Royal Philips has announced the establishment of its first Africa research laboratory in Nairobi, highlighting Kenya’s growing status as the continent’s tech hub.

Dutch technology firm Royal Philips has announced the establishment of its first Africa research laboratory in Nairobi, highlighting Kenya’s growing status as the continent’s tech hub. The facility will be tasked with developing and deploying application-focused scientific and user studies that will aid in improving access to lighting, affordable healthcare, as well as creating new inventions to meet needs of Africa's growing middle class. The Philips Africa Innovation Hub will be located at the Philips East African headquarters in Nairobi, and will kick-off with ventures that are under development as well as those in pilot phase. The Amsterdam-based firm says international researchers together with African talent will operate on the concept of “open innovation” and will work in close collaboration with the R&D ecosystem of Kenya and Africa. Philips is in discussions with local organisations and universities on R&D collaborations to co-create meaningful solutions for Africa. “With Kenya as a leader in the continent in science and entrepreneurship as well as a hub of collaboration on technology and innovation, Nairobi, is the ideal location to establish Philips’ African research presence. We want to tap into the city’s vibrant R&D ecosystem and contribute to the process of co-creating new solutions, new business models and meaningful partnerships to provide innovations that make an impact,” saidJJ van Dongen, Senior Vice President and CEO Philips Africa. The setting up of the research centre comes after US tech giant IBM opened an innovation hub in Nairobi to match IT innovators with investors who will help develop the ideas commercially.

Royal Philips has announced the establishment of its first Africa research laboratory in Nairobi, highlighting Kenya’s growing status as the continent’s tech hub.

Dutch technology firm Royal Philips has announced the establishment of its first Africa research laboratory in Nairobi, highlighting Kenya’s growing status as the continent’s tech hub. The facility will be tasked with developing and deploying application-focused scientific and user studies that will aid in improving access to lighting, affordable healthcare, as well as creating new inventions to meet needs of Africa's growing middle class. The Philips Africa Innovation Hub will be located at the Philips East African headquarters in Nairobi, and will kick-off with ventures that are under development as well as those in pilot phase. The Amsterdam-based firm says international researchers together with African talent will operate on the concept of “open innovation” and will work in close collaboration with the R&D ecosystem of Kenya and Africa. Philips is in discussions with local organisations and universities on R&D collaborations to co-create meaningful solutions for Africa. “With Kenya as a leader in the continent in science and entrepreneurship as well as a hub of collaboration on technology and innovation, Nairobi, is the ideal location to establish Philips’ African research presence. We want to tap into the city’s vibrant R&D ecosystem and contribute to the process of co-creating new solutions, new business models and meaningful partnerships to provide innovations that make an impact,” saidJJ van Dongen, Senior Vice President and CEO Philips Africa. The setting up of the research centre comes after US tech giant IBM opened an innovation hub in Nairobi to match IT innovators with investors who will help develop the ideas commercially.

HOW MONEY TRANSFER IS DRIVING KENYA ECONOMY

HOW MONEY TRANSFER IS DRIVING KENYA ECONOMY
Usage of mobile money transfer is on increase in Kenya day bay day. Some of the operation than by mobile money service include the following
 Paying of electricity and water bills, this days you do not see people lining up in banks just pay the bills.
 Shopping online many companies today in Kenya give their customers to pay for goods or service by paying through mobile money cash transfer. This process operate just like visa.
 Booking of travel ticket today in Kenya major airline services operating in the country allows it customers to pay for their tickets by Mpesa.
Cheap mobile phone being launched in Nairobi my major mobile manufacturers, especially those from china is the key to the success of the project I the country. the four major mobile providers companies in Kenya are;
a) Safaricom through Mpesa service
b) Airtel through Airtel money
c) Orange by Orange money
d) YU by Yucash
Just four months after safaricom launched M-shauri in collaboration with Commercial Bank of Africa a program that allow its customers to save cash or borrow cash. Its recorded massive response from Kenyans. Today it has more than 4 million customer already.
Statistics from Central Bank of Kenya shows that there are 15million bank deposits accounts compared with 24million money transfer accounts.

