DD
MM
YYYY

CATEGORIES

PAGES

DD
MM
YYYY

spot_img

CATEGORIES

PAGES

Home Blog Page 7648

iCow Receives 10,536 Euro From Indigo Trust Towards Setting Up Apps HelpCenters

By
Tekedia Editors
-
0

Technology is transforming the African continent. In East Africa alone there are 50 million mobile phone subscribers and an increasing number of mobile web users. Across the region, the number of IT graduates and tech entrepreneurs is exploding, providing new opportunities to foster social and economic growth. Last year Apps4Africa was organized through the support of the U.S. government and the winner was iCow.

 

iCow, a voice-based mobile application that helps farmers track the estrus stages of their cows. This application can enable farmers everywhere to better manage breeding periods as well as monitor cow nutrition leading up to the calving day. This will help farmers get the most of their cows and their farms. From Kenya, Charles Kithika is the first place winner receiving $5,000 and an Apple iPad.

 

We just noticed that The Indigo Trust has  has awarded a grant of £10,536 to the prize-winning iCow app. The grant is to be used towards the cost of setting up a customer care centre designed to handle feedback and provide support to registered users.

 

Due to be launched in Kenya later this month, iCow is a mobile application that has been specially developed for small-scale dairy farmers. The app acts as a virtual veterinary nurse and midwife for dairy farmers, giving advice on issues such as gestation, milk production and fodder. Specifically designed to run on low-end phones and available in a number of languages, iCow delivers SMS or voice messages to farmers that have registered for the service. Once registered, users input key data about their cow, such as expected calving or insemination date, and receive tailored messages and advice on caring for their cow. It is hoped that this innovative app, which won first prize in a recent Apps4Africa competition, will reduce cow mortality and lead to healthier calves and better yields for dairy farmers.

The Best Deal Of 2011, So Far – A16Z Sale Of Skype To Microsoft, $6 Billion Profit For Two Years Of Work

By
Tekedia Editors
-
0

In 2005, eBay bought Skype from founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, for $2.6 billion. It could neither manage nor integrate it to its services.Instead of becoming a boom to help eBay make money, Skype became a distraction. Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. It is hugely popular and has about 600 million users from 400 million in 2009.

In Sept 2009, eBay sold it to the duo of  Andreessen-Horowitz and Silver Late Partners for $2.75. Two years later, the latter companies it sold to Microsoft at $8.5 billion. So, within two years, these companies made $6 billion.

It takes uncommon vision to get such deals done.  Skype was actually losing money. It lost $10m in 2010 and $418m in 2009. Yet, the AtoZ and Silver Late were able to get that hefty price from Microsoft. Two years, $6b, this is a vision and insight any mortal needs.

Never mind Microsoft. They seem to get these deals right. When they sent more than $240m to get about 1.6% stake in Facebook, the world quipped. Today, that deal is more than $1.3billion if the valuation of Facebook holds as per SecondMarket. And if they lose all this money, Windows generates more than $15 billion with nothing to dig or build. Just print CDs and deliver software over the web. Microsoft can absorb it without any qualms.

Nigerian Startups, Examine Your Business Model And Get Ready, Tech Bubble Is Near, Precisely 2015

By
Tekedia Editors
-
0

Tekedia Intelligence has looked at many data and we can conclude one simple thing – the tech bubble is near. We estimate that it will happen within the next five years. We have extended the date from 2014 because investors few months ago were putting money in winners, avoiding 2nd tier companies. But our recent research, especially the numbers we see in SecondMarket has convinced us that the bubble is near. They will jack up the valuations to the late 1990s rates and by 2015, we will have a tech bubble. Simply, now is the time to examine your business model and get your Plan B ready.

Typically, bubbles are bad for the investors and companies, but over time, it enables a new phase of technology adoption.When bubble happens, prices of tech gadgets drop, making them affordable for people that would not have afforded them few months before. So, as more people use those technologies, they quickly rebuild the sector or industry. So, bubbles are not necessarily that bad. Without tech bubbles, many cannot afford most gizmos as nothing will bring down the prices.

