TechEye |  |
- Data centres drive storage growth
- Sales of chips up in July
- The voice of computers croaks
- Qualcomm split subject to Heisenberg
- Screen time is killing kids’ grades
- Google Docs transcribes speech in the clouds
- Diodes buys Pericom
- Enterprises are thinking of artificial intelligence
- Germany takes the lead in 2-in-1 market
- IBM gets into bed with ARM
| Data centres drive storage growth Posted: 04 Sep 2015 03:09 AM PDT
IDC said that revenues were spurred by original design manufacturers (ODMs) which sell their wares direct to hyperscale data centres. That segment of the market grew by 25.8 percent in the quarter, year on year, and accounted for $1 billion worth of revenues. The trend is for enterprises to buy storage tech cutting cost and complexity – that means a move towards cloud storage, software defined storage, flash optimised systems and integrated systems. Despite the move towards buying from ODMs, EMC remained on top of the vendor pile, although its revenue growth fell by four percent year on year. It holds 19.2 percent of the market. HP grew by 8.7 percent in the quarter, with 16.2 percent market share. Third was Dell with 101 percent market share, and IBM held fourth position with 8.1 percent share. |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2015 01:38 AM PDT
The numbers are up, but only by 0.4 percent compared to June 2015, worth $2.837 billion on July. ESIA said the figures show the revenues were based on strong demand for microprocessors and logic chips, aided and abetted by sales of memory products. Sales were mostly represented by semiconductors aimed at consumers, computers and wired communications. But exchange rate fluctuations played a significant role in July, ESIA said. In Euro, semiconductor sales fell by 0.3 percent compared to June, but increased by 7.1 percent compared to July 2014. |
| Posted: 04 Sep 2015 01:08 AM PDT
As a leading researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Flanagan pioneered the developing field of acoustics and developed the tech for speech recognition, teleconferencing, MP3 music files and the more efficient digital transmission of human conversation. He was famouse for his 1976 article, "Computers That Talk and Listen: Man-Machine Communication by Voice," that appeared in Proceedings of the I.E.E.E., a journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. More than 39 years ago, the point is that it painted a picture of society in the 21st century that actually happened. Flanagan had his name on 50 patents. These included an artificial human larynx and a typewriter activated by the same audio tones as a push-button phone for the deaf. His innovations included preserving the sound of a human voice while crunching it digitally. He also taught computers to articulate by converting sound waves into digital pulses. In 1974, Flanagan was one of six acoustical experts appointed by the courts in the President Nixon Watergate scandal. He proved that 18.5 minutes of a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 20, 1972, were deleted in five separate erasures and re-recordings requiring "hand operation of keyboard controls". The conversation took place three days after the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington. Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, accepted blame for erasing the first five minutes of the tape, saying she had been interrupted by a telephone call while transcribing it. Her explanation was dismissed as technically implausible. Nixon later resigned under threat of impeachment for, among other charges, withholding evidence. Flanagan had come a long way from his family's cotton farm in Greenwood, Mississippi Delta. He joined the Army Air Forces at 17, worked to perfect signal scrambling and radar during World War II. Afterwards he returned to Mississippi State University and later received a master's degree and a doctorate from M.I.T. In 1956, he joined Bell Labs, where he would work for 33 years. He retired in 1990 as director of information principles research. In addition to his wife, Mildred, he is survived by his sons, Stephen, James and Aubrey and five grandchildren.
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| Qualcomm split subject to Heisenberg Posted: 04 Sep 2015 01:06 AM PDT
The outfit was under pressure from its activist shareholders Jana to sell off its chipmaking side and concentrate on a more lucrative patent trolling business. Qualcomm President Derek Aberle said he was still looking into it but said a review of a possible split will not be complete until the end of the year. Aberle agreed with Jana that its stock is undervalued but was still not sure that spinning off Qualcomm's two divisions was the answer. “You have to step back and say why that is and would a separation solve whatever the underlying issues are that are creating the current valuation? You have to be careful that it’s not too simplistic an analysis.” The company’s current structure allows Qualcomm to use its relationships with Chinese customers since the chipmaker is well positioned to help them expand to other countries. Aberle acknowledged that having chip and licensing divisions created conflicts with customers, “but we manage it pretty well”. Qualcomm was approached by Jana, a hedge fund which owns $2 billion in stock. Aberle said the outfit did not pressure Qualcom to pursue a breakup but rather wanted them to review a split as one option to unlock value. It is also working on adding a third independent board member, whom Aberle declined to name. Qualcomm has already added two new board members in cooperation with Jana. “A lot of the things Jana put on the table were very consistent with things we'd already been talking to our shareholders about and already been planning for a long time,” Aberle said. Qualcomm said in July it would reduce costs by about $1.4 billion, cut about 4,500 full-time staff, or 15 percent of its workforce, and boost capital returns to shareholders. |
| Screen time is killing kids’ grades Posted: 04 Sep 2015 01:05 AM PDT
