Thursday, November 24, 2016

Reviewing the WhatsApp Video Calling feature...can it push into Skype market?

WhatsApp has announced the mass rollout of its video calling feature, which had been in beta testing since August. With this move, WhatsApp has brought encrypted video calling facility to over 1 billion of its users worldwide, enabling them to make face-to-face calls despite the distances between them.
Video calling is taking over the world of text messaging day by day. Ever since network carriers increased the network connectivity areas and internet bandwidth, everyone is shifting form text messaging to video calling instead. For that reason WhatsApp has just rolled a new update that includes the long expected video calling feature. Tech experts are seeing the addition of this feature as a direct shot towards Apple’s FaceTime and Skype.
Skype was the first major player in this space, while FaceTime comes pre-installed on millions of Apple devices across the world, giving it a huge user base as well. Each of these apps offers secure video calls and smooth interface, and claims to offer good user experience.
The reason that the company has taken almost a year to test the feature is because of the massive user base of the multimedia messaging platform spread across multiple operating systems and architectures. The company does not want any service interruption or severe bug for all the users that are using the service. After months of leaks at screenshots and feature reports from the closed beta testers, the company launched the feature has a hidden feature in Android WhatsApp beta. The company seems to have stepped on the gas regarding introducing new features alongside working on new features in last one year.
However, unless you are on Wi-Fi, using Skype, WhatsApp video calls, or FaceTime can be an expensive affair, considering the data consumed and associated charges. A comparison made on the data consumed by WhatsApp, Skype, and Apple’s FaceTime in video calls to find out which uses the least amount was very instructive.
Apple’s FaceTime used the least amount of data in a test, eating up 8.8MB of data in a 4-minute call while Skype and WhatsApp consumed an average of 12.3MB and 12.74MB of mobile data during video calls. All calls were made on Vodafone 3G network in Delhi-NCR telecom circle. The amount of data consumed was calculated as an average of 3 calls made using each app.

In a separate control test carried out by TBR® Africa in Lagos – Nigeria, it was also observed that video call quality on WhatsApp was very unsatisfactory while using a 3G mobile network. Though Skype was not so great either, but the choppy video was more pronounced in the former. In the Delhi-NCR telecom test for FaceTime, the video call quality was decent till the other person switched to mobile data as well, after which the video became severely pixelated and lagged considerably.  So, FaceTime used less data despite the call quality being better or comparable.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

NITDA, Mira Tech, FPG Tech, Cedarview, Sawtel, others gear up for WACC 2016

The 8th edition of the West African Convergence Conference holding on the 30th of November inside Sheraton Hotel and Towers, Ikeja, Lagos, is gathering momentum as more companies and stakeholders continue to sign up to be part of the conversation at WACC 2016. At the last count, more than 10 established and growing technology firms have indicated their readiness to use the WACC 2016 platform to engage ICT enthusiasts that'll be gracing the annual event. 
WACC has remained a major meeting point for industry players in the ever dynamic technology space of West Africa with more than 280 million people to make the sub-region one of Africa’s brightest spots for investment.
Nigeria’s IT Regulator and Director General (DG) of National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami) will open discussions on regulatory flanks on convergence at the 2016 West Africa Convergence Conference (WACC) holding in Lagos November 30th at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers. WACC begins at 8AM. Registration is at www.waconvergenceconference.net.
Pantami, a lecturer and a professor of Computer & Information Systems before his appointment as the DG of NITDA will be making a presentation on ‘Convergence, IT Regulation and the Promotion of Local Content,’ in the opening Session on Regulation and Convergence. With technologies increasingly moving towards uniformity and becoming disruptive, regulation in the era of convergence poses a unique challenge for both regulators and technology innovators. Pantami already positioning NITDA to focus more on regulation and local content will be providing insight on the agency’s regulatory posture to technology dynamics and local content.
The NITDA’s boss has severally indicated that a re-jigged agency will be expanding its portfolios in regulation, local content, capacity building, policy formulation and standardization. At WACC, Pantami will share with critical stakeholders on harnessing the benefits of convergence within the context of NITDA’s roadmap.
WACC is promoted by Knowhow Media International as an all-stakeholders forum on convergence trends in West Africa. WACC official tweet-point is #WACC_2016.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

