Dedicated Server

A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting in which the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations have full control over the server(s), including choice of operating system.

Managed Dedicated Server

Managed dedicated server To date, no industry standards have been set to clearly define the management role of dedicated server providers. What this means is that each provider will use industry standard terms, but each provider will define them differently. For some dedicated server providers.

SQL ServerCompact Edition

The compact edition is an embedded database engine. Unlike the other editions of SQL Server, the SQL CE engine is based on SQL Mobile (initially designed for use with hand-held devices) and does not share the same binaries.

SQl Server Architecture

When writing code for SQL CLR, data stored in SQL Server databases can be accessed using the ADO.NET APIs like any other managed application that accesses SQL Server data.

Bandwidth and Connectivity

Bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate or the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period (usually a second) and is often represented in bits (of data) per second (bit/s).

Monday, December 19, 2011

Top 10 Culture-Tech Stories of 2011

Technology is frequently examined as though it were the reason for its own being, a kind of byte-driven tautology or spectacularly dry religious sect. But technology is a means to address questions. In that spirit, here are the top 10 stories about how we've employed the social web to ask and answer questions about our lives. These are "top" stories in the sense that they are representative, not exhaustive.
I'm focusing on culture, specifically on the humanities and science. I'm leaving politics and free speech to the side for the moment, since I've reviewed that aspect of tech a couple of times this month. Here are stories of how tech has been used to uncover our past, conserve our present and preserve our future. They are organized by date of publication, oldest to latest.

10. 9-11 Oral Histories Saved and Shared via Smart Phone
911mem.pngThe terrorist attacks against the United States in September of 2001 left a lasting impression on the country and changes that came from that moment rippled out across the globe. We humans use whatever we can to understand what we've gone through and this year, mobile technology grew in leaps and bounds. It was inevitable that we used that technology to address our own feelings on the 10th anniversary of the attack.
Broadcastr, a Brooklyn-based mobile start-up, has struck an agreement with National September 11 Memorial and Museum to make 50 oral histories of first-responders available via smart phone and online. When Broadcastr leaves beta In February, it will welcome the collection of additional cell-recorded oral histories it is hoping users will gather. Interviewers can also geolocate the interview.
9. Mapping the Dead Zones
As our population continues to increase and, as a species, we continue to claw at the world, technology keeps pace in an attempt to understand and roll back the damage.
The World Resources Institute and the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences have teamed to create an interactive map of eutrophication and hypoxia in the world's coastal areas. There are 530 areas identified as suffering from low oxygen - that's hypoxia - and 228 more suffering eutrophication, or excessive fertilization, usually from run-off. Identifying problem spots is job one for anyone hoping to slow, stop or reverse these sorts of marine declines.
8. New Software Helps Rebuild Ancient Cities
rome_map.pngThe natural world is not the only victim of our weight on the planet. Our own cultural patrimony and history suffers from neglect and abuse. Added to that, time, which is an intrinsic part of the environment, does nothing beneficial to the artifacts of our societies. But academics are hoping that advances in the sensitivity and data capacity of new technology will allow them to rebuild, in mind if not in fact, the physical remains of our past, specifically, the buildings that defined our relationship to the world. It's an effort, as it were, to resurrect our ancestors from their footprints.
The first step in virtualizing a building is tracing it. That's a tough and time-consuming activity. It can be creative but it can also produce inaccuracies. Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have developed a software that can capture and restore destroyed buildings from old maps. Professor Stephen Laycock and his team have created a tool that will automatically extract dimensions and relationships from colored maps. Users can extract black and white maps by directing a cursor within the building's mapped edges.
7. Using 3D Printing to Repair Rodin's Thinker
3D printing is increasing in popularity as it decreases in cost. Makers fairs are increasing in frequency and small personal 3D printers are a bit more common, in offices, if not at the kitchen table. But it's still largely the purview of dedicated companies. In 2010, Dutch firm Materialise worked with Egypt's Council of Antiquities to "print" a picture-perfect Tut for traveling exhibits.
This year, Cornell University has begun to employ it to create safe-to-handle exact replicas of cuneiform, the ancient Near Eastern writing system, used on now-fragile clay tablets. But Materialise's experience repairing the famous Thinker sculpture by the French sculptor Rodin, is a good picture of the so-what of 3D.
In 2007, the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands, where The Thinker resided, was burglarized. The meatheads who broke in did so not to steal the art, but to steal the metal. They made off with seven sculptures and started to try to chop them up to sell for scrap. The Singer Laren needed to figure out how to deal with the butchered figure. iMaterialise had an idea. They did a CT scan of the damaged figure. Then they scanned the original mold retained by the Musee Rodin in Paris. They printed out a full-sized copy from the original on their Mammoth 3D printer. The conservators at the Singer Laren have used that and the scans of the original to re-fabricate and lay in the missing and damaged parts of the statue.
6. Using Twitter to Preserve Minority Languages
celltower_jun10.jpgLanguages, like rain forests, have the potential to contain answers to questions we may not even have had to form yet, or information that will guide us or remedies for what ails us. But the same technological tools that allow us to throw our voices halfway across the world - television, film, telephones - have pressured us to use the same language to exercise it. Centralization has meant standardization.
But new communications technologies, the social web and its mobile technology, may have provided us with an avenue back to Babel. (It can be a confusing, clamorous place, but it offers a fecundity that homogeneity does not.)
Of the approximately 6,000 languages alive in the world today, 60 percent or more are said to be dying out. The majority of the world's languages are, in fact, "minority" languages, used in the shadow of a more politically powerful tongue. On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University launched a project called Indigenous Tweets. Using a web-crawling statistical software he wrote called An Crúbadán, Scannell identifies which minority languages are being tweeted, by whom and how.

