Apple Faces Trademark Lawsuit Over Snow Leopard Name

A Chinese firm is seeking $80,000 and an apology from Apple.
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[Update] Windows 8 Upgrade Paths for Windows XP, Vista and 7

UPDATE: Microsoft has officially announced upgrade paths of Windows 8. Windows XP, Vista and 7 users will be able to upgrade to Windows 8 for just $39.99. Windows 8 Pro users will be able to add Windows Media Center for free using "Add features" option. Also a packaged DVD version of the upgrade to Windows [...] Read rest of this article at AskVG.com
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Scientists develop spray-on battery

Scientists in the United States have developed a paint that can store and deliver electrical power just like a battery. Traditional lithium-ion batteries power most portable electronics. They are already pretty compact but limited to rectangular or cylindrical blocks. Researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have come up with a technique to break down each element of the traditional battery and incorporate it into a liquid that can be spray-painted in layers on virtually any surface. "This means traditional packaging for batteries has given way to a much more flexible approach that allows all kinds of new design and integration possibilities for storage devices," said Pulickel Ajayan, who leads the team on the project. The rechargeable battery is made from spray-painted layers, with each representing the components of a traditional battery: two current collectors, a cathode, an anode and a polymer separator in the middle. The paint layers were airbrushed onto ceramics, glass and stainless steel, and on diverse shapes such as the curved surface of a ceramic mug, to test how well they bond. One limitation of the technology is in the use of difficult-to-handle liquid electrolytes and the need for a dry and oxygen-free environment when making the new device. The researchers are looking for components that would allow construction in the open air for a more efficient production process and greater commercial viability. Neelam Singh, who worked on the project, believes the technology could be integrated with solar cells to give any surface a stand-alone energy capture and storage capability. The researchers tested the device using nine bathroom tiles coated with the paint and connected to each other. When they were charged, the batteries powered a set of light-emitting diodes for six hours, providing a steady 2.4 volts. The results of the study were published on Thursday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/Scientists-develop-spray-on-battery-13393



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MakeMyTrip appoints Sanket Atal as Chief Technology Officer

Nasdaq-listed Indian online travel company MakeMyTrip has today announced the appointment of Sanket Atal as the new Chief Technology Officer to head the technology development and support teams in the travel company. Atal was previously Senior Vice President & General Manager for the India Technology Center of CA Technologies in Hyderabad. The MakeMyTrip Group achieved sales of Rs. 4,800 crore in the financial year ending March 2012. Deep Kalra, CEO and Founder, MakeMyTrip said, "We are extremely pleased to have Sanket on board. His broad-based experience and expertise is an asset as we strengthen our focus on technology and Innovation to drive the next phase of our evolution. He brings with him a global management style and a clear understanding of enterprise and consumer business to hold him in good stead in this critical role." Atal added, "I am looking forward to my association with MakeMyTrip. Technology is the natural enabler in our business to fuel innovation and achieve excellence in customer experience. I am very excited to have this opportunity to lead this vertical, and the experience I have amassed so far in the software industry will support my quest for innovation."
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/MakeMyTrip-appoints-Sanket-Atal-as-Chief-Technology-Officer-13403



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Cloud computing for the people? It’s called SaaS.

