Ustream Launches Viewer for Android Devices

Ustream, one of the best services for those in need of a free video streaming platform, has just launched the Android Viewer, an app that lets you watch any Ustream show on your Android device, provided you’re connected to the Internet via either 3G or WiFi.
The Viewer is the second app you need for a full Ustream (ustream) experience on the Android (Android). The first app – Android Broadcaster – was released a couple of weeks ago, enabling users to stream video from the device.
Android Viewer lets you choose from a list of featured or all videos, it includes chat, and works with Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 platform devices. As far as content goes, why not start by tuning into the live Kiss concert, available here at 9pm PST/12am EST.
READ MORE - Ustream Launches Viewer for Android Devices

APAC mobile multimedia services to dethrone SMS

By year-end, revenue from mobile multimedia services will overtake that of short messaging service (SMS) for the first time to become the top non-voice service in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, according to a new report.
Released Monday by IDC, the report predicted that mobile multimedia services will constitute 11 percent of total mobile services revenue by end 2009 and continue to grow. On the other hand, SMS revenue contribution will stagnate at 10 percent over the next few years.
In 2008, revenues from both categories were on par, with SMS contributing 10.3 percent and mobile multimedia services, 10.1 percent, said IDC.
The report identified ring tones and wallpaper downloads, which attracted younger demographics, as the early drivers of mobile multimedia content.
Spurring the growth of mobile multimedia services is the advancement in mobile phone technology, IDC said. Up until recently, mobile devices did not feature advanced operating systems and fast connectivity needed for quick content transfers, which hampered uptake of content services, the market analyst explained. Common in many mobile devices today, however, are built-in networking capabilities such as USB, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, which offer users broader access to content for personalization of their devices or for sharing.
"Today, the emergence of handsets featuring larger screens and even touch-screen interfaces has pushed the uptake of mobile multimedia services to a new level," Alex Chau, senior research manager for mobile and wireless technologies or services at IDC Asia-Pacific, said in a statement.
"This has spurred content and application developers to develop tens of thousands of applications to satisfy this new demand amongst mobile users," he added.
The next stage of growth, Chau noted, requires mobile operators to invest in and upgrade mobile networks in the region in order to handle the explosive mobile packet data traffic growth. "In the markets where operators have already upgraded to HSPA 7.2, 14.4 Mbps and HSPA+ 21 Mbps, the take-up of USB-dongle HSPA cards has been overwhelming, driving operators to ration the registration of new subscribers," he said.
Going forward, mobile operators will increasingly lose differentiators such as network quality and new or exclusive services, added Chau. Instead, in developed markets, uptake of services will boil down to price. The addition of app stores will further spark a price war that ultimately would benefit users, he said.
READ MORE - APAC mobile multimedia services to dethrone SMS

Microsoft warns of IE exploit code in the wild

Microsoft on Monday said it is investigating a possible vulnerability in Internet Explorer after exploit code that allegedly can be used to take control of computers, if they visit a Web site hosting the code, was posted to a security mailing list.
Microsoft confirmed that the exploit code affects IE 6 and IE 7, but not IE 8, and it said it is "currently unaware of any attacks trying to use the claimed vulnerability or of customer impact," according to a statement.
The exploit code was published to the BugTraq mailing list on Friday with no explanation.
"The exploit targets a vulnerability in the way Internet Explorer uses Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) information. CSS is used in many Web pages to define the presentation of the sites' content," Symantec wrote in a blog post over the weekend.
"The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully functional, reliable exploit will be available in the near future," Symantec said. Symantec urges IE users to keep their antivirus software up-to-date, disable JavaScript, and visit only trusted Web sites, until Microsoft issues a patch for the hole.
Anyone believed to have been affected can visit Microsoft's Consumer Security Support Center, report it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, and contact the FBI or law enforcement in the particular country, Microsoft said. U.S. residents can also call Microsoft's PC Safety Customer Service and Support number at 1-866-727-2338.
In July, critical holes in IE prompted Microsoft to issue a rare out-of-cycle (in other words, pre-Patch Tuesday) fix.
READ MORE - Microsoft warns of IE exploit code in the wild

EU extends deadline for review of Oracle-Sun deal

European regulators have agreed to extend the deadline to review Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, giving Oracle some more time to develop arguments in reply to Europe's concerns, according to Reuters.
Earlier this month, the European Commission filed a statement of objections, a first step toward blocking the US$7.4 billion deal, over concerns about MySQL. Oracle immediately fired back, issuing a statement that said European regulators have a "profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics".
The same day, the U.S. Department of Justice, which has already given its blessing to the deal, pretty much backed Oracle and offered reasons why the United States did not see the deal as anticompetitive.
Oracle has said that delays are becoming costly--to the tune of US$100 million per month--and are further damaging the economies through job losses. Sun has had to put restructuring plans in place to stay alive while everyone waits for European approval, most recently by laying off 3,000 employees.
Oracle has said that Sun's customers "universally support this merger and do not benefit from the continued uncertainty and delay". The company said evidence against the Commission's position is overwhelming, and that it lacks any credible theory or evidence of competitive harm.
Read more of "EU extends deadline for review of Oracle-Sun deal" at ZDNet.


READ MORE - EU extends deadline for review of Oracle-Sun deal

Where to download Microsoft Office 2010 and Office Mobile 2010

Re: Microsoft Office 2010


Latest in Microsoft's chain of releases Office 2010 beta has been launched at its annual Professionals Developer Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles today. All you over-curious geeks looking for a first hand experience can now download Office 2010 beta. The Redmond company has announced the release of Office 2010 early next year. Until then the company would be working on the feedback from the beta users to come up with an accomplished product. The first impression in which we exposed in the full preview of Office 2010, Microsoft provided a hint of its the changes in it's Office suite. While addressing the complete overview of Microsoft Office 2010, we had an in-depth study of the Office productivity suite. Accompanying the public beta, Microsoft also released the Office Web Apps that marks its entry into the online web application market. So where do you download the Microsoft Office 2010.
Microsoft made Office 2010 beta already available for the developers and IT professionals subscribed to MSDN and TechNet Services. This provided a clear hint of the public launch. Now the public beta is available for download at Microsoft's Official website.
Those who download Office 2010 might experience the public preview of Office Web Apps via Windows Live account to create, edit, store and retrieve documents online. To use the Office Web Apps you would require the Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7), or Firefox 3.5 or later on Windows, Mac and Linux, or Safari 4.0 for Mac.
In addition to the desktop version of Office, Microsoft also launched a public beta version of Office Mobile 2010. The Office Suite runs on Windows Mobile 6.5-based phones. The mobile version of Office 2010 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and new SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010. Its features include
  • View and edit your Microsoft Office documents with confidence
  • Stay connected to work from anywhere with SharePoint Workspace Mobile
  • Use PowerPoint Mobile as a presentation aid
The latest version of Office Mobile is touchscreen only and it doesn't support the non touchscreen devices. Since there are no non touchscreen Windows Mobile devices this issue is irrelevant. Moreover the application allows syncing with the Microsoft OneNote. The mobile version of Office 2010 is available in Windows Market Place.
windowsmobile7
Microsoft reveled the screenshot of its next-gen OS. From what can interpreted from the screenshots office suite is running in an environment that is quite contrasting from the existing Windows Mobile 6.5 platform. Given that Windows Mobile 7 is ready for release in 2010, it can be anticipated that the screenshot highlight Microsoft's next-gen OS.
READ MORE - Where to download Microsoft Office 2010 and Office Mobile 2010

