TechEye

Kids told to sign away school work to content industry
Samsung Galaxy brand trumps Android in popularity contest
Chip sales down 2.7 percent in 2012
Ahmadinejad wants to be first in space
British army uses 10cm nano-hornets to sniff out insurgents
Microsoft working on advanced crystal ball
Nokia went for Windows over a fear of Android dominance
HDD sales expected to plunge
Dell deal still being thrashed out

Kids told to sign away school work to content industry

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:50 AM PST

School kids in Maryland could soon be taken to court if they choose to copy their homework or art projects for posterity. The Board of Education of Prince George's County has come up with an ingenious proposal to copyright all work created by staff and students under its jurisdiction.

This basically means that the school system would own everything teachers and their students come up with, from a first-grader's drawing to mobile apps created by university students. Although the US government has transformed into a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Content, the proposal is not going down well with parents and just about anyone else who came across it.

David Cahn, an educational activist who attends school board meetings believes there is something inherently wrong with the proposal. "There are better ways to do this than to take away a person's rights," he told the Washington Post.

Law professor David Rein said he had never heard of a similar policy enacted by a school board. He pointed out that most universities have sharing agreements for work created by professors and college students. Under the agreements, the university, professor and student all benefit from their projects.

"The way this policy is written, it essentially says if a student writes a paper, goes home and polishes it up and expands it, the school district can knock on the door and say, 'We want a piece of that,' " Rein said. "I can't imagine that."

So, how did the school board come up with the idea in the first place? Enter Apple and its iPads for school program.

Board Chair Verjeana M. Jacobs and Vice Chair Carolyn M. Boston attended an Apple presentation and learned how teachers can use apps to create new curricula. The proposal was designed to ensure schools own teacher-developed curricula created on school property iPads.

However, board members apparently got a bit carried away, so they expanded the policy to cover all work submitted by staff and students. Jacobs then pulled an Instagram, insisting that it was never the board's intention to declare ownership of students' work and calling on legal counsels to "restructure the language" to reflect the district's real goals instead.

Even when if they do, the school district would still retain copyright on everything developed by the faculty and what better way to mould young minds than to tell their teachers that they need not bother coming up with anything innovative, useful and potentially profitable.

Samsung Galaxy brand trumps Android in popularity contest

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:34 AM PST

Samsung's Galaxy brand is slowly becoming more popular than Android.

According to blogger Benedict Evans and a bit of Google Trends number crunching, an increasing number of people are associating Samsung's own brand with all Android phones. Evans puts it this way: "Android is over - normals call It Galaxy."

In terms of brand recognition, Galaxy has already met Android and plenty of consumers simply don't know the difference. The trend is hardly surprising, as Samsung is the top Android handset maker worldwide. Furthermore, the Korean outfit almost never mentions Android in its marketing and it spends billions on marketing every year. It is bad news for Google, as Samsung is becoming synonymous with Android phones. However, Samsung does not use vanilla Android on its Galaxy phones. It uses a heavily skinned version of its own, with the tacky TouchWiz user interface on top.

Google reps often try to make a distinction between pure Android devices like Nexus phones and Android-based devices, which run a heavily customised version of Android, like Samsung's Galaxy gear, Amazon tablets, HTC smartphones and so on. However, since Google never did a very good job at marketing Nexus products, few consumers even know what vanilla Android is supposed to look like.

According to the Brand Keys 2013 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, Samsung is now the market leader is most categories, although it ties with Apple in some. In the past, Apple enjoyed a clear lead in brand loyalty. Brand Keys founder and president Robert Passikoff said Samsung's success is a big turnaround.

"Samsung was always strong, but this is a bit of a switchover. It was a surprise. I guess it shouldn't have been. I've been watching their advertising, and I thought it was really good," Pasikoff told Marketing Daily. "I think they're making real inroads."

Pasikoff also pointed out that Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets are starting to make their presence felt, due to solid brand value and integration. More and more consumers are trading in their e-readers for Amazon tablets, helping Amazon grow the Kindle Fire brand. This could be more bad news for Google, as an increasing number of consumers start to associate inexpensive Android tablets with Amazon, despite the fact that Google spent the last three quarters pushing its own Nexus tablets. What's more, Amazon uses an even more customised version of Android than Samsung.

So, when it comes to "normals," all Android-based devices could become Galaxies, while most if not all small Android tablets will be viewed as Kindles. For some reason Google failed to properly promote its Nexus brand, or even meet demand for some products, such as the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10. Although many people heard of the Nexus brand, very few consumers even know what the real advantages of Nexus gear are.

Chip sales down 2.7 percent in 2012

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:25 AM PST

Semiconductor sales are down in line with gloomy forecasts, but things might not be as bad as they seem. Chip sales dipped $291.6 billion in 2012, down 2.7 percent from record sales of $299.5 billion in 2011.

