iPod Nano with Video

Apple introduces new iPod Nano, A quick scroll through the menu takes you to the video camera. Then you’re ready to record video in portrait or landscape — perfect for emailing or posting on Facebook or MobileMe. A built-in mic lets you capture audio, too. And when you play back your video on iPod nano, you’ll hear the recorded audio with it. All of which means your indispensable music player is now your indispensable video camera.

Wataniya Telecom, Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS) and Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today launched the BlackBerry® solution in Kuwait. The BlackBerry solution brings together smartphones, software and services to allow easy wireless access to email, phone, calendar, web, multimedia and other business and lifestyle applications. Wataniya customers in Kuwait will now be able to enjoy the freedom and productivity benefits of using BlackBerry® smartphones to stay connected to people and information on the go.

“By providing the BlackBerry solution to customers in Kuwait, Wataniya further demonstrates its commitment to providing innovative technology and sophisticated products to satisfy the needs of its customers, and as such, will offer its best-ever service plans to meet customer needs and expectations,” said Scott Gegenheimer, GM&CEO of Wataniya Telecom. “The BlackBerry solution is the ideal choice for customers who are looking for mobile phones that can serve both business needs and entertainment. The depth of functionality and variety of applications available for BlackBerry smartphones makes them ideal for both enterprise users and consumers alike.”

Babar Khan, CEO of Emitac Mobile Solution (EMS), RIM’s strategic channel partner in the region, said “We are delighted to partner with Wataniya Kuwait to bring the many benefits of the BlackBerry solution to their customers. We will be supporting Wataniya Kuwait in their everyday mission by bringing the latest BlackBerry products and services to the market.”

Mark Guibert, Vice President, Corporate Marketing at RIM added: “We are very pleased to work with EMS and Wataniya Telecom to introduce the BlackBerry solution to their customers in Kuwait. BlackBerry smartphones are popular with people around the world who want well-balanced mobile phones that deliver advanced features, refined usability and stylish designs.”

At launch, Wataniya Telecom will offer the BlackBerry® Bold™ and the BlackBerry® Curve™ 8900 smartphones.

The BlackBerry Bold is a communications and multimedia powerhouse. It is the first BlackBerry smartphone to support tri-band HSDPA high-speed networks around the world and comes with integrated GPS and Wi-Fi® (802.11 a/b/g). It features a lustrous black exterior, satin chrome finished frame and stylish leatherette back plate as well as a stunning display, sophisticated user interface and newly designed full-QWERTY keyboard.

The BlackBerry Curve 8900 packs a wide range of advanced communications and multimedia capabilities in the thinnest and lightest full-QWERTY BlackBerry smartphone available. As with all BlackBerry smartphones, it gives users the industry’s leading mobile email and messaging solution together with access to a wide range of other mobile business and consumer applications. In addition to being an exceptional phone that offers access to email, messaging, organizer, web browser and multimedia applications, the new BlackBerry Curve 8900 smartphone features built-in Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g), GPS for location-based applications, Bluetooth® 2.0, a next generation processor (512MHz) and a dazzling hi-resolution display, enabling customers to remain connected, productive and entertained while on the move.

Webnewswire

ITQ8 Forum will hold its third meet on May 31 in Kuwait with the theme of “Planning for a successful ERP System Implementation”. The forum is convened by Chandrashekhar Nene, CIO of Wataniya Airways under the initiative of United Business Group, organizers of the forum said yesterday.

Nene will deliver an introductory talk on the “Need for ERP and extracting value from the system.” Nene as he is known in Kuwait IT fraternity has an extensive experience of over 31 years. He has successfully concluded complex ERP projects, for 4 major corporations in Asia, Africa and Middle East regions.

In the recent past the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been an important building block within the IT architecture of majority of corporations at Kuwait. This has primarily been the result of the immense pressures put in by the recessionary trends in the global market.

