Ex-Nokia team makes rival smartphone
20 May 2013
Last updated at 17:08
The smartphone has interchangeable back panels that alter the phone’s software
A company made up of former Nokia employees has shown off Jolla, a new smartphone with a custom operating system known as Sailfish.
The software has been built from the remnants of MeeGo, a project abandoned by Nokia in 2011 in favour of adopting Windows Phone for its handsets.
The Jolla phone – pronounced Yol-la – is due to be released by the end of the year, and will only be sold online.
It will enter a market already heavily crowded with several operating systems.
“For a couple of years we haven’t had anything really interesting in the mobile phone market,” said Antti Saarnio, chairman and co-founder of Jolla.
“This creates opportunities for newcomers to come in. It’s different, but it’s purposefully different.”
The Other Half
The phone has a 4.5in screen, with an eight megapixel camera. It also supports 4G and is compatible with apps made for Google’s Android.
Among the handset’s other features is what the company has called “The Other Half.”
The coloured back of the phone is interchangeable – and the operating system’s interface will change depending on what type of cover you have.
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Antti Saarnio
Chairman, Jolla
These changes could include, for example, team colours for a football team.
“You connect it to the phone, and the user interface reflects the players and colours of the team,” Mr Saarnio told the BBC.
“It’s an interesting way to show you ‘belong’ with something.”
He would not confirm how exactly this feature works – but many speculate the use of near-field communication (NFC) technology.
Splinter group
Mr Saarnio left Nokia in 2011, along with several other employees who had been working on a joint Nokia-Intel project to create a new mobile operating system to rival the likes of Apple’s iOS and Google Android.
Nokia released one handset running the MeeGo software, the N9-00.
Mr Saarnio felt it was not given enough of a chance to succeed.
The smartphone will initially only be sold online
“The team really felt that this was one of the best phones in the market, even though it was quite under-marketed,” he said.
“Everybody felt so strongly that they wanted to continue.”
Several of the team left the Finnish mobile giant to start their own company and remain working on MeeGo, which it has renamed Sailfish.
Despite leaving the company, Mr Saarnio said he wished Nokia well – and that Jolla was open to letting them use Sailfish in future handsets.
“We are actually quite open – we are offering this operating system for other smartphone makers to use.
“Let’s wait and see and we will just do our best in our business.”
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22599877#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Yahoo to buy Tumblr for $1.1bn
20 May 2013
Last updated at 15:49
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Wikpedia’s Jimmy Wales gives his reaction to Yahoo’s deal with Tumblr
Yahoo has agreed a deal to buy New York-based blogging service Tumblr for $1.1bn (£723m; 857m euros) in cash.
Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer said that as part of its promise “not to screw it up”, Tumblr would operate independently.
David Karp, will continue as chief executive officer of Tumblr.
The deal is the largest made by Ms Mayer since she took the helm at Yahoo last July, and she described the acquisition as a “unique opportunity.”
“On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo couldn’t be more different, but at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary,” added Ms Mayer.
Mr Karp, 26, who owns 25% of the privately-owned company he co-founded with Marco Arment in 2007, said he was “elated” to have the support of Yahoo.
“Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from,” he added. Mr Karp emphasised that neither its aims or team was changing as a result of Yahoo’s purchase.
Continue reading the main story
Analysis
Can Yahoo become hip again? In buying Tumblr, the company is trying to change its reputation with hipsters.
Yahoo was once a name synonymous with the internet, but its lead has been eclipsed by Google and it doesn’t generate the same kind of buzz as Twitter or Facebook.
The odds of success may be stacked against it. Websites such as Mashable.com are already reporting a backlash among Tumblr’s user base in reaction to reports of the Yahoo acquisition.
Simply buying a company like Tumblr doesn’t guarantee street cred. Remember when News Corporation bought the social networking website MySpace? (MySpace was eventually sold for a fraction of the price News Corporation paid for it.)
Yahoo will most likely want to integrate Tumblr into its services. The company is hoping it will boost traffic to its other properties, such as the photo sharing site Flickr. But the $1.1bn question is: will it also help boost revenue?
