'Beginning of the end for BlackBerry'

OTTAWA: Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of BlackBerry, on Friday recalled that when he announced a in the introduction of a new line of phones a year ago, he was told his company was "finished." Not so, he argued then, give us time to get this thing right.

The phones, known as BlackBerry 10s, are now here. But the results the company announced Friday, BlackBerry has not turned around its fortunes. Just the opposite.

In the first full quarter of sales of the make-or-break BlackBerry 10s, BlackBerry reported that it shipped 6.8 million phones, of which only about 2.7 million were the new models.

Or, to put it another way, Apple sells as many iPhones in a week as BlackBerry 10s were shipped over three months.

"For many, going into these earnings, it was seen as the end of the new beginning," said Anil Doradla, an analyst with William Blair & Co in Chicago. "Now, coming out of the earnings, it looksthe beginning of the end."

BlackBerry's share price plummeted nearly 28% on Friday after it reported an unexpected $84 million loss and revealed the early shipping figures of its new phone. The loss of 16 cents a share was substantially worse than analysts' expectations of a gain of 6 cents, according to a Thomson Reuters survey. Revenue was $3.07 billion, again below analysts' estimates. But it was 15% better than the $2.8 billion for the same quarter a year ago.

When asked during a conference call with investors about BlackBerry 10's reception by customers, Heins said, "We're only five months in."

He added that notBlackBerry 10 models were available inmarkets during the quarter. A version with a physical keyboard, the Q10, went on sale in the United States this month.

Heins also noted the company's planned to grow its software business and said, "There's more to come, more exciting products to come."

But he did warn investors that further losses were likely this year as the company increases spending on BlackBerry 10 promotion and advertising. Heins again asked for time for the BlackBerry 10 to prove itself.

But time might be short for the company that until recently was known as Research in Motion. It was not that long ago that BlackBerry was a dominant force in smartphone sales, with 55.3% of the US market in 2009, according to technology analyst IDC. It also had a who's who of customers, including federal agencies and many large companies.

But Apple's iPhone, with its slick touchscreen interaction and downloadable apps, eroded BlackBerry's position. A Kantar Worldpanel Comtech survey puts BlackBerry's US market share at 0.9%.

The question is whether the BlackBerry 10, which can handle many of the same tasks as an iPhone or similar Android and Windows phones, can recover its slow start.

Doradla said he was hard pressed to think of any electronics products similar to the BlackBerry 10 phones that overcame a disappointing start and ended up successful.

"It's tough," he said. "If you're looking at precedents, you're just making the case for BlackBerry more awful."

Further worrying investors, Heins and other executives declined to say how many of those BlackBerry 10 phones ended up on store shelves or in warehouses rather than being purchased by consumers. Peter Misek, an analyst with Jefferies in New York, estimated that only 2.3 million of the BlackBerry 10 phones were sold to users.

"When people are actually happy with the numbers, they tell you the numbers," addedles Golvin, a technology analyst with Forrester Research.

Despite the quarterly loss, BlackBerry is not in imminent danger of collapse. It still has $3.1 billion in cash, and the company has no substantial debt. But its future as a smartphone seller is getting cloudier. Because of its small sales volume when compared with rivals, it does not have negotiating leverage with suppliers, increasing its production costs at a time when it is unable toge premium prices, analysts said.

Some people say they believe that the company's phone business has long been unprofitable and that BlackBerry's operating profits are tied to its software and services business.

Some analysts, including Misek, said BlackBerry should cut its losses in hardware and concentrate on its profitable businesses. But Heins rejected that idea on Friday, saying that his customers want a one-stop option for their communications needs.

BlackBerry did take one small step away hardware. Heins said he had canceled work on the BlackBerry 10 operating system for the PlayBook, a tablet computer. The device was introduced with fanfare in April 2011, but only 1,00,000 units were shipped in the most recent quarter. In comparison, Apple shipped an estimated 19.5 million iPads in the first quarter of 2013, according to IDC.

Notanalysts are ready to give up on BlackBerry as a phone-maker. Ramon Llamas, of IDC, said that BlackBerry's turnaround and its switch to a new operating system were not going to be quick.

"Renaissances don't take place overnight," Llamas said. "They can be long and take time."

Tutorial: How to speed up your Mac in 30 minutes

Introduction

You opened that beautiful Apple box to find your gleaming new Mac within ages ago! It booted up, and immediately the Mac seemed so much faster than what it replaced. Apps opened with a speed you found astonishing. And any task you could throw at it seemed to happen in the blink of an eye.

The novelty of your no-longer-new Mac's incredible speed wore off a long time ago. Now you find yourself tapping the table impatiently, sighing as you wait for applications to open and documents to load. And if the cursor changes to a spinning beachball, you get that sinking feeling that tells you you're going to be waiting a good long time for whatever you were doing to finish.