5. Geospatial Humanities: Using Location Tech to Rebuild the Past
compas_location_150x150.jpgGeotechnology is being used in an ever-increasing number of places and situations to understand where we come from and how we behave when we get there. As distributed as are our points of contact in the era of the social web, it still counts when a publication (still) as central to the national (and global) conversation as the New York Times recognizes it. It means it has moved from the realm of the specialist to that of the educated layman.
It's not just the NYT who recognize how these technologies are changing the way we orient ourselves. The University of California, Los Angeles has opened a Center for Digital Humanities, that awards an interdisciplinary minor in Digital Humanities, the use of new technology for non-technological study.
Here are some examples of from the New York Times of how geotech is being used to understand where we came from.
  • Gettysburg: rebuilding the topography of the battlefield as it existed at the time
  • Salem: the geography of the witch trials
  • The Dust Bowl: extent and reason for erosion during the Great Depression
  • Eastcheap: the lay of the land and the location of the taverns where Shakespeare's Prince Hal and Falstaff prowled
4. ARKive to Document Every Species on Earth
I am a fan of archives and I am especially keen on any archive, whether physical or digital, that takes access as an important elements of its mission. And I don't just like archives of books and manuscript, I also dig archives that have nothing to do with the written word. For instance, if you haven't marveled, drop-jawed, at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, do.
Coming a close second to that in my personal pantheon of parchment-free archives is a digital project called ARKive.
Their goal: no less than the capture and preservation of a photographic record of every species under the sun. The group's immediate goal is the completion of audio-visual profiles for all of the threatened species on the IUCN Red List. The materials can be browsed by species group or eco-region or can be searched. Additional information includes topics like climate change and geography. Also on offer is an educational menu tailored to specific age groups. The photos themselves can be viewed individually or as slideshows and each species' photo gallery is accompanied by a detailed description of the animal or plant.
3. Scientists Use Google Earth to Understand Mysterious Giant Wheels
stafford smith.jpgOver the last several years, Google Earth, and other large-scale search tools with a geographical function, have helped archaeologists and others to identify history which was too large to be seen. In the past, such technology has identified lost cities, revealed ghost towns to be imperial capitols and unearthed hundreds of invisible Egyptian pyramids, temples and towns.
This year's triumph was the revelation of hundreds of large-scale prehistoric earth-art installations spread all about the Arabian peninsula.
Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries. Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia has been using Google Earth and aerial photography to study the structures, which were first reported in 1927 by British Royal Air Force fliers who were making mail runs over the area.
Image copyright of, and drawn by, Stafford Smith, APAAME.
2. Afro Nerd Superstar Explosion: How the Future of 1 Billion People is in the Hands of a Bunch of Nerd Girls and Poindexters
In October, I spent several weeks in East Africa, speaking with executives, government officials and, most interestingly, developers. I visited three incubators in Nairobi devoted to startups in the social space. Given the emphasis in Kenya on mobile - as many as 60% of Kenyans pack mobile phones but as few as 5% have Internet connectivity via laptop or desktop computers - the development also focused on mobile, though not exclusively.
Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with 1 billion people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years old. High tech has been a primary driver of East Africa's 40% growth over the last decade and small and medium-sized enterprises are poised to take over a great deal more of that growth going forward. Anyone who is not paying attention to the continent, and paying attention to it as a forge, not just as a market, is going to be sorry. The "developing world" is making the not-so-slow transformation from market to makers. Africa is right out front of that translation, having moved recently into the #2 position in the global mobile market.
I've come to the conclusion that no one is waiting for the government to wise up. They all seem powered, to various degrees, by the nerd catechism of "think it, code it, build it, sell it - NOW." That is hardly to say that government interest in such a top-heavy country as Kenya is unimportant to these groups, it just seems they have little hope of great support anytime soon. And, instead of despairing, they have all created different ways of reaching out to, and beyond, Kenyan society. In fact, one of my primary impressions was how these developers, as focused as they are on their own markets and the needs of their own society, are nonetheless well versed in global development issues and best practices and are in constant contact not just with each other, but with their peers and with corporations as far flung as Finland and the Silicon Valley.
1. 100 Years of Dance Music = Data With a Beat
dancemap150.jpg
Hey, people? It's been a rugged year. Let's face facts. There's been political unrest like there hasn't been in decades. The economy has been a sick mess. Our shared stress level has been high enough to interfere with the magnetosphere. (I made up that last bit but the sad fact is that it seems possible.) So let's end this year in a massive, shared shaking of our groove things, alright?
The travel geeks at Thomson have created a data visualization you can dance to. They tracked the top-level dance genres over the past century, and expressed the data as an animated map that moves from parent genre to descendant, proliferating over time. The mapmakers used data from the books Bass Culture, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and The All Music Guide to Electronica, as well as Wikipedia. They marked the birth of each genre in five year periods.
Can I ask you to do one thing for me, as this grisly year draws to a close? Would you mind terribly getting down on it? Would you get down on it? Get your back up off the wall? Now you've got it. See you next year. (Inch'Allah.)