With Brexit and Trump, see the 7 Chinese companies that will shape the future of the tech industry

The UK's decision to leave the European Union and the recent uncertainties as a result of the emergence of Donald Trump as President-Elect of the USA, has led to predictions of doom for the western tech industry. TechRadar reported how the move could cripple the sector by removing EU talent and funding, cut off access to data and markets, and complicate trading and data privacy laws for years.
American tech industry investors might see fit to cheer the weakening of international competition, but in truth they have little reason to celebrate: the effects of Brexit on the US tech industry strike a harsh financial blow, and could have long-term ramifications on US businesses, from tech giants to fledgling startups. This is in addition to the expected backlash from the global market on the emergence of Trump.

Recently, technology companies in China have leapt forward in Usain Bolt-like strides in recent years, as they've evolved from remarkable copiers to legitimate innovators. 

If you still think Chinese tech companies are only about replicating the innovations that others have made, then you've got some catching up to do. Today's Chinese tech sector is filled with a number of disruptive companies that are not only competing but leaping ahead in the race to build better products and use tech to solve important problems.
The following companies are doing big things and are likely to be important players in the tech industry's next stage.

1. Baidu
Often called "the Google of China," Baidu is best known as the Chinese mainland's most popular search engine, which makes it an online advertising colossus. However, the company also does maps, news, cloud storage, internet TV, and a ton of different search products. Beyond core internet services, it has also branched out into e-payments with Baidu Wallet and food delivery services in over 70 Chinese cities with Waimai. Like Google, the long term future of the company may be in artificial intelligence. The company is also working on a self-driving car in its Silicon Valley lab that's ramping up to over 100 engineers by the end of 2016.

2. Alibaba
The Chinese tech giant that's perhaps best known across the English-speaking world is Alibaba, the world's largest e-commerce company. Yahoo famously owns a 15% stake that's valued at over $30 billion--far more than Yahoo's core business is now worth. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang bought the stake for $1 billion in 2005, in exchange for a 40% ownership of Alibaba at the time. In a sign of how radically their fortunes have changed, Alibaba has considered acquiring Yahoo in recent years. Today, Alibaba is an e-commerce juggernaut. Although China is a distant second to the US in GDP, China is the world's largest e-commerce market because it doesn't have a retail infrastructure to match the US or Europe, and Alibaba has built B2C, C2C, and B2B platforms to serve it. It's best-known for Taobao, its eBay-like C2C platform, but it also has B2C platform Tmall, online payment service Alipay, and B2B cloud computing platform Aliyun.

3. Tencent
Sometimes referred to as the "Facebook of China," Tencent was long known for its instant messaging client QQ.com, with over 200 million users. However, Tencent's successor to QQ, WeChat, has become the world's second largest social network behind Facebook and it is growing like crazy. WeChat has exploded from its launch in late 2010 to over 200 million users by 2013 and now 700 million users in 2016. Think of WeChat as a combination of WhatsApp, Facebook, Apple Pay, Google News, and Slack. It does it all. At a time when social networks are splitting out specific functions into different apps, WeChat is taking the Swiss Army Knife approach, and it's working. Whenever I met people in Beijing and they wanted to follow up, they always asked if I was on WeChat. It's the place where people spend more digital time than anywhere else. Almost all the other tech vendors I spoke with talked about their partnerships with WeChat--whether it was its news feed, its photo sharing, or its payment service. You can now download it and use it in multiple languages and it's starting to make inroads in India and is available in the US.

4. JD.com
You can think of JD.com as "the Amazon of China," but it's actually racing ahead of Amazon in several areas. A decade ago, JD made a bet that a lot of Chinese shoppers would evolve from being price-motivated to wanting to buy based on quality and brand authenticity once consumers in China had more disposable income, and that's exactly what's happened. China is flooded with knock-off products, but JD carries only authentic goods from the world's most iconic brands. At the same time, it realized 70% of its complaints from customers were about shipping, so it built its own shipping service--which infuriated investors. Today, it offers same-day delivery to 600 million customers in China and next-day delivery to virtually the entire country. It's also working on drone delivery to remote rural areas. They use big data to keep inventories low, maximize delivery, and create sophisticated data models to run its own financing for customers.

