HMD gets iconic Nokia PureView trademark: Camera-centric phone in offing?

HMD Global, the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer behind the Nokia-branded devices, has acquired the rights to use the PureView trademark, according to a report by technology portal GSMArena, which has cited a listing of the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). This could mean that the Finnish company might be working on a camera-centric flagship smartphone that could resurrect Nokia’s PureView series.

In retrospect, the PureView was once a trademark of Nokia’s camera-centric smartphones. In 2012, the Finnish company introduced the Nokia 808 PureView smartphone with a mammoth 41-megapixel primary camera, coupled with several industry first camera-centric features such as optical image stabilisation, ND filter, mechanical shutter, bright Xenon flash and ability to save photos in RAW format. These features revolutionised the smartphone industry and marked the beginning of camera-centric smartphones. This was followed by other smartphone brands such as Samsung, Sony and HTC.

No more pesky calls! Tech Mahindra joins Microsoft to develop a technology

Tech Mahindra and Microsoft have partnered to develop blockchain-based technology to curb pesky calls and SMS as recommended by telecom regulator Trai.

"Tech Mahindra...announced today its collaboration with Microsoft to create a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based solution to build a robust ecosystem in line with the regulations issued by Trai," a joint statement by the two companies said.

Based on blockchain technology and built on Microsoft Azure, the solution aims at mitigating the issue of unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) in the country, it said.

According to Trai's new rules to quell pesky calls, telecom operators are required to deploy blockchain-based technology to prevent unauthorised access of subscribers data, make system non-repudiative and enhance confidentiality.

This is apparently first-of-its-kind technology in the world to be deployed to prevent leakages of consumer information from unauthorised telemarketers.

Microsoft bans cryptocurrency ads on Bing; calls it a risk for its users

After Facebook and Google, Microsoft has now banned advertisements showing cryptocurrencies and related products from its Bing search engine.

"Because cryptocurrency and related products are not regulated, we have found them to present a possible elevated risk to our users with the potential for bad actors to participate in predatory behaviours, or otherwise scam consumers," Melissa Alsoszatai-Petheo, Advertiser policy manager at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Wednesday.

"To help protect our users from this risk, we have made the decision to disallow advertising for cryptocurrency, its related products, and un-regulated binary options," she added.

Bing Ads will implement this change globally in June, with enforcement rolling out in late June to early July.

Google in March announced that it would ban advertisements for cryptocurrencies and other "speculative financial products" across its ad platforms.

Rajnath urges Gates foundation to build "Model Villages" in India

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday requested Microsoft founder and head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, to concentrate on making "Model Villages" to inspire the local people.

Singh, who met Gates here today, had requested him to initiate health awareness programmes in the country.

The home minister suggested that the Foundation should concentrate on developing villages and make them model ones.

He also appreciated various welfare works being undertaken by the Gates foundation in India.

Gates explained the various technologies being adopted by them in the field of agriculture and sanitation.

He also assured the home minister that the Foundation will offer constructive support to India.
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Microsoft to release Office 2019 next year with better mobile linking power

Microsoft has announced that Office 2019 would be available in the second half of 2018.

The 2019 suite is said to be for people who don't want their apps and services in the cloud, the CNN reports.
The suite will include the standard apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and server versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business.

The company, at its Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, said that Office 2019 will include more IT features and server upgrades to improve usability, voice and security,

The apps will also come with better linking capabilities for mobile devices, such as pressure sensitivity and tilt effects.

The last major update to the suite was Microsoft Office 2016, which came out in 2015.
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Digital transformation should not degrade humanity: Satya Nadella

With organisations across the globe going through an unprecedented level of digital transformation to enhance productivity, Microsoft's India-born chief Satya Nadella today cautioned that new technologies should not "degrade" humanity but provide new levels of inclusiveness.

In his keynote address at Microsoft's Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida Nadella spoke about the upcoming quantum computing era and gave examples of how it could help solve some of the planets biggest challenges.

"We want more productivity and efficiency but we do not want to degrade humanity," Nadella said at the conference being attended by some 25,000 technology experts and analysts.

"We want technology to provide new levels of inclusiveness," Nadella said, as his Ignite keynote was being translated for the first time in 12 languages with the use of artificial intelligence.

"As we talk about technology, one of the things we need as technologists and decision makers is keeping in mind the timeless values that drive what we do," he said, adding that the most critical thing "for us is to bring all of us, across our functional roles, across all our expertise and skills," to support this process of continuous change and renewal.

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Now, Nawaz Sharif's daughter accused of 'Fontgate'; Twitter goes berserk

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's daughter Maryam Nawaz was in the midst of a raging controversy on Tuesday after the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) probing the Panamagate graft case against her family alleged that she submitted fake documents. JIT accused Maryam of presenting tampered documents on two 2006 declarations to the probe team. Interestingly, the font used in the documents pertaining to the year 2006 is "Calibri", which was not commercially available until January 30, 2007.