It isn't you. You're not getting irrationally impatient - your Mac really may be slowing down. Over time, the software you install may affect the overall performance of your Mac. What's more, software updates, full version upgrades and new versions of OS X may put additional load on your Mac. And as your hard drive fills up, files can get fragmented - that can hurt speed too.

As system and application software specifications change, your Mac's hardware itself may not be as up to the task as it once was. Faster drives, more memory and other hardware tweaks can breathe new life into an old system in dramatic ways, and you don't need to spend a lot.

There are a lot of ways to slow down your Mac, but there are a lot of ways to speed it up too. We're going to take a look at many of the ways you can restore your Mac to its original potential, and we're also going to look at the ways you can improve your Mac's performance beyond factory spec!

What's slowing down your Mac?

Take the guesswork out of tuning your Mac's performance with some helpful tools

Your Mac didn't slow down just by itself. The software running on the device, even core operating system processes, take their toll on your Mac's overall performance over time.

The first step to figuring out how to speed up your Mac is to find out what's running. To that end, OS X includes some handy tools to give you a sense ofyour system resources are being spent.

Activity Monitor

Check inside the Utilities folder on your Mac, and you'll find a tool provided by Apple that will help you understand what's running on your Mac. It even gives you a way of stopping stuff in its tracks if it's causing problems.

Activity Monitor shows youthe processes that are running on your Mac - not just applications that you might recognize, butthe discrete functions the system needs to operate, or software that you depend on may need to continue working even when it's not running.

At a glance, and by rearranging some columns by clicking on their headers, you can quickly ascertain what processes are demanding the most attention the CPU, or gobbling up the most memory.

You'll find a lot of stuff running on your Mac that might otherwise be invisible, but don't panic. These are usually legitimate things that your Mac and the software you've installed needs to work. Still, if you find a runaway process that's gobbling up resources, you can force quit it here.

Before you do, though, Google the Process Name exactly - perhaps with 'CPU', for example, if it's soaking up your processor - to check if others have solved the problem.

Activity Monitor's Memory tab

At a glance, this piet, accessible by clicking on Activity Monitor's Memory tab, tells you the state of your Mac's memory:

Free: How much RAM is available.
Wired: How much memory can't be offloaded to disk in a pinch.
Active: Information in RAM that's recently been used.
Inactive: RAM that's recently been touched by an app but that can be allocated for something else if need be. 
Used: The amount of RAM used in total.

On the right, Page Ins and Page Outs gives you a sense of how often the Mac is moving information between RAM and the hard disk. If you have a high number of Page Outs, or your piet is mostly warm colours, adding more RAM to the Mac can help improve performance.

Console

Also inside the Utilities folder is Console, a handy app that lets you check the logs your Mac produces to document what it's doing. The Mac is constantly writing notes to itself, and these notes are useful in diagnosing problems - especially kernel panics.

Console is a handy troubleshooting tool if you think an app is giving you trouble but you're not exactly sure why. OS X documents what it's doing and when it's doing it, and if an app or processes crashes it, a log will be generated telling you what happened. You can even set a preference in Console to alert you when an open log changes, if you want to keep an eye on a specific process or app that you think is giving you trouble.

Admittedly, there's a tremendous amount of alphabet soup in here, with processes running with names you may not recognize. Doing a quick Google search can usually yield answers. Apple Support Communities can also be a great resource to search for what you need.

iStat Menus

This indispensable $16 utility Bjango populates your menu bar withts and graphs that show you at a glance how full your hard disk is, what sort of inbound and outbound network traffic your Mac is experiencing, how memory is being used and much more.

30 minutes to a faster Mac

Quit open apps you don't need

Just because you've closed open windows doesn't remove apps memory - you have to remember to quit them altogether to remove their footprint the operating system.

If you're a recent Windows convert, this idea might be a bit strange to you. If you run a lot of apps simultaneously and you don't have to, make sure to actually quit them to reduce their impact on your Mac's performance.

Any app that appears in your dock with a light underneath is something that's taking up RAM. You can quit open apps by ing Quit the application menu to the right of the Apple menu while the app is active, or right-click on their Dock icon and Quit.

Clean your desktop

Do you knowthose files and folders you keep within easy reach on your desktop, or the stuff that you saved to the desktop but you're just too lazy to put away?

Technically, the Finder treats every icon on your desktop as a separate window behind the scenes, and that puts a significant additional strain on resources. Find a place for everything in the Documents folder or somewhere else you're likely to remember, away the Finder.

Clear your browser's cache

Safari can fill up with a lot of junk that will slow it down over time, and the last thing you need when you're in a hurry is a spinning beachball.

To do so, first open Safari's Preferences, then click on the Advanced button. Click the checkbox labelled 'Show Develop menu in menu bar' and a new menu will appear. Half way down the list is Empty Caches. Alternatively, try Reset Safari… in the Safari window.

