Royal Philips Electronics, a global leader in Healthcare, Consumer Lifestyle and Lighting has outlined its focus on India as an emerging market. Keeping its commitment to delivering affordable healthcare solutions in emerging markets, Philips announced the acquisition of Meditronics, a leading manufacturer of General X-Ray systems targeting the economy segment in India.
Emerging Markets
Philips has stepped up its focus on emerging markets by creating an emerging markets structure which has become operational since spring this year. Focusing on emerging markets allows the company to accelerate growth in developing countries such as India, China, Latin America and Russia.
“Executing on our strategic decision to scale up our presence in emerging markets has been an important element of Philips’ transformation into a focused, less-cyclical company in recent years,” said Gerard Kleisterlee, President and Chief Executive Officer, Royal Philips Electronics. “We are committed to continue this course of action by increasingly redirecting resources to help fuel growth in emerging markets, and build out our industrial footprint in this cost-effective and high-quality manufacturing environment - for Healthcare, but also for our Consumer Lifestyle and Lighting sectors.”
Thirty percent of Philips’ sales in FY 2007 were from emerging markets, also representing a 10% sales growth over FY 2006. This geographical spread contributes to the resilience of Philips’ portfolio.
Philips has said that it is redirecting Euro 250 million of innovation spend from mature to emerging market to drive growth and (original) product & market development, and that it is also redirecting Euro 250 million to emerging markets to align marketing spend with innovation to ‘embed’ its product & solution simplicity message with customers; increase the dialogue with stakeholders to allow them to experience the brand.
Healthcare
Philips is committed to delivering affordable healthcare solutions in emerging markets. And the acquisition of Meditronics is its second in recent months of a healthcare equipment maker in India specialized in manufacturing products for the economy segment - one of the fastest growing market segments in the global healthcare equipment market.
Said Murali Sivaraman, CEO, Philips Electronics India Limited, “Meditronics’ high-quality and clinically proven economy segment product portfolio complements Philips’ existing high-end General X-Ray range and further strengthens Philips’ leading position in India’s high-growth imaging and monitoring equipment market. This also allows us to gain access to local manufacturing platforms at emerging markets cost levels.”
Analysts estimate that the General X-Ray segment of the Indian market will show annual growth rates of 10% or higher. This acquisition gives Philips access to strong sales and distribution channel for the economy segment. Meditronics has dealer network of 25 dealers with large geographical coverage, focused on mid/low end X-Ray business.Lighting
Philips in India is now a key production, research and development (R&D) hub for the company’s global lighting operations.
Philips has recently set up a global research and development centre for lighting electronics at Noida, India. It is its third such unit in the world. The facility will develop advanced lighting solutions, will be scaled up and linked to the global development centre in Shanghai. The centre will cater not only to the specific needs of the Indian market but also the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and North America. The centre currently employs 35 engineers and the headcount will increase with the unit taking up more work.
Philips aims to lead the Indian industry in Green initiatives and create awareness about Energy Efficient Lighting solutions. Solid State Lighting is the next wave of energy efficient solutions and Philips became the first company to introduce LEDs for the home segment last year. The company now plans to introduce the Consumer Luminaire range in India in the next few months.
Consumer Lifestyle
In India, Philips drives innovation by actively combining its global expertise with local consumer insights to deliver offerings designed for Indian audiences. After the successful launches of the Intelligent Food Processor (hands-free mixer grinder) and the Intelligent Water Purifier last year, Philips introduced Rip-all AZ1856 Sound machine in India early this year. Philips now plans to introduce in India some of its innovative global offerings from the Consumer Lifestyle stable such as Aurea TV, Ambisound and high end beauty and personal care range.
Friday, November 21, 2008
AT&T launches first super Internet Data Centre in Singapore
AT&T Inc. announced the launch of the first super Internet Data Centre (IDC) in Asia, located in Singapore.
The super IDC, an expansion of AT&T's existing facilities, would act as a regional gateway to the Internet and the AT&T network to deliver AT&T Synaptic HostingSM, its next-generation utility computing services.
This launch is part of AT&T's $1 billion planned global network investment in 2008 to increase global data centre hosting capacity throughout the 38 data centres in AT&T's global Internet protocol (IP) network.
Other super IDCs are located in Piscataway, New Jersey; San Diego, California; Annapolis, Maryland and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which will form the regional hubs in the US and Europe.