Mobile devices
The $1.1bn price tag for Tumblr represents a significant premium on its $800m valuation when it last raised money from private investors.
Tumblr’s 2012 revenue was just $13m, according to a report by Forbes magazine, leading analysts to suggest Yahoo had overpaid for the deal.
“Even if revenue was $100 million, it means Yahoo paid 10 times revenue,” said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis. “Ten times is what you pay to date the belle of the ball. It’s on the outer bands of MA.”
Tumblr combines elements of blogging with social networking, and its simple design has attracted millions of users since its launch.
According to its homepage, it now hosts 108 million blogs, with a total of 50.7 billion posts.
It also has a significant presence on mobile devices.
But despite its fast-growing user base, it has struggled to make money and has traditionally resisted advertising.
It said in April 2012 that it would roll out limited use of adverts.
Ms Mayer said Yahoo would now work with Tumblr to create ads that “are seamless and enhance the user experience”.
Tumblr’s founder David Karp will keep his role as chief executive
Brian Wieser, analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said that the quickest way for Yahoo to boost Tumblr’s revenue would be to combine its sales force with the blogging site, but that this would risk alienating users.
“It’s not clear that this deal will be favourable from a return-on-capital perspective,” Wieser said. “One billion [dollars] for one company is a big bet.”
Yahoo remains a giant in the internet world, with around 700 million visitors to its website every month. The majority of its revenues come from advertising.
But it has limited mobile reach and lags behind Google in the search engine rankings.
It also shed more than 1,000 jobs during 2012 and has long been divided over whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22591026#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Intel chief’s striking confession
CEO valedictions follow a well-known script: My work is done here, great team, all mistakes are mine, all good deeds are theirs, I leave the company in strong hands, the future has never been brighter … It’s an opportunity for a leader to offer a conventional and contrived reminiscence, what the French call la toilette des souvenirs (which Google crudely translates as toilet memories instead of the affectionate and accurate dressing up memories).
For his farewell, Paul Otellini, Intel‘s departing CEO, chose the interview format with the Atlantic Monthly’s senior editor Alexis Madrigal. They give us a long (5,700+ words) but highly readable piece titled Paul Otellini’s Intel: can the company that built the future survive it?
Intel’s outgoing CEO Paul Otellini. Photograph: Guardian.co.uk
The punctuation mark at the title’s end refers to the elephantine question in the middle of Otellini’s record: Why did Intel miss out on the smartphone? Why did the company that so grandly dominates the PC market sit by while ARM architecture totally, and perhaps irretrievably, took over the new generation of phones – and most other embedded applications?
According to Otellini, it was the result of Intel’s inertia: It took a while to move the machine.
Madrigal backfills this uneasy explanation with equal unease:
“The problem, really, was that Intel’s x86 chip architecture could not rival the performance per watt of power that designs licensed from ARM based on RISC architecture could provide. Intel was always the undisputed champion of performance, but its chips sucked up too much power. In fact, it was only this month that Intel revealed chips that seem like they’ll be able to beat the ARM licencees on the key metrics.”
Note the tiptoeing: Intel’s new chips “seem like” they’ll be fast enough and cheap enough. Madrigal charitably fails to note how Intel, year after year, kept promising to beat ARM at the mobile game, and failed to do so. (See these 2010, 2011 and 2012 Monday Notes.) Last year, Intel was still at it, dismissively predicting “no future for ARM or any of its competitors“. Tell that to ARM Holdings, whose licencees shipped 2.6bn chips in the first quarter of this year.
Elsewhere in the article, Otellini offers a striking revelation: Fresh from anointing Intel as the microprocessor supplier for the Mac, Steve Jobs came back and asked Intel to design and build the CPU for Apple‘s upcoming iPhone. (To clarify the chronology, the iPhone was announced in early January, 2007; the CPU conversation must have taken place two years prior, likely before the June, 2005 WWDC where Apple announced the switch to x86. See Chapter 36 of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs bio for more.)
