Virtuelle Schlachten und Bauernhöfe sind dem japanischen Telekomkonzern Softbank offenbar über eine Milliarden Euro wert. Kauft doch Softbank die finnische Spielefirma Supercell, welche Games wie "Clash of Clans" und "Hay Day" im Portfolio führt.
Das traditionsreiche Unternehmen Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) firmiert ab sofort unter dem Namen Unify. Mit der Umbenenning kappt SEN sozusagen die letzten Wurzeln zum Siemens Konzern. SEN war im Oktober 2006 durch die Ausgliederung des Bereichs Communications aus der Siemens AG entstanden.
An den jährlich stattfindenden Microsoft Partner Connection Days in Zürich hat Microsoft Schweiz kürzlich in zehn Kategorien die „Partner of the Year Awards“ vergeben. Die IT-Dienstleisterin und Systemintegratorin Trivadis hat sich die Auszeichnung in der Kategorie „Application Platform“ geholt.
Ab kommenden Montag können Quickline-Kunden im momentan schnellsten Internet der Schweiz surfen. Der Quickline-Verbund will nämlich die Bandbreiten in sämtlichen Abos entsprechend erhöhen und gleichzeitig das Angebot für die Endkunden vereinfachen, wie es in einer Aussendung heisst.
Der Surseer Microsoft Gold-Partner IOZ angelte sich mit Matthias Hummler einen Spezialisten für Microsofts Cloud-Lösungen (Office 365, Windows Azure und Intune), um sein Cloud Innovation Center personell zu verstärken. Bei diesem Cloud Innovation Center handelt es um eine im Frühling 2013 neu geschaffene Geschäftseinheit, mit der sich der letztjährige „Microsoft Partner of the Year“ ausschliesslich auf Microsoft-Cloud-Dienste konzentrieren will.
Apple hat nach rund einem Jahr den Job an der Spitze seines weltweiten Einzelhandelsnetzes aus mehreren hundert Läden besetzt. Die bisherige Chefin der Modemarke Burberry, Angela Ahrendts, wechselt im Frühjahr zu dem iPhone-Konzern. Sie werde direkt Firmenchef Tim Cook unterstellt sein und auch die Online-Stores beaufsichtigen, teilte Apple am Dienstag mit.
Der angeschlagene Smartphone-Pionier Blackberry hat mitten im Existenzkampf einen offenen Brief an nervöse Kunden und verunsicherte Partner gerichtet. "Wir möchten, dass unsere Kunden wissen, dass sie weiterhin auf uns zählen können - wir sind hier, um zu bleiben", heisst es in dem Schreiben, dass am Dienstag in neun verschiedenen Ländern in insgesamt 30 Medien veröffentlicht werden sollte.
Der US-Geheimdienst NSA sammelt nach einem Bericht der "Washington Post" weltweit Hunderte Millionen von Kontaktlisten von persönlichen E-Mail- und Instant Messaging-Konten. Viele Konten gehörten Amerikanern, schrieb das Blatt online am Dienstag.
In St. Gallen haben sich 26 IT-Unternehmen zusammengeschlossen und die Initiative "IT St.Gallen rockt!" gestartet, mit der die Attraktivität des IT-Arbeitsstandort St. Gallen hervorgehoben werden soll. IT- Fachkräfte sollen in Zukunft bei der Stellensuche auch an die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten und Standortvorteile in der Wirtschaftsregion St.Gallen denken, lassen die Unternehmen verlauten.
Das Technologieportal "The Kernel" wirft Amazon vor allem in Bezug auf sein Lesegerät Kindle unzureichende Zensur vor. Den Angaben des Online-Magazins zufolge stehen insbesondere in der Rubrik der Laien-Autoren eine Reihe von E-Books zum Kauf bereit, die von Vergewaltigungen, Pädophilie und Inzest handeln. Darunter erregte zum Beispiel ein Buch mit dem Titel "Taking My Drunk Daughter" massive Aufmerksamkeit.
Yahoo reported a 5 percent drop in revenue for the third quarter, with the money it makes from display and search ads both continuing to decline. . Excluding traffic acquisition costs, revenue was down 1 percent. Its profit for the quarter was $297 million, much lower than last year, when it made a big one-off gain from selling shares in China’s Alibaba Group. On an operations basis, Yahoo’s profit for the quarter was $93 million, a drop of 39 percent. “I’m very pleased with our execution, especially as we’ve continued to invest in and strengthen our core business,” CEO Marissa Mayer said in a statement.