Sprint has just released its financial report for Q4 2012. Compared to Q3's net loss of $767 million

America's third-largest carrier added 401,000 postpaid customers over the quarter, but lost 644,000 from its Nextel network. Over 2012 as awhole, Sprint added a total of 1.5 million postpaid subscribers, and when offset against losses from the Nextel network, added a total of 605,000 new customers over its entire network — that includespostpaid, prepaid, and wholesale. The Nextel network is set to close down later this year, and Sprint has failed to convince a large number of Nextel subscribers to switch to its network.
The fourth quarter of 2012 is the first full quarter to close since Sprint's acquisition by Japanese carrier SoftBank was announced, but since that deal hasn't yet closed, it has yet to dramatically affect Sprint's business. Sprint says the deal is still tracking to close by the middle of this year, so we should see the effects of SoftBank in thenot too distant future.

mobile handset sales drove earnings at Samsung Electronics to another record

The South Korean group's operating profit hit a record for the fifth straight quarter, rising 88 per cent from a year earlier to aboutWon8.8tn ($8.27bn), it saidin preliminary guidance published on Tuesday. Revenue rose 18 per cent to approximately Won56tn.
Although Samsung did notprovide a breakdown of the results, analysts believethe profit growth was driven by the handset business, which accounted for about two-thirds of earnings in the previous quarter.
Read more: Touch laptops are coming
Samsung has established itself as the leading smartphone maker by unit sales with a product range that stretches from premium to low-end devices, unlike rival Apple,which focuses on the top end of the market.
Apple won a hard-fought US legal battle when a California court in August ordered Samsung to pay$1bn for infringing patents related to the iPhone.
The legal tussle has continued, with Apple last month appealing against a US judge's refusal to ban some Samsung products from sale in the country. InSeptember, Apple unveiled the iPhone 5 amid feverish publicity, followed the next month by a miniature version of the iPad.
Read more: Six gadget trends at the CES
But analysts said Apple's introduction of competing devices failed to slow Samsung's momentum. Daniel Kim at Macquarie Securities estimated that Samsung sold about 15m units of its flagship Galaxy S3 smartphone in the period and about 8m of its Galaxy Note 2 miniature tablet.
Samsung phones using Microsoft's Windows Phone8 operating system will go on sale in the US early this year, as the company seeks to diversify beyond However, the rapid growthof the handset business threatens to leave Samsung"too dependent on a single profit source", Mr Kim added.
While Samsung is the world's leading producer of memory chips, smartphone application processors and televisions, these businesses combinedcontribute a fraction of the profits generated by the smartphone division.
The operating profit figure was ahead of analysts' consensus forecasts of Won8.5tn compiled by Bloomberg, but the shares fell 0.9 per cent in morning trading in Seoul.
Marcello Ahn, an analyst at Nomura, said investors were taking profits following a strong run that had seen the shares rise 19per cent since the beginning of September.
"For the share price to move by another jump from this level, we must see Samsung diversifying its [earnings base] into tablets and PCs," he said.
Another key factor in Samsung's performance this year will be the impact of its next flagship smartphone, expected to be released in the second quarter of the year.

Apple's products were the preferred mobile device target of many thieves in the NewYork city,

