Yamei. “We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little.”
Foxconn, a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry and the employer of 1.2 million souls, has said that it would increase the compensation of employees to make up for lost overtime.
In addition, however, Foxconn is working to cut labor costs by replacing some workers with robots over the next three years – one million robots, according to a report last July by Xinhua.
Such a move might eventually help maintain Foxconn’s margins and prevent factories from moving to countries like the Philippines with lower labor costs, but it won’t come as good new to current Foxconn employees such as Huang Hai.
“This is a good company to work for because the working conditions are better than a lot of other small factories,” he told Reuters. ®
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/30/foxconn_workers_speak/
Apple hit by China Foxconn report
30 March 2012
Last updated at 00:48
Foxconn plants have been heavily criticised by rights groups over working conditions
An independent investigation has found “significant issues” among working practices at Chinese plants making Apple iPhones and iPads.
The US Fair Labor Association (FLA) was asked by Apple to investigate working conditions at Foxconn after reports of long hours and poor safety.
The FLA says it has now secured agreements to reduce hours, protect pay, and improve staff representation.
Apple said it “fully accepted” the report’s recommendations.
“We share the FLA’s goal of improving lives and raising the bar for manufacturing companies everywhere,” it said in a statement.
The findings emerged as Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Foxconn facilities.
Mr Cook toured Zhengzhou Technology Park, where 120,000 employees work, on Wednesday.
A string of suicides at Foxconn last year put the spotlight on working conditions at its factories. Last month, the company announced it was to send independent inspectors from the FLA to audit the facilities.
Legal limits
The investigation – one of the largest ever conducted of a US company’s operations abroad – found employees often worked more than 60 hours a week and sometimes for seven days running without the required day off.
Other violations included unpaid overtime and health and safety risks.
Average monthly salaries at the three factories ranged from $360 (£227) to $455 (£289). Foxconn raised salaries by up to 25% recently.
The FLA said Foxconn had agreed to comply with the association’s standards on working hours by July 2013, bringing them in line with a legal limit in China of 49 hours per week.
The company will hire thousands more workers in order to compensate for the move, Reuters reports.
The BBC’s Adam Brookes in Washington says the report has been much anticipated as embodying a new and transparent approach to an old problem: that of cheap but popular consumer goods manufactured in poor conditions in developing countries.
However, he says, a telling line in the report is the one which notes that the Foxconn workers did not have true trade union representation.
The authorities in China are very wary of unions and are likely to remain so.
Before the report was released, labour unions expressed doubts that the company was committed to improving standards.
“The report will include new promises by Apple that stand to be just as empty as the ones made over the past 5 years,” SumOfUS.org, a coalition of trade unions and consumer groups, said.
Foxconn employs 1.2 million workers in China to produce products for Apple as well as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and other companies.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-17557630
Intel: Xeon E5s to surf impending server upgrade wave
You could say that Diane Bryant, the new general manager of Intel’s Data Center and Connected Systems group, which makes server, storage, and networking chips and the platforms that employ them, was lucky in that she took over the job just as the chip giant was getting ready to launch its Xeon E5-2600 workhorse processors for servers.
Bryant would be the first to agree with anyone who said that – and did in fact say so at a lunch she hosted in New York for IT journos.
In a wide-ranging conversation on Thursday, Bryant was peppered with questions and didn’t really get a chance to eat much of her salad and salmon. But she did concede that it was “wonderful to come into a new job and have this ‘Wow!’ event.”
While the debut of the Xeon E5s only six weeks after she took over the group was fortuitous, perhaps even more important for Bryant – and for the future of Intel in the data center – is the fact that she was Intel’s own CIO for the prior four years.
“I am so much better prepared for this job,” Bryant said, and then was asked a slew of questions, first about Intel’s internal IT department, and then about what is going on out there in x86 server land.
