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Apple buys Facebook for $92.5 Billion, investors panic

Posted by – April 1, 2012
Category: Opinions

At 1:13PM Eastern Time, Apple Computers Inc announced that they have been in advanced talks for the past 3 months to acquire Facebook Inc of Santa Clara. The deal is about $69.1 Billion in cash and $23.4 Billion in shares. Apple Computers Inc CEO Tim Cook said:

We love what Facebook Inc has done with Social Networking and find it to be a perfect match to integrate with our iCloud and iTunes. If the European regulators approve of our plans to acquire Facebook Inc, we will integrated it Ping and the App Store. Our goal is to strengthen our position on cloud technologies through acquiring Facebook’s technology and talented workforce and together we plan to build a strong search competitor to Google.

At the news of this acquisition, Apple Computers Inc stock price was down 11.94% in after hours Japanese Nikkei tradings. Wall Street analysts are in shock. Goldman Sachs Group Inc chief analyst George Moignon had this to say:

We didn’t see this one coming. After Apple for the first time announced a dividend just 2 weeks ago, we were very surprised to hear this. We have been valuating Facebook Inc at $102 Billion because we believe in the value of their social graph. Yet we did not anticipate that Apple would spend nearly all of its cash and assets to buy the social network.

Baird Research analyst Colin Fritz reports:

After hearing this announcement, we have decided to recommend shorting AAPL stock. Our calculations demonstrate that over 90% of Apple’s current profits come from the sale of their ARM Powered devices, most importantly the iPhone 4S which currently represents over 80% of Apple Computers Inc’s overall profits. We would have thought Apple would invest their cash in owning Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean manufacturing capacity and blocking out the cheaper and better Android competition. We would have recommended Apple acquire Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron, that they acquire Sharp Display Inc and that Apple’s cash reserves could have allowed Apple to own a controlling share of Japan Display Inc and then block out cheaper and better Android competition from getting access to the latest screen technologies and that Apple could have tried to also get exclusives on more crucial hardware components of ARM Powered tablets and smartphones. But instead, we now hear that Apple has planned to spend most of their cash on purchasing Facebook, which quite frankly, we do not estimate to have that much value. We believe users easily can migrate over to competing social networks such as Google+, and that Facebook’s social graph actually is quite worthless.

What do you think of this announcement? Do you think Apple has a chance to build a Google search competitor now that they are announcing the purchase of Facebook? If this is not the right move, what do you think Apple should have done with their $100 Billion? What do you think Mark Zuckerberg is going to do with the $23.7 Billion cash that is his share of this acquisition?

Metaio Augmented Reality status on the Texas Instruments OMAP4

Posted by – March 30, 2012

Metaio shows a demo featuring their latest status for augmented reality on the Texas Instruments OMAP4 platform.

MHL for the car, using the Pioneer AppRadio2

Posted by – March 30, 2012

Now the MHL standard can be used to charge your MHL compatible phone in the car and at the same time send audio and video to the car, and remote control the phone over Bluetooth and MHL using a larger touch-screen GPS and in-car entertainment type of screen like the Pioneer AppRadio2. As every phone is getting to have an MHL connector, it’s likely that every car also soon enough are equipped with an MHL connector. Your smartphone screen isn’t big enough to provide a safe in-car user interface, but it should be fully synchronized with your in-car optimized screens and user interface.

InHand Hydra-T3 Ruggedized 7″ Pixel Qi tablet released

Posted by – March 28, 2012

InHand releases their new Hydra-T3 ruggedized 7″ Pixel Qi tablet. It runs on the Texas Instruments DaVinci DM3730 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 and 800MHz TMS320C64X+™ DSP, up to 1GB DDR2, up to 16GB eMMc Flash, the Pixel Qi LCD screen is the 7″ 1024×600 built using a chemically strengthened resistive touch screen layer (I wonder how readable this resistive Pixel Qi implementation is). Having been tested through the military specs MIL-SPEC, MIL-STD-810G, MIL-STD-461F it can support extreme temperature, fluid contaminates, solar radiation, fungus, immersion, shock and vibration. It uses a 37WHr redundant 3.7V Lithium Polymer battery for up to 10 hours of battery life. It can run Android 2.3, Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows Embedded Compact 6.

