Microsoft expands buyback deal to goose sales of Surface, Windows phones

Microsoft has expanded a buyback program intended to boost sales of Windows smartphones and tablets, and will pay up to $350 for a wide variety of rival hardware powered by Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group who specializes in retail, applauded the deal. "This is clearly a marketing ploy, [but] they usually prove to be good programs for getting people into stores," said Baker.

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The new program followed an earlier, more limited buyback deal that dealt only in Apple iPads. Customers can trade in a used iPad for a minimum of $200, with the funds placed on a gift card good for purchases at Microsoft's own retail stores.

Microsoft's expanded buyback accepts numerous rival devices, including smartphones and tablets running Android made by the likes of Samsung, Lenovo, and others; Apple iPhones and iPads; and even BlackBerry smartphones.

Customers receive quotes online from Clover Wireless -- one of the many "re-commerce" companies bidding for used hardware that they then refurbish and resell, mainly in developing markets outside the U.S. -- and then ship their hardware along with proof of purchase of a Windows phone or tablet. Assuming everything's approved, Clover returns a prepaid Visa card loaded with the payment amount.

The caveat: Customers must first buy a Windows smartphone or tablet.

"The Microsoft device must have been purchased within thirty days of the date you ship your old device," the program's FAQ states. The new purchase does not have to be a Surface RT or Surface RT tablet, but can be a third-party Windows-based phone from Nokia, HTC, Huawei, and Samsung; or a tablet made by Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.

Clover Wireless' quotes for used hardware were in line with those generated by other cash-back rivals. Clover quoted $75 for a used 16GB iPhone 4 running on Verizon's network, while Gazelle and NextWorth -- two popular buyback vendors -- offered $75 and $65 for the same device on Thursday.

Some critics panned the expanded program -- and earlier, the original -- saying that Microsoft was essentially paying for new customers, or trying to.

"Of course they are," retorted Baker. "That's the whole point of marketing and advertising. Whether it's rebates or buybacks or lower prices or advertising, companies pay for new customers. That's how things work."

Nor are Microsoft's buyback programs a mark of desperation, an easy-to-conclude analysis because the Redmond, Wash. company has struggled to sell its Surface tablets since their introduction last October.

"Anyone who says that knows nothing about consumer marketing, knows nothing about how to drive traffic into stores," said Baker, rejecting the desperation thesis. "These are smart moves, not stupid moves. If you're not doing something to drive traffic, that's a stupid move.

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Intel expands custom processor business

Intel is putting a sharp focus on expanding its custom processor and chip operations in response to a growing trend of companies building servers in-house to meet specific workloads or data center designs.

Last year, Intel has supplied custom processors to 18 companies, most notably eBay and Facebook, said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, in an interview.

"That trend is growing. In the last year we've delivered 18 custom silicon processor solutions for the full array of customers -- our direct customers, the OEMS and the end users -- in order to meet their specific needs," said Bryant, who runs Intel's most profitable group.

The growing custom processor business will supplement Intel's bread and butter server chip business, consisting of selling generic Xeon processors available in rack, tower and blade servers sold by companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard. But server infrastructures are changing with the growing adoption of cloud computing, big data and other applications, which has translated into a growing demand for custom processors, Bryant said.

Companies like Facebook and Google with mega data centers design servers in-house, and get them made from direct server suppliers like Quanta. The barebones servers typically cut excess components and are good enough to handle the growing cloud transactions such as search requests and social networking tasks. Facebook and Google have experimented with ARM processors in servers, while Tilera processors have also been tested.

"When you work with these end users who have technology as their core business, they are very clear on what is required," Bryant said. "They know what their workloads are, what their various applications are, they know what metric they are looking to hit from a performance per total cost of ownership."

The level of processor and chip customization varies with the workload, data center design, and even cooling solutions. Bryant provided an example where a flexible cooling system in a data center would allow customers to run processors at a higher frequency.

"We will have customers that have a very [specific] power target, so we will create versions whether its through changes in frequency, changes in core count, changes to drive down the power," Bryant said.