Instagram on Track to Oust Foursquare as Biggest Mobile Social Network

For a service that only exists on one platform, Instagram has been wildly successfully. The photo-sharing app for iOS is now on track to hit 15 million users, which as a post SocialFresh points out, is how many people are using Foursquare today.
Among mobile-first social services, Foursquare is arguably the biggest right now, but the geolocation check-in app is on track to be surpassed soon, despite being a year older than Instagram and being available on every major mobile platform and having a highly functional Web-based UI.

Instagram's growth has come exclusively on the heels of the iPhone's popularity, and received two boosts recently in the form of the launch of the iPhone 4S and being named Apple's iPhone App of the Year.
As SocialFresh writer Jason Keath points out, Instagram also benefits from the fact that its core functionality - taking, sharing and viewing photographs - are things we've done since the advent of consumer photography. Sharing our precise physical location with a network of others is an activity that's not quite as firmly embedded in our lives already.

Instagram For Android: Still in the Pipeline

Instagram's most recent project was a significant overhaul to the app's underlying functionality that went live in September. The company has long promised that the two items next on their list are a Web interface and and Android app.
It's that application for Android, which CEO Kevin Systrom recently confirmed they're currently building, that stands to send the service's user adoption rate through the roof. As beloved as the iPhone is, iOS still makes up a smaller share of the market than Android, which has itself ballooned pretty quickly. If the current buzz around the iOS version carries over across platforms, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect Instagram's user base to double within a year or so.
The company's other top priority, a Web-based UI for the service, should also help attract users. Right now, people see Instagram shots posted to Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter all the time. When they click through, however, all they see is the photo itself, some basic information about the user who posted it and a link inviting them to download the iPhone app. For those who are unfamiliar with the service, there's very little detail about what Instagram is and why they should care about it. One way to get that idea across would be to offer the ability to explore more images from within the desktop browser.

