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  • Biz-News.com “Product of the Year Award 2009”

    2009 is coming to a close, a difficult year for many and an opportunity for others.

    With a recession lurching over world economic growth we have seen some companies that have continued betting on innovation and development and have launched some amazing products into the market.

    Last year Biz-News.com celebrated the “Product of the Year Awards 2008”. Nominations where received from all parts of the globe. First hand users explained their experiences and recommended best practices for the most innovative products out there.

    Honouring those who have fought to make the most of this year, Biz-News.com again wishes to call upon its readers to nominate their favourite product of the year.

    Nominations will begin on November 19th and will close on February 15th 2010. Runner ups will be featured in our editorial and winners will have an exclusive interview complete with user reviews and photographic backup published on Biz-News.com.

    To make your vote on the Product of the Year for 2009 please fill in the following form.

    Product of the Year Winners in 2008

    VoIP.biz-news.com
    – MyGlobalTalk by i2Telecom
    – IPsmarx

    Storage.biz-news.com
    – RestorePoint by Tadasoft

    Smartphone.biz-news.com
    – AmAze

  • Biz-News.com “Product of the Year Award 2009”

    2009 is coming to a close, a difficult year for many and an opportunity for others.

    With a recession lurching over world economic growth we have seen some companies that have continued betting on innovation and development and have launched some amazing products into the market.

    Last year Biz-News.com celebrated the “Product of the Year Awards 2008”. Nominations where received from all parts of the globe. First hand users explained their experiences and recommended best practices for the most innovative products out there.

    Honouring those who have fought to make the most of this year, Biz-News.com again wishes to call upon its readers to nominate their favourite product of the year.

    Nominations will begin on November 19th and will close on February 15th 2010. Runner ups will be featured in our editorial and winners will have an exclusive interview complete with user reviews and photographic backup published on Biz-News.com.

    To make your vote on the Product of the Year for 2009 please fill in the following form.

    Product of the Year Winners in 2008

    VoIP.biz-news.com
    – MyGlobalTalk by i2Telecom
    – IPsmarx

    Storage.biz-news.com
    – RestorePoint by Tadasoft

    Smartphone.biz-news.com
    – AmAze

  • Biz-News.com “Product of the Year Award 2009”

    2009 is coming to a close, a difficult year for many and an opportunity for others.

    With a recession lurching over world economic growth we have seen some companies that have continued betting on innovation and development and have launched some amazing products into the market.

    Last year Biz-News.com celebrated the “Product of the Year Awards 2008”. Nominations where received from all parts of the globe. First hand users explained their experiences and recommended best practices for the most innovative products out there.

    Honouring those who have fought to make the most of this year, Biz-News.com again wishes to call upon its readers to nominate their favourite product of the year.

    Nominations will begin on November 19th and will close on February 15th 2010. Runner ups will be featured in our editorial and winners will have an exclusive interview complete with user reviews and photographic backup published on Biz-News.com.

    To make your vote on the Product of the Year for 2009 please fill in the following form.

    Product of the Year Winners in 2008

    VoIP.biz-news.com
    – MyGlobalTalk by i2Telecom
    – IPsmarx

    Storage.biz-news.com
    – RestorePoint by Tadasoft

    Smartphone.biz-news.com
    – AmAze

  • California Approves New Energy Efficient TV Regulations

    The California Energy Commission approved the U.S. first energy efficiency standards for televisions.

    When these standards are implemented in 2011, new TVs sold in California will be the most energy efficient in the nation, as the commission claims.

    After ten years, the commission estimates the regulations will save $8.1 billion in energy costs and save enough energy to power 864,000 single-family homes.

    The technology neutral standards mandate that new televisions sold in California should consume 33 percent less electricity by 2011 and 49 percent less electricity by 2013. The standards affect only those TVs with a screen size 58 inches or smaller.

    For example, a 42-inch screen would consume 183 watts or less by 2011 and 115 watts or less by 2013. Pacific Gas & Electric estimates that over a decade the standards will reduce CO2 emissions by three million metric tons.

    More than 1,000 TV models on the market today already meet the 2011 standards and cost no more than less efficient sets. The regulations will not affect existing televisions that consumers already own or the TVs currently on retail store shelves.

    Stores will not be prohibited from selling existing stock of older televisions after the standards go into effect.

    California’s per capita electricity use has remained flat for the past 30 years compared to the rest of the nation which has increased its energy consumption by 40 percent.

