Cisco tries to free up internet traffic jam
There is nothing more infuriating than a slow mobile connection. With people bringing their own devices to workand everywhere else, wireless networks will be working hard to accommodate the mobile traffic flood.
Here’s where Cisco comes in: On Tuesday, it unveiled a wireless access point called the Aironet 3600 Series, which can increase the speed of connection by up to 30 percent on any kind of mobile device no matter how weak or strong the network is.
According to Cisco, it is the first company to offer access points with four antennas and three spatial streams. What does it mean? Essentially more people have more range to use their devices, even if there is more traffic.
The device make changing lanes on the wireless freeway easier so your device can find a faster lane and congestion never gets very dense.
But it isn’t cheap–$1,495 for an internal Aironet 3600 and $1,595 for an outdoor one. .
Cisco said customers would likely be health-care providers, banks, hotels, universities or airports. It said the University of South Florida, the country’s 9th largest university, is a already customer as is Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt. Cisco has hawking wireless access points for a while and between 2000 and the end of October, it has sold some 11.7 million units. Cisco likes to point out that is more than the 10.4 million albums Britney Spears has sold in that time. Photo: Reuters
Tech wrap: Adobe scraps Flash for mobile browsers
Score a point for Apple. Software maker Adobe scrapped its Flash Player for mobile devices after a mutli-year battle with Apple over the merits of the technology, which is used to view videos and play games on the Web. Take a look back at the legendary tech spat in this blow-by-blow timeline that stretches back to January 2007 when Apple launched its iPhone with a browser that was not compatible with Adobe’s Flash player. The company said in a blog post it plans to focus its future mobile browsing efforts on HTML5, a competing technology that is now universally supported on all major mobile devices.
Online business reviews site Yelp has hired bankers to lead an intitial public offering that could value the company at up to $2 billion, several people familiar with the matter told DealBook’s Evelyn M. Rusli. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup will participate in the offering, which is expected in the first quarter of next year, one of the sources said.
Cisco Systems singaled a turnaround on Wednesday when it raised its forecast revenue and earnings above Wall Street expectations as demand from government and enterprises for its network equipment remained resilient despite global economic troubles. Earlier, the company reported quarterly earnings per share that beat estimates, signaling that efforts to revive growth are beginning to pay off.
Delays were being reported by some BlackBerry customers on Wednesday, but Research in Motion said it’s not experiencing problems on the scale of an outage last month that knocked out service for four days. “There is no system-wide outage,” a company spokesman told Reuters, adding that the delays being reported are limited to Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa.
Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt reassured its Android partners embroiled in lawsuits that it will continue to support them in their disputes with other firms. That support takes the form of information sharing, industry expertise and access to Google’s patents for licensing and legal purposes, Schmidt said during a visit to Tapei on Wednesday.
Reuters tech correspondent Bill Rigby strolls the streets in Seattle’s South Lake Union district, an emerging technology hub that calls to mind Silicon Valley to the south. In addition to long-time tenant Amazon.com, the neighbourhood has seen a rush of newercomers setting up shop, including cloud computing firm Salesforce.com and online gaming company Zynga. Facebook also recently set up its new Seattle offices nearby.
(This post’s original headline was changed to make it clearer)
Tech wrap: Cisco beats “low bar”
Cisco Systems Inc’s quarterly results edged past Wall Street’s scaled-back expectations as IT spending held up despite fears of a severe pullback, buoying its shares in extended trading. The world’s largest networking equipment maker reported sales of $11.2 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter, surpassing expectations for under $11 billion.
“They beat a low bar. A lot of it is coming from cost cutting, which we anticipated. In that sense it’s a relief,” Joanna Makris of Mizuho Securities USA told Reuters.
Groupon Inc’s plans for an initial public offering have been dented by the stock market slump and new financial disclosures that suggest the daily deal company’s business is slowing in North America, analysts said on Wednesday.
Facebook has begun closing the accounts of California prison inmates after a convicted child molester viewed the pages of his victim from behind bars, authorities and the social networking site said.
