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Didn’t get a chance to back the ambitious OUYA Android game console to lock in your pre-order? Considering how much press the thing has gotten, you don’t have much excuse for missing that particular window, but never fear — OUYA intends to sell the $99 pint-sized gaming gadget through retail partners like Amazon, Gamestop, and Best Buy starting on June 4.

The folks at Engadget obtained the full press release, which goes on to note that Android gamers in the U.K. and Canada would be able to pick up an OUYA that same day. Of course by then most (if not all) of the people who shelled out money when the project was in its early stages will have already received their devices. The Verge points out that OUYA began passing shipping notifications to its users earlier today.

While the hardware inches ever closer to its mass-market release, there’s still a question of content to contend with. OUYA hasn’t provided much insight on how many game submissions it’s received since it began accepting them a few weeks back, though quite a few developers have already thrown their weight behind the little console that could.

Of course, there’s a tendency for some gamers to cling to proven hits from years gone by, which is why it comes as no surprise to see some developers taking up the task of making the OUYA a first-rate emulation device. It was revealed earlier this week that NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 emulators would be available in OUYA’s storefront at launch. And emulator developer Robert Broglia confirmed yesterday that he plans to bring his existing Android emulators for consoles like the TurboGrafx-16 and Sega Saturn (!) to the OUYA before too long.

The OUYA’s journey from kooky idea to full-fledged product has been a long one, and it’s not over yet. Getting the device onto store shelves is certainly a milestone for the young company, but the true test lays in how run-of-the-mill consumers will react to it. Granted, its price point may give it a leg up on more prominent rivals like the Xbox 360, Wii U, or PlayStation 3, but we’ll soon see if the gamers of the world wind up warming to it.

Apple (AAPL) has continued to move away from its dependence on Samsung’s manufactured components in new products. David Hsieh of NPD Group’s DisplaySearch said on Thursday that the company will rely on Taiwanese firm Innolux and China’s Century Display for touch panels in its next-generation iPad mini, the Taipei Times reported. Innolux revealed earlier this week that it plans to ship its first touch panels for smartphones and tablets with its touch-on-display technology by the end of this year. Digitimes also reported that Apple will move away from Samsung (005930) and instead rely on components from LG Display (LPL), Sharp (SHCAY), Japan Display and AU Optronics (AUO) for the iPad mini.

Ropes & Gray, the global law firm, represented TPG Growth and Michael Xin Hui in their effort to take private ShangPharma, a China-based contract research organization. Hui is ShangPharma’s CEO. The deal closed on Wednesday.

PRESS RELEASE:

Ropes & Gray represented the buyer group consortium of TPG Growth and ShangPharma’s CEO, Michael Xin Hui, ShangPharma’s going private transaction, which closed March 27.

ShangPharma is a leading, China-based contract research organization.

The transaction is just the second private equity sponsor-backed going-private transaction of a China-based, NYSE or NASDAQ listed company to sign and close since the beginning of 2012.

The Ropes & Gray team advising the buyer group and TPG is led by Asia-based partners Scott Jalowayski and Paul Boltz.

The post In ShangPharma’s Going-Private Transaction, Ropes & Gray Represented Buyer Consortium appeared first on peHUB.

Samsung, which is making a strong case for having the top phone for 2013 with the Samsung Galaxy S 4 even though the year is still young, is preparing to ramp up the sales channel just a bit more with the help of Best Buy. According to reports, several Best Buy locations throughout the country have been instructed to make some modifications to their sales floor so they can fit in a new Samsung “store” within a store. Coincidentally or not, this is a similar concept to what Apple and Best Buy already do for the Apple sales channel.

If you have been to a Best Buy with an Apple “store” you should be familiar with the concept. For the Apple stores, Best Buy carves out an area that is unique for Apple products only. The shelving, signage and other accoutrements are different from the rest of the Best Buy store and closely mimic what you would find in a standalone Apple store. There is more space for potential buyers to look at product and the sales associates have some special training to help recreate a dedicated Apple store experience.

