PC market unlikely to change with new versions of portable devices, says Michael Dell

A number of ultraportable devices being introduced by different hardware vendors including Dell were not likely to change shape of the PC market, according to Michael Dell.

Answering to a query on the netbook phenomenon, Dell himself was not convinced with the form factor. He argued that 85% of portable computers with advanced operating systems were in use in 14-15 inch screen size and it was difficult to predict how widespread the use of 8 to 10-inch size screen devices would be.

Michael recalled that Dell introduced a product in that range but believed those netbooks might not prove to be a massive growth factor in the market.

Michael, the founder and chief executive of Dell, was planning company’s push into services by launching an expanded managed service in London including helpdesk support for the customers.

Michael informed that Dell’s services business accounted for £3.8bn. According to him companies spent $2 to $3 on support and infrastructure services for every dollar spent on PCs. He explained that by selling 90,000 machines to an Australian mining company, Dell could get opportunity to target that $2 to$3 and take over its system management.

Michael clarified that Dell would prefer smaller acquisitions and would not go for really big acquisition like EDS by DP.

Nokia to popularise Symbian devices in emerging markets

Nokia has launched its developer programme, Forum Nokia, for its Symbian mobile operating system to help harvest new applications.

Nokia is aiming to increase its handset sales by popularising OS through the “Calling All Innovators Contest”, particularly in emerging markets, according to the Forum Nokia executive. One of the three competitions is designed to encourage application development.

Forum Nokia’s vice president, Tom Libretto, in an interview stated that developers, the majority of whom belonged to advanced nations, did not focus on applications for emerging markets. He explained that proposed competition was being organised to make developers ponder over the needs of those markets, adding that developer ecosystem could help by delivering weather information or real time market updates by inexpensive means like SMS.

Libretto cited example of an Indian farmer who could be assisted in getting advanced information on prices of wares at different places instead of making long trips everyday to various markets. He claimed that such applications would popularise Symbian devices in emerging markets while driving their sales as well.

According to Libretto, the competition would also help other handset vendors to boost their sales, while Nokia would try to differentiate its handsets from others in price and form.

The other two competitions included applications for reduction of environmental impact and advanced utilisation of phone technology.

The first, second and third place winners in each category of the competition carry prize of £14,000 and a trip to mobile World Congress next year, £10,000 and £5,000 respectively.

Google launches mobile mapping service

Google announced the launch of a new version of Google Maps for Mobile (GMM) on Wednesday. This mobile mapping service, first time in the mobile format, includes Google’s Street View service.

The new version adds walking directions and business reviews which were available on Google’s desktop version for some time.

Street View is presently confined to locations in US, Australia, Italy, France and Japan. The service involves camera-equipped Google cars which drive in urban areas and photograph views seen by the driver while travelling down the street.

According to the blog posted by Google’s service product manger Michael Siliski, GMM could be used to view the storefront image after locating the store on a handset through Google search. Michael also wrote that Street view could also be launched by a simple click on the map and selecting “Street View”. Overlaid Street View could also be browsed on the map or full screen and the view could be rotated to see surroundings while moving along the street.

Street view is likely to be launched in the UK by end of 2008. Google’s vehicles have been photographing parts of the UK after getting the all-clear for the service from the Information Commissioner amid protests by privacy campaigners.

The new GMM version is presently available on Java-enabled handsets and BlackBerry smartphones, but not yet with apple’s iPhone.

OLPC terms response of some commercial laptop makers to its project as unfortunate

The One Laptop per Child Organisation (OLPC), which launched its super low-cost laptop for developing world’s school children some years ago on its own market, is now facing vicious competition from commercial laptop makers hungry for growth.

The chief learning architect for the not-for-profit organisation OLPC, David Cavallo, was however upbeat about the new makers in the educational laptop market which was kick started by his organisation. He was delivering a keynote address at the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology.

Cavallo described the entry of the new makers as huge success for OLPC since it was not working for profit and was not meant to be a laptop company. The organisation was on mission of providing education for the most marginalised, and One Laptop per Child was a humanitarian project. It was great to see that lot of companies were now making devices since there were still more than a billion children in the world who needed help.

