E FUN's 7" Nextbook premium Android tablet with Google Play

USA: E FUN, a consumer electronics designer and manufacturer of fun, easy-to-use lifestyle products, announced that its newest Nextbook Android tablet featuring full access to Google Play, the Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP, is available now for $99.99 at retail nationwide. The 7" tablet features Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google Play and access to a full suite of Google apps.

"Our Premium 7SE-GP is the perfect holiday gift for those interested in a high performance tablet at an affordable price," remarked Jason Liszewski, managing director and vice president of sales for E FUN. "Its combination of hardware, software and pre-loaded content make this tablet one of the year's hottest items for everyone on your list."

Optimized for Google Play, the Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP gives users numerous benefits including:
* Access to more than 600,000 apps and games, millions of songs and books, and thousands of movies in the Google Play store.
* Capability to read, listen and watch content not just on the Nextbook but on any device including a desktop, laptop or mobile phone with Google Play's cloud feature.
* Access to Android apps from Google including Gmail, Google Talk, Google+, Google Maps, YouTube™ and much more.
* 5GB of free cloud storage with Google Drive.

The Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP features a 7" five-finger multi-touch capacitive color screen and runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with a fast Amlogic A9 1GHz processor and 1GB DDR3 RAM. Additionally, it features a front-facing camera and a high-definition video player that can send a 1080p HD video to an HDTV or computer via the HDMI-out port.
Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP users can now watch YouTube videos, listen to Internet music, receive and send e-mails, or simply browse the Internet with the built-in Wi-Fi connectivity.

To keep all of a user's files safely stored, the Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP includes 8GB of built-in flash memory, expandable both via the microSD slot (supporting SDHC cards up to 32GB), or via a USB flash drive in its full-sized USB host port. It has an 800x480 screen with 16:9 ratio and a G-sensor auto-rotate orientation feature for landscape or portrait viewing, as well as over-the-air (OTA) firmware update capabilities.

The Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP is preloaded with a wide selection of applications including Net Nanny parental controls and CloudLink's "Productivity Toolbox," which includes numerous free applications such as 5GB of free cloud storage, free mobile security, wireless printing, and credit card processing.

The new Nextbook Premium 7SE-GP (model #NEXT7P12-8G) is available now for $99.99.

OSG selects Infosys CommerceEdge to transform e-commerce portal

INDIA: OSG Corp., one of Japan’s leading cutting tool manufacturers, has selected Infosys CommerceEdge to transform its legacy e-commerce platform.

The new digital commerce platform will provide OSG with a robust merchandizing support and offers a range of tools to engage with their customers through online and mobile channels. The cloud-based platform will reduce operating costs by up to 40 percent as compared to other available systems.

Infosys CommerceEdge will allow OSG to have better visibility and control over their inventory and pricing. This social commerce platform will provide each customer a personalized online transaction experience.  The advanced analytical features of the platform will help OSG get real-time visibility into customer buying behavior and patterns to drive more effective marketing campaigns.

The new social commerce platform is key to OSG’s global expansion plans. CommerceEdge comes equipped with pre-built accelerators and integrators and is capable of multi-language support. This makes it easy and cost effective to roll out in new geographies. In the first phase of deployment, the platform will support OSG’s customers in Japan, with plans in place to extend support to its customers across South East Asia and Europe.

WHIPTAIL raises $31 million in series C and strategic funding

USA: WHIPTAIL, the data storage-industry innovator powering faster and more energy-efficient computing for today’s global businesses via flash storage, announced a $31 million investment, including strategic investments from flash-memory leader SanDisk as well as an unnamed Silicon Valley industry titan. Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures andSpring Mountain Capital also contributed to this Series C funding and Silicon Valley Bank provided debt financing.

“The intersection of performance and efficiency has never been more important as companies and organizations are moving to new technologies like flash storage to drive the top and bottom lines,” said WHIPTAIL CEO Dan Crain. “The new investors we’ve added to our existing team demonstrate the confidence they have in our vision. This funding will ensure continued growth of WHIPTAIL and accelerate our product roadmap through 2013, with groundbreaking products coming over the next 12 months that will leave our competition scrambling to catch up.”

The investment will fund growth in WHIPTAIL’s engineering team and accelerate global expansion. In addition, the company announced a new chief financial officer to lead WHIPTAIL’s fiscal policy into 2013 and beyond.

WHIPTAIL’s significant growth across its customer base, revenue and employees worldwide is a testament to the leadership and innovation provided in its all-flash storage arrays.  The company has achieved triple digit year-over-year revenue growth as more than 150 customers are now utilizing WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA and ACCELA arrays to power more than a quarter of a billion IOPS. To accommodate this expansion, WHIPTAIL’s employee base has increased by almost 500 percent in 2012.

SanDisk has announced an investment in WHIPTAIL via SanDisk Ventures, the company’s newly formed strategic investment arm.

