Archive for October, 2010

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Google TV isn’t ready for prime time

October 31st, 2010
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Google designed its Google TV software to bring the diversity of Web video to your TV without the complexity of the personal computer.

But so far, as tested on Logitech’s $299.99 Revue, it inflicts too much of the latter while, through no fault of Google’s, falling short on the former.

The Revue and other devices running Google’s software (four Sony HDTVs and one Sony Blu-ray player ) stand apart from such cheaper, simpler Web-media receivers as the Apple TV and Roku box es recently reviewed here. Instead of only providing access to selected video sites through a collection of applications, the Revue includes a standard Web browser that should handle any site. And instead of ignoring your current cable or satellite-TV service, Google TV tries to provide a front end for that, too.

In short, Google TV has a difficult job to do. And it does it poorly.

I tested the Revue against four configurations in four homes: a Verizon Fios-issued Motorola high-definition digital video recorder, a TiVo HD and a Cisco high-def DVR hooked up to separate Comcast subscriptions, and a Toshiba DVD recorder connected to an over-the-air antenna.

The Revue didn’t detect any of those devices automatically, instead requiring a slower manual configuration (in some cases, prolonged by a failure to see a wireless network that I could fix only with a reboot). Then it didn’t list the right TV providers in each Zip code (memo to whoever provided Google’s database: Cox and RCN don’t offer service in Arlington). Then its list of channels often failed to match those available on each set, after which it offered no way to filter out such irrelevancies as standard-definition versions of HD channels on Comcast or the Baltimore-area stations listed on the Toshiba.

The only pleasant surprise: Although Logitech bundles an “IR blaster” cable to place in front of a tuner or DVR to send commands to its remote-control sensor, in most cases its built-in IR transmitter handled the job.

Post-setup, Google TV’s clean onscreen home page owed nothing to the cluttered interface of the average cable or satellite service. You can browse through what’s on, either channel by channel or through categories (“Sports,” “Food and leisure,” “Reality and game shows” and so on), but the whole point of Google TV is to search first. That’s where its simple interface, combined with the Revue’s keyboard-equipped remote, succeed brilliantly.

A Google TV search brings up both TV and Web video, showing, for example, that you can watch a movie on a premium channel Thursday or in a few seconds through Amazon’s video-on-demand service (although the latter rents only standard-definition fare on Google TV for now).

But too many TV tasks required switching back to the old and busted DVR interface you’d presumably buy Google TV to escape.

For example, while I could pause or record live TV in the Fios and TiVo tests without leaving Google TV’s environment, I had to pick up the Comcast DVR’s remote to record anything on that setup.

Google TV’s searches did not list content available on Verizon and Comcast’s own video-on-demand services or recordings saved on each DVR. Nor could it even schedule a future recording on any of these systems, instead lamely suggesting that I press the remote’s Guide button to switch to the DVR’s interface and find the program there.

The only way to get those essential features is to subscribe to Dish Network, thanks to the satellite service’s extra support for Google TV on some DVR models.

A different sort of disappointment awaits when you turn to Web content. The Revue’s browser is based on Google’s Chrome and includes Adobe’s Flash player, but the Revue’s processor can’t keep up with some sites. At Major League Baseball’s mlb.com site, the Gameday animation visibly lagged behind.

Some video sites outright block Google TV. Hulu shuts it out, saying in a message that it plans to bring its $9.99/month Hulu Plus service to Google TV’s Chrome-based browser, never mind that Hulu is free in Chrome itself.

ABC and CBS blocked Google TV as well, even when I only tried to watchpromotional clips at their sites; NBC denied the Revue at times aswell. Other network sites passed on this self-defeating game. Foxdid not reject Google TV, nor did the sites of CW, PBS and ComedyCentral. Even ESPN’s ESPN3.com worked.

The networks are playing a dangerous game here. If it’s rightly regarded as idiotic and unfair to block people from watching programs because they own the “wrong” make of TV, why should software be any different?

