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  • Nokia Sells Luxury Division Vertu

    Nokia wants to sell the luxury phone line Vertu as part of restructuring the company. Given the problems faced by the Finnish phone manufacturer and the quite difficult adoption of the Microsoft’s operating system for its phones, Nokia has done a pretty natural step in thinking about selling the luxury division Vertu.

    Nokia missed the trend of technology and now is struggling to get rid of all its businesses that suddenly became unprofitable. After closing several factories all over the world, where they were producing cheap phones, Nokia is now trying to get rid of its “Crown Jewel” – Vertu luxury handset division.

    The UK-based subsidiary that manufactures phones with a starting price of at least 1,000 pounds, designed for those who can afford throwing money on a weak terminal in terms of performance, but with a case made of rare materials and with inlays in rubies or diamonds.

    According to sources close to the talks, it seems that Goldman Sachs mediates this sale. Although no one knows the value of the Vertu Company, its annual revenues are estimated at EUR 200-300 million.

    Vertu was considered an exclusive brand, and even if, technologically speaking, the phone wasn’t that brilliant, the handset compensated through the materials used – gold, silver, diamonds, sapphires. Thus, the phone was seen more as a luxury accessory than a functional object, needed every day.

    The latest model of the company – Constellation – which has a 3.5-inch AMOLED screen and 8-megapixel camera has a price of £ 10,000 if purchased with options such as crocodile leather and diamonds.  True value of these terminals does not come from the sum of technical specs or materials used but from certain VIP service of specialized consultants that can make recommendations about any field and set up meetings with other exclusive members worldwide.

    There are no details about potential buyers, but according to international media, there are only several investment funds interested in purchasing the Nokia subsidiary. Whoever will take over Vertu, will have a lot of work to do – phone design is exceeded, while the gold and the diamonds cannot compensate the performance needed by users.

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  • Sales Below Expectations For Nokia Lumia 800

    Nokia Lumia 800, although very promising at the time of launch, fails to stop the Finnish manufacturer from its sharp decline in the smart devices market.

    Despite efforts made by Nokia to promote their new model Lumia 800 and the encouraging sales figures announced at the time of launch, the reality seems to be different at all. The direction taken by Nokia Lumia 800 is actually moving toward sales far below the Finnish manufacturer's expectations.

    According to analyst James Faucett at Pacific Crest, if current trends maintain, sales figures for the Lumia 800 will not exceed 500,000 pieces sold, four times less than expected by Nokia.

    Given that the design team has done their homework, creating a very successful handset, which should easily convince the audience it is addressed, the only culprit remains its operating system – Windows Phone 7.5, still regarded with suspicion by many users.

    Nokia can only hope not to end the year with disastrous financial results. They only have the winter shopping season, which could raise again the sales figures.

    Unfortunately, at least for now, the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft does not seem to give the results foreseen by the CEO Stephen Elop, putting the company in disadvantage by using a too-new operating system, with many limitations artificially imposed and unable to convince in front of the competition presented by Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

    Despite the optimism shown by Nokia, the success that Lumia 800 enjoys in the UK cannot be entirely attributed to the design team. Orange UK recently launched a very aggressive campaign to promote Nokia’s handsets, rewarding about half of customers who have pre-ordered the phone with an xBox console completely free. As expected, the offer was very useful, even if it’s just a low-end version of the xBox console.

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    BitDefender Launches Mobile Security for Android Smartphones
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  • BitDefender Launches Mobile Security for Android Smartphones

    BitDefender, one of the leading antivirus vendors in the world, has launched BitDefender Mobile Security, an application specially designed for Android smartphones.

    The solution proposed by the Romanian company protects the users of smartphones and tablets against all the malware for Android, expanding BitDefender’s technological competence from desktop solutions to security applications for mobile devices.

