Atos origin expanding e-ticketing business

Atos Origin is gearing up for its growth and expansion through its UK card payments and e-ticketing businesses. The company’s UK office has reported sales of £376m in the first half of 2008, which is a 12 per cent increase over last year. The profit margin has also increased by six per cent in comparison to the corresponding period last year.

Keith Wilman, the UK CEO of Atos, said that the performance was a result of transformation programme designed to focus a few main verticals, like government homeland security and environment; fast-moving-consumer-goods enterprise outsourcing; health business process outsourcing; rail and road transport; and mutual financial services pensions and insurance systems.

He also felt that one of the biggest areas of operations is payments in the transport vertical. They process roughly around £5bn per year in rail tickets payments. Thus the next step is to sell tickets. The company is also looking at deploying near-field-communication technology in the field of payments and ticketing. They also intend to grow in their payment and loyalty card transactions business.

They derive about £10m every year in revenues via their loyalty and payments cards operations but the company believes it has a potential to earn far higher revenue.

Web an important business channel for many high-street retailers

Online shopping is aiming to take a share of 20p out of every UK consumer pound by year end. Analysts believe that this will make the web an important business channel for many high-street retailers. As declared by IMRG Capgemini E-Retail Sales Index, UK shoppers now spend more than £26.5bn online. This is almost 38 per cent more from the same period last year.

Although the growth in online shopping fell in June, the report predicts that the economic downturn will coax consumers to spend more online looking for good bargains. Stores will have to change their business models as online sales become more popular. Retailers believe that that people will do more research online, but will still come to the store on a Saturday. So this may mean that they will reduce the products and display and invest in staff who will be equipped to help customers.

If the analysts are to be believed, then old school retailers who have so far ignored online sales will have to wake up and invest in revamping their model. If they do not take heed of the change, they will lose a large chunk of their customers.

Microsoft’s web-based Software Suites welcomed by users

Microsoft recently announced its plans for the web-based software suites that they have built for big companies. Microsoft aims to enhance productivity with its ‘deskless worker’ tools within the Microsoft Online Services line-up.

The idea behind the move is to push towards amalgamation of online and desktop software, and in the process, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the ‘cloud’. Microsoft’s web-based Software Suites have been welcomed with enthusiasm by users

Stephen Elop, the president of the Microsoft Business Division, said that Microsoft Online Services is a major element of the software plus services initiative. The business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled web conferencing.

All these services are available for a nominal monthly charge to a user. Users will also need to shell out a small sum every month for the Deskless Worker Suite that combines aspects of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online.

The SharePoint portal provides access to the internal company websites and search. The Exchange Online Deskless Worker includes calendars, Outlook Web Access Light, security filters and mail.

Viacom and YouTube reach agreement on user histories

A Google blog post on Monday, mentioned that YouTube would be allowed to hide important information of the users from records. It further added that Viacom and other litigants withdrew their demand for viewing YouTube user histories.

Viacom spokesman offered no comments on the blog.

The agreement is the fallout to a federal court ruling which directed Google’s YouTube to furnish usernames, viewing histories and IP addresses to Viacom. The ruling led to a controversy over privacy, forcing Viacom to adopt defensive approach.

Viacom had filed a lawsuit against Google’s YouTube last year alleging violation of its copy rights. Subsequent to the court order, Viacom was severely criticised for its attempt to intrude on users’ online privacy, though it insisted that it did not seek personal information details.

But the controversy does not seem to be over. Google has reportedly refused to pass on information to Viacom about the videos watched and uploaded by YouTube employees to the site. According to the sources Viacom could use this information to substantiate its charge that YouTube turned blind eye to the infringement of copyright on its site. Google also may demand Viacom to furnish similar records about its employees.

Cuil promises a transparent privacy policy

A start-up founded by former Google engineers continues to make news. There have been mixed reactions to the launch of Cuil. A section of the search market analysts perceive it will emerge as a formidable challenger to Google, whereas some analysts believe that Cuil will not find it easy at all, to come up with a web search service that can beat the leader.

The operating philosophy of the new search engine, as claimed by it, is that is analyses the Web, not its users. Cuil promises that it will analyse only Web pages and not click-throughs. “We do not need to know your search habits and history,” It assures and adds: “Our privacy policy is simple. When you search with us, we do not collect any personally identifiable data. We do not have any idea as who sends queries; neither by name nor by IP address.”

Users’ search history is their business, Cuil maintains, and states the search engine will not keep any logs of its users’ search activity. The search service Cuil claims to index a huge amount of information faster and at a far less cost than Google. It claims to go beyond existing search procedures that only concentrate on web links and audience traffic patterns.

Symantec presents faster antivirus protection Norton 2009 betas

Symantec has presented internet users with two Norton 2009 products; Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009. These products will accelerate scans and services with fewer system resources.
Both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton AntiVirus 2009 feature new codes that not only makes the scans and services run faster, but consumes fewer system resources, said Tom Powledge, Symantec vice president of consumer product management.

