Amazon Cloud Player App Comes to iPhone, iPod Touch -- At Last

Amazon today released its long-awaited Cloud Player App for the iPhone and iPod touch. The free app allows users of iOS devices, including the iPad, to stream or download music stored online in their Amazon Cloud account.

After launching its cloud drive and music service in March 2011, Amazon has certainly taken its time before releasing a native app for iOS. In May of last year, Amazon made its Cloud Player compatible with the mobile version of Safari. But a native app, essential to making the music service appealing to iOS users, was missing until today.

Cloud Player also lets you manage and create playlists, and play music already stored on your mobile device.

Amazon customers get 5GB of free cloud storage and can buy additional space as well, including 20GB for $20/year or 50GB for $50/year. Users who buy a storage plan receive unlimited space for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no additional cost, but only for a limited time, the company said. Read More

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Intel says Android not ready for Dual Core

Operating system needs work

Chipzilla is claiming that not enough work is being done to adapt the Android operating system to work on dual core CPUs. Intel is currently having a crack at entering the market with its single-core Medfield Atom processors and running Android on multi-core chips might be a disadvantage.

Mike Bell, general manager of Intel’s mobile and communications group, said that in mobile power use was constrained and multi-core chews up a lot of juice. He told the Inquirer that if you did not have to worry about power, multiple cores would make a lot of sense. Namely, you can run the cores full out and heavily load them if the operating system has a good thread scheduler.

But when it comes to Android, things like thread scheduling and thread affinity are not there and when the operating system goes to do a single task, a lot of other stuff stops. Bell said that moving into multiple cores on Android means that Intel has to put a lot of investment into software to fix the scheduler and fix the threading so if we do multi-core products it actually takes advantage of it.

Its other problem is that more cores generate too much heat. At the moment with the multiple core implementations in the market, "it isn’t obvious to me you really get the advantage for the size and the cost of what’s going into that part", Bell said. Read More

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Zuckerberg's wealth down $4.5 billion as Facebook tumbles on NASDAQ

The drastic fall in the share price of Facebook has significantly eroded the personal wealth of its 28 year-old co-founder Mark Zuckerberg by a massive USD 4.5 billion in just three weeks.

Zuckerberg's fortune has declined to USD 11 billion from USD 15.5 billion on May 18 when the company went public as investors have dumped the stock amid concerns over growth prospects of the social networking giant, according to the data available with stock exchanges.

Within three weeks of making an entry into the secondary market, the stock value of the company has collapsed by about 29 per cent to USD 27.10 apiece on Friday from USD 38 on debut.

Zuckerberg's about 408 million shares were valued at USD 15.5 billion based on debut price of USD 38. However, on Friday's closing price of USD 27.10 apiece, his wealth has shrunk to USD 11 billion, a erosion of around USD 4.5 billion. Read More

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Oracle Cloud Makes Public Debut

The Oracle Cloud is an effort that Ellison's company has been working on for at least seven years under the guise of its Fusion application suite. At Oracle's OpenWorld event in 2011, the company first took the wraps off the Oracle Cloud with a preview of the platform. Oracle's cloud includes versions of all its software products including database, CRM and collaboration tools.

Oracle is also taking specific aim at rival Salesforce.com with a Social Relationship Management offering that is different than traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Ellison explained that the goal is to enable users of the platform to work with people before they are customers and to build relationships so that they will become customers.

Ellison onstage demonstrated the platform, which is fully integrated with social media management capabilities for Twitter and Facebook. Going a step further, the system can be used to analyze and understand what customers are saying in order to drive them to acquire more products. Read More

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Facebook rolling out App Center

(CNN) -- Make room, Apple, Google and Amazon. One more major Internet player now has an app store.

The Facebook App Center gives users a one-stop shop for Draw Something, Instagram, Pinterest and hundreds of other apps that run on the social-media mega-site.

In all, the center, which began rolling out Friday to users in the United States, will open with about 600 apps available. And, for the first time, Facebook will be offering paid apps as well as free ones from the center.

The center will be available on the Web and on Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems.

 Facebook: Is now the right time to buy? Facebook's history remains unwritten

According to Facebook, the center will offer personalized suggestions to users based on their interests and will only include "high-quality apps" based on feedback from people who use them.