Now Reuters.com columnist Mitch Lipka wonders if Facebook can help its 750 million citizens, like Elisa Zuritsky, protect themselves from hackers?
A German court has temporarily barred Samsung Electronics from selling its flagship Galaxy tablet in most of the European Union in a significant victory for market leader Apple Inc.
In other Apple news, media companies are taking different routes in addressing new iTunes subscription rules announced a couple months ago. AllThingsDigital’s Peter Kafka says big print publishers like the New York Times are complying with the new rules and handing over 30 percent of their subscription revenues “in order to reach the 225 million iTunes accounts Apple controls.”
Tech wrap: Is Groupon’s IPO window closing?
As the Nasdaq Composite index continued its week-long tailspin, tech investors and analysts are wondering what the stock plunge could mean for the pending IPOs of companies like Groupon and Zynga.
The coming week, which has about a dozen IPOs scheduled to price, will be a good test of the severity of the selloff, according to Nick Einhorn, an analyst at Connecticut-based IPO research house Renaissance Capital. “Less mature, less profitable companies could have a tougher time going public,” Einhorn told Reuters.
If there was to be another recession, writes Investor Place’s Tom Taulli, “the IPO market will freeze up. It will mostly be only standout companies – such as Zynga and Facebook – that will get traction. A company like Groupon, which has substantial losses, may have to delay its offering or cut the valuation.”
Groupon, which more than doubled subscribers this year to 115 million, plans to abandon the use of a controversial financial measure it once touted as a good indicator of performance, two sources with knowledge of the situation said.
Hackers competing at the world’s largest hacking convention in Las Vegas found it ridiculously easy in some cases to trick employees at some of the largest U.S. companies to reveal information that can be used in planning cyber attacks against them.
Will it be more bad news for Cisco Systems? The IT giant reports its quarterly results on Wednesday and investors expect a weak outlook after Juniper Networks and Brocade Communications Systems slashed their forecasts.
Almost half the workers in Verizon Communications’ wireline telecommunications business went on strike on Sunday as negotiations for a new labor contract failed.
The more I read about Groupon’s shady accounting practices, the bleaker their future seems. I mean, their numbers (which are NOT taking in account the percentage Groupon is to pay merchants) don’t add up. How can I trust a business that relies so much on long financial float times?
On the other end of the spectrum is BigTip, whose business model is a great deal sturdier. Plus, they don’t — pardon my French — screw over small merchants the way Groupon does. They have powerful merchant tools that allow business owners to fully customize the deals. When merchants win, consumers win, too. Whether you are a business or just someone who loves to save with coupons, BigTip is the way to go.
Tech wrap: Yahoo battle with Alibaba heats up
Yahoo’s battle with Alibaba intensified as they issued contradictory statements over the Chinese company’s transfer of a major Internet asset to its CEO. Analysts said the handover of Alipay, an online e-commerce payment system, to Alibaba CEO Jack Ma has reduced the value of Yahoo’s 43 percent Alibaba stake. Yahoo said it had been blindsided by the deal, while Alibaba countered that Yahoo was aware of the transaction by virtue of having a board seat, now held by former Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang, who is also a Yahoo director.
PR agency Burson-Marsteller, in the spotlight after it was revealed that Facebook had hired the firm to run a smear campaign against Google, said it will give the employees in charge of the operation extra training instead of firing them, The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons writes.
Cisco Systems is expected to cut thousands of jobs in possibly its worst-ever round of layoffs to meet Chief Executive John Chambers’ goal of slashing costs by $1 billion. Four analysts contacted by Reuters estimated the world’s largest maker of network equipment will eliminate up to 4,000 jobs in coming months, with the average forecast at 3,000. That would represent 4 percent of Cisco’s 73,000 permanent workers. It also has an undisclosed number of temporary contractors.
A British judge banned Twitter users from identifying a brain-damaged woman in one of the first attempts to prevent the messaging website from revealing sensitive information. Lawyers say leaks of information protected by a British injunction on U.S.-based Twitter show that court orders to gag the press are unsustainable.
