TechEye |  |
- Toshiba sells sensor unit to Sony
- Falling tablet sales spark closure
- Bristol engineers develop Star Trek style tractor beam
- Apple posts results lower than expectations
- Boy bailed in TalkTalk case
- Europe puts end to mobile roaming charges
- Internet of things won’t be an easy journey
- Notebook shipments to fall 17.5 percent
| Toshiba sells sensor unit to Sony Posted: 28 Oct 2015 02:26 AM PDT
The image sensor manufacturing plant in Oita, southern Japan will go to Sony by the end of the fiscal year through March. Tosh is giving up on the sensor business completely. Sony will take on the sensor business’ 1,100 workers. The deal was worth around $166.15 million. Toshiba also said it will withdraw from the white light-emitting diode (LED) business, part of its semiconductor division. The moves amount to the first restructuring steps Toshiba has announced since it said earlier this year that it had overstated earnings in a wide range of businesses including chips, television sets and personal computers over seven years. Sony gets to solidify its already dominant position in the industry. It already controls about 40 percent of the market for complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors. |
| Falling tablet sales spark closure Posted: 28 Oct 2015 02:25 AM PDT
Coretronics makes backlight modules used in Apple iPad said it was closing its Nanjing factories due to sluggish global demand for tablets. Global shipments for monitors, notebooks and tablets are projected to drop an average 10 percent on year respectively in 2015. Overall demand is likely to remain stagnant because various applications markets are becoming saturated. Coretronics spokeswoman Cindy Wen declined to say which products are produced at the Nanjing plant, or give details about its size. She said Coretronics’ six other panel plants in China are still in operation. Coretronics plants in Nanjing and Guangzhou in southern China are listed under Apple’s 2015 supplier list. “Since last year the growth of tablet sales has become worse than previous years, and the market demand has been declining for several quarters,” Wen said. “We might make some further adjustments in our production capacity in the future, but at the moment we do not have plans to close down more factories,” she added. |
| Bristol engineers develop Star Trek style tractor beam Posted: 28 Oct 2015 02:25 AM PDT
The team has been thinking small, and so far has tested the design on small pea-sized objects, which they can manipulate from 30 to 40cm away. According to the popular science magazine Nature Communications, they think the work could help develop remote surgical instruments. Bruce Drinkwater from the University of Bristol, one of the study’s authors said that the team programmed a grid of small speakers to emit ultrasound in intricate, shifting patterns, crafting shapes from the interacting waves that resembled tweezers, bottles, and tiny tornado-like twisters. These “holograms” were able to control small beads up to 5mm across. Crucially, the design works from just one side – including above or below the beads – instead of requiring the object to be surrounded by loudspeakers. Drinkwater said the holy grail in this field is to use this sort of manipulation in, for example, targeted drug delivery. “Our method, we hope, will now be applied, both at a smaller scale – maybe for medical purposes – and at a larger scale, potentially for handling dangerous materials in some sort of non-contact production line.” The work builds on research from the University of Dundee, published last year, had already demonstrated that sound waves could tug an object towards a sound source. The Bristol engineers say their tech could eventually help deliver drugs in a targeted way They used a clinically approved device, which was designed for doing focused ultrasound surgery which was programmed that to create the same sort of beams that the Scots did. Next up, should be a sonic screwdriver. |
| Apple posts results lower than expectations Posted: 28 Oct 2015 02:23 AM PDT
It is worthwhile pointing out that analysts have been predicting trouble ahead for Apple as its days of mega-growth appear to be over so they had low expectations. On paper the figures looked great, but China sales dipped from the fiscal third quarter, when Apple notched $13.2 billion in revenue there. The decline is important as many analysts believe China is poised to replace the United States as Apple’s biggest market – only this suggests that it is losing its grip. Apple, the world’s largest company by market value, said it sold about 48.05 million iPhones worldwide in its fiscal fourth quarter ended 26 September, slightly below analysts’ average forecast of 48.72 million, according to a poll by Fortune magazine. For the current quarter, which will include a full three months of sales of the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models, Apple forecast revenue between $75.5 billion and $77.5 billion. The company’s generally conservative forecast was in line with what Wall Street thought. Morningstar analyst Brian Colello said the forecast was slightly below expectations but investors were pricing in a worse outcome. Investors and analysts are more interested in what happens in the Christmas quarter. There is always a spike in sales when Apple fanboys automatically replace their gear. The Christmas rush is a time when Apple should make a lot more money. Shares in Apple raised when investors believed that things were not as bad as they thought they were for the fruity cargo cult. Then they fell again when they realised they were still just as bad. It could have been worse. Some analysists were predicting 20 percent falls in shares. |
| Posted: 27 Oct 2015 08:45 AM PDT
He was arrested on Monday and questioned by police overnight, and released on police bail first thing this morning. Police in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, arrested the boy on suspicion of breaking the Computer Misuse Act. Meanwhile, TalkTalk has moved to restrict people with contracts from simply leaving the service and taking their business elsewhere. It will only release customers from terminating their contracts if there is evidence that money has been stolen, and that is only a "gesture of goodwill", the company said. TalkTalk said over last weekend that the attack wasn't as far reaching as it first thought. The company has four million UK customers. |
| Europe puts end to mobile roaming charges Posted: 27 Oct 2015 07:09 AM PDT
That means that if you go on holiday and use your mobile phone, you won't come back to an enormous bill from your provider. People will pay the same rate in Europe. The EU has fought against high roaming charges for a decade. The costs of roaming are already set to be cut in April next year, and it won't be until the middle of 2017 that the roaming charges will be completely abolished. |
| Internet of things won’t be an easy journey Posted: 27 Oct 2015 06:58 AM PDT
But, analysts have warned, moving to the IoT will be a "difficult, multi staged journey". Most organisations will have to adapt their current organisational skills to move to the IoT. The point is that while the IoT will help organisations to "re-invent" their businesses, there needs to be close collaboration between business and technology executives before enterprises jump in feet first. Vernon Turner, IDC senior vide president, said that enterprises need to have a road map to implement IoT enabled systems. "The IoT is enabling organisations to re-invent how they engage with their customers, helping them to accelerate the speed at which they deliver their products and services, and effectively re-inventing industry processes," said IDC. |
| Notebook shipments to fall 17.5 percent Posted: 27 Oct 2015 06:51 AM PDT
The latest data, from Digitimes Research (DR), estimates that global notebook shipments will slump by 17.5 percent in the fourth quarter. The market research company believes that vendors are still cautious about demand, particularly in the consumer market. Enterprise sales are only likely to decline by a fraction of this figure. DR said that Hewlett Packard is very cautious about shipments in the fourth quarter and is facing its own challenges in the move to splitting the company into two separate entities. And Lenovo is not selling as many machines as it hoped to, either. Apple appears to be still doing pretty well as demand rises for its notebook products with people shifting away from Windows machines, and 2-in-1 machines also seem to be bucking the trend. |
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