Samsung is employing a similar strategy for the mobile device area with a section that is visually separated from the rest of the Best Buy store and provides demonstration space just for Samsung products. Samsung is also working on a specific training course for Best Buy sales associates assigned to the Samsung “store” so they can better show off some of Samsung’s unique features and capabilities.

The new Samsung Stores are scheduled to start opening next month, just in time for the shelves to be packed full of Galaxy S 4 devices and accessories. If the early interest in the Galaxy S 4 is any indication, this should be a boon to Best buy as well. Although struggling in the retail market, mobile phone and tablet sales have been a bright spot and Best Buy continues to be more aggressive in the mobile device market.

source: Geek.com

Come comment on this article: Samsung Stores find their way into Best Buy, just in time for Samsung Galaxy S 4 launch

TriNovus, a Birmingham, Ala.-based software-as-a-service company focused on compliance issues, has been acquired by banking software systems company Temenos. Founders Investment Banking, an M&A advisory firm based in Birmingham, acted as the exclusive adviser to TriNovus’ shareholders.

PRESS RELEASE:

Founders Investment Banking is pleased to announce that TriNovus LLC has been acquired by Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the leading provider of banking software to the financial services industry with clients in over 125 countries.

Headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., TriNovus is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology provider guided by David Brasfield, a proven FinTech operator with more than 25 years of industry experience. TriNovus has developed deep relationships with its more than 800 community bank and credit union clients through unmatched customer service, innovative software solutions and a reputation as the authority in U.S. banking compliance. The combination of Temenos’ best of breed core banking solutions, strong executive leadership and cutting edge technology with TriNovus’ keen understanding of the U.S. banking environment, SaaS delivery and national customer base bolsters Temenos’ position in the U.S. marketplace, while enhancing its overall product offering to the broader financial services industry.

“Temenos has a long and proud history of helping to rid the industry of legacy systems, giving financial institutions the tools to dramatically improve customer service, risk management, innovation and efficiency,” said David Arnott, Temenos CEO. “We have been working with customers in the US since 1997 and have developed the right set of products, now enhanced and available on a SaaS basis with a much enlarged supporting team, to allow U.S. financial institutions to leapfrog their peers and capitalize on the transformation taking place in the market. I am delighted to welcome David Brasfield and his team to Temenos and look forward to working together.”

The Principals of Founders Investment Banking acted as the exclusive advisor to TriNovus’ shareholders and worked in a registered capacity with M&A Securities Group, Inc. to advise on structuring the transaction.

“The fit between TriNovus and Temenos is extraordinary,” said Zane Tarence, managing director of Founders’ Technology Practice. “David is one of the best SaaS entrepreneurs that I have had the privilege to work with, and I commend him and his team for the incredible business they have built in such a short period of time. TriNovus will bring substantial value to Temenos’ service offering and geographic distribution. Temenos will contribute its best of breed technology to TriNovus, which is backed by an unyielding commitment to R&D. We are excited to see this combined entity become one of the premier FinTech companies here in North America.”

“We are delighted to be joining forces with Temenos,” said David Brasfield, TriNovus President & CEO. “The combination has huge advantages for our customers, who will have access to a broad portfolio of modern, cutting-edge and market-leading solutions and who will benefit from Temenos’ commitment to industry-leading levels of R&D. What is more, the combination brings to the US market for the first time a credible and technologically advanced alternative to the large incumbent vendors. I am greatly looking forward to working with Temenos to shake up the US market and to realizing the significant market opportunity that exists.”

About TriNovus LLC
TriNovus, founded in 2009, is a Birmingham, Alabama-based company focused primarily on the provision of SaaS compliance solutions and core processing to financial institutions. In addition, the company also provides technology addressing social media monitoring, stress testing, vendor management, distressed assets, fraud, security and more. For more information, please visit www.trinovus.com.