Join Storify's Story Of The Year Contest & Win An iPad 2


Storify is announcing a contest to find the best story of 2011. The team has pulled together 10 nominees, but all Storify posts are eligible to win. Users can vote by clicking the Storify 'Like' button at the top of each story. You can like as many as you want, but you can only like each story once. The story with the most likes by December 29 wins Story Of The Year, and the author wins an iPad 2.

The Story Of The Year page will keep a running tally, and the top 10 authors will all receive Storify t-shirts. After liking a story, you'll be prompted to tweet about the contest. By promoting the contest on Twitter, anyone can enter into a drawing for another iPad 2. Make sure to include the hashtag, #storifyoftheyear. "This year, stories have often unfolded first on social media," says Storify co-founder Xavier Damman. "We can't wait to see which story moved people the most."

storify_kimjongil.jpg
Storify is the social Web news site starring you. It provides powerful but simple curation tools to pull together moments from around the Web, including tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube videos as well as images or links. Posted stories become standalone webpages, which Storify curates on its front page, and they can also be embedded anywhere. See our post about Storify's 10 most quoted tweets of the year for for an example.
Storify can be used to capture funny, everyday moments, like our breaking Twitter story of a Gmail outage. But it has also been used to report on some of the biggest news stories of the year, enabling even mainstream media organizations to cover fast-developing events, like the Occupy Wall Street protests, in unprecedented ways.
storify_mona.jpg
Storify's nominees include documentation of police brutality and journalist arrests at Occupy protests, an overall timeline of the many uprisings of 2011, and the story of journalist Mona Eltahawy's capture and beating by Egyptian law enforcement.
There are also some sillier moments, like a Storify tracking the saga of Sean Power's stolen laptop and the live-tweeting of a Burger King breakup.

Visit the 2011 Story Of The Year Storify page to see all the official nominees and the contest rules. Remember, you can vote for any story by clicking the 'Like' button, not just the ones nominated.

Dumbest Moves of the Year in Web Enterprise Services

It was quite a year of mistakes, with Carol Bartz leaving Yahoo, HP trying once again to re-orient itself and hiring ex-California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. On top of this comes various reports that once again email is dead or dying (this could be a tedious repetition of the "year of the LAN" that we went through in the 1990s, even though email has been incorporated at the main notification mechanism of just about every piece of corporate software). But there were some spectacular enterprise Web blunders of the year that we've seen that are worth


  1. Delicious sold from Yahoo to YouTube.Delicious continues to be a disappointment, as we wrote earlier this fall, looking like "just another Web 2.0 startup." As social bookmarking morphs into "Like" and "Share" buttons on just about every social software, Delicious' time has come and seemingly gone.
  2. Data.com and Salesforce.com. Data.com has two parents, Salesforce and Dun & Bradstreet. The union will result in combining the information in Jigsaw with the information in the D&B archives, which tracks mostly large businesses across the world. We wrote here that the conflict with Jigsaw, an existing Salesforce effort was going to be a problem earlier in the fall. The jury is still out on this one.
  3. VMware v5 mispricing. We wrote about the various miscues with the new v5 versions of various VMware products here. While they made some adjustments, their pricing is still far too complex and too costly. Eventually, we think they will regret these decisions. In the meantime, the VMware ecosystem is rich with apps, partners and users. While there are stories of a few customers who are switching, most are just complaining for now.
  4. Google App Engine overpricing. We wrote about Google's huge price increases to its App Engine here earlier this fall. They still haven't done anything to address this and answer the complaint from many of their developers.
  5. In June, OpenOffice.org began the transition from a 12-year project at Sun/Oracle to a "podling" as they are called in the Apache Foundation open source community. Many of the original developers of OpenOffice left or were pushed out and went to The Document Foundation, where they developed a separate fork called LibreOffice that was first released at the beginning of 2011. Apache's public license is somewhat different from the GNU licensing terms used by Oracle, which means that code improvements from Apache can be used by Libre but not the other way around. Since LibreOffice began, they have added features and cleaned up the old code, announced plans for delivering iOS and Android versions, and are now the default Office software in numerous Linux distros.
  6. Microsoft acquired Skype in May and a lot was written about the promises and opportunities. To date, none of these have been realized, but also Skype seems to be fine and continuing under its new overlords. There are new versions for both Mac and Windows, something feared when Microsoft made its purchase but which hasn't come to pass. Hopefully, Microsoft will leave Skype alone and not try to make it into Unified Live Office Communications Realtime Professional Edition.
  7. Facebook. No accounting for enterprise blunders of the past year can ignore the numerous bad examples of Facebook. On its way to becoming the great equalizer of the profound and the trivial, they continue to perplex everyone with its UI-of-the-week club, features that come and go faster than Microsoft can say "Office Ribbon" and of course so many privacy options to make your head spin. Perhaps next year will see more maturity and stability of the popular service. Until then, its antics are a case study in what not to do for ordinary mere mortal developers who have apps with say 750 users rather than 750 million).