Intel has over 100,000 employees, and around 6,400 of them work in IT, she explained. The company generally spends somewhere between 2.7 and 2.8 per cent of total revenue on IT operations – which is not particularly high for a high-tech company – and aims to get that down to 2.6 per cent.
Intel has a slew of systems running its business, including a grid of around 45,000 servers spread across its research facilities that is used for chip design.
Intel Data Center and Connected Systems GM Diane Bryant
The company has two big data centers – one in Folsom, California and the other in Hillsboro, Oregon – and last year had a whopping 147 data centers spread out around the world. Under Bryant’s direction, the company did a massive data-center consolidation last year, while at the same time converting its systems to a private, virtualized cloud, cutting the data centers down to 87. The goal is to get it down to 53 by the end of this year – and while that sounds like a high number, it isn’t once you see why.
First of all, every chip-design center has some local processing capacity because of latency issues. And every one of Intel’s seven chip fabs has two data centers that house redundant home-grown apps that run the wafer-baking operations. Only the paranoid CIO survives at Intel because, as Bryant put it, “if a fab goes down at Intel, you are fired.”
The assembly and test operations also have their own data centers. And of course, Intel also has data centers to run back-office systems.
And no, Bryant won’t divulge what cloud fabric or back-office applications it uses, because “it loves all of its partners.” In general, any of the design systems run Linux and any back-office systems run Windows.
By the way, that internal cloud can provision compute, storage, or networking resources in under an hour.
While Intel won’t divulge the vintage of the servers running inside of its own data centers, Bryant said that the company developed a sophisticated ROI tool that allowed her – and now her replacement – to plug in the feeds and speeds of the machines in the Intel data centers and calculate, based on workloads, power draw, heat dissipation, and performance when the optimal time is to upgrade a server.
Generally speaking, it makes sense to upgrade after about four years, although in some cases with particular workloads or new hardware features, you can make a case for doing it sooner. Intel looks at its server portfolio every quarter to see what is due for an upgrade and what can get by for another three months.
“We want to eat our own dog food, and we want to debug and test systems,” Bryant explained. “But when we do deployments, we have to show the ROI and we have to back it up with data.”
Sometimes, it is not that hard. For example, during a server audit last year, Intel techies found 2,500 machines running in its own data centers, eating up space and power, that didn’t just have minimal workloads but which had zero workloads. Nadda. Zilch.
This is what happens when you are a $54bn company, whether or not you are in high tech.
Bryant relayed a story of a Global 100 account that did a similar survey of its data centers and found that 36 per cent of its servers were four years or older, were consuming a whopping 65 per cent of its data center power, and represented 4 per cent of the aggregate compute cycles across the data centers.
“I think this customer is extremely typical,” said Bryant.
If so, Intel is looking forward to a huge wave in upgrades to Xeon E5 machines, since so many servers out there in the world are long in the tooth after the Great Recession put the freeze on spending. New apps perhaps have gotten new servers, but now it is time to consolidate old apps onto new and more powerful systems.
The Xeon E5-2600s started shipping in limited quantities last September and were launched in early March, and Bryant said that the ramp was building along the scheduled plan. Intel is not seeing customers waiting to find out what the future low-cost Xeon E5-2400 processors, also for two-socket boxes, might portend when they are launched later this year.
“We see tremendous pull for the Xeon E5-2600s, and we don’t see any stall waiting for any additional SKUs in the Xeon E5 family,” Bryant said. “We see strong demand for servers overall. There’s just insatiable demand for compute.”
As for when the next Xeon server refresh is coming with the 22-nanometer Tri-Gate process that will etch the “Ivy Bridge” Core processors for notebooks and desktops later this year, Bryant was not about to show Intel’s cards. But she also made it clear that Intel was not trying to march to an annual cadence. “We’re not as fixated on whether it has to be one year or two years,” she said about the cadence of launches. “There isn’t the hard refresh cycle we see in the PC or with handhelds.”