Intel passed on the opportunity [emphasis mine]:
“We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it […]
Indeed, the world would have been different. Apple wouldn’t be struggling through a risky transition away from Samsung, its frenemy CPU supplier; the heart of the iPhone would be made In America; Intel would have supplied processors for more than 500m iOS devices, sold even more such chips to other handset makers to become as major a player in the smartphone (and tablet) space as it is in the PC world.
Supply your own adjectives …
Indulging briefly in more What If reverie, compare the impact of Intel’s wrong turn to a better one: How would the world look like if, at the end of 1996, Gil Amelio hadn’t returned Apple back to Steve Jobs? (My recollection of the transaction’s official wording could be faulty.)
So, again, what happened?
At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.“
A little later, Otellini completes the train of thought with a wistful reverie, a model of la toilette des souvenirs:
“The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,” he said. “My gut told me to say yes.”
The frank admission is meant to elicit respect and empathy. Imagine being responsible for missing the opportunity to play a commanding role in the smartphone revolution.
But perhaps things aren’t as simple as being a “gut move” short of an epochal $100bn opportunity.
Intel is a prisoner of its x86 profit model and Wall Street’s expectations. It’s dominant position in the x86 space give Intel the pricing power to command high margins. There’s no such thing in the competitive ARM space, prices are lower. Even factoring in the lower inherent cost of the somewhat simpler devices (simpler for the time being; they’ll inevitably grow more complex), the profit-per-ARM chip is too thin to sustain Intel’s business model.
(Of course, this assumes a substitution, an ARM chip that displaces an x86 device. As it turns out, the smartphone business could have been largely additive, just as we now see with tablets that cannibalise classical PCs.)
Another factor is the cultural change that would have been required were Intel to have gotten involved in making ARM devices. As both the designer and manufacturer of generation after generation of x86 microprocessors, Intel can wait until they’re good and ready before they allow PC makers to build the chips into their next products. The ARM world doesn’t work that way. Customers design their own chips (often called a System on a Chip, or SoC), and then turn to a semiconductor manufacturer (a foundry) to stamp out the hardware. Taking orders from others isn’t in Intel’s DNA.
And now?
The answer might lie in another French expression: L’histoire ne repasse pas les plats. Google Translate is a bit more felicitous this time: History does not repeat itself. I prefer the more literal image – history doesn’t come around offering seconds – but the point remains: Will there be seconds at the smartphone repast?
Officially, Intel says its next generation of x86 processors will (finally!) topple the ARM regime, that their chips will offer more computing might with no cost or power dissipation penalty. In their parlance “the better transistor” (the basic unit of logic processing) will win.
I doubt it. The newer x86 devices will certainly help Microsoft and its OEMs make Windows 8 devices more competitive, but that won’t prevent the spread of ARM in the legion of devices on which Windows is irrelevant. For these, Intel would have to adopt ARM, a decision Otellini has left to the new tandem leadership of Brian Krzanich (CEO) and Renée James (president). Will they stick to the old creed, to the belief Intel’s superior silicon design and manufacturing technology will eventually overcome the disadvantages of the more complex x86 architecture? Or will they take the plunge?
They might be helped by a change in the financial picture.
In 2006, that is after throwing Jobs in Samsung’s arms (pun unintended), Intel sold its ARM business, the XScale line, to Marvell. The reason was purely financial: for similar capital expenditures (costly fabs), ARM processors achieved much lower per-unit profit, this is because of the much more competitive scene than in the x86 space.
Now, if Intel really wants to get a place at the smartphone table with new and improved x86 devices, the company will have to price those to compete with established ARM players. In other words, Intel will have to accept the lower margins they shunned in 2006. Then, why not do it with the ARM-based custom processors Apple and others require?
– JLG@mondaynote.com
—————————-
(I’ll confess a weakness for the Atlantic and, in particular, for its national correspondent James Fallows, a literate geek and instrument-rated pilot who took iy upon himself to live in Beijing for a while and, as a result, can speak more helpfully about China than most members of the Fourth Estate. Going back to last week’s reference to the Gauche Caviar, when my Café de Flore acquaintances fall into their usual rut of criticising my adopted country for its lack of “culture”, I hold out that the Atlantic – which sells briskly at the kiosk next door – is one of many examples of American journalistic excellence.