    "The real winners of these new TV energy efficiencies are California consumers who will be saving billions of dollars and conserving energy while preserving their choice to buy any size or type of TV," said Energy Commission Chairman Karen Douglas.

    California was recently named the nation’s most energy efficient state by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

    The Energy Commission began working on TV energy efficiency standards in January 2007. Since then, the Commission’s staff collaborated with a variety of stakeholders including major statewide utility companies, the environmental community, TV industry groups and retailers, and consumer groups in an open public process to develop these regulations.

  • AMIMON Introduces Wireless HD Modules for the Notebook Market

    AMIMON, a fabless semiconductor company that specialize in HD solutions, announced the availability of its WHDI (Wireless Home Digital Interface) modules which can be embedded into notebook and netbook enabling a wireless HD connection from PCs to HDTVs.

    Earlier introduced, the company’s WHDI allows flat-panel televisions and multimedia projectors to wirelessly interface to all HDTV video sources at a quality equivalent to that achieved with wired interfaces such as component video, DVI and HDMI.

    Newly released modules are available with a mini-PCI form-factor of 50mm*30mm and will also be offered with a standard Display-Mini card form-factor of 44.4mm*26mm based on the interface defined by the PCI SIG which uses Displayport.

    Additionally, these cards are designed for the WHDI standard and are capable of wirelessly delivering full uncompressed 1080p/60Hz HD content throughout the entire home, as the company claims.

    Notebook PCs embedded with the new WHDI modules are expected to be in the market in 2010 offering the ability to connect notebook wirelessly to any WHDI-enabled HDTV or, through an external WHDI-to-HDMI adaptor, also to any HDTV.

    AMIMON says the new modules will also enable external wireless PC-to-TV accessories (‘dongles’) which connect to the PC and TV via HDMI.

    The WHDI modules are based on the newly developed video modem technology operating in the 5GHz unlicensed band. WHDI co-exists in the same frequency spectrum with Wi-Fi and uses similar RF building blocks and antennas.

    It synergies with Wi-Fi enable a roadmap to integrated WHDI + Wi-Fi semiconductor components which is said to offer notebook OEMs the prospect of a low cost WHDI wireless HD link to the TV.

    According to the firm, the WHDI Modules key features include support for full high definition resolutions up to 1080p/60Hz, Hollywood approved HDCP 2.0 copy protection, 5GHz unlicensed band with support for Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS), compact form-factor, practically no latency (less than 1 millisecond) and low power consumption modes for portable devices.

    Noam Geri, vice president of marketing and business development for AMIMON believes WHDI is gaining momentum with TV OEMs. “Now also PC OEMs set to offer consumers multiple WHDI enabled products in 2010,” he said.

  • Samsung Retakes Leadership in U.S. LCD-TV Market

    Samsung in the third quarter retook the No.-1 ranking in the U.S. LCD-TV market from chief competitor Vizio, according to iSuppli.

    The iSuppli research shows the South Korean electronics giant shipped 1.3 million LCD-TVs in the United States during the period from July through September, equaling a 16.8 percent share of the market.

    This gave Samsung a 1.1 percentage point lead over U.S.-based Vizio, which held a 15.7 percent share in the third quarter with shipments of 1.2 million LCD-TVs.

    The last time Samsung held the top spot in the U.S. LCD-TV market was in the fourth quarter of 2008. “Vizio in the first and second quarters of 2009 took the lead in the United States as consumers warmed to its low-cost, full-featured sets sold through high-volume retailers like Wal-Mart,” the report says.

    “However, Samsung in the second quarter began to regain momentum and increase its market share as the company focused on advanced LED-backlit LCD-TVs and reduced prices for its high-end sets.”

    According to Riddhi Patel, principal analyst, television systems, for iSuppli, Samsung is leading the LCD-TV industry’s adoption of LED backlighting technology.

    “The company has been marketing these sets intensely, attracting the interest of U.S. consumers. Consumers like LED-backlit LCD-TVs because of their ultra-thin form factors. With Samsung cutting the prices of these sets aggressively, they now are becoming increasingly affordable for a larger number of U.S. consumers,” she said.

    The report also shows that the United States now leads the world in sales of LCD-TVs with LED backlights: LED-backlit sets accounted for 3.7 percent of total U.S. LCD-TV shipments in the third quarter, up from 2.1 percent in the second.