That said, you must not allow your company to become the victim of the bubble. You need to plan and execute to mitigate any potential impact it will have. We are certain that a bubble is on the way. The numbers do not lie:

  • LinkedIn had a 2010 revenue of about $243m but closed on its IPO date at  $8.9 billion

  • Yandex was $440m but ended with $12.5 billion

  • Pandora was $138m but ended with $2.8 billion

By historical standards and date available to Tekedia, we see these numbers as very outrageous. Recall that eBay had $5.7m revenue in 1997 and ended on IPO day in 1998 at $1.9billion. Yahoo was moderate because it was too far from the late 1990s bubble; it had a revenue of $1.4m in 1995 and raised $848 million on the IPO first day.

While the numbers above do not show good judgement on the value of the stocks with the earning power, open an account in Second Market and see the valuations on Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Facebook generates about $2b and is worth excess of $80b (You can pick Facebook over Amazon or Cisco as they are largely the same value now. It is already bigger than Boeing and other iconic firms); Groupon, the commerce site and heavy cash burner is a $713m revenue firm and worth $20b. Zynga ends the top flights at $597m and valued at about $20b for making FarmVille, CityVille, Coffee-Ville, etc. Twitter is worth $8b in SecondMarket, a secondary market. The valuations in SharePost for these companies are not different.

These evaluations do not depict reality. You can also see that these numbers are pushing real estate high in the Silicon Valley environs. We think for the investors to overlook that LinkedIn is trading at 750 times its next year’s earning is wrong. S&P and Dow valuations average around 12x of the forward earnings.

LivingSocial is certain to go public soon. It was a mixed one for Chinese Youku which is expected to become what Youtube is to the English world in China. It reached $70 before it came down to $25. But our biggest sign of bubble is color.com that received $41m to make an app for photo sharing. We think the domain value is more valuable than the product. Investors are discounting risk and valuing companies with reckless abandon.

Recall that Bebo was bought for nearly a billion dollars (more than $800m) but got dis-invested at few million dollars ($10m?). Myspace is a case in point; News Corp bought it for $580m in 2005 but sold it for $35m few weeks ago.

Do not be deceived thinking that a bubble in Silicon Valley will not affect you in Nigeria or Kenya. No. It will because most of the services we use now are cloud-based and any bubble could take those companies away with your data.  So watch carefully as these changes unfold. Tekedia will be giving updates.

Canonical Launches Cloud-Based Support For Ubuntu

By
Ejiofor Agada
-
1

Most people, who like Linux, love Ubuntu (like yours sincerely). Though we may object to Ubuntu’s new Unity desktop, but at day’s end, they still use Ubuntu. Technology businesses though have a more jaundiced view of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company. Canonical, though, is now taking steps now to make its potential hardware and software partners happier.

 

First, Canonical is trying to become better friends with its reseller partners. Their new channel partner program, Ubuntu Advantage (UA) is “designed to help resellers bring a new set of support services for Ubuntu server, desktop and cloud installations direct to businesses. The program is launching with global partners, including CSS in the US, Asia and Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA).”

 

The name of the game, according to Canonical, is to “provide enterprise customers with access to the tools and support they need to get maximum return from their Ubuntu infrastructure including round the clock support, Ubuntu Landscape management and monitoring tool, knowledge base and legal cover. Ubuntu Advantage helps to minimize any impact on mission-critical services and reduce the cost of system downtime. The Ubuntu Advantage partner program extends the availability of these services beyond Canonical and, for customers, adds local resources and responsiveness to the expertise that Canonical continues to provide.”

 

What resellers will get out of this is the usual additional revenue streams from new services. In addition, Canonical promises that they’ll get “marketing, technical, commercial and pre-sales support and an assigned account manager as part of the UA program.”

 

Canonical has offered enterprise software stacks in partnership with IBM; the Ubuntu distributor also briefly tried a retail, open-source software package; and has long been targeting Red Hat and the other server operating system giants for the Linux server market. While Canonical has had some success with that last mission-albeit Red Hat continues to be server Linux’s 800-pound gorilla–over the years its partners have been happy with it.

 

As The VAR Guy Website observed, Canonical has lots of good partner ideas but they haven’t pulled them off because “Canonical experienced multiple management changes and product launches that pushed – and pulled – the company into new directions.”

 

In addition, Canonical is simplifying its hardware certification program. In the past manufacturers had a choice of two levels of endorsement for systems: “Ubuntu Certified” and “Ubuntu Ready.” Canonical recognized that this was confusing so starting with October’s Ubuntu 11.10 release there will only be one Canonical-endorsed hardware certification program: Ubuntu Certified.