Celebrities who bombard fans with Twitter updates are likely to have shorter careers than those who maintain an aura of mystique, according to a survey. Easy access to stars through social networking websites has made them less appealing and increases the likelihood of followers getting bored, music consumer research by publishers Bauer Media said.
Travelers in the western U.S. should not rely solely on technology such as GPS for navigation, authorities said, after a Canadian couple were lost in the Nevada wilderness for 48 days. Sheriff’s offices in remote, high-elevation parts of Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming report the past two years have brought a rise in the number of GPS-guided travelers driving off marked and paved highways and into trouble.
Tech wrap: HTC trumps Nokia
HTC launched the HTC Sensation, offering an entire library of movie and TV shows via a wide screen, with a fast 1.2GHz processor. While Nokia, which dumped its once-dominant Symbian software earlier this year after falling behind Apple in the high-end handset market, launched two new models improved with better text input, faster Internet browsing and a refreshed Ovi Maps application, in a bid to stem customer defections while it works on a new offering.
“The new HTC Sensation phone reflects the mountain Nokia needs to climb to close the hardware and software gap with its rivals,” said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight. “On the day Nokia unveils the 600Mhz X7 ‘entertainment phone’ it has been trumped by HTC’s Sensation which has a dual-core 1.2Ghz processor”.
Cisco Systems will dump its Flip video camera division, retiring the popular brand rather than selling it in a first step toward reviving a company CEO John Chambers admits has lost its way. The decision to nix Flip, along with a planned folding of its Umi home videoconference business into the more successful TelePresence arm, underscores Chambers’ need to whittle down a money-losing consumer division that also includes Scientific Atlanta set-top boxes and Linksys home routers. Among the steps announced, Cisco plans to combine its lackluster Umi service with its TelePresence system for corporate clients. The company will also change the way it manufactures its Linksys line of networking equipment.
As smartphones gain functionality like video recording and GPS, what do you no longer see a need for?
The Huffington Post unfairly pocketed more than $100 million from its unpaid bloggers when AOL Inc bought the influential news website in February, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday. Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the website, sold it to AOL for $315 million.
VeriFone Systems, the largest U.S. maker of payment terminals, said it expects to ship over 1 million near-field communication (NFC)-enabled systems this year, underlining growing momentum for a technology that allows shoppers to buy with a wave of a smartphone. The number of mobile payment users is expected to top 340 million in 2014, ringing up $245 billion worth of transactions, according to research firm Gartner.
Poll: After Cisco’s Flip, what’s next for the smartphone serial killers?
The iPhone and its rivals claimed another scalp in the consumer electronics industry this morning when Cisco announced it was powering down its Flip video camera business. The market for dedicated digital video recorders has looked precarious even since Apple added video to the iPhone with the launch of the 3GS model in June 2009, just three months after Cisco announced the Flip acquisition. Since then, the ever-improving functionality of the iPhone and Android devices have steadily eroded demand for still cameras, GPS devices and a host of other gadgets. Which ones have you stopped using?
My phone is so smart, I no longer see the need for a separate:
- Stills camera
- Video camera
- Email device
- GPS
- MP3 player
- E-book reader
- Portable game player
- Kitchen timer
- Life partner
My camera, GPS, MP3 player, and Nook are paid for and have no monthly fees. Until a [Verizon] smartphone can do all that without having to shell out $30/mo extra for the “privilege”, it ain’t smart enough for me.
Tech wrap: Cisco ripe for activist assault?
In a remarkably candid memo to employees, Cisco chief John Chambers admitted that the networking giant had been slow to make decisions, fallen down on execution, lacked discipline in an aggressive expansion and will need to change to restore its credibility. He warned staff to prepare for a number of unspecified changes in the next few weeks and coming fiscal year, starting in August.
Cisco’s poor performance, valuable assets, cash pile and years of capital misallocation provide the kindling to spark long-suffering shareholders into an uprising, writes Rob Cox.