Here’s a fun fact that came out during the lunch conversation: four-socket servers are crazy-stupid popular in emerging markets, and particularly in China. The ratio of two-socket to four-socket servers is completely reversed in China, said Bryant, because companies there are building greenfield data centers and their workload demands are rising so fast they can’t do capacity planning – they are just buying headroom right from the get-go.
Just because you buy a four-way machine does not mean you put four processors in it from the start. You might begin with two and then add two more as workloads grow. ®
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/29/intel_bryant_xeon_lunch/
Google’s Android has generated just $550m since 2008, figures suggest
Android generated less than $550m in revenues for Google between 2008 and the end of 2011, if figures provided by the search giant as part of a settlement offer with Oracle ahead of an expected patent and copyright infringement trial are an accurate guide.
The figures also suggest that Apple devices such as the iPhone, which use products such as its Maps as well as Google Search in its Safari browser, generated more than four times as much revenue for Google as its own handsets in the same period.
With roughly 200m Android devices having been activated to the end of 2011, including an estimated 90m during the past two years, it suggests that Google derives slightly more than $10 per Android handset per year.
That compares to Google’s $38bn total revenues in 2011, almost entirely derived from advertising on PCs, of which there are 1.25bn installed worldwide, according to Microsoft. That suggests an average revenue for Google of about $30 per PC per year, though not all will be capable of accessing the internet or will use Google, so the actual figure will be higher.
Google has never released figures for revenues it derives from the use of Android handsets, where it makes the software available to handset makers for free and generates revenues from adverts and app sales. The company declined to comment on the Guardian’s calculations, which it was shown ahead of publication.
The figures emerge from a damages offer that Google made to Oracle as part of settlement talks ordered by Judge William Alsup in the case, in which Oracle is alleging that Android infringes patents and copyright that it owns on the Java programming language. It acquired that intellectual property when it bought Sun Microsystems, which owned Java, in 2010. The trial is due to start on 16 April.
The suit began in 2010 with Oracle claiming that Android infringes a number of Sun patents and also infringes copyright in Java. The number of patents has been whittled down to just two.
In a pre-trial settlement offer, Google proposed that it would pay Oracle a percentage of revenues from Android, suggesting it would pay $2.8m in damages on the two remaining patents that Oracle is asserting for the period to 2011, and then 0.5% of ongoing Android revenue on one patent which expires this December, and 0.015% on another which expires in April 2018. The court documents (PDF) do not explain how the Android revenue is calculated, but the key source would be advertising revenue. Google also gets a 30% cut from app sales to Android devices.
Google said the damages figures matched what had been calculated by a court-appointed expert. The offer does not mean Google accepts that it has infringed the patents claimed by Oracle.
The $2.8m offer, at a combined rate of 0.515%, suggests that Android’s total revenue since the launch of the first handsets at the end of 2008 through to the end of 2011 was $543m. Patent payments relating to phones are generally made on a per-handset basis at a fixed licence fee for any phones that would be judged to infringe the relevant patents.
The figures also suggest that Android could generate more than $1bn in advertising revenues this year. To achieve Android “certification” handset manufacturers have to include services such as Google search, maps, YouTube and other functions. Some companies, including Amazon, have declined to do this.
Google has however talked up mobile generally as key to its future. Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, said during an earnings call in October that Google was “seeing a huge positive revenue impact from mobile, which has grown 2.5 times in the last 12 months to a run rate of over $2.5bn.”
But while some people interpreted that to indicate Android revenue, it overlooked Google’s deal with Apple, in place since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, through which it provides maps and the default search engine for its iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch products, which run Apple’s iOS software. Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook said the company has sold 315m iOS devices, though nearly half of those have been sold in the past year.
In turn, the comparison of total Android revenues from the court documents suggests that iOS has so far generated more revenue for Google than its own handset ecosystem.
Oracle rejected Google’s offer, saying the proposed damages were too low.