Customers usually give information about the applications they are running, the accelerators they need, the performance and power consumption levels they are looking to hit. Intel then customizes processors and chips that meets the specifications. Some customers in the technology and the data center business get specific about the server infrastructure.

"It all boils down to scale. I had one cloud service provider who had told me a single application is running across tens of thousands of servers. You can afford to tune that server very targeted against that application and eke out every bit of performance at ever lower cost of operations," Bryant said.

Intel is also now able to build system-on chip (SoC) designs, in which the CPU is combined with other accelerators, I/O, graphics and other processing units. That makes it easier to build custom processors and chips, Bryant said.

"With our SoC capability now, we can actually do rapid turns of our base product with very unique accelerators. Whether it's voice recognition acceleration or encryption or graphics acceleration... all the different types of accelerators that are targeted at different apps. We can deliver unique products there too," Bryant said.

Intel next year will release Xeon server chips based on the Broadwell processor core, which will succeed Haswell. Bryant said that the server SOC will also help optimize the chip to workloads, be it analytics or cloud.

"We have this wonderful Xeon core, and now Intel has a system-on-a-chip capability where we can rapidly turn out grabbing different intellectual property blocks and accelerators. Why not take this Xeon core and marry it with the SoC capability, and come up with... very [specific] processors targeted at unique capabilities," Bryant said.

In some ways, Intel is taking the same route as Advanced Micro Devices, which is creating custom chips based on its CPU and graphics architectures, but largely for non-server products. AMD's custom chips will be used in the upcoming Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One gaming consoles.

Intel is also investing in software development to tie applications directly to chip development. The chip maker has released its own version of Hadoop, and is also actively contributing an orchestration layer to OpenStack so resources are effectively allocated at server, storage and network levels in distributed computing environments.

Beyond the server, Intel is also looking to change data center design. One of the projects called Rack Scale aims at decoupling the processing, I/O and storage units in data centers with faster throughput mechanisms.

"Instead of a rack being 24 servers slotted in, with each of those servers with compute, memory and I/O, instead break that artificial barrier of the server down and look at it at the rack level. And create pools of compute, memory and I/O so that the application can access and use whatever capacity it needs," Bryant said.

The company is expected to announced a new optical throughput standard called MXC, which will be detailed at the Intel Developer Forum next month. The company is also developing processors for different target markets, Bryant said. Intel will also announce a new Atom processor called Rangeley for embedded networking devices in early September, ahead of IDF.

"We have hundreds of microprocessor products to cover the entire space," Bryant said.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com

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Jongo expands streaming speaker lineup, unveils subscription music service

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Salesforce.com expands mobile application development support

Salesforce.com has expanded the number of mobile application development tools it supports and also created a series of templates aimed at helping coders create mobile applications faster.

The focus of the 20 open-source HTML5 and CSS-based templates is on exploiting "micro-moments," or the many brief periods of interaction people have with their mobile devices each day, said Adam Seligman, vice president of developer relations, Salesforce.com platform.

Salesforce.com got the idea for the templates, which cover narrow scenarios such as an inventory check or appointments, through feedback from developers during a 40-city tour it conducted recently, Seligman said.

"The thing our developers are trying to do is not take massive, legacy applications and make them available in the cloud," Seligman said. "They're trying to get to what their customer wants to do," namely "super-fast," relevant and contextual business activities, he added.

Salesforce.com has gone even further than the templates, with a new "gallery" of sample mobile applications, which are also available now.

The mobile application world is fragmented, with many developers already having a favorite development framework. Salesforce.com's strategy is to embrace the situation rather than attempt to hem developers into a single homegrown toolset, although it has also developed one itself.

Earlier this year, Salesforce.com announced that it supported access to its APIs (application programming interfaces) from several popular JavaScript frameworks, including JQuery and Backbone.js.

On Tuesday, it announced API support for four additional frameworks, including Knockout.js, Appery.io, Sencha Touch and Xamarin. The last is aimed at Microsoft .NET developers and is based on Mono, the open-source implementation of .NET.

