Global News

AMD sees red Chipmaker, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), has reported its sixth quarterly loss in a row. The company reported that it lost $358m between January and March 2008. The news comes in as AMD continues to lose market share to rival Intel. The firm had also warned recently that the sales were weak of across product lines. It however hopes that the Phenom chip could turn around its fortunes. In contrast, other tech companies reported robust earnings in the recent weeks. Intel, for instance, reported a 12% drop in profits to $1.44 bn, but predicted healthy demand for its processors. It had recently announced a technological breakthrough with the unveiling of 45nm microchips. AMD on the other hand is still trying to catch up. Even memory chipmaker, SanDisk, reported profits of $17.9 m during the first three months of 2008, despite the prices of memory chips experiencing a continuous decline. SanDisk had earlier reported a loss of $575,000, during the same period a year earlier. AMD is in the process of restructuring, and had earlier announced that it would be revealing these plans in the near future. It had also recently announced that it would cut 10% of its global work force, with a loss of about 1,600 jobs.

Microsoft tests ‘Albany’, a rival to Google Docs Microsoft has confirmed that it is planning to release a subscription-based low-end productivity software code-named Albany, and that it has sent an early version of the product to thousands of beta participants for private testing. This move confirms speculations that emerged last month that the company was planning to launch a suite to compete with Google Docs and other free or low-cost productivity suites available in the consumer market. The company has said that Albany is not just a productivity play and goes beyond that. It is a combination of Office Home and Student 2007; Office Live Workspaces (that gives customers the ability to store and share documents online directly from within the Office interface); Windows Live Mail, Messenger, and Photos client software; and Windows Live OneCare (includes firewall and anti-virus protection). It will also feature a welcome window that would show customers all of the features and offerings included in the suite. The users can either separately purchase or download all of the products that will be a part of Albany or can opt for a unified installation package. Microsoft has not set the pricing for Albany yet, and has said that it will be sold on a subscription basis.

Phishing attacks double in the UK According to Apacs, the UK payment association, phishing attacks on UK consumers have more than doubled for the first quarter of this year. The association has recorded more than 10,000 reported phishing incidents in the first quarter of 2008, which is up by over 200% from the same period last year. The number of recorded phishing incidents for the first quarter of 2007 was 3,394, which was an increase from 2,369 in the first quarter of 2006. Apacs has maintained that though the banking losses due to fraud have decreased by one-third, from £33.5 million in 2006 to £22.6 million in 2007, the efforts to defraud users have climbed considerably. It has also stated that the phishing scams are on a continuous rise and are becoming more sophisticated by the day. In addition, the association has also put forward that the users are becoming more conscious with regard to phishing attacks, and that the proportion of deleting phishing messages or taking no action over them has increased from 75% in 2006 to 82% last year. It said that 93% of users have now installed anti-virus software, but this figure falls to 71% for anti-spyware software.

IBM buys Diligent Technologies IBM has announced that it has acquired the storage vendor Diligent Technologies for an undisclosed sum. With the company in its kitty, IBM now has the access to Diligent’s de-duplication technology, which is used for eliminating redundant data and saving storage space. As per the deal, Diligent’s technologies and its workers will be brought under IBM’s system storage business unit within the systems and technology group. This buy marks the third storage-related grab by IBM in just the past few months, following its moves to acquire XIV and FilesX. IBM, which had reported strong second-quarter earnings recently, said that the Diligent deal is also part of its planned earnings-per-share growth strategy. Diligent Technologies has offices in Framingham, Massachusetts, and Tel Aviv, and is known for its de-duplication technology, a technique for saving storage space by eliminating redundant data, such as multiple copies of the same e-mail attachment within an e-mail archive. The company’s ProtecTIER product employs an in-line de-duplication engine that does the work as data is brought into a system.

Microsoft to cut off Hotmail access via Outlook Express Microsoft Corporation has announced that it will turn off the access to its Web-based Hotmail service from desktop e-mail software Outlook Express at the end of June. Therefore, Outlook Express users would now be required to download Windows Live Mail software (free) in order to access their Hotmail accounts after June 30. Users, however, would still be able to use Outlook to read their Hotmail messages offline, but may have to upgrade their Outlook Connector synchronization software. Windows Live Mail was released last November, and is a successor to both Outlook Express and the Windows Mail client. Some of its features include, support for RSS feeds, improved photo-sharing and increased integration with other cloud-based Windows Live online services. One of the blogs posted at Microsoft technical support website, states that the company is disabling the DAV e-mail protocol used by Outlook Express to download messages because it is too slow for the larger e-mail in-boxes now in use. In contrast, the Windows Live Mail software uses new technology called DeltaSync to replicate e-mail, contacts and other data between Hotmail and a user’s PC. Outlook Express first appeared in 1997, when it was bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0. It was one of the most popular e-mail software among Windows users, but its usage started to decline after major virus and malware problems early this decade. Microsoft’s last update of the software, Outlook Express 6, was released in August 2004.