    Samsung in October was selling 55-inch LED-backlit LCD TVs for $2,650, just $325 more than for equivalent-sized and featured sets using conventional Cold-Cathode Fluorescent Lamp (CCFL) backlighting technology.

    “This low price point and minimal gap with CCFL sets represents a critical price threshold for LED-backlit sets, making them more acceptable to U.S. consumers,” Patel said.

    She adds that most of the Top-5 LCD-TV brands in the U.S. saw their shipments and market shares decline in the third quarter compared to the second, as smaller companies increased their sales.

    iSuppli predicts the fourth quarter, which brings the Christmas selling season, will bring stronger shipment growth because of aggressive discounts for full-featured LCD-TVs.

    “Furthermore, retailers are expected to offer attractive deals on product bundles. Such bundles will include LCD-TVs sold with Blu-ray players, surround-sound systems, DVRs, game consoles, and installation services. Premium brands such as Samsung, LG and Sony are expected to lead the way with these packaged deals,” Patel said.

  • Research: Bringing Cloud into the Datacenter Transformation

    “Datacenter transformation is a stark reality facing most customers in the Asia/Pacific region,” says IDC.

    Based on its recent datacenter research, the ageing and somewhat inefficient datacenters that were built seven-ten years ago are struggling to keep up with the current technology – leading to high operational costs, poor utilization levels and increasing complexity.

    “However – the report says – the current economic environment has led many CxOs to mandate CAPEX restrictions, which has forced CIOs to look for ways they can do more with the same.”

    Datacenter transformation is a broader discussion than cost and capacity, and one which aims at building an IT architecture that is more agile and adaptive for the business. IDC states that this need is driven by the increasing pervasiveness of IT, which is driving businesses to use the same or even more IT than before- even when the IT budgets are not expanding.

    “This has caused a dilemma for the CIO, and they are forced to think about new ways to build their IT fabric such that its more elastic, flexible and agile,” the company says.

    IDC says it has discussed this type of IT within the scope of what we called as the dynamic IT infrastructure.

    However, transforming the current IT complexities to reduce the rigidity has been an arduous task for most IT heads, and one that they have continued to battle with over the past few years. The arrival of cloud computing has revived the hopes of CIOs to consider a new way of attacking this old problem, as IDC claims.

    IDC believes that over the next few years, we will see increasing interest in cloud computing from organizations. But these organizations will have to start planning on building a more dynamic IT framework as a precursor.

    According to the research, this is especially true for enterprises that are considering to build their own private or internal clouds. The current chaotic IT environment with its complexities and redundancies will pose a huge challenge in migration, and indeed this has left many CIOs stumped about where to even start.

    "There is a lot of pent-up demand for revamping and building new datacenters that have been postponed due to the ongoing recession" says Avneesh Saxena, Group Vice President for Domain Research at IDC Asia/Pacific.

    "Meanwhile the demand for IT has not gone down and CIOs worry about coping with the turnaround as and when it comes through. This has to lead to the emergence of a adaptive and elastic IT framework – whether inside or outside the organization," he added.

  • ParaScale Launches Open Private Cloud Storage Platform

    ParaScale introduced ParaScale Cloud Storage software R2.0 – version 2 of its PCS clustered NAS system. The new release targets enterprise storage administrators who must economically scale capacity and performance, and service providers who want to offer a variety of storage cloud services.

    ParaScale’s open solution leverages any commodity hardware running Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS or CentOS, and can integrate applications directly onto storage nodes. PCS R2.0 also provides integration capabilities into virtualized environments and web services.

    This latest release of ParaScale Cloud Storage software reflects the growing realization by global customers that existing approaches to managing their stored data assets prevent them from rapidly delivering a pool of storage that easily scales capacity and performance independently and economically.

    The company claims PCS R2.0 removes these obstacles as a software-only solution that can be downloaded from the web and applied to any standard Linux platform to enable hundreds of commodity servers to be clustered together as a file repository, as a storage cloud with massive capacity and parallel throughput, or as a disaster recovery option for virtualized environments.

    One of the key features of PCS R2.0 enables ParaScale to function as a back-up for virtual machines and their respective data. In the event of a failure, the virtual machines can be booted directly from ParaScale and be up and running in seconds without having to move around VM images.

