Open-Xchange to double development team, speed up feature rollout

Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange has received a US$20 million investment that it will use to expand its development team to speed up feature rollouts for its Web-based office suite, the company announced on Thursday.
The biggest chunk of the money will go into the expansion of the engineering department, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. The office development team, which now consists of 15 people, will be doubled in the next 12 months or so, he said.
Open-Xchange started rolling out a browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents in March. Thus far the company has launched  OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files as well as OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files.
The application was developed by a team of former OpenOffice developers who are now concentrating on new features, Laguna said.
A spreadsheet program will be added by the end of this year and a presentation program should follow in the second quarter of 2014, Laguna said. "And then you will see new releases coming up more quickly," he said, adding that he couldn't discuss all the planned features.
The first release of the programs in the suite focus on providing key features that allow users to edit any Word or Excel document without Open-Xchange breaking anything, Laguna said. The idea is that users can use Open-Xchange in the cloud to work on documents that were created with their usual document editor, he said.

"We are not converting the document. We do not expect anyone to exclusively use our office suite for their work," he said, though he added that he does think that Open-Xchange is the best tool for many tasks.

For long documents with 500 pages or so with lots of footnotes and cross referencing however, it's better to use a text editor like Microsoft Office to create the original, Laguna said. "When you're done, you can do minor edits and go back to our tool," he said. Documents can also be edited on smartphones using Open-Xchange's office suite, said Laguna.

Open-Xchange plans to offer features that avoid the process of having to download a document, edit and mail it back to the sender, creating several copies of the same document, Laguna said.

In the next Open-Xchange release, users can click on "edit" when they receive a document attached to an email. Users will then be able to edit the document inside the email and hit reply from within the OX Text component, Laguna said. Then a link is sent back, which the recipient can click on to continue editing without downloading the document, or choose to download the document, he said.

Open-Xchange currently only has 75 customers, which are mainly service providers, but has a total of 80 million end users of which the company estimates that 35 million are active users. "What the service provider needs is good software with a lot of functions," so they can compete with similar offerings, said Laguna.

In addition to investing in a stronger engineering team, Open-Xchange also plans to invest the money in marketing, Laguna said. The company wants to attract a more diverse customer base, for instance by marketing its service to carriers, he said.

Google speeds up Chrome for iOS with new data compression feature

Google's Chrome Web browser for iOS devices has been updated to include several enhanced features, including data compression designed to speed up page loading.
Reducing data consumption and improving the speed of Web performance on mobile devices is something Google has been working toward in recent months. At the company's I/O developers conference in May, new file compression formats for images and video were announced for Android-powered mobile devices, drawing partly from capabilities already present in Chrome for the desktop.
The latest Chrome update, released Wednesday, brings some of those concepts over to devices powered by Apple's iOS.
The data cost savings, the company said, will reduce data usage and speed up page load times. Users can view their data savings in the app's bandwidth management settings. These data-reduction features will be available to all users over time, Google said.
The update also builds in interoperability with other Google apps, giving users the option to open links for YouTube, Maps, Google+ and Google Drive in the app instead of in the browser. In the update, there are also voice search enhancements to provide text-to-speech for all variations of English, Spanish, German and several other languages. Users can also now access their full browser history to view a list of websites the person has visited while using Chrome in standard mode.
On the whole, the new features are not groundbreaking, but the more interesting development is the expansion of the bandwidth management features, said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "Google is working to make the Web experience better even as it promotes its own app store," he said.
"Web tends to get left behind on mobile, but it's an important platform for communication and information," he said.
"Anything the operating system or distribution platform owners can do to curtail data traffic, while preserving the integrity of mobile data experiences, is a good thing," agreed John Jackson, an IDC analyst. That's especially true as mobile devices move toward becoming the mainstream, if not dominant, platform for consuming content.
"There's a case to be made that Google has an interest in Web-ifying apps, or app-ifying the Internet," he said.
Google's Chrome browser has seen a steady rise in usage rates over the past couple of years, Google executives said at the I/O conference. At the time of last year's show, there were 450 million monthly active users, and as of this past May there were more than 750 million users, according to the company.
"Our goal is to make the Web better, both on the desktop and mobile," said Linus Upson, VP of engineering for Chrome, at the conference.
The Chrome software is overseen by Sundar Pichai, who also heads Google's Android mobile operating system. The executive is meeting with members of the press next week at an event in San Francisco, but it is not clear whether any new Chrome product will be announced then.

