Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday January 29 2008

Mobile network O2 has overhauled the cost of using Apple’s iPhone handset just two months after it went on sale in the UK.

The mobile network today announced that iPhone owners who are currently paying its lower-rate tariffs of £35 and £45 per month would get a substantially improved package, and simultaneously introduced an expensive “super-tier” contract costing £75 per month.

The new deal will give up to three times as many free calls and text messages for the same price, with £35 tariff customers – who form the bulk of the user base – receiving 600 free minutes per month instead of 200. The company also said it was phasing out its existing £55 per month deal, moving customers to the equivalent £45 per month contract instead.

The high-end tariff, costing £75, will give users 3,000 minutes and 500 texts. The £269 cost of the iPhone itself remains unchanged, and the length of all new contracts will remain at 18 months, said the company. It also confirmed that the iPhone’s free access to wireless internet provided by Cloud will stay in place.

Whiirl of publicity

O2 has exclusive British rights to carry the iPhone, which launched last year in a whirl of publicity. The new tariffs bring the costs of using Apple’s handset into line with many of O2’s other deals, but some critics will undoubtedly be concerned that the new offers are being launched as a remedy for poor sales - particularly in light of press reports that the handset has not met O2’s sales targets.

Apple has yet to release UK sales figures, although chief executive Steve Jobs said earlier this month that 4 million iPhones had been shipped worldwide since the gadget first went on sale in the US last summer.

In a statement, O2 said that it was happy with the performance of the iPhone and existing customers would be pleased with the changes.

“The iPhone is already our fastest-ever selling device and this added value will allow us to appeal to an even greater segment of the market - it is an unbeatable proposition,” said UK marketing director Sally Cowdry.

However, the Financial Times has quoted sources suggesting that the handset had sold 190,000 units in the run-up to Christmas, falling narrowly short of O2’s public expectations of 200,000 in the first eight weeks.

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Skyfire’s free mobile browser is meant to support everything a PC browser can, including Flash, QuickTime, JavaScript, and AJAX

By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service January 28, 2008

A growing set of developers is setting to work making Web browsing on a phone match the experience on a PC.

Skyfire, a startup in Mountain View, Calif., joined the fray on Monday when it unveiled a free browser intended to support everything a PC browser can. That includes Flash video, QuickTime, JavaScript, AJAX, and more, though not everything may be there right now, according to Nitin Bhandari, Skyfire’s CEO. The browser is now in a private beta test for U.S. users only. The software was demonstrated at the Demo conference in Palm Desert, Calif.

Apple’s iPhone changed the mobile browsing world last year when it drew a huge following with its Safari browser. Unlike most browsers for phones, it lets users view a full, standard Web page all at once and zoom in to make up for the small size of the screen, though it doesn’t support Flash video and some other standard Web features.

Meanwhile, more opportunities have opened up for third parties to get any sort of application onto a consumer’s mobile phone. Parts of Google’s Android development environment are already available to developers, and Apple is preparing a software development kit for the iPhone. Both Verizon and Sprint Nextel, two of the biggest U.S. operators, have outlined plans to allow any device and any application on mobile networks.

“The iPhone has pretty much settled the debate. People want a rich, full Web experience,” Skyfire’s Bhandari said. “There’s a lot of consciousness that that’s the bottom now, and everything now has to be there or above it.”

Since the phone’s June debut, Mozilla has started developing a mobile version of Firefox, which looks somewhat like mobile Safari in screenshots on Mozilla’s wiki. However, Mozilla has been vague about when that software will come out. Norwegian browser vendor Opera has its own mobile browser, Opera Mini.

Skyfire’s product will be set apart from Opera Mini and others by supporting the full browsing experience, Bhandari said. It does so by relieving the phone from some of the heavy lifting of presenting a Web page. In fact, a server transcodes every page into an efficient protocol that Skyfire has developed over the past 18 months, he said. The additional exchange of packets between phone and server to make that possible isn’t a problem, because the server can carry out tasks much faster than a phone, according to Bhandari.

“The delay added by the server is actually such a small percentage of the time we’re actually saving … that it’s actually a huge benefit in the end-user experience,” Bhandari said. Skyfire operates the servers in its own datacenter.

Skyfire can deliver full versions of popular Web sites, such as YouTube and ESPN, as demonstrated in a YouTube video. The zooming function, the critical tool for viewing full-size Web pages on a small screen, is different from the iPhone’s “pinch” and “unpinch” gestures. A gray box appears over part of the Web page, and users can size that box to cover the area of the page they want to see full-screen, then tap on it to zoom in, Bhandari said. The browser also features a search bar and a tab with featured links in categories including news, sports, and video.

The browser is available only for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 today, but a version for Symbian, as well as an international beta test, are coming later, Bhandari said. Skyfire might also develop versions for Android and for the iPhone once Apple’s SDK becomes available, he said. It is talking with handset makers and mobile operators about having the browser built into phones, but also sees search and advertising as possible revenue sources.