"Enterprise storage represents a significant growth opportunity for flash, and SanDisk is excited to invest in innovative companies such as WHIPTAIL, which are bringing breakthrough system solutions to their enterprise customers,” said Sumit Sadana, executive VP and chief strategy officer at SanDisk. “Increasingly, customers are turning to flash-based solutions to address the need to access big data at lightning-fast speed, and do so with elegant, scalable, power-efficient systems from leading companies like WHIPTAIL.”

For Richard Fade, a partner at Ignition, the moves coming from WHIPTAIL have justified their investment in the company from the beginning.

“Enterprise SSD is white hot – it's becoming affordable for the datacenter, enabling competitive advantage and becoming a key tier of storage in many industries and applications,” he said. “WHIPTAIL is building the best implementations in the market. While others have been building hype, WHIPTAIL has quietly been delivering the fastest, most flexible and cost effective products in the market."

On the coattails of the strategic financing agreement, WHIPTAIL announced the hiring of CFO Catherine Chandler. Chandler brings more than 25 years of experience to WHIPTAIL. She previously served as CFO of Vitrue, a social marketing technology platform purchased by Oracle in 2012, and Liaison Technologies, an integration and data management technology services company with operations in the US and Europe.

LASELEC develops system to reduce wire waste in industry

FRANCE: LASELEC, a leader in the UV-laser industry, has designed a new wire-marking system that will reduce wire waste in industry, especially aerospace. The company has developed a method that uses ULYS Modena wire markers and an automatic feeding system to reduce waste from 1 metre to between 4 and 12 centimetres.

Each time production begins on a new type of wire, up to a metre is wasted, which can lead to substantial costs due to the price of aeronautical wire, for example. LASELEC, a worldwide leader in the UV-laser industry, has developed a method that can reduce such waste to a length of between 4cm and 12cm, using ULYS Modena UV-laser wire markers and automatic feeding.

The system can be mounted on both single-spool and multi-spool dereelers and, thanks to LASELEC’s innovative design, the system can also be retrofitted on all ULYS Modena machines that are already installed.

Using UV lasers to identify electric wiring is currently a method in widespread use in both military and civilian projects, as it is a process that provides indelible marking without damaging the insulation, thanks to the machine’s robust and reliable wire dereeling and cutting system.

The ULYS Modena UV-laser range perfectly meets all wire-marking requirements, from the ULYS 110, which is an entry-level machine that is suitable for low-production rates, to the ULYS 990, which has unmatched productivity.

Entities involved in modification, maintenance and repair of aircraft are showing growing interest in this technology. The MRO 200 was developed by LASELEC specifically to meet the needs of such aerospace companies. Devoted to small and medium production runs and to unit-by-unit production, this range of markers is used in workshops producing small runs and can be used for rework.

The French-based company’s computer-controlled laser cable markers are easy to operate, reliable and efficient. The marking ranges are constantly evolving and have had new models added this year.

A key benefit of direct UV-laser marking is a reduction in the wiring weight, which subsequently reduces the weight of the wire-equipped devices, lowering users’ energy costs. Such wire marking is gradually replacing sleeving in the aeronautics industry, and LASELEC equipment is used by all of the main aircraft manufacturers, including Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, EADS, Embraer, Eurocopter, Northrop Grumman, and Sikorsky.

The rail industry has also begun using LASELEC equipment, including Canadian rail specialist Bombardier Transportation. Similarly, workshops for industrial vehicles, as well as those for upscale, competition and rally vehicles, feature such equipment, which is specifically suited to their particular requirements.

In 2012, LASELEC began to take part in a collaborative R&D project, VESUVE, which aims to improve considerably the productivity of aeronautical-cable production by developing the laser solutions of the future.

VESUVE will take place within the framework of the Fonds Unique Interministériel (FUI, France’s Inter-ministerial Single Fund) and will be supported throughout by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The project was selected by ERDF thanks to its innovative approach to wire waste, along with the business that it will generate.

AVnu Alliance welcomes Axon and forms Pro Video subgroup

USA: AVnu Alliance, an industry forum that certifies Audio Video Bridging (AVB) products for interoperability, has added broadcast infrastructure equipment developer Axon Digital Design to its membership roster. In addition, Jan Eveleens, CEO of Axon, will serve as chairman of the newly-formed AVnu Alliance Pro Video Subgroup.

Axon joined the AVnu Alliance as a result of the growing need for the professional video industry to adopt Ethernet – and specifically AVB – as its primary networking interface. The interoperability and functionality enabled by AVB, including low latency, time synchronization and bandwidth reservation, are essential for video and broadcast applications.

“Joining the AVnu Alliance fits very well in our history and strategy of being at the forefront of new technologies and standards in professional video,” said Jan Eveleens, CEO of Axon. “We strongly believe that networked video is the next big thing in professional video applications, and the AVnu Alliance is an excellent platform to help drive this vision towards a reality.”

