LG Electronics and Microsoft sign MoU
LG Electronics and Microsoft Corporation have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to form a strategic collaboration in Mobile Convergence. The agreement was signed in Seoul by Yong Nam, Vice Chairman and CEO of LG Electronics and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.
“Under this MoU, the converge mobile device business will be reinforced through incorporating LG’s core competences in marketing and products in the mobile and IT sector, and Microsoft’s proficiency in Windows Mobile OS, applications and service,” explained Simon Lee, LG Electronics’ GM in Saudi Arabia. “This will undoubtedly benefit our customers here in the Kingdom, making available to them a wide array of LG’s new services and products coupled with rich content.”
The agreement ensures continued strategic collaboration in R&D, marketing, applications and services in the field of converged mobile devices. The proposed partnership also reflects both companies’ commitment to leverage best-in-class technology, resources and expertise by joining forces with leading players in key markets. In particular, as a part of its strategy to reinforce LG’s global competitiveness in smartphones, LG has set mid- to long-term goals and is creating products, R&D, marketing, and services to meet these goals. Both companies will continue to define and align their mobile strategies through annual top management meetings.
IT spending to slow significantly
Worldwide spending on information technology will slow significantly in 2009 as a direct result of the global financial crisis that began in September 2008. According to a newly-revised forecast from IDC, worldwide IT spending will grow 2.6 percent year over year in 2009, down from IDC's pre-crisis forecast of 5.9 percent growth. In the United States, IT spending is expected to decline to 0.9 percent in 2009, much lower than the 4.2 percent growth forecast in August.
“Although all the economic forecasts went from up slightly to down drastically in a matter of days, the good news is that IT is in a better position than ever to resist the downward pull of a slowing economy,” said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. “Technology is already deeply embedded in many mission-critical operations and remains critical to achieving further efficiency and productivity gains. As a result, IDC expects IT spending will continue to grow in 2009, albeit at a slower pace.”
On a regional basis, spending growth in Japan, Western Europe and the United States will hover around one percent in 2009. In contrast, the emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America will continue to experience healthy growth, but at levels notably lower than the double-digit gains previously forecast. On a sector basis, software and services will enjoy solid growth while hardware spending, with the exception of storage, is expected to decline in 2009.
Looking beyond 2009, IDC expects IT spending to make a full recovery by the end of the forecast period with growth rates approaching six percent in 2012. Despite these gains, IDC estimates that more than $300 billion in industry revenues will have been lost due to slower spending over the next four years.
In light of the uncertainties associated with the ongoing financial crisis, IDC also developed a downside scenario to help executives plan for a situation where the impact of the crisis is more pronounced. In this scenario, IDC lowered the forecast for worldwide GDP growth in 2009 to 0.3 percent, which is 1.5 percent lower than the current forecast and worse than any year since World War II. This produced a forecast of 0.1 percent growth in worldwide IT spending in 2009 with negative growth in the United States, Western Europe and Japan.
Bad economy leads to rising retail theft
According to the second annual Global Retail Theft Barometer, the cost of retail crime, calculated on the basis of crimes by customers, employees and suppliers/vendors (excluding internal error), plus the costs of loss prevention, were $112.78 billion in 2008, compared to $108.1 billion last year. Globally, customer theft, including shoplifting and organized retail crime, remained the largest source of shrinkage loss in most individual countries, totaling more than $43 billion. Employee theft accounted for $38.15 billion of shrinkage, while supplier/vendor theft and supply chain fraud represents $6.09 billion in shrinkage. Internal errors and administrative failures (such as pricing, process or accounting mistakes) accounted for $17.22 billion in losses.
Current loss prevention systems and processes helped retailers apprehend nearly 5.3 million customer and employee thieves in 2007-2008, the majority of which, 84.6 percent, were customers. The average amount stolen or admitted per customer theft incident was $328. Employee theft sums were more than 5.6 times greater per incident, averaging $1,842. The total value recovered, including customer and employee theft, was $3 billion — an extremely low amount.
The primary role of most Shrink Management Systems is to create a strong deterrence for theft by making the risk and reward analysis less attractive for would-be thieves. All figures in the report relate to the twelve-month period ending in June 2008. There is every indication that with the economic outlook grim, retail theft will continue to increase. People are used to a certain ‘lifestyle’ and will try to maintain it even if they lose their job or find themselves with a lower paying job due to the recession. The reported $3 billion recovered from over 5 million individuals does send a deterrence message to society at large, but more needs to be done. In the next few years, systems and processes will need constant improvements to increase the risk of detection for likely thieves.
Thieves are remarkably consistent in their choice of goods, regardless of geographic region, favoring merchandise such as razor blades/shaving products, cosmetics/face creams/perfumes, alcohol, fresh meat/expensive foodstuffs, infant formula, CDs and DVDs, fashion, electronic games, cellular phones and watches. Retailers estimated that on average they lost between two and five percent of new product lines to theft. Popular products such as the Harry Potter books, electronic games and recent DVDs reached loss levels of up to eight percent, causing supply shortages.
Global loss prevention costs were $25.47 billion or 0.33 percent of retail sales. Electronic article surveillance (EAS) was the main method of protecting high-theft items. Other means of protection included keepers/safers, display in locked cabinets or locked shelves, cables or loop alarms, and dummy cartons or ticket systems.
Google Docs struggles
From May to November 2008, ClickStream Technologies’ standing panel of adult US Internet users showed that use of free productivity applications such as Google Docs and OpenOffice remains low, while Microsoft Office is in use by over fifty percent of adult US Internet users and shows no signs of declining popularity.
Of all free productivity applications observed, OpenOffice was the most popular, in use by five percent of all users. OpenOffice also had the heaviest and highest frequency of use among free apps, with an average of 548 clicks performed and 8.7 days of use per user. Google Docs was the second most popular free productivity app, used by one percent of users. Google Docs also had the lightest use of all productivity apps, with an average of 40 actions performed in the app, compare with 548 in OpenOffice and 1,797 in Microsoft Word, and the fewest average days used during the 6-month period.
Of all participants who used Google Docs or Google Spreadsheets during the study, 68 percent also used Word at least once, indicating that Google Docs has yet to be considered a stand-alone product by most of its users. By contrast, only 26 percent of OpenOffice users also used Word during the six-month study. Although Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been touted as a potential competitor to the Microsoft Office Suite, OpenOffice is currently the more likely app to take that position, possibly indicating the value of offline and local processing enabled by installed applications.
