D-Link is kicking off the year with a round of full day xStack Product Specialist Workshops to run in East Coast cities plus Auckland.
Staff Writers
Google Only Wants To Milk YouTube
According to a recent report in Reuters, Googles number one priority this year is to make money off its YouTube video-sharing site, comments which sent Google’s shares up 4.7 per cent straight away.
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Google said in relation to YouTube, it planned to introduce a series of new advertising products aimed at generating advertising revenue.
The new ad services will go beyond basic in-line text ads that run along the bottom of YouTube videos, the report noted.
Long term, Google says it is focused on automating “the trillion-dollar industry that is advertising” and said its push into the business software market would help it forge relationships with big corporate customers that last “20 or 30 or 40 years” and “will ultimately be very, very lucrative.”
Google also said it was still in the running for a business deal in which Yahoo would replace some portion of the ads running alongside its search results with Google-delivered ads, a move that lets Yahoo focus on other advertising fields.
Victorian PC Panel
A PC and Notebook purchasing initiative from the Bracks Government hopes to save the State up to $20 million over the next five years
The plan may help save the environment too with demands placed on suppliers to recycle and reuse old computer parts. The purchasing panel, which permits only six companies to sell PC hardware to State Government Departments includes Acer, Dell, HP, IPEX, Optima and Toshiba.
“This new panel will take advantage of the whole-of-government purchasing power to deliver the best possible outcomes for the State,” the Minister for Information and Communication Technology, Marsha Thomson.
“It will be mandatory for use across all Victorian Government departments, making early use of a new State Purchase Contracts Policy to guarantee full participation over the next five years.
NetComm Back In The Red
After a brief period in the sun ASX-listed networking and communications hardware vendor, NetComm has drifted back into a loss making position despite a 13.2 per cent increase in revenue for the half year to December 31st.
Although revenue increased by $10.3 million, the company still reported a small net loss of $392,000 due to its investments in new product categories.
“Our drive to increase market share resulted in a gratifying 13.2% growth in revenue over the previous year, although gross margins suffered during the campaign. Profitability is expected to improve in the 2nd half as supported by current data,” said David Stewart, NetComm’s Managing Director.
“The results from the Company’s previously stated initiative to progressively balance out its product offering with higher value, higher margin technologies targeted at the SME sector will see increased margins delivered over the next 12 months,” he said.
The company explained the EBITDA result was impacted by a number of one-off costs associated with the development of the company’s resources to address these new opportunities, such as developing more sophisticated products.
There were also costs associated with the establishment of strategic partnership with Octtel and the Dynalink/Askey acquisition which is designed to increase the company’s access to the
NetComm detailed where some of the money went in its Stock Exchange filing:
- $70,000 spent on M&A consultancy and legal fees for the acquisitions of Dynalink and Askey
Australia. - $200,000 spent on product development, testing and certification expenses for new SMB VoIP products developed under an alliance with Octtel Communications.
- $90,000 to redesign and relaunch product packaging, and to redesign the corporate web site with e-commerce capabilities.
- $150,000 to develop the NetComm Auto Provisioning System – a software solution that will reside on the servers of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) remotely configure their customers’ modems.
The Company also noted that its half-yearly consolidated balance sheet reflects some material changes as a result of the Dynalink and Askey acquisitions. Since the acquisition took place on December 21, 2005, no revenue from these companies has been recognised in the accounts.
However, the accounts show: A reduction in cash as NetComm absorbed the overdrafts of these two firms; An increase in receivables and inventory as the company absorbed the receivables and inventory of the acquired companies; and an increase in current liabilities which was also due to consolidating the two acquisitions into NetComm.
“These adjustments and investments are proceeding as planned,” said Stewart. “The Board and management of NetComm are confident that the company will see a return on its investments in Q3 and Q4 of this fiscal year. The company’s new product range will be released to market from the third quarter of the current fiscal year with additional revenue contribution to be reflected in the full year results.”
iPod's Double Profits For Warner Music
Despite their concerns about music piracy, the recording industry is making a motza from digital downloads.
The Warner Music Group almost doubled its first-quarter profits thanks to a Christmas Day downloading frenzy according to reports. The thing which will cheer recording industry execs more than their eggnog was that profits were up so much despite lower revenues.
Warner Music profits for the three months to December 31 rose to US$69 million, from US$36 million a year prior.
“Our digital revenue was up dramatically year-on-year, especially after MP3 players went live on December 25,” Michael Fleischer, chief financial officer, told Reuters. Fleischer revealed that costs for the quarter fell 6 per cent from a year earlier to $900 million, while revenue from the company’s recorded music business fell 2 per cent to $920 million, and revenue from music publishing fell 15 per cent to $131 million.
But the high margin digital music business more than made up any shortfall. With virtually no distribution costs digital sales rose to US$69 million (an amount equal to the company’s entire profit for the quarter). This was an increase of 30 per cent from the prior quarter and triple what the company sold in digital music a year earlier.
The company said that sales spiked significantly on December 25th as new iPod (and other MP3 player) owners hit the Internet to top up their new toys. The
Digital revenues were almost equally split between song downloads ringtones, said Fleischer.
Samsung Aims For Control Of Retail Display Market
Samsung says it has launched 20 new large format display monitors for business and retail needs and claims it will to double its global Large Format Display (LFD) sales to almost US$480 million this year by focusing more on the Business Display Solutions market.
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The company has pointed to the rapidly growing Business Display Solution market as the key growth driver for its monitor business and says it aims to “double its global LFD sales to US$479 million this year”, according to reports.
Some analysts point out that Samsung has already built up a good head of steam in the Large Format Display segment, with last year achieving close to 90 per cent growth to reach nearly US$277 million sales globally.