And, if you’re interested in more strange turns, see this other string Alexis Madrigal piece in the same Atlantic: The time Exxon went into the semiconductor business (and failed). I was there, briefly running an Exxon Information Systems subsidiary in France and learning the importance of corporate culture.) – JLG
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/20/intel-smartphone-iphone-paul-otellini
Yahoo ‘to buy Tumblr for $1.1bn’
19 May 2013
Last updated at 21:52
The deal is expected to be announced on Monday
Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to buy New York-based blogging service Tumblr for $1.1bn (£725m), US media reports say.
The acquisition is expected to be announced as early as Monday.
The deal was a “foregone conclusion” and was unanimously voted for by the board, tech blog AllThingsD reported, citing sources close to the matter.
If confirmed, it will be CEO Marissa Mayer’s largest deal since taking the helm of Yahoo in July 2012.
Neither Yahoo nor Tumblr responded immediately to requests for comment.
Under the terms of the acquisition, Tumblr would continue to operate as an independent business, the Wall Street Journal said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation.
The company is currently run by David Karp, a 26-year-old New Yorker who founded Tumblr in 2007, and he is expected to remain in his role.
Analysts say that by acquiring Tumblr, Yahoo will gain a larger social media presence and enhance its ability to attract younger audiences in its battle with internet rivals Google and Facebook.
Premium price
Ms Mayer, a former Google executive, has already made a number of small acquisitions since taking over at Yahoo, but the Tumblr deal is expected to be the biggest.
Tumblr’s founder David Karp is expected to keep his role as chief executive
A $1.1bn price tag would represent a significant premium on Tumblr’s $800m valuation when it last raised money from private investors.
Tumblr combines elements of blogging with social networking, and its simple design has attracted millions of users since its launch.
According to its homepage, it now hosts 108 million blogs, with a total of 50.7 billion posts.
It also has a significant presence on mobile devices.
But despite its fast-growing user base it has struggled to make money, and has traditionally resisted advertising.
It announced that limited use of adverts would be rolled out in April last year, but made just $13m in revenues for 2012, according to a report by Forbes magazine.
It is unclear whether a deal with Yahoo would result in more adverts on Tumblr.
Yahoo remains a giant in the internet world, with around 700 million visitors to its website every month. The majority of its revenues come from advertising.
But it has limited mobile reach and lags behind Google in the search engine rankings.
It also shed more than 1,000 jobs during 2012 and has long been divided over whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22591026#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Eric Schmidt defends Google’s tax affairs following Commons criticism
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has defended his company’s financial affairs after a Commons committee branded the internet giant devious and unethical for sheltering its multibillion-pound profits from UK taxes.
Writing in the Observer, Schmidt said his company’s accounts were complicated but complied with international taxation treaties that allowed it to pay most of its tax in the United States.
Schmidt said that he understood why Google’s apparent sidestepping on UK taxation had generated controversy and called for a reform of international tax law.
“At a time when families are having to tighten their belts and funding for vital public services is under pressure, corporate taxation is rightly a hot topic,” Schmidt wrote. “And as a company that has always aspired to do the right thing, we understand why Google is at the centre of that debate.”
His remarks follow Google’s mauling at the hands of the Commons Public Accounts Committee on Thursday. Members reacted in disbelief after it emerged that they paid just £3.4m of tax on £3.2bn of sales taken from UK customers last year as their sales were technically “closed” in low-tax Ireland.
Schmidt insisted that corporation tax should be paid on a company’s profits rather than its revenues and said because his was a multinational corporation whose engineers were chiefly based in the United States, Google’s taxes should be channelled there. This, he said, obeyed rules laid out by politicians.
“We pay more taxes in the US than in any other country – around $2bn in corporate income taxes to the US government in 2012,” he wrote. “It’s the same for UK-based technology or pharmaceutical companies, which pay the majority of their corporation tax in the UK, as that is where most of the activity that generates their profits takes place.”
Schmidt said that the debate over international taxation showed it could benefit from reform. He added that because Google was able to generated large revenues, it was also able to plough money back into the UK economy.