He was however disappointed with the response of some commercial laptop makers to OLPC project and termed it as unfortunate. He was surprised that those companies had taken this as market for competition, and started competing in a vicious way. OLPC was interested neither in capturing market share nor in profit making or knocking anybody out. He declared that OLPC project would continue pushing hardware costs down to make it affordable for many.

Oracle teams up with Dell and EMC for its data-warehouse package

Dell and EMC have joined hands with Oracle in its Optimised Warehouse Initiative which would offer data-warehouse setups for businesses. Dell would offer its hardware while EMC would provide software for the ready-to-go setup.

The new version of the package was announced at the Oracle Open World Sow in San Fransisco on Tuesday. The package uses EMC’s Clariion CX4 storage arrays and latest rack-mounted PowerEdge Dell servers.

EMC’s Clariion CX4 has a data storage capacity of 1 to 10 TB (terabytes) with advanced features such as virtual provisioning and flash storage, both of which enable fast access to data.

The preconfigured package will be sold by Dell under a joint Dell and EMC brand name. Dell and EMC have developed a close business relationship, Dell being the biggest third-party user of EMC’s storage equipment. Dell-EMC brand 1TB version of Optimised Warehouse was launched last year. The Oracle, Dell and EMC tie up brought Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC), Oracle Partitioning and Oracle database Enterprise Edition with Dell’s R900 PowerEdge servers which use 4 quad-core Intel Xeon 7400 processors.

According to Rick Becker of Dell’s product group teaming up with EMC and Oracle would remove complicities in implementation of sophisticated data-warehouse solutions and facilitate customers in scaling up their business.

EMC’s vice president of Technology Alliance Mike O’Neill stated that Oracle, Dell and EMC were focussed on high performance, high capacity and mainstream data-warehouse workloads.

VMware chief laughs off Microsoft’s guerrilla marketing

VMware is unfazed by the bizarre guerilla marketing campaign launched by Microsoft. VMware chief executive Paul Maritz laughed off the attempts by the Microsoft staff while addressing a global conference in Las Vegas.

Microsoft employees distributed one-dollar poker chips to the delegates of VMware who arrived on day one to attend the worldwide conference. These employees had announced the release of Microsoft Hyper-V last week as a challenge to VMware’s software virtualisation dominance.

The poker chips were inscribed with “Looking for your best bet? You won’t find it with VMware” and web address-vmwarecostswaytoomuch.com. The inscription was shown leading to a site which compared VMware’s ESX flagship product with Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Maritz, claiming to be an old hand at such tactics, claimed that Microsoft’s effort flattered him; since he believed that guerrilla marketing campaigns were deployed by the followers and not by the leaders. He further hit back by saying that guerrilla marketing was used when you were distant second with the competitor and sought attention.

Maritz, who appeared hitting quite hard termed Microsoft’s attempt as indirect flattery to VMware for the fact that mighty Microsoft was forced to come down to the conference and dish out chochkhas (meaning cheap souvenirs) to VMware customers.

London tops world list of Wi-Fi business usage

London continues to reign at the top in the global list of cities for business usage of Wi-Fi, as reported by mobility-management company iPass.

The iPass Mobile Broadband Index report mentioned that London captured the top spot in the second half of 2007 and has continued to occupy it thereafter.

iPass is the provider of connectivity to users of Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile-broadband services. Its report covered activities on its virtual network worldwide, based on data from 3,000 businesses located in 80 countries, using over 104,000 Wi-Fi sessions.

London’s iPass business users had 31,842 sessions in the first half of 2008, which was approximately 27% higher than the sessions in same period in 2007.

According to Pierot Depaoli, director of global product marketing at iPass, London was the top city by quite a wide margin, followed by Singapore at second spot with 20,333 sessions in the first half of 2008.

He informed that Wi-Fi business usage rankings were based on cities’ relative density of hotspots. London and Singapore had 1,300 and 1,100 hotspots respectively.

