Monday, August 27, 2012

Samsung unveils Galaxy Player 5.8, pockets everywhere brace for impact

posted Aug 27th 2012 12:15AM
Samsung unveils Galaxy Player 58, pockets everywhere brace for impact
We hope you wear baggy pants, because you're going to want big pockets to carry Samsung's giant new jukebox. The Galaxy Player 5.8 is dominated by its namesake 5.8-inch, 960 x 540 LCD -- a screen that makes the 4.8-inch AMOLED on the closely related Galaxy S III look downright modest by comparison. Android 4.0 and the latest generation of TouchWiz make their first appearances in a Samsung media player here, with the spin naturally on books and movies instead of the tasks you'd associate with a smartphone. You're otherwise looking at the kind of media player you'd expect in 2012: there's either 16GB or 32GB of built-in storage, a microSD slot, a front VGA camera for those face-to-face sessions and a huge 2,500mAh battery to compensate for the display. We're still waiting on a few details, such as the exact processor and the Galaxy Player 5.8's launch schedule, although the announcement's timing suggests we may get a peek at this behemoth when IFA 2012 kicks off later this week. In the meantime, we'd advise against buying a pair of skinny jeans.

Lenovo's K860 phablet gets priced in China: 2,188 yuan on August 28th

posted Aug 27th 2012 8:41AM
Lenovo's K860 phablet gets priced in China 2,188 yuan on August 28th
Lenovo's K860 has been making the rounds for a while now. That five-incher's specs are hardly a secret. But, what has continued to evade us was a price and release date for this quad-core Exynos-powered beast. Thankfully, the Chinese manufacturer has finally come clean and we are happy to tell you the phablet will be hitting shelves tomorrow, August 28th, for 2,188 yuan (about $344). The initial run of this heavily skinned ICS handset will be fairly limited unfortunately -- only 2,000 will be released on the first day. But, we're sure a wider release can't be far behind.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Fair Labor Association's Foxconn investigation notes improved factory conditions


Back in March, the Fair Labor Association issued the results of its investigation of Foxconn's Chinese plants, spurring a joint effort between Apple and the manufacturer to make working conditions better for employees. The non-profit has since followed up to investigate the fruits of the companies' promise, visiting three Foxconn facilities for a visual inspection of the factories and review of documentation like payroll records and policies. The FLA discovered a fair amount of progress being made on its visits, noting,
Many physical changes to improve worker health and safety have been made since the investigation, including the enforcement of ergonomic breaks, changing the design of workers' equipment to guard against repetitive stress injuries, updating of maintenance policies to ensure equipment is working properly, and testing of emergency protective equipment like eyewashes and sprinklers. Foxconn has also engaged consultants to provide health and safety training for all employees.
Also on the list is the election of unions, extension of insurance coverage and the reduction of the work week down to (a still over-the-limit) 60 hours. The organization has promised to continue to monitor progress as Foxconn and Apple work to meet all of its goals. Check out the source link below for a more complete look at the findings.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Google teases hackers with $2 million in prizes, announces Pwnium 2 exploit competition


Google teases hackers with $2 million in prizes, announces Pwnium 2 exploit competitionThe folks in Mountain View are starting to make a habit of getting hacked -- intentionally, that is. Earlier this year, Google hosted an event at the CanSecWest security conference called Pwnium, a competition that challenged aspiring hackers to poke holes in its Chrome browser. El Goog apparently learned so much from the event that it's doing it again -- hosting Pwnium 2 at the Hack in the Box 10th anniversary conference in Malaysia and offering up to $2 million in rewards. Bugging out the browser by exploiting its own code wins the largest award, a cool $60,000. Enlisting the help of a WebKit or Windows kernel bug makes you eligible for a $50,000 reward, and non-Chrome exploits that rely on a bug in Flash or a driver are worth $40,000. Not confident you can break Chrome? Don't let that stop you -- Google plans to reward incomplete exploits as well, noting that it has plenty to learn from unreliable or incomplete attacks. Check out the Chromium Blog at the source link below for the full details.

The Unconscious Mind Unveiled

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

How to Know When to Start Your Own Business (Infographic)

There will always be a reason why now isn't the right time to start your own business. And there will always be a reason it is.
Have a look at the infographic (below) from the startup organization Funders and Founders that challenges many of the excuses life presents. You just started school? Well, says Anna Vital, the organization's founder, just going to school alone won’t do anything for you, you have got to get out there and "do." Vital recommends you get your business idea rolling while you are in school. Just got married and too busy settling down to launch a business? Vital says you have just got yourself a perfect co-founder.