The Revue’s own software selection featured only a thin lineup of apps: CNBC, the NBA, Pandora, Napster, a Google podcast collector and a painfully basic media-playback tool from Logitech that can show content from a USB flash drive plugged into the Revue or a computer that supports “DLNA” sharing.

Future software updates – for example, the promised addition of access to Google’s Android market – will hopefully add to that toolkit and remedy other oversights, such as Google TV’s inability to present YouTube consistently in Google’s new, simplified LeanBack interface or the bizarre lack of a search function (of all the things for Google to forget!) in Google TV’s online help.

These issues aren’t all Google’s fault. The lack of consistent, supported standards across the cable and satellite-TV industries has defeated many lesser products. But they are Google’s problem. Don’t make it yours, too.

Source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/29/AR2010102905289.html?hpid=news-col-blog

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Microsoft’s phones: A call too late

October 31st, 2010
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Ever seen a Microsoft Zune HD? It’s a lovely little device for watching movies, listening to music and playing games. Slim, sleek, sophisticated — and irrelevant. That’s because the Zune HD was released two years after the debut of Apple’s iPod Touch. By the time it joined the battle, the war was already lost.

In technology, being late can be as disastrous as being wrong. And that’s the battle Microsoft is now fighting with the release of Windows Phone 7, its new smartphone operating system. The good news is that the software is generally a winner: Fun, easy to use and not just another iPhone wannabe. The bad news is that the good news may not matter.

As devastating as the iPhone’s arrival proved, Microsoft’s true mortal threat comes from Google’s Android software, which in little more than a year has skyrocketed. Google says it is now activating more than 200,000 new Android devices a day. While Google gives its software to manufacturers, Microsoft charges for its.

CEO Steve Ballmer’s previous attempts to stem the Android-iPhone tide resulted in embarrassment upon embarrassment, including a roundly panned update of Microsoft’s previous mobile operating system in 2009 and, earlier this year, the dismal failure of its Kin line, two phones built around social networking that were killed off less than two months after they were introduced.

In other words, the stakes could hardly be higher. And because of that, Microsoft – which is exerting a great deal of control over manufacturers in terms of the look and feel of the new Windows Phone 7 handsets – deserves a lot of credit for being willing to do a few things that go against the prevailing smartphone norm.

‘Live tiles’
The difference is apparent from the moment you power up a Windows Phone. Instead of screen after screen of application icons, as with the iPhone and Android phones, you’re presented with a set of colourful rectangles Microsoft calls ‘live tiles’. Some of these provide information and summon basic functions, like the phone tile that tells you how many calls you’ve missed and brings up the dial pad; some are links to programs, such as a mobile version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Browser; and some are entry points for what Windows Phone 7 calls ‘hubs’.

To the extent that Windows Phone 7 has a Big Idea, hubs is it. These are collections of programs, information and functions organised around a single theme. There are six of them: People, Pictures, Music and Video, Marketplace, Microsoft Office and Games. Microsoft has a good idea here, but it has to do much more to make its phones friendlier to the things I want to use on it, not what it and its partners want me to use.

That, in fact, is my biggest complaint about Windows Phone 7: Too much about it seems dictated by business considerations rather than user experience. For instance, the two AT&T phones I tested – the HTC Surround and the Samsung Focus – both included a fat first-screen tile touting AT&T’s U-verse television service. Office, which includes limited-function productivity software, seems to be a hub because, well, Microsoft owns Microsoft Office.

Playing catch-up
Because Windows Phone 7 is, essentially, an entirely new smartphone platform, it will take a while before we have any sense of whether and how quickly third-party developers write apps for it (the new Marketplace hub is still in the process of being populated.) Certainly Microsoft, with its deep pockets, will do all it can to provide inducements, but it’s safe to say that it will lag far behind the iPhone, Android devices and even Research In Motion’s BlackBerry for a long time to come.

Similarly, Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do in terms of basic functionality. Among other things, Windows Phone 7 doesn’t yet offer a visual listing of voicemail messages, as Android phones and iPhones do, nor does is it equipped to share its Internet connection with other devices.

