Reuters is reporting that Lenovo?(LNVGY), the Chinese electronics giant, is in talks to acquire NEC?s mobile phone unit. Lenovo has been speculated to be in talks with both Nokia (NOK) and BlackBerry (BBRY) over the past two years. Various brokerages have claimed that it is negotiating to buy Nokia?s feature phone unit, Nokia?s Lumia phone unit or BlackBerry?s hardware operations. If Lenovo ends up buying the NEC handset operations, it would acquire a technologically highly sophisticated operation with a minuscule annual production volume of roughly 4 million units.
[More from BGR: iPhone 5S announcement rumored for June 20th, launch in July]
The acquisition would open the door for the world?s No. 2 PC vendor to try to execute an aggressive cross-over to smartphone market ? Lenovo would presumably be well positioned to ramp up smartphone volumes rapidly. This would mean that the most likely buyer of Nokia or BlackBerry would gobble up a much cheaper and more easily integrated alternative.
[More from BGR: Google?s ?Babble? cross-platform messaging service gets detailed in purported leak]
NEC enjoyed its halcyon days around 2001, when its global mobile phone market share briefly spiked close to 10% and hit double digits in Germany and the United Kingdom. That was the period when i-mode was the hottest buzzword in the mobile telecom industry and Japanese vendors like Sony (SNE), Panasonic and NEC were making big gains in Europe and North America. The Japanese vendors were badly dented by the phone industry downturn in 2001-2003 and mostly retreated from the global competition to their home market.
Lenovo is one of China?s most ambitious electronics companies; its acquisition of IBM?s (IBM) PC business made it the world?s second largest personal computer brand. The company has come to regret that purchase, however: Soon after it snapped up the PC division it became obvious that smartphones would become the most important consumer electronics category and that the PC was entering its twilight era.
China and India are now bursting with smartphone brands with heady global growth numbers. Huawei, Micromax, Spice, Karbonn and others are enjoying 80%-plus volume growth by capitalizing on one of biggest trends in the industry as growth has shifted from North America and Europe to South-East Asia and China. Until now, Lenovo has watched the triumphant expansion of these upstarts silently seething. The giant may now be ready to make its move.
Ironically, Lenovo just might be about to repeat the timing mistake it made with its big personal computer acquisition. Global smartphone volume growth has slowed from over 50% to about 35% in just a year. Growth in North America and Europe is sputtering badly right now. If Lenovo buys the NEC phone division and starts to ramp up seriously in 2014, it just might enter the global smartphone competition just when the volume growth falls below 25% amidst intensifying competition.
With a debt crisis still stalking Europe, a Spanish entrepreneur has a new idea to protect your euros: a mattress with a safe inside.
By Whitney Eulich,?Staff writer / March 27, 2013
Two men walk in the business district in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday.
Paul White/AP
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Europeans have tossed and turned at night since the continent's sovereign debt crisis began three years ago. Right now it?s the Cypriots, surprised earlier this month by an announcement that some personal bank accounts could be taxed in order to raise the needed contribution for a bailout.
Skip to next paragraph Whitney Eulich
Latin America Editor
Whitney Eulich is the Monitor's Latin America editor, overseeing regional coverage for CSMonitor.com and the weekly magazine. She also curates the Latin America Monitor Blog.
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The creator of My Mattress Safe explains his unusual product
But Greeks, Irish, and Spaniards know the drill all too well themselves. Spanish bank deposits, for instance, dropped by 4.7 percent between June and July 2012, as faith in the country?s banking system plummeted.
In banks, it?s safe to say, many Europeans do not trust.
So what better way to slip soundly into sleep each night than knowing the precise status of one?s life savings? That?s the idea behind the simple and inventive Caja MiColch?n, or My Mattress Safe, a bed manufactured in northwestern Spain that is?outfitted with a safety deposit box.?
Francisco ?Paco? Santos worked in the mattress business for 14 years before losing his job in 2009. Unemployed, he tapped a dormant entrepreneurial spirit, designing this mattress that stands out from the rest.