However, the Semiconductor Industry Association believes the drop was not all that bad. Shipments still managed to beat most forecasts and things could have been even worse.

Some regions did better than others. Sales in the Americas increased 12 percent in Q4 2012 year-over-year, showing a possible recovery, although sales on a yearly level were down slightly.

Global sales in December were $24.7 billion, down three percent sequentially. The Asia-Pacific region did well, with 6.7 percent of growth in December, but Japan and Europe are down by 5.5 and 11.2 percent respectively.

"Despite substantial macroeconomic challenges, the global semiconductor industry outperformed forecasts and posted one of its highest yearly sales totals in 2012," said SIA President Brian Toohey. "Recent momentum, led by strength in the Americas, has the industry well-positioned for a successful 2013."

Toohey's optimism echoes previous projections from research outfit IHS iSuppli, which also expects a rebound in the second and third quarter. However, semiconductor inventory is currently at record levels and sales in the current quarter are set to remain weak.

Evidence of the PC slump is all over the SIA report. Sales of MOS processors are down, along with memory chip sales. However, logic, optoelectornics and NAND sales were up, thanks to strong smartphone and tablet sales.

We're not sure whether the semi market will hit the $300 billion milestone this year, but the odds at our betting shop around the corner are rather long.

Ahmadinejad wants to be first in space

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:18 AM PST

Comedy president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has announced that he is "ready to be the first man in space".

Ahmadinejad, who apparently has not heard of Yuri Gagarin, would not be the first world leader to be an Astronaut. According to the North Korean press, Kim Jong-il has also done a turn or two in space, landed on the moon, and kicked over the Americian flag. Kim would have flown further but had to return to save his people from a giant imperialist badger which was threatening the country.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, despite being a world pariah and not having much cash, Ahmadinejad has insisted that Iran run an ambitious program which aims to send a human into orbit by 2020.

"Our youth are determined to send a man into space within the next four, five years, and I'm sure that will happen," he said during a ceremony in Tehran where two new Iranian-made satellites were unveiled, according to the ISNA news agency.

He added that he is ready to be the first Iranian to be sacrificed by the scientists of his country and go into space, even though he knows there are a lot of candidates. Recently, a monkey volunteered for the sacrifice, but made it back to earth unscathed.

Judging by Ahmadinejad's popularity both at home and in the rest of the world, we are sure a few world leaders will chip in to send him on an exploration of the surface of the sun using a revolutionary new tin foil space suit.

He said he was willing to "auction himself and donate" the money to the Iran's space program. Although we doubt he would find many takers, even for parts.

The presidency website showed pictures of Ahmadinejad at the ceremony with what was purportedly Pishgam (pioneer), the monkey claimed to have been sent into orbit by Tehran last week.

Iran's space program is believed to be a cover for the development of ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, despite denials from Tehran.

The UN Security Council has imposed an almost total embargo on the export of nuclear and space technology to Iran since 2007.

British army uses 10cm nano-hornets to sniff out insurgents

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:14 AM PST

The British Army is deploying nanobots in the war against Afghan insurgents.

While not exactly being the sort of nano bots which Wesley Crusher could use to destroy the Enterprise, the pocket-sized spy drones are pretty small.

Dubbed Black Hornet Nano, the remote controlled toy is 10 centimetres long and weighs about 15 grams.

It is used it to look for insurgent firing points and check out exposed areas of the ground before crossing.

Sergeant Christopher Petherbridge was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the gizmo is a real asset. It means that the British can find insurgents hiding in cover before exposing themselves to a hail of bullets. The nano bot is also hard to see, let alone shoot.

The drone is made by the Norwegian company Prox Dynamics. It can fly indoors or outdoors either flown manually or programmed using GPS coordinates.

The Hornet is powered by a small rechargeable battery and reportedly has a working range of about 800 metres, a top speed of 35 km/h and can fly for up to 30 minutes at a time.

Britain obtained the technology as part of a $31 million contract for 160 of the beasties, the Associated Press said.

Microsoft working on advanced crystal ball

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:11 AM PST

Software giant Microsoft is considering abandoning its faithful set of tarot cards as its key method of predicting the future.

According to Parity News, the Vole has decided that tarot cards are no way to predict the future and favours an advanced form of Bibliomancy instead. Microsoft Research has teamed up with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to create software that can predict events like outbreaks of disease or violence by mining data from old news and the web.

It if it all works then it could mean an end of the educated guess or intuition.

So far, the team, consisting of Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky from Technion-Israel Institute, tested it with articles from the New York Times spanning over 20 years from archives between 1986 and 2007.

We guess, based on that source, Apple technology will rule the world and everyone will be a happy subject in Cupertino's walled garden.