    According to Arun Taneja, principal, Taneja Group, the power and scale of cloud compute and storage begins to make sense in an open and interoperable environment where resources can be provisioned as needed, any commodity hardware can be added to grow the cloud including repurposed servers, and new applications can be leveraged to create a virtualized data center.

    “ParaScale provides a unique open alternative to other cloud storage platforms and is developing an ecosystem of partners to integrate applications like back-up and disaster recovery, content management, and data migration on its storage servers,” he said.

    “Storage teams in 2010 are going to face the issue of getting ready for growth with budgets and headcount frozen at 2009 levels. How are they going to pull off this magic? By going outside the box, by looking at technologies that the innovators are using and not old workhorse NAS technologies from 1990,” said Sajai Krishnan, CEO, ParaScale.

    “Release 2.0 represents a significant step to provide our customers with a simple solution to store and manipulate any type of Tier II file data on higher-performance, more scalable, more accessible, and cheaper storage,” he added.

  • Review: Lenovo IdeaPad U350

    The Lenovo IdeaPad U350 laptop offers computing and entertainment technology at its best.

    With the retail price starting from as little as R6 699 (~$900), the IdeaPad U350 is a must for technology lovers for its amazing range of utilities.

    The smallest IdeaPad U350 laptop is a mere 1.58kg and is less than 25mm in size, making it easy to carry around.

    The battery also has a long life span and if fully charged is unlikely to leave you frantically searching for a power source to recharge it when outdoors.

    Among the wide range of benefits of using the IdeaPad U350 is that it is fitted with a 16:9 aspect ratio high definition 13.3 inch LED panel and an HDMI connector which allows the user to watch movies or other multimedia in high definition.

    Computing technologies on the IdeaPad U350, which include Intel Core 2Solo and Pentium ultra low voltage processors, up to 8 GB high speed DDR3 memory and up to 500 GB of hard drive storage, speeds up video editing.

    The protective system of the IdeaPad U350 is also high quality as it can make the hard drive to stop if the machine is dropped and has the facility – OneKey Rescue System – to help the user recover information in the event that data is corrupted.

    Several extra features like the Ambient Light Sensor which automatically adjusts the screen’s brightness according to the lighting environment and therefore reduces eye strain, make the IdeaPad U350 all the more valuable and desirable.

    A camera also comes in handy for video messaging or making Skype calls through the laptop’s WiFi connectivity.

    IdeaPad U350 laptop is certainly a useful gadget for the working class, students and all the computer literate people out there.

    ***
    Disclaimer: this review has been possible thanks to Lenovo who has provided the unit we tested.

  • GIPS Brings HD Voice to Android

    Global IP Solutions announced support for a mobile operating system, allowing Android mobile application developers to quickly create applications with HD voice inside. Building first-rate VoIP-enabled clients is now possible with GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile.

    GIPS VoiceEngine allows Android developers to build VoIP-enabled applications that offer HD voice, while tackling all the typical IP network issues – such as delay, jitter, packet loss, bandwidth constraints, noise and echo.

    VoiceEngine family consists of VoiceEngine PC (voice processing solution optimized for softphone applications on PC platforms), VoiceEngine Mobile (adds VoIP capabilities to mobile applications; includes echo cancellation technology designed for difficult mobile environments), VoiceEngine ATA (enables residential gateways with VoIP capabilities) and VoiceEngine IP Phone (delivers suite of voice processing technology to IP Phone manufacturers).

    “Today, mobile users desire a smartphone that offers a unique experience, which includes the ability to have great quality communication. With GIPS engineering expertise, developers can quickly and effectively build their applications enabling them to concentrate on their core business,” said Roar Hagen, GIPS’ Chief Technology Officer.

    GIPS also announced that Nimbuzz, a free mobile social messaging application, will be the first customer to offer HD voice (VoIP) on Android phones using GIPS voice mobile solution.

    “We’re thrilled that Nimbuzz will be GIPS’ first customer to deploy their application on Android mobile phones. Nimbuzz continues to offer their users a distinctive unified social messaging application that connects popular social and instant messenger networks into one simple, user-friendly offering,” added Hagen.

    GIPS already offers mobile versions of its voice engine to developers on the iPhone and Symbian platforms.

    With nearly 3 billion users worldwide, the mobile phone has become the most personal and ubiquitous communications device. Research firm Gartner has predicted that Android will become the second most popular smartphone by 2012 with 14.5 percent market share and iPhone with 13.7 percent market share.