Cloud-based servers simple enough to be at the beck and call of every Joe Schmo off the street are a compelling vision, but presently not a realistic one. At this point, in fact, one could argue that the holy grail of the consumer cloud has already been realized. In the business world, it's called software as a service, but the rest of the world just knows it as "the cloud." In a blog post on Thursday, Anil Dash laid out a vision that pretty much boils down to this quote: "[W]e need a consumer cloud offering. An app store for EC2 or a marketplace for Rackspace. The same one-click stores that offer us easy apps on our own local devices should let us purchase consumer-friendly apps that run on our own individual cloud servers." It reads well, but until cloud computing prices drop far enough that individual servers cost next to nothing, the vision seems infeasible. That's why multitenant cloud services, what Dash calls "centralized services," are proving so popular. Although Dash dismisses the idea of centralized services as being primarily the realm of profit-hungry platform companies such as Google and Facebook, and archaic compared with the type of edge innovation that mobile apps enable, that's not entirely the case. The truth is that there's a whole slew of entrepreneurs building consumer-friendly services atop cloud platforms — like almost every popular web and mobile app you can think of, including Instagram, Draw Something , Tumblr, Wordnik, Foursquare, you name it. Yes, it's true there isn't yet a cloud service for every possible need a consumer could have, but new ones are popping up every day. Some of them are actually targeting the compute-intensive workloads Dash thinks aren't profitable enough for large platform providers to build but that might require an entire virtual server. I'm thinking of Zencoder (and the host of other video-rendering services), Animoto and Aviary, but there are plenty of other examples floating about. It's all about cost and architecture For a variety of reasons economic and architectural, a centralized model is just so much more efficient than having every version of an app running on its own server. A big one is that most apps don't need the power of an entire server, which is why multitenancy works so well. There's also the issue of OS patches and other administrative tasks that are a lot easier with centralized control and not so easy when apps are running on their own servers god-knows-where. These are among the same reason businesses love SaaS, by the way. And then there's the cost; applications that rely on consumers spinning up their own servers are not going to be cheap. If an app were running 24 hours a day on a standard Amazon Machine Image (a requirement if you don't want to wait minutes for a new server to power on every time you open the app), it would cost just less than $60 a month for compute alone, not to mention charges for storage, database calls, etc. I can't imagine a freemium model that can support than kind of cost. Multitenant SaaS providers can keep prices low and still turn a profit by taking into account peaks and valleys in usage, but I don't see how that's possible in a single-tenant model. Amazon Web Services actually has an AWS Marketplace, but it consists primarily of business applications — and for good reason. While tens to hundreds of dollars a month is a relatively good deal for business software, it's a terrible deal for consumers. That's why multitenant, or centralized, cloud architectures work so well. It's also why many mobile applications have a foot in the cloud to provide a distributed datastore, but offload computing where possible to our increasingly powerful mobile phones and laptops. Such architectures also provide the added benefit of letting apps run offline but sync with the cloud backend when devices are back online. Built right (that can be easier said than done, I know) a centralized cloud service can stay online during an outage that would knock individual servers offline and take consumers' instances with them. Don't get me wrong, I completely see where Dash is coming from in wanting, essentially, a world in which consumers can buy cloud apps that mirror and perhaps outdo their PC apps in terms of features and computing power. I just don't see it happening given the myriad advantages cloud services have as a business model. Anyone can write and host their own application in the cloud — the advent of platform as a service makes that easier than ever before — but if they build something the rest of the world might want to use, the economics of a single-tenant architecture just aren't there yet.
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/Cloud-computing-for-the-people-It-s-called-SaaS--13416



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Is the iPad 2 cannibalizing the new iPad’s profits?

In about four weeks, Apple will announce its fiscal 2012 Q3 earnings. Its accountants are busy tallying the numbers, including the number of iPads sold and revenue from the iPad product line. These two numbers hold the key for the longevity of the iPad 2. Are the days numbered for the $399 iPad 2? When Apple announced the new iPads in March, it dropped the cost of the lowest-priced iPad 2 (the 16GB Wifi only version) by $100 and continued to sell it side by side with the third-generation iPad. This is not in the usual mold of clearing out previous generation products at a reduced price. Analysts speculated that Apple kept the iPad 2 around to counter the threat from cheaper tablets, specifically Kindle Fire. Despite being a year old, the iPad 2 is packed with power and features that other tablets do not come close to matching. Offering it at $399 helped bring in new customers who didn't consider buying it at $499 and snag some who would have bought a Kindle Fire. It is a win-win for Apple — almost. The $399 price point is also attractive to those who otherwise would have bought the new iPad at higher price points. This is what economists call second degree price discrimination. When offered multiple options at different prices, customers pick the one that gives them the most value (consumer surplus). In the absence of the $399 iPad 2, customers would have picked the pricier new iPad. But when offered side by side, some see higher consumer surplus from the iPad 2 than the new iPad. That is exactly why Apple kept just the 16GB Wifi model of the iPad 2 and not the entire product line. For every customer who chooses to buy the iPad 2 instead of the new iPad, Apple loses $100-plus in pure profit (the cost difference between the models are marginal). If that total loss turns out to be more than the profit from selling the iPad 2 to new customers, Apple will quickly pull the plug on the iPad 2. We will not get a breakdown from Apple on the number of iPad 2s and new iPads sold. But we can figure out these numbers by doing simple math on Apple's earnings statement. Last quarter, when it had the $399 iPad 2 for only a month, Apple sold about 2.1 million $399 iPad 2 units. That was 18 percent of the total number of iPads sold, which did not increase much from the previous quarter. This translates to just 10 percent of total iPad revenue. The higher the number of iPad 2 units sold, the lower its contribution to revenue. This is the first full quarter when iPad 2 and the new iPad are sold side by side. Apple would prefer to keep the iPad 2 proportion at 18 percent or lower. If that number goes up, it signals significant erosion of Apple's iPad profits by its own product. The worst case scenario is that Apple sells three times as many iPad 2s as the previous quarter without a net increase in total number of iPads sold. When the earnings report comes in next month, pay close attention to the iPad numbers. If you have been waiting to buy one, you might want to grab one now before they're gone.
http://techgig.com/tech-news/editors-pick/Is-the-iPad-2-cannibalizing-the-new-iPad-s-profits--13417



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Funny Facebook tricks

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