Microsoft's 'enterprise feature pack' for Windows Phone adds auto VPN

Microsoft said Wednesday that it planned to release an “enterprise feature pack” for corporations who wish to adopt Windows Phone, while extending the support lifecycle for Windows Phone 8 to 36 months, through 2016.

The new feature pack includes VPN functionality that will automatically trigger when protected resources are accessed, Microsoft said, plus S/MIME to sign and encrypt email and EAP-TLS enterprise Wi-Fi support. The pack will be released in the first half of 2014, Microsoft said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Microsoft
The real question, however, is whether Microsoft’s carrier partners will allow the feature pack to be pushed to their customer’s phones—or, at least, that was what virtually every commenter on Microsoft’s post had in mind. Carriers typically review, test, and deploy new OS upgrades over a matter of months, with no guarantee that updates will actually be pushed to consumers.



And while Microsoft also extended the support lifecycle of Windows Phone 8, it did not extend that same courtesy to those who own Windows Phone 7 devices, making Microsoft’s older platform less attractive. Microsoft will make updates, including security updates, available on WP7 phones for a total of 18 months, or until Sept. 9, 2014. At that point, they’ll be forced to shift over to WP8 phones, which will be supported, including security updates, through Jan. 12, 2016. (TechHive has rounded up eight other reasons for upgrading to Windows Phone and WP8, and written a Windows Phone SuperGuide, to boot.)

In all, however, Microsoft hopes that businesses sign on to the Windows Phone platform with the same enthusiasm they've shown for Windows 8. (Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, told attendees at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference that 73 percent of enterprises are “current” on Windows.)

MicrosoftYou could be seeing this screen in a corporate environment if Microsoft has its way.
”By lengthening the Windows Phone support lifecycle policy and announcing the enterprise feature pack, we show Microsoft’s commitment to the Windows Phone platform,” Tony Mestres, vice president of Windows Phone partner and channel marketing, wrote. “This gives business customers the confidence to invest in Windows Phone today, with the knowledge that their investments are secure, and the platform is evolving to be an even better choice for business.”

The full list of the enterprise feature pack includes:
S/MIME to sign and encrypt emailAccess to corporate resources behind the firewall with app aware, auto-triggered VPNEnterprise Wi-Fi support with EAP-TLSEnhanced MDM policies to lock down functionality on the phone for more enterprise control, in addition to richer application management such as allowing or denying installation of certain appsCertificate management to enroll, update, and revoke certificates for user authentication
Nevertheless, some users were doubtful that they’d ever see what Microsoft promised. “This is all excellent news, and I can’t wait for this to be available... but how will this feature pack be released?” a commenter named “GoodThings2Life” wrote. “Will we continue to be at the mercy of carriers and OEMs to publish this in a timely manner, or will it be available as a store app or customer-installable or enterprise-pushable update?

”I vividly remember Joe Belfiore saying at 2012 Build and again at the WP8 launch event how we would be able to participate in an Early Adopter style program, and that has yet to materialize for customers,” the commenter added. “I would hate to see another situation where we’re stuck waiting on OEMs and carriers.”

First Feature Film Completed Under Hungary Fund Bows at Karlovy Vary

KARLOVY VARY -- The first feature film completed with backing from Hungary’s new national film fund had its world premiere Wednesday at the Karlovy Vary international film festival.

Janos Szasz’s Le grand cahier (A nagy fuzet, also known in English as The Notebook) – a $4 million-budget Hungarian co-production with Germany, France and Austria that tells the harsh story of twin brothers put into the care of a cruel grandmother during World War II, received $780,000 (600,000 Euros) from the Hungarian National Film Fund (HNFF).

An adaptation of Agota Kristof’s international bestseller, the film’s three-year journey from script to a screening at one of Europe’s leading film events coincided with a major shake up in Hungarian public film funding.

STORY: Cannes Debut of 'The Notebook' Marks Hungary's Return to the Movie Business

A change of government and revelations of multi-million dollar debts – along with allegations of corruption at predecessor body the Hungarian Motion Picture Public Foundation (MMKA), lead to the establishment of the new film fund, backed by national lottery funding worth $26 million this year.

