Business News Holding

Tag: google

  • TP-LINK and Google Launch OnHub, a Router for a New Way to Wi-Fi

    TP-LINK and Google Launch OnHub, a Router for a New Way to Wi-Fi

    onhub-router-google-tp-link

    TP-LINK has collaborated with Google to introduce OnHub, a new kind of router designed to keep up with the latest technology in the home, and help make Wi-Fi faster, more secure, and easy to use.

    OnHub addresses some of the most significant challenges associated with Wi-Fi today. It’s designed to be out in the open, where it works its best. It has fewer wires, a shell to keep cords tidy and lighting that is subtle and useful.

    OnHub’s innovative antenna design combined with smart software continually work to enhance users’ Wi-Fi connection. With its extensive router heritage, TP-LINK’s expertise was an integral contribution to OnHub’s design, in particular its unique circular antenna with 13 built-in, hidden antennas that reduce network interference and optimize network connectivity.

    “We count on Wi-Fi more than ever, and we need it to work well to do all the things we love to do online,” said Trond Wuellner, group product manager at Google. “By working with TP-LINK, we’ve brought together expertise across hardware and software to design OnHub, a new router that gives you a fast connection, makes Wi-Fi management simple, and gets better over time.”

    OnHub is managed by the Google On mobile app, making it easy to set up and manage Wi-Fi. During setup, OnHub selects the settings that will work best for the home, then automatically adjusts if things change so the network is always performing at its best.

    OnHub is designed to get better with time. The router automatically installs new features and the latest security updates. OnHub is also Bluetooth Smart, Weave, and 802.15.4 ready, so it can support a growing number of smart devices in the home.

    For a full list of OnHub features, visit on.google.com/hub/#specs.

    Price and Availability

    OnHub is available for online preorder today on Amazon and will be widely available at retailers in the U.S. and Canada in the coming weeks. MSRP for OnHub is $199.99.

  • Report: Internet of Things (IoT) in Retail Market Forecast to 2020

    Report: Internet of Things (IoT) in Retail Market Forecast to 2020

    report-market

    The global IoT in retail market is expected to grow from USD 14.28 billion in 2015 to USD 35.64 billion by 2020, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 20.07%, according to Research and Markets’ “Internet of Things in Retail Market – Global Forecast to 2020” report.

    The key players in this market include IBM, Intel Corporation, Zebra Technologies, SAP, Google, Microsoft, Freescale, PTC, ARM, and Cisco. These companies will dominate the $35 billion industry.

    Internet of Things (IoT) is significantly adopted in every process of retailing such as advertising and marketing, smart kiosks, vending machines, inventory management, and customer payments.

    The fact that IoT is rapidly connecting with these retailing processes is due to increasing internet ubiquity, and emergence of cloud platform. The declining cost of sensors and RFID have also significantly increased its adoption by the retailers. Along with these drivers, the market is facing certain restraints such as lack of common standards, skill gap, and security and privacy concerns.

    There are various assumptions that have been taken into consideration for the market sizing and forecasting exercise. A few of the global assumptions include political, economic, social, technological, and economic factors. The dollar fluctuations are expected to not seriously affect the forecasts in the emerging regions.

    Visit Research and Markets for more info.

  • Amazon Lowers Its Cloud Prices after Google Slash

    Recent cut by Amazon of its cloud prices are still not enough to rival Google's cloud storage prices. The slash by amazon comes after Google announced a reduction of its storage costs – Google made a reduction on its pricing by a very high margin compared to those of their competitors such as Microsoft, Rackspace, and HP.

    Google newly introduced "sustained use" pricing model has enabled it to pass savings onto users of its cloud. This compares to Amazons model, which guarantee customers saving after they pay upfront.

    Amazon`s senior vice president defended its stand on not responding to Google new model. He said that the company lowered their prices on many occasions without any external or competitive pressure.

    Amazon and Google seem to be at the same level though their prices on key areas such as storage are still significantly different. Google has a flat rate pricing for storage while Amazon does tiered pricing.