So with these latest additions to its LFD line-up, Samsung says it now has one of the industry’s widest range of LFD monitors, “incorporating cutting-edge design, built-in network solutions with enhanced touch screen interactivity and connectivity capabilities”.
And although figures for Asia-Pacific are a bit sketchy, in the US for example, industry research indicates that by the year 2009 there will be over one million digital signs and the North American market is on track to install nearly 135 million locations over the next 10 years, many of which will incorporate LFD technology.
Jaycar Opens New Store In The West
Jaycar Electronics has announced the launch of a new store, located at Midland in Western Australia.
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The 260m2 open plan designed store has been completely fitted with a huge interior featuring interactive displays to reflect the Jaycar Electronics brand.
Midland Store Manager Jarrom Frazier, with over 11 years electronics experience says he is looking forward to developing the new store and working alongside his team of three customer-focused staff.
“Working for Jaycar Electronics enables us to interact with customers and pass on our own knowledge and ideas. It is satisfying to help individual’s complete do-it-yourself projects themselves and then see the results.”
The range of products are available at the Jaycar Electronics Midlands store includes quirky gadgets, electronic components, car and home audio, power products, automotive accessories as well as alternative energy, security, computer and outdoor products.
OneTouch Gets Speed Boost With FireWire
Maxtor is now offering a OneTouch II drive with a FireWire 800 interface for Apple Mac or PC users with a FireWire port.
Actually, the FireWire 800 Edition features a triple interface for universal connectivity so can be connected using either FireWire 800, FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 interface.
Using FireWire, the drive delivers up to 800Mbit per second data transfer rates to quickly transfer and store high-resolution graphics, digital audio/video, heavy multimedia files, photos and more.
“The Maxtor OneTouch II, FireWire 800 Edition supports our strong following of creative professionals who need reliable, high-performance storage” said Edwin Tien, Country Manager,
FireWire 800 provides twice the bandwidth of FireWire 400 and is 66 times faster than USB 1.1. Coupling the interface with the Maxtor OneTouch II drive’s 300GB capacity and 16 MB buffer, users can transfer and store their digital content at blazing speeds.
The OneTouch II drives come bundled with Maxtor’s DriveLock security software and a version of EMC Dantz Retrospect Express HD software for backup and restores.
Using the FireWire interface, the Maxtor OneTouch II drive is fully bootable on a Mac computer running OS X system software. No additional software or hardware is required.
The Maxtor OneTouch II, Fire Wire 800 is priced at $399 (RRP) for the 200GB and $499 (RRP) for the 300GB version.
Dell May Finally Sell AMD
After years of hard work, countless rumours and repeated failure, it seems likely AMD’s stellar marketshare growth in the US may finally force Dell to submit.
The latest rumours are strong, that Dell may do a deal to resell an AMD notebook as a prelude to a more extensive partnership including AMD Opteron servers. A deal could be done as early as next month say the rumours, though Dell executives are still denying there’s any chance of recapitulation.
However, the rebuttals fall short of definitive and Michael Dell is on record at this year’s CES as saying an AMD deal is “a distinct possibility”.
Then at last week’s Davos meeting in
Now a financial analyst, Doug Freedman of American Technology Research, is predicting an Dell will sign up to sell AMD processor systems and provides amore specific date. “We believe there will be an AMD/Dell deal announced very soon; more specifically, we believe it will come as early as March,” Freedman wrote in an update to his customers.
A deal at this point in time would be interesting as AMD has made significant marketshare gains on Intel thanks to a processor performance lead it has held for most of the past two years. This technology lead really paid off last year, but the company will be fighting to pull a rabbit out of a hat later this year as new Intel product looks set to leapfrog the junior player this year.
An Dell deal with AMD may be too little too late, though Michael Dell may see it as payback for Intel’s recent signing of Apple Computers which dropped the PowerPC processor and began offering systems based on the x86 architecture chips from Intel earlier this year.
Though a deal with Dell would be a major marketshare boost for AMD, the company has had a hard time signing the last major hold out vendor. Last year AMD accused Intel of anti-competitive behaviour forcing its customers, including Dell, to avoid AMD chips. The two chip-makers are currently in the discovery phase of an anti-trust court case likely to begin later this year.
AMD has also recently resolved a number of supply issues it had last year which would have prevented it from supplying sufficient processors to feed Dell’s potential volumes. With its latest Fab36 in
BigPond Cuts Wireless Broadband
Telstra has cut pricing on its wireless mobile Internet connection plans and introduced the country’s first timed usage subscription in response to what it calls competitive pressure.
The announcement came late yesterday after wireless broadband network operator Unwired announced it would enter the
The new plans start with an entry level 10 hours access at 512Kbps for just $29.95 per month. This compares to the previous entry level of 256Kbps for 200MB of downloads priced at $69.95. That plans now costs just $49.95.
In addition to the lower usage costs, BigPond is flexing its marketing muscle offering new customers up to 12 months half-priced access and $129 off the price of the PC card required to access the service. The card normally retails for $299.
The new pricing levels apply only to the full mobile service using a PC card. The desktop modem plans remain unchanged.
Telstra BigPond Plans are now as follows.
- Speed: 512/64 Kbps, Usage: 10 hours, Price: $29.95
- Speed: 512/64 Kbps, Usage: 20 hours, Price: $49.95
- Speed: 256/64 Kbps, Usage: 200MB, Price: $49.95 (previously $69.95)
- Speed: 256/64 Kbps, Usage: 1GB, Price: $79.95 (previously $99.95)
- Speed: 512/64 Kbps, Usage: 400MB, Price: $79.95 (previously $99.95)
- Speed: 512/64 Kbps, Usage: 1GB, Price: $109.95 (previously $129.95)
Excess usage on time based plans, 80c for 5 minutes. Excess usage on MB usage plans 30c