5. Didi
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Like its US rival Uber, Didi has been a rocketship for the past several years. Didi Chuxing, as it's officially known, has created the Chinese mainland's most popular ride hailing service, serving over 10 million rides per day (compared to 2 million that Uber does daily worldwide). Founded in 2012, Didi now has over 5,000 employees and is valued at over $16 billion--and it famously got a $1 billion investment from Apple earlier this month. Didi has gone far beyond just being a taxi app. They work directly with existing taxi drivers in addition to independent operators. They set up carpooling and ridesharing with Didi Bus. They work closely with corporate clients to book and manage business rides. They have a service that will pick up both you and your car and drive you home if you've been drinking. They have a test driving service that let's you try out a car before you buy it (or loan out your car for a fee). Traffic is one of the biggest problems in China and Didi sees itself using machine learning and big data to solve it. The company said its services are moving more cars off the street, creating 4 million new work opportunities per month, and saving 13.3 million tons of carbon emissions through carpooling alone. While Didi has 87% market share in China, it's only reached 1.5% of the population, so its growth potential is massive.

6. Huawei
Once considered the "Cisco of China" because of its role as a hardware provider to telecommunications companies in Asia, Huawei has branched out in recent years and become one of the world's leading mobile device makers. As Chris Duckett recently wrote, Huawei's smartphone market share is on the rise in a number of markets outside of China. But, the company is also seeing its boats rise in other waters as well. It's working on a narrowband IoT deployment in Australia, it's building a 1.0 Gbps 5G network that will be deployed in 2017 in Singapore, it's partnering with Google to bring Daydream VR to Android, and its new Honor 5X (budget brand) smartphone is getting solid reviews. In a world where everyone wants to be a software and services provider, Huawei has emerged has a pre-eminent hardware maker--in both the B2B and consumer markets.

7. Xiaomi
Speaking of hardware makers, Huawei's biggest competition in the consumer device market isn't just from Apple and Samsung but from its upstart Chinese neighbor, Xiaomi. The privately held startup launched in 2010 as an alternative Android OS maker, but it soon decided to make its own phones and hired away Google's Android chief Hugo Barra to help. Since then, the company has developed a rabid fan base for its "Mi" brand of smartphones by fostering a huge community of 170 million worldwide users and 10 million beta testers. That's helped make Xiaomi devices the phone of choice among the most active smartphone users in China. While the Mi smartphones themselves still draw a lot of their design cues from Apple and Samsung, Xiaomi has been more innovative in other areas. The company is becoming a much broader consumer product brand--almost a mix of Braun and Apple. Its latest products include flat screen televisions, hi-fi headphones and earbuds, an Android TV set top box, a fitness tracker, a hoverboard, a water quality measurement pen, and a WiFi-enabled rice maker.

Also keep an eye on...
Other companies to watch include Cheetah Mobile, which is branching out from being an Android app maker into artificial intelligence and robots with the launch of Cheetah Robotics, and LeEco, which wants to take a run at Tesla in the race to create the first mass market electric car.
Incumbents
While there are a number of other Chinese tech companies that have made a strong name for themselves, including Lenovo, ZTE, and Sina--and they remain important to keep on your radar--they aren't quite as innovative and disruptive as the big seven mentioned above.

Startups
China is also starting to percolate lots of new startups. Many engineers, innovators, and leaders who have left China to study in the US, are now returning to China to launch their own companies instead of going to work for US tech giants. Some of that is due to the large pool of VC money, some of it is due to the huge numbers of engineers available, and some it is simply due to the broader tech ecosystem that's developing in China, especially in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. You can technically still think of Didi and Xiaomi as startups. But there are also impressive new companies just starting to breakthrough, such as Deep Glint (big data-powered security cameras) and Hover Camera (personal photography drones).