The JIT said Maryam Nawaz, her brothers Hussain and Hassan Nawaz, as well as her husband Captain Mohammad Safdar (retd), had signed false documents to mislead the Supreme Court.

The controversy

The members of JIT, after having received the documents from Maryam Nawaz, forwarded the documents to a British forensic handwriting firm which revealed that the ‘Calibri’ font used by Maryam in its documents had not been made available by Microsoft at the time. According to a report of Express Tribune, the font used in documents suggested that the 2006 declarations were fake and it is a federal crime.

Earlier, JIT in its 10-volume report submitted to the apex court recommended that a corruption case should be filed against Sharif and his sons Hassan Nawaz and Hussain Nawaz, as well as daughter Maryam Nawaz, under the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) ordinance 1999.
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India presses Microsoft for Windows discount in wake of cyber attacks

India is pressing Microsoft Corp to offer a sharply discounted one-time deal to the more than 50 million Windows users in the country so that they can upgrade to the latest Windows 10 operating system in the wake of ransomware attacks.

Microsoft officials in India have "in principle agreed" to the request, Gulshan Rai, India's cyber security coordinator, told Reuters over the phone on Friday.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft in India declined to comment on the matter. Officials at the company's headquarters in the United States and regional headquarters in Asia also declined to comment.

If Microsoft agreed to such a discount, it could open up the global software giant to similar requests from around the world. Rai said the government was in talks with Microsoft management in India. It is not immediately clear whether any other countries were seeking similar deals.

Rai said India began talks with Microsoft after the WannaCry ransomware attack last month, noting that both WannaCry and this week's attack, dubbed by some cyber experts "NotPetya", exploited vulnerabilities in older iterations of the Windows OS.

"The quantum of the price cut, we expect some detail on in a couple of days," Rai said, adding the Indian government expected the company to offer the software at "throw-away prices."

"It will be a one-time upgrade offer to Windows 10 and it will be a discounted price for the entire country," said Rai, who was hand-picked by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be the country's first cyber security chief.

Rai declined to be more specific, but said he was confident that it would be "less than a quarter of the current price."

Rai, who has over two decades of experience in different IT areas including cyber security, said his team began coordinating with government agencies and regulators to push for OS upgrades soon after the WannaCry attack began on May 12.
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Amazon shares break $1,000; accounts for 17% market cap of the S&P 500

Amazon.com on Tuesday became the second of the current S&P 500 components to hit the $1,000 price mark, beating Google parent Alphabet to the punch and underscoring a massive rally in large-cap technology-related stocks.

Shares of Amazon have risen 33 percent so far in 2017 alone, adding roughly $120 billion to its market value. Priceline was the first S&P 500 stock to hit $1,000, doing so in September 2013. Analysts on average expect Amazon to rise another 10 percent according to the median price target of $1,100.

"The world is becoming more and more aware of how unstoppable the business plan is," said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Asset Management in New York. He said Amazon accounts for 3.5 percent to 5 percent of the firm's portfolios.

"The $1,000 is a bit of a psychological barrier for any stock, but it is just another number and we're still big believers in it."

Among the other four largest U.S. companies by market cap, Apple and Facebook share prices have also risen nearly 33 percent this year while Alphabet has gained 26 percent and Microsoft has added 13 percent.

The combined market cap of the top five is near $3 trillion, or more than 13 percent of the S&P 500 index stocks' capitalization.

Amazon, the only one of the top five not in the technology sector, accounts for 17 percent of the market cap of the S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector.

In terms of stock prices, Amazon's high of $1,001.20 is second among the S&P 500 behind Priceline, which recently hit $1,850.50. Priceline's near $92 billion market cap is, however, runs far below Amazon's $476 billion.

Apple dominates that metric with a capitalization of more than $800 billion.

Amazon beat Alphabet, which recently hit $994.32, in a race to $1,000. The other S&P component above $900 per share is Intuitive Surgical, at $912.80.

Apple three years ago split its stock in seven. If it had not, its current stock price would be about $1,080.11.

Amazon is ahead of Facebook in the race to become the fourth U.S. company with a market cap of more than half a trillion dollars, joining Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft.
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Are public sector organisations prone to cyber-attacks on old computers?

Hospitals across Britain were crippled by the recent ransomware cyber-attack, making the country’s National Health Service one of the most high-profile victims of the global incident.

The government has been criticised for cutting IT support for the health service and failing to replace old computer systems. Meanwhile, ministers hit out at NHS bosses for not improving cybersecurity, amid reports that an upgrade that could have prevented the attack was made available a month ago.