But apparently the test data also included data from other sources such as the web which means the software is able to soothsay more efficiently and put them into better context. In the case of the New York Times it meant that the software could see that there was not just a band called Coldplay, and there were technology companies out there other than Apple.

According to a research paper from the team, the database considers the use of words and their related terms. For example, if you wanted to predict the number of deaths by chocolate, you would type in the words "death" and "chocolate."

The researchers want to develop the tool in such a way that it will provide proper guidance in terms of short term actions that can be taken based on present data.

According to the researchers, their work will go on - and they are looking forward to mining more data from other newspapers, digitised books and such sources to refine their software.

The team hopes that its work will promote additional research in this field by using past experiences and human knowledge to predict future events and come up with good ideas to solve problems before they happen.

They claim that the software may assist government agencies and other organisations working towards humanitarian causes to provide better response in case of disasters and epidemics. It could also help Steve Ballmer avoid missing key business opportunities, again.

Nokia went for Windows over a fear of Android dominance

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:08 AM PST

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has explained that the reason he dumped Symbian in favour of Windows was to prevent Samsung from gaining too much power.

While many thought that Elop, who used to work for Microsoft, had simply handed over the keys to Redmond, he insists that ignoring Android was necessary.

Elop told the Sydney Morning Herald that Nokia was "very worried" about Samsung's expected monopoly over Android.

He said that the company was anxious that Nokia would be entering Android late and that Samsung was well on the road to becoming the dominant Android vendor at the expense of everybody else.

Symbian was not a starter, Elop claimed, because it "was seen as a much higher risk." It also ditched it because Windows Phone allowed the company to differentiate from rivals who used Android.

Elop was also not happy with Google's Android licensing which was becoming restrictive.

For example, Google insisted that its Maps product was installed on every machine, which would have undermined all the cash that Nokia had sunk into its own mapping products.

"If you watch very carefully as to what's happening with the changes to the open handset alliance agreement and the work Google has done on their contracting, it's become more and more constricted over time in terms of what you're allowed to do," Elop said.

Elop, who was in Australia to launch the budget Lumia 620 smartphone, said that Nokia is looking at how Microsoft's Surface tablet performed the market before launching its own.

He hopes to bring Windows Phone into "double digit" market share but could not give a time frame in which to reach the target.

Elop said that the fears about Samsung's dominance turned out to be right. At the time he made the decision Samsung was big, HTC was pretty big, Motorola was pretty big. But Samsung has captured the lion's share and the others have been squeezed out.

HDD sales expected to plunge

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:01 AM PST

HHD sales will take a canning this year as SSDs boom, according to beancounters at iSuppli.

iSuppli claims that HDD revenue is set to drop to about $32.7 billion this year, down 11.8 percent from $37.1 billion last year.

HDD revenue will be flat the following year, amounting to $32 billion in 2014, iSuppli said.

HDDs shipments dropped from 659.7 million in 2010 to 626.3 million in 2011 to 578.1 million in 2012.

Fang Zhang, an analyst for storage systems at iSuppli, said that the HDD industry will face lots of challenges in 2013.

Shipments for desktop PCs will slip, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to spend on smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs will also allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs, Zhang said.

All that being said, HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for Ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing, Zhang's report said.

HDDs are still as cheap as chips, particularly when higher densities are involved and dollars per gigabyte are calculated, he said.

He expects the average selling price for HDDs to decline a further seven percent this year.

On average, HDD prices have dropped from 50 cents per gigabyte of capacity in 2007 to 10 cents per gig in 2012, according to Zhang. SSD prices have dropped from $8.79 per gigabyte of capacity in 2007 to $1 in 2012, the report said.

While it is still too early to see the SSD price in 2013, it will be down, Zhang claimed.

Dell deal still being thrashed out

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 01:59 AM PST

It looks like negotiations between Michael Dell, his backers and the company are dragging on a lot longer than many expected.

The deal, which would give Dell control of his company and allow it to go private, was expected to have been thrashed out over the weekend. However, the expected announcement did not happen yesterday.

According to Reuters, the deal is close to being hatched but the sticking point appears to be the price. The deal is expected to involve $24 billion changing hands, but arguments seem to be over whether the Michael Dell consortium should pay $13.50 or $13.75. Currently the price of Dell shares are $13.27 and the $13.50 to $13.75 per share price range being negotiated means Dell will be worth between $23.5 billion to $23.9 billion.

Last night, a deepthroat told Reuters that everything was on track and an outcome is expected soon. The source did warn that no final agreement had been reached and negotiations could still break down.

Microsoft is expected to invest around $2 billion, while private equity firm Silver Lake is expected to put in about $1 billion.

Michael Dell is expected to roll over his 16 percent stake and put in some of his own money so he has control of the company.

Any deal that Michael Dell negotiates will also need the approval of a majority of the shareholders.