Source:http://sify.com/finance/microsoft-s-phones-a-call-too-late-news-technology-klbaF0ciaba.html

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Top software and programming stock gainers (MSFT, SWI, VRSN)

October 31st, 2010
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Microsoft Corporation added 1.46% to $26.67. This week, the company said its quarterly net income rose to $5.4 billion, or 62 cents a share, from $3.6 billion, or 40 cents a share, in the same period last year. The company said revenue for the period ended in September rose 25% to $16.2 billion.

Analysts polled by FactSet Research had expected Microsoft to report first-quarter earnings of 55 cents a share and $15.8 billion in revenue.

The stock went down more than 13% year-to-date.

SolarWinds, Inc. went up 0.95% to $18.15. The company reported results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2010. The company reported record total revenue for the third quarter of 2010 of $41.2 million, a 27% increase over total revenue in the third quarter of 2009.

License revenue was $20.9 million in the third quarter of 2010, representing an 18% increase over license revenue in the third quarter of 2009.

Over the past 52-week, the stock had traded within the range of $12.10-$24.95. At Friday`s closing market price, the market capitalization of the company stood at $1.25 billion.

Verisign, Inc. rose 3.89% and closed at $34.75. This week, the company reported a third-quarter profit of $784.9 million, or $4.48 a share, compared with a profit of $53.6 million, or 28 cents a share. Revenue was $172.6 million, up from $156.8 million.

Analysts had expected the company to report earnings of 27 cents a share, on revenue of $172.6 million, according to a consensus survey by FactSet Research.

The stock made its fresh 52-week high of $35.50.

Source:http://stockmister.com/201010312217/earnings-updates/top-software-and-programming-stock-gainers-msft-swi-vrsn/

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Cranes software plans Rs 430 cr debt rejig, to infuse Rs 300 crore

October 31st, 2010
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Cranes Software, a publicly-held software products company in the engineering and analytics space, is in the process of restructuring debt to the tune of Rs 430 crore.

Towards this end, the Bangalore-based company is planning to infuse Rs 300 crore into the company, partly through preferential allotment of shares as well as other means like private placement, GDR issue as well as roping in strategic investors into its subsidiaries.

Cranes will raise Rs 150 crore via preferential allotment of shares, Cranes Software managing director Asif Khader said. “We will take a decision on the mode of raising the remaining Rs 150 crore in a few days,” Khader said. The company’s stock has fallen 82 per cent in the past 12 months.

Industry sources indicated that Cranes may look to raise the remaining Rs 150 crore by roping in strategic partners at the vertical or enterprise level. The company is looking to settle at least Rs 100 crore in short-term debt from the fresh infusion.

Cranes Software has been leveraged over three times under debt of Rs 630 crore, including foreign currency convertible bonds worth Rs 200 crore, on which the company has a discounted buyback option by March 2011. Excluding this, the debt position was at around Rs 430 crore of which about Rs 180 crore was short-term debt.

The company has so far restructured Rs 300 crore into long-term debt.

Source:http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/cranes-software-plans-rs-430-cr-debt-rejig-infuse-rs-300-crore-706

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Fraud-busting firm’s software hopes

October 31st, 2010
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A Wellington start-up company claims to have made a breakthrough with a software product that could help tackle the country’s growing fraud problem.

Consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers last year found that New Zealand had the eighth-highest level of reported fraud based on a survey of 3000 businesses in 54 countries.

Aptelisense, a company created by former Metropolitan Police and Barclays Bank worker Steve Hutchins, has developed a Windows Server product that is designed to detect fraud as it is attempted.

The software monitors the eight most common computer databases, sending a series of escalating email alerts if it detects activities that break rules set by businesses to monitor for potentially suspicious activity.

Businesses could set a rule to send an alert, for example, if different invoices were raised that shared a common payee account, or an account password was changed outside working hours.

“The rules can be as complicated or as simple as you want,” Mr Hutchins said.

“Any field in data can be validated between values, or across databases.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers forensic services expert Alex Tan said New Zealanders might be more honest about acknowledging fraud, but doubted that was the sole reason for New Zealand’s poor showing in its survey.