My Mattress Safe was released by Mr. Santos' company Descanso Santos Sue?os (DESS) three weeks ago, in step with the Cyprus banking saga. It sells for about $1,120.?
Set to upbeat, jazzy music, one promotional video on the company?s website shows the ins and outs of production. The mattress is made with ?the best materials? and implanted at the foot of the bed is a digital-entry safety box (there's no mention of whether or not it?s fireproof).
In the video, Mr. Santos parodies a bank commercial, calling My Mattress Safe a ?financial institution? with a new, imaginative take on saving. Not to fear, he says ? this approach to savings doesn?t come with the threat of bankruptcy, mergers, or market fluctuations.
That could be a powerful selling point, with the safety of bank deposits high on the mind in Europe once again this month. According to The Christian Science Monitor, the European Union ?raised serious doubts about its promise to guarantee citizens? savings ? a vital pillar of any financial sector that underpins savers? trust ? when it went along with a plan to levy small Cypriot depositors.?
DESS hasn?t released sales figures, but the company said they?ve exceeded expectations. And despite the initial double take, there may be a larger audience for a Mattress Safe than one might expect.
In Argentina, for example, many keep their US dollars (a popular currency because of high rates of inflation) out of Argentine banks after ?harsh lessons? learned from past economic crises. The Monitor met one Argentine last summer who keeps his dollars in a safety deposit box.
?I know that the dollars in my box are actually there,? says Francisco, an IT worker in Buenos Aires.??If you have a bank account in dollars your money doesn?t exist ? it?s just virtual money."
The My Mattress Safe tagline feeds into this mentality: ?Your money, very close to you.?
For customers looking for assurance that their money isn't going anywhere with the Caja MiColch?n, there?s a calculator on the website where customers can work out their savings over time. Enter the deposit amount, the number of months of planned investment, and voila:?The same number of euros deposited in a My Mattress Safe is at the investor?s disposal a month, year, or decade later. (?What you deposit is what you have. So easy, so simple,? reads the website.)
"History repeats itself,? Santos told Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
?Older generations thought the safest place to keep their money was under the mattress. Now we?re proposing the same thing as we've seen people's uneasiness about the current situation. I'm not going to deny that the idea is a little crazy, but we believe that people with this mattress not only will sleep well, but also will be more relaxed because their savings are safe."
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) ? Thousands of North Koreans have turned out for a mass rally at the main square in Pyongyang in support of their leader's call to arms.
Chanting "Death to the U.S. imperialists" and "Sweep away the U.S. aggressors," soldiers and students marched through Kim Il Sung Square in downtown Pyongyang on Friday during a 90-minute rally.
State media reported early Friday that leader Kim Jong Un called an emergency military meeting to order the army's rocket unit to prepare to strike the U.S. and South Korea in case of a "reckless provocation" by Washington or Seoul.
A full-blown North Korean attack is unlikely, though there are fears of a more localized conflict. Pyongyang has railed against the U.S. decision to send B-2 bombers for military drills with South Korea.
Excel is the second-most widely used productivity app in the world, and it's second only to Microsoft Word. If you use Excel every day, but you don't need Word or Outlook or PowerPoint or the rest of the enormous toolbox that makes up Office 2013, you don't need to buy the whole Office suite. A long-standing but little-known option makes it possible to buy Excel alone. Just visit Microsoft's Office store, scroll down until you find the tiny icons that let you but the Office apps separately, and click on the icon that lets you buy Excel 2013 for $109.99. Just don't ask why Microsoft chose that price, because Microsoft isn't saying. It's a strange price, but for all the power the app offers, it's an excellent deal.
Excel 2013 deserves a longer and deeper look than we had room for in our write-up of the full Office 2013 suite, partly because Microsoft seems to have packed more new features and conveniences into Excel 2013 than into any of the other apps in the suite. Some of these new features add functions that Excel never had before, but most of them make it effortless to use features that took a lot of time, trouble, and expertise to use in earlier versions.