Sinofsky's Windows plan: More data, less testosterone

LOS ANGELES--While some have criticized Steven Sinofsky for being tight-lipped, the Windows boss insists that he is being prudent, not secretive.
"Everybody wants to know what's coming and what's next." But, he said, talking too soon, too early is actually a bad thing that just leads to frustration.
"You reacting to some nightly developer build isn't really productive to anybody," Sinofsky said in an interview at last week's Professional Developers Conference.
Sinofsky says that people don't want to show up to a restaurant and watch a potato being peeled and taste it half-cooked. For the same reason, he prefers to not talk about things until they are well, fully baked.
"It's hard to imagine what else you want to see while it's in progress," Sinofsky said. "I don't want to see the daily cuts of a movie. I want to see what the director thought at the end."
As a result, Microsoft didn't show Windows 7 until last year's Professional Developers Conference, just a year before the product was released. That's in sharp contrast to the prior version of Windows, which was first shown as Longhorn back in 2003. It ultimately suffered through numerous delays and significant changes before being released as Vista.
From early indications, Sinofsky would appear to be on to something. While Vista was largely panned by critics and shunned by businesses, Windows 7 has thus far had strong early sales and gotten high marks from reviewers.
It's some of the same philosophy Sinofsky took in his earlier days, when he led development of Microsoft's Office franchise.
"Normal people have stuff to do," he said.
That's also why he doesn't really look for public feedback until the software is largely done.
"We don't want feedback on a screenshot," he said.
Sinofsky shifted from Office to Windows in March 2006 and earlier this year added responsibility for the business side of Windows as well, becoming the unit's president.
He said his philosophy toward Windows really boils down to a single word--responsibility. "There's not another project in software to work on that a billion people use and we take that really, really seriously in the hallways of our dev team," he said.
Sinofsky also isn't one to be swayed by emotional arguments for or against a feature. If you want his attention--show him the numbers. He said he wants feedback, but he wants that feedback to "be based on data and not assertions or opinions or anecdotes."
During his PDC talk last week, he referred to the other approach as "testosterone-based engineering".
"It turns out we did a lot of things by that method," Sinofsky said. Often times, decisions on which features to include in the next version of a product were made that way. People, Sinofsky said, would basically just ask their friends.
"Let me get this straight," Sinofsky said. "You are going to ask your 10 friends who all go to Fry's and build their own gaming machines and that's going to be the way we decide which features go in the product?"
That, he said, "seems a little homogeneous. It seems a little limited in its reliability".
But these days, Microsoft has a better option, gathering lots and lots of data from real-world use. Quite often, he said, the data will show things that might not be intuitive to Redmond's engineers.
As an example, he showed a graph at the conference that showed the huge variety of graphics resolutions that Windows users were operating at, including a significant number with VGA-resolution displays. Folks in Redmond initially assumed they didn't really need to worry about such low-resolution screens.
True to form, Sinofsky was emphatically silent when my questions drifted toward the future. I asked whether we might see a beta of Internet Explorer 9 at Mix and he literally just sat there silent until I asked the next question.
Later on in the interview, the mere mention of Windows 8 got the same stone-faced glare.
"I won't ask you what's in Windows 8, but can you talk at all (about it)? You mentioned that you are a few weeks into designing IE 9," I said. "Are you a similar amount into Windows 8?"
Silence. More silence.
"I didn't say any of the words--Windows 8--those were all your words," he said. "Next."
Sinofsky did have some interesting things to say when I asked for his take on competitors like Google and Apple.
"You have to take it very seriously," he said of the competitors. "That's always, always true in the software world. In the software world it doesn't take a lot to have a dramatic shift in how people perceive you or how they act. It's just very important no matter what your perceived or real or measured share is at one moment, it doesn't take a lot to change it down the road."
READ MORE - Sinofsky's Windows plan: More data, less testosterone

Software developers looking to enter the market should focus their energy on building games, navigation and music apps for the mobile platform, because this is where the money currently is. Tim Renowden, device analyst at Ovum's London office, noted that these apps are popular with the consumer masses. However, these market segments are also highly competitive and developers would have to come up with "something unique" to tap the burgeoning sector, Renowden said in an e-mail interview. According to Ovum, the number of mobile app downloads will clock 18.6 billion across all platforms in 2014, with end-user revenues reaching US$6 billion. "These areas are highly competitive and difficult to make money from, unless an app is a huge success," said Renowden. "Most apps struggle to find an audience unless they can break into the very top ranked app lists on each platform, which is extremely difficult especially for smaller developers." He added that most popular apps are tied to an existing Web service. His assessment is shared by Nokia's Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia and the Nokia developer community, who said there is no "free lunch" for developers hoping to make a quick buck out of a "hit app". "Developers should [instead] look for platform vendors who provide longer term viability for their business, by providing both the technologies that simplify development costs and provide global reach," explained Kochikar. "This includes not only tools to build the apps, but an understanding of local markets, business models and consumption patterns." Enterprise-level applications, and the marketplace for these software, will also become "more prevalent", she said, due to the availability of high bandwidth and cloud computing. This, she added, will change the "dynamics of the types of apps, modes of operation and types of users" in the market, although coding business apps would require a different skillset. Android next big thing? Another potential lucrative niche is the Android market, which Renowden observed is receiving "enormous industry buzz" at the moment, particularly as more Android-based handsets are released into the market by major manufacturers and the platform continues to mature. "There is potential for Android handsets to vastly outsell the iPhone simply because it's becoming clear how many models will be running [the Google OS], and at various price points," he said. Travis Ho, director of Touch Dimensions, thinks likewise. The Singapore-based startup is currently developing its Windows Mobile-based real time strategy game Autumn Dynasty. Ho noted that the Windows Mobile and Android platforms--though still in their "nascent stage--are the most likely competitors able to shake iPhone's dominance of the apps market. "Both app stores have the potential to reach loads of phone users as [the app stores] are still under-exploited. So it's likely that there is much room to grow [on these two platforms] before the next killer platform, that everyone wants to jump onto, is introduced," Ho told ZDNet Asia. Regardless of platform, developers should look closer at opportunities for apps that deliver compelling experiences to end-users. Mark Glikson, Microsoft's Asia-Pacific general manager of developer and platform evangelism, pointed to the company's latest beta version of its Web development platform, Silverlight 4, as an example that can deliver rich performance apps to heighten user experience. Platform interoperability barrier However, the main challenge mobile developers face today is the wide variety of platforms available in the market, and the difficulty in producing apps that are platform-agnostic. This platform fragmentation shows no signs of easing off, with various platforms based on mobile Linux now emerging, noted Renowden. These include Nokia's Maemo, Vodafone's 360 and Emblaze's ELSE platform, which are not compatible with each other or with other operating systems such as Samsung's Bada or Palm's WebOS. Ho, however, believes this issue is not difficult to resolve. He explained that programs for desktop computers, Microsoft's Xbox game console and Windows Mobile OS phones, can be coded in the C# programming language, which is "fairly easy to cart around". He noted that some recoding is "unavoidable", since different platforms only support a certain set of framework, while others simply have different properties such as mobile phones and their small screen format, and PCs without accelerometers. Jeffrey Jiang, also a director at Touch Dimensions, said the initial development phase requires significant time testing on various platforms. "But, once the first game is deployed on multiple platforms, subsequent programs would be a lot easier," he said. Kochikar also noted that Web technologies enable platform-agnostic application development for the most part. However, while these technologies are good enough for building basic apps, they are not "sophisticated enough to enable fantastic experiences" that some rich-media developers aspire to build. "At Nokia, we are addressing this by providing WebRT for the basic apps, and Qt, a runtime that works across many platforms, as means to enable the fantastic applications without the complexity of building native apps," she said. Glickson added that there is a time and a place for both platform-agnostic and platform-specific applications to co-exist. "[While] there is the opportunity to deliver strong value across multiple standards-based browser platforms…quite often the richest experiences and the best economic value point, for both the developer and consumer of an application from a productivity perspective, will come from leveraging the proprietary strengths of platform elements designed for a specific form factor," he said.