As chair of the AVnu Alliance Pro Video Subgroup, Eveleens will work with other alliance member companies to define key requirements for AVnu certification of video products. The goal is to ensure that professional video equipment manufacturers and their customers can benefit from the performance and interoperability advantages of AVnu-certified AVB products.

“The AVnu Alliance continues to expand, and we welcome the addition of another AVnu Alliance member that is so video-centric,” said Lee Minich, Marketing Work Group chair of AVnu Alliance, and president of Lab X Technologies. “Axon’s participation has boosted our ability to support the AVB standard in the exploding networked video market.”

AVnu Alliance’s membership is comprised of notable companies in the pro video market, including Barco, Digital Design Corporation, Riedel and Xilinx, as well as key players in the automotive, consumer electronics, and professional audio markets.

Tablets make ebook readers an endangered species

USA: After spectacular growth during the last few years, the ebook reader market is on an alarmingly precipitous decline, sent reeling by more nimble tablet devices that have gained the ardent patronage of consumers, according to an IHS iSuppli Consumer Electronics Special Report.

Unknown to consumers before 2006, ebook readers saw shipments skyrocket for the next few years. From 2008 to 2010, shipments grew from 1.0 million to 10.1 million, up by a factor of 10. The market peaked in 2011, with 23.2 million units.

However, shipments of ebook readers by year-end will fall to 14.9 million units, down a steep 36 percent from 2011. Another drastic 27 percent contraction will occur next year when ebook reader shipments decline to 10.9 million units. By 2016, the ebook reader space will amount to just 7.1 million units—equivalent to a loss of more than two-thirds of its peak volume in 2011, as shown in the figure attached.

“The rapid growth—followed by the immediate collapse—of the ebook reader market is virtually unheard of, even in the volatile consumer electronics space, where products have notoriously short life cycles,” said Jordan Selburn, senior principal analyst for consumer platforms at IHS.

“The stunning rise and then blazing flameout of ebooks perfectly encapsulate what has become an axiomatic truth in the industry: Single-task devices like the ebook reader are being replaced without remorse in the lives of consumers by their multifunction equivalents, in this case by media tablets. And while other uni-tasking devices—like digital still cameras, GPS systems and MP3 players—also face similar pressures and battle dim prospects ahead, all have had a longer time in the sun than ebook readers, demonstrating even more painfully the depth of the ebook reader’s fall.”

European reprieve?
Despite their challenges, the market for ebook readers remains strong in Eastern Europe, and Russia. There also exists a potential opportunity in regions such as Africa and India, where the power efficiency of ebook readers may make them more attractive, given ongoing power issues in those regions.

Sales prospects for ebook readers also could improve if prices drop further.

Tablets on the rise
In contrast to the ebook readers, tablets are enjoying unstoppable growth, mostly thanks to the Apple iPad, which made its appearance in 2010. Tablet shipments will hit 120 million units in 2012 only after two short years of the device being on the market, and 340 million systems are expected by 2016—a magnitude of sales exceeded only by mobile handsets.

The versatility of the media tablet—able to serve as a reader of emails as well as books, while capable of surfing the Web and playing movies—has even overcome the cost advantages of the ebook reader. Dissections made by the IHS iSuppli Teardown Service of a wide range of ebook readers and tablets alike confirm that ebooks are much less expensive to build.

For instance, the 7-inch Amazon Kindle reader, released in late 2011, has a total bill of materials cost of $84, while the recently released Nexus 7 tablet from Asus is almost twice as high at $153.

Dime novels
To try to maintain their market, ebook readers are likely to continue to sell at manufacturing cost or even less in the future. Industry rumors speculate the Txtr Beagle reader, an ultra-low-cost model with a 5-inch screen, potentially selling for as little as $13 alongside operator subsidies in 2013—less than the cost of the display alone.

Such extremely low pricing may serve to prolong the life of the ebook reader market for a little while, IHS iSuppli believes, but the devices on the whole will not regain the popularity they once had.

For the manufacturers of ebook readers, the pressure to keep costs to an absolute minimum will be extreme, especially in cases where the system manufacturer is not also a content provider. In such a context, Amazon is more insulated than other ebook reader manufacturers, because the giant bookseller can recoup some of its losses through the huge sales generated from ebooks and other content available through its online store. Amazon is also not being caught empty-handed in the hardware arena, having morphed its Kindle ebook reader into the Kindle Fire media tablet.

The decline of the ebook reader market will translate into benefits for media tablet suppliers along their supply chains. The market for tablet displays, for instance, is expected to double from 2011 to 2014, reaching almost $10 billion.

Semiconductor shipments for tablets will show a similar pattern of robust growth. Total semiconductor consumption by tablets will top $20 billion by 2016—more than twice the amount in 2011—making the area one of the most lucrative opportunities for the overall chip industry.

Sadly for ebooks, which looked like the “Next Big Thing” just a few years ago, their moment of glory came and went all too quickly, the expectations of explosive growth suddenly quashed by the arrival of a much more agile—and insurmountable—rival.

Source: IHS iSuppli, USA.