What's Obviously New Some of the new features are obvious, such as the way Excel now opens multiple worksheets in separate Excel windows, each with its own ribbon interface, instead of as separate panes in a single Excel window sharing one ribbon. This makes it easy to manage different worksheets in a dual-monitor setup, while also bringing Excel into line with Word, which has used separate windows for separate documents for ages. Some are under the hood, including fifty new functions for use in formulas, including one that converts strings to numbers in a customizable way, so that "15%" appears as to "0.15" without requiring a trip to the "Format cell" dialog to change a cell's appearance.
Other new features streamline existing features, making it surprisingly easy for beginners to perform tasks that used to be limited to experts. When you select a block of data, a Quick Analysis icon appears at the lower right of the selection. Click on it, and Excel displays a gallery of suggested formatting, charts, totals, and much more. For example, as you move through the suggested choices, Excel displays a row or column of totals, running totals, averages, and other calculations based on the selected data.
Quick Analysis also suggests suitable charts, or custom formatting that color-codes the data, or displays icons in each cell indicating whether the number of greater or less than the preceding cell. The same gallery also suggests possible pivot tables for custom views of the data, making this feature more accessible than ever. All these various options were (and still are) available from the Ribbon if you had the knowledge and patience to find them, but now Excel goes out of its way to offer them. By the way, keyboard aficionados will be glad to know that the Quick Analysis gallery, like everything else in Excel, can be opened with a keyboard shortcut, in this case Ctrl-Q.
My favorite new feature, because it saves a tremendous amount of time-wasting effort, is called Flash Fill, and it's one of many features where Excel acts as it it's using its brain, not just its raw number-crunching power. If you have a column of first names and a column of last names, and you want a single column containing cells with a last name followed by a comma, then a first name. I used to accomplish this by copying the names into Word, combining them there by replacing tabs with commas, and then copying the results back into Excel. Now, all I need to do is go to the top row of the columns of names, containing, for example, "Arthur" and "Andersen," find an empty cell on that row, and enter "Andersen, Arthur". Then I start typing a similar combination of names on the next cell down, corresponding to the names in the second row, and Excel fills in that cell, and the whole rest of the column, with the combined names that I want. The filled-in data appears in gray until I click on an icon that invites me to confirm that I got the data I want.
You can use the same trick in reverse, too, extracting the first or last word from cells that contain multiple words, instead of combining multiple words into one cell. With some experimentation, you may find that Flash Fill is smarter than you expect. For example, if you have a column of dates such as "2012, 1995, 1987, 1990" and you enter "2000s, 1990s" in the column next to them, Excel will instantly suggest "1980s," and "1980s" to continue the series correctly.
What's Under the Hood Some of Excel's best new features aren't visible in Excel itself because they exist only on the Web. One especially nifty feature lets you add a view-in-Excel button to almost any table that you want to include on a webpage. This can be a webpage on your own site or a blog or anywhere else. All you need to do is to visit Microsoft's site, click a few buttons to get the two chunks of HTML code that you need, and then paste that code above and below a table in a web page.
This isn't quite the BlackBerry earnings story you're waiting for -- after all, the US figures covering the success (or otherwise) of the Z10 won't arrive until the next quarter. Instead, we're looking at the company's results from the end of the financial year to March 2nd, which show that BlackBerry made $94 million in GAAP income on revenues of $2.7 billion -- in contrast to the $125 million net loss it made in the same quarter last year. More importantly, it shipped out almost one million BlackBerry 10 devices during the three weeks of the quarter that they were available. In addition, it managed to push five million of its older smartphones and 370,000 PlayBook tablets out of the door, but saw user numbers fall from 79 million last quarter to 76 million now.
It's important to notice that as revenues have remained relatively flat, the surge in profits is more than likely down to Thorsten Heins' cost-cutting measures, with the CEO remarking that "We have implemented numerous changes at BlackBerry over the past year and those changes have resulted in the Company returning to profitability in the fourth quarter."