Choose a neutral platform and read the fine-print in the cloud provider's SLAs (service level agreements) to maintain data integrity in the cloud, say industry voices.
The advent of offsite data residing on the cloud has raised concerns about data management and integrity. Earlier this year, the U.S. government held a two-day meeting discussing topics such as data management in the cloud, and the implications of data privacy across geographic borders.
When contacted, data management vendors offered several tips on how companies should handle a move to the cloud.
1. Don't take your problems to the cloud.
Suganthi Shivkumar, South Asia managing director for Informatica, said: "The cloud is just another medium [and is] driven by economics. It will not radically change data quality."
That is, companies should not take the move to the cloud as an overhaul because problems from badly-kept data will still exist in the cloud, said Shivkumar.
Companies should first ensure data is complete and accurate, and has passed through all traditional data hygiene checks, before preparing the move to the cloud, she said.
2. Choose a neutral platform to avoid lock-in.
Ashok Munirathinam, solutions and services manager at Sybase Singapore, said companies should make data available on various environments to support the myriad applications on which enterprises depend.
Off-the-shelf applications often come with proprietary databases and platforms, said Munirathinam. Similar to an on-premise set up, enterprises should choose a cloud infrastructure provider that allows a heterogeneous operating environment capable of running operating systems such as Linux, Windows and Solaris, for example, he added.
Developers have also noted that a neutral platform will help data move between online repositories, should a user choose to switch cloud providers in future.
Shivkumar added that companies should select a platform-neutral central repository so that users can access company data from different platforms.
3. Check if cloud provider has data management SLAs.
A cloud provider should spell out its data management practices in its SLA, said Shivkumar. "Companies should be more vigilant and ask: 'Is the provider able to conform to my best practices?'"
A cloud provider that is able to provide data updates in real-time will help maintain data "freshness", she noted.
Munirathinam said cloud availability is also important. The ability to perform cluster and remote site recoverability in seconds will help reflect updates and allow users to access data, in the event of an outage.
4. Maintain best practices and control in the cloud.
"Whatever best practices the company has, should stay, even when data goes to the cloud," said Shivkumar.
When they audit cloud providers, businesses should measure how much control they are losing over the data-cleansing process, in order to maintain flexibility, she said.
Marrying the organization's existing best practices with the tools offered by a cloud provider, will give a company flexible management of its data, she noted. "Flexibility will be delivered through a holistic data integration plan," she said.
Munirathinam said enterprises should choose a cloud that carries scalable tools, to provide the elasticity touted by cloud providers. Database management, as a "key component" of the cloud, should also be scalable, he said.
5. Learn from other companies that have gone to the cloud.
Shivkumar said network issues in parts of Asia will likely hold back some of its countries from moving to the cloud as quickly as counterparts in the West. By that token, "we can learn lessons from Western early adopters", she said. "Adopt best practices, and learn from [others'] mistakes to leapfrog the competition."
Munirathinam said companies can choose two different approaches to data migration--to choose a similar platform on the cloud as the on-premise platform, or synchronize and consolidate data onto a single platform, which she said, typically requires a longer migration path and more investment.
READ MORE - Software developers looking to enter the market should focus their energy on building games, navigation and music apps for the mobile platform, because this is where the money currently is. Tim Renowden, device analyst at Ovum's London office, noted that these apps are popular with the consumer masses. However, these market segments are also highly competitive and developers would have to come up with "something unique" to tap the burgeoning sector, Renowden said in an e-mail interview. According to Ovum, the number of mobile app downloads will clock 18.6 billion across all platforms in 2014, with end-user revenues reaching US$6 billion. "These areas are highly competitive and difficult to make money from, unless an app is a huge success," said Renowden. "Most apps struggle to find an audience unless they can break into the very top ranked app lists on each platform, which is extremely difficult especially for smaller developers." He added that most popular apps are tied to an existing Web service. His assessment is shared by Nokia's Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia and the Nokia developer community, who said there is no "free lunch" for developers hoping to make a quick buck out of a "hit app". "Developers should [instead] look for platform vendors who provide longer term viability for their business, by providing both the technologies that simplify development costs and provide global reach," explained Kochikar. "This includes not only tools to build the apps, but an understanding of local markets, business models and consumption patterns." Enterprise-level applications, and the marketplace for these software, will also become "more prevalent", she said, due to the availability of high bandwidth and cloud computing. This, she added, will change the "dynamics of the types of apps, modes of operation and types of users" in the market, although coding business apps would require a different skillset. Android next big thing? Another potential lucrative niche is the Android market, which Renowden observed is receiving "enormous industry buzz" at the moment, particularly as more Android-based handsets are released into the market by major manufacturers and the platform continues to mature. "There is potential for Android handsets to vastly outsell the iPhone simply because it's becoming clear how many models will be running [the Google OS], and at various price points," he said. Travis Ho, director of Touch Dimensions, thinks likewise. The Singapore-based startup is currently developing its Windows Mobile-based real time strategy game Autumn Dynasty. Ho noted that the Windows Mobile and Android platforms--though still in their "nascent stage--are the most likely competitors able to shake iPhone's dominance of the apps market. "Both app stores have the potential to reach loads of phone users as [the app stores] are still under-exploited. So it's likely that there is much room to grow [on these two platforms] before the next killer platform, that everyone wants to jump onto, is introduced," Ho told ZDNet Asia. Regardless of platform, developers should look closer at opportunities for apps that deliver compelling experiences to end-users. Mark Glikson, Microsoft's Asia-Pacific general manager of developer and platform evangelism, pointed to the company's latest beta version of its Web development platform, Silverlight 4, as an example that can deliver rich performance apps to heighten user experience. Platform interoperability barrier However, the main challenge mobile developers face today is the wide variety of platforms available in the market, and the difficulty in producing apps that are platform-agnostic. This platform fragmentation shows no signs of easing off, with various platforms based on mobile Linux now emerging, noted Renowden. These include Nokia's Maemo, Vodafone's 360 and Emblaze's ELSE platform, which are not compatible with each other or with other operating systems such as Samsung's Bada or Palm's WebOS. Ho, however, believes this issue is not difficult to resolve. He explained that programs for desktop computers, Microsoft's Xbox game console and Windows Mobile OS phones, can be coded in the C# programming language, which is "fairly easy to cart around". He noted that some recoding is "unavoidable", since different platforms only support a certain set of framework, while others simply have different properties such as mobile phones and their small screen format, and PCs without accelerometers. Jeffrey Jiang, also a director at Touch Dimensions, said the initial development phase requires significant time testing on various platforms. "But, once the first game is deployed on multiple platforms, subsequent programs would be a lot easier," he said. Kochikar also noted that Web technologies enable platform-agnostic application development for the most part. However, while these technologies are good enough for building basic apps, they are not "sophisticated enough to enable fantastic experiences" that some rich-media developers aspire to build. "At Nokia, we are addressing this by providing WebRT for the basic apps, and Qt, a runtime that works across many platforms, as means to enable the fantastic applications without the complexity of building native apps," she said. Glickson added that there is a time and a place for both platform-agnostic and platform-specific applications to co-exist. "[While] there is the opportunity to deliver strong value across multiple standards-based browser platforms…quite often the richest experiences and the best economic value point, for both the developer and consumer of an application from a productivity perspective, will come from leveraging the proprietary strengths of platform elements designed for a specific form factor," he said.