This story doesn’t feel too surprising. Anyone who regularly deals with public services in person will probably have seen government employees struggling with outdated computer systems. Certainly, other major state-run organisations have also been hit by the ransomware, including German railway company Deutsche Bahn and the US Department of Homeland Security. But is the public sector really any worse than the private sector at keeping its IT security up to date and avoiding cybercrime?

The recent “WannaCry” attack was made possible by a flaw in the 15-year-old Windows XP operating system. Software manufacturers often provide updates or patches to their products after they discover such a flaw, to prevent cyber-criminals from exploiting it. However, Microsoft stopped routinely updating XP in 2014, and those still using it have to pay for custom support to receive any further patches.

Once the company became aware of the WannaCry flaw, it was quick to release a patch back in March. But because many customers were still using unsupported versions of XP, WannaCry rapidly infected a large number of systems when it emerged in May. Microsoft then made its patch available to all XP users but many of those who didn’t update immediately were caught out. This is exactly what happened within the NHS.
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India a land of software developers: Microsoft official

India has become a land of software developers with the country accounting for the third largest number of such professionals, a senior Microsoft official has said.

Driven by immense opportunities that the Indian government's digitisation programme has offered and the fact that it opens up a new vista of more than a billion plus market inside the country, there is a new level of enthusiasm and confidence among the Indian developers community, said Narendra Bhandari, GM Developer Group in India, Microsoft.

"The impact of these policy initiatives like demonetisation and GST, which is being rolled out soon, on software developers is that people who are building these applications are now thinking, how do I build these applications for a billion people, not for the twenty million people living in Bangalore and Mumbai and Delhi," Bhandari told PTI in an interview.

The huge size of the market itself and the potential of reaching out to every nook and corner of the world is a big motivating factor the developers in India, who are now coming out with "amazing" software and mobile apps.

It is estimated that there are around four to five million developers in India and it ranks third after China and the United States, he said, adding that developers in India have moved from just code-writing to product development.

"Over last two to three years .. A lot of the developers now are not just building applications but they're building experiences, they're building retail capabilities, they're building supply chain infrastructure, they're building business applications. That has changed the landscape quite a bit," he said.

The ecosystem in India has changed where it's not just "I want to work on a large project and every three months or six months I'll have a release, now you're working on a project and you come up with capabilities every few weeks," Bhandari said.
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Wall Street go red as tech, consumer discretionary stocks decline

US stocks were slightly lower on Thursday, with the Dow on track for its third straight day of losses, led by declines in consumer discretionary and technology sectors.

Macy's disappointing profit and a 11 per cent slump in shares took a toll on the consumer discretionary sector, which fell 0.52 per cent with all of its components in the red.

Kohl's was down about 2 per cent despite beating profit estimate.

"Retail is front-and-center because it has been a sore area for the market over the last year or two," said Adam Sarhan, chief executive officer at 50 Park Investments.

At 9:41 am EDT the Dow Jones industrial average was down 40.78 points, or 0.19 per cent, at 20,902.33, the S&P 500 was down 7.72 points, or 0.32 per cent, at 2,391.91 and the Nasdaq Composite was down 21.11 points, or 0.34 per cent, at 6,108.04.

Ten of the 11 major S&P 500 sectors were lower. Technology was down 0.3 per cent, following losses in Microsoft and Intel.

Shares of Snapchat owner Snap Inc plunged 20 per cent after the company reported a slowdown in user growth and revenue in its first earnings report as a public company.

Straight Path fell 20 per cent after agreeing to be bought by Verizon for $184 per share and terminated an earlier deal with AT&T.

Whole Foods was up 5 per cent after the grocer shook up its board and appointed a new CFO.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers on the NYSE by 1,836 to 718. On the Nasdaq, 1,662 issues fell and 606 advanced.

The S&P 500 index showed six 52-week highs and six lows, while the Nasdaq recorded 28 highs and 16 lows.
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Apple tops Fortune's most admired companies list, no Indian firm makes cut

 Latest News - Tech giant Apple has been named the most admired company in the world, followed by Amazon and Starbucks in a list compiled by Fortune magazine, but no Indian firm could make the cut.

Others in the top ten include Berkshire Hathaway, Disney, Alphabet, General Electric, Southwest Airlines, Facebook and Microsoft.

According to Fortune, some 3,800 executives, analysts, directors and experts voted for these companies.

Fortune collaborated with its partner Korn Ferry Hay Group on this survey of corporate reputations.

"We began with a universe of about 1,500 candidates: the 1,000 largest US companies ranked by revenue, along with non-US companies in Fortune's Global 500 database that have revenues of USD 10 billion or more (Read More)

Tata Motors logs into Microsoft to improve in-car connected experience