Courtesy: Funders and Founders
Fear of the unknown is the biggest obstacle for many want-to-be-entrepreneurs. But everyone struggles with some degree of fear. Many people are far better off when they do exactly what they are the most afraid of.
Where were you in your life when you started a business? Were you afraid? And if so, what did you do to confront that fear? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Google to acquire Frommer’s travel guidebooks

August 14, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 14 — Google Inc is buying the Frommer’s line of travel guidebooks, the latest move to amass a trove of publishing content that could strengthen the No. 1 Internet search company’s push to become a major online travel broker.
The sale by John Wiley & Sons Inc comes nearly a year after Google’s US$151 million (RM470.1 million) purchase of Zagat Survey, which offers reviews of restaurants, hotels and nightclubs in cities around the world.
Google and Wiley & Sons did not announce financial terms for the deal, which is expected to close shortly.
The deal will meld the 55-year-old travel publisher’s deep database of hotels and sights into a search giant that is seeking to position its services across the entire trip-planning process, from searching for a holiday destination and looking up hotel reviews to booking tours and restaurants in far-flung cities.
As a result, analysts said, Google is increasingly threatening a range of companies, like review site Yelp Inc and flight and hotel booking service TripAdvisor , which are scrumming for a slice of the growing online travel market.
US online travel sales are expected to reach US$119.2 billion this year, up from US$107.4 billion in 2011, according to eMarketer.
“It’s been Google’s overarching strategy to dominate the travel vertical,” said B. Riley & Co analyst Sameet Sinha. “They want to dislodge these vertical search engines that may have gained over the last few years.”
Shares of Yelp fell 7.7 per cent to US$23.87 yesterday after the deal was announced. Online travel website Expedia Inc’s stock slipped 1.1 per cent to US$53.83. TripAdvisor fell 4.5 per cent to US$33.52.
Shares of Google, which yesterday announced plans to lay off 20 per cent of its recently acquired Motorola Mobility business, rose 2.8 per cent to US$660.01. Wiley & Sons shares were off 1 cent, or 0.02 per cent, at US$47.58.
Going local
Last year, Google closed a US$700 million deal to acquire ITA Software, which provides search technology to companies such as Kayak Software Corp.
But Google’s aspirations in travel are just part of its broader ambitions. For years, the company has tried to help broker commercial transactions between its roughly one billion users and small, local businesses.
Google’s local search efforts — headed by its high-profile executive Marissa Mayer until she left to head Yahoo Inc last month as chief executive — have been a priority for the search engine.
Since acquiring Zagat, Google has given more and more space on its search results page to business listings from Zagat, a practice that has drawn regulatory scrutiny and criticism from competitors such as Yelp.
By teaming up with Frommer’s, which publishes 350 titles and covers over 4,000 destinations, Google could further expand its reach internationally and beef up information on local hotels and tourist activities across the globe.
“They want to marry content with commerce, and content is an important part of that equation,” said Sinha, the B. Riley & Co analyst.
In recent years, Google has not hesitated to offer top dollar for other properties that it believed could strengthen its local commerce offerings.
In December 2009, the company unsuccessfully offered more than US$500 million to acquire Yelp. One year later, in late 2010, Groupon Inc, the daily deals company, turned down a US$600 million offer from Google.
Europe on US$5 a day
For an acquirer such as Google, the most valuable part of Frommer’s is its extensive database of business listings and tourist hotspots that have been maintained and curated for years and can be integrated into Google’s deep pools of data, analysts said.
“When Google buys Frommer’s they’re not really buying a book publisher or imprint, they’re buying a database with both content and photography,” Lorraine Shanley, president at Market Partners International, a publishing consulting firm in New York.
A Google spokeswoman said that over time, the company would integrate the content acquired from Frommer’s with Zagat. But initially, Google will continue to offer the reviews of hotels, restaurants and sights across the world on the Web under the Frommer’s brand name.
The spokeswoman said there was nothing to announce regarding whether Google would continue to publish the print guidebooks.
Wiley, which also publishes the “For Dummies” series, acquired the Frommer’s line in 2001.
The publisher had been looking to offload Frommer’s in recent months as it consolidates its business around its textbook offerings, said Morningstar analyst Michael Corty.
The latest acquisition by the Internet giant caps a 55-year journey for a series that first appeared in the early years of commercial air travel. In 1957, Arthur Frommer, a former US soldier, released his European sightseeing book, entitled “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day”, after fellow GIs snatched up a similar guide that Frommer had distributed while he was stationed in Germany.
Written in a breezy style and appealing to the budget-conscious, the slim book encouraged Americans across a broader economic spectrum to venture overseas in the flush postwar era.
His guide, Frommer wrote in the first edition, was meant for American tourists who “own no oil wells in Texas” and have “never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation”.
In the 1970s, tattered copies of Frommer’s book accompanied a new generation of young American backpackers across Europe. And in the years since, other publishers such as Lonely Planet have also found considerable success printing thick bound guides for the independent traveller. Lonely Planet is now owned by the British Broadcasting Corp.
But the golden days of travel-book publishing may be over, given the rise of always-connected tablets and e-books that can be easily updated with the most current maps and listings, said Shanley, the publishing consultant.
“People still want to take a travel guide with them when they go on a trip, but presumably that will erode over time,” Shanley said. “I’m not going to sound the death knell of travel books, but the expense of creating a new edition and then printing it and distributing it is becoming prohibitive.” — Reuters