Apps to flourish on mobile, games

Software developers looking to enter the market should focus their energy on building games, navigation and music apps for the mobile platform, because this is where the money currently is.
Tim Renowden, device analyst at Ovum's London office, noted that these apps are popular with the consumer masses. However, these market segments are also highly competitive and developers would have to come up with "something unique" to tap the burgeoning sector, Renowden said in an e-mail interview.
According to Ovum, the number of mobile app downloads will clock 18.6 billion across all platforms in 2014, with end-user revenues reaching US$6 billion.
"These areas are highly competitive and difficult to make money from, unless an app is a huge success," said Renowden. "Most apps struggle to find an audience unless they can break into the very top ranked app lists on each platform, which is extremely difficult especially for smaller developers." He added that most popular apps are tied to an existing Web service.
His assessment is shared by Nokia's Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia and the Nokia developer community, who said there is no "free lunch" for developers hoping to make a quick buck out of a "hit app".
"Developers should [instead] look for platform vendors who provide longer term viability for their business, by providing both the technologies that simplify development costs and provide global reach," explained Kochikar. "This includes not only tools to build the apps, but an understanding of local markets, business models and consumption patterns."
Enterprise-level applications, and the marketplace for these software, will also become "more prevalent", she said, due to the availability of high bandwidth and cloud computing. This, she added, will change the "dynamics of the types of apps, modes of operation and types of users" in the market, although coding business apps would require a different skillset.
Android next big thing?
Another potential lucrative niche is the Android market, which Renowden observed is receiving "enormous industry buzz" at the moment, particularly as more Android-based handsets are released into the market by major manufacturers and the platform continues to mature.
"There is potential for Android handsets to vastly outsell the iPhone simply because it's becoming clear how many models will be running [the Google OS], and at various price points," he said.
Travis Ho, director of Touch Dimensions, thinks likewise. The Singapore-based startup is currently developing its Windows Mobile-based real time strategy game Autumn Dynasty.
Ho noted that the Windows Mobile and Android platforms--though still in their "nascent stage--are the most likely competitors able to shake iPhone's dominance of the apps market.
"Both app stores have the potential to reach loads of phone users as [the app stores] are still under-exploited. So it's likely that there is much room to grow [on these two platforms] before the next killer platform, that everyone wants to jump onto, is introduced," Ho told ZDNet Asia.
Regardless of platform, developers should look closer at opportunities for apps that deliver compelling experiences to end-users.
Mark Glikson, Microsoft's Asia-Pacific general manager of developer and platform evangelism, pointed to the company's latest beta version of its Web development platform, Silverlight 4, as an example that can deliver rich performance apps to heighten user experience.
Platform interoperability barrier
However, the main challenge mobile developers face today is the wide variety of platforms available in the market, and the difficulty in producing apps that are platform-agnostic.
This platform fragmentation shows no signs of easing off, with various platforms based on mobile Linux now emerging, noted Renowden. These include Nokia's Maemo, Vodafone's 360 and Emblaze's ELSE platform, which are not compatible with each other or with other operating systems such as Samsung's Bada or Palm's WebOS.
Ho, however, believes this issue is not difficult to resolve.
He explained that programs for desktop computers, Microsoft's Xbox game console and Windows Mobile OS phones, can be coded in the C# programming language, which is "fairly easy to cart around".
He noted that some recoding is "unavoidable", since different platforms only support a certain set of framework, while others simply have different properties such as mobile phones and their small screen format, and PCs without accelerometers.
Jeffrey Jiang, also a director at Touch Dimensions, said the initial development phase requires significant time testing on various platforms. "But, once the first game is deployed on multiple platforms, subsequent programs would be a lot easier," he said.
Kochikar also noted that Web technologies enable platform-agnostic application development for the most part. However, while these technologies are good enough for building basic apps, they are not "sophisticated enough to enable fantastic experiences" that some rich-media developers aspire to build.
"At Nokia, we are addressing this by providing WebRT for the basic apps, and Qt, a runtime that works across many platforms, as means to enable the fantastic applications without the complexity of building native apps," she said.
Glickson added that there is a time and a place for both platform-agnostic and platform-specific applications to co-exist.
"[While] there is the opportunity to deliver strong value across multiple standards-based browser platforms…quite often the richest experiences and the best economic value point, for both the developer and consumer of an application from a productivity perspective, will come from leveraging the proprietary strengths of platform elements designed for a specific form factor," he said.
READ MORE - Apps to flourish on mobile, games

Bing integrates Wolfram Alpha results

Microsoft has integrated results from the Wolfram Alpha computation engine into its Bing search engine.
Bing is one of Wolfram Alpha's first application programming interface (API) customers, Wolfram Alpha developer relations architect Schoeller Porter said in a blog post on Wednesday.
"Wolfram Alpha's knowledge, computed from expertly curated data, will enrich Bing's results in select areas across nutrition, health and advanced mathematics," said Porter. "By using our API, Bing will be able to seamlessly access the tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data from Wolfram Alpha, and directly incorporate the computations in its search results."
Wolfram Alpha, which went live in May, allows users to query the engine to obtain statistical and other data around a search term.
The three topic areas Bing will use Wolfram Alpha for are queries about the nutritional values of foodstuffs, body mass index calculations and mathematical computation, Microsoft said in a blog post on Wednesday.
READ MORE - Bing integrates Wolfram Alpha results