    In terms of technological solution, BitDefender Mobile Security is based heavily on the in-the-cloud scanning, so that the process of scanning the application to be made with maximum efficiency and only when necessary. This is why the fingerprint of the security solution is minimal in terms of hardware resource consumption, fact certified in the “real life” by the more than 120,000 beta testers of BitDefender Mobile Security.

    Apart from the minimal impact on processing speed, the battery of mobile equipment is the second major beneficiary, the application having very little influence on energy consumption. "BitDefender Mobile Security is an excellent example demonstrating that an application can be very strong in the level of protection and also amazing when it comes to economic resources or battery," said Alex Balan, Senior Product Manager at Bitdefender .

    "The very high performance of our application is guaranteed by the years of experience in the malware field, BitDefender technologies being certified and awarded internationally. Finally, we are among the most experienced in-the-cloud developers, so that our security solution extensively uses this resource, the concept of "mobile security" becoming truly mobile," he added.

    BitDefender Mobile Security includes features such as Application Audit, Anti-Theft or Web Security, which help the user preserve privacy, to protect themselves against all the threats or even to recover a lost or stolen mobile device.

    Commercially speaking, the BitDefender security solution is a “freemium” type of product, meaning the application can be downloaded for free from the Android Market.

  • Samsung Wave 3 Available in Europe

    Samsung announced yesterday the availability of the Samsung Wave 3 on the European market. The smartphone running bada 2.0 was first announced in late August in Berlin during the IFA Consumer Electronics Fair.

    “The Wave 3 is a smartphone to benefit from the power of the bada 2.0, as well as a newly expanded suite of Samsung applications and services. We will continue to enhance our bada platform and its eco system for Wave smartphone line-up by developing more innovative features, application and content services,” said JK Shin, President of Samsung Mobile Communications Business.

    “We believe the Wave 3 is a smartphone that will truly deliver Samsung’s commitment to the bada platform in the mobile industry, and I hope customers around the world will enjoy it and take full advantage of its many innovative features,” he added.

    The new Samsung Wave is a solid smartphone, literally and figuratively, dedicated to persons who focus on design and safety, not just performance. The phone has a 9.9 mm thick aluminum body, a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, a 1.4 GHz processor assisted by 512 MB RAM, plus a storage capacity of 4GB (plus a microSD card reader). The Wave 3 also offers support for A-GPS and for the Glonass system (Russian counterpart to GPS), a 1500 mAh battery, HSDPA communication module, WiFi b/g/n support, WiFi Direct and Bluetooth 3.0, but also a 5-megapixel camera.

    Bada 2.0 platform

    Samsung Wave 3 runs on bada 2.0 platform, providing users a new experience: bada platform and TouchWiz interface. The Live Panel home screen can be optimized with Instant shortcuts to the most important content and applications.

    The Wave 3 also features an integrated technology called WiFi Direct, which is automatically connecting the device any WiFi networks available.

    Applications

    The device allows access to thousands of local applications through the app store Samsung Apps. The messaging service ChatOn is also present, connecting all the mobile network users in a single community.

    Thanks to the integrated system Store & Player, Music Hub gives users access to over 12 million tracks and also the possibility to fully customize the music files.

    Samsung Apps will celebrate the launch of the bada 2.0 operating system through the free download promotion of the games Camcard, Skyview and The Adventures of Tintin and: The Game, for a limited period of time.

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  • Amazon Prepares a Smartphone

    It seems that lately, Amazon becomes a synonym for “success”: after the exceptional sales of their e-book reader, Kindle, it foresees a good season for Kindle Fire tablet, but also the launch of a smartphone under the same brand!

    The information comes from the research department of Citigroup, which recently published a note by Mark Mahaney: “Based on our supply chain channel checks in Asia led by Kevin Chang, Citi’s Taipei-based hardware research analyst, we believe an Amazon Smartphone will be launched in 4Q12.”