When plans for the center were announced last month, Facebook said developers will now be given the option of charging a one-time fee for their apps.

"Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps," Facebook's Adam Brady wrote.

Many of the apps featured in the App Center are already available on Facebook (although the site expects new ones to spring up). But with the App Center, users will be able to browse for new ones instead of randomly discovering them. Read More

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How IT Can Reclaim Social Relevance

Social technologies are spreading through the business in a decentralized way, not via IT leadership. How can organizations and IT leaders make the most of this trend?

If there's anything that's striking about the changes taking place in technology today, it's that many of the most transformative new advances are bypassing the IT department entirely. One only has to look at the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon to see this clearly. Most IT departments are planning to enable (if they haven't already) BYOD, a form of user-led computing adoption. It's easier and easier to make the case today that technology, especially on the edges, is increasingly moving out of IT's hands.

It hasn't always been thus: Graphical user interfaces, computer networks, the Internet, e-mail, and the first and second generations of mobile devices. All of these were embraced and realized by technology leaders as primary computing capabilities in relatively short order. Read More

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The Second Coming Of Facebook

Facebook's eye-watering IPO has raised some awkward questions for the future of social networking. The record breaking $100 billion valuation was greeted with skepticism from some quarters, which will only have heightened in the wake of a less than stellar trading performance.

Investors and analysts are nervous. Facebook may have almost 900 million users, but the company only makes an average of $5 profit from each of them per year. Finding ways to increase that figure without alienating people is an urgent task.

Cynics might even suggest that Mark Zuckerberg and company are cashing in now precisely because future growth is uncertain, but let's not forget we're talking about a man on a publicly stated mission to change the world, for whom wealth seems to be only a secondary concern. Read More

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Bye Bye Facebook? Analyst Predicts Social Network to 'Disappear' in 5 to 8 Years

Facebook will become something of a has-been within five to eight years, according to one analyst. And while that assertion has raised a ruckus online this week, other industry analysts wouldn't be shocked if the prediction comes true.

"In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared," said Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital while appearing on CNBC's Squawk on the Street. "Yahoo is still making money. It's still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it. But it's 10% of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all intents and purposes, it's disappeared." Read More

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Tech Mahindra Q4 net rises three-fold

IT firm Tech Mahindra on Wednesday said its net profit has increased more than three-fold to Rs 302.5 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2012.

This is against Rs 92.1 crore in the same period last year, Tech Mahindra said in a statement.

Revenues during the reported quarter increased 12.5 per cent to Rs 1,419 crore from Rs 1,261.5 crore in the year-ago period. For the year ended March 31, 2012, the company's net profit grew 70 per cent to Rs 1,095.4 crore from Rs 644.1 crore.

Revenues in FY12 stood at Rs 5,489.7 crore, up 6.7 per cent from Rs 5,140.2 crore in 2010-11. Total headcount stood at 40,763 as of March 31, 2012, with software professional headcount at 24,833.

Number of BPO professionals stood at 14,792, while support staff was 1,138 at the end of March 2012. The cash and cash equivalent stood at Rs 402 crores as on balance sheet of March 31, 2012. Read More

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Facebook allows users to vote on privacy changes

Facebook is letting its nearly 1 billion users vote on changes to its privacy policy. The changes announced in May include new sections explaining how it uses people's information. 

The voting period started June 1 and runs through this week.

The changes reflect recently added features such as a new profile format called Timeline. The new policy also opens up the possibility for Facebook to start showing people ads on outside websites, targeting the pitches to interests and hobbies that users express on Facebook.

The company had announced the changes in May, a week before its initial public offering of stock. 

Facebook's highly anticipated IPO landed with a thud, closing just 23 cents above its $38 offering price on its first trading day. The stock has declined another 26 per cent in the two weeks since then.

This is the second time Facebook Inc is letting users vote on policy changes. The first time was in 2009 when Facebook was a much smaller, privately held company with fewer than 200 million users. Read More

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Money On The Margin

Do you want to own a profitable e-commerce business? Starting a full-fledged online retail store can be a daunting task involving investment in inventory, warehouse and logistics to procure and deliver products. 

How about an online business where all that you need to do is collect payments? Sounds too good to be true? Thanks to the drop-ship business model, it is a possibility.

