Sprint Nextel Corp, which recently said it would spend up to $5 billion on a mobile high-speed wireless standard by 2010, said it had awarded the New York WiMax market to Samsung Electronics Co.
Samsung had previously been awarded the Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Providence, R.I. and Boston markets as part of Sprint’s push to use the mobile WiMax wireless standard.
“Those are very good markets that we’ve given to Samsung,” Barry West, president of Sprint’s high speed wireless unit, told Reuters on Monday after Samsung made the official announcement on the sidelines of the Samsung 4G Forum.
Samsung officials also sounded an upbeat note, with Choi Gee-sung, president of its telecommunications unit, saying the mobile WiMax business could turn profitable within the next 3 to 5 years.
Samsung in a news release separately predicted its handset sales would top 40 million units in the third quarter, after selling a record 37.4 million handsets in the second quarter.
Neither company disclosed financial information regarding the contract. Samsung was awarded lead vendor status, which includes the manufacture and installation of radio access equipment and the supply of chipsets and mobile devices.
Earlier this month, Sprint, the No. 3 U.S. carrier, made its biggest push yet to convince investors of its bet on mobile WiMax technology, saying it would spend heavily on the high-speed wireless network by 2010 and predicting up to $5 billion in revenue a year later.
IBM last week announced that it will license parts of Siemens AG’s OpenScape software to add unified communications capabilities to its Sametime instant messaging and webconferencing software.
The companies did not disclose the value of the deal, which was announced at the VoiceCon conference in San Francisco.
Analysts said the move is an effort by IBM to bring Sametime, part of its Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration suite, up to par with Microsoft Corp.’s Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, which is slated to ship on Oct. 16.
“This sets IBM up to be a more credible player in unified communications,” said Barry Marks, an analyst at IntelliCom Analytics LLC in Union, N.J. “This is something that Sametime needed.”
OpenScape will let Sametime users manage communications across multiple telephone technologies, including cellular and voice over IP. It also will allow users to access calls through most applications, IBM said.
Acer Inc. plans to acquire U.S. computer maker Gateway Inc. for $710 million in a deal that will push the Taiwanese company past China’s Lenovo Group as the world’s third largest vendor of personal computers.
Acer said Monday it is offering to buy Gateway for $1.90 per share in a deal expected to close by December, pending regulatory approvals in Taiwan and the U.S.
The offer price amounts to a premium of 57 percent to Gateway’s Friday closing price of $1.21. Gateway traded at $81.50 in 1999.
The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Gateway and Acer and is subject to standard closing conditions, it said.
The deal will create a multi-branded computer company with over $15 billion in revenues and shipments in excess of 20 million units per year, Acer said in the statement.
‘’This strategic transaction is an important milestone in Acer’s long history,'’ said J.T. Wang, Acer’s chairman, in the statement. ‘’This will be an excellent addition to Acer’s already strong positions in Europe and Asia.'’
Acer President Gianfranco Lanci said the acquisition will allow Acer to implement an ‘’effective multi-brand strategy and cover all the major market segments.'’
The takeover will result in reductions in per unit procurement and component costs, and also create an opportunity for the cross-selling of product portfolios, he added.
Two longtime rivals in computing, IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., plan to cooperate on server technologies, a move that could put pressure on their joint competitor Hewlett-Packard Co.
Sun’s chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, called it a “comprehensive relationship” that “represents a tectonic shift in the market landscape.”
The collaboration announced Thursday will enable Sun’s Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers. Among other things, that means customers that run Sun servers will be able to switch to Big Blue’s hardware without having to rewrite any programs.
At first this will be possible on IBM’s “x” series of servers, which also run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows or the open-source Linux system. But eventually IBM hopes to bring Solaris to the mainframe, the big multitasking machines that have been one of the company’s core profit centers for decades. (One of the biggest bashers of the mainframe as a supposed dinosaur used to be Sun’s former CEO, Scott McNealy.)
IBM has been expanding the kinds of programs that can run on mainframes, to encourage customers to consolidate multiple servers onto these bigger machines as a cost-saving move.
