China Daily: China to open telecom sector to private capital

China's Ministry of Industry Information Technology has decided to allow and encourage private capital to enter the telecommunications sector. Specifically, private investment will be allowed in the resale of mobile communications , broadband services, value-added telecom services and basic operating services, according to a report from China Daily and a press statement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In addition, telecom operators may proceed with IPOs on domestic exchanges and the state will dilute its stake in major players. The Ministry will also encourage private investment in telecom infrastructure construction and maintenance projects, including holding the operating rights of base stations and telecom towers. China Daily explains the decision as a bid to boost the slowing economy.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-06/28/content_15531642.htm
http://www.miit.gov.cn/n11293472/n11293832/n11293907/n11368223/14687672.html

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Google Expands its Cloud Ambitions with Compute and Drive

 In day two of the Google I/O event in San Francisco, the company further outlined its cloud ambitions by introducing Google Compute infrastructure service while expanding its consumer-oriented Google Drive.

The new Google Compute Engine provides on-demand, virtual Linux machines at Google scale. The service lets you run large-scale computing workloads on the same infrastructure that runs Google Search, Gmail and Ads. "Ten thousand cores is really cool," said Urs Hölzle, Google's Sr. VP of Technical Infrastructure, and then demonstrating a genomics application being instantly scaled to a further 600,000 cores. Google is promising up to 50% more computer power per dollar compared to other cloud computing service providers. The price for one virtual core starts at $0.145 per hour. The service is live now and a Developers Guide with open APIs is available.

"Google Drive is all about making your life easy to live in the cloud," said Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management. This means making all of your files available on all of your devices. Google is introducing a Drive app for iOs and Chrome OS.

Optical character recognition is now part of the Google Drive, enabling users to search their Google drive without having to input meta data for photos or scanned documents. The company is adding real time collaboration tools (keystroke by keystroke syncing ) to Google Documents using Google Drive. Google also introduced number of major new features and platforms to the Google Drive SDK, seeking to encourage developers to build Google Drive storage into their apps. Google Docs has also added offline capabilities.

Some other notes:

• Chrome has nearly doubled since last year’s I/O—from 160 million to 310 million active users around the world.
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• Chrome is now available for iOS. It is already the top download in the iTunes store.
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• Gmail now has 425 million active users globally.

http://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine.html

28-Jun-12

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EXFO Posts Revenue of $59.5 Million, Net Loss

 EXFO reported quarterly revenue of US$59.5 million for its third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$67.6 million in the third quarter of 2011 and US$66.9 million in the second quarter of 2012. IFRS net loss in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 totaled US$3.9 million, or US$0.06 per share, compared to net earnings of US$1.8 million, or US$0.03 per diluted share, in the same period last year and net earnings of US$1.0 million, or US$0.02 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2012.
Bookings attained US$57.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$61.3 million in the same period last year and US$60.6 million in the second quarter of 2012. The company's book-to-bill ratio was 0.97 in the third quarter of 2012.
http://www.exfo.com

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