In addition to invited testers, a limited number of public users will be allowed to participate in the beta. They can sign up at Skyfire’s Web site.

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Plenty of change lies ahead in the area of offshore outsourcing, which has evolved from a little-used practice to a mature industry in less than 10 years. Here are five predictions for offshore outsourcing in 2008:

1) Businesses that use offshore outsourcing will devote more time and effort to ensuring the success of such projects. Occasional problems with bad software code, miscommunications, and high staff turnover haven’t been enough to turn companies away en masse from offshore outsourcing — many are too hooked on the personnel cost savings — but they’ve been enough to demand greater oversight on offshore deals. This also will have some companies working in closer partnership with their offshore providers.

2) More offshore work will go to Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, and other low-cost locations as India struggles to deal with its tightening IT talent pool. Service providers in India say they’re working hard on the problem, going as far as to retrain science graduates to become technologists and scouring the rural regions of India for talent. But these measures smack of desperation, and India’s talent problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

3) India IT salaries will continue their annual double-digit increases, rising perhaps even higher than the 15% range suggested by Indian service providers, but not so much that U.S. companies won’t continue to be attracted by the cost savings/skill level combo offered by Indian technologists.

4) India will decline as a location for telephone call center jobs for U.S.-based companies. People are impatient by nature, and even more so when on the phone with a customer service rep talking about a bill they owe or a problematic product they’ve purchased. Add even a slight language barrier, and you’ve got customers demanding to speak to managers and e-mailing complaints. Meanwhile, turnover rates for call center reps serving customers during U.S. daylight hours are high in India, since they’re night-time jobs there. Even high-level execs at India offshore firms have admitted to me that call center work is an increasingly unattractive business. Look for U.S. companies to bulk up call center staffs in rural, low-cost areas of the U.S. where labor is cheap, and in Canada, for their English-speaking customers.

5) If the economy tanks in the next year, offshore outsourcing will suddenly become a much more interesting topic on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. The U.S. unemployment rate for IT is still very healthy right now, about 2%, and most Web-based development skills are in high demand. But if a recession hits, layoffs may follow, and presidential candidates will be forced to be more definitive on the topic than they’ve been to date.

Read full article Posted by Mary Hayes Weier, Jan 1, 2008 11:25 AM

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By Aoife White Associated Press BRUSSELS — IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union’s group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany’s data-protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the E.U. group, which is preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others comply with E.U. privacy law.

Scharr told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address, “then it has to be regarded as personal data.”

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is. That is true but does not take into consideration that many people regularly use the same computer and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

These exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of “whois” Internet sites, which allow users to type in an IP address and will then generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.

Google was the first last year to cut the time it stored search information to 18 months. It also reduced the time limit on the cookies that collect information on how people use the Internet from a default of 30 years to an automatic expiration in two years.

A privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center said it was “absurd” for Google to claim that stripping out the last two figures from the stored IP address made the address impossible to identify by making it one of 256 possible configurations.

“It’s one of the things that make computer people giggle,” the center’s executive director, Marc Rotenberg, said. “The more the companies know about you, the more commercial value is obtained.”

Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, said Google collects IP addresses to give customers a more accurate service because it knows what part of the world a search result comes from and what language is used — and that was not enough to identify an individual user.

“If someone taps in ‘football,’ you get different results in London than in New York,” he said.

The way Google stores IP addresses meant that one address forms part of a crowd, giving valuable information on general trends without infringing on an individual’s privacy, he said.

Google says it needs to store search queries and gather information on online activity to improve its search results and to provide advertisers with correct billing information that shows that genuine users are clicking on online ads.

Internet “click fraud” can be tracked by showing that the same IP address is jumping repeatedly to the same ad. Advertisers pay for each time a different person views the ad, so dozens of views by the same person can rack up costs without giving the company the publicity it wanted.

Microsoft does not record the IP address that identifies an individual computer when it logs search terms. Its Internet strategy relies on users logging into the Passport network that is linked to its popular Hotmail and Messenger services.

The company’s European Internet policy director, Thomas Myrup Kristensen, described the move as part of Microsoft’s commitment to privacy. “In terms of the impact on user privacy, complete and irreversible anonymity is the most important point here — more impactful than whether the data is retained for 13 versus 18 versus 24 months,” he said.

Neither of the search engines received a pat on the back from Spain’s data protection regulator, Artemi Rallo Lombarte, who criticized them for not trying to make their privacy policies accessible to normal people.

Their privacy policies “could very well be considered virtual or fictional . . . because search engines do not sufficiently emphasize their own privacy policies on their home pages, nor are they accessible to users,” he said, describing the policies as “complex and unintelligible to users.”

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The company is marketing to IT-challenged small businesses that want computers capable of terabyte storage and improved graphics capabilities.

By Antone Gonsalves January 8, 2008 02:40 PM

Apple on Tuesday introduced a more powerful Xserve aimed at organizations with limited IT support, such as small businesses or departments in larger companies.