 

Just like resellers and corporate customers, original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s and original design manufacturer (ODM)s much prefer simple and stable over constant small changes and tweaks.

 

If Canonical is successful in doing all this, and in stabilizing it own management structure, then Canonical, and Ubuntu, will have a much better chance of moving from Linux lovers’ desktops to corporate offices and server rooms. That’s easier said than done though.

 

Canonical has also announced the launch of Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest, a set of technical support services, management tools and legal cover for businesses running Ubuntu in public cloud environments. Cloud Guest gives businesses running public cloud instances access to round-the-clock technical support and a comprehensive knowledge base for rapid resolutions as well as Landscape, Canonical’s systems management and monitoring tool. A single Cloud Guest subscription covers up to 100 public cloud instances offering businesses the flexibility to adapt to changing business demands.

 

“As the public cloud looks to take its place alongside the data centre as a standard IT resource, organisations are looking for the reassurance of support, which guarantees the same service levels as they expect from other IT implementations.”

 

Public clouds like RackSpace, Amazon’s AWS and GoGrid, are popular due to their flexibility to adapt and scale to changing demands. Start-ups, tech companies and enterprises alike are using these environments for a variety of workloads spanning development to deployment. Ubuntu Server has proven immensely popular as a guest operating system across all these environments. With Ubuntu Advantage already providing support for Ubuntu as the Infrastructure as a Service layer in cloud platforms, Cloud Guest provides the next level of reassurance for businesses who choose to also run Ubuntu instances in public cloud platforms. Additionally the systems management tool (Landscape) will provide more control and optimised deployment of Ubuntu instances on the cloud.

 

Businesses are realising the importance of support and management of their IT environments as they become more complex with cloud instances. In fact, according to Gartner, worldwide IT spending on public cloud is expected to grow four times faster than overall spending as companies shift to the cloud.

 

 

Nick Barcet, Cloud Solutions Product Manager at Canonical comments; “As the public cloud looks to take its place alongside the data centre as a standard IT resource, organisations are looking for the reassurance of support, which guarantees the same service levels as they expect from other IT implementations.”

Acer Iconia Tab W500 Review – Embrace Windows 7 OS And SocialJogger

By
Tekedia Editors
-
0

The Acer Iconia Tab W500 is bucking the current tablet trend by opting for an operating system other than Google´s Android. There have been many critics of Microsoft´s touch sensitive version of Windows, Windows 7, which they claim is still based on the old principles of mouse and keyboard interaction. While it has been claimed that some of the icons on Windows 7 are too small to be put to good use on such a device, Windows 7 has the benefit of being easy to use for the many people already familiar with Microsoft´s operating system. It also provides a lot of freedom and functionality than other operating systems that have been designed for tablet use.

 

Windows 7 is also a great asset on the Iconia Tab when you consider the additional docking port that is available for it. This is a feature quite unique to the Iconia Tab, in that it allows you to transform the tablet device into a more familiar laptop like device. With this you can be afforded with a physical keyboard and mouse as an alternative means of operating the tablet.

 

The Acer Iconia Tab W500 has some excellent hardware power behind it including a dual core processor, 2GB RAM and hardware acceleration for graphics. The Iconia Tab comes with Wi-Fi for web connection and 3G is available on some models. There are also two 1.3 megapixel cameras, one on the front for video calling and one on the back for traditional usage.

 

With a 10″ screen the Iconia Tab is in the larger range of tablet devices with a spacious screen that makes it ideal for video and web entertainment. Running on capacitive technology the Iconia Tab comes with support for multitouch input gestures as well.

 

Along with running Windows 7 the Iconia Tab comes with some of Acer´s software installed too. This includes Acer Ring, which provides a much more touch friendly means of loading applications, and SocialJogger, which can pool information from all of your social network accounts like Facebook and twitter.

 

The Acer Iconia Tab W500 is an excellent tablet device with a spacious screen making it ideal for all forms of visual entertainment and web browsing, and the device really stands out for its additional laptop docking port that can provide you with a means of interaction that is not available on other tablet devices. The physical keyboard available with the docking port should compensate for the claims made by some that they find some icons on the Windows 7 OS too small for proper finger use.

 

You can buy this phone from our UK partner Best Mobile Contracts

1...7,6477,6487,649...7,991Page 7,648 of 7,991

© Tekedia. All rights reserved.

Term & Privacy

© Tekedia. All rights reserved.

Term & Privacy