Posted 11/05/09 at 08:41:23 AM by Paul Lilly

While most segments in the tech industry have had a hard time coping with a global recession, the smartphone market seems to have weathered the economic storm just fine, suggests a new report from research firm Canayls.

According to Canayls, smartphone sales saw growth of 4 percent against the same quater last year, and shot up 14 percent from last quarter.

"While growth has undoubtedly slowed, it is still outperforming the overall mobile phone market by some margin, as well as driving data revenue for operators, and smartphones are ushering in a range of changes in user behavior when it comes to what people actually do on their phones," said Canalys senior analyst Pete Cunningham.

The smartphone market has been particularly kind to Apple, whose iPhone 3G S helped the iPhone grow its market share by 4 percent to settle in at 18 percent of the market. That puts it in third place behind RIM, which holds a 21 percent share.

"Demand for the iPhone 3G S far outstripped supply, and we expect to see continued growth for Apple, especially with new operators coming onboard, for example in the UK with teh end of O2's exclusivity on the device," Cunningham added.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 09:53:11 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Millions of credulous internet users fall prey to scareware every year and voluntarily end up compromising their systems. According to a new Symantec report, more than 40 million users found themselves prey to “increasingly persuasive online scare tactics” being adopted by cyber criminals during the 12-month period between July 2008 and June 2009.

The price of a fake security software program usually hovers between $30 and $100. But the hidden costs seem to be greater. Installing rogue security software can not only wreck the system but it also makes the owner vulnerable to identity theft. Deceptive ads linking to rogue software appear on both malicious and legit sites. Cybercriminals are also using search engine optimization (SEO) and social media tricks to ensnare even more people.

Have you installed SpywareGuard 2008, AntiVirus 2008, AntiVirus 2009, SpywareSecure, or XP AntiVirus yet? Don’t! They top the list of the most reported rogue security software.

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Posted 10/16/09 at 09:16:20 AM by Paul Lilly

While you contemplate whether or not it's worth upgrading your work PC to Windows 7 or trashing the old hardware for something new, one thing's for sure - moving to Windows 7 will be "all but inevitable," according to a report from market research firm Gartner.

"The Windows 7 release will generate renewed interest in consumers and small businesses following its release, but corporate demand is not expected to gain momentum until the end of 2010," said Charles Smulders, managing VP at Gartner. "An overdue PC hardware upgrade cycle and the economic environment will be as equally important as Windows 7 in determining final demand in 2010."

Before taking the plunge, Gartner senior analyst Michael Silver said corporations will have to consider five factors, including moving off of XP by the end of 2010, starting their migration projects now instead of later, they should avoid skipping Windows 7 to avoid the kinds of problems that plagued "organizations that skipped Windows 2000 and waited for XP," larger organizations should budget carefully and take note of the migration costs (as much as $1,930 per user to move from XP to Windows 7, and up to $510 to move up from Vista), and avoid waiting for Windows 7 SP1 before making the jump.

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Posted 10/13/09 at 09:25:15 AM by Paul Lilly

According to market research firm Ovum, WiMax doesn't have much of a future outside of niche markets. In a report titled WiMax in emerging markets, the opportunity assessed, Ovum said that this holds true both for developed regions and emerging markets.

"Two thirds of the 300+ WiMax networks globally are in the emerging markets of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Latin America," said Angel Dobardziev, practice leader at Ovum. "Yet, most emerging market WiMax operators currently have thousands, or tens of thousands of subscribers, rather than the hundreds of thousands of subscribers they planned to have at this stage."

Dobardziev attributes part of the problem to the pricing structure, pointing out that on a non-subsidized basis, WiMax is priced and positioned as a broadband option for businesses or wealthy consumers. Ovum doesn't see this changing any time soon and predicts that WiMax will account for less than 5 percent of the 1.5 billion fixed and mobile broadband access connections in the emerging markets by 2014.

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Posted 09/29/09 at 11:34:58 PM by Pulkit Chandna

You can now curse your ISP with even more conviction. A task force set up by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed that actual broadband speeds are slower than promised speeds by as much as 50% to 80%.

Although the task force didn’t name any decent ways to express dissent, it is suggested that indignant consumers learn the art of protesting from the true masters of the art: the Palestinians, who have pioneered some of the most effective and economical techniques, including stone pelting and the fabled catch-and-hurl-back-teargas-grenade technique.

Coming back to the subject of broadband access, the task force is busy preparing a report on ways to enhance broadband penetration in rural and urban areas. The panel will submit its final report to Congress in February. It said in an interim report that anywhere between $20 and $350 billion might be needed for installing necessary wireless and landline infrastructure. Its estimate depends on the internet speed.

“This speaks to consumer empowerment. And if you are advertising one speed but delivering another, that takes power away. Consumers can't make accurate decisions based on quality of service from one provider off another,” Joel Kelsey, an analyst at Consumers Union, told the Washington Post.

The panel said in its report that while nearly 2/3 of Americans are wallowing in broadband bliss and 1/3 have access but haven’t subscribed, 4% have no access whatsoever. The panel also expects smartphones to march ahead of blander phones by 2011.

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Posted 08/24/09 at 12:15:04 PM by Paul Lilly

Forget about all this talk of losses and job cuts, the economy is apparently doing just fine for Facebook, the social networking site which boasts the most users. It's doing so well that mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg news agency in an interview that the company plans to increase its staff by as much as 50 percent before the end of the year.

As it currently stands, Facebook claims 900 employees, so by our math, the planned hiring would put the worker count up to 1,350 strong. And why not when your list of investors includes venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, Microsoft, and Russian Internet firm Digital Sky Technologies.

But not all social networking sites are looking to expand. MySpace in June announced plans to reduce its U.S.-based workforce by 30 percent and two-thirds of its international employees.

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Posted 08/19/09 at 08:02:20 AM by Paul Lilly

For the second time in a row, Asus has come out ranked No. 1 in reliability for personal computers, according to Rescuecom's 2009 Second Quarter Top 5 Computer Reliability Report.

"Because Asus just introduced the newest version of the EEE Laptop last fall, the original predicted computer reliability of this laptop has been somewhat up in the air," says David A. Milman, Rescuecom's founder and CEO. "However, a good eight months later, we're still receiving the fewest calls for computer repair and support with Asus, while their market share is increasing."

Rescuecom ranks computer reliability based on the number of computers a company ships versus the number of computer repair and service calls Rescuecom receives. According to the report, of the top 5 companies, Rescuecom received the fewest number of calls for Asus at 0.6 percent. Apple, which ranked No. 2 on the list, received the third most calls with 2.2 percent, which is more than Asus and IBM/Lenovo combined.

Full results here.

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Posted 07/31/09 at 02:46:07 PM by Paul Lilly

Did your surgery take longer than expected? If so, maybe your surgeon was looking up tips on Wikipedia. Sounds far fetched -- and that example surely is -- but according to a report in April by U.S. health care consultancy Manhattan Research, 50 percent of doctors turn to Wikipedia for medical information.

Part of the reason for this may be that Wikipedia entries often dominate search engine results. In an unrelated study in this month's Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, it was discovered that Wikipedia articles appear in the top 10 results for more than 70 percent of medical queries across four different search engines.

"My overall impression is that the quality of health information varies wildly, almost ridiculously wildly," said Kevin Clauson, a pharmacologist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "If [a website] is treated as an authoritative source, and there's evidence that it isn't, then it's potentially dangerous."

On the positive side, several studies have found that Wikipedia's medical content is almost entirely free of factual errors in many cases, but the risk remains for "vandalism" by malicious users.

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