About Temenos Group AG
Founded in 1993 and listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX: TEMN), Temenos Group AG is the market-leading provider of banking software systems to retail, corporate, universal, private, Islamic, microfinance and community banks, wealth managers, and other financial institutions. Headquartered in Geneva with more than 55 offices worldwide, Temenos software is proven in over 1,500 customer deployments in more than 125 countries across the world. Temenos’ products provide advanced technology and rich functionality, incorporating best practice processes that leverage Temenos’ expertise around the globe. Temenos customers are proven to be more profitable than their peers: in the period 2008-2010, Temenos customers enjoyed on average a 30% higher return on assets, a 46% higher return on capital and an 8.5 percentage point lower cost/income ratio than banks running legacy applications. For more information please visit www.temenos.com.

About Founders Investment Banking, LLC
Founders Investment Banking is a merger and acquisition advisory firm based in Birmingham, Alabama. Its team’s proven expertise and process-based solutions help companies and business owners access capital and prepare for and execute liquidity events to achieve specific financial goals. The firm’s practice areas include a Technology Practice that serves clients operating nationwide in the software-as-a-service (Saas), Internet, and Digital Media sectors; a General Transaction Practice, which serves clients from a variety of industries located in the Deep South; and an Oil and Gas Services Practice focused on the U.S. oilfield services sector. In order to assist Founders Investment Banking with securities related transactions, including this transaction, certain Principals are registered investment banking agents of M&A Securities Group, Inc., member FINRA/SiPC. M&A Securities Group and Founders are not affiliated entities. The testimonial presented herein does not guarantee future performance or success. For more information, visit www.foundersib.com.

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Nigel Browning, a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has been elected a Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America.

The “Fellow” designation distinguishes senior MSA members who have made significant contributions to the advancement of the science. Browning was recognized for advancements in electron microscopy, a type of microscopy that allows scientists to see structures on the molecular level.

A scientific leader in the field, Browning has led a large-body of ground-breaking research since the early 1990s. In 2008, with colleagues from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Browning received an R&D 100 award for developing dynamic transmission electron microscopy, or DTEM. This technology can focus on objects as small as a few nanometers and catch a moment in time to reveal what happens over about 15 billionths of a second. This high resolution in both time and space allows researchers to take snapshots of what happens during chemical reactions.

Browning joined PNNL in 2011 with a goal of making DTEM work at normal pressures and temperatures. Currently, it requires samples to be in a vacuum. In addition, he is exploring how to use DTEM to control how nanoparticles form and grow – a method that could lead to new and improved materials for use in energy applications.

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Browning earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom in 1988 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1992.

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The Microscopy Society of America (MSA), founded in 1942, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion and advancement of the knowledge of the science and practice of all microscopic imaging, analysis and diffraction techniques useful for elucidating the ultrastructure and function of materials in diverse areas of biological, materials, medical and physical sciences. Further information can be obtained by visiting www.microscopy.org or by calling 1-800-538-3672.

The number of threats on the smartphone market has increased significantly lately, especially on Google’s Android OS, which is currently the leading mobile platform out there, and thus the main target for malware, adware and other forms of attacks.

Coming from IObit Mobile Security, Advanced Mobile Care offers … (read more)

T-Mobile is taking seriously its commitment to separating the phone from the service plan. It turns out that starting April 12, you can walk out of a T-Mo store with an unlocked iPhone 5 in your hands and never deal with T-Mobile again – but you’ll have to pay the full MSRP of $650, not the carrier’s discounted price of $580.

As we reported earlier this week, T-Mobile is upending the traditional subsidy-and-contract model, selling you a device at full price but without a contract and without the device fees hidden in most carrier’s monthly rate plans. The result is a more expensive phone, but much cheaper monthly service rates, which ultimately save customers money in the long run.

What’s more, T-Mobile is sweetening the pot further by offering substantial discounts on the full cost of its phones. For instance, an unlocked sans-contract iPhone normally retails from Apple or other distributors for $650. T-Mobile is selling it for $580 either up front or through financing plan, making it a relative bargain. The catch is you have to sign up for one of T-Mobile’s new Simple Choice plans to gain the discount.