A Cambridge University report, published in the International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity found that teens who spend an extra hour a day surfing the internet, watching TV or playing computer games risked performing two grades worse in exams than their peers who don’t. A study of more than 800 students aged 14 and 15, also found that physical activity had no effect on academic performance, thus confirming that psychopathic PE teachers were the chocolate teapots of academia. Researchers followed the pupils over time to see how different behaviours affected performance. The scientists said it was reasonable to conclude that too much screen time reduced academic achievement. Kirsten Corder of Cambridge’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research, who co-led the work said that it is possible to reasonably suggest that screen time may be damaging to a teenager’s grades. The study found the average amount of screen time per day was four hours. An extra hour in front of the TV or online at age 14-and-a-half was linked with 9.3 fewer exam points at age 16 — equivalent to two grades, for example from a B to a D. Two extra hours was linked to 18 fewer points. Pupils doing an extra hour of daily homework and reading scored better had averages of 23.1 more points than their peers. Further research was needed to confirm the effect conclusively, but advised parents worried about their children’s grades to consider limiting screen time. It is not all tablets and mobiles though. TV was the most detrimental in terms of exam performance. |
| Google Docs transcribes speech in the clouds Posted: 04 Sep 2015 01:04 AM PDT
The new version of Google Docs has several new features but the sexiest is one which records speech and converts it into a transcript. It is the ultimate for students sitting through university lectures and could be used for those god-awful brainstorming sessions in business. Computer voice recognition with accuracy sufficient for accurate dictation is recent, as processing algorithms were error prone. Recently, Google developed a set of neural networking models that are far more accurate. To make sure it worked, Google funnelled its own voicemail traffic through the recognition circuits. The voicemail provided what are essentially grammatical rules as well as recognition material. Now the new voice dictation system has less than half the errors the best of the older models had. Other functions in Google Docs include a Research and an Explore function. Explore makes sense of data stored in Google Sheets spreadsheets and displays it in a way that makes sense. Data still has to get into the spreadsheet somehow and you still have to tell Explore what data you want to look at, but the rest is automatic. Research and Explore works only on Android while voice dictation and typing work only on Android and iOS mobile devices. All of the features will work on PCs running Windows and on Macs as long as you use the Chrome browser. |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2015 07:29 AM PDT
Diodes makes discrete, logic and analogue semiconductors while Pericom supplies connectivity and timing products. Pericom's board of directors said the deal, if it gains approval, will produce a company with revenues of around a billion and gross profits of £337 million. Diodes said that the acquisition will strengthen its analogue business and add a mixed signal connectivity string to its semiconductor bow. The transaction is expected to be approved in the fourth quarter of this year but there's already a potential snag. US law firm Johnson & Weaver has launched an investigation into whether the board of Pericom breached their fiduciary duties. It claims that it will investigate on whether Diodes is paying enough for Pericom and whether it had sought alternatives to the acquisition. |
| Enterprises are thinking of artificial intelligence Posted: 03 Sep 2015 06:30 AM PDT
That's the prediction of market research firm Trendforce, which said big vendors are snapping up smartups and personnel to bolster the development of such applications. Giants like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo are in a race to be first to market with persuasive enterprise AI apps whereas in former days AI was a specialised research field. Carlos Yu, a senior analyst at Trendforce, said that AI technologies have made great advances in the last few years. "Large enterprises have not only begun to acquire AI solutions, they also set set about improving their AI based services by combining them with cloud and big data technologies," he said. IBM appears to be the leader of the pack right now, but the other giants are using "deep learning" AI to improve their technologies. Yu believes that AI will be adopted in major industries including manufacturing, automotive, internet, retailing and information engineering. He said in the healthcare sector AI is being combined with wearable devices to both improve patient care and also help design new pharmaceuticals. |
| Germany takes the lead in 2-in-1 market Posted: 03 Sep 2015 06:20 AM PDT
And now IDC said that figures it has obtained will show that by the end of this year Germany will be the biggest 2-in-1 market in Western Europe. Its projections estimate that nearly 800,000 devices will ship to Germany by the end of this year. IDC said volumes of 2-in-1s in the country have grown by 30 percent compared to last year, but demand for these devices has exceeded predictions. And it's not only ordinary people that are buying these devices but enterprises too, according to IDC. Chrystelle Labesque, a research manager at IDC Europe said: "2-in-1s are the only [PC] product category with a positive outlook over the next four years. This is due to an acceleration of the mobility trend, driven by increasing digitalisation of business processes in German companies and by the release of Windows 10." Windows 10, she said, has the potential to solve integration problems with existing IT infrastructures. Unlike other territories, IDC said that Samsung beats Apple in the smartphone and tablet market with a third of total shipments. |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2015 06:10 AM PDT
IBM said that the initiative, called the IBM IoT Foundation will provide "out of the box" connectivity with ARM devices to analytic services. Big Blue also said it has started the first in a series of IBM Cloud IoT services, called IoT for Electronics. The service is aimed at electronic manufacturers. The IoT Foundation, IBM said, lets fully managed and cloud hosted offerings analyse large quantities of data and provides a level of security for embedded devices too. The deal with ARM means that products that use ARM mbed enabled chips to auto register with IBM's offerings and connect to IBM's analytic tools. IBM claims a number of electronics manufacturers have already adopted the tools it's offering giving as an example a smart washing machine that when it breaks down triggers an alarm to call a service engineer. |
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