The lawsuit began after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems for $7.3bn in 2010 and with it the rights to the Java programming language and its patents. Oracle has complained that Android in effect copies functions of Java without a valid licence.
Oracle, a business software maker with $36bn in annual revenue, has said it is seeking hundreds of millions in damages – though it was forced to water down its earlier damages claims after pre-trial examinations led to a number of claimed patents on Java being invalidated.
Google, which relies on its dominance of search and advertising for most of its $38bn in annual revenue, believes that even if it loses the case, it won’t have to pay more than a few million dollars.
A joint statement filed this week provided the latest reminder of the friction between the two companies.
In the papers, Google argued that the trial could be shortened from its scheduled eight weeks and sought to appear before a US district judge instead of a jury. Oracle doesn’t believe the trial schedule should be revised, nor is it willing to waive its right to a jury trial. Juries typically award larger damages and are seen as more likely to find in favour of the plaintiff in patent and copyright trials.
• Article updated to include data about PC installed base and that Google has not released Android data before. Clarified that iOS does not use the Chrome browser. Sub-headline clarified to indicate that Android revenue does not come from handset sales.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/29/google-earns-more-iphone-android
Osborne opens Google UK tech hub
29 March 2012
Last updated at 12:02
The Google Campus will house newly established technology start-ups
The UK will become the “technology centre of Europe”, Chancellor George Osborne has vowed.
He was speaking at the opening of Google Campus, a new centre offering desk space and mentoring for technology companies.
Mr Osborne said Campus was part of a wider effort to “create the next generation of British technologies”.
Google’s Eze Vidra described the opening as a “transformational moment for the UK start-up community”.
Campus is situated in the Old Street area of east London, an area dubbed the Silicon Roundabout.
The new building incorporates existing co-working space TechHub, which has now moved out of its original premises.
On the building’s sixth floor is SeedCamp, an early stage investment programme which puts cash into about 20 fledgling technology companies a year.
Partnership
Mr Osborne said the work between Google and the government’s Tech City initiative was the first of several partnerships required to give the sector sufficient support.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
This is the path we need to take to create new jobs”
End Quote
George Osborne
Chancellor
“This partnership model is absolutely in line with our approach to Tech City,” he said.
“The government doesn’t believe you can click your fingers and create a technology cluster. Wherever possible, our approach is to go with the grain of what’s already happening.”
He said since the Tech City initiative was launched in 2010, the number of technology firms in the area had risen from 200 to 700 – although this high number is often disputed by those within the community.
Further plans to bring research and development companies to the area would mean the UK remained at the “very cutting edge of innovation”, the chancellor said.
“We want the UK to become the hub for technology in Europe as a whole.
“This is the path we need to take to create new jobs, new growth, and new prosperity in every corner of this country.”
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-17548128
Plan ahead to make virtualisation work
The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions, and never more so than when it comes to virtualisation.
Many companies embark on virtualisation because they think it will make IT better, cheaper and faster. There is no denying that it helps initially, reducing costs through consolidating servers and making other areas such as rebuilds and backup easier.
But our research shows that unless steps are taken early on to manage the shift that accompanies virtualisation, then the outcome can actually be a more complex and fragile infrastructure that doesn’t respond well to change.
A common result is that companies reach a natural plateau where their skills, tools and operational processes are overwhelmed by virtual machine sprawl and unpredictability.
With this in mind, we will focus on some of the key lessons gleaned from those who have already suffered the pain of virtualisation and emerged victorious.
Now’s your chance
For a start, it is important early on to change the footing on which IT projects are planned. In the world of physical systems, hardware and software are usually funded as part of a dedicated project budget.
Virtualisation breaks this dependency and is an opportunity to separate the underlying hardware from the end customer – but unless you take advantage of this shift you risk losing control. Rather than seizing the initiative to provide better services, you may find cost cutting is imposed.
One way to approach this was outlined to me by a CIO who foresaw that virtualisation was the ideal pretext to change the way IT provided services to the business.