    Mahaney adds that Amazon would develop the smartphone together with the producer Foxconn. Thus, Foxconn will develop the concept of the smartphone and will receive the NRE fees (non-recurring engineering fees) from Amazon, while the execution part will come to TMS division of Hon Hai Group (the same that produced the e-reader and the tablet for Amazon).

    According to Citigroup’s predictions, the smartphone will be based on a processor powered by Texas Instruments and a 6 Series dual core chip from Qualcomm (traditional supplier to Amazon).

    Mahaney’s estimates led to a production cost of about $150 to $170, the analyst stating that a competitive sale price should be close to this amount. “For a normal brand like HTC, they need to price the product at US$243 to make 30% gross margin. If Amazon is actually willing to lose some money on the device, the price gap could be even bigger,” said Mahaney.

    Although he doesn’t specifies whether the smartphone will use Google’s Android OS, but suggests this stating that Amazon will have to pay royalties to Microsoft for the operating system – given that Microsoft has obtained this fee in justice from the hardware partners that are using Android.

    Speculations about pricing are perfectly real, considering that Amazon decreased the price of their Kindle Fire tablet to only $199 and expects sales of five million units in Q4. According to iSuppli, this price would be lower than production costs, given that components’ price would be only $185.

    The future Kindle Phone would have to be another “sales vehicle”, a mobile extension of the website, additional to Fire tablet. According to the scenario, the phone may integrate an application that will scan the desired product on the website and to buy it through a single touch.

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    Official: Motorola Mobility To Be Bought by Google for $ 12.5 Billion
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  • Official: Motorola Mobility To Be Bought by Google for $ 12.5 Billion

    It's official! Motorola Mobility shareholders have approved the transaction by which the company will be acquired by Google for $ 12.5 billion, but the ball is now in the competition authorities' field, which have already opened an investigation after which they will also have to give their consent for this transaction.

    Motorola expects the deal will be completed at the beginning of 2012. In mid-August Google announced that it would buy Motorola Mobility in what is the biggest transaction in the history of web giant.

    Motorola shareholders approved unanimously the transaction, the company being convinced that competition authorities will also give their consent. U.S authorities have also opened an investigation in September in order to see if a so big transaction has or not a negative impact over the market competition.

    Motorola estimates that all approvals will be obtained before the beginning of 2012, and the transaction will be initiated at that time.

    Motorola Mobility separated earlier this year by Motorola Group, which five years ago started to have serious difficulties in mobile segment, but also because they didn’t react quickly enough to come up with competitive touchscreen devices.

    Motorola recorded in 2009 losses of $ 1.2 billion and last year earned operational profit of $ 76 million.

    Explaining why Motorola, the company in Mountain View mentioned in the press release of announcing this important transaction that this company has 80 years of history, invented the mobile phone three decades ago and in 2008 decided to use Android OS on the entire range of smartphones, being among the first large companies that have adopted this operating system.

    Google made a stock of Android adoption and says that over 150 million terminals were activated since 2007 and so far, and 550.000 are added daily.

    Android handsets are sold in 123 countries under the logos of 30 smartphones manufacturers.

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  • Kaspersky Lab In a Partnership with TAG Heuer

    Kaspersky Lab has signed a partnership agreement with TAG Heuer, the famous Swiss luxury watches manufacturer. The latter, in collaboration with ModeLabs Manufacture, launched the first luxury smartphone with touchscreen, called TAG Heuer Link, which runs Google’s Android.

    For this new smartphone, Kaspersky Lab developed TAG Heuer Mobile Security (powered by Kaspersky), a security solution, which is offering a high level of data stored in the phone.

    “Kaspersky Lab and TAG Heuer share common values, such as cutting-edge technology and an ongoing process of innovation,” said Eugene Kaspersky, President and CEO at Kaspersky Lab. “TAG Heuer Mobile Security is our first project in the luxury segment and we want to further develop this partnership.”