A surge in thefts of iPhone and iPads is responsible for a slight uptick in New York City's overall crime rate, according to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Apple's products were the preferred mobile device target of many thieves in the city, Bloomberg noted duringhis weekly radio address,according to the New York Times .
Statistics published by the New York Police Department revealed thatas of Monday, there were3,484 more major crimes reported in 2012 than forthe same period last year.During that time, the city experienced 3,890 more thefts of Apple products.
"If you just took away thejump in Apple, we'd be down for the year," Marc La Vorgna, the mayor's press secretary, told the Times.
NYPD announced in September that thefts of iPhones and iPads have increased 40 percent this year, compared with the same period last year. To combat the rise in iPhone and iPad thefts, New YorkCity police have been running sting operations to catch people fencing stolen devices.
The NYPD has also launched a new service dubbed "Operation ID" to help owners find mobile devices that are lost or stolen. Because theloss of mobile devices is not limited to New York, the FCC announced earlier this year that it wasworking with the four major U.S. wireless carriers to create a centralized national database of lost or stolen cell phone information.
In addition, Apple recently filed a patent application for a theft detection system for smartphones that would sound an alarm if the device determined that ithad been stolen.
In the meantime, the mayor also had some advice for people using mobile devices on the streets of his fair city.
"Put it in a pocket in sort of a more body-fitting, tighter clothes, that you can feel if it was -- if somebody put their handin your pocket, not just an outside coat pocket," the mayor said.

a California Instagram user leveled breach of contract and other claims against the company.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook's Instagram photo sharing service has been hit with what appears to be the first civil lawsuit to result from changed service terms that prompted howls of protest last week.
In a proposed class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court on Friday, a California Instagram user leveled breach of contract and other claims against the company.
"We believe this complaintis without merit and we will fight it vigorously," Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an e-mail.
Instagram, which allows people to add filters and effects to photos and share them easily on the Internet, was acquired by Facebook earlier this year for $715 million.
In announcing revised terms of service last week, Instagram spurred suspicions that it would sell user photos without compensation. It also announced a mandatory arbitration clause, forcing users to waive their rights to participate in a class action lawsuit except under very limited circumstances.
The current terms of service, in effect through mid-January, contain no such liability shield.
The backlash prompted Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom to retreat partially a few dayslater, deleting language about displaying photos without compensation.
However, Instagram kept language that gave it the ability to place ads in conjunction with user content, and saying "that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such." It also kept the mandatoryarbitration clause.
The lawsuit, filed by San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk, says customers who do not agree with Instagram's terms can cancel their profile but then forfeit rights to photos they had previously shared on the service.
"In short, Instagram declares that 'possession isnine-tenths of the law and if you don't like it, you can't stop us,'" the lawsuit says.
Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who had criticized Instagram, said he was pleased that the company rolled back some of the advertising terms and agreed to better explain their plans in the future.
However, he said the newterms no longer contain language which had explicitly promised that private photos would remain private. Facebook had engendered criticism in the past, Opsahl said, for changing settings so that the ability to keep some information private was no longer available.
"Hopefully, Instagram willlearn from that experienceand refrain from removingprivacy settings," Opsahl said.
The civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Lucy Funes, individually and on behalf of all otherssimilarly situated vs. Instagram Inc., 12-cv-6482.
(Reporting by Dan Levine;Editing by Dan Grebler)

Kodak To Sell Digital Imaging Patent Portfolio For$525M

Kodak has agreed to sell itsdigital imaging portfolio to a consortium of 12 licensees for $525 million, organized by patent-holding company Intellectual Ventures and patent risk advisory firm RPX Corporation . It said it will use the proceeds from the sale to pay down bankruptcy debt — the transaction is subject to the approval of the BankruptcyCourt, as well as “certain customary conditions”.
Kodak said a portion of the money will be paid by the 12 licensees, giving each licensee rights to the digital imaging patent portfolio and “certain otherKodak patents”, while another portion of the money will be paid by Intellectual Ventures, which Kodak said will be acquiring the digital imaging patent portfolio “subject to these new licenses, as well as previously existing licenses”.
It is unclear exactly who all12 licensees are but Earlier this month Bloomberg reported that Apple and Google were