Rather than just consolidating the company’s systems, passing the savings back and looking like a hero in the short term, he fought to work the anticipated cost reduction into a business case for investing in something more future-proof.
He proposed the creation of a new virtualised service pool containing servers, storage and networking, with licensing optimised for highly virtualised workloads. All of this was underpinned by integrated management and comprehensive monitoring and reporting.
This enabled him to go back to the application owners knowing what it cost to provide IT services, both physically and virtually.
Dive into the pool
Instead of force-fitting applications onto highly consolidated servers, the IT department gave service owners a choice: they could continue to fund their own projects and systems in the old manner using dedicated kit, or they could run them in the new virtual pool.
The cost difference between the two meant that unless there was some compelling counter argument, most services quickly moved to the new virtual infrastructure, which was more manageable and flexible than the old static one.
Costs and service expectations can become a political hot potato
This highlights two other areas to consider when choosing the virtual infrastructure route. The first is that when things are shared, costs and service expectations can quickly become a political hot potato.
Complete visibility is needed about what is being delivered and what it costs to do so when demonstrating to the business the implications of various requests.
Our research has shown that putting in place at least a basic billing or cost-reporting capability can go a long way towards creating a much better experience all round.
Shared troubles
The second point is that when it comes to service delivery in a virtualised infrastructure, nothing matters more than the experience at the point of consumption.
Whatever service level agreements are in place on individual components of the service, what really needs to be monitored and managed is what is actually being delivered to the business.
We touched on this briefly in the previous article in this series, but few companies have proactive service monitoring in place.
When the service is provided by dedicated physical systems they can be sized reasonably effectively and don’t have to contend all the time for resources to meet targets.
But when things are shared and changed regularly, failure to take ithe potential impact into account can cause real issues for users or customers.
Without timely feedback, it is difficult to see the real service situation until the phone starts ringing. ®
Andrew Buss is service director at Freeform Dynamics
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/28/virtualisation_planning/
US House backs crowdfunding bill
28 March 2012
Last updated at 13:21
The bill is expected to be signed by President Barack Obama soon
Raising money for start-ups via the internet is set to become easier after a new bill was backed by the US House of Representatives.
Supporters of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (Jobs) said it would help firms to “crowdfund” capital from small investors.
However, critics have warned the measures could lead to increased levels of fraud.
President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill soon.
The proposals were supported overwhelmingly in the House with members voting 380-41 in favour. It was backed earlier in the week by the Senate.
Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular way for small companies to gain early investment using the internet.
US-based site Kickstarter has raised millions of dollars for mostly arts and media projects.
The biggest of these, a video game called Double Fine Adventure, raised more than $3m (£1.9m) from over 80,000 backers.
However, while sites like Kickstarter provide funds on a philanthropic basis, the Jobs Act intends to allow small-scale investors to own equity in companies they back.
Up to $1m can be raised via crowdfunding, or $2m for companies that provide investors with fully audited financial statements.
Currently, small businesses with more than 500 investors must open up their books to US financial regulators.
In the proposed bill, that threshold is raised to 2,000. It would, backers said, reduce red tape and cut the costs of running a business.
‘Petri-dish of fraud’
The bill has been largely welcomed by start-up companies looking to secure vital funding in a year when lending by US banks is expected to drop.
Michael Lipton, founder of digital firm Breakfast, told the BBC the measures meant a wider array of businesses could be created.
“If someone believes in an idea and believes in a company’s strategic vision, they should be able to put their capital behind it,” he said.
However Jesse Eisinger, a finance reporter for the US news website ProPublica, described the proposals as a “petri-dish of fraud”, and dismissed pledges it would lead to significant job creation.
“It’s a bad deal for the retail investor,” he told the BBC.
“They’re going to get solicitations online, they’re going to be asked for small investments.
“The only jobs that are really going to benefit from this are fraudsters, shills and Wall Street analysts.”
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/technology-17535660