According to the report Chelsea and Canary Wharf had the highest density compared to rest of London. Hotspots in London were better established than those in Singapore.

De Paoli informed that iPass witnessed more Wi-Fi usage in Europe than in North America for the first time due to increase in usage of roaming broadband and number of hotspots.

Samsung announces plan for ‘antibacterial’ netbook

The Korean manufacturer Samsung intends to enter the crowded netbook market for launch of its low-cost subnotebook, NC10. It made announcement of its plan on Friday, September 19.

The netbook would feature 10.2-inch no-gloss LED screen with 1,024×600- pixel resolution. With the provision of a six-cell battery, the 1.33 kg. netbook can run for almost 8 hours of usage on a single charge, as claimed by Samsung.

The other specifications included Bluetooth 2.0+EDR wireless connectivity, 802.11b/g WiFi, three-in-one memory card, USB ports, VGA connections and integrated webcam. It also uses Windows XP and Atom processor of Intel.

The netbook is designed with some unusual features such as ‘full size’ keyboard which is slightly larger than normal laptop keyboards, and ‘ultra-durable Protest-o-Edge casing’. The keyboard is coated with silver ion powder, which Samsung claimed made breeding and survival of bacteria on the keys impossible. This feature is specifically highlighted by Samsung insisting that that users working continuously on netbook were protected from hazards of bacteria which normally bred on keyboards.

The Samsung NC10 netbook is slated for sale in October. It would be priced up to £329 excluding VAT, depending on type of configuration.

MSI Wind and Asus’s Eee 1000 are the other competitions’ netbooks in the market with the same screen size.

UK third for IT competitiveness

The UK is reported to have jumped up one place to number three in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU’s) report entitled “How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008”. As per the rankings, US remained at the top for incubating high-tech starts-up and bringing in technology innovation. Three other countries which made the top five position for the first time, displacing previous heavy weights Japan and Korea, included Taiwan, Sweden and Denmark.

Iran was placed at the bottom of the ranking list while India, Russia and China surprisingly ranked low at numbers 48, 49 and 50 respectively. The Business Software Alliance sponsored report being published since last year, ranks the performance of 66 countries based on six categories, which include IT talent pool, R&D environment, overall business environment, technical infrastructure, legal regime and government support.

The authors of the report foresaw harder times for IT producers due to economic downturn, but contended that IT industry’s competitiveness could remain unaffected. They identified sourcing of talent as the biggest challenge which threatened developed IT industries including US and the UK. They observed reverse trend in the brain drain of IT skills from developing countries which made it extremely difficult for developed countries to attract best technology skills.

The report emphasised competitive broadband market was most vital for IT competitiveness and noted that all top-ranking countries possessed high-quality fat-pipe network.

Microsoft still quite ahead of Apple in best-brand survey

The reigning king of consumer gadgets, Apple is still failing to climb to the top ten positions in the list of most valued brands of the world.

The iPhone maker is far behind rival Microsoft, occupying 24th place against Microsoft’s prestigious third place in the Best Global Brands 2008 survey by Interbrand, a well known market-research organisation. In contrast, Google recorded an impressive jump to 10th spot from 20th last year. It joined the top 10 group for the first time.

Though Coca Cola topped the list, the top ten places witnessed dominance of tech companies with IBM and Microsoft occupying 2nd and 3rd position respectively. Nokia stood at 5th position, Intel at 8th and Google at 10th place.

Value of the brand, as per the Interbrand logic determined on the basis of revenue forecast, bank risk and market research analysis and criterion like customer loyalty.

According to Interbrand’s criterion Apple’s value has increased by 24% to $13.7bn while Google registered 43% increase to $25.6bn in last 12 months.

Chief executive Jez Frampton of Interbrand remarked that despite low positioning, Apple’s rise in the ranking had been quite significant. Interbrand report pointed out that ability in defining new customer needs and delivering beautifully simple and desirable products was Apple’s main strength.

Google’s success was attributed to innovations like Google Book Search, Google Docs and spreadsheets and Google Mobile by the Interbrand report.

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