In addition, the company launched a Mac Pro with twice the performance of the previous version of the workstation for creative professionals and research organizations. Apple unveiled the new products a week before the Macworld conference opens in San Francisco.

Both new products are under $3,000 and come standard with two Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Xeon quad-core chips, codenamed Harpertown, which were released only last month. Last year, the same custom design would have cost $4,000.

“One of the advantages in using Harpertown is that it packs a lot more performance per watt in the same thermal envelope,” Tom Boger, senior director of desktop, servers and storage product marketing at Apple, told InformationWeek. “Just by itself, the Harpertown processor raw is a 60% improvement over the previous configuration [Cloverton].”

Apple designed the hardware and software in the new products to take advantage of Harpertown’s low-power capabilities, Boger said. The new machines can show as much as a 2x performance boost with some third-party applications. In addition, Apple is offering in both machines terabyte hard-drive capabilities for the first time.

With the new Xserve, Apple is also drawing attention to the Mac OS X Leopard Server operating system as a strong competitor to other products aimed at organizations without large IT staffs. The 1U rack server can operate in a mixed environment of Macs and Windows clients, and is powered by two Xeon 5400 series processors running up to 3.0GHz. The chips are Intel’s latest 45 nanometer manufactured processors, which top previous products in power and energy consumption.

The new Xserve includes up to 3 Tbytes of internal storage and two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots that provide up to four times the input/output bandwidth of the previous model to support 4 Gbit Fibre channel and 10 Gbit Ethernet cards.

Apple has added accelerated graphics to the new Xserve to support several Apple Cinema Displays at once. The new product also includes two FireWire 800 and three USB 2.0 ports, and comes with a license for unlimited client seats. The starting price is $2,999.

The latest server draws attention to Leopard’s capabilities as an OS for small businesses and other organizations that can’t afford large IT staffs, industry analysts with Technology Business Research said in an e-mailed commentary.

“TBR believes this package is a strong offering wherever IT services are limited,” the market research firm said. “Apple will use the value proposition of easy-to-use comprehensive services to broaden its market to small businesses and departments, where Xserve is an ideal first server.”

Included with Leopard Server are mail hosting, Web hosting, file sharing, client management, network management and security, VPN, chat, search, and directory services, TBR said.

With the new Mac Pro workstation, Apple is offering its fastest Mac through the use of two Xeon 5400 series processors running up to 3.2GHz. The machine comes standard with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256 Mbytes of video memory.

The machine includes a PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers twice the bandwidth as previous generations, and can be upgraded with Nvidia graphics cards, such as the GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, and the Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of memory.

The system can carry up to four 1Tbyte Serial ATA hard drives, and includes nine ports for external devices, including five USB 2.0s, two FireWire 400s and two FireWire 800s. The Mac Pro also supports SAS drives, which run at a higher rate than SATA drives and provide RAID 0, 1 and 5 storage protection.

Pricing for the new desktop machine starts at $2,799.

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What is business process outsourcing (BPO)? BPO is the process of hiring another company to handle business activities for you. BPO is distinct from information technology (IT) outsourcing, which focuses on hiring a third-party company or service provider to do IT-related activities, such as application management and application development, data center operations, or testing and quality assurance. 

In the early days, BPO usually consisted of outsourcing processes such as payroll. Then it grew to include employee benefits management. Now it encompasses a number of functions that are considered “non-core” to the primary business strategy. Now it is common for organizations to outsource financial and administration (F&A) processes, human resources (HR) functions, call center and customer service activities and accounting and payroll. 

These outsourcing deals frequently involve multi-year contracts that can run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Often, the people performing the work internally for the client firm are transferred and become employees for the service provider.

Dominant outsourcing service providers in the BPO fields (some of which also dominate the IT outsourcing business) include US companies IBM, Accenture, and Hewitt Associates, as well as European and Asian companies Capgemini, Genpact, TCS, Wipro and Infosys.  Many of these BPO efforts involve offshoring — hiring a company based in another country — to do the work. India is a popular location for BPO activities.  Frequently, BPO is also referred to as ITES — information technology-enabled services. Since most business processes include some form of automation, IT “enables” these services to be performed.  An offshoot of BPO is KPO — knowledge process outsourcing. Considered by some to be a subset of BPO, KPO includes those activities that require greater skill, knowledge, education and expertise to handle. For example, whereas an insurance company might outsource data entry of its claims forms as part of a BPO initiative, it may also choose to use a KPO service provider to evaluate new insurance applications based on a set of criteria or business rules; this work would require the efforts of a more knowledgeable set of workers than the data entry would.

The current definition of KPO encompasses R&D, product development and legal e-discovery, as well as a number of other business functions.  Also coming into use is the term BTO — business transformation outsourcing. This refers to the idea of having service providers contribute to the effort of transforming a business into a leaner, more dynamic, agile and flexible operation. 

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Source: http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/what_is_bpo.asp