This tablet seems to compete with the Orchard Inc Toughlet which is also a ruggedized 7″ Pixel Qi tablet for military and industrial use. The military and the industry must be very eager to use the Pixel Qi screen for tablets outdoor readability, low power consumption as soon as possible.

Read more about this new Pixel Qi tablet at: inhand.com
Source: InHand press release

Sony to launch the first ARM Powered Chromebook?

Posted by – March 24, 2012

According to some FCC leak and rumoring, it looks like Sony is about to release a new Chromebook and the FCC info may point towards it running on an ARM Processor! T25 is the leaked processor info, that sound like the Tegra 250 T25. I think the thinking was T25 is intermediary between T20 and T30, in between Tegra2 and Tegra3. Basically, I think, the hope should be that if it’s a Tegra2, that it has a new faster memory bandwidth and a higher clock speed compared to the “first generation” Tegra2 devices that were released back since the end of 2010!

The Dual-core TI OMAP4470 runs at 1.8Ghz, the Dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Krait S4 runs above 1.5Ghz, might it be that a new Dual-core Nvidia T25 processor also runs at similar clock frequency and might it be that the T25 has an improved memory bandwidth?

If Sony plans to have a target price for it around $199 for the 11.6″ version, with upwards 20 hours battery life, make it the thinnest, lightest, this can become one of the new top selling laptops in the world.

Source: laptopreviews.com via: engadget.com

900,000 Rockchip RK2918 7″ Tablets purchased by Thailand’s Government for Education

Posted by – March 21, 2012

The 900,000 Scopad SP0712 Android tablets are going to be delivered before the next semester. The first batch of 50,000 tablets to be delivered within 15 days of the signing of the memorandum of understanding (which may mean 15 days from now).

The price per tablet is $82 and to be delivered by Shenzhen Scope Scientific Development. The Chinese Government had suggested four suppliers be considered for the deal including also Huawei Technologies Co, TCL Cooperation and Haier Information Technology (Shenzhen).

I don’t know if those have capacitive screens, what the battery life is going to be.

I think it’s crucial for the successful use of tablets in education for those to include a Pixel Qi LCD screen! Readability and very low power consumption are crucial features for these! Android tablets can become very successful tools for education, but they need to last 20 hours on a battery and not 5 hours! And the screens need to be as readable as paper! And the screen must be usable outdoors!

Not using Pixel Qi I think may be the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful educational tablet initiative! In rich countries, consumers don’t care much, because they always have enough power, they don’t care about reading and they are satisfied just playing video games on the devices, in rich countries, the tablets are just being used as entertaining gadgets for a bit of fun, nearly no productivity happens thus far. If you want to use tablets in education, you really carefully have to think about usability, battery life and productivity.

A $5 keyboard dock design can also be quite crucial for those to actually be usable for productive learning!! A built-in kick-stand I think is also pretty much compulsory.

The Pheu Thai Party promised during its campaigning ahead of last year’s election that, if voted in, it would give a tablet computer to every first-grade student nationwide.

Gp Cpt Anudith said the next step was to draft the agreement and forward it to the Office of the Attorney General for checks. The process would be finished before the end of this month, he said.

Chinnapat Bhumirat, secretary-general to the Office of Basic Education, said: “The G to G contract and MoU agreement are not that different, and the Chinese government will help us deal with the supplier and get as low a price as possible.”

Mr Chinnapat said the first batch of about 50,000 tablets would be sent to Thailand within 15 days of the MoU being signed. A team of 1,000 experts will train 15,000 teachers and supervisors nationwide on tablet use in early May.