Some of the blame for the high level of fraud could be attributed to people’s willingness to borrow and sometimes then defraud their way to the “boat, bach and BMW” lifestyle in a relatively low-wage society, he said.

“There are too many million-dollar houses being sold for the number of millionaires in New Zealand. There are too many beach baches worth fortunes being bought by ordinary people and too many $50,000 boats owned by people who don’t have $50,000.”

Mr Tan said his company was seeing a rise in fraud for “need not greed” as people pinched a bit to make ends meet. “The problem is you can’t reverse that. Once good times get better, are they going to stop?”

Charities have not been exempt. Adrian Lawrence Coombe was jailed for two years and eight months in September for stealing nearly $130,000 from diabetes organisations to fund an online gambling addiction.

Another charity, IHC, was defrauded of $590,000 by an employee who created invoices for bogus companies – the type of activity Aptelisense is designed to spot.

Harder to detect using technology was a massive $16.9m fraud of the Otago District Health Board by former chief information officer Michael Swann and fellow offender Kerry Harford.

Aptelisense software will be marketed in New Zealand by Pasis Group, set up by another British expat, John Spain.

Mr Spain said he recognised Aptelisense as a commercially available solution that was similar to multimillion-dollar bespoke systems banks used for their own fraud prevention.

Aptelisense software can be configured so it cannot be overridden without the approval of multiple staff members.

Pasis Group plans to help businesses work out what rules to implement in the software and is talking to potential customers. It sees a market for the software overseas.

Source:http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/4292142/Fraud-busting-firms-software-hopes

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Confusion galore on sale of software

October 31st, 2010
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Recently, the Madras High Court was called upon to adjudicate if computer software provided along with an End User Licence Agreement could be characterised as ‘sale of goods’ or ‘service’. The question before the Court was whether the Parliament has the legislative competence to levy service tax on such transaction.

The position of Software Dealers Association, who filed a writ petition, was that software is ‘goods’ and there is no element of ‘service’. Since the right of possession and effective control is transferred (outright) to the purchaser, such transactions are amenable to VAT alone. On the other hand, the Revenue argued that there is no element of sale where standardized software is supplied as it is merely licensed for limited use. Further, there is no question of absolute ownership of software since the user cannot tamper or modify the software and, more importantly, it does not have the right of commercial exploitation.

Amendment in Constitutional provisions The controversy on dual Indirect tax levy owes its origin to the Constitutional amendment of Article 366 with regard to definition of ’tax on sale of goods’. Prior to the 46th Amendment (of 1982), composite contracts such as works contracts and hire-purchase agreements were not liable to sales tax or VAT as it is understood now. The locus classicus holding the field was the judgement of the Supreme Court in Gannon Dunkerley’s case which specified three primary conditions governing sale of goods – (i) an agreement to transfer title in goods, (ii) supported by consideration, and (iii) an actual transfer of title. In the absence of any one of the three elements, it cannot be construed as sale of goods.
This recommendation of the Law Commission pursuant to the ruling lead to an amendment. The amendment specifically allowed composite contracts viz works contracts, hire-purchase contracts, etc, by legal fiction to be divisible contracts where the sale of goods element can be isolated and subjected to sales tax /VAT. Indian states amended their laws after 82 to levy sales tax /VAT on such transactions.

Source:-http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/confusion-galoresalesoftware/413316/

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Apple Sues Motorola Over Smartphone Software

October 31st, 2010
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Apple has filed a lawsuit against Motorola claiming the rival technology company is violating Apple’s patents on smartphone software. The nine-page complaint follows Motorola asking a judge in Delaware on Oct. 11 to rule that it doesn’t infringe on Apple patents and to rule the patents invalid. It’s the latest chapter in the high-tech tit-for-tat battle between the two.
Bloomberg.com reports that Apple’s suit, filed in Wisconsin Friday, involves three patents linked to the Droid, Devour i1, Charm, Backflip and Cliq. The nine-page complaint lists three Apple patents it says Motorola is violating with its phones and the software applications controlling those devices.

Source:-http://www.wtma.com/rssItem.asp?feedid=114&itemid=29593116

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