    The new smartphone TAG Heuer Link is a powerful communication tool, developed by Swiss engineers, assembled in France and equipped with Android OS. According to the company, TAG Heuer Link was made with quality materials and with the most advanced components used in horology and automotive industries, including diamonds and pink gold. The stainless steel used for this phone is also used to create surgical instruments and is hypoallergenic and resistant to corrosion.

    TAG Heuer Mobile Security offers a high level of protection against network attacks, malware for mobile phones and SMS spam. Besides the fact that it grants users the possibility to locate where the phone was lost or stolen, using the GPS Find function, the software offers the opportunity to store all digital files in encrypted folders and to lock or delete remotely all the files from the phone.

    Thanks to Mobile Security software from Kaspersky Lab, the owner is able to effectively manage the private contacts, to filter out the unwanted calls and SMSs by entering contacts in “black” and “white” lists and to restrict children’s access to the phone.

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  • RIM Launches Blackberry Bold 9790 and Blackberry Curve 9380

    Canadian smartphone manufacturer Research In Motion has announced today in Jakarta two new models from the series running the new operating system Blackberry 7. The new smartphones, BlackBerry Bold 9790 and BlackBerry Curve 9380, will be offering a unique design and an impressive suite of features.

    BlackBerry Bold 9790
    The new model from Bold family does not differ very much from the previous 9900. The only difference worth mentioning is its design. BlackBerry Bold 9790 has embossed buttons over the QWERTY keyboard, while the device’s back looks very much like BlackBerry Torch 9850. The new Bold presents – like the BlackBerry 9900 – a touchscreen in addition to the physical QWERTY keyboard.

    BlackBerry Bold 9790 has a 1GHz processor, NFC support and an internal memory of 8GB, which can be easily expanded with a microSD card.

    BlackBerry Curve 9380
    Curve series has always been designed for customers who want an affordable and powerful BlackBerry device and the new model does not disappoint. BlackBerry Curve 9380 is very similar to BlackBerry Storm, being the first device in Curve series with a 3.2-inch touchscreen. The new Curve presents a lot of social media applications preinstalled, such as Twitter, Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger or Social Feeds.

    BlackBerry Curve 9380 is expected to have a 5-megapixel camera and a 800GHz processor with 1GB of storing memory.

    Rumors inside RIM say that their brand new BlackBerry Bold 9790 and BlackBerry Curve 9380 will be available globally in the next few weeks, but they didn’t disclose any pricing details.

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  • Vidyo First to Achieve 100 HD Rate Matching Ports on a Virtualized Machine

    Vidyo announced it has virtualized the first video conferencing infrastructure and delivered an HD video conference on over 100 concurrent lines. To date, virtualization in the video conferencing market has been limited to call control. Vidyo has now virtualized media processing, enabling service providers to offer unlimited multipoint scalability and low latency rate matching capability on demand to accelerate the adoption of high quality, universal video conferencing on any endpoint.

    "Vidyo's virtualization of the media plane is as significant to the video conferencing industry as VMware's virtualization of the compute plane was to the data center," said Ofer Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Vidyo.  "Vidyo has already enabled service providers to offer telepresence calls at pennies instead of dollars per minute. Today's technology announcement marks a new era of virtualized video conferencing with unprecedented scalability, flexibility and affordability by providing media processing when and where it is required. Hardware-based solutions are not scalable and have limited capacity for multipoint video conferencing, requiring costly MCU devices that have to be pre-provisioned in data centers instead of providing availability on-demand."

    "Virtualization has affected almost every aspect of IT, and network infrastructure is the last untapped bastion," said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst, ZK Research. "Vidyo is the first company to demonstrate the impact of virtualized video conferencing in terms of scalability and economics on the most expensive part of the network infrastructure. There is no longer a reason for video conferencing to be a hardware investment; customers need to select a software-based architecture today that can address tomorrow's future growth needs."