At the same time, the company let slip that Mike Lazaridis will retire from his position as vice-chair and director of the company he helped found the better part of three decades ago. He'll exit the business on May 1st so that he can concentrate on his new enterprise, Quantum Valley Investments.
Contact: Caroline Clancy caroline.clancy@bristol.ac.uk 44-011-792-88086 University of Bristol
Common fruit fly key to discovery as to how memories are written into brain cells
Scientists have identified a key molecule responsible for triggering the chemical processes in our brain linked to our formation of memories. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Neural Circuits, reveal a new target for therapeutic interventions to reverse the devastating effects of memory loss.
The BBSRC-funded research, led by scientists at the University of Bristol, aimed to better understand the mechanisms that enable us to form memories by studying the molecular changes in the hippocampus the part of the brain involved in learning.
Previous studies have shown that our ability to learn and form memories is due to an increase in synaptic communication called Long Term Potentiation [LTP]. This communication is initiated through a chemical process triggered by calcium entering brain cells and activating a key enzyme called 'Ca2+ responsive kinase' [CaMKII]. Once this protein is activated by calcium it triggers a switch in its own activity enabling it to remain active even after the calcium has gone. This special ability of CaMKII to maintain its own activity has been termed 'the molecular memory switch'.
Until now, the question still remained as to what triggers this chemical process in our brain that allows us to learn and form long-term memories. The research team, comprising scientists from the University's School of Physiology and Pharmacology, conducted experiments using the common fruit fly [Drosophila] to analyse and identify the molecular mechanisms behind this switch. Using advanced molecular genetic techniques that allowed them to temporarily inhibit the flies' memory the team were able to identify a gene called CASK as the synaptic molecule regulating this 'memory switch'.
Dr James Hodge, the study's lead author, said: "Fruit flies are remarkably compatible for this type of study as they possess similar neuronal function and neural responses to humans. Although small they are very smart, for instance, they can land on the ceiling and detect that the fruit in your fruit bowl has gone off before you can."
"In experiments whereby we tested the flies' learning and memory ability, involving two odours presented to the flies with one associated with a mild shock, we found that around 90 per cent were able to learn the correct choice remembering to avoid the odour associated with the shock. Five lessons of the odour with punishment made the fly remember to avoid that odour for between 24 hours and a week, which is a long time for an insect that only lives a couple of months."
By localising the function of the key molecules CASK and CaMKII to the flies' equivalent brain area to the human hippocampus, the team found that the flies lacking these genes showed disrupted memory formation. In repeat memory tests those lacking these key genes were shown to have no ability to remember at three hours (mid-term memory) and 24 hours (long-term memory) although their initial learning or short-term memory wasn't affected.
Finally, the team introduced a copy of the human CASK gene it is 80 per cent identical to the fly CASK gene into the genome of a fly that completely lacked its own CASK gene and was therefore not usually able to remember. The researchers found that flies which had a copy of the human CASK gene could remember like a normal wildtype fly.
Dr Hodge, from the University's School of Physiology and Pharmacology, said: "Research into memory is particularly important as it gives us our sense of identity, and deficits in learning and memory occur in many diseases, injuries and during aging".
"CASK's control of CaMKII 'molecular memory switch' is clearly a critical step in how memories are written into neurons in the brain. These findings not only pave the way for to developing new therapies which reverse the effects of memory loss but also prove the compatibility of Drosophila to model these diseases in the lab and screen for new drugs to treat these diseases. Furthermore, this work provides an important insight into how brains have evolved their huge capacity to acquire and store information."
These findings clearly demonstrate that neuronal function of CASK is conserved between flies and human, validating the use of Drosophila to understand CASK function in both the healthy and diseased brain. Mutations in human CASK gene have been associated with neurological and cognitive defects including severe learning difficulties.
###
The BBSRC-funded study, entitled 'CASK and CaMKII function in the mushroom body a'/' neurons during Drosophila memory formation' by Bilal Rashid Malik, John Michael Gillespie, James John Llewellyn Hodge was published on Wednesday 27 March 2013 in the Frontiers in Neural Circuits Journal.