“While profit has become something of a dirty word, it’s important to remember that many corporations reinvest their profits in research and product development, which in turn tends to lead to job creation, further economic growth and, ultimately, more tax. For example, Google has just announced plans to invest more than £1bn in new offices in London’s King’s Cross. It’s been estimated that this investment will generate some £80m a year in new employment taxes and £50m in stamp duty. This is in addition to the significant amounts we already pay in UK tax through corporate, local and employment taxes.”
Schmidt’s comments came as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said he believed some multinationals, including Google were not fulfilling their social responsibilites.
Miliband told the Observer: “Now, what is the politicians’ responsibility: change the law. But it is also to talk about the kind of society we want to create and what the responsibilities of a company like Google are.
“I don’t think they are living up to their responsibilities at the moment and I will be very clear about that on Wednesday.
“It is part of a culture of irresponsibility. If everyone approached their tax affairs as some of these companies have approached their tax affairs we wouldn’t have a health service, we wouldn’t have an education system.”
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/18/eric-schmidt-google-tax
Man lists 12,000 call menu options
17 May 2013
Last updated at 11:55
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The BBC’s Mark Norman meets Nigel Clarke to find out about his one-man mission against call centre menus
Retired IT manager Nigel Clarke, from Kent in the UK, has launched a website listing the call centre menu sequences for accessing thousands of services.
He started the project after growing frustrated about the number of options and amount of recorded information on call centre menus.
Mr Clarke discovered that some automated menus have nearly 80 options.
It can take over four minutes to get to the service required if the caller listens to each stage in full, he said.
As an example, speaking to an adviser at HM Revenue and Customs only required pressing four buttons but it could take six minutes to get through each menu level, Mr Clarke said.
HMRC said it was working on improvements to the service.
“HMRC is looking at ways to improve its interactive voice responses and is getting ready for the introduction of new speech recognition technology,” said a spokesman.
“This technology will react to what the caller says instead of asking them to select an option by pushing a button on their phone. HMRC plan to introduce these improvements later this year.”
Labour of love
Mr Clarke said the website pleasepress1.com was a “labour of love” which he built after seven years of creating post-it notes of sequences he used regularly.
He used Skype and recording software to make thousands of calls, with the bulk of the work being carried out in the last six months.
Reporting a water leak to Lloyds TSB’s home insurance department requires dialling a total of seven numbers, one at each stage of the call (1, 3, 2, 1, 1, 5, 4), and it takes more than four minutes to navigate the 78 menu options, according to the website.
“The companies have these systems in place for a reason,” said Mr Clarke.
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Nigel Clarke
“I’m not against the system, but I am against bad design.”
In an ideal world, he said, companies should just offer different phone numbers for different services.
“No menu is best – but if it is a necessity then design it properly. I think two levels maximum is ideal. Some stretch to three. You don’t really want much more than that.”
Mr Clarke said he was inspired to build the website after being surprised by the “emotional response” he got from people whenever he mentioned it.
He says he doesn’t intend to devote himself full-time to maintaining it.
“I’d like the companies themselves to say, ‘we care about our customers, we’ll publish our menus’,” he said.
When tested by the BBC, some of the sequences did not seem to result in significant time savings, while others ended with the user being transferred straight to a customer adviser rather than going through each level of the automated system.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22567656#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Charlie Parsons buys stake in Gaydar
Charlie Parsons, the creator of shows including Survivor and The Big Breakfast, has backed a buyout of the dating business of the now-defunct Gaydar Radio operation.
As part of the deal, Henry Badenhorst, majority-owner of the Gaydar business he co-founded with fellow South African Gary Frisch, is to leave the business.
Charlie Parsons Creative, his boutique investment company, has backed the team led by managing director Trevor Martin, who will take on the role of chief executive.
Parsons, who co-founded The Word-maker Planet 24 with Lord Alli, has backed a management buy-out of the gay dating operation for an undisclosed sum.
The remaining Gaydar business – radio licences to the 11-year-old brand were sold off by previous owner QSoft Consulting in January – includes Gaydar.co.uk and GaydarGirls.com dating sites, as well as mobile sites and an app.