    Amazon`s price change indicates an emerging competition among businesses offering cloud computing services. Amazon's strategy, using lower prices, has enabled it to build a successful brand. Google price change is a threat, one that deserves a response, to its cloud business margins. This comes at a time when Google and Microsoft have made continuous investment aimed at grabbing a portion of the revenue streaming into Amazon Web Services.

    Both companies have being experiencing problems that affect their core businesses. Google, for instance, has closed some of its business such as Google Reader and Wave and at times made price changes without warning their customers. This has negatively affected their customers who are now skeptical of their innovations.

    Microsoft despite having the most successful software business customers are suspicious of their products as they will be difficult to license or be costly.
    Amazon`s core business-retail- ensures use of cheap storage, ideal cloud computing, and relatively low margins.

  • Google sells Motorola Smartphone business to Lenovo


    Lenovo     has gotten an amazing opportunity while it continues to grow impressively in the PC industry.

    Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.4 billion in August 2011 and now it announced that Lenovo would be buying Motorola for $2.9 billion.

    Being the largest PC maker internationally, Lenovo are looking to expand into smart phones with the recent trend of increased phone use over computer use to access the internet.

    Lenovo wants to be a leader in the Smartphone industry internationally since it’s already leading in China and so this acquisition is strategically planned. It had been rumored that it was among the blackberry potential potential buyers when the company wanted to sell.

    The Motorola acquisition is the second big deal they have made this year after they bought part if IBM server business at $2.3 billion.

    The Arris Group bought part of Motorola from Google in 2013 at $2.35 billion, allowing Google to recover some of the money it spent acquiring the business. From the sales values that Google is selling Motorola, it could be an acknowledgement by the company that they over priced the value of Motorola during its acquisition.

    Google’s intention for buying Motorola was mainly to increase its patent portfolio and after the sale they have remained with over 20,000 patents which will ensure them legal security for its Android software. Lenovo’s deal secured them 2,000 patents together with the manufacturing part of Motorola.

    The Razr was one of the most popular Motorola phones launched in 2004 and Motorola was able to maintain its popularity until the iPhone was launched by Apple in 2007 which introduced the now popular touch – screen mobile devices.

    The Google’s sale of Motorola might take around 9 months so Motorola’s losses will not affect books for the first half of the year.

    On the other hand, Lenovo will have broadened its operations to now include smart phones, PCs and tablets which will secure clients who prefer to buy all the devices from a single company.

  • Google Upgrades Platform Cloud and Joins Microsoft and Amazon's Cloud Level


    Google has upgraded its platform cloud to include a dedicated memcache, rendering the company's technology characteristically akin to the floating silos operated by Microsoft and Amazon. The open source object caching system, Memcache, is a dedicated serviced for storage of key-value data from multiple servers in pooled RAM. Its adoption by Google App Engine (GAE) comes packaged in the 1.8.2 release of the platform cloud.

    Alongside the dedicated Memcache is support for Git Push-to-Deploy, which allows developers to use the Git code management service. Google has also introduced updates relating to App Engine Modules, which enable developers to break large applications into modular components capable of sharing services. These updates also include Eclipse and PHP support.

    Dedicated memcache will bring developers performance and capacity guarantees for $0.12 cents per gigabyte per hour. They will be able to purchase in-memory data caching capacity leading to more data being cached, and with a higher cache hit rate the applications will be faster and Datastore costs reduced. This is according to a blog post Google cloud product manager Chris Ramsdale wrote.

    Google's service will be competing with Microsofts's Windows Azure Caching with memcache protocol support and Amazon's Amazon ElastiCache. Websites that use Memcache are Craigslist, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

  • Mobile World Congress 2013: The End of Apple Dominance Is Near

    The annual meeting Mobile World Congress, ongoing this week in Barcelona, seems to mark more than any other event the end of Apple dominance in the global market for smartphones and tablets and the rise of some rivals with more open operating systems.

    Mozilla has opened the event in Barcelona unofficially. The nonprofit organization, which used Firefox a decade ago to fight Microsoft control in the online search engine market, wants to change totally the smartphone market as well.

    The industry is currently unnaturally controlled by a few companies, said general manager of Mozilla, Gary Kovacs, during the presentation of the first generation of mobile devices with Firefox operating system.

    More than 20 telecom industry executives who brought their support to the launch of Firefox OS had similar views.

    “We change the industry for the common good,” said Cesar Alienta, general manager of Telefonica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. Spanish company chief criticized the closed operating systems, such as iOS, and warned that “the smartphone market is making a step back from the internet’s opening feature”. Telefonica wants to introduce shortly Firefox OS devices in Spain, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

    America Movil, controlled by Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, committed to launch Firefox OS in Mexico “and in all possible markets” soon.

    The outgoing General Director of Deutsche Telekom, Rene Obermann, called the Firefox OS release “an important step towards more competition between different systems”. Deutsche Telekom will launch Firefox OS devices starting from this summer in Poland.

    Mozilla is not the only company that wants to change the market for smartphones and tablets. Samsung and Intel are also developing an operating system called Tizen, which would be even more open and will allow software developers more important changes compared to Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

    Mobile operators are strongly attracted by the prospect of being able to strongly change the operating systems, for an interaction as direct as possible with the user.

    The irony in this case is that the success of Samsung with Tizen would make the South Korean company less dependent on Google and stronger in the smartphones and tablets market.

    The rest of the world seems to recover the distance to Apple's platform for mobile devices, and the American company must innovate again or will be cannibalized by rivals with cheaper and more accessible devices. Smartphone market seems to have matured, so that real opportunities could be in the expansion in emerging markets.

  • Comcast and Google welcome ARRIS Group into Relationship

    Comcast has thrown its hat in the cable box and modem arena by pledging to invest in the ARRIS Group, Inc. to the tune of $150 million. In return for its investment, Comcast will acquire about 10.6 million shares of ARRIS, which amounts to approximately 7.85 percent of the company.

    The stock was purchased from Google, which previously owned 15.7 percent of ARRIS but with the Comcast deal found its shares reduced in half. This deal makes Comcast and Google equal holders of common stock in the company.

    Although Bob Stanzione, ARRIS CEO seemed pleased, "We believe this investment by one of our largest customers is a strong indication of customer support for the Motorola Home acquisition and its potential to accelerate innovation to the benefit of the industry and consumers." The deal between Comcast and ARRIS is small compared to ARRIS's acquisition of Motorola Home for $2.35 billion from Google. Motorola Home was part of Motorola Mobility, which was in turn a subsidiary of Google Inc. It is expected that ARRIS will be an active participant in Comcast and that the two companies will work in close conjunction with each other.

    The result is, that after the dust settles, Comcast will have its foot in the door by owning part (7.85%) of the ARRIS Group's broadband media technological empire. ARRIS owns Motorola Home and Google is richer by $2.35 billion from the Motorola Home sale and $150 million from the Comcast deal. Additionally Google's shares of common stock in the ARRIS Group are now down to 7.85 percent.

  • Facebook, Google and Amazon reportedly outsourcing new storage product orders to Taiwan-based ODMs

    Inexpensive data storage boxes from Taiwan are being picked up in lieu of storage arrays from Dell, EMC, HP and NetApp by Facebook and other vast data-centre operators such as Google and Amazon.

    Supply chain insiders say that the juggernaut that is Facebook is about to buy bargain storage kits from original design manufacturers, or ODMs, based in Taiwan. Original design manufacturers work with customer specifications to design and produce hardware. Both Quanta Computer and Wistron will be likely bidders for Facebook's supply contracts.

    Facebook looks to save a small fortune by using arrays defined by its Open Compute Project standard and running its own software. It's quite possible this may not even occur, as reports from Far East supply chain sources tend to be a little questionable, but the information is interesting nonetheless.

    Using ODMs for storage gear doesn't come as a big surprise; Facebook is merely following a trend. According to Digitimes, Google buys all its servers from ODMs and Amazon follows suit about 30 per cent of the time.