Expert says Adobe Flash policy is risky

A lax security policy in Adobe Flash puts visitors to user-generated content sites at risk, says a researcher who has found a technique exploiting the way browsers handle Flash files.
The problem stems from the origin policy of Adobe Flash, Mike Bailey, a senior security researcher at Foreground Security, said in an interview earlier this week. "Adobe should change the way Flash Player handles the security policy so it doesn't allow arbitrary content to access the application without permission."
By default, Flash Player trusts anything, but it should only trust what is allowed," he said, providing more technical discussion in a blog post.
For example, someone could upload what appears to be a picture to a social-networking site but which is actually a Flash file designed to execute malicious code in the browser when the file is opened. Anyone who views that picture could be compromised, said Mike Murray, chief information security officer at Foreground Security.
Bailey said that as far as he knows the technique has not been used in the wild as an attack, but that a "huge number of sites are vulnerable". (Gmail previously had an issue that could allow for this type of attack, but that has been fixed. Flash payload could "theoretically" still be executed, but it would be incredibly difficult to do, Baily wrote in his post.)
Adobe has known about the issue for a while but says it can't fix it or risk breaking a lot of existing Flash content and applications around the Web, he said.
Administrators make configuration changes to each Web site to mitigate the risk, Bailey said.
Meanwhile, users should disable Flash completely or use NoScript, a browser plug-in that blocks Flash and Java from untrusted sites, he said.
Asked to comment, an Adobe representative provided this statement:
"Generally speaking, by nature, Flash (SWF) content is powerful, active content and should be handled with the same care as other active content technologies, such as JavaScript, to ensure a site's design does not become vulnerable to abuse scenarios. Adobe has always advised that allowing arbitrary uploads or attachments of Flash (SWF) content to trusted domains should not be performed due to potential abuse scenarios, such as the ones outlined by Mike Bailey. Adobe has published several best practice advisories and blog posts for developers and site owners on how to safely host Flash content. For example, our Flash Player security white paper describes our model in great detail."
READ MORE - Expert says Adobe Flash policy is risky

'Pragmatic' Intel seen in AMD deal

Intel's settlement with AMD is seen as "pragmatic" on the part of the market leader to avoid lengthy legal battles and further court damages, according to an analyst.
John Spooner, senior analyst at Technology Business Research (TBR), said Friday Intel had chosen "to control its own destiny and settle upfront" by making peace with its chip competitor.
The two companies announced Thursday in the United States they have reached a settlement over a long-time dispute over Intel's alleged antitrust practices. As part of the agreement, Intel will pay AMD US$1.25 billion and the pair will enter into a new five-year cross-licensing agreement over x86 technology. The smaller chipmaker will also drop its litigation in the United States and Japan.
Using the fine dished out by the European Commission as a gauge, Intel could potentially face treble damages of over US$4 billion by allowing the antitrust suit to drag on, he said Spooner.
The decision to settle, he noted, is also a sign of Intel's "broader change in strategic direction".
"Intel has been preparing to reduce its reliance on the PC and server processor market, which now supplies more than 90 percent of its quarterly revenue," he pointed out. "The chipmaker has been re-aligning itself to expand its revenue base into graphics, handsets and consumer electronics. It will leverage its 32-nanometer manufacturing technology to make a significant push into these markets in calendar 2010."
Still, it will "take time" for the full effects of the settlement to pan out, particularly when it comes to government antitrust probes on Intel, he added. In the near-term, Intel will continue to "compete aggressively", especially in a PC market expected to return to strong unit growth next year, said Spooner. Intel, he noted, has around 80 percent market share in the PC and server processor space.
In a conference call with media Thursday in the United States, Intel CEO Paul Otellini also described the settlement as a practical move. According to ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET News, reactions from investors suggested that AMD gained more from the transaction than did its rival: Intel's share's price dropped marginally, while AMD's stock rose 22 percent.
Deal improves AMD's long-term viability
Aside from the cash injection, the smaller chipmaker gains in two distinct ways, according to Spooner.
The settlement terms will especially help allay concerns from AMD's PC and server OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners about reprisal from Intel for using AMD processors, he noted. Another benefit is that AMD improves its longer-term viability with a five-year extension of the pair's x86 cross-licensing agreement as well as specific provisions for its manufacturing arm Globalfoundries to produce chips without legal threat from Intel<.
According to Spooner, AMD "very strongly believes" the settlement opens the door to "significant market share gain". This, he added, will boost the company's revenue and profitability even as the industry rebounds in the year ahead.
READ MORE - 'Pragmatic' Intel seen in AMD deal

Smartphone batteries need 'breakthrough'

It will take "years" and a technology "breakthrough on multiple fronts" before the battery lives on smartphones will reach "good" levels, according to the head of Nokia's research center, Henry Tirri.

By "good", Tirri meant phones that can last on a weekly power charge, which will support battery utilization closer to what basic phone models require today, he said at a media interview here Tuesday.

Lamenting the current state of smartphone battery life, he noted that most high-performance models with large screens do not last more than eight hours of constant usage on a single charge.

The reason is that power management research, up until recently, has focused on optimizing phones for voice and SMS messages, he said. But, in "two short years", the cellular phone industry has come up with faster, power-hungry processors and bigger, brighter screens, and power research simply "hasn't been able to catch up with this trend", said Tirri.

Solving this issue will take a "breakthrough", for multiple technologies in various phones to work optimally on less power, he noted.

Nokia is currently researching solar and kinetic power as alternative forms of energy, he added.

According to Tirri, the challenge with power is also holding back the cloud computing industry. Every device connecting to the cloud will consume more power--utilized by the central computing resource. It also takes more energy to exchange data with the cloud than to perform the computing task directly on the device, he said.

"The cloud cannot handle the next billion users... It will run out of power," said Tirri.

READ MORE - Smartphone batteries need 'breakthrough'

NBN to lead pay TV way for SingTel

Local carrier Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) believes the ability of its Internet Protocol television (IPTV) network to interoperate with the next-generation national broadband network (NBN) will be the company's key differentiator in the pay TV market.

Allen Lew, SingTel's Singapore CEO, said the country's plans to roll out its fiber network next year would be a "game changer", as SingTel's IPTV set-top box is already compatible with the NBN. This is not the case for the company's only pay TV rival and current market leader StarHub, Lew said at a media conference Wednesday to announce SingTel's second quarter financial results.

Net profits up

SingTel reported a net profit increase of 18.8 percent year-on-year, ending Sep. 30, 2009, to S$952 million (US$685.1 million). The company's growth was driven by strong consumer demand for its mobile services and new offerings, such as the iPhone and pay TV programs. These offset weak demand for business-related services such as data and voice services, according to the carrier.
"Taking into account the results of the group to date, and the general improved economic outlook, we now expect that for the current financial year, the operating revenue of each of the Singapore and Australia businesses to grow at single-digit level and Ebitda of the respective businesses to grow at low single-digit level," said Group CEO Chua Sock Koong.

SingTel scored a coup last month when it secured a deal to broadcast English Premier League (EPL) football matches via its IPTV service, mio TV. StarHub, which exclusive rights to the popular football league will end after the current season, has since offered to host SingTel's mio channels, including the EPL.

SingTel executives, however, said they have yet to receive any formal proposal from StarHub. Group CEO Chua Sock Koong further questioned the objective of StarHub's decision to publicize its intention before first speaking with SingTel.

Asked if SingTel would consider sharing content, Lew noted that because StarHub's existing architecture is different and not built to work with the NBN, initiatives to share content will require a change in set-top boxes.

He revealed that when SingTel entered the local pay TV market three years ago, it needed to decide whether to build its own network or run its services over StarHub's network. Having received no proposal from the incumbent, Lew said the company then proceeded to pump in the investments to build its own IPTV network.

StarHub's offer now to share content is "too late" since SingTel had already invested the resources to build its network.

