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Tag: microsoft

  • 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.

  • Box and IBM Join Hands to Boost Analytics and Cloud Storage  

    Box and IBM Join Hands to Boost Analytics and Cloud Storage  

    Box-IBM

    Box and IBM have combined their cloud products as a way of boosting their appeal and scope. The partnership will bring together IBM security technologies and tools with Box’s cloud storage services, enabling the two companies to have a global reach offered by the IBM cloud.

    Aaron Levie, Box’s CEO said in a blog post that the partnership will help them target more public sector and enterprise customers, which he insists they cannot do alone. He further said: “We’re taking the best of Box’s technology and combining it with IBM’s impressive portfolio of leading security, analytics, content management and social capabilities to jointly create all-new offerings and outcomes for customers.”

    In this new partnership Box will have at their disposal IBM security technologies and enterprise-grade content management tools. The agreement also allows Box users to store data on the IBM Cloud.

    Meanwhile, IBM will be able to increase their Watson Analytics service scope by analyzing data and content stored in the Box platform.

    Both companies will provide consultancy to enterprises looking at using Box with their existing data and systems. They will also work together to create content management apps and integrate Box features into IBM’s MobileFirst for iOS apps.

    This is of course not the first time we are seeing Box entering into such partnerships as they already have a working relationship with Microsoft, a major IBM competitor in the cloud business.

  • Nokia dispels rumors that it might be manufacturing smartphones again

    Nokia dispels rumors that it might be manufacturing smartphones again

    Nokia-Logo

    A report published on Gizmodo stated that Nokia might be getting back into the manufacturing of consumer handsets at the end of the year (Dec 31st, 2015) – that is immediately after its non-compete agreement expires. However, a statement released yesterday by Nokia dispels the rumors as inaccurate and false.

    The statement reads, “Nokia notes recent news reports claiming the company communicated an intention to manufacture consumer handsets out of a R&D facility in China. These reports are false, and include comments incorrectly attributed to a Nokia Networks executive. 

    Nokia reiterates it currently has no plans to manufacture or sell consumer handsets.”

    The return of Nokia into the manufacture and selling of consumer handsets started at Re/code where an article at their site stated that Nokia was plotting a 2016 return. The article speculated that Nokia was looking into designing exciting devices and then licensing the designs and its name to a Chinese manufacturer.

    Nonetheless, the recent press release by Nokia pours cold water over the rumor and this somehow makes a Nokia revival pretty damn unlikely, at least for now.

     

     

  • Microsoft Ups Storage 5,000% to 1 TB for Each Office 365 User

    Microsoft Ups Storage 5,000% to 1 TB for Each Office 365 User

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    Microsoft bumped up its cloud storage increasing it from 20 GB to 1 TB for every Office 365 user. It also increased its Microsoft OneDrive from 7 GB to 15 GB. According to Microsoft’s data, out of every four people, three have storage of less than 15 GB on their PC.

    This storage boost has put Microsoft in the forefront when compared to Google and Dropbox, as far as free allocation goes. The Free Dropbox accounts get a sparing 2GB, even though it may be expanded through signing up friends. While Google may offer 15 GB free cloud storage, it includes Gmail, Drive and Photos.

    In addition, Microsoft has also lowered the price of purchasing additional storage to$2 per month from the previous cost of $7.50 per month for 100 GB.

    Office 365 storage

    So if you are thinking of getting more than an extra 100 GB, you will be better of switching to an Office 365 account, as all Office 365 account holders get storage increase to 1TB.

    A personal Office 365 subscription costs $6.99 per month and comes with 1 TB for every user while the Home Office 365 subscription costs up to $9.99 monthly and comes with approximately five 1TB OneDrive allocations.

    An earlier announcement by Microsoft also revealed that OneDrive for Business clients as well as university students also get a boost to 1 TB.

    All the changes are expected to be effected this month, according to Microsoft.