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Crime exacting toll on KL’s economy, stress levels

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 13 — The Klang Valley’s crime rates are causing the already high cost of living and doing business to go up even as the stress of constantly looking over their shoulders impacts the productivity of residents and their feelings of well-being.
From shopping malls to restaurants, from homes to offices, Malaysians living in and around the nation’s capital are having to shoulder the burden of spending more on safety measures due to a general sense of insecurity that was made worse by a spate of shocking crime incidents in the past few months and a feeling that more people they personally know were becoming victims of crime.
File photo of cars for sale on display in a shopping mall in Putrajaya. Businesses, homes and offices are feeling the stress of the increasing crime rates. — Reuters pic
The diversion of money into security risks cutting into the amount available for re-investment into more productive areas of business could even deter investment altogether as well as reduce the consumption power of Malaysians just as the country is trying to rebalance its economy to depend more on domestic spending rather than external demand. Ken Wong, 35, who operates several kopitiam-style cafes and lives in a gated community here, says he feels like crime has not only gone up but also increased the costs of living and doing business.
In addition to the over 20 CCTVs he installed, Wong recently signed up to spend over RM300 a month for a new panic button service for one of his cafes that will allow staff to call for help with a touch of a button in the event of a robbery. He also opted to increase his insurance against theft on the premises.
“I now pay more for my insurance premiums and the new panic button service which could be money saved if area security is better,” he said.
His home in a hill-top gated community in KL also comes at a high price of a RM1,200 monthly fee.
The high charge is due to the fact that because the area is completely enclosed by motion sensitive perimeter fencing, the neighbourhood has to incur additional costs to take ownership of its roads and street lights and services such as landscaping and garbage collection as the local town council will no longer be responsible.
But the RM1,200 also buys peace of mind as neighbours can leave their gates open — a rare luxury in KL — without overwhelming fear of getting robbed by parang-armed gangs.
“If possible, I wouldn’t want to have to pay so much,” he said. “Paying RM1,200 is almost like paying instalments on a new mortgage.”
Many others in KL are not so lucky as their neighbourhoods have so many entry points that it is too difficult to block access to outsiders even if they could afford the additional costs to buy extra security.
Wong says that his aunt, who lived in an ungated neighbourhood in northern KL before moving to Puchong, had her car stolen twice in one year about two years ago.
Shopping malls in the Klang Valley are apparently also having to overspend on security compared to their counterparts in developed countries.
Malaysian Association for Shopping and Highrise Complex Management president H.C. Chan said that on a recent visit to Australia, he was exchanging notes with executives of a shopping mall there and was surprised to discover that they only needed 15 security personnel for a shopping mall that is larger than KL’s MidValley Megamall.
“A similar-size mall in Malaysia would have 10 times more security guards,” he said. “This trend is quite common. In UK, it is also the same case as in Australia. We are spending more per capita on security than other countries.”
Chan, who is also CEO of Sunway Shopping Malls, said he was worried the country could develop a reputation that would scare away tourists and impact the RM1 billion-a-week tourism industry, of which about a quarter goes to shopping.
He said he hasn’t seen a significant impact on shopping malls yet but is concerned the stories on crime will be picked up overseas.
Datuk Akhbar Satar, the director of HELP University’s Institute of Crime and Criminology, said the crime rates that contribute to a sense of insecurity could be related to the level of development of the country.
“It is important that integrity is part of a child’s upbringing,” he said.
Akhbar also said there was a lack of interest in crime research in the country.
“People like to study politics but not crime,” he said.
Akhbar added that crime could have a dampening effect on productivity and investment.
“If people felt more secure, they would be more willing to stay late at the office,” he noted. “If there is lack of security, who would want to invest?”
RAM Ratings chief economist Yeah Kim Leng said the most direct cost of crime on the economy was the toll on human resources.
“If people are directly hit by crime, there is a loss of productive capacity and there is also the psychological cost — the fear — and it may also result in the pullout or closure of business,’” he said.
Yeah said if insecurity became pervasive, it could lead to lower levels of investment as more feel deterred from starting a new business as well as a re-allocation of resources to safety matters.
“The increased cost of doing business will have a dampening effect,” he said. “The worst-case scenario is that there is a total loss of confidence and then businesses and people will take flight.”
Yeah noted however that official statistics point to a drop in crime rates despite the widespread public concern.
“What they need to do is redeploy resources to crime hotspots,” he suggested. “And show a detailed breakdown of statistics to give people greater confidence in the figures.”
Residents in the Klang Valley have long lived in fear of having their bags snatched or being attacked in their own homes by violent criminals, resulting in the sprouting of makeshift security posts barricading entry into various housing estates around the city and the increasing popularity of gated and guarded new housing developments.
The Najib administration vowed to reduced crime under the Government Transformation Programme (GTP) launched in 2009, but the spike in sensational crimes such as a series of attempted kidnappings at popular shopping malls in recent months brought the issue of public safety back into the fore
The government sought to allay fears over the apparent surge in crime rates by releasing statistics showing the country’s crime index dropped by 10.1 per cent to 63,221 cases in the first five months of this year from 70,343 during the same period last year.
The new chairman of the GTP National Key Result Area Secretariat, Datuk Wira Ayub Yaakob, had said that the implementation of the crime reduction initiative will be reviewed and enhanced.
For people like café owner Wong, however, statistics showing a drop in crime have not been of much comfort.
“It is mentally distressing to have to worry about our safety every time we leave the house,” he said.