Online businesses are flourishing in India. While existing e-commerce players are scaling up operations by adding products and services, new portals are successfully claiming a pie of the $10 billion Indian e-commerce market. The market still has the capacity to absorb many more players. Read More

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AppDynamics Intros Free .NET Performance Monitoring Solution

AppDynamics announces AppDynamics Lite for .NET, its new application performance management (APM) solution for .NET applications. The software is free.

The application performance management (APM) market continues to heat up as AppDynamics, a provider of APM software, announced the release of AppDynamics Lite for .NET.

AppDynamics officials called the new offering a production-ready performance monitoring tool for Microsoft’s .NET framework. The company expanded the scope of AppDynamics Lite, which has been available for the Java platform with more than 70,000 users.

AppDynamics Lite for .NET is free. The .NET monitoring product enables IT staffs to quickly troubleshoot and diagnose performance problems in production. AppDynamics Lite installs in less than 90 seconds, identifies and monitors an application's business transactions, and gives insight into common application issues such as slow SQL, stalls, errors and slow response time, the company said. The software comes with code-level diagnostics as well as trending and alerting capabilities. Read More

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Windows 8, Windows Store Need Tweaking to Change PC Users' Expectations

Microsoft released its Windows 8 Release Preview May 31, a follow-up to the Consumer Preview of the new operating system that it released in February. Included in the new Release is an early look at Windows Store, Microsoft’s answer to the App Store—in as much as Windows 8, with its Metro aesthetic, is an answer to Apple’s success and the halo effects that have endeared many a PC user to the iPhone, iPad and even Mac.

Microsoft has a tremendous amount riding on its new platform, which is widely expected to ship this fall. Global purchases of PCs have been put on hold, as buyers wait and see, and the tablet market is expected to shift with the introduction of a new, major player, as a considerable portion of enterprise customers, more comfortable with Microsoft than with Apple, finally embrace the tablet form factor.

The Release Preview store offers an app catalog for users in 26 markets, up from five during the Consumer Preview, as well as 33 new developer submission locales and more on the way. Read More

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Microsoft Sets Do Not Track as Default in Internet Explorer 10

Microsoft, as it has done with the current version of its Internet Explorer Web browser, is enabling support of the Do Not Track effort with its next-generation IE 10.

However, unlike what Microsoft did with IE 9 and other browser vendors have done, Microsoft is making the Do Not Track capability the default setting, generating praise from some consumer privacy advocates but drawing the ire of advertisers.

Do Not Track is one of several initiatives under way to protect the of online users, who are increasingly wary of the amount of personal data that is being collected by the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple and what those companies are doing with the information. With Do Not Track, users can essentially decide against being racked by third-party advertisers who hope to use the information gleaned from users’ online habits for more targeted advertising. Read More

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SBI, RBI and Google among top job destinations for young jobseekers

MUMBAI: Indian students are veering towards public sector jobs and domestic firms to find a cushion against an uncertain economy, which clocked its lowest quarterly growth rate in nine years at 5.3%.

This trend, visible globally as well, reflects on how youngsters are looking at job security as one of the most important parameters while choosing their future employers.

While the Reserve Bank of India ( RBI) and State Bank of India ( SBI) emerged as the most preferred employer for under-graduate business students in the country, engineering and MBA students chose technology giant-Google as their ideal employer in a survey conducted among 8,356 students across Indian colleges by Universum, a global consulting firm that helps companies improve their attractiveness to prospective jobseekers. Read More

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US job growth plunges again, Fed most likely to go for QE3

WASHINGTON: U.S. job growth braked sharply for a third straight month in May and the unemployment rate rose for the first time in nearly a year, raising chances of further monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve to support the sputtering recovery. 

Employers added a paltry 69,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the least since May of last year, and 49,000 fewer jobs were created in the previous two months than had been thought, the Labor Department said on Friday. 

The report is troubling for President Barack Obama, whose prospects of winning re-election in November could hinge on the economy's health. Republican opponent Mitt Romney called the report "a harsh indictment" of Obama's policies. 

The jobless rate rose to 8.2 percent in May from 8.1 percent in April, although the increase reflected more people entering the labor force to look for work, a possible sign of growing confidence.  Read More

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