     

     

  • Siemens Forges Partnership with NextPlane to offer Extended Federation Services


    According to an announcement made last week, Siemens Enterprise Communications and NextPlane UC Exchange Service will partner in providing extended federation services for Siemens' OpenScape UC platform through the NextPlace UC Exchange service.

    With Siemens being the world's leading unified communications provider and NextPlace being the market leader in provision of federation services that are cloud-based for UC, anyone who joins the NextPlace UC Exchange and is a Siemens customer will now enjoy a seamless connection and collaboration with lots of other partner on UC platforms. These include Google, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Open-Fire, eJabberd, eZuce, and Isode.

    Other than this ability to federate with their business partners, Siemens customers will also get to enjoy UC-to-social media federation like Yahoo! and Skype, public social media networks like Twitter, and enterprise social media networks like Microsoft Yammer and Salesforce Chatter.

    This is a partnership aimed at underscoring the commitment of Siemens Enterprise Communications to openness and support for the evolving communications business needs of their customers. The company announced that there will be instant message sharing of its customers with the business partners of their colleagues, third-party suppliers, supply chain vendors, and clients as if everyone is on a single platform.

  • Microsoft and Google hot on the Heels of Amazon in the Cloud

    Amazon's success in cloud computing is the cause of much woes for its competitors Microsoft and Google. In an attempt to catch up with Amazon, whose web services are currently the leader in the cloud computing service sector, Microsoft and Google have decided to upgrade their services with new features. These upgrades are also expected to heat up the competition between them.

    According to a NetworkWorld report, this week Google upgraded its public cloud service by launching load-balancing features. The service usually aims at enabling customers to scale up and down virtual machines and hence accommodate any demand spikes experienced. As for Microsoft, just a few months ago it improved its Azure cloud service with new auto-scaling feature, and thanks to these features users can now scale up and down resources in the cloud.

    Brandon Butler of NetworkWorld has been reported stating that the two companies are already playing catch-up with Amazon Web Services, which is the leading IaaS provider and already offers such services.

    In the meantime, Microsoft has raised its stakes in the battle against Google through a new advertisement in which Microsoft consumers are warned "not to gamble with Google Docs." This move is geared towards earning the company public favor in the cloud space.

  • 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.

  • The Microsoft-Polar Team on Companion Web Demo via TV App


    Second screen experiences have become the "in" thing on mobile devices, as most TV viewers would attest to thanks to such apps as zeebox. Only problem is — two-way interaction is still unexplored and hence often limited to in-house efforts such as SmartGlass. Microsoft has made a move to spread this kind of integration.

    Microsoft is going into a partnership with Polar on a web app demo of the Companion Web. With this app, pages on two devices control and complement each other. TV viewers using Polar's app are able to register their opinions of a TV show using their phones and then watch as their votes are reflected on a matching site on their TV and tablet, alongside the page ranking.

    The Companion Web demo may not rival Google's Map Dive experiment in terms of details, but with features like Xbox One's Snap Mode in play it does make a good case for a present time where browsers are no longer novelties in the living room.

  • Microsoft OneNote Updated


    Microsoft has released a major new version of its OneNote app for iOS. A post on the official Office blog says that iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users will now be getting a much more rich editing experience.

    The app is designed such that you can see any markings you draw on a note using a Windows tablet on the other devices. Formatting and files, including borders, graphs, texts, and more, look similar across all iOS devices.

    Microsoft says users can sync their notebooks with Share Point and Office 365. The devices also support file sharing between Office users. Additionally, the One Note app is much like Google as multiple people can now edit a note simultaneously.

    Among the features on the iPad app is the Office Ribbon UI, an Office app feature that has become synonymous with other devices. There is now more text, customization options for style, color, font, and size, as well as insert and edit tables and graphs.

    On the iPhone, Microsoft has finally delivered an optimized One Note app for the iPhone 5 display just eight months after its launch.

  • 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.