A slumping PC business affected Intel’s business during the third quarter, but the company believes brighter days are ahead with its new Core and Atom chips. The company Tuesday reported no growth in revenue or profits during the quarter ending Sept. 28. The company reported a profit of $2.95 billion, compared with $2.97 billion in the same quarter last year. Intel reported earnings per share of $0.58. Quarterly revenue came in at $13.48 billion, compared with $13.46 billion in last year’s third quarter. The consensus estimate from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters was for $13.46 billion. Intel’s earnings came in as expected, and the company had “modest growth in a tough environment,” said Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich, in a statement.
How long before it gets lost at a bar?
, a new home screen management system for Android that aims to keep everything under control, intelligently. , on the fly, and based on where you are or what you’re doing. Once installed, Aviate is the first thing you see when you unlock your phone. Instead of the standard Android home screen, you receive a simplified screen that offers contextual information and access to the most relevant apps installed on your device. If you’re dining at a restaurant, Aviate will place the icons for food-centric apps such as Yelp and OpenTable in a menu on the screen, and you’ll be offered the option to check in on the social network of your choice without having to dig around to find the right app. Aviate will also automatically pull and display information about the location from other location-based services, like Foursquare, right on the home screen. , your calendar, email, and communications apps might be given top billing. Of course, the specifics are all dependent upon the types of apps you have installed on your device.
A privacy group lacks legal standing to challenge a U.S. National Security Agency data collection program, and the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t have jurisdiction to grant the group’s request for it to review the program’s legality, lawyers for President Barack Obama’s administration have argued. The Electronic Privacy Information Center can’t challenge the legality of the NSA’s practice of collecting U.S. telephone records because the Patriot Act of 2001 only allows challenges from businesses that receive government orders to turn over business records or from the U.S. government, according to U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. and lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice, who made the argument in . Because the law doesn’t allow EPIC to challenge an NSA order directed at Verizon Communications, the Supreme Court “lacks jurisdiction” to act on EPIC’s request, they wrote. EPIC asking the Supreme Court to vacate an order from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Court requiring Verizon to turn over all its phone records. If the court decides against that course of action, EPIC asked it to review the legality of the program.
I’ve never understood dance. I don’t just mean I’m bad at dancing—though that is also true. I mean I don’t it. Where other people see expression, grace, artistry, I see arms, legs, people jumping into the air and kicking. I see the various parts that make up “dance,” I just fail to grasp the larger intent. Occasionally I can snag some small piece of understanding. I have been known, in the wee hours of the night when Bob Seger's comes on the bar jukebox, to sway back and forth in some ritualized, primitive motion. I’m also no stranger to mosh pits, having grown up in New Jersey during its fertile pop-punk and hardcore years. But on the whole, dance is lost on me. Or was. Until I played Soundodger+. Soundodger+ is built on a simple premise: you play as a circle, trapped inside an arena. Other objects shoot from the arena’s walls—triangles, cubes, larger circles. Colliding with these objects is .
This iteration of the FuelBand is an evolution that offers more accurate fitness tracking, better battery efficiency, and an improved design, Nike says.
For years, Microsoft, Apple, and others have offered educational discounts to students. Now, Microsoft has gone significantly further, providing a free copy of Office to students whose schools license it for their faculty and staff. The Student Advantage program essentially extends an Office 365 subscription to the student body. Beginning Dec. 1, any academic institution that licenses Office for staff and faculty can provide Office 365 ProPlus for students at no additional cost, Microsoft announced at the Educause 2013 conference. Until now, Microsoft has offered access to Office for both students and educators via its , available in three tiers. A free, basic tier offers perks like 25GB of hosted SkyDrive storage, hosted email with a user-selected domain name, and other benefits that go a bit beyond what Microsoft offers via the Web for consumers—including Office Web Apps. But only the paid A3 tiers and above offer desktop versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, Access, Lync, and OneNote; under that plan, students pay $2.50 per month per user, and faculty and staff pay $4.50 per user, per month. Students can also buy a four-year Office 365 University license for $79.99.
Puppet Labs has added some visual pizzazz to its namesake open source IT automation software, providing a graphic event inspector for administrators to see at a glance where trouble spots in their systems reside. Puppet Enterprise 3.1, , also provides cloud provisioning for the Google Compute Engine, can manage the legacy Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) 4.0 distributions, and can provide a way to reboot machines running Microsoft Windows from over a network. One of the major headaches that system administrators can face is trying to troubleshoot a specific problem within a complex and interconnected infrastructure of IT equipment and associated software. Puppet’s new event inspector promises to show where trouble spots reside, minimizing the amount of time needed to scan through megabytes of log files. “The event inspector offers you an organized, at-a-glance view of any change events in your infrastructure and provides instant access to detailed, actionable information,” wrote Puppet software engineer Lindsey Smith announcing the release of Puppet Enterprise.