ERP systems are, if used judiciously, an excellent tool to manage the corporate expenditure and improve the financial performance. Therefore, a presentation on this subject, by a senior IT practitioner would very useful for all our members of the IT fraternity, the organizers added.

This talk would be followed by a detailed presentation by Sriram Papani, Senior Vice President, at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. He will present on the “Successful Implementation of the ERP system in an Organization”. Papani has an extensive experience of over 22 years, in the field of Enterprise Applications, who heads Satyam’s Enterprise Application Practice globally.

This will be followed by a presentation on HP Procurve Solutions by a Technical Expert from the Hewlett Packard, Systems, (HP) team. The United Business Group, along with some prominent IT professionals in Kuwait has launched the ITQ8 forum on November 13, 2008. The inaugural event, sponsored by IBM and Lenovo, happened to be a tremendous success with over 100 enthusiastic participants from the IT space.

According to the organizers, UBG has partnered with industry giants like IBM, Lenovo and HP and also works closely with the likes of Satyam, Kale Consultants, Nalsoft etc on various projects. United Business Group has been phenomenal in bringing together the IT Fraternity under one umbrella, the ITQ8 Forum, in a very short time.

The second meet of the ITQ8 Forum, held on January 29, 2009, was attended by over 100 decision makers from the IT domain with experts like Dr Fadi Chehayeb, CIO, National Bank of Kuwait. The ITQ8 Forum will be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Farwaniya at 6.30 pm.

Kuwait Times

Within the range of its unique and exclusive client services, VIVA Tuesday announced in a press release the launch of a new service – VIVA Land.

The service comes as a gateway to more comprehensive range of content services which comprises of educational, interactive and recreational services via SMS and MMS.

VIVA PR & Communications Manager, Hind Al-Nahedh said that the new package of services introduced would meet the needs of clients, which Al-Nahedh described as deserving the best. She stressed that the service comes in appreciation of the trust invested in VIVA by its clients ever since its launch in December last year.

She added that VIVA services meet the aspirations and dreams of clients and they were presented new exclusive packages within VIVAs VAS Campaign.

Al-Nahedh said that VIVAs VAS content launch would enable clients to choose their service categories, which included newscasts from CNN and BBC and also from Arabic channels such as Al-Jazeera both in Arabic and English, in addition to local and international news bulletins. It also offers weather, sports, business, entertainment and other reports.

She added that the VAS content launch also offered recitations from the Holy Quran, prayers, hymns and a vast collection of services such as consultancies, prayer timings, daily talk, daily duaa, programs such as ” In the Realm of Allah” and ” In the Realm of the Prophet”, Quranic interpretations in addition to a wide range of religious additions comprising of religion-inspired background displays, mosques, recitations of hymns and verses of the Holy Quran.

She pointed out that this launch also offered artistic services for ladies through which women would be able to receive daily tips on the mobile in various spheres of interest.

The launch also included entertainment and amusement services, which comprised of movie videos, comic strips, sports footages, documentaries and many other services, and clients would be able to forward any of these items to family members and friends, which made the launch yet more exclusive and unique, Al-Nahedh concluded.

alwatan

Yesterday, both Apple and Microsoft issued whopper security patches. The way they were handled shows that Apple has a lot to learn from Microsoft about security. Here are the four most important ones.

Patch it faster

As this latest patch shows, Apple is very slow at fixing security problems with Mac OS X. Two of the security problems were big ones, uncovered in March at the “Pwn2Own” annual hacking contest sponsored by 3Com’s TippingPoint. Waiting two months to fix the problems is simply too long. On March 27, Mozilla fixed the security problem found with Firefox. And it turns out that the version of Internet Explorer 8 hacked at the conference wasn’t final, and the final version of IE 8 wasn’t vulnerable.

The Apple patch fixed a total of 67 bugs. The Microsoft one fixed only 14. The reason? Microsoft issues these patches regularly, so they’re out the door as quickly as possible. Apple waits far longer, and issues them in a bigger batch.

