Nokia, SAP to form new company
Nokia Oyj and SAP announced on Tuesday that the two companies are looking forward to a partnership. The two announced that they would be soon establishing a new company providing brand owners technological services to fight multi-billion dollar counterfeit and private product businesses, Original1.
The new firm, Original1, will be headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and will be headed by Claudia Alsdorf, who is currently the vice president of SAP Research. The new company is expected to begin operations before the end of the year 2009.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Nokia’s general manager for Commerce, Corporate Development, Antti-Jussi Suominen said, “We see a big business opportunity in brand protection services.”
Both the companies, Nokia and SAP will hold 40 per cent of the new company, while the third partner, German firm Giesecke & Devrient, will hold the remaining 20 percent.
In the partnership, Original1’s services will rely on SAP technology and solutions, while Nokia will deliver mobile authentication software and Giesecke & Devrient will offer security solutions for the entire value chain, the companies said.
$535 Million Loan Guarantee For Solyndra’s New Solar Plant
Solar power systems maker Solyndra Inc will be helped by a $535 million loan guarantee from the US Energy Department in its bid to construct a photovoltaic panel manufacturing plant.
The loan guarantee will cover 73 percent of the total cost of setting up the plant while Solyndra will be expected to finance the rest. The plant will have a capacity to generate 500 megawatts of power a year. Apart from contributing to the generation of clean and alternative form of energy, the solar panel manufacturing plant is also expected to be an important source of job creation. The company announced in March that the project will lead to at least 3000 new construction jobs and as many as 1000 long-term jobs.
The loan guarantee offered to Solyndra Inc is part of the Obama administration’s attempts to encourage greater developments in energy projects that will reduce greenhouse emission in the country. For this purpose, the administration has set aside $83 billion in loan guarantees to be distributed among companies which are ready to take up such projects. The loan guarantee scheme is being funded by the economic stimulus plan that President Obama signed in February this year.
EBay to Sell Majority Stake in Skype
Internet commerce portal eBay announced Tuesday that it planned to sell a majority stake in Skype to a group of private investors led by equity firm Silver Lake Partners.
Under the terms of the deal, buyers will acquire 65 percent stake in Skype calling service in exchange of $1.9 billion in cash which however includes a loan of $125 million from eBay. The latter will continue to hold 35 percent equity investment in Skype which has been estimated to be worth $2.75 billion under the conditions of the present deal.
Skype is an internet calling service which has established its presence in the highly competitive market of web-based calling services. According to industry estimates Skype is predicted to garner more than $600 million in revenue in the current year.
The group of buyers for Skype is led by Silicon Valley-based private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. Other significant names in the group are Andreessen Horowitz, a recent venture capital firm floated by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Index Ventures, another venture capital firm based in London which was of the first investors in Skype.
EBay acquired Skype for $2.1 billion in 2005 in a deal that was rumored to have paid much more than the internet calling service was then worth.
Wal-Mart Online Store to Sell Products from Other Vendors
In a new business move, Wal-Mart Stores Inc will now allow outside retailers to sell around one million items from its online store, Walmart.com. The step is being seen as an attempt by the retail giant to tap into the vast reserve of online consumers across the world.
Some of the retailers that Wal-Mart has roped in to sell goods through its online store are CSN Stores, eBags and Pro Team. According to Wal-Mart the main reasons for selecting these retail companies are because they have large product assortments and proven track record of customer service.
Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world and its online store sell products across a vast range of categories like home, toys, baby, apparel as well as sports goods and related memorabilia. Market experts believe that the move will allow Wal-Mart explore newer areas of growth since its real stores have pretty much saturated the American market. Moreover its web portal will enable Wal-Mart to reach online consumers in places from Europe and South Korea where it does not have a real presence.
The decision to include other retailers in its online store will allow Wal-Mart to catch up with major e-commerce portals like Amazon.com and Apple.
E-transactions On the Rise in India
More people are opting for electronic or online method of fund transfer against check transfers, latest data from India shows.
Figures released by the Reserve Bank of India reveal that the number of checks processed in India 2008-2009 fell five percent to 1.18 billion checks as opposed to 1.20 billion checks processed in 2007-2008. The previous two years in fact show a growth of seven and eleven percent in the number of checks processed in India. RBI data includes those checks which use the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition code.
Data collected by the RBI also showed that a large part of electronic fund transfer took place through retail electronic transaction which surged by 28 percent to 280 million in 2008-2009. Moreover there was a similar rise in Real Time Gross Settlement which is an electronic means of transferring funds over Rs 100,000. RBI data, in fact, revealed that RTGS transaction rose by 27 percent to 35.2 million in 2008-2009 from 27.2 million in 2007-2008.
The increasingly popularity of online and electronic fund transfers show that a emerging economies like India are making use of newer technological methods for purposes of ease and speed in business transactions. The economic downturn was another cause of lower check usage, according to the RBI.