China consumers counter economy gloom with travel boom

August 13, 2012
BEIJING, Aug 13 — Soaring numbers of Chinese tourists packed onto flights out of the country is a sure sign that a fast-growing consumer class of around 130 million is not worried that the likely slowest year of economic growth since 1999 will sap their spending power.
Nearly 39 million mainlanders left China on overseas trips in the first half of 2012, roughly double on five years ago and evidence that a powerful consumer force — envisaged by the top leadership as the engine of economic expansion in a generation to come — may be bulking up faster than thought.
The question for investors is if a burgeoning bourgeoisie is now big enough to fully offset the economic impact of faltering foreign demand evident in data last week, when undershoots in July new bank lending, export, import and industrial output growth prompted analysts to start slicing into GDP forecasts.
Paul French, Shanghai-based chief China strategist at market intelligence consultancy Mintel, says the purest view of the domestic economy’s health always comes from the consumer.
“If consumers feel good about things they’ll spend. If they don’t feel good they’ll stop,” he told Reuters. “Travel is a good indicator because people are travelling more and they are consuming a lot when they travel abroad.”
Investors, facing world growth slowing to levels economists define as marking a global recession, are anxious for any sign that critical consumer mass may have already arrived in China.
Tourists on rafts in Yongjia County, Zhejiang Province. There are hundreds of ancient villages in Yongjia County, the oldest of which dates back to more than 1,400 years. — Reuters pic
Consumer spending in China has comfortably enjoyed double-digit growth for a decade, while exports have slowed to become a net drag on the economy in 2011 and in the first half of 2012. Retail sales rose 13.1 per cent year on year in July. Adjust for inflation and it was the second best month of the year.
But that’s not been enough to arrest six straight quarters of slowdown, with the latest Reuters poll forecasting economic growth to slide to 8 per cent in 2012 from 9.2 per cent in 2011.
While well below the 10 per cent average of the last 30 years and a level that has previously prompted urgent action to create jobs, 8 per cent remains above Beijing’s 7.5 per cent target.
Meanwhile the labour market appears tight, with data showing the ratio of vacancies to workers near its highest in 10 years.
Stronger, faster
Evidence that consumers are rapidly getting stronger comes from the Geneva-based Digital Luxury Group, which reckons China’s travel market is already worth some US$232 billion (RM722.3 billion).
Its new World Luxury Index China Hotels report says Chinese travellers made 70 million overseas trips in 2011 to be pampered at spa resorts in Bali, to shop in Dubai, Paris and London, and to spend in Singapore and Hong Kong.
International Air Travel Association chief executive, Tony Tyler, says airlines will see an extra one billion travellers in a decade if average annual incomes in China hit US$15,000.
Part of the proof is in the building going on. China, IATA says, plans to build 56 new airports nationwide before the end of 2016, with a further 16 relocated and 91 being expanded.
Chinese carriers made about half of all the US$7.9 billion in profits earned by the global airline industry in 2011, according to IATA, which expects international traffic growth of 8-9 per cent from China in the five years to 2015.
A Beijing-backed World Bank report envisages per capita income rising to US$16,000 by 2030 from about US$5,000 now, with two thirds of economic activity forecast to come from domestic consumption against less than 50 per cent now.
Consumer cushion
A shift to the domestic market, leveraging China’s 1.3 billion-strong population, would cushion the economy from huge falls in foreign demand that Europe’s debt crisis is causing, barely three years on from the trade shock it suffered in the 2008-09 global financial turmoil.
An emerging urban middle class has made grocery shopping the engine of domestic retail sales growth, taking in 41 per cent of all retail spending in China, which analysts at Citi reckon will be up 55 per cent up over five years to US$600 billion in 2012.
Annual double digit wage rises over the past decade — the government has decreed minimum wages rise at least 13 per cent in the five years to 2015 — have helped China create what brokerage CLSA says is “the world’s best consumption story”.