You Don't Have To Use Twitter To Invest $300M In Twitter


The $300 million secondary investment Twitter confirmed  Monday morning comes from a key figure in a region where Twitter is experiencing some of its fastest growth.

Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn't a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account - including Fox News and Barack Obama - and he hasn't tweeted since Oct. 6 when he sent out RIP condolences to Steve Jobs).

Arabic is the fastest growing language used on Twitter and the company has gotten credit for playing a role in the Arab Spring uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East earlier this year, and that makes Prince Alwaleed's investment significant.
"Kingdom realizes the importance of social networks like Twitter and their future growth prospects, and decided to benefit from this trend," Samer Darwiche, an analyst at Gulfmena Investments in Dubai, told Bloomberg News.

The investment was confirmed by a Twitter spokesman, but the company declined to give further details.

Twitter, which remains a private company, was valued at $8 billion in August. A series of recent management shakeups and staff departures has had some speculating that the company is growing through some growing pains, but other see it as an attempt to solidify its engineering talent and prep the company for more growth and, perhaps, an initial public stock offering.

Facebook Has More Android Than iOS Mobile Users

AppData.com revealed that daily average use on Facebook for Android has, for the first time ever, surpassed  Facebook for iPhone. The Android Facebook app now has 58.8 million daily average users, while Facebook for iPhone has only 57.6 million daily average users. This new data also coincides with the worldwide rollout of Facebook Timeline, which finally happened on December 15, 2011.

Last week, Facebook released Timeline  for Facebook.com and m.facebook.com, and Timeline for the Facebook Android app. Over the weekend, Facebook released version 4.1 for the iPhone, giving iOS users access to mobile timeline. Facebook did release Timeline for Android first - perhaps they were already seeing higher engagement from Android users.

Apple and Facebook do not play nice. Apple baked Twitter, not Facebook, into iOS 5. Facebook, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. With Facebook for Android surpassing the iPhone app, will Facebook mobile engineers start focusing more on Android and less on iOS?

Is Facebook going to start focusing more on Android? Or will it just eventually converge all mobile and browser-based platforms into one UI? Tell us what you think in the comments.


FB-iPhone-DAU.png
FB-Android-DAU.png

Thursday, December 15, 2011

France gets four bids in 4G auction

France's telecoms regulator has received bids from all of the country's major operators for a second batch of higher-quality fourth-generation mobile licenses and will choose winners in the coming weeks.

ARCEP said in a statement on Thursday that France Telecom, SFR, Bouygues and Iliad had submitted offers but did not disclose how much each company had bid.

The French government aims to raise at least 1.8 billion euros ($2.33 billion) in the second phase of the auction, which offers "golden frequencies" in the 800 MHz band, so dubbed because they allow mobile signals to travel long distances without losing strength.

France has already sold off a batch of frequencies in the 2.6 GHz band for 936 million euros, representing a premium to what similar frequencies sold for in some neighboring European countries.

In the first round, France Telecom and soon-to-be new mobile player Iliad won two larger blocks of 20 megahertz, while SFR and Bouygues got 15 MHz each.

Analysts predicted that SFR, the country's second-biggest mobile operator, would bid aggressively in the second round since it had not received as much spectrum as it wanted in the first.