Bernard Yee, vice president, AT&T Asia Pacific, said: "AT&T continues to invest in growing its business to support customers and to meet the demands of multinational corporations for next-generation services and solutions. To help customers in this challenging economic environment, the first super IDC in Asia, combined with our Synaptic Hosting platform, will offer them much greater flexibility to scale their information technology resources up or down to meet their business requirements."
"The super IDC will enable us to offer information technology and infrastructure service as turn-key managed infrastructure solutions on demand," Yee added.
"In addition, AT&T is going to offer managed application services within the sectors of enterprise resource planning software, eCommerce, web services, messaging and unified communications services to enhance our value proposition and managed services proposition for our customers in Asia and globally."
"Our goal is to allow them to focus on running their businesses while achieving greater flexibility, improved performance and further cost-savings," Yee said.
The AT&T IDCs allow AT&T to deliver consistent, highly scalable, enterprise-class information technology (IT) services around the globe. In addition to the hosting services available in all other centres, the super IDC supports large-scale computing and application infrastructure on demand that can be combined with other AT&T hosting services, such as managed networking, virtualised security, application acceleration and storage.
Companies can deliver end-user applications infrastructure whenever and wherever they are needed on a pay-for-use model. The new services can be accessed from anywhere in the world and combines technology acquired by AT&T from application service provider US inter-networking.
An online challenge to Google library
The European Union has announced the launch of its Europeana digital library, an online digest of Europe's cultural heritage that aims to draw together millions of books and other items.
According to the media reports, the project would use the latest technologies to allow users anywhere access to films, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and documents as well as books kept in European libraries.
The source mentioned that the prototype that was launched today and would contain around two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain, as the most recent items are plagued by problems linked to copyright.
Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy.
Originally known as the European digital library network – EDLnet – it is a partnership of 90 representatives of heritage and knowledge organizations and IT experts from throughout Europe.
By 2010, the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational, the aim is to have 10 million works available, though this is very negligible compared to the 2.5 billion books in Europe's more common libraries.
Around one percent of the books in the EU's national libraries are now available in digital form, with that figure expected to grow to four percent in 2012.
And even when they are digitalized, they still have to be put online. Google, one of the pioneers in this domain, claims to have seven million books available for its 'Google Book Search' project, which had gone online in 2004.
According to the media reports, the project would use the latest technologies to allow users anywhere access to films, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and documents as well as books kept in European libraries.
The source mentioned that the prototype that was launched today and would contain around two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain, as the most recent items are plagued by problems linked to copyright.
Europeana is a Thematic Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy.
Originally known as the European digital library network – EDLnet – it is a partnership of 90 representatives of heritage and knowledge organizations and IT experts from throughout Europe.
By 2010, the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational, the aim is to have 10 million works available, though this is very negligible compared to the 2.5 billion books in Europe's more common libraries.
Around one percent of the books in the EU's national libraries are now available in digital form, with that figure expected to grow to four percent in 2012.
And even when they are digitalized, they still have to be put online. Google, one of the pioneers in this domain, claims to have seven million books available for its 'Google Book Search' project, which had gone online in 2004.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Are mobile phones really hot?
Christmas being just round the corner, as always mobile phones are a popular gift choice. Reevoo.com gives you the low-down on mobiles; examining what's hot, what's not, what people are actually buying and which phones are the best value for money.
What's hot? The iPhone 3G of course! But it's not highly ratedDespite being one of the most talked about phones of the year, the iPhone 3G has failed to beat its 2007 predecessor.
The original iPhone is rated 8.3/10, just pipping this year's 3G offering to the post, (the iPhone 3G scores 8.2/10). According to owners, the major issues with the 3G model are its battery life and application crashes, meaning that other phones have been able to storm ahead of the iPhone. So, what really is the hottest mobile phone this season?
Revoo recommendations: Top five Christmas mobile phones
Top five most popular in last 30 days:
1. Nokia N96
2. Samsung F480 Tocco
3. Blackberry Storm
4. Sony Ericsson C902
5. Samsung Omnia
Top five highest rated phones of 2008:
1. BlackBerry Bold 9000
2. Sony Ericsson W980i
3. Apple iPhone 3G 8/16GB
4. Samsung F480 Tocco
5. Sony Ericsson K660i
Reevoo reviewers pick the BlackBerry Bold 9000 as the best phone released in 2008.