"If we do decide to use their network, and that's a big 'if', then we have to contend with the fact that at 2012 [when the NBN is expected to achieve 95 percent coverage], we have to change the set-top box again and the impact that would have on customers," he added.

Brewing competition in pay TV
Analysts said the EPL deal will not be profitable for SingTel but can prove critical in boosting the carrier's pay TV subscriber base.

Lew noted that the EPL deal, which spans three years, "is not just about pay TV" and its profitability should be seen beyond the term of the broadcast agreement. Through the acquisition, he said, mio TV now has "something to stand for" in the minds of consumers, particularly sports fans. Once the broadcast deal is in operation, he hopes to use the "wedge" the EPL will help create, and move its subscriber base into other non-sports related segments.

It will further lead to "a slew of competitive products" from the carrier, and into the NBN consumer market, he added.

Lew also dismissed impending competition in the mobile front from StarHub and MobileOne (M1), which recently inked deals to sell Apple's iPhone in the country later this year, ending SingTel's exclusive hold in this segment.

With the one year lead the company, having offered the iPhone since August last year, SingTel has "soaked up significant demand, particularly from people who are tech-savvy…and who like to use Apple-type products", Lew said. But, he added that there "is [still] significant demand in the Singapore market", given that the handset continues to attract attention.

"Like our colleagues in [Australia's] Optus, operating in an environment where there are two other operators selling the iPhone is not new to SingTel. We have taken some learnings from them in terms of how to continue to get the largest market share in Australia, and we'll be implementing some of these in advance of what our competitors are likely to do," he said.

SingTel as universal apps adapter?
SingTel is also keen to develop a platform "aggregator" role in the mobile applications realm, according to Lim Chuan Poh, SingTel's international CEO.

He told ZDNet Asia, on the sidelines of the media briefing, that there are many applications available in the market today, but few can work on different mobile platforms including iPhone, Nokia's Symbian and Google's Android.

Here, SingTel can help build capabilities by working with third-party partners and developers to create apps that can work on any device, regardless of its platform, and reach a wider audience.

According to Lim, most apps currently can only be used on smartphones. By bringing apps to less advanced handsets, mobile developers and players can reach markets where smartphone adoption is low.

Lew also told ZDNet Asia that the carrier will soon be ready to announce the commercial launch of its cloud platform, dubbed SingTel Marketplace, which operates under the company's SingTel Innovation Exchange initiative for independent software vendors.

Likely to be commercially launched in the new year, he said SingTel is finalizing several customer trials and has been working to ensure cloud-based applications run smoothly on its platform.

READ MORE - NBN to lead pay TV way for SingTel

Is Project Manager Redundant in Extreme Programming?

lifecycleagileup Extreme Project Management (XPM) is an agile approach for managing project that emphasizes on incremental planning instead of traditional one-time planning.  It helps managers to control  project schedules, assign work tasks, and assure that work is done efficiently and correctly more efficiently than traditional programming practice.  The project management in Extreme Programming (XPM) can be divided into two types, planning practices and control practices. Planning practices consist of the Release Plan, Weekly Plan, and Stories. The rest of the practices focus on daily quality control. The core features of project management is described below in terms of extreme programming.
  • Risk Management:  Extreme programming establishes the fact that smaller projects have a higher success rate. It breaks a big project into multiple small projects so that each release of the software contains only a subset of the required functionality. The final project deliverable is going to be the incremental production of small projects. Each release offers stakeholder to test the functionality so that high quality feedback is obtained, improving the quality of the software.
    The targeted time between two releases are 6 to 8 weeks.  If there is any serious issues in the early releases, there is still budget and schedule available to address those issues. Another important aspect if a project is canceled in the halfway. In this case, a team that has produced several incremental releases potentially have delivered something that will return value to the organization despite the project is not complete. Further, the risk of an important technical resource is offset by collective ownership of the project.
  • Integration Management:  The scope of continuous integration requires that the work of software developers be integrated on a daily basis. It allows the team to identify any issue in the early stage. Otherwise, there is lot of rework required in case of any issue that is detected at the final stage of integration.
  • Scope and Time Management: In traditional programming, the standard practice is to produce a project schedule based upon different activities like Analysis, design, Development and Testing. But, Extreme Programming focuses on Work Breakdown Structure and its constituent Work Packages. That would help a team improve their planning.
  • Planning: In Extreme programming, user functionality is noted in a work package. The work package describes each project participant what the user wants in terms of functionality. The work package is used further to figure out estimates, build schedules, authorize work, conduct testing, and report status.
    At the beginning of each iteration the developers estimate each work package as a team. Estimated work packages are then grouped into releases of useful functionality. Each release is then further broken down for two weeks development phase.
    Once the project schedule is finalized, the next two-week development iteration begins. The developers discuss how to break the work package into smaller task or activities. The team members distribute the tasks among themselves and begin development.
  • Quality Management: Extreme programming emphasizes on simple design, simple code and flexible module as per the requirement of work package. If there is addition or modification of functionality, the design is reworked and modified in line with the most recently scheduled features.
    Extreme programming do away with the status reports and weekly status meetings. Instead, daily stand up meeting is conducted to discuss the progress and issues.
    Another beauty of Extreme Programming is pair programming. Having two programmers working together during coding stage  offers several advantages. It proves collective ownership in a manner that code reviews by your peers is not going to happen.
    During each incremental coding step, 100 % quality test has to be passed by means of automated test. Each and every function must have a functional specification captured in the form of an automated test suite. Automated test is a part of design phase and is written before the coding phase.
    The key requirement to this practice is that the developers need easy access to someone who is capable and willing to make decisions when questions arise. The ideal situation is that there has to be a member of the user community who can be called on-site customer. If the user requirement changes as per the onsite customer, the new functionality needs to be added in work package.
Conclusion:
Extreme Programming is the new direction of project management where software developers collaborate with fellow team members to solve problem quickly and effectively. Hence, in other word, Project Management has an important role to play in extreme Programming. It establishes the fact that the role of the project manager is not redundant. On the contrary, he has an important role to play, although, the approach is completely different than traditional project Management approach.
READ MORE - Is Project Manager Redundant in Extreme Programming?