Microsoft to Market IE 8 More Aggressively
With the launch of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft hopes to sharpen its edge in the highly competitive Web Browser market and is thus urging holdouts to upgrade from earlier versions of the software.
Since its release five months ago, IE 8 has steadily made its impact in the web browser market, prompting users to leave behind the aging IE 6. This is good news for Microsoft which also expects its latest operating system Windows 7 – to be released in October this year – to erase the bad memories of Windows Vista.
However IE 6 still manages to hold onto a significant 27.2% of the web browser market according to figures released in July by Net Applications. The main reason behind this is the lack of awareness about the latest IE 8 version as well as the feeling that the present browser is ‘good enough’ for regular purposes.
Moreover the recession has also made users wary of trying out newer products and tempted them to retain that with which they have been satisfied in the past. Schools, hospitals and other organizations facing a funding crunch could especially be daunted by the cost of upgrading computer systems to new software.
Global Sale of Smartphones Shoots Up in Q2
Worldwide sale of smartphones recorded an impressive surge of 27 percent in the second quarter while the sale of mobile phones fell by 6.1 percent in the global market.
Global sales figures from Gartner released on Wednesday revealed that smartphones recorded remarkable gain of 27 percent in sales compared to sales in the same period last year. Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple were the three companies whose smartphones grabbed the top three market shares. While Nokia came first with a market share of 45 percent and sale of 18.4 million units, Research in Motion followed next with 7.6 million sales and an 18.7 market share. Apple’s iPhone sold 5.4 million units around the world and helped it to claim third biggest market share of 13.3 percent.
Mobile phones on the other hand continued its downward slide in the second quarter with sales falling by another 6.1 percent after the record 9.4 percent decline in the first quarter. Overall 286.1 million handsets were sold in the second quarter as compared to the 304 million sales in the same period last year.
Among the smartphones which recorded the highest jump in global sales was Apple’s new iPhone 3GS model whose shipments surged by 51%.
Lenovo Posts Q1 Loss
Chinese personal computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd posted a U.S $16 million loss in its first quarter of current fiscal year as declining foreign demand and lower product prices offset growing domestic sales.
In its first quarter report this year, Lenovo Group Ltd posted a loss of U.S $16 million or U.S $0.18 per share as compared to a profit of $110 million or $1.15 per share in the same period, a year back. The report also revealed that consolidated sales for the quarter slid by 18% to U.S $3.46 billion from sales of $4.21 billion the same quarter last year. However the first quarter losses were lower than those of the preceding quarter.
Lenovo attributed its decline in revenues in the first quarter to a slide in average selling price of its products, brought about by price competition as well as by going for a product mix comprising of lower price points. This accompanied by lower technology spending in the climate of global recession offset the increase of its sales in the domestic market.
Lenovo is the largest maker of personal computers in China. The company said that while the operating atmosphere will continue to be challenging for the rest of the fiscal year, it hoped that sales will be better in the next quarter.
A New Customizable Home Page for Yahoo
Yahoo will be launching its new home page on Tuesday, said a company announcement touting it as the first major change in its main website since the start of the company.
The most important aspect of the new Yahoo home page is that it will be customizable. This means that users will be able to view news, social networking sites as well as other services they use most often right on the home page. This can be done by going to a pane called My Favorites on the left side of the new home page and then customizing the links from there to the most-frequently used services, either on Yahoo or elsewhere.
The change is crucial to Yahoo’s future since in recent times it has been losing ground as the most important entry point to the Web. Users now are increasingly directly accessing a range of individual services like Google, Twitter and Facebook instead of going through Yahoo home page. The links to the most popular sites on Yahoo’s home page will allow Yahoo to maintain its importance as the gateway to the Web and charge advertisers accordingly.
The new Yahoo home page will initially be available only o users in the US in the beta test form and then later to those in parts of Europe and India.
Toshiba to Enter Blu-Ray Disc Market
Japan’s electronics giant Toshiba plans to produce its own Blu-Ray disc player this year, according to a report in the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbum.
Toshiba’s weekend announcement brought confirmation to weeks of rumors that the company is going to make its own Blu-Ray disc player after almost one and half years of fighting against the format.
The format war saw Toshiba and Microsoft backing high definition DVD while Sony, Panasonic and several consumer electronics companies were in favor of promoting Blu-Ray disc format. The tussle stretched for one year and five months until Toshiba withdrew HD DVD from the market in February last year. Toshiba was forced to cede defeat after a series of market results revealed that HD DVD format was not match for Blu-Ray disc which was the format of the future.
However Toshiba announced at the time that it would explore alternative technologies in accessing high definition content. To some extent the company was even successful in its plans as is evident from the strides that Toshiba made with its cell processor and video processing. But now overarching business concerns seem to have made Toshiba embrace the very format it had battled against since Blu-Ray disc format has emerged as the most likely successor to the standard definition DVD market reputed to be worth over a quarter of a billion dollars.
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