But signing up for a plan isn’t that much of a commitment. Remember, T-Mobile has gone contract-free. You can sign up for a single month of service and face no further commitment. If you use T-Mobile’s installment plan, your phone will be locked to the operator’s network, but as soon as you finish paying off your device (which you can do at any time) T-Mo will unlock the device.

T-Mobile, like any wholesale buyer, isn’t paying full price for the iPhone from Apple so it’s passing some of its savings along to the customer – as my colleague Kevin Tofel points out, it will likely do this for other popular devices like the Galaxy S 4. But T-Mobile also doesn’t want to be taken for a patsy. It’s not going to sell discounted phones, which buyers just take immediately to another carrier. It wants to get some modicum of service commitment – even if it’s a mere month – in exchange for that discount.

What’s interesting, though, is that T-Mobile is still selling a commitment-free iPhone for full price even if it doesn’t stand to gain from the transaction as a service provider. T-Mobile is essentially becoming a phone retailer as well as carrier, and I think that has significant implications for the industry.

Why an open device ecosystem is a good thing

If you can just walk into any store, buy a phone and pick your carrier later, then we get a model like that which has developed in Europe, where phone purchases and service plans are independent transactions. That could lead to a whole new retail marketplace in the U.S. where sellers can discount or bundle features with unlocked phones based on other factors besides contracts.

For instance, Samsung, HTC and Nokia could build legitimate businesses in the U.S. around selling phones directly to consumers at lower prices since there’s no carrier middleman to deal with. BlackBerry could sell unlocked phones directly to businesses packaging them with its enterprise email services. BestBuy might give you a deal on a device if you sign up for Geek Squad protection. And of course, the already growing mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) community could get a big boost if there were greater phone portability.

Of course, there are some pretty big obstacles to this kind of model in the U.S. The biggest one is the fragmentation of airwaves and technologies that acts as a de facto lock for most devices to specific carrier networks. Even if you got an unlocked iPhone from T-Mobile, there are only a few other places you can take it, namely AT&T, a few regional GSM operators and a handful of MVNOs like Straight Talk.

Building that independent device market is going to be difficult and it will take a lot of consumer education. Retailers will have to explain carefully which carriers will be supported on specific devices. Luckily device technology is improving. Dual-mode GSM-CDMA devices are becoming more common and vendors are starting to pack more bands into a single device.

Everyone stands to benefit from an open device ecosystem – consumers, handset makers and, according to T-Mobile, carriers — so every step we take in that direction, no matter how small, is good one.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Arcady

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Google has posted a new Hangout discussing how to upgrade to and use its new Enhanced Campaigns features in AdWords:

If you’re really serious about learning about Enhanced Campaigns, you should probably watch this webinar too.

Source Refrigeration & HVAC, an Anaheim, Calif.-based provider of commercial refrigeration and HVAC services in North America and a portfolio company of the private equity firm Arsenal Capital Partners, has acquired Fournier Air Conditioning and Refrigeration, based in Jacksonville, Fla. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

PRESS RELEASE:

Source Refrigeration & HVAC (Source), a portfolio company of Arsenal Capital Partners (Arsenal), today announced the acquisition of Fournier Air Conditioning and Refrigeration – Florida (Fournier).

Based in Jacksonville, Florida, Fournier is a leading provider of Refrigeration and HVAC service solutions to grocery, commercial, industrial, and retail clients throughout Florida and South Carolina. The acquisition builds on Source’s strong platform as the leading independent provider of commercial refrigeration and HVAC services in North America, serving the nation’s top supermarket chains, many of the largest convenience store chains, and leading telecom and industrial companies.