Close Dashboard widgets that you don't need

The Dashboard can be a convenient way to run tools you might need occasionally, but each of them take up memory and eat up your Mac's limited resources. If you only need to know the value of British pounds against Icelandic Króna every once in a while, close the converter Widget when you're not using it (click the minus button and then click the x buttons on the Widgets you wish to close).

Reduce the number of Login Items

If your Mac is slow to boot, it may be because there are too many software processes trying to load when you first log in. You have control over this activity, however. Simply go to the System Preferences and click on Users & Groups. Click the Login Items tab, and you'll be presented with a list of software that loads before you see your desktop. the items you don't want the Mac to load, and then click the minus button below.

Run Software Update

Apple regularly posts system software updates and even occasionally produces firmware updates for its computers. Some of these can have a positive effect on performance, so they're clearly worth doing. Software Update the Apple menu to check for the latest changes, and make sure to apply them within the Mac App Store to see if your Mac can speed up a bit.

Clear caches using OnyX or another tool

How to build your own PC for Rs 26,000

I want to assemble a gaming PC for around Rs 26,000. I already have a FullHD monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers. Please suggest other components. 

— Mitul Maheshwari 

Considering you want a gaming rig, we suggest you build your computer around a graphic card. And given your budget, the AMD HD 7770 1GB (Rs 9,000 approx) is a good option. It can handle most games at FullHD - and even the graphic-intensive Battlefield 3 runs smoothly, albeit at reduced settings. 

For your processor you can choose the entry-level Intel Pentium G2020 processor (Rs 3,800 approx), or if you want more horsepower, Intel's Core i3 3220 (Rs 7,000). 

Pick up an ASUS P8B75-M LX motherboard (Rs 4,200); a 500GB hard disk Seagate or Western Digital (Rs 3,200); and 4GB DDR3 RAM Transcend or Kingston (Rs 1,800). 

For your chassis and power supply unit, we recommend the Cooler Master Elite 344 (Rs 1,900) and the Corsair VS350 (Rs 2,200), respectively. And you can buy an LG or Samsung internal DVD drive (Rs 1,000).

Micromax Canvas Lite phablet launched at Rs 8,499

NEW DELHI: Micromax has today launched its Canvas LiteA92 smartphone in the Indian smartphone market. This handset is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor, runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and has been priced at Rs 8,499. The phone is currently available on e-commerce websites and will hit the stores over the weekend.

The all-new Canvas LiteA92 has a 5-inch touchscreen with 800x480p resolution and 187ppi pixel density. This handset's dual-core Mediatek chipset is backed by 512MB RAM; it also has 4GB internal storage and supports up to 32GB expansion via microSD card.

On the back of the phone is a 5MP fixed-focus camera with LED flash, but Canvas Lite does not have a front-facing unit. Connectivity features in the device include 2G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and microUSB. Micromax claims that the 2,000mAh battery of the phone offers 6 hours 30 minutes of talk time. 

Key specs:

Display: 5-inch touchscreen with 800x480p resolution and 187ppi pixel density; Operating system: Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean);

Processor & RAM: 1GHz dual-core CPU, 512MB RAM;

Storage: 4GB internal storage, up to 32GB via microSD card;

Connectivity: 2G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and microUSB;

Camera: 5MP rear camera with LED flash; and

Battery: 2,000mAh

Google's new London HQ to be in 'groundscraper'

LONDON: Google has revealed that its new UK headquarters is a building longer than the Shard skyscraper is tall. 

The so-called groundscraper at the King's Cross Central development is the latest overseas property deal by the cash-rich US internet group, which will houseof its London staff under one roof when completed in 2016. 

Google revealed designs for the low-rise one million square feet scheme on Friday after announcing its move to King's Cross in January. 

At 330-metre long, it exceeds the height of the 310-metre tall Shard, western Europe's tallest skyscraper. 

Swiss bank UBS is undertaking a similar large-scale low-rise scheme at the Broadgate complex in London's main financial district. 

Several thousand people will work at the site - a large scale operation Google would have found difficult to house in space-constrained central Londonland is also more expensive. 

Google has spent about 650 million pounds to buy and develop the 2.4-acre site and the finished development will be worth up to one billion pounds, sources told Reuters. 

Construction will start early next year subject to planning approval and it will be one of the internet giant's largest offices outside its so-called Googleplex corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. 

The internet giant is a prized tenant for landlords and its presence is expected to draw other technology companies to King's Cross - especially small start-ups - and help bump up rents. 

The new site is likely to include a 20,000 square feet area for bike parking, about the size of seven tennis courts, and features a climbing wall between floors, a source close to the project told Reuters. 