Safaricom launches M-Shwari mobile banking service, banks fears

The mobile firm on Tuesdaylaunched a micro-loan product dubbed M-Shwari,which will allow its 19 million subscribers to save and borrow money from their mobile phones using the M-Pesa platform.
It is being run in partnership with Commercial Bank of Africa, which will provide the banking services.
The service will allow saving of as little as Sh1 andborrowing of a minimum Sh100, with interest rates ranging from two to five per cent per year, depending on one’s savings.
Borrowers will also part with a one-off facilitation fee of 7.5 per cent of the borrowed amount. Subscribers can borrow up to Sh20,000, payable in 30 days.
Safaricom joins Airtel which in May launched a similar product, though on a smaller scale, through a partnership with micro lender Faulu Kenya.
Airtel’s service, known as Kopa Chapaa, allows subscribers to get loans of between Sh100 and Sh10,000 charged at an interest of 3-10 per cent.
Speaking at the launch, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said that the product would enable low-income earners access affordable loans based on their savings.
These services are promising to bring competition in the short term lending market that has been dominated by shylocks.
Banks have, however, downplayed the entry of mobile operators in the lending industry on grounds that they are targeting the unbanked population.
“Product innovation, particularly in the mobile banking space, will continue to be a differentiating factor for thesector as banks move to increase accessibility to financial services. You therefore would expect to see more linkages with various telecom providers, as we have seen with Commercial Bank of Africa and Safaricom on the M-Shwari product,” Kenya Bankers Association boss Habil Olaka said in an emailinterview.
To activate the M-Shwari account, one will be required to go to the M-pesa menu, select the account option, choose the update menu option and then enter their M-pesa PIN number.
An M-Shwari will automatically be included in the M-pesa menu.
“It is simple. There are no ledger fees, no limits on thefrequency of withdrawals, no minimum operating balance and no charges on deposits for M-Pesa to M-Shwari account,” said Mr Collymore.
“Loan defaulters will be blacklisted and will not be allowed to borrow for five years,” said the head of National Payments System, Mr Stephen Nduati.
Preferred pace
M-Shwari creates a platformon which customers can save at their preferred pace.
“It creates a safe environment for customers to borrow small amounts and links the amounts of credit available to the ability to save,” Vodafone director of Mobile Money, Mr Michael Joseph said.

Paul Ottelini Intel CEO would retire in May,

Intel said on Monday that Chief Executive Officer PaulOttelini would retire in May, stepping down from the world's leading chipmaker at time when it isgrappling with weak PC demand as the industry shifts towards mobile computing.
Intel's board said it would consider internal and external candidates for the CEO position. It said in a statement that it expected the "leadership transition" to last six months.
The company said it would promote three executives tobe executive vice presidents. They are Renee James, who is in charge of Intel software; Brian Krzanich, who is chief operating officer and also oversees manufacturing; and Stacy Smith, the chief financial officer and directorof corporate strategy.
Ottelini, 62, was the fifth CEO of the company, stepping into the post in the second quarter of 2005.

Hacked Not Us says Twitter

After many Twitter users received e-mails on Thursday morning asking them to reset the passwords to their Twitter accounts, many suspected that they, or the company, had been hacked.
Not so.
As a security policy, Twitter regularly resets passwords to accounts it believes may have been compromised and sends users an e-mail informing them that they need to create a new passwords. But on Thursdaymorning, a large number of Twitter users took to the platform to complain that they had received the e-mail and worried they had been hacked.
Twitter said it had mistakenly reset passwords for more people than it it intended on Thursday. "We unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised," the companysaid in a blog post. "We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused."

Galaxy S3 world best selling smartphone

Galaxy S3 became the world's best-selling smartphone model last quarter, pushing aside Apple Inc's iPhone, which has dominated the chart for more than two years, research firm Strategy Analytics said on Thursday.
Strategy Analytics estimated Samsung sold 18 million S3 models in the third quarter, compared with iPhone 4S sales of 16.2 million.
Strong sales of the flagship Galaxy S3 - which comes with a large 4.8 inch touchscreen - helped Samsung post a record $7.3 billion operating profit in theJuly-September quarter.
"Samsung's Galaxy S3 has proven wildly popular with consumers and operators across North America, Europe and Asia," said analyst Neil Mawston, adding the new iPhone 5 would likely reclaim the top spot for Apple in the currentquarter