“We are excited to add Fournier’s service and installation offering and strong customer relationships to our growing platform, and welcome their employees and customers to the Source family,” said Bruce Buchholz, President and Chief Executive Officer of Source. “Expansion in the southeastern United States continues to be a critical element of our national expansion strategy,” added Buchholz. “Fournier enjoys strong, long-standing relationships with the leading grocery retailers in their markets and we look forward to continuing to serve them with expanded capabilities. This acquisition, along with our existing Source operations in Alabama, Florida and Georgia, position us well for continued growth and penetration throughout the southeast.”

Neil Lansing, President of Fournier, commented that “Source’s commitments to employee training, advanced information technologies and delivering high-quality customer solutions fit very well with Fournier’s approach to the market”. Lansing added that “the Fournier team is excited to join forces with a national market leader like Source who has the resources, focus and offerings to grow the business and take customer service to the next level.”

Sal Gagliardo, an Operating Partner at Arsenal Capital Partners said, “Fournier is well-established in the Florida and South Carolina core markets for mission critical refrigeration and HVAC services and provides Source with complementary capabilities and expanded market coverage in the southeast. The recent acquisition of TP Electrical and now Fournier demonstrates our commitment to expand Source into the leading service provider in the southeast and to better serve our valuable national and local customer base. We will continue to review opportunities for further expansion of Source’s national presence and service offering.”

About Fournier Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Fournier is a leading provider of refrigeration and HVAC solutions to grocery, commercial, industrial, and retail clients across the Southeastern United States. Fournier offers a complete suite of services including maintenance programs, emergency repairs, new installations and remodels of mission-critical refrigeration and HVAC systems. Their growth and leading market-share position are attributed to their reputation for outstanding quality and reliability. For additional information about Fournier Air Conditioning and Refrigeration, please visit www.fournierair.com.

About Source Refrigeration & HVAC

Source Refrigeration & HVAC is the leading independent provider of commercial refrigeration and HVAC services in North America, serving the nation’s top supermarket chains, many of the largest convenience store chains and leading telecom and industrial companies. With over 1100 employees and service locations nationally, Source designs, installs, services, maintains and optimizes mission-critical refrigeration & HVAC systems. For additional information about Source Refrigeration & HVAC, please visit www.sourcerefrigeration.com.

About Arsenal Capital Partners

Arsenal Capital Partners is a leading New York-based private equity firm that invests in middle-market specialty industrial and healthcare companies. Arsenal makes investments in sectors where the firm has prior knowledge and experience, and targets businesses that have the potential for further value creation by working closely with management to accelerate growth and leverage the firm’s operational improvement capabilities. Arsenal currently has over $1.6 billion of committed equity capital. For additional information on Arsenal Capital Partners, please visit www.arsenalcapital.com.

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/03/27/4727564/source-refrigeration-hvac-acquires.html#storylink=cpy

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If you’re like me, then you probably love to text on your Android smartphone, but may have one major complaint when it comes to texting on our Android smartphones: receiving those coveted picture messages. Sure you may get the MMS notification, but when you try and check for the message, you are likely stuck with either having to physically force the picture message to download or worse— forcing the download only to not see the photo appear. Well cry no more friends as we will be giving you a simple and brief guide on how to relieve yourself of the pesky inconsistency when it comes to receiving those coveted attachments within an MMS message. Oh and believe us— you’ll be glad you did once you hit the break.

Requirements

• Stock Messaging app or third-party alternative (such as Handcent or GoSMS)
• A minute or so of your time

 

Enabling the MMS messages

• Open the messaging client of your choice
• Enter the Settings option (Stock Messaging/GoSMS apps: Menu –> Settings | Handcent: Menus –> Settings –> Retrieve Message Settings |
• Simply check the Auto retrieve button

Stock messaging app

Handcent

GoSMS Pro

Now once completed, your phone should automatically retrieve the MMS content as soon as you receive the new message notification, so you should be good to go moving forward and shouldn’t have to deal with the inability to receive those coveted MMS messages and all.