“Although Gaydar is one of the best known gay brands in the world, there are many opportunities to build on the success to date,” said Parsons. “I am delighted to invest in what is a very exciting business with such great potential.”
Parsons’ undisclosed investment makes him the majority shareholder and he will also take a seat on the board of Gaydar.
“Gaydar is not just a dating site, but a vibrant community, and it was important that anyone taking this company forward understood everything that the business stands for,” said Badenhorst. “I am very pleased that Charlie and his team have backed the existing management team to help Gaydar fully realise its potential.”
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Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/may/17/charlie-parsons-buys-stake-gaydar
Jail sentences for Lulzsec hackers
16 May 2013
Last updated at 15:19
Lulzsec hacker al-Bassam posted stolen data and login details online
British hackers who were behind a series of high profile cyber-attacks in 2011 have been sentenced.
The four men, Ryan Cleary, Jake Davis, Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Ackroyd, were part of the Lulzsec hacking group.
Cleary was jailed for 32 months, Davis for two years and Ackroyd for 30 months. Al Bassam was given a 20-month suspended sentence.
Targets included Sony Pictures, games maker EA, News International and the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency.
Group effort
The actions of the group were “cowardly and vindictive”, said Andrew Hadik, a lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service.
“The harm they caused was foreseeable, extensive and intended,” he said. “Indeed, they boasted of how clever they were with a complete disregard for the impact their actions had on real people’s lives.
“This case should serve as a warning to other cybercriminals that they are not invincible,” he said.
Each man filled a different role during their cyber-attack spree. Ackroyd was the ring leader of the small group choosing targets and directing the efforts of the others. Davis acted as its press secretary, Cleary provided the software to carry out attacks and al-Bassam posted stolen data online.
Some of the four could face extradition to the US as US law enforcement agencies have lodged indictments against them.
Cleary has also pleaded guilty to possession of images showing child abuse, which were found by police on his hard drive. The sentence for this offence will be given at another hearing.
During the trial Ackroyd, 26, from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, admitted stealing data from Sony.
The former soldier was also responsible for redirecting visitors trying to visit the Sun newspaper’s site to a fake story about News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch committing suicide.
He has pleaded guilty to carrying out an unauthorised act to impair the operation of a computer.
Bassam, 18, from south London, Davis, 20, from Lerwick, Shetland, and Cleary, 21, from Wickford, Essex, all pleaded guilty to two charges – hacking and launching cyber-attacks against organisations including the CIA and Soca.
In addition, Cleary pleaded guilty to a further four charges, including hacking into the US Air Force’s computers and possession of indecent images of babies and children.
Prosecutor Sandip Patel said that unlike the others, Cleary was not a core member of Lulzsec although he had wanted to be.
“It’s clear from the evidence that they intended to achieve extensive national and international notoriety and publicity,” he said.
“This is not about young immature men messing about. They are at the cutting edge of a contemporary and emerging species of criminal offender known as a cybercriminal.”
Botnet attack
Lulzsec’s name is combination of the acronym Lol – meaning laugh out loud – and security.
It emerged as a splinter group from the hacking collective Anonymous two years ago.
Lulzsec carried out a 50-day series of cyber-attacks in 2011
Mr Patel said the spin-off lacked the “libertarian” political agenda of the larger group. Instead, its stated goal was to laugh at others’ flawed security measures “just because we could”.
This involved stealing emails, credit card details and passwords from their targets’ computer servers and crashing victims’ websites with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This involved flooding organisations’ web servers with requests sent from hijacked computers used as part of a botnet.
Lulzsec’s original ringleader is alleged to be another man – US-based Hector Monsegur, also known as Sabu. He was arrested in June 2011 and later co-operated with the FBI to help it identify other members of Lulzsec. Monsegur has yet to be sentenced.
A 24-year-old Australian has also been arrested and accused of attacking and defacing a government website as part of Lulzsec’s campaign.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22552753#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Google launches music subscriptions
15 May 2013
Last updated at 20:32
US users are the first to be offered access to Google’s new music subscription service
Google has unveiled a streaming music subscription service.
Google Play Music All Access offers users the ability to listen to millions of tracks in addition to the ones they already own. The firm described it as “radio without rules”.