…Contributions – zdnet TechRadar

Thursday, November 3, 2016

More Tense moments as Oracle intensify Netsuite Acquisition Bid

Oracle Corp. is extending the deadline to complete its $9.3 billion deal to buy NetSuite Inc. by one more month, after having received only about a quarter of the shares necessary from the cloud-computing pioneer’s stockholders. Concerns by NetSuite’s largest institutional shareholder, T. Rowe Price Group Inc., that Oracle’s offer of $109 a share undervalued the company, are apparently derailing the deal. A spokesman for T. Rowe declined to comment.
“In the event that a majority of NetSuite’s unaffiliated shareholders do not tender sufficient shares to reach the minimum tender condition, Oracle will respect the will of NetSuite’s unaffiliated shareholders and terminate its proposed acquisition,” the company said in a news release. Oracle needs 20.4 million shares to be tendered to close the deal. As of Thursday, only 4.6 million shares had been tendered. NetSuite shares fell 3.4% to $105.61 in midday trading in New York, while Oracle shares slipped 0.2% to $38.66.
Oracle—which wants to buy NetSuite to extend its cloud-software offerings, a market segment where Oracle widely has been perceived as a laggard and is racing to add new services—said the Nov. 4 deadline would be the final extension.
In July, Oracle jumped back into the purchasing pool with its largest cloud-focused acquisition attempt yet, an offer for NetSuite Inc., a company that counts Oracle cofounder and Chairman Larry Ellison as its largest investor. That deal could be in doubt, however: NetSuite’s largest investor besides Ellison, T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., told the company earlier this month that it expected to vote against the merger, a huge blow considering Ellison and other Oracle and NetSuite executives will not be allowed to vote on the deal.
At same period, this was the statement from Oracle: “Oracle and NetSuite cloud applications are complementary, and will coexist in the marketplace forever,” said Mark Hurd, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle. “We intend to invest heavily in both products—engineering and distribution.”
“We expect this acquisition to be immediately accretive to Oracle’s earnings on a non-GAAP basis in the first full fiscal year after closing,” said Safra Catz, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle. “NetSuite has been working for 18 years to develop a single system for running a business in the cloud,” said Evan Goldberg, Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Chairman, NetSuite. “This combination is a winner for NetSuite’s customers, employees and partners.”
“NetSuite will benefit from Oracle’s global scale and reach to accelerate the availability of our cloud solutions in more industries and more countries,” said Zach Nelson, Chief Executive Officer, NetSuite. “We are excited to join Oracle and accelerate our pace of innovation.”
The evaluation and negotiation of the transaction was led by a Special Committee of Oracle’s Board of Directors consisting solely of independent directors. The Special Committee unanimously approved the transaction on behalf of Oracle and its Board of Directors.
NetSuite is the sixth acquisition Oracle has announced in 2016. Prior to NetSuite, Oracle announced the acquisition of Opower, Crosswise, Textura, Ravello Systems, and AddThis. Crosswise and AddThis were acquired to augment the company’s position in the data cloud and marketing cloud spaces.
Its obvious Oracle aims to strengthen its position in cloud with NetSuite acquisition. According to Synergy Research’s recent estimates, cloud infrastructure service revenues in 1Q16 have surpassed the $7 billion landmark. Amazon continued to rule the cloud space with a 31% market share, followed by Microsoft, IBM, and Google, which collectively accounted for 22% of the cloud space.
Apart from these four players who collectively rule more than half of the cloud space, the next 20 players, which include Rackspace, Oracle, Salesforce, and VMware, grew 41% on average on a yearly basis. These 20 players collectively held 27% of the cloud space. “On the surface, the growth posted by the 20 players looks promising. However, when we compare their growth figures with the growth in the overall cloud space, it doesn’t appear to be satisfactory. Synergy Research estimates show that the cloud space is growing at a rate of more than 50% while these 20 players, including Oracle, reported average yearly growth of 41%, indicating that they are losing market share”.

This explains the rationale behind Oracle’s pursuit of NetSuite.

TECNO Wins 2023-2024 Global Top Brand

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