According to Computerworld, many of the patches were related to Open Source applications or components integrated with Mac OS X, such as Apache Web server and the WebKit browser rendering engine. Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, said that he had seen patches for those security holes issued for Linux nearly half a year ago in December. Yet Apple waited until May to fix them.

Storms also said that Apple should follow the way that Microsoft issues patches more frequently. Here’s what he told Computerworld about Apple waiting longer than Microsoft to issue patches:

Read more

Apacer, a digital storage hardware and software company launched two flash drives-Serial Advanced Technology Attachment [SATA] flash drive 254 for industrial purpose and SATA flash drive 254 M for commercial purpose. “Flash drive technology is the next big thing and Apacer finds demand in military, medical, surveillance, banking and laptop market.. We estimate that in future 50 percent of laptops will use this technology,” says Sriram Venkat, India Country Head, Apacer.

Hard drives have dominated the storage market till now. Hard drives are cheap and offer more than one terabyte of storage space. Hard drives, if dropped can get damaged and there are chances that the data will be lost. Flash Drives does not have any moving object inside and even if they are dropped the data will not be lost. Venkat says “Mobile radar units, surveillance camera, ATM machines and high tech medical instruments will be using this technology.” Apacer’s competitors Hitachi and Toshiba are in the rat race to tap the market.

SATA flash drive 254 can read and write data at a speed of 150/130 MB/sec and SATA flash drive 254 M upto 150/90 MB/sec with maximum capacity of 128 GB. These flash drives have a low power detection technology, which saves data if the power is too low to avoid data loss. It also proactively tells user to back up their data if some problem arises.

SAFD 254 is available in 64GB and 128GB priced at $640 and $1256, while SAFD 254M is available in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB, priced at $136, $236 and $436, respectively.

Siliconindia

Microsoft Corp. should give Windows Vista Ultimate owners a free upgrade to Windows 7, an analyst said Monday.

“I’d like to see a free upgrade [to Windows 7] for Vista Ultimate users,” said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. “It would buy them a lot of good will, and I don’t think it would cost them much.”

Cherry cited Microsoft’s failure to deliver on the promise of “Ultimate Extras” as his reason for urging the company to compensate users.

Ultimate Extras was one of the features Microsoft cited in the months leading up to the early-2007 release of Windows Vista Ultimate to distinguish it from lower-priced versions. According to Microsoft’s marketing, Extras was to regularly provide “cutting-edge programs, innovative services and unique publications” only to Ultimate users.

But users quickly took Microsoft to task for failing to offer very many add-ons. Five months after Vista’s launch, critics began complaining, and Microsoft said that it would do better.

Two months later, users again blasted Microsoft as the company’s self-imposed deadline for delivering more add-ons came and went without any new downloads. The last time Microsoft delivered Extras was in September 2008, when it released a puzzle game, some sound effects and three screensavers.

Last February, in fact, Microsoft announced that it would drop the concept from Windows 7’s Ultimate edition. “Our new approach to planning and building Windows doesn’t have the capacity to continue to deliver features outside the regular release cycle,” a company spokeswoman said at the time.

It looks like at least some Ultimate owners would agree with Cherry’s suggestion that Microsoft give users a free upgrade to Windows 7. “Like an idiot, I purchased Vista Ultimate expecting the ‘extras’ only Ultimate users would receive,” said a Computerworld reader identified as “Garygfd” in a comment on a February story about Extras. Saying that all he ended up receiving were “useless” apps that he had no desire to download, Garygfd when on to suggest that “what Microsoft should do is give us Ultimate idiots a big break on Windows 7.”

Microsoft has not yet disclosed the pricing for Windows 7’s editions, although it will reportedly offer free or discounted upgrades to users who buy Vista PCs after July 1. According to those reports, people who buy Vista Ultimate after that date will be upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate.

“Pricing is always the last thing for them to decide,” Cherry said.
(Computerworld)