NewsGator wants its Social Sites add-on for SharePoint to handle companies’ innovation cycles with a beefed-up set of capabilities for brainstorming, idea evaluation, concept development, and execution. Social Sites, an enterprise social networking (ESN) product, has an existing “ideation” module that’s called Idea Stream and is mainly for brainstorming, but NewsGator released on Tuesday a broader “innovation” edition of the full suite. With Social Sites for Innovation, NewsGator wants to tap further into the demand for enterprise software that lets companies solicit ideas from employees, collect and manage their contributions and distill the suggestions into concrete plans. In fact, last month Mindjet, which makes project-based collaboration software, merged with Spigit, which specializes in innovation management, to offer enterprises tools that help from idea creation to completion of projects. Other NewsGator rivals provide various levels of innovation management functionality for their broader ESN suites.
Your online address books are probably being accessed by the government. But you probably kinda knew that anyway. reported late Monday, drawing once again from documents leaked by Edward Snowden. According to the report, the NSA actively collects and stores “buddy lists” and online address books from “most major webmail” systems and has been since at least January 2012. The Agency uses these virtual reams of “metadata-rich” info to create searchable recreations of an individual’s life based on their online connections. programs, which gave the government the ability to access nearly all digital communications.
Two fall Apple events are better than one! The folks from Cupertino will show off something new next week on October 22.
Siemens Enterprise Communications has changed its name to Unify and now hopes to take advantage of a growing interest in hosted unified communications. The rebranding comes at time when the way enterprises communicate is changing. Thanks to trends such as bring-your-own-device, employees are no longer tied to a desk and a desk phone for their work. For example, 87 percent of North American enterprises plan to add video conferencing to their unified communications infrastructure by August next year, according to a recent survey conducted by Infonetics Research. At the same time, the use of the cloud is also on the rise: 22 percent of respondents had implemented portions of their unified communications system in a private cloud and 19 percent had done so in a public cloud, the market research company said.
One of the major obstacles for delivering faster Internet to the home is the sheer amount of work and money it takes to lay the cable. Now, researchers are coming up with a workaround that transmits the data wirelessly. The latest effort, from researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, has set a new world record for wireless data transmission. They've managed to hit 100 gigabits per second while transmitting data over 20 meters, using a frequency of 237.5 GHz. A previous effort by the same group reached 40 Gbps over 1 kilometer. ”) across two transmission towers. TGDaily also notes that the researchers hit 100 Gbps using a single data stream. In the future, researchers could achieve even higher bandwidths through interweaving of multiple data streams and other techniques.
Spammers, rejoice! A new opt-in setting lets anyone send you a direct message on Twitter.
. lock down each mail account with SSL encryption. Instead, Yahoo Mail lets users login via SSL and then flips to an unencrypted connection during a regular mail session. when your email is in transit across the Internet. In other words, the decision to make SSL the default connection method for its email service is long overdue.
An E.U. proposal to place copyright levies on cloud computing services would be a complete disaster if implemented, according to a member of the European Parliament. Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom said Tuesday that he could not envision a proposal worse than that of French MEP Françoise Castex, who presented her plan for the overhaul of the Copyright Directive to the Parliament's legal affairs committee Monday. She said her proposal will make the issue of copyright levies and downloading clearer across the European Union. "The very principle of levies is all wrong, we should be reducing them, not increasing them," Engstrom said in response. Castex believes that "the private copying system is a virtuous system that balances the right to copying for private use with fair remuneration to rightholders, and that it is a system worth preserving."
to protest what the company considered intrusive data requests from the U.S. government. Lavabit’s data recovery is slated to begin on Friday, October 18. Before Lavabit data becomes publicly available again, users will have 72 hours to change their passwords at the rebelliously named https://liberty.lavabit.com. Lavabit says it is offering a brief password reset window to ease concerns that user login data may have been compromised. "If users are indeed concerned that their account information has been compromised, this will allow them to change their account password on a website with a newly secured SSL key," Lavabit said in a statement.
Introducing F!rst, a new social network designed specifically for gamers.
Oops, did you just drop your phone in the toilet? Again?
Classic Shell isn't a me-too Windows 8 fixer. This free utility's first beta came out in November 2009, close on the heels of Windows 7. It's been helping frustrated Windows users regain lost features and add new ones ever since. New stable version 4.0 powers up Windows 7, 8, and 8.1.