According to Rockchip, here are the 3 key points for the Rockchip Tablet solution to win governmental tender projects:

1: RK2918 has the highest cost-performance for governmental tender projects;
2: RK2918 MID has already passed CTS certification from Google both on Android 2.3.5 and Android 4.0.3 version, which is the most important thing for governmental tender projects;
3: RK2918 has its good reputation for its well software-supporting service from Rockchip Electronics among its clients all over the world.

Source: bangkokpost.com

Grandstream GXP2200, GXP2124, DECT phones announced at CeBIT 2012

Posted by – March 19, 2012

GrandStream is one of the leaders in cost effective VOIP SIP phones. They’ve now been on the market for 10 years and they are showing their next generation Android powered VOIP phones for the office, hotels, also for any consumers to use in the home. Just get one of these with your SIP VOIP account and you’re all set for free phone calls!

This video features following devices:
GXP1105: 1:49 (40€)
GXP1405: 2:18 (50€)
GXP1450: 2:38 (60€)
GXP2100: 3:00 (80€)
GXP2110: 3:35 (110€)
GXP2120 (110€)
GXP2124: 4:48 (new announcement at CeBIT)
GXP2200 Android HD IP Phone: 5:22 (new announcement at CeBIT)
GXV3140: 7:18 (140€)
GXV3175: 9:06 (240€)
DECT phones: 10:06 (new announcement at CeBIT)

NameRobot.de, online naming tool

Posted by – March 19, 2012

NameRobot.de is built by linguistics specialists and programmers, it can help generate names with available domain names for startups.

Twago.com freelance marketplace

Posted by – March 19, 2012

Twago is one of the biggest marketplaces for freelancers that can program web apps and anything else in IT that someone can need. This service competes with freelancer and elance.

Transfluent, translation for social media and websites

Posted by – March 19, 2012

Transfluent is a service that offers effortless, near real-time professional translation to social media feeds and websites.

CorruptionTrak, crowd-sourced corruption tracking

Posted by – March 19, 2012

CorruptionTrak is a service that aggregates data regarding incidents of petty/day-to-day corruption in India and acts as a channel to direct this data to relevant authorities. All the reports logged are made freely available to the public, including journalists, NGOs and concerned governmental authorities. They withhold the names of their citizen reporters from public view and make them available only to trusted authorities for further investigation. The relevant authority may contact citizen reporters for more information if it decides to investigate the case.

Xattel, augmented reality community/messaging app

Posted by – March 19, 2012

Xattel is an app shows an augmented reality layer for social networking.

brightsideofnews.com: Huawei U9510 Ascend D Quad XL Benchmarked

Posted by – March 17, 2012

Brightsideofnews.com provides this benchmark of the HiSilicon K3V2 powered Huawei U9510 Ascend D Quad XL phone comparing it with some of the other super phones on the market:

According to this benchmark (which I don’t really know how it was measured and what it really means in terms of real Android usage performance):

Huawei K3V2 processor managed to beat NVIDIA Tegra 3, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8660, Samsung Exynos, TI OMAP4 right off the bat. At 1280×720 resolution (HD Ready), the HiSilicon K3V2 and its GPU managed to achieve 25 frames per second, with the closest follower being Qualcomm Snapdragon and its Adreno 220 GPU with 18 fps. In the same benchmark, NVIDIA Tegra 3 with its ULP GeForce GPU only managed to reach 12 frames per second.

Source: brightsideofnews.com

Read more at: huaweidevice.com

More benchmarking: phandroid.com

JVC GY-HMQ10, 4K Quad-HD 144mbitps pro camcorder for $9000!

Posted by – March 17, 2012
Category: Cameras, 4K UHD

JVC is now releasing their new JVC GY-HMQ10 professional camcorder below $9000 on the Japanese market (750,000 Yen). It’s using the JVC Falconbrid processor as in my JVC GC-PX10 camcorder that I’ve been using to film all of my CeBIT 2012 videos (using 720p@50fps@12mbitps for faster uploads), all of my OLPC Summit videos (most include direct-download links to the original 1080p@50fps@36mbitps camcorder files), all my LeWeb 2011 videos were also filmed using the JVC GC-PX10.