    Multipoint media processing mixes multiple video streams, a function traditionally performed by a transcoding multipoint control unit (MCU) which is not scalable.  Expanding video conferencing services from hundreds of thousands of rooms to hundreds of millions of mobile and desktop endpoints requires a new approach for multipoint scalability. Leveraging virtual machines allows service providers and enterprise companies to scale video conferencing capacity on demand by creating a virtual machine and running a VidyoRouterTM, with no incremental hardware required.  Companies still get all the benefits of Vidyo's patented Adaptive Video LayeringTM technology, which provides the most efficient bandwidth utilization, local error correction, and real time video optimization for unprecedented video quality over the Internet. 

    The Vidyo Difference

    The Vidyo communication and collaboration platform is software-based, highly flexible and can be easily customized for individual enterprise and vertical market video conferencing needs. The patented VidyoRouterTM architecture introduces Adaptive Video LayeringTM, which dynamically optimizes the video for each endpoint leveraging H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC)-based compression technology and Vidyo's IP. Adaptive Video Layering eliminates the MCU and offers unprecedented error resiliency and low latency rate matching thus enabling natural, affordable, high-quality video to work over the Internet, LTE, 3G and 4G networks. The platform allows users to quickly leverage the latest hardware innovations and new consumer devices, making it uniquely attractive to partners. Vidyo has been active driving H.264 SVC and SIP videoconferencing interoperability in various standards bodies since 2005.

  • Storage Predictions for 2012: Infiltration of ‘Small Data’ and a New Kind of Cloud

    Drobo has released storage industry predictions for the coming year. These predictions are based on the company’s interactions with thousands of customers, analysts and industry luminaries.

    "The pace of change in the storage industry is going to accelerate in 2012," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Drobo. "Cloud strategies are evolving rapidly, solid-state media will have its day, and Big Data technologies will find their way to 'Small Data' customers. Any vendor with an old school product line is going to learn some new lessons the hard way in 2012."

    Among Drobo's predictions:

    • It’s the end of cloud storage as we know it today.  Pure cloud adoption will become less common than a hybrid approach that tightly integrates public and private cloud architectures with modern on-premise storage systems. This trend will hold true for both home users and small-medium businesses (SMBs). According to recent cloud usage research conducted by Drobo, 96 percent of SMBs (up to 500 employees) report they will store at least 50 percent of their data on-site for a minimum of the next three years. Factors cited included cloud performance, security and reliability concerns. Both businesses and individuals did state that they wanted tighter and more automated integration between their on-site data and their cloud provider. As stated by Buiocchi, "The cloud is going to have one foot on the ground for some time to come."
    • 'Small Data' eclipses Big Data in importance.  Today there is big buzz around Big Data, but the fact of the matter is Big Data is relevant to only the largest of companies and data hoarders—similar to the perspective that only one percent of the population owns 99 percent of the nation’s wealth. It’s the one person, family or business having to navigate the protection and management of their own data that affects the largest group of people: 100 million individuals and small businesses nationwide alone. This is the more pervasive problem (when compared to Big Data), and it highlights a persistent oversight of the entrenched, legacy storage system vendors that focus on the one percent while under-serving the "little guy." The numbers are too big to ignore—while Big Data will continue as a top issue in 2012, it’s the 'Small Data' opportunity that will explode.
    • Consumerization of IT continues as enterprise storage features hit the SMB and home user market.  It happened with PCs years ago and now it’s happening with tablets. In 2012 it will happen with personal and small business storage. Automated data protection, advanced thin provisioning, and powerful data-tiering with solid-state drives (SSD) are among the innovative technologies that entered the enterprise market first, but in 2012 they will further permeate home and small business offices. Will most new home or small office users know how to describe these cool, geeky storage features? Probably not, but they will know that storage has never been so easy to use, reliable and fast. 2012 will be the year that the idea of storage for the rest of us takes on a larger role in our lives, better protecting our rapidly growing digital universe.