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Contact: Caroline Clancy caroline.clancy@bristol.ac.uk 44-011-792-88086 University of Bristol
Common fruit fly key to discovery as to how memories are written into brain cells
Scientists have identified a key molecule responsible for triggering the chemical processes in our brain linked to our formation of memories. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Neural Circuits, reveal a new target for therapeutic interventions to reverse the devastating effects of memory loss.
The BBSRC-funded research, led by scientists at the University of Bristol, aimed to better understand the mechanisms that enable us to form memories by studying the molecular changes in the hippocampus the part of the brain involved in learning.
Previous studies have shown that our ability to learn and form memories is due to an increase in synaptic communication called Long Term Potentiation [LTP]. This communication is initiated through a chemical process triggered by calcium entering brain cells and activating a key enzyme called 'Ca2+ responsive kinase' [CaMKII]. Once this protein is activated by calcium it triggers a switch in its own activity enabling it to remain active even after the calcium has gone. This special ability of CaMKII to maintain its own activity has been termed 'the molecular memory switch'.
Until now, the question still remained as to what triggers this chemical process in our brain that allows us to learn and form long-term memories. The research team, comprising scientists from the University's School of Physiology and Pharmacology, conducted experiments using the common fruit fly [Drosophila] to analyse and identify the molecular mechanisms behind this switch. Using advanced molecular genetic techniques that allowed them to temporarily inhibit the flies' memory the team were able to identify a gene called CASK as the synaptic molecule regulating this 'memory switch'.
Dr James Hodge, the study's lead author, said: "Fruit flies are remarkably compatible for this type of study as they possess similar neuronal function and neural responses to humans. Although small they are very smart, for instance, they can land on the ceiling and detect that the fruit in your fruit bowl has gone off before you can."
"In experiments whereby we tested the flies' learning and memory ability, involving two odours presented to the flies with one associated with a mild shock, we found that around 90 per cent were able to learn the correct choice remembering to avoid the odour associated with the shock. Five lessons of the odour with punishment made the fly remember to avoid that odour for between 24 hours and a week, which is a long time for an insect that only lives a couple of months."
By localising the function of the key molecules CASK and CaMKII to the flies' equivalent brain area to the human hippocampus, the team found that the flies lacking these genes showed disrupted memory formation. In repeat memory tests those lacking these key genes were shown to have no ability to remember at three hours (mid-term memory) and 24 hours (long-term memory) although their initial learning or short-term memory wasn't affected.
Finally, the team introduced a copy of the human CASK gene it is 80 per cent identical to the fly CASK gene into the genome of a fly that completely lacked its own CASK gene and was therefore not usually able to remember. The researchers found that flies which had a copy of the human CASK gene could remember like a normal wildtype fly.
Dr Hodge, from the University's School of Physiology and Pharmacology, said: "Research into memory is particularly important as it gives us our sense of identity, and deficits in learning and memory occur in many diseases, injuries and during aging".
"CASK's control of CaMKII 'molecular memory switch' is clearly a critical step in how memories are written into neurons in the brain. These findings not only pave the way for to developing new therapies which reverse the effects of memory loss but also prove the compatibility of Drosophila to model these diseases in the lab and screen for new drugs to treat these diseases. Furthermore, this work provides an important insight into how brains have evolved their huge capacity to acquire and store information."
These findings clearly demonstrate that neuronal function of CASK is conserved between flies and human, validating the use of Drosophila to understand CASK function in both the healthy and diseased brain. Mutations in human CASK gene have been associated with neurological and cognitive defects including severe learning difficulties.
###
The BBSRC-funded study, entitled 'CASK and CaMKII function in the mushroom body a'/' neurons during Drosophila memory formation' by Bilal Rashid Malik, John Michael Gillespie, James John Llewellyn Hodge was published on Wednesday 27 March 2013 in the Frontiers in Neural Circuits Journal.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 28-Mar-2013
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