Twitter use becomes easier
If you are someone who loves Twitter, then the company’s recent switch from Tinyurl to Bit.Ly is good news. Bit.LY is a portfolio company of Betaworks, which is also an investor in Twitter, so the switch was anticipated.
When Twitter depended on Tinyurl to shorten web addresses to conserve characters in tweets, it caused a lot of grief for Twitter followers in the Kingdom. For no explained reason, the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) has been blocking Tinyurl for years. It was necessary to turn to http://untiny.com/ in order to view the shortened URLs provided in tweets. Interestingly, the shortened URLs created by Bit.Ly are not facing blocking.
This may convince more Saudi businesses to begin using Twitter. Saudi Aramco announced in July that it would be making notification of the release of Saudi Aramco news items and publications through its Twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com/Saudi_Aramco. There are only 80 “followers” of the world’s largest oil company so far, but that number is bound to grow.
Spoken Arabic translation
Sakhr Software has acquired Dial Directions, a provider of voice-entry technology for mobile devices and services. With Dial Directions’ network-based speech recognition technology and mobile applications expertise, Sakhr Software plans to deliver new technologies to enable real-time speech-to-speech translation for Arabic.
For 20 years Sakhr Software has been a pioneer in Arabic natural language processing (NLP). In 2008, Sakhr Software USA and Dial Directions partnered together to develop language application technology for mobile, cloud-computing environments. The companies collaborated to create an open speech-to-speech mobile translation application for the US government and business customers. The solution enables English and Arabic speakers to speak their native language, hear the audio translation and read the text translation — all with an iPhone or Blackberry. See a demo video of the application at www.sakhrusa.com/demo/speech_to_speech.
All Dial Directions employees have joined Sakhr. The combined company has 200 employees, and will be led by Adeeb Shanaa, former Dial Directions CEO. Fahad Al-Sharekh, Sakhr’s previous CEO has become chairman. Sakhr’s management team will be based in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, with an offshore development office in the Middle East. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Mobile data explosion
In 2014, the volume of mobile data sent and received every month by users around the world will exceed by a significant amount the total data traffic for all of 2008, according to a new study from ABI Research.
“When people think of mobile data they think of BlackBerry and iPhone handsets,” said ABI senior analyst Jeff Orr. “But the bulk of today’s traffic is generated by laptops with PC Card and USB modems.” While add-on cellular modems represented two-thirds of traffic in 2008, computers with embedded 3G/4G modems will lead in 2014 with more than 50 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic.
The study found that global mobile data traffic surpassed 1.3 exabytes transferred during 2008. By 2014, an average of 1.6 exabytes will be sent and received monthly. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. In five years nearly 74 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be from Web and Internet access. By that same time, 26 percent will come from audio and video streaming. Peer-to-peer file sharing and voice over IP’s contribution to overall mobile data traffic will be less than one percent. Video streaming will experience the fastest growth of any IP traffic type at a compound annual growth rate of 62 percent between 2008 and 2014. Western Europe accounted for nearly 31 percent of mobile data traffic in 2008, but the region will yield to Asia-Pacific, which will account for over 28 percent by 2014.
No rebound yet
Worldwide PC microprocessor shipments in the second calendar quarter of 2009 (2Q09) rose notably, according to new data from IDC. While the increase is unusually positive for the second quarter of a year, IDC analysis of the results indicate that Intel and OEM inventory refreshes drove this performance and not the return of significant end demand for PCs.
“Going forward,” said Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing research at IDC, “IDC believes that OEMs have balanced out their inventories and so we can’t rely on inventory replenishment to drive market improvements. Instead, we can only rely on what actual end demand really is, and that means we have to be cautious not to be over-exuberant that, say, the traditional back-to-school PC buying season will materialize into a bullish second half. It won’t.”
IDC also found that worldwide spending on Internet advertising contracted for the second consecutive quarter, by five percent, to $13.9 billion from $14.7 billion in the same quarter a year ago. IDC’s analysts noted that all global regions posted losses, with the exception of the Asia/Pacific region and Japan, which saw slight gains in the second quarter (2Q09).
“We think the industry will continue to see losses in the third and fourth quarters, but the growth rates — or the loss rates, if you will — will eventually begin to improve. However, we also believe the industry may have to wait until mid-2010 until it sees real growth again,” said Karsten Weide, program director, Digital Media and Entertainment at IDC.
Checking service quality
Postal services in 21 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE in the Middle East, are testing out a new United Nations tool that uses state-of-the-art technology to measure their performance and improve the quality of their operations. The Global Monitoring System has been under development by the UN’s Universal Postal Union (UPU) for the past three years. Postal services will use the System, the first phase of which began last week and continues until December, to measure their service quality against established domestic standards. More than 30 other countries are expected to join the System in the second phase of the project from 2010.
Improvements to a country’s domestic quality of service are expected to have positive repercussions on international mail as well. From now until December, 530 independent panelists from 38 countries will send 24,000 test letters containing RFID tags through 45 postal facilities worldwide. The RFID tags will transmit their unique serial numbers wirelessly, using radio waves. Digital Readers will capture data on the tags and transmit it to a computer system — without needing a person to be involved. The data collected as the test letters pass through special gates will be transmitted to the UPU and be used to help postal operators identify service failures and hopefully improve operational efficiency.