 

 

Come comment on this article: How to automatically receive MMS picture messages

Brad Feld, cofounder of the Boulder-based venture capital firm Foundry Group, has joined the board of Harmonix Music Systems, a video game development company in Cambridge, Mass.

From Foundry Group’s blog:

We are pleased to announce that Brad will be joining the board of Harmonix. The company, best known for developing three massive game franchises – Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central – is hard at work on a new generation of games that transform the way humans and computers interact.

Given our deep focus on human-computer interaction, it was easy for us to decide to get involved with Harmonix. We’ve learned an enormous amount about the intersection of human-computer interaction and video games over the past five years through our investments in Zynga, Sifteo, and Orbotix. We’ve continued to stretch the envelope of human-computer interaction with investments in Oblong, Occipital, and Organic Motion. We’ve seen, and experienced, first hand the power of using different HCI paradigms to capture human emotion and interaction in different contexts.

We’ve known the Harmonix founders, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, for 18 years. What they and their team have accomplished is the stuff of legends, and the new games they’ve showed us are all mind-blowing. We believe once again they are about to give us a window into the future. It’s an honor and a delight to get to work with them.

The post Foundry Group’s Brad Feld Joins Board of Harmonix appeared first on peHUB.

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon officially kicked off the Year of Luigi this week. To help celebrate the launch, Nintendo partnered with game art community iam8bit to create a replica of Luigi’s Poltergust 5000.

Now we just need to strap a Luigi hat on Reggie Fils-Aime, give him this Poltergust 5000, and send him off with Shigeru Miyamoto to hunt ghosts.

A young girl who was kidnapped from her L.A.-area bedroom has been found alive.

The Associated Press is reporting that the girl was spotted wandering around a Northridge coffee shop in a white t-shirt and no shoes by someone who had seen her in local reports about her abduction. Her face was reported to have cuts and bruises, and she was taken to a hospital for treatment.

The girl’s parents stated that they last saw her just before midnight. They reported her missing just before 4 am.

According to the AP report, the girl told police that two men entered her bedroom in the early morning hours of March 28 and kidnapped her. She stated that she was held in an abandoned house near her home for most of the day.

Police are now investigating the incident but are also emphasizing that these types of kidnappings are rare, and that there probably isn’t a serial kidnapper in the area.

The Carlyle Group, the publicly traded asset manager, has closed a $623 million C.L.O. fund (typically a collection of large loans made by banks to corporations with higher amounts of leverage). It’s the firm’s second new-issue CLO of the year. Carlyle Global Market Strategies CLO 2013-2 will invest in corporate leveraged loans and high yield bonds. Morgan Stanley arranged the transaction.

PRESS RELEASE:

Global alternative asset manager The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG) today announced the closing of a $623 million Collateralized Loan Obligation (CLO) fund, the firm’s second new-issue CLO of the year. Carlyle Global Market Strategies CLO 2013-2 will invest in corporate leveraged loans and high yield bonds. Morgan Stanley arranged the transaction.

Carlyle’s first new-issue CLO fund of 2013 closed in February at $605 million. The firm closed a total of four new-issue CLOs last year, raising $2.26 billion.

Carlyle’s structured credit/CLO business, with $17 billion in assets under management, is part of the firm’s Global Market Strategies platform, which had $32.5 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2012. The platform includes: mezzanine and energy mezzanine loans; high yield and structured credit; distressed equity and debt; and four hedge fund strategies (long/short credit, emerging market equities, macroeconomic and commodities). The GMS platform has more than 200 investment professionals in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong, and London.