The JVC Falconbrid is one of the new upcoming 4K2K Quad-HD camcorder processors to bring more and more affordable 4K cameras to the market!

The JVC GY-HMQ10 I think is designed for professionals, but I also think it’s possible that sooner rather than later, JVC might decide to provide 4K recording support in the sub-$1000 camcorders also in something like a successor to the JVC GC-PX10, perhaps the sub-$1000 JVC GC-PX20 will support 4K!

The main question is how to let it record 4K video uncompressed. The new JVC GY-HMQ10 provides 4 SDXC slots supporting thus 4x 64GB SDXC cards that can thus store 4 hours of 4K 144mbitps video onto those four 64GB SDXC Cards in RAID 0 (256GB) in Apple’s ProRes422.

It takes space for 4 SDXC card slots, I wonder if it’s possible to provide a slot for 2.5″ SSD drive or perhaps even a SATA hard drive, but then the 4K camera has to become bigger in size than the JVC GC-PX10.

This sounds like it might be cheaper than the Red Scarlet camera (that seems to need to cost at least $15000 to be able to shoot 4K).

Sub-$9000 for 4K start to be getting there. I wonder though if 2012 isn’t going to be the year of the first sub-$2000 4K camcorders, as I also think people are going to be able to find affordable 4K 55″ HDTVs also from Sharp and others.

Source: newsroom.jvc.com via: akihabaranews.com

Archos 101 G9 Turbo 1.5Ghz for $259 on Woot.com today only

Posted by – March 17, 2012

Only today, the Archos 101 G9 Turbo 1.5Ghz is being sold for $259 at http://sellout.woot.com/

It’s basically better than the iPad3 and for half the price! Here are some of the reasons I think it’s better than the iPad3:

1.5Ghz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 vs 1Ghz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9, Kick-stand, HDMI output, full sized USB-host port for 3G/4G/LTE dongle (for now only 3G is on the market for Europe/Asia), that full sized USB host can also be used for USB Keyboards/Mice/Hubs/Hard Drives etc, second USB-host through Micro-USB with adapter, Samba/Upnp file streaming, full codecs up to MKV 1080p high profile full bitrates with up to DTS audio (meaning any video you download from the Internet just works natively), Android Ics Cream Sandwich runs on it and is open unlike iOS (meaning you can install any app you want through any app store you want and customize the OS as you want), the 1280×800 10.1″ capacitive screen is decent although the next generation of 10.1″ 1920×1200 screens are coming (obviously for more expensive prices), etc.

Found via: carrypad.com

Zenithink ST-Ericsson U8500 3G 7″ 1024×600 Tablet for $150

Posted by – March 15, 2012

Zenithink shows their new ST-Ericsson U8500 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 based tablet designed by ontim with a built-in 3G HSPA+ modem, bluetooth, WiFi, and a decent 1024×600 screen resolution. The price is $150 for an order of at least 1000 units. They also show a $65 AmLogic based Android set-top-box with a built-in DVB-T tuner.

Huawei WLAN, SMB Routers, Switches, Networking at CeBIT 2012

Posted by – March 15, 2012

Huawei has a whole lot of networking equipment on show at CeBIT 2012, here’s a guided tour of some of this. Those devices are powering the Internet, they are powering the network infrastructure of big corporations, big university campuses and more. Some of those Huawei optical fiber switches are probably powering the backbone of the Internet.

Satzuma USB Gadgets

Posted by – March 15, 2012

Satzuma sells a bunch of USB gadgets.

Kimree e-cigarette manufacturer

Posted by – March 15, 2012

There are a few booths displaying electronic cigarettes at CeBIT, Kimree are selling millions of them worldwide.

Cubecurated virtual exhibition space

Posted by – March 15, 2012

Cubecurated builds virtual 3D exhibition spaces, designing the architecture copying real places or designing new ones, for any kind of exhibition, they build it, host it for art exhibitions and also for any other kind of exhibition.