As a result, the French government may end up raising more than the 2.5 billion-euro minimum it set for the 4G licenses, a boon that would be welcomed in a time of tight national budgets.

The results of the auction will shape the competitive landscape in France's telecom market for years to come. The amount of spectrum an operator has determines the quality of service it can offer customers surfing the web from smartphones or tablets, a lucrative and fast-growing market.

With Iliad set to launch its mobile service in the coming days or weeks, France's telecoms market has been in a phase of intensifying competition and declining prices in the past year, and analysts expect that dynamic to continue.

Iliad's approach to the second round of the auction - whether it bids aggressively for the best frequencies or not - is likely to be interpreted as a sign of its ambitions in the mobile market.

Already Iliad, which markets its offers under the Free brand name, surprised in the first round by winning one of the bigger blocks over larger rival SFR.

Similar 4G auctions have been carried out in Spain, Germany, and Italy, while the UK has delayed its auction until next year.

ABB to power Facebook data center in Arctic Circle

Sony Corp said it was keeping to its target to sell 15 million PlayStation 3 game machines in the year to end-March, even as a long-running debt crisis grips Europe, one of the Japanese electronics group's most important markets.

Welsh-born Andrew House, who took over as head of Sony Computer Entertainment, the group's video games business, less than four months ago, told reporters on Thursday that PS3 sales were, if anything, slightly ahead of target.

He declined to give a unit sales estimate for the PlayStation Vita, the new handheld games device, which launches in Japan on Saturday and reaches U.S. stores in late-February.

The Vita has sold out in advance bookings in Japan, but is likely to face a tougher challenge in the United States and Europe, partly due to the overall sense of economic gloom.

The challenge from smartphones and tablets such as Apple Inc's iPhone and iPad is adding to existing competition from domestic rival Nintendo Co Ltd, which aims to sell 16 million of its 3DS handheld games gadgets by March.

Sony Computer Entertainment made its first profit in five years in the 12 months to March 2011, as it managed to squeeze PS3 production costs, boosting profits for the whole company.

House said the speed at which Sony could turn Vita hardware sales profitable would depend on currency rates. Sony has been hard hit by the yen's rise against the euro.

The PS Vita's predecessor, the PS Portable, sold 73 million units since its launch in December 2004 - less than half the number of the rival Nintendo DS.

ABB to power Facebook data center in Arctic Circle

Swiss engineer ABB has won an $11 million contract to power Facebook's first data centre outside the United States, covering an area in the Arctic Circle equivalent to 11 soccer pitches, it said on Thursday.

Facebook chose Lulea, northern Sweden, as the site for its green data center -- set to be the largest of its kind in Europe -- because of its access to renewable energy and the cold climate that is crucial to help cool the huge server buildings.

Data centers are set to boom as companies shift to cloud computing and traffic soars on social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook. One data center consumes as much power as 25,000 U.S. houses.

ABB, whose products are also used by oil, mining and utility companies, will build two high- and medium-voltage air and gas insulated switchgear substations to supply power to the data center, which is due to become operational next December.

Apple to open R&D center in Israel

Apple will open a research and development center in Israel that will focus on semiconductors, the Globes business daily reported on Thursday.

The Israeli newspaper said the maker of iPods, IPads and iPhones has already hired Israeli high-tech veteran Aharon Aharon to run the center.

Apple was not available for comment.
Globes said that although Apple was a global innovation leader, it is a small investor in R&D. It invested $2.4 billion in R&D in 2010, just 2 percent of its revenue and less than other high-tech firms, it said.
The R&D center in Herzliya, Israel's version of Silicon Valley, would be Apple's first outside California, Globes said.

The newspaper said Apple vice president of R&D Ed Frank was currently visiting Israel.
Earlier this week, Israeli media reported Apple was in advanced talks to buy Anobit, an Israeli maker of flash storage technology, for $400-$500 million.

Apple has declined to comment on the report.

Sony eyes Vita push, feels Fitch heat

Sony Corp, set to report a $1 billion loss this year, is banking on a big slate of new software to drive sales of its new PlayStation Vita handheld games device, even as Fitch downgraded the Japanese electronics giant to a notch above junk.