Ancestry.com hopes to stand test of time

In 1997, a publisher of genealogical reference books and magazines launched a Web site, Ancestry.com, to complement its other offerings. More than a decade later, the site has eclipsed the magazine and grown into a profitable online destination for genealogical research, with 11 million family trees and the world's largest online database of birth certificates and marriage records.
On Nov. 5, Ancestry.com (ACOM) is slated to begin a new chapter in its history as it lists on the Nasdaq stock market. Before the start of trading, the stock was expected to be priced between US$12.50 and US$14.50 per share, with US$100 million in total proceeds. Morgan Stanley (MS) and Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC) are listed as the lead underwriters of the public offering.
Ancestry.com's public offering comes after a relative drought for IPOs, owing to the weak economy and lack of investor confidence that prevented businesses from going public. A handful of other technology companies, including software maker Solar Winds (SWI) and Internet startup OpenTable (OPEN), have gone public this year with some success. And if it performs well, Ancestry's offering could help open up the market for IPOs. "During the challenges of the last year, most investors didn't have an appetite for risk," says Lise Buyer, founder and principal of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based Class V Group, an adviser to companies going public. "Now that things have stabilized there's more of an appetite."
Sluggish growth rates
Will the family tree Web site have the staying power of other publicly traded Internet companies, like eBay (EBAY) and Amazon.com (AMZN)? Analysts applaud the subscription model of Ancestry.com, which sees more than 1 million users paying over US$150 per year for access to genealogical records they can't find elsewhere. "They've built an incredible subscription model, which is not easy to do. To get any online consumer to pay for anything is a monumental task," says Tom Taulli, an independent analyst of IPOs.
But the company's sluggish growth rates are a concern. In 2008 revenues were US$197.6 million, up 18.8 percent from 2007, when revenues were US$166.4 million. That's respectable for most companies, but a bit slower than investors may want to see in a newly public tech company. "This is a company that's growing, but not at a speed that is typical for a technology company," says David Menlow, founder of IPO Financial. "It's not really moving the needle off the scale." Also of concern is a high attrition rate: About 4 percent of users leave the site each month, which means that nearly half of its subscribers leave over the course of a year.
The company is a leader in the relatively small space of online genealogy. In September, Ancestry.com sites saw four million unique online visitors, according to the market research firm ComScore (SCOR), compared with 1.1 million for its next largest competitor, FamilyLink. The main attraction is a collection of census lists, birth and death certificates, military, marriage, and other records in which the company has invested more than US$80 million. "They're obviously the market leader in online family history research," says Eric Guja, analyst with Renaissance Capital.
Facebook is a threat
But the popularity of free social networking sites such as Facebook, which many people use to look up and interact with family members, is a growing threat to Ancestry. Facebook has more than 300 million users. And even larger Internet players may present unforeseen challenges. "If Google (GOOG) can copy every book in the world, you've got to wonder if they can do the same thing with birth certificates," says analyst Taulli.
One person that disagrees is Paul Allen, who helped found what would become Ancestry.com when his company Infobases bought the brand in 1997. After leaving the company in 2002, Allen now runs FamilyLink, a free Web community for family members. Allen calls Ancestry's IPO "fantastic" for the whole genealogy business. "Ancestry.com is about building your historic family tree," he says. "Facebook and [FamilyLink] are focused on your living relatives. I think it's a different market."

READ MORE - Ancestry.com hopes to stand test of time

The Role Of Quality Manager in Agile Development

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Agile projects emphasize on  working software, which is quite different from traditional software. Traditionally, the success of a project is measured by the functional milestone.  (analysis complete, documentation complete, code complete etc). In agile projects, however, working software is the final measurement of project status. At the end of each short iteration, a working product is produced  and available for review. There are several metrics available for agile project. This is important to go through some of them.

Agile Project Metrics:

  • You can use the function points to measure the functionality of the system.
  • Measure the number of tasks completed in a necessary metrics.
  • The total time that is used in a critical metrics.
  • Establishing the lines of codes per developer based on some kind of code quality metrics.
  • Another effective metrics is Running Tested Features (RTF). It quantifies about how much business value has been achieved during the development process. The main advantage of this metrics provides enough time to fix any mistake during the execution of a project before it affects adversely on the project.

Roles of Project Manager:

In agile methodology, this is the responsibility of the whole team to achieve the success of the project. The achievement does not rest only on the project manager alone. In agile project development, the bottom line is that the project manager drives the metrics , the metrics does not drive the manager. I jotted down some basic qualities that a project manager should possesses  and they are:
  • He should be a strong motivator in order to achieve team communication and collaboration.
  • He should focus upon continuous learning strategy of the team members.
  • He should promote feedback because sooner we know something sooner we can improve or  correct the mistake.
  • The main job of the project manager is to remove any obstacle.
  • He should conduct 'agile meeting' periodically.
  • Helps improve the productivity of the team.
  • The biggest benefit of this methodology is that project goal is reported in every day. So the project manager does not need to create a status report.
  • Cost estimation and project scheduling is easily accomplished based on quality project metrics in combination with the active participation of the team members.

What project manager shouldn't do:

  • Quality or project manager doesn't manage the team.
  • They don't assign tasks.
  • Also, they don't make decision for the team

Conclusion:

Agile quality management is primarily about human resource management. The total team spirit is the sum of the team morale of individual member. Agile quality manager has the responsibility to facilitate the team and remove any impediment during the execution of the project.
READ MORE - The Role Of Quality Manager in Agile Development

Wi-Fi-free iPhone officially lands in China

It could be the Year of the iPhone in China, as Apple officially started selling its iconic smartphone in the world's largest mobile market Friday night.
While China saw nothing near the frenzy of the first iPhone launch day here in the U.S., crowds there did honor the tradition of lining up for the phone many hours in advance at several locations. A few hundred people queued up in the rain and cold outside The Place shopping center in Beijing, for example. There, Zhi Xianzhong became the first person to get the iPhone from Apple partner China Unicom after waiting 7 hours and 40 minutes, according to China Daily.
As expected, China Unicom, the country's second largest telecom operator after China Mobile, is selling two versions of the iPhone in China under a three-year deal with Apple. But cost could prove to be a deterrent. Prices range from 4,999 yuan (about US$732) for the 8GB 3G model to 6,999 yuan (about US$1,025) for the 32GB 3GS phone (sans contract).
Consumers can get cheaper, cracked, gray-market iPhone models at local electronics stores or bring them in from other markets. But price isn't the only potential obstacle here. In accordance with Chinese government regulations, the handsets also lack a key feature--Wi-Fi capability--though reports say China Unicom hopes to offer Wi-Fi-enabled iPhones within a few months.
China Unicom is starting off by selling the iPhone in 285 cities. The carrier hopes to sell five million devices in three years, according to Chinese news reports, but the company wouldn't confirm that figure.
READ MORE - Wi-Fi-free iPhone officially lands in China

Google: We're not making Android hardware

Google's Andy Rubin, head of the company's Android development, would like to clear something up: Google is not in the phone-making business.
Don't expect to see Google-developed hardware competing with the Motorola Droid anytime soon.
Last week TheStreet.com reported that Google had plans to sell a Google-developed phone at retail this year, bypassing carriers with its own Android implementation. But Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the notion that the company would "compete with its customers" by releasing its own phone.
"We're not making hardware," Rubin said. "We're enabling other people to build hardware."
Now, Google has played a role in designing phones that have emerged with Android, such as the G1. For example, Google advocated the infamous hinge design on the G1 based on its desire to offer a phone with a five-row keyboard, Rubin said. That design was not popular with reviewers, however, and Rubin joked that perhaps that's why Google shouldn't make its own hardware.
But pushing for a design feature is a far cry from designing an entire phone, contracting with a manufacturing partner to build it, and working the distribution channels to get it to market. That would be "a fundamental shift" in Google's business model, Rubin said, and one the company does not seem prepared to make at this time.
Rumors of a so-called "Gphone" date back years, long before Google formally announced Android in November 2007. But Google's strategy to date has been a somewhat traditional volume licensing play, working with hardware and carrier partners to spread Android far and wide as the mobile operating system of choice, rather than following Apple's lead with a complete hardware and software design like the iPhone.
Almost two years later, the software is rounding into form with the release of several phones this year along with the pending release of the Motorola Droid, which runs Android 2.0 on Verizon's network.
READ MORE - Google: We're not making Android hardware

Opera: Mini leads cross-platform charge

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software says it wants to be platform agnostic and enable all devices to communicate with one another.
"Opera started off as a PC browser developer but we [later] decided to move our browser core to other devices as well," James Wei, Opera's Asia-Pacific president, said Monday during a meeting with local media. "Opera wants to be platform independent."
The company, he said, has since extended the reach of its browser to devices such as mobile phones, games devices, in-flight entertainment systems and television.
According to Wei, the mobile platform is leading the way, where over 35.6 million people used Opera Mini in September 2009, up 11.5 percent from the previous month and 150 percent the year before.
Asked whether Opera will be focusing mainly on the mobile platform, he said the browser was built for desktops, too.
"Opera was not a latecomer to the browser scene but Internet Explorer (IE) became more popular due to Microsoft Windows," he added, noting that Microsoft ships its Web browser together with their Windows operating system.
"We've always been fighting with Microsoft [regarding the browser-OS bundle], but the good news [is that] people in Europe now get to choose which [PC] browser they want," said Wei.
The European Commission concluded in January that Microsoft was violating antitrust laws by not including other browsers along with Windows operating systems. In the next five years, PC users in Europe running IE as their default browser will receive a ballot screen that allows them to download and install other browsers.
Opera's communications manager Peko Wong also noted that Opera's market share in countries such as Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, "exceeds Microsoft's IE". She explained that most users in these markets have slow network connection and are on dial-up connection. For them, Opera presents an easier download because the browser is supported by Opera Turbo, a compression engine that compresses data to speed up data transfer and reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded, Wong said.
Executives here also reiterated the company's vision of the next Internet wave, Web 3.0, where "devices can start talking to each other". Key to its plans is a new browser-based collaboration service and platform the company calls, Opera Unite, which that turns the device into a Web server. This, the company said, will enable users to access and share files and data, including images and music, without the need for "third-party servers"
READ MORE - Opera: Mini leads cross-platform charge

Freescale aims Android at embedded kit

Freescale Semiconductor has begun taking orders for a Power Architecture development platform for Android-based products, opening a new category of embedded devices to Google's open-source mobile operating system.
Freescale's MPC8536-ADK product combines the company's MPC8536E PowerQUICC III processor with a Power Architecture implementation of the Android OS developed by Mentor Graphics, Freescale said on Tuesday.
The port was begun by Linux development firm Embedded Alley, which was acquired by Mentor in July. Power Architecture is a broad term describing similar Risc architectures used in chips from IBM, Freescale, Tundra and others, overseen by the Power.org governing body.
According to Freescale, the port means Android can be used to run new types of embedded devices. The MPC8536E PowerQUICC III is an embedded chip aimed at the industrial, networking, storage and media equipment markets.
Possible products that can be addressed by the new development platform include multifunction printers, industrial equipment and touchscreen interfaces for system controls, the company said.
READ MORE - Freescale aims Android at embedded kit

S'pore workers job-hunting, IT professionals in high demand

Despite the depressed market conditions and increased unemployment rates in Singapore, IT talent is still hard to come by, according to an employment trends survey by human resource (HR) and recruitment firm, Randstad.
This comes as Singapore's Ministry of Manpower's (MoM) latest preliminary statistics show unemployment rose to 3.4 percent in the third quarter of 2009.
According to the Randstad survey, more than half, or 55 percent, of employers believe that there is still a shortage of talent available to them in their industries.
Karin Clarke, Randstad's regional director, said focusing on the unemployment rate "can be misleading".
"While the overall unemployment rate may be near a four-year high, some sectors continue to find it tough to find talent, with employers in IT and financial services, in particular, looking to hire and finding it hard to secure the people they want," Clarke said in a statement.
However, the MoM report also showed that the number of people getting employed increased by 15,400, with significant increases in the services and construction industries. Commenting on the report, Clarke said these figures suggest that many Singaporeans who wanted to change their jobs over the last year "opted for job security and held back".
But with dissatisfaction at their workplace and "positive indicators pointing toward a gradual recovery" as push factors, employers might find it difficult to retain workers.
"As the recovery gathers pace, [employers] will need to focus on ensuring staff are happy, motivated and receiving competitive remuneration and benefits, to prevent them looking for new jobs," said Clarke.
READ MORE - S'pore workers job-hunting, IT professionals in high demand

Smaller APAC telcos innovate to compete

Tier two and three mobile operators in the Asia-Pacific region are banking on innovative services to grow their subscriber base, according to an industry player, who says Singapore operators can do more in this respect.
Tan Choon Seng, Asia-Pacific vice president of sales and co-head at Convergys Singapore, told ZDNet Asia in an interview smaller telcos in the region have been quicker to implement new customer services to stay competitive.
Referring to Indonesia's PT Hutchison as an example, Tan said the operator has demonstrated agility in offering subscribers different services compared to competitors. For example, it offers loyalty schemes to new customers "before they even [activate] their SIM cards". The objective is to upgrade customers in pre-paid segments into longer term subscribers, he said. Convergys is an operations support systems/business support systems (OSS/BSS) provider.
As a result of such efforts, Hutchison's subscriber base jumped from 200 to 7 million within two years after the Indonesian arm of Hutchison Telecom was set up, he said. "Smaller operators need to act and think differently," Tan said.
Singapore's operators, on the other hand, as players in a saturated developed market, are not driven by such aggressive growth aspirations, he said, but noted the need for these companies to still consider new services to offer.
"Operators here can do a better job" of implementing more innovative tools, such as consolidated billing, he added. While such features may "seem minor", they offer a way to differentiate from the competition and the impact on the operator's business is cumulative, Tan said.
Jean-Herve Jenn, executive vice president of client development at Convergys, added that service staples such as product catalogs, still require a refresh to keep up with new trends. Triple-play operators, in particular, need the ability to offer more "sophisticated bundles", compared to operators offering "single products", he said.
Operators can also find new ways to slice up the market and provide more targeted offers, said Jenn. The "rudimentary" segmentation of enterprise and consumer customer bases could be further partitioned by age, he said. This, for instance, will allow service providers to push specific bundles to elderly consumers requiring home-surveillance products, creating more market opportunity, he added.
For Convergys, today, the market potential is in the migration from voice to data revenues, said Jenn. Operators looking to ride the data wave are seeking new data billing modules to augment their backend systems, he said.
ARPU balancing act
But, for operators, it is not simply a matter of tacking new services. Telcos face the dilemma of wanting to stay ahead of the game while predicting what users want, said Robert Lento, Convergys' president of information management.
The telco industry is one where it is "difficult to see a clear path forward", Lento said, adding that operators have to invest in introducing new value-added services "because you assume the competition will", while at the same time, hope the investment will pay off.
He said a new bundled service may lower average revenue per user (ARPU), but serve to attract more subscribers overall. Carriers have to see if the drop in ARPU can be justified by the growth in subscribers--a task more daunting in saturated markets that have little room to grow, he explained. He noted that operators in mature markets are typically more cautious, compared to their peers in emerging markets.
"The profitability of a carrier in the United States may not be any greater than the profitability of a carrier in Indonesia. They just find different ways to do business," he said.


READ MORE - Smaller APAC telcos innovate to compete