The facility is set to compete with Spotify, Xbox Music, Rdio, Pandora and other similar products.
However, unlike several of its rivals there is no free-to-use option beyond an initial 30-day trial period.
Instead users face a $9.99 (£5.60) monthly charge to access a library containing millions of songs via an Android device or web browser. Early adopters are being offered a discounted rate of $7.99-a-month.
Pricing and availability outside of the US have not yet been announced.
The news came at the firm’s I/O developers conference in San Francisco. Investors appeared to welcome the move sending Google’s shares above $900 for the first time.
Streaming music
Music All Access allows users to manually add songs to a playlist or allow a feature called Explore to offer them recommendations. Playlists can also include songs which the user owns which would otherwise not be available.
One industry watcher suggested Google was wise not to offer an advert-supported free-to-listen option.
“One of the things that has really slowed Spotify down is its freemium tier,” said Alice Enders, a music industry expert at consultancy Enders Analysis.
Music All Access can be used via an Android app or a PC’s web browser
“It helps familiarise people with a streaming music service, but it immediately means you are selling online advertising and that means in a fragmented market that you have to have local sales teams.
“Let’s face it, a freemium tier is a very expensive marketing device.”
However, another analyst said Music All Access’s success was not guaranteed. He noted Spotify has 24 million users but the service had only managed to convince 6 million of them to pay.
“This will be the fourth big music play that Google has launched over the years and every time they do it people get excited, because it is Google, but most of the products to date haven’t had the massive impact people thought they would,” said Chris Cooke from trade newsletter CMU Music Network.
“I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that this is a Spotify-killer or a total game changer.
“But what is interesting is that Google already owned the most successful music streaming service in terms of hits and revenue in YouTube – it’s just that it comes with videos and doesn’t integrate into Google Play”.
Voice searches
Rumours that Google would reveal details of an upgrade to its mobile operating system, taking Android to either 4.3 or 5.0, proved to be unfounded.
But announcements it did make included a new cross-platform messaging app called Google Hangouts.
It allows users to have video chats, send text messages and swap pictures between Android and iOS devices as well its Chrome web browser. Past conversations are stored on Google’s servers.
Google says it has rebuilt its web maps service “from scratch” to offer more personalised results
The facility poses competition to Skype, Whatsapp, BBM, Tango and others.
The firm is also adding a voice-powered search facility to the Chrome browser.
By saying “OK Google” followed by a search command, users can ask their PC to provide information, find pictures or carry out tasks such as making a reservation.
Voice-search was previously limited to its smartphone apps.
The tool can also anticipate follow-up questions. Google gave the example of asking where a theme park was based. The information was given and then followed with directions showing how to get there from a restaurant which had been booked earlier.
Google Maps gets a major refresh. The web browser version has been rewritten to personalise results, highlighting locations the firm believes the user will be most interested in. These are based on the person’s previous use of Google’s services and the reviews their friends have posted on its Google+ social network.
The firm’s Android and iOS Map apps are also to get more features including live details of reported road accidents alongside suggested changes to a motorist’s route.
Video games
Developers were told new video game features were being added to Android.
Google chief executive Larry Page spoke a day after revealing he had been diagnosed with vocal cord paralysis
They include the abilities to synchronise a player’s progress across different devices and to compare scores on leaderboards managed via its Google+ social network. The leaderboard feature will be offered to gamers playing on Apple’s iOS devices or using web-based titles.
Google also announced a service to make it easier to write multiplayer games, but a tech demonstration failed.
In hardware, Google revealed it is to sell a version of Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 handset running the basic Android system without the South Korean firm’s TouchWiz user interface installed on top.
One mobile phone reviewer thought the option could prove popular since it removed “clutter” from the device.
“Samsung has an overwhelming share of Android sales and both firms have been privately worried about their reliance on the other,” said Graeme Neill, deputy editor at Mobile Today.
“You could describe this as a Nexus version of the Galaxy S4, and it might be seen as a sign that the troubled relationship between the two companies, that was reported on earlier this year, is a little less tense. Even so, they will continue to watch one another warily.”