* * * * *

About The Carlyle Group
The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG) is a global alternative asset manager with $170 billion of assets under management across 113 funds and 67 fund of fund vehicles as of December 31, 2012. Carlyle’s purpose is to invest wisely and create value. Carlyle invests across four segments – Corporate Private Equity, Real Assets, Global Market Strategies and Solutions – in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and South America. Carlyle has expertise in various industries, including: aerospace, defense & government services, consumer & retail, energy, financial services, healthcare, industrial, technology & business services, telecommunications & media and transportation. The Carlyle Group employs 1,400 people in 33 offices across six continents.
Web: www.carlyle.com

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Today President Obama welcomed President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone, President Macky Sall of Senegal, President Joyce Banda of Malawi, and Prime Minister José Maria Pereira Neves of Cape Verde to the White House.  The United States has strong partnerships with these countries based on shared democratic values and shared interests.  Each of these leaders has undertaken significant efforts to strengthen democratic institutions, protect and expand human rights and civil liberties, and increase economic opportunities for their people. 

President Obama and the visiting leaders discussed how the United States can expand our partnership to support their efforts to strengthen democratic institutions and promote economic opportunity, both in their countries and across sub-Saharan Africa.  A particular focus of the conversation was on the importance of transparency and respect for human rights, and President Obama commended each leader for their work in these areas and their commitment to join the Open Government Partnership.  President Obama also commended these leaders for their leadership on food security and engaged the leaders in a fruitful conversation about how the United States can help Africa harness the potential of its young people and empower the next generation of African leaders.

read more

What would the Thursday before Easter be without a good scare to keep network administrators awake at night. Perhaps IDC just mixed up the candy holidays thinking it’s Halloween. Whatever, the analyst firm warns of a troubling increase in enterprise distributed denial of service attacks and promises more are coming to you.

Of course, the real motivation here is to scare businesses into exploring DDoS-protective solutions. IDC forecasts 18.2 percent growth rate in DDoS products and services through 2017, reaching $870 million. To be fair, there’s little dispute about rising DDoS risks.

The Spamhaus Project just finished a rocky week of “large-scale DDoS attack“. Another DDoS disrupted Wells Fargo’s website this week.

Last month, Gartner also warned of increased DDoS attacks, many targeting banks and often used as distractions to cover other criminal behavior.

Avivah Litan, Gartner vice president, warns about a “new level of sophistication in organized attacks against enterprises” and that “they will grow in sophistication and effectiveness” this year.

Payment provider Dwolla is under DDoS attack as I write. Site is inaccessible. “Yesterday afternoon, Dwolla’s service providers became the victim of a distributed denial of service event, resulting in limited or no availability to the website, Dwolla.com”, according to the company. “This advanced event, still persists today, and is preventing people from viewing the website and consequently accessing its services”.

Prolexic, one of those DDoS-protection providers IDC claims more enterprises will give money to, says that “fourth quarter of 2012 exhibited high levels of activity” of attacks against its “global client base”. That’s up 19 percent year over year and by 27.5 percent from Q3. Also quarter-on-quarter, there was a “67 percent increase in average attack duration to 32.2 hours from 19.2 hours”.

“As these attacks surged in prevalence and sophistication, organizations were often caught unaware”, Christian Christiansen, IDC veep, says about enterprise DDoS assaults last year. “Embedded capabilities were quickly overwhelmed and outages were readily apparent on the Web. This is driving the need for proactive solutions to protect customer’s infrastructure from current and future attacks”.

But wait, there’s a sales pitch. “With the number of high-profile attacks steadily increasing, the market for DDoS prevention solutions will surge”, John Grady, IDC research manager says “A defense-in-depth posture with a combination of on-premise equipment and cloud-based mitigation provides the best protection against advanced application and SSL-based attacks as well as large-scale volumetric attacks”.

Photo Credit: Fabio Berti/Shutterstock

The big Businessweek profile on Samsung (005930) makes for some fascinating reading, and not just because it details Samsung’s gleeful willingness to try anything and everything when it comes to smartphone form factors. The other part that really stands out from the piece is this: Samsung executives are extremely paranoid. And in case you’re wondering, I mean that as a compliment.

Continue reading…

After posting decent Q4 results, BlackBerry seemingly celebrated by releasing updates for its Facebook and Twitter apps on BlackBerry 10.

If you fancy yourself a Facebook user, the latest update for BlackBerry 10 is sure to delight with its latest features: