Category: Technology

The Chinese smartphone maker Huawei Technologies has beaten one time favorites of Nokia, Research in Motion, Sony and LG Electronics to become the world’s No. 3 behind Apple and Samsung Electronics. The world’s No. 1 and 2 together accounts for 54 percent of the global market share in smartphones. Huawei reportedly make $23 billion sales a year and growing at 3.5 percent per year.

Huawei Technologies was started in 1987 and made telecom gear for phone companies. Only in 2000 that the company start to make cell phones. They entered the smartphone production in 2009. Within short few years they became world’s No. 3 due to competitive pricing and good products. They were able to cut cost by putting Android operating system in their phones rather than trying to invent their own operating system. Their products are capturing the market share in China, Middle East and Africa. They expect to manufacture 60 million smartphones in 2012. They supply phones to Metro PCS and recently signed a contract with AT&T.

The company’s sudden explosion has some governments worried. The Australian government banned them from bidding on a national broadband project. The U.S. Congress is evaluating the security risk they pose to the nation and its ties to Iran.

On June 18, 2012, in Los Angeles, California the Microsoft announced that it is introducing a tablet, the Surface. It will be arriving in October 2012. Software and hardware for the Surface will be made by Microsoft. This is a new dimension for the long standing software company. Now it will compete with its business partners such as Dell, Acer, and Hewlett-Packard, and challenge Apple who is dominating the field.

Until the new Surface, only hardware that Microsoft owned was Xbox, keyboards, and mice. The Surface will weigh 1.5 pounds, 9mm thick, and will run on low-power ARM chips. It will have a built in kick stand and body made of light weight material called vapor-deposited magnesium. The inside of the cover will house a full size keyboard. Few months later a slightly bigger Surface that runs on more powerful Intel chip will follow the first release. This version will support yet to be released Windows 8 and other earlier Windows applications. According to Microsoft pricing will be comparable to similar units available in the market.

Critics say the announcement indicates hardships that Microsoft is facing. Until Surface it has not announced any plans beyond Windows 8 which is due later this year.

For most part Intel is absent from the mobile app world until now. The industry leader in making chips for wireless devices including mobile smartphones and other mobile devices is ARM Holdings. The success of ARM Holding is their high-powered chip architecture that is based on low-power use.

Intel is the world’s biggest chipmaker and the power house for manufacturing chips for PCs. However, until now it failed to adopt its PC architecture to the needs of the low-power mobile devices. But over the next few months, Intel will release its Atom line of low-power chips for tablets and smartphones in the U.S., U.K., France, China, and India. Intel spent over $5 billion to develop fabrication plants to manufacture Atom chips.

Mobile smartphones are going through an explosion worldwide. It is estimated that a billion units will be in use by 2015. Smartphone sales will generate about $150 billion in 2014.

In April, first mobile phones with Intel inside rolled out in India by Lava International. Intel smartphone made by Lenovo and ZTE will be rolled out in China shortly. The France Telecom wireless carrier, Orange, will roll out Intel powered Santa Clara line in France, U.K. and the rest of Europe.

The 4th International Conference and Exhibition, Cloud Slam’12, is slated for May 30 – June 1, 2012 in San Francisco, California. We have no doubt that clouds will play a major role the way we store data in the future.

However, there is very limited effort at the time for globalization of clouds. It is any ones guess who will lead the field. It is anticipated that telecom giants are primed to take the lead. Telecoms such as AT&T, Verizon, BT Global Services and others are in discussions with third- party data centers and public cloud services.

Telecom services see the opportunity that clouds could contribute to their bottom line. They may not want to let it go and would like to keep their hands on any new development. They see the expansion opportunities in retail, software and other business models.

Industry is leading towards what is known as “everything-as-a-service (EaaS). This can be seen in Verizon’s recent efforts.

It is somewhat difficult to read the tea leaves at this early stage. But cloud is here to stay. The global spread of clouds will continue to benefit the customer, enhance the IT services, support new cutting-edge computing and promote affordable businesses.

On January 20, 2012, the New Zealand police arrested German born computer programmer Kim Dotcom (previously Kim Schmitz) along with three other co-workers. At the time of the arrest he was living larger than life. He lived in a $24 million mansion just outside Auckland, New Zealand. Police seized 18 luxury vehicles and froze $9 million worth of accounts. This is not the first time that he got into trouble. In 2000 he was convicted in one of the largest insider trader scheme in Germany.

This time it is copy right infringement which earned him an estimated $175 million a year. U.S. authorities accused him and his colleagues of willfully and repeatedly violating the copyright law and request that he be extradited to U.S. for prosecution. He founded the online storage service Megaupload.

Jury is still out there. Some say this case will injure investors as well as entrepreneurs that predict a bright future for cloud computing. Some even say that the government action is over reaching which will curb the growth of an industry. The recording industry on the other hand acknowledge legitimate businesses like Dropbox and say the threat from piracy cause far more greater damage to the industry due to lost revenue.