Budapest-born Hollywood producer Andy Vajna (Rambo, Terminator, Nixon) was brought in to oversee the reforms to fund commercially viable films destined for theatrical release.

At the time, the changes provoked dismay among many filmmakers who feared they would no longer win public funding for their projects.

While some famous Hungarian directors publicly denounced the new system – most notably art house director Bela Tarr, who announced his retirement from filmmaking, most chose to give it time to prove itself.

STORY: Bavaria Film Group Signs Partnership with Hungary's Origo Film Studios

Szasz, whose film initially won support from the MMKA before interim backing from a government department, completed the movie under Vajna’s new system.

It’s the first of six films slated for release this year and next -- including Kornel Mundruczo’s White God (Feher isten) and Karoly Ujj Meszaros’ Liza, the Fox-Fairy -- and is one of 27 movies that have been greenlit for production funds.

HNFF CEO, Agnes Havas, said strict rules governing revenue share, accountancy practices and, in some cases, granting the fund international sales rights for backed projects, had established financial transparency and revolving door funding for further movies.

“Hungarian films are back in the market,” Havas told The Hollywood Reporter shortly before Le grand cahier screened Wednesday.

"Under the old system, more money was spent than the foundation had. All that has changed now.”

Havas, who began her career in film in the 1980s and has worked with HBO among others, said the selection committee system of the new fund guaranteed that a genuinely wide range of projects win backing.

“We are backing existing talent and bringing forward new talent,” she said.

Szasz, who works in both film and theater, said despite the changes of funding bodies, the whole process had been "smooth."

"It was even easy; I cannot and won’t complain."

Duck Dynasty to Feature Beardless Brother Alan Robertson in Season 4

Alan Robertson, the beardless fourth brother in Duck Dynasty's famed duck call-manufacturing family, will make his debut on season four of the A&E reality show.
Life is about to get a little hairy for Alan Robertson. The clean-shaven pastor, 47, is set to join the rest of his family, the famously bearded Duck Dynasty clan, on their hit A&E reality series this fall, the New York Post reports. Alan is the eldest of Phil and Kay Robertson's four sons -- his younger brothers are Willie, Jase, and Jep -- and the only one who doesn't a) have a big, scraggly beard, and b) work in duck call manufacturing.

PHOTOS: See the Duck Dynasty guys before they had beards!

At least one of those things will change when Duck Dynasty returns for its fourth season on Aug. 14. Alan told the Post he's quitting his day job to join the show and the family business as the company's "Beards and Beauty Wrangler," which is Duck Dynasty speak for public relations. He said he hopes the series' popularity will allow him to spread the word of God to more people.

PHOTOS: More bearded men in Hollywood

"What I do for our church -- you see, it's a pretty good-sized church -- impacts a lot of people, but because of my association with the show, I'll get to minister to a lot more people," he told the paper. "Any person that's an evangelist, that's what you want to do, so I had to give this up for something possibly bigger."

PHOTOS: Return to reality TV

Bigger -- and hairier. Phil, Willie, Jase, Jep, and Phil's brother Si are famous for their hirsute, camo-clad personas. So will Alan follow suit? "The beards are so iconic," he admitted to the Post, noting that he lets his facial hair go wild during hunting season.

PHOTOS: Biggest reality show fights

Beard or no beard, Alan is in for a big change when he makes his debut on the series in August. Duck Dynasty is a bonafide smash; its season three finale brought in nearly 10 million viewers.

"All this time, I've been flying under the radar; I can go to Starbucks and get Mama coffee," he told the Post. To which his dad Phil replied, "That is about to change."

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Roland Emmerich: 'Independence Day' 2 to Feature Gay Character

More details are emerging about Roland Emmerich’s sequel to his 1996 blockbuster Independence Day.

In the latest tidbit to drop, the director and LGBT activist revealed the sequel will feature a gay character. Emmerich, who said he has been closely following developments in the Supreme Court concerning same-sex marriage, was asked if he would consider incorporating gay rights issues into his films.

"Actually in the next Independence Day there is a gay character," Emmerich told The Huffington Post.

Pressed for more details, the director played coy.

Would the White House be blown up, yet again? “I don’t know," Emmerich said.