Japanese carrier SoftBank and gaming company GungHo Online Entertainment are investing $1.5 billion for a 51 percent stake in Finnish game developer Softcell, highlighting how hot this sector has become. Tuesday. The combination of tablets, mobile and the free-to-play business model has created a new market for games that will be accessible to billions of people -- more than ever before in the history of games, according to Paananen. Supercell has been a success since it first started developing games for tablets in 2011, with the development of "Clash of Titans" and "Hay Day," which are both among the top grossing iOS games.
Salesforce.com has delivered an identity product designed to let enterprises consolidate user authentication and application access control on a single tool. Called Salesforce Identity, the cloud application was announced little over a year ago and released on Tuesday. It will be available for customers with Enterprise and Unlimited Edition licenses for several of the vendor's products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Communities, as well as for customers of the Force.com platform as a service. , the company wants to simplify for IT administrators the process of provisioning and managing their companies' collection of mobile, cloud and on-premises applications, which in many enterprises is growing in size and diversity. The tool will allow IT departments to manage "any app on any device" for employees, customers and partners, according to Salesforce.com, which said the Sierra Club will use the product in online communities for its more than 2 million members.
Easy expansion, lower costs and cloud-like internal services are common themes in storage today, and startup Coho Data is playing all three with a "micro-array" architecture that it's introducing on Tuesday. Enterprises will be able to combine Coho's micro-arrays in a grid to form huge storage systems with capacities reaching up into the petabytes. Users will be able to tap into that capacity as if they are signing up for more storage on a public cloud, without worrying about what storage hardware makes up the underlying system, the company says. Coho will showcase the system this week at Storage Networking World, where backup veteran Sepaton will also unveil a new architecture designed to scale out to multiple nodes. The heart of the Coho DataStream architecture is the company's software, which lets it take full advantage of fast PCIe and Ethernet interfaces without bottlenecks, according to Coho. The company first planned to sell its technology as pure software but found through pilot projects that enterprises didn't trust a storage platform that didn't come with its own hardware, Coho Co-Founder and CTO Andy Warfield said. So Coho combined flash devices, hard disks, CPU sockets and network interface cards in rack-mounted boxes. It links multiple micro-arrays together logically through a software-defined networking switch. "We get the hardware that lets us build that balanced trio of resources as densely as we can," Warfield said. The hardware components can come from various sources, which may change over time.
Backup and recovery is starting to get some of the same capabilities as primary storage systems to handle the rising floods of data with less management overhead. On Tuesday, at Storage Networking World, veteran data protection vendor Sepaton is announcing a backup and recovery platform that's designed to grow easily as an organization accumulates data. Sepaton's introduction of its VirtuoSO appliance and the underlying Optiscale architecture comes just days after tape specialist Spectra Logic announced its BlackPearl appliance to integrate web and cloud data into vast and growing tape libraries. While primary storage technology has matured to the point where many systems can automatically grow to accommodate more data, backup and recovery is still mostly built around products that force IT administrators to reconfigure their systems every time they add a new hardware unit, analysts say. That threatens to become a bottleneck in a world where, according to research company IDC, enterprises are expanding their storage capacity by more than 30 percent every year to keep up with data growth. What's important enough to store is usually considered worth backing up in some form, so data protection challenges are escalating along with storage woes.
Predictions of Apple's next event, the shame of bad in-car tech interfaces, smart smoke detectors, and international roaming
Two tablets enter, one tablet leaves!
. had less than 10,000 Android malware samples in its database by late 2011. Now, two years later, that number has blossomed to around 1.3 million. take a few steps to meaningfully improve your mobile security. Join me as we walk through three of the best strategies. (Note: Click on the smaller images below, to enlarge them.) One of the easiest things you can do to protect an Android or iOS device is to take advantage of built-in hardware encryption. This feature will turn the data on your phone into nearly unreadable junk—unless it's properly unlocked with your password.
Searching for the right results among the billions of pages on the Web? You don't need just a search engine; you also need some know-how.
VMware continues to push its plan to virtualize the whole data center, with the general availability of its network virtualization platform, and desktops too with the acquisition of desktop-as-a service company Desktone. Less than two months after VMworld in San Francisco, VMware has gathered users and partners in Barcelona for the European version of its user conference. The main theme is once again virtualizing the whole data center, including servers, storage, networking and security. "Virtualization has unquestionably been the most powerful tool for IT over the last decade for transformation and cost savings, and we are just getting started," said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger during his keynote at the event on Tuesday. A key part of VMware's strategy is the NSX network virtualization platform, which is now generally available. It offers networking and security functionality in software, and in the process the platform decouples management from the networking hardware.