However, an up-front cost of $649 might discourage some consumers.
Android’s rise
Google also revealed new figures related to the growing popularity of Android.
It said that it had now recorded 900 million activations of the operating system. That more than doubles the figure given last year.
In addition it said that more than 48 billion apps had been installed from its Google Play store and that on average users were spending two and a half times more on it than they were a year ago.
An attempt to show off a new multiplayer facility failed to work as planned
There was no repeat of a stunt on the scale of last year’s live video feed which showed skydivers jumping out of a plane while wearing the company’s upcoming Glass eyewear.
However, chief executive Larry Page did briefly talk about the project.
“Glass is a new category, quite different than existing computing devices and so I think it’s great that we’ve started on it and our main goal is to get happy users,” he said.
“Basic use cases we have around photography are amazing – I love taking pictures of my kids.”
But he declined to reveal how many copies Google planned to make in its initial production run or to disclose other details about the upcoming launch.
Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22542725#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
Google’s Larry Page says Oracle among those holding back tech industry
The Google co-founder Larry Page spoke out on Wednesday about the “negativity” he believes is holding back the technology industry, a day after revealing that he has been suffering from a rare vocal-cord condition that has made it difficult for him to speak.
In a raspy voice, Page told the audience at the internet giant’s annual developers conference, Google I/O, that he believed a lack of cooperation between tech partners was holding back progress. “Today we are still just scratching the surface of what’s possible,” he told the conference in San Francisco.
Page blamed a “focus on negativity and zero-sum games” for the industry’s failure to achieve its full potential. He said: “I’ve been sad that the industry hasn’t been able to advance those things.”
Computers were slow, the web was not advancing as fast as it should be and big technology companies were not co-operating enough, he said. “I think it’s kind of sad we have all these computers out there that are connected to each other by a tiny, tiny, tiny pipe that’s super slow.”
Page named the tech giant Oracle as one of the roadblocks to faster progress. “Money is more important to them” than having any kind of cooperation, he said. The two companies have clashed repeatedly over patents.
Page said he was excited about Google’s developments in driverless cars, maps, music and Google Glass, the company’s controversial new headset device. He said people had said Google was “crazy” to diversify from its core search product, but he cited the success of Gmail and said: “Every time we tried to do something crazy we made progress. So we’ve become a bit emboldened by that.”
Last year, Page missed Google’s annual shareholders meeting in June and a conference call to discuss the company’s quarterly earnings in July. He did not appear at last year’s Google I/O. The absences had caused concern among investors, some of whom were concerned that Google was not giving them the full picture about his health, in the same way that the late Apple boss Steve Jobs had initially hidden his illness from the public.
On his Google+ profile Page, 40, said his left vocal cord has been paralysed for 14 years, after he had suffered a severe cold. The condition worsened last year, after another cold impaired his right vocal cord.
“While this condition never really affected me – other than having a slightly weaker voice than normal which some people think sounded a little funny – it naturally raised questions in my mind about my second vocal cord. But I was told that sequential paralysis of one vocal cord following another is extremely rare,” Page wrote. “Fast forward to last summer, when the same pattern repeated itself – a cold followed by a hoarse voice. Once again things didn’t fully improve, so I went in for a check-up and was told that my second vocal cord now had limited movement as well. Again, after a thorough examination, the doctors weren’t able to identify a cause.”
Concerns about Page’s condition eased last October, when he took questions during Google’s earnings call. Page has spoken in each of Google’s three earnings calls since the one he missed. He provided further reassurance in Tuesday’s post.
“Thankfully, after some initial recovery I’m fully able to do all I need to at home and at work, though my voice is softer than before,” he wrote.
Google’s stock rose as the conference got under way, by more than 2% to more than $980 a share on Wednesday afternoon. Google shares have risen by 50% since Page replaced Eric Schmidt as chief executive, in April 2011.
Page, who owns Google stock worth about $22bn, has made a donation to Boston’s Voice Health Institute. He did not disclose the size of the donation but said it was large enough to support a “significant” research program that will be led by Dr Steven Zeitels from the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General hospital voice centre.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/15/google-larry-page