Will Bill Pullman -- who played the courageous President Whitmore -- return?

Emmerich simply responded, “Yeah.”

Last week, 20th Century Fox announced that Independence Day 2 will open on July 3, 2015. None of the original cast has been officially announced as being on board, but Emmerich said last week that Will Smith will not return.

"Will Smith cannot come back because he's too expensive, but he'd also be too much of a marquee name," Emmerich told the New York Daily News. "We have maybe half of the people that you would know from the first film, and the other half people who are new," Emmerich added.

PHOTOS: 30 Groundbreaking Sci-Fi Films

The director, who is openly gay, indicated in April that he would like to work on a smaller budget film about the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York. The landmark gay rights event saw police raid the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the East Village. The Stonewall’s clientele pushed back and the resulting three-day event sparked similar demonstrations in other major cities.

“It’s one of these civil rights moments, like Rosa Parks,” Emmerich told Empire magazine “And very little is known about it. Even gay people don’t know much about it.”

Emmerich’s next film, White House Down, hits theaters Friday.

 

iOS 7's new design is its least exciting feature

The iOS 7 preview that Apple showed off at its Worldwide Developers Conference sports a massively overhauled look. You’ve read all about it already—the parallax animation, the flatness, the 3D effects: iOS 7 looks sort of like a brand new phone, albeit one you already know how to use. But make no mistake: Based on what Apple’s shown so far, even if iOS 7 looked pixel-for-pixel exactly like iOS 6, it would still be a very significant update.

 

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that iOS 7’s changes are only skin (or screen) deep. Though the visual changes are dramatic, they may well rank, in practice, as the least exciting update to the operating system, once it ships this fall.

 



 

The previews Apple provided during its WWDC keynote and on its website make it clear that though iOS 7 looks very different, it’s still basically the same operating system we’ve become familiar with since the original iPhone. But the buttons look less like buttons, and there’s a lot more whitespace and a lot less skeuomorphism to go around.

 

I’m in the camp that thinks iOS 7’s new look seems cool, if in need of some polish before the fall release date rolls around.

 

And the visual changes include niceties like animated backgrounds, a new keyboard, new icons, and a new visual take on most of the visual elements that iOS comprises. But, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, so what?

 

Control Center will offer quick access to systemwide settings and common apps.

 

When I think of the most annoying limitations of iOS, several persistent ones spring to mind. Chief among them are issues like a lack of quick access to settings, mediocre multitasking, and unsatisfactory battery life. iOS 7 purports to address all three. Control Center, a panel that you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen, will offer omnipresent access to toggles for Bluetooth, AirDrop, AirPlay, Wi-Fi, Airplane Mode, Do Not Disturb, orientation lock; apps like Clock, Calculator, and Camera; and even a built-in flashlight.

 

Honestly, if Control Center were the sole new feature in iOS 7, I’d still be eager to install it on my iPhone.

 

The announced updates for multitasking have me similarly excited. Apps will now be able to pull down fresh data even when they’re not running, giving seemingly magical powers to the apps that you rely on: You’ll launch your podcasts app, or your Twitter app, or your read-it-later app, or anything else and, rather than wait for the latest content to download while you stare at a spinner or stale data, you should see the latest information already available. That’s awesome.

 

Now, Android owners have had such multitasking features for a while, and may mock my enthusiasm for that feature’s impending arrival. The key, however, is Apple’s claim that iOS 7’s multitasking will rely on intelligent algorithms: For example, apps that you use frequently will get more time to work in the background than apps you don’t use often, and apps that you turn to first thing in the morning will pull down data before then, but perhaps not throughout the rest of the day.

 

While we can’t know for sure until Apple releases iOS 7 later this year, all those multitasking smarts should mean that iOS battery life isn’t ruined by the multitasking improvements. That’s a big deal.

 

Notification Center’s Today view seems reminiscent of Google Now.

 

What’s really exciting about iOS 7 is that features like Control Center and improved multitasking sound awesome, but are really just the tip of the iOS-berg. Apple could build an entire iOS release around several other promised features, too: AirDrop will let you send files wirelessly to others nearby without requiring any special configuration—and it’s likely that such hassle-free, ad-hoc connections will prove a boon to local, wireless gameplay, too.