Salesforce.com's own mobile SDK is also getting an update, with a main new feature called SmartSync, which allows developers to create applications that work with data both off and online.

While Salesforce.com eventually hopes to generate significant revenue through mobile applications, it's taking the open-source approach now in order to seed the market.

"We have developers building apps fast and furious for the platform, and we want make them super, super successful," Seligman said.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Review: Hover Zoom expands images without extra clicking

Hover Zoom Hoverzoom provides larger versions of thumbnail pictures when you hover the mouse over them.

Download Now

Hover Zoom is one of the best and most useful browser plugins in existence...provided you use the Chrome browser, as it is not available for anything else.  It allows you to move your mouse over a small picture and instantly magnify it, without clicking or opening anything.

Shown here on a Facebook feed, Hover Zoom quickly shows bigger versions of thumbnail images.

This free extension from Romain Vallet works on many popular sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, and Twitter.

The automatic upsizing can get annoying when you mouse over an image by accident, though. To prevent this, you can either specify a time delay before the plugin kicks in, or you can activate the plugin by means of a keyboard shortcut only.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Chrome store, install this software directly into your Chrome browser.

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SAP expands partner program for application development

SAP has broadened its partner program for companies that want to develop applications using its technology and then sell them through the SAP online store.

While SAP already had programs aimed at mobile application development and its HANA Cloud service, the expanded offering brings in more technologies and also accommodates partners who want to build products that run on-premises, according to Monday’s announcement.

Partners will also be able to bundle and sell runtime licenses for SAP platform software with any applications they build, “so you can join the program once and then decide on your application scope, architecture, business model and routes to market,” according to an FAQ document. This approach also gives partners the ability “to act as ‘one face to the customer,’” SAP said.

SAP will charge partners royalties for the platform products “as a percentage of the net revenue of your packaged application (based on license list price and considering standard discounts such as volume discounts),” according to the FAQ.

Admission to the program requires a “low annual fee,” which gives partners access to their choice of “innovation packs” centered on various SAP products.

SAP Technologies covered by the expanded program include HANA, HANA Cloud, mobile platform, NetWeaver and ABAP, Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ and Sybase SQL Anywhere.

The program features a variety of partner onboarding services, ongoing training and support, and ultimately product review and certification services.

Partners can get their products qualified for the SAP store through an application review at no additional charge. Integration certifications are available for a fee. SAP charges 15 percent of revenue for applications sold through its store, compared to 30 percent for Apple’s iTunes store.

However, iTunes has a far higher profile than SAP’s store, as one question in the FAQ document alluded to. “SAP will drive demand to the SAP Store and will develop it further,” the FAQ states.

One-year, limited access “exploration memberships” for the expanded partner program are available for those who want to try before they buy, according to SAP.

The announcement is “a welcome evolution of partner development onboarding,” said Jon Reed, an independent analyst who closely tracks SAP, via email. “It’s more integrated, and increasingly clear on pricing.”

“Basically SAP has consolidated and simplified the ability for partners to develop apps,” Reed added. “Even though the marketplace for those apps is not as well-established or conceived, SAP clearly needs a real apps ecosystem around its products and partners need this kind of simplified process.”

Still, “it’s a welcome step but there is still a lot to prove in terms of partners building apps that are truly impactful for customers,” he said.

In addition, “a big missing piece from what i can see is connecting this partner program to individual developers (such as highly skilled independents),” Reed said. “That path is clear inside SAP but it doesn’t seem clear from the outside.”

SAP’s announcement didn’t particularly emphasize one technology more than another, even though HANA has emerged as the focal point for all internal development efforts.

It has launched a separate program for HANA aimed at getting startup companies to build products on the platform, and says to date that more than 500 have joined.

Also Monday, SAP announced that three more software vendors—PROS, AlertEnterprise and Clockwork—have become HANA OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners and will embed the technology in their products.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
More by Chris Kanaracus

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