Reviews on Reevoo for the BlackBerry Bold 9000 include:
Positive+
+ Great keyboard for e-mailing and texting. Cracking screen which is nice and bright and videos look lovely on it. The sound from the internal speaker is really good. Just a great phone overall.
+ The Bold is undoubtedly the most impressive Blackberry yet. One of its greatest advantages is that in spite of many new features, it feels very familiar. Web browsing is almost broadband speed.
Negative
– Out of the box battery life is bad but gets better with regular charges
- The hyped-up phones usually get all the attention but it's interesting to see how the most popular phones differ from the most highly rated:
The Nokia N96, whilst being the most popular phone on the market, gets marked down by reviewers for poor battery life and software problems. At around £500 for Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) customers, it's no surprise that it also gets rated below average for value for money.
However, it does impress with its design and features. One reviewer writes "great picture and video quality, very easy to find your way around, fantastic features...looks good".
So who wins the race?
When it comes to value for money, the stylish Samsung F480 Tocco is a great buy. It scores highly for design and features and gets much higher scores for battery life than the Nokia N96, both iPhones and the BlackBerry Bold 9000. It's around £150 PAYG or free on some contracts.
Here are some of the reviews from owners of the Samsung F480 Tocco:
Positive:
+ Easy to use, good haptic technology feedback from the touch screen, excellent camera, fair battery life, smart, compact, stylish.
+ It's easy to use and has a very good memory and has good features that I would have expected.
Negative
- No Wi-Fi capability.
- Should come with a ball point touch screen pen, can be hard to press the right keys sometimes.
Indian techie accused in $1-bn Intel data theft
An Indian software engineer working with AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has been charged with stealing sensitive documents from his former employer Intel, said court reports on Tuesday.
Intel has filed a criminal complaint against Biswamohan Pani, former design engineer for chipmaker Intel, in the US district court in Boston. The case is that Pani made off with information valued by Intel at more than $1 billion. He is due to appear in Boston federal court today.
Intel filed the complaint formally, after the FBI sleuths searched his house in Worcester in July, which recovered some top-secret files with details of future Intel chip designs, said a report.
Pani had resigned from Intel in May but he said the company that he could continue to work at Intel till June 11. But he started working with AMD on June 2 while he still continued with Intel.
During this period he allegedly remote-accessed the secret files with an intention to pass it on to AMD. But FBI has ruled out AMD's involvement in Pani's conduct.
On the other hand, Pani pleaded innocence in the incident and said that the design files were meant to help his wife who still works with Intel and were not intended for sale. Networking major Cisco in its recent report on data leakage had pointed to the 'insider threat' to corporate information.
How do you evaluate this kind of 'insider threat' as far as maintaining the security of data is concerned? Do you think the corporates are making serious efforts to ensure the security of their data in a highly networked environment?
Intel has filed a criminal complaint against Biswamohan Pani, former design engineer for chipmaker Intel, in the US district court in Boston. The case is that Pani made off with information valued by Intel at more than $1 billion. He is due to appear in Boston federal court today.
Intel filed the complaint formally, after the FBI sleuths searched his house in Worcester in July, which recovered some top-secret files with details of future Intel chip designs, said a report.
Pani had resigned from Intel in May but he said the company that he could continue to work at Intel till June 11. But he started working with AMD on June 2 while he still continued with Intel.
During this period he allegedly remote-accessed the secret files with an intention to pass it on to AMD. But FBI has ruled out AMD's involvement in Pani's conduct.
On the other hand, Pani pleaded innocence in the incident and said that the design files were meant to help his wife who still works with Intel and were not intended for sale. Networking major Cisco in its recent report on data leakage had pointed to the 'insider threat' to corporate information.
How do you evaluate this kind of 'insider threat' as far as maintaining the security of data is concerned? Do you think the corporates are making serious efforts to ensure the security of their data in a highly networked environment?
Women power in IT on the rise
The number of women in the IT sector is on the rise. There are 2 million employees in this sector, out of which 28% are women (2007-08) up from 24% in 2005-06. Also the intake of women at the entry level this year was 46% up from 38% last year. Considering the next 10 years, India has a unique role to play for which contribution of women cannot be ignored, said NASSCOM president Som Mittal.
Moreover, NASSCOM conducted a survey of 50 companies and found that 11% of leaders in the industry were women. These roles were in senior management mostly for decision-making. Also two year’s back, three or four companies formally followed gender diversity programmes, but now there are about 80 companies that have some initiative to handle issues for women and take care of gender diversity and inclusiveness.
Moreover, NASSCOM conducted a survey of 50 companies and found that 11% of leaders in the industry were women. These roles were in senior management mostly for decision-making. Also two year’s back, three or four companies formally followed gender diversity programmes, but now there are about 80 companies that have some initiative to handle issues for women and take care of gender diversity and inclusiveness.
Techies turn to social media to reach consumers
Recognizing the limits of traditional advertising, established technology companies are diving headlong into the sometimes chaotic landscape of social media to promote their products.
Companies ranging from PC maker Dell Inc to storage equipment maker NetApp are increasingly turning to outside blogs, viral videos and websites such as FaceBook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Digg — and their tens of millions of users — to reach consumers.
These social networking sites harness the age-old power of the word-of-mouth recommendation and can be potent marketing tools. If nothing else, they demand a higher level of consumer engagement than conventional ads.
“This is 180 degrees from that sort of advertising,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. “Having a conversation with them (consumers) is a very new skill.”For tech companies with big marketing budgets, the shift to social media is an implicit acknowledgment that television and print are not necessarily the most effective ways to reach buyers, particularly younger ones.
In addition, with a recession looming, corporate budgets are being slashed. UBS has forecast global ad spending will fall 3.9 per cent in 2009. In such an environment, social media could prove to be a cost-effective way to sell to consumers.
But the strategy is not without some risk. While every company wants to generate buzz, online backlash can be brutal.
Consumer healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson learned that the hard way with a recent Web video ad for its Motrin painkiller. While apparently trying to be irreverent about the pain of wearing a baby in a sling, the ad offended many mothers who savaged it on Twitter, the wildly popular “micro-blogging’’ site where users communicate with short “tweets’’ of 140 characters or less. J&J was forced to apologize on Monday.
Brian Keeler, a vice president at media consultancy VShift, said the key to social media is credibility and enlisting consumers in the act of marketing itself. But if you upset your audience, it can mean trouble. “With the online media, things can go viral and spin out of control really fast,’’ he said.
Dell has a dedicated team of around 40 people that interacts with consumers through its blogs, community forums and third-party sites. The company began its social media push last year as it moved to repair its public image.
“There’s been a realization over the last several years that your customers are going to talk about you online and you have a choice to join that conversation,’’ spokeswoman Caroline Dietz said.
Companies ranging from PC maker Dell Inc to storage equipment maker NetApp are increasingly turning to outside blogs, viral videos and websites such as FaceBook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Digg — and their tens of millions of users — to reach consumers.
These social networking sites harness the age-old power of the word-of-mouth recommendation and can be potent marketing tools. If nothing else, they demand a higher level of consumer engagement than conventional ads.
“This is 180 degrees from that sort of advertising,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. “Having a conversation with them (consumers) is a very new skill.”For tech companies with big marketing budgets, the shift to social media is an implicit acknowledgment that television and print are not necessarily the most effective ways to reach buyers, particularly younger ones.
In addition, with a recession looming, corporate budgets are being slashed. UBS has forecast global ad spending will fall 3.9 per cent in 2009. In such an environment, social media could prove to be a cost-effective way to sell to consumers.
But the strategy is not without some risk. While every company wants to generate buzz, online backlash can be brutal.
Consumer healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson learned that the hard way with a recent Web video ad for its Motrin painkiller. While apparently trying to be irreverent about the pain of wearing a baby in a sling, the ad offended many mothers who savaged it on Twitter, the wildly popular “micro-blogging’’ site where users communicate with short “tweets’’ of 140 characters or less. J&J was forced to apologize on Monday.
Brian Keeler, a vice president at media consultancy VShift, said the key to social media is credibility and enlisting consumers in the act of marketing itself. But if you upset your audience, it can mean trouble. “With the online media, things can go viral and spin out of control really fast,’’ he said.
Dell has a dedicated team of around 40 people that interacts with consumers through its blogs, community forums and third-party sites. The company began its social media push last year as it moved to repair its public image.
“There’s been a realization over the last several years that your customers are going to talk about you online and you have a choice to join that conversation,’’ spokeswoman Caroline Dietz said.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)