The company's offices are famous for perksgourmet food, bowling alleys, roof gardens, high-tech gyms and on-site medical staff and massages. 

King's Cross Central, which sits on a former fish, coal and grain goods yard to the north of the city, spans 67-acre and will contain homes, offices and shops. It is being built by the King's Cross Central Limited Partnership which includes developer Argent Group. 

Google has traditionally leased its overseas offices but in the past two years has purchased premises in Paris, Dublin, and now London, its filings show. 

As of December 31, 2011, Google had $44.6 billion of cash, with $21.2 billion of that held offshore, according to its 2011 annual report. If the funds held offshore were repatriated, they would be subject to US taxes, Google said. 

Tax campaigner and accountant Richard Murphy told Reuters at the time of the January announcement that the decision to buy rather than rent was likely "tax motivated," driven by the fact the company cannot repatriate the cash to the US without paying a fat tax bill. 

Google declined to comment on the tax issue in relation to its new London building but said such a large-scale investment was a boost to the Britain's economy. 

Earlier this month British MPs described Google's tax affairs as "contrived" after a Reuters report showed the company employed staff in sales roles in London, even though it had told MPs in November its British staff were not selling to UK clients - an activity that could boost its tax bill substantially.

Google's internet balloons may come to India

HYDERABAD: Internet search giant Google may implement 'Project Loon', which is a balloon-mounted internet access service, in various countries including India. 

"We are doing a pilot project in New Zealand and going to see how it works. Once we get satisfactory results, we will be in a position to implement it in other countries as well," Google's managing director, Global Channel Sales, Todd Towe told reporters. 

"Interestingly, while we are still in the pilot phase, we have been getting multiple queries different countries including India, which are interested in implementing the project," Towe said. 

However, he said, there is no time-frame to launch the project in India.

'Project Loon' balloons, which carry internet signal antennas float in the stratosphere, at a height twice as high as air planes. 

They are carried around the earth by winds and can be steered by rising or lowering them to a particular altitude, with winds moving in the desired direction. 

Customers may connect to Google's balloon network using a special internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces balloon to balloon, onto the internet and back to the earth. 

A 'Project Loon' pilot project began on June 15 at the 40th parallel South, which is a circle of latitude, that is 40 degrees south of the earth's equatorial plane, when 30 balloons launched New Zealand's South Island beamed internet signals to a small group of pilot testers. 

The experience of these pilot testers will be used to refine the technology and shape the next phase of 'Project Loon', Google had said earlier. 

Speaking about the company's Premier Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Partner Programme, Rowe said within 10 months of its launch, the model has gained significant momentum in India. 

"We have partnered with 16 medium sized companies, with over 3,000 sales people who have been trained to help SMEs gain digital advertising. In the next one year, we are looking to significantly increase our presence in South India by doubling our partners and add another 3,000 sales force though these partners," Rowe said. 

Jaspreet Bindra, CEO, Getit Infomedia, one of the largest Premier SME Partners of Google India said that it had entered into a strategic alliance with Google India, though its SME programme to increase Getit's presence in the country.

India becomes happy hunting ground for SAP

BANGALORE: For German business software maker SAP, its India unit has become a fertile poaching ground for talent, with the Walldorf-based company elevating at least five Indian executives to global leadership roles during the last year. 

The latest such is the choice for India human resources head Bhuvaneswar Naik for a global role in the HR team, based in Singapore. Anil Warrier, a director of talent acquisition at SAP, India has been elevated as global head for early-talent acquisition, based in the UK, in January this year. In December, VR Ferose, managing director of SAP Labs India, was named the head of the Globalization Services Organization.

"Companies understand the criticality of India as a fast-growing market and a source of large-scale talent and they often involve Indian executives in decision-making," said CK Guruprasad, a principal at global technology and services division of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. "Moreover, there's a shortage of leadership talent at the global level."

Anirban Dey, who took over as managing director of SAP Labs India Ferose, said that globally, SAP is welcoming an increasing number of Indians to its senior management team as the country transitions a back-office location to a fast-growing market.

India's is the third-largest market for SAP after Germany and the United States, with sales of around Rs 7,000 crore and an employee base of over 6,000. "SAP looks at India as a ground of talent and it's now a trend within the company," Dey said.

Other leaders who were recently chosen for global roles include Dilipkumar Khandelwal, a senior vice-president at SAP India who now heads global development teams in human capital and supplier relationship management, and Pravin Agarwala, who heads its cloud product Bydesign.

According to experts, success and experience in a complex market such as India makes senior executives here well-suited for challenging global roles. "India is a difficult markets to crack, so people who do well in this market are often given bigger opportunities," said Aditya Narayan Mishra, head of the staffing business at human resources services firm Randstad India.

Unlike markets such as Latin America and China,local culture is dominant, Indian employees are exposed to an international language and work-culture an early stage in their careers.