Welshman Andrew House, who took the top job at Sony Computer Entertainment in September, must plot a much-needed success story for the Vita, negotiating a minefield of consumer gloom and competition from smartphones and tablet PCs such as Apple Inc's iPhone and iPad.

Sony, which has forecast a fourth straight annual loss this year, launches the Vita in Japan this weekend.

It hopes a package of 24 software titles at launch will help the gadget avoid the fate of rival Nintendo's 3DS, which flopped shortly after launch, forcing a hefty price cut.

"It's unprecedented for us to achieve that degree of publisher and development support ... we adopted a different approach to the lead-up to the platform in terms of our relationships with publishers and developers," House told reporters at Sony's Tokyo head office on Thursday.

He said he hoped the Vita would outsell its predecessor, the PlayStation Portable (PSP), which has shipped 73 million units since launching in late-2004.

The videogames unit made a first profit in 5 years in the year to March, as it squeezed production costs for the Playstation 3, boosting profits for the whole company. The unit's sales accounted for more than a tenth of Sony's 7 trillion yen in total revenue.

But costs involved in driving Vita sales may push the unit back into the red this year, adding to Sony's struggle with huge losses in televisions.

Sony needs the Vita to be a hit to ease the pain from its TV business, which is set for an annual loss of $2.2 billion, an eighth straight year of losses. Sony is looking to halve that loss next year, but has given few details on how it plans to get the business back into profit.

FITCH MOVE

The Fitch ratings agency turned up the heat by downgrading Sony to BBB- - a notch above non-investment, or junk, grade - from BBB, citing the group's weakened financial performance and the challenges it faces in recapturing its former strong position in key markets.

"A likely overall FY12 EBIT loss, excluding financial services, and an increase in debt driven by acquisitions will significantly weaken Sony's credit profile," said Nitin Soni, Associate Director in Fitch's Asia-Pacific Telecommunications, Media and Technology team.

Sony said in October it was taking over its mobile phone joint venture with Ericsson for $1.5 billion, and is also leading a group to buy EMI's music publishing operations in a deal valued at $2.2 billion.

"Of course, if the rating is downgraded it makes it more expensive for them to raise money, so it's not good," said Keita Wakabayashi, an analyst at Mito Securities.

"(Sony has) slashed its profit outlook for the current year and even if the North American market has improved slightly, European and Japanese markets and emerging markets are in a severe state. So downgrades are something we'll have to keep in mind."

VITA

The Vita, featuring a 5-inch OLED display and 3G connectivity, sold out in advance bookings in Japan, where buyers have rushed to upgrade from the PSP. Sony has not provided a unit sales target for the Vita.

The United States and Europe may pose a tougher challenge as a February 22 launch date for the Vita comes well after the crucial year-end holiday sales season.

"We've been told the PS Vita sold out on pre-bookings. How it sells next year depends on the software. If they can come up with something like Monster Hunter they will be able to sell a lot, but if they don't, prospects don't look so bright," said Mito's Wakabayashi, referring to a game title that drove sales of the PSP in Japan.

The challenge from smartphones and tablets comes on top of competition from long-standing domestic rival Nintendo, which aims to sell 16 million of its cheaper 3DS handheld games devices by March. Sony on Thursday said it was keeping to its target of selling 15 million PS3 game machines in the year through March.

Another rival, Microsoft, doesn't offer a portable device.

After a slump in sales, Nintendo slashed the price of its handheld gadget in August by about 40 percent to $170, compared with $249 for the PS Vita, or $299 for the 3G version.

The games industry has shrugged off the broader economic gloom and is forecast to top $81 billion by 2016, according to research firm DFC Intelligence, up 23 percent from this year and more than three times the size of the recorded music industry.

Much of that growth is likely to be in online, social and casual games, rather than the traditional hardware model that has been Sony's staple.

Japan's software houses are pouring resources into mobile social gaming, and industry executives have expressed some concern over the future for dedicated handheld gaming devices.

Sony was criticized in June, when it announced the pricing of the Vita, for making the gadget too expensive, and has teamed up with U.S. telecoms firm AT&T as Vita's exclusive carrier. Many U.S. iPhone users have complained that AT&T provided poor connectivity.

Sony shares closed down 1.5 percent on Thursday, their lowest in two weeks.

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