Tens of millions of customers and employees of banks Citigroup and Capital One, retailers Walgreens, Best Buy and Target, and hotel chains Hilton and Marriott are at risk of “spear-phishing” attacks if they respond to camouflaged emails seeking their credit card numbers or other information, after hackers stole their email addresses in what may become one of the biggest data breaches ever, security experts warned. Using emails that appear to come from a trustworthy source to steal data — is sometimes known “spear-phishing” because such emails are more focused than traditional “phishing” emails.
President Obama will visit Facebook’s headquarters on April 20 and hold a town hall forum on the economy, the White House said. The move comes as Facebook has been deepening its ties in Washington, writes the WSJ’s Geoffrey Fowler. Under pressure over privacy issues, Facebook has been building up its policy team, Fowler adds. Last summer, Facebook hired former White House National Economic Council chief of staff Marne Levine as a new vice president of global public policy.
The mobile app Fring is expanding its video calling feature to include free group calls for the iPhone and Android platforms, writes Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove. The feature isn’t ready yet but will be tested on a limited group of users.
from Summit Notebook:
Cisco home TelePresence: online school heaven?
You can just hear the University of Phoenix licking its chops right now.
Cisco expects to have its home TelePresence system -- a living room version of what you have seen in those quirky Ellen Page commercials (see below) -- by the holiday season at around $500 (plus some kind of monthly service fee), Cisco Executive Vice President Rob Lloyd said on Thursday at the Reuters Global Technology Summit. He and some other Cisco employees are about to start a round of internal testing.
The system will let two users have a conversation with video. Ok, yes, Skype does that every day over garden variety laptops. But TelePresence, as described by Lloyd, uses your high speed Internet link, and your own flat-screen TV, to deliver crisp video, and overcome that weird latency issue where you and your conversation partner both talk at the same time, and both stop to say "no...you go."
The key benefit, he says, is that it works over your home TV and brings the myriad tools of the Internet to your conversation. So if you are talking about the family tree, you can bring up photo apps during the chat, or video or other useful information. And for school... its priceless.
When you get the latency too high -- I say something, you say something, two seconds later you stop, and I stop and we both stop. We have all been there. You get the latency nailed down, and then you get applications integrated into that -- because just talking to someone is interesting, but you probably want to have that integration into a marketplace when you can get service that can take advantage of that. So you want some small business services, some educational capabilities, you want to take some MBA classes from home, connected to a university that is offering some extension services -- not on a website, but on a consumer TelePresence - it is going to happen.
So you will get education just transforming itself. A whole bunch of universities are going to love us.
So, would you buy this Web-videochat-on-steroids system?
From science fiction to desktop for telepresence
Telepresence was science fiction in the 50s, a Disneyland attraction in the 60s, and eventually morphed into costly corporate “telepresence rooms” and other high-end systems, which relied on expensive dedicated communications lines.
Vidyo, a start-up company in New Jersey, says it has invented the next generation of teleconferencing that is cheaper and more portable, in part by using the Web to transmit, getting around the need for special communications lines and instead using the Web. It says that it will make teleconferencing available in offices, homes and hotels – and not just in boardrooms.
“Our product is a breakthrough to democratize telepresence and make it more affordable and portable,” said Ofer Shapiro, chief executive of Vidyo. Shapiro knows the earlier generation. He led the design team at Radvision in the 1990s that designed a key piece of equipment called a Multipoint Control Unit, or MCU, still in use today. Shapiro thinks it obsolete.
Most teleconferencing offered today by such dominant players as Tandberg and Polycom, depends on MCUs, which are refrigerator-sized appliances that take television pictures from individual feeds, re-digest them and then put them together as Hollywood Square style pictures on a single screen.
The companies are players in a market projected to explode. Research firm Gartner says Teleconferencing among corporate users is projected to increase nearly 30-fold by 2015, to 200 million from 7 million last year.
Recently Cisco bid to buy market leader Tandberg for $3.4 billion while Logitech, the world’s top computer mouse maker, is to buy privately held video conferencing group LifeSize Communications for $405 million.
Scotty … beam me up!
I am a big fan of Vidyo. Based on video quality there is no match in market. I am using it with professional hardware (http://www.iris2iris.com/en-UK/home.htm ). Perfect combination for business use.