The 46,000 people reportedly infected by ads on job sites may be only a fraction of the victims of an ambitious, multi-stage attack that’s stolen data belonging to several hundred thousand people who posted resumes on Monster.com, a researcher said this weekend.
According to Symantec Corp. security analyst Amado Hidalgo, a new Trojan horse called Infostealer.Monstres by Symantec (and Prg by SecureWorks) has stolen more than 1.6 million records belonging to several hundred thousand people from the job search service Monster.com. That data is then used to target the Monster.com users with credible phishing mail that plants more malware on their machines.
“We are investigating the reports related to this Trojan and will take any necessary steps indicated by that investigation,” Monster.com spokesman Steve Sylven said Sunday in an e-mail.
The personal information filched from Monster.com includes names, e-mail addresses, home address, phone numbers, and resume ID number, said Hidalgo, who traced the data to a remote server used by the attackers to store the stolen information.
By this point, everyone should know that broadband providers always provide “up to” speeds with the connections they sell. By “up to” they usually mean under perfect conditions that you will never, ever see. But just what kinds of speeds should you actually expect? A new study in the UK found that broadband speeds tend to be about a third of the “up to” speed. The worst speeds were about one-eighth of the promoted speed.
As the article linked here notes, is it really any surprise that only 30% of people claim they’re satisfied with their broadband? While it still seems like this should be false advertising, so far various regulatory bodies have said that the “up to” language is perfectly legal, no matter how misleading it may be.
How hard would it be for an ISP to advertise expected speeds? I would imagine it would have happier, more loyal customers who know that the ISP is actually being honest, rather than hyping up speeds that will never be delivered.
The Open Invention Network, an organization created to help take the pressure of patent litigation off Linux developers, has added Google to the ranks of its contributors.
The move is a major progression for the OIN: Google is not only one of the world’s biggest users of open-source software, but it is also the group’s first end-user member. The network’s other members, including IBM and Red Hat, are all vendors selling products based on open-source software.
In announcing the move, Google noted that the company relies heavily on open source and, particularly, on Linux. “Check a Google engineer’s workstation, and you’ll probably find it’s running Linux. Do a search on Google.com, and a Linux server will return your results,” Google open-source programs manager Chris DiBona said in a Monday entry on the official Google blog. Google prizes Linux for its power and flexibility, DiBona said.
“For us, today’s announcement marks the latest development in a long, fruitful relationship with the open-source community.”—Chris DiBona, open-source programs manager, Google
Google’s membership of the group means that it will, like other OIN members, agree to cross-license open source-related patents to other OIN members free of charge. The idea is that member companies can then freely collaborate on open-source projects with less of a burden, in terms of dealing with intellectual-property issues.
With an estimated 60-70% of electrical consumption in large data centers being used to ONLY keeping the systems cool, in order to maintain performance, it’s no wonder that such a huge commitment to power usage has caused I.T. budget monitors to consider joining the “Green” movement.
The extremely air-conditioned computer farms known as data centers are the gas-guzzling jalopies of the technology world. Some require 40 or 50 times more power than comparably sized office space.
So with energy costs high and environmental friendliness making for good public relations, more tech companies are touting ways they are “greening” data centers, which serve up Web pages, swap Internet traffic, and process and store business information.
But it’s a lot easier to put out a news release than to build a data center with a significantly smaller environmental footprint. Even as efficiency improvements are reducing the energy gulped by many kinds of hardware, the industry’s overall electricity consumption could double from 2006 to 2011 as demand grows.
“It’s somewhat analogous to someone who decides to purchase an energy-efficient automobile and says, ‘Gee, I’m using 30% less gasoline with this, that means I can drive 30% more miles than I used to, and still do something for the environment,”‘ said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research. “It’s an interesting philosophical question.”
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the easiest, least inexpensive changes to data center operations — involving tweaks to software, layout and air conditioning — could boost efficiency by 20%.
Rackmount Ranger is so good with computers that he has never had to deal with any problems of jealousy as depicted in these two videos (from JealousComputer.com).
