Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest Issue No. 490
05-11-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
China impervious to iPhone charms | Anti-trust charges mount against Intel
Tech jobs continue to trickle in
Week by week we seem to be getting little snippets of good news on the jobs front. Last Thursday, as a result of Satellite Broadband Ireland winning a contract to provide broadband to rural areas under the auspices of the National Broadband Scheme, the firm announced it would be creating 30 new jobs in Mullingar, Co Westmeath. These will be high-skilled jobs, including engineering positions. Satellite Broadband's offering is aimed at reaching areas of the country where Three Ireland, the company delivering the scheme, cannot get to. Then on Friday, Galway got a slice of the action with the news that Hewlett-Packard is to create 50 new high-value positions as it invests EUR11 million in establishing HP Galway as a Centre of Expertise for Cloud Computing Services and setting up an RD&I group focusing on the area of customer support tools. Separately, online marketplace Buy.com announced its plans to locate its European Operations Centre in Galway, creating 40 tech jobs in the process. The firm will be recruiting for positions in multilingual customer support, online sales and marketing, finance, and software design and development. Back in Dublin, on Monday information security consultant firm Sysnet said it would be expanding its workforce by 60 in the next four years. The move comes as the firm invests EUR1.27 million in an expansion programme that will see it target markets in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East and Africa.
Samsung shines in mobile market
Consumer electronics maker Samsung has had quite the quarter, posting record figures with net profit tripling to SKW3,723 billion, up from SKW1,219 billion a year ago. Sales revenue rose 29 percent to SKW24,862 billion. The firm has said higher chip prices and strong sales of flat-panel TVs and mobile phones have helped its bottom line. Sure enough, the South Korean firm has started to make a real impact on the global mobile phone market. It shipped a record 60.2 million handsets during the quarter, according to Strategy Analytics, up an above-average 16 percent on last year's tally. Samsung's market share breached that psychological 20 percent hurdle to hit 20.7 percent, cementing its position as a solid challenger to Nokia, which itself had a poor quarter. The Finnish firm shipped 117.8 million phones, down 8 percent on the same quarter last year. Nokia's growth rate for the quarter underperformed on the industry average for a record fifth quarter in a row and left it with market share of just 37.3 percent, its lowest rate since the first quarter of 2007. Meanwhile, LG, in third place in the global market, had an impressive quarter, growing shipments by 37 percent year-on-year. Elsewhere, Sony Ericsson and Motorola had a pretty disastrous quarter with shipments declining by 45 percent and 46 percent, respectively. Outside of the top five, Apple made inroads into the market; its share reached an all-time high of 2.5 percent, thanks to sales of 7.4 million iPhones during the quarter. Overall, the mobile market dipped 4 percent during the quarter to 291 million. The prospects are good for the upcoming quarter, with Strategy Analytics predicting that the market will grow by 3 percent year-on-year, signalling an end to the handset recession.
China impervious to iPhone charms
Staying with mobile phones, and the iPhone in particular, Apple's wildly popular handset has received a tepid reaction from the Chinese market since its launch there last Friday. China Unicom, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in China, said it had sold a mere 5,000 iPhones in the first four days it's been available. The unusually slow start -- bear in mind that AT&T sold 146,000 iPhones in the first weekend when it originally launched in 2007 -- has prompted Apple analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray to revise downward his prediction that China would contribute between 1 million and 2 million iPhone sales for the next year. He now estimates the tally will be more like 550,000. Meanwhile, in Europe, the exclusive carrier contract O2 had with the iPhone in the UK market is coming to an end. Mobile operator Orange will begin selling the iPhone from 10 November; however, consumers will be disappointed to note that it's decided not to jump into a price war with O2 and is instead offering tariffs that are broadly similar to those of O2. Rather than rely on a cheaper price, Orange said it hopes to attract customers due to its 3G network. O2's exclusive contract in Ireland is to end in early 2010 when Vodafone will begin selling the iPhone. Let's hope Vodafone takes a more aggressive approach with its pricing tariffs.
Anti-trust charges mount against Intel
First Asia, then Europe, and now the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed anti-trust charges against chip giant Intel, accusing it of using "illegal threats" to ensure PC makers bought its chips instead of those made by competitors. Cuomo said Intel had been engaged in a "worldwide, systematic campaign of illegal conduct. Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market." The 83-page lawsuit alleges that Intel's strategy involved paying PC makers "rebates" in order to discourage them from using chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). While the suit says IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell received these rebates from Intel, it alleges that Dell was the recipient of more money than any other PC maker. Over the period between February 2002 and January 2007, Dell allegedly received around USD6 billion from Intel. Intel responded to the lawsuit after it was filed on Tuesday, saying: "We disagree with the New York attorney general. Neither consumers -- who have consistently benefited from lower prices and increased innovation -- nor justice are being served by filing a case now. Intel will defend itself." Intel is already defending itself against charges in Europe where it was fined USD1.5 billion by competition authorities, while it is also facing a private suit brought against it in the US by its chief rival AMD, which is due to take to the courts next year. Looks like Intel's legal team will have a busy few months on its hands.
Yahoo predicts a OneRiot
Yahoo has made its move into the real-time search arena as it tests a "search shortcut" that would include real-time results at the top of search results pages. Real-time search provides results of what internet users are searching for at any given moment, rather than traditional search results, which could be up to a couple of hours old. "The shortcut will only appear on certain queries that will be determined by Yahoo. This is a test designed to discover if showing such content is useful to people," the company said. According to sources Yahoo has linked up with web search start-up OneRiot to test this new feature, which is scheduled to go live in the coming days. Reports quoting unnamed sources suggest that OneRiot's data will be available initially to about 10 percent of Yahoo's users. The search firm is reportedly also working with other companies on real-time search tests. In July, Yahoo signed a separate 10-year search deal with Microsoft, which is expected to close next year. Under the terms of that deal, any data that Microsoft's search engine has access to would also be accessible to Yahoo. Microsoft itself last week signed a licensing deal with micro-blogging site Twitter which means real-time tweets will feature in Bing search results (Google also signed a similar deal with Twitter). Real-time search results have become the latest battle ground for the large search engines as internet users increasingly crave ready access to huge amounts of data.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 