 

Apple showed off a new tab in Notification Center that looks downright Google Now-ish, mixing weather conditions with your next appointment, travel times, and such. And the new Missed tab in Notification Center will offer a feature I’ve wanted since Notification Center’s launch: a view seemingly sorted just like notifications on the lock screen, with most recent alerts first, instead of grouped unnecessarily by app.

 

Couple all those updates with improvements like the faster camera with filters and other options, lots of enhancements to photo sharing and organization, and new capabilities in my favorite iOS feature, Siri, and you get the sense that iOS 7 will be overwhelming. In a good way.

 

So yes, iOS 7 will immediately and obviously look different to anyone who spots it. I appreciate the design efforts behind such a change, and I don’t doubt that countless iOS app designers will work to update their own apps to fit in better.

 

To me, though, the fresh coat of paint and special effects just pale in comparison to the other, meatier features that Apple announced. Beauty is only screen deep; when I describe iOS 7’s delightful features, I won’t be referring to its looks.

 

 

Oracle to charge extra for 12c database's 'fundamental' feature

For the better part of a year, Oracle has touted the “pluggable database” feature in its upcoming 12c database release as a significant architectural shift that will usher in major performance and efficiency improvements and also make cloud-based applications more secure.

But customers who want to take advantage of the pluggable database concept when 12c is released won’t get it in return for their regular maintenance fees. Instead, Oracle plans to offer it as a “separately priced option,” CEO Larry Ellison revealed Thursday on the company’s fourth-quarter and year-end earnings call.

The feature allows multiple databases to run inside of a single 12c database instance and constitutes Oracle’s take on multitenancy, which is a key ingredient of cloud-based applications.

In the past, multitenancy has referred to a practice followed by SaaS (software as a service) vendors such as Salesforce.com, where many customers share the same application instance, but with their data kept separate. Oracle believes that application-level multitenancy is inferior and less secure than 12c’s approach, which pushes multitenancy to the database tier, Ellison said on the conference call.

Pluggable databases in fact represent “a fundamental re-architecture of the [Oracle] database,” Oracle senior vice president Andy Mendelsohn said at last year’s OpenWorld conference when 12c was introduced. “Now if I’m an administrator, I have one database overall to administer.”

But in order to get that experience, customers who upgrade to 12c will need to fork over extra money above and beyond the core license fee for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, which as of Friday remained listed at $47,500 per processor, as it has been for some time.

Mendelsohn’s characterization of pluggable databases as a “fundamental” change to the platform notwithstanding, Ellison’s announcement is not altogether surprising.

Many other previously released features for Enterprise Edition also carry additional fees, such as Real Application Clusters, which cost $23,000 per processor.

While Oracle tends to give customers heavy discounts off list price for software licenses, by breaking out pluggable databases and other options from the main product, it generates additional streams of lucrative annual maintenance revenue.

Therefore, Oracle database customers who have been anticipating 12c and paying for maintenance on the core product will likely be disappointed to discover that they won’t receive pluggable databases as part of a regular upgrade.

That said, it’s possible the cost of using the pluggable database option can be significantly offset by benefits such as easier system maintenance and lower demand for computing resources.

Still, one database industry watcher offered a less-than-glowing assessment of Ellison’s announcement.

“Oracle’s business model depends upon extracting maximum revenue from those enterprises that have chosen to be captive to it,” said analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research.

Oracle has yet to announce an actual launch date for 12c, but it is expected to occur soon.

Meanwhile, Oracle is set next week to announce a number of partnerships with software vendors around 12c that will “reshape the cloud and reshape the perception of Oracle technology in the cloud,” Ellison said.

While Ellison promised the announcements would be “startling,” and are to involve companies such as NetSuite, Salesforce.com and Microsoft, only the last seems especially intriguing.

That’s because both NetSuite and Salesforce.com are longtime users of Oracle’s database technology, although Salesforce.com has made a few moves away from the platform.

But Microsoft has its own widely used SQL Server database, which competes with Oracle’s product and is available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. And Oracle has its own Azure-like service, through which it also offers its database.

Still, Microsoft and Oracle’s joint press conference Monday is apparently important enough to merit the attendance of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Oracle president Mark Hurd, although Ellison wasn’t expected to appear.

The rumor mill has churned