    Sales of standardised hardware via distribution channel partners to the West and beyond could start happening anytime. Amazon, Baidu and other cloud giants are likely to expand their services into the cloud; businesses are purchasing fewer storage arrays because of the cloud, so it's no surprise that Amazon, Baidu and others are making forays into this area.

    DEY Storage, a startup company, claims it can follow the trend started by Amazon, Facebook and Google. The company claims they can unbundle "storage management from the physical layer to provide customers with a storage system which is massively scalable and designed to align and integrate with their services-based infrastructures".

    The current crop of servers, storage and network switch vendors may have to look to Taiwan for a new model if they want to continue to be successful.

  • Samsung Galaxy S Range Sells Over 100 Million Copies

    Samsung has announced in a post on the official blog the number of over 100 million Galaxy S terminals sold.

    It all started two and a half years ago with the Samsung Galaxy S, top of the range at that time and a quite controversial terminal. It was cited often in the Apple-Samsung trial in the United States. From then until now, the No. 1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world sold over 100 million units of Galaxy S, Galaxy S II and Galaxy S III. The latter two models were able to sell each in an impressive number of 40 million units. It is possible that in the total figure to be included the supplies of Galaxy S Plus and Galaxy S III Mini, but the percentage is small.

    The most successful Galaxy smartphone is Galaxy S III, which, according to Samsung officials, at this moment sells about 190,000 units per day.

    Samsung Galaxy S III combines advanced technology developed by Google with high-end components. Thus, users of this top smartphone benefit from the experience offered by the 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display, with 720p HD resolution, supported by a 1.4GHz quad-core processor.

    With such popularity, the next Samsung Galaxy S is already in the top of terminals expected this year. We’d dare to say that the interest in the iPhone 5S or iPhone 6 is significantly lower. Apple has already provided a significant upgrade to the iPhone 5 and the next model could be a sort of facelift. As for the Samsung Galaxy S IV, it is expected even in this spring, with a 5-inch full HD screen. It seems that the “phablets” are on a roll and Samsung cannot get out of the trend.

    South Korean company will announce at the end of this month the quarterly earnings recorded in Q4 2012.

  • Cloud Storage Vendors Aggressively Slash Prices Again

    Since November, the three leading cloud storage vendors have slashed prices for data storage per month, offering massive discounts for the first terabyte. Amazon Web Services reduced prices by up to 28% to 9.5 cents, extending reductions to its nine regional centers. Google Cloud Storage dropped data rates by 30% to 8.5 cents. Microsoft Windows Azure slashed its prices by 12% to 8.5 cents.

    Vendors are cutting prices to attract as many early cloud adopters as possible, with the knowledge that switching service provider later might prove to be difficult for customers.

    "It's definitely a race, but it's a land grab," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "The race is to the bottom to get more data into the cloud. They are trying to accelerate adoption because the service is very sticky. Once data is in the cloud, it's hard to switch providers."

    Steve Zivanic, vice president of marketing at Nirvanix, a San Diego based cloud storage provider, said the three dormant cloud providers keep competing on price because their services are similar.

    "If you have no technology differentiation between clouds, then it's the same as disk-drive vendors waging a war for the lowest price per raw drive," said Steve Zivanic, "The key is to wrap advanced storage services around the physical drive and sell business value of that overall service. The price cuts between Amazon, Google and Azure are basically battles for cheap, raw online disk."

    An analyst for IT infrastructure and cloud at 451 Research Cloud, Carl Brooks said that while storage prices have come down, the costs of bandwidth, replication, security, compliance and maintenance, make the price of cloud storage high compared to on-premises storage.

    "Cloud providers are well over the cost of actually provisioning on-premises storage," said Carl Brooks. "Hard drives are almost a commodity at this point. We have not seen that in the cloud market. The trend behind the price cuts are more about cloud providers trying to get ahead of the trend. They don't want to be undercut by other vendors."

    "Amazon, Azure and Google cut prices to continue to be relevant," Brooks said further. "You are going to see price competition for a couple of years, and you will see cloud service providers go out of business.