But while workers in the world’s second largest economy are earning more, they lag well behind those of the United States.
Average annual wages in the state-owned firms which dominate economic output were 42,452 yuan (RM20,857) in 2011 and just 24,556 yuan in the private sector, which creates some 75 per cent of the country’s jobs. The US average wage was US$39,959 in 2010, according to the latest data available.
China’s wealthy elite, however, have generated a whole new market for the world’s luxury personal goods makers, estimated to be worth US$25 billion a year now and likely to leapfrog Japan and the United States to the US$28 billion top spot by 2015.
It indicates a consumer market presently polarised between the super rich and a middle-class with modest discretionary spending strength, but growing rapidly in size and affluence.
It is one reason why Yolanda Fernandez Lommen, head of the economics unit at the Asian Development Bank’s China mission, says a self-sustaining consumer class is some way off.
“We consider that 10-15 per cent of the population shows a consumption pattern that is consistent with the type that would be regarded as a solid domestic driver of growth,” she said.
“In general, economies where consumption plays a meaningful role as a driver of growth entail a wide middle class that on average comprises about 70-80 per cent of the population.”
Affluence arriving
China officially classed 51 per cent of its citizens as urban dwellers in 2011, but that includes some 230 million rural migrant workers who generally do poorly paid jobs in cities, lack residency rights in them and have very little to spend.
Only deep structural reforms will turn those migrant workers into fully-fledged urban consumers, Fernandez Lommen said.
Analysts at consultancy, McKinsey, say affluence is arriving faster than many economists anticipate, forecasting a giant leap by 2020 based on annual surveys it has carried out since 2005.
By then China will have 167 million “mainstream” consumer households — those with annual disposable income of between US$16,000 and US$34,000 — more than 10 times the 14 million, or 6 per cent, who currently fit that definition.
There will also be 120 million households with US$6,000-US$15,999 of spending power, according to McKinsey.
Analysts at Nomura point out that domestic consumption contributed 4.5 per centage points of the 7.8 per cent growth in China in the first half of 2012.
All of which implies consumer strength underpinning activity - and the confidence Mintel’s French says his clients have in the spending power of China’s shoppers at home and overseas.
“The only thing we’re seeing slowdown in is some softening in the higher end numbers for luxury goods. But the reason for that is because we have got unparalleled amounts of arbitrage going on from the Chinese going abroad and shopping,” he said. — Reuters

Soros Said to Plan Marriage to Consultant Tamiko Bolton

BillionaireGeorge Soros, who turns 82 today, plans to marry Tamiko Bolton next year in Southampton, New York.
Soros announced his engagement to family and friends gathered at his house in Southampton on Long Island yesterday to celebrate his birthday, according to a person who attended and asked not to be named because the party was private.
The couple met in 2008 at a luncheon in New York, the person said. Soros proposed to Bolton, 40, on a recent weekend. Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Soros, declined to comment.
Bolton is a health-care and and education consultant who most recently developed a Web-based yoga-education platform, the person said. She graduated from the University of Utah and has an MBA from the University of Miami. It will be her second marriage and Soros’s third.
Soros is chairman of New York-based Soros Fund Management LLC, his former hedge fund that became a family office last year. The office oversees $25 billion for Soros, his family and foundations.
The Hungarian emigre, who ranks 21st on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, stepped back from day-to-day money management in 1989 to spend more time on philanthropic work. In the past three decades, he’s given away more than $8 billion to promote democracy, foster free speech, improve education and fight poverty around the world, according to his Bloomberg Billionaires biography. He has five children from his previous marriages.
The couple told their friends the wedding will take place next summer, the person said.