Symantec vice president, consumer product management, Mr. Tom Powledge quoting an example explains that Norton Internet Security 2006 occupied 300MB space of hard-disk whereas 2009 version occupied only 100MB. This was achieved through elimination of number of redundancies, such as multiple copies of signature database.

Chief executive Eva Chen alleges that antivirus companies misled customers by over hyping their products’ effectiveness. According to Powledge, the new product is made to focus only on files that have changed thereby making it lighter and faster. Norton during a scan, marks files with digital photos and songs as trusted since these do not change subsequently. This enhances speed significantly and saves time in scanning larger drives. The 2009 antivirus products will get updated every 15 minutes with new signature files and will be available on the Symantec site.

Google urges businesses not to lose faith in Cloud Computing

An hour, last Tuesday, was enough to raise serious doubts about Google’s cloud computing when word processors and presentations of Google Docs users suddenly came to standstill. The incident created volley of doubts not only about cloud computing but also about the progress in making cloud concept palatable.
In cloud computing, software runs on computers on the internet instead of PCs or company servers. It is therefore very difficult to rely on their computing infrastructure until one develops immense faith in the technology.

To enhance reliability, practical tools are being developed to ensure smooth transition. Google itself offers service level agreement (SLA) which guarantees availability of Gmail, 99.9 per cent of the time and promises extension of service credits to customers if service level dips below 99.9 per cent. Google is planning to introduce SLAs for rest of its applications.

According to product manger for Google Apps., Rishi Chandra, company has so far not provided SLA for Google Docs and Google Calendar, but intends to do so quickly in the near future. Cloud computing is classified in two categories. One category involves Google Apps, Abode Buzzword for word processing, Yahoo’s Zimbra for email and Zoho for business software. The second category which allows customers to run their own applications includes general-purpose foundations viz. Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services.

Experts doubt Microsoft’s claims of patent infringements

Many experts seem to be in disagreement over Microsoft’s claims that open-source software industry has indulged in infringement of its 235 patents. Microsoft insists that it was compelled to release the tally to evolve a deal on intellectual property licensing with the open-source companies.

Industry experts feel Microsoft’s demand, that open-source companies should disclose which patents they infringed before starting a dialogue, is unrealistic and difficult to accept. Searching for potential patent violations is extremely difficult due to the opacity, number and breadth of the patents in the US. The search can also cost a lot to the company since as per the law, if infringement charge is proved, the company aware of the potential infringement is liable to pay triple the financial damages for wilful infringement, compared to infringement which takes place unknowingly.

According to Matthew Schruers, General Counsel to Computer & Communications Industry Assocaiation (CCIA), the fear of wilfulness in infringement of patterns prevents the software application developers from conducting complete patent searches. He adds that Microsoft adopts a dual policy when it comes to license other’s patents. It paid $1.4bn in 3 years; but adopts a passive role in licensing other’s patents.

Microsoft in its statement asked the companies to talk to if they believed that their intellectual property was being used by Microsoft. It did not reveal whether it notified parties like Red Hat, Linus, Torvalds and others of alleged infringements.

European regulators likely to charge Intel

European regulators are likely to level new antitrust charges on the chip giant Intel. The charges, as per the sources, pertain mainly to the practices employed by Intel in its marketing and sales activities.
The new charges expected to be levelled soon, refer to the alleged involvement of Intel in preventing European retailers from purchase of processors from rival AMD by offering them inducements.

According to Intel’s spokesman Chuck Mulloy, company is extending full co-operation to the European Commission, but did not know what the Commission intended to do. He reiterated company’s stand that it is operating within law and did not violate any of the Commissions regulations. The new charges are the latest in Intel’s ongoing battle with the US regulators and those abroad, over antitrust practises.

In June it was learnt that US Federal Trade Commission was scrutinising Intel’s business practices and had initiated a formal antitrust investigation against the chip maker. This was not the case in isolation. Intel has earned bad name for its practices and has been put under intense scrutiny in different parts of the world specifically in South Korea, Japan and Europe. It had however managed not being questioned about its practices in the U.S in the recent past.

Corporate networks at risk due to BlackBerry PDF flaw

RIM has issued warnings to businesses asking them to disable functions which enable reading of PDF files through BlackBerry. RIM disclosed the high severity flaw last week but did not release a patch; nor did it give the resolution time frame in its advisory. The flaw will hamper functioning of corporate networks.
RIM has advised customers to disable BlackBerry Attachment Service until they are provided a patch by the company. The service allows processing of PDF attachments by the BES so that users are able to view it on BlakBerry devices.

RIM’s high severity advisory lists 4.1 Service Pack 3 (4.1.3) up to 4.1 Service Pack 5 (4.1.5) as vulnerable systems. It goes on to explain that if a smartphone user on BES opens and views PDF attachments on phone, the computer could be compromised by the arbitrary code execution.

According to Jason Edelstein, principal consultant of Sense of Security, this poses risk to the corporate networks as most of them place BES within their networks. He adds that there are many architectural problems in BlackBerry implementations.

According to Edelstein, the end user can ascertain their vulnerability by opening the BlackBerry browser and accessing intranet resources. If the resource appears on BlackBerry despite not being published on the internet, it surely implies vulnerability.

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