Saturday, October 8, 2011

Kyocera Makes Haptics Happen

from http://hothardware.com:

>>According to a report by Tech-On!, Kyocera Corp. demoed a new touchscreen panel for mobile devices at CEATEC Japan that simulates the feeling of touching a physical button.

Bearing the moniker “New Sensation Touch Panel”, the new touchscreen apparently uses piezoelectric elements embedded between the LCD and touch panels. When the user’s finger touches a given spot on the screen, the piezo elements sense the pressure and vibrate, which gives the user the sense that they’re touching a physical button.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Wedbush Analysts Reiterate a “Outperform” Rating on Jamba (JMBA)

from http://localizedusa.com:

>>Jamba (NASDAQ: JMBA)‘s stock had its “outperform” rating reaffirmed by equities research analysts at Wedbush in a research note issued to investors on Thursday. The analysts currently have a $2.50 price target on the stock.

Samsung Q3 Profit Beats Estimates on Smartphones

from Bloomberg:

>>Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s second-largest maker of mobile phones, reported profit that beat analysts’ estimates as demand for Galaxy smartphones outweighed slumping sales of displays and semiconductors.

“I’m quite amazed,” said Lee Seung Woo, a Seoul-based analyst at Shinyoung Securities Co. “It seems like there was a big surprise on the smartphone side.”

The company, which aims to sell more than 60 million smartphones this year, probably shipped half of that in the third quarter, Shinyoung’s Lee said.

Samsung will likely meet its target to sell more than 300 million handsets this year, including basic models, J.K. Shin, head of Samsung’s mobile-phone division, said Sept. 26.

The South Korean company’s sales accelerated from the second quarter after it began selling the Galaxy S II, a successor to its best-selling Android device introduced last year to counter Apple’s iPhone.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

KDDI haptic touch screen pushes your buttons

from http://news.cnet.com:

>>If you're always pressing the wrong icon on your smartphone touch screen, Japan's KDDI is working on a haptic screen that makes it feel like you're pushing a button instead of just a flat surface.

Prototypes shown off here at Ceatec 2011 respond to pressure and provide a sensation of clicking a keyboard button. The cellphone giant demoed potential applications including easier Web browsing and more interactive game playing.

The tech was developed for industrial applications by Kyocera, which was exhibiting a small tactile screen for industrial use at the trade show outside Tokyo. It consists of a touch panel sitting on an LCD with piezoelectric elements.

Video Tour of SY3 – Equinix’s Third IBX Data Center in Sydney

Earlier this year, Equinix announced the phase one opening of its third International Business Exchange™ (IBX) data centre in Sydney, known as SY3.

SY3 provides 1,000 cabinet equivalents of capacity, expanding to 3,000 with subsequent phases. The new IBX significantly increases the company’s Sydney capacity and ability to meet high demand for premium colocation and interconnection data centre services.

http://blog.equinix.com/2011/10/video-tour-of-sy3-equinixs-third-ibx-data-center-in-sydney/

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Tier 3 to Bring Enterprise-grade Virtual Private Cloud to New York with New Data Center

Tier 3's Multi-Region Architecture Provides Highly Available, Secure Hybrid Cloud for Business Continuity, Business Agility. Enhancements to Tier 3 Enteprise Cloud Platform Announced at Interop NY.

New York, NY (PRWEB) October 05, 2011

Today at Interop NY, enterprise cloud platform provider Tier 3 announced that it will add a data center in the New York metro area to complete the multi-region architecture of its enterprise-grade infrastructure as a service solution. New York joins Seattle and Chicago for a three-region model that enhances the high availability and built-in business continuity of the Tier 3 enterprise cloud. With its intuitive management controls, high performing, highly availability infrastructure and platform-agnostic orchestration and automation layer, Tier 3 meets the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) requirements of companies wishing to deploy public or virtual private (hybrid) clouds for increased business agility.

"Enterprises across the country are actively identifying apps they can move to a virtual private cloud, but to do so they are demanding a true enterprise-grade cloud platform that provides control, transparency, security, performance and a high availability five 9 SLA," said Adam Wray, CEO, Tier 3. "These customers also want to benefit from the peace of mind of built-in, multi-zone business continuity features and the value that advanced operation automation or auto-ops capabilities bring to significantly reducing operational complexity and costs. Tier 3 meets all of those customer requirements."

Tier 3 chose to locate in New York based on frequent requests from customers, prospects and partners for a regional solution that offers high performance and low latency with the best combination of cloud-based utility and enterprise-grade availability and security. Tier 3 elected to collocate in Equinix's New York IBX® (International Business Exchange™) for its enterprise-grade connectivity and carrier-neutral environment. This allows the company to offer Tier 3 Direct Connect for secure, performance-optimized connectivity - including Cross Connects and Equinix's Carrier Ethernet Exchange as well as private VLAN and VPN.

Benefits of Bringing the Tier 3 Cloud to New York:

  • Filling Gap in Region's Public Cloud Market: Tier 3 provides a virtual private cloud IaaS solution fully managed thru the operating system, which eliminates the complexity of managing bare metal while still empowering enterprises with the control and transparency they require in a hybrid or virtual private cloud. With Tier 3 Direct Connect, New York metro customers can leverage private, secure, and performance-optimized connectivity.
  • Enhances Robust Built-In Business Continuity: Today, with every enterprise server deployment, Tier 3 keeps multiple copies mirrored locally and replicated automatically to an alternate data center, thus preserving a rolling 14-day backup. The new multi-region architecture now also ensures risk mitigation for single point of failure issues while allowing for complex deployments to be "rolled" across geographic regions. These new features compliment Tier 3's other enterprise-grade cloud features, including 99.999% SLA across entire system; high availability via provisioning across clusters with separate ESX hosts; secure multi-tenancy architecture, compliance and audit-ready policies and monitoring; and built-in business continuity/disaster recovery.

Availability: Tier 3 expects to be operational in New York by the end of the quarter. Visit Tier 3 to demo this solution, including the Autoscaler 2.0 features announced at this show, this week at Interop NY booth 804.

KDDI haptic smartphone prototype

From Engadget:

>>Surprisingly, the feedback was effective to the point that we could even feel the ridges on the virtual keypad -- KDDI's ambition with this is to allow the partially-sighted to touch-type (presumably alongside some UI visual aid as well), while everyone else can also benefit from preemptive hyperlink selection in the web browser with the help of fine haptic feedback, thus reducing the chances of hitting the wrong links (see the video below). We were also impressed by the pressure sensor on the touch layer that enabled a "soft punch" input and a "hard punch" input in the demo game, so you can imagine the possibilities with even more layers implemented; except the prototype we saw was already bulky enough. Regardless, as far as availability is concerned there's no info just yet, though this technology is currently patent pending.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

BATS Europe data centre migration

Following two successful dress rehearsals, the BATS Europe data centre migration is on schedule to launch live trading at its new facility in Equinix Slough (LD4) on Monday, October 10.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Data Center-Related Stocks End Rough Quarter

Read the whole article at Seeking Alpha:

>>The worst quarter for the stock market since the financial crisis in 2008 ended on Friday, and data center related stocks were no exception to the trend.

To put some performances within the surrounding environment, the S&P 500 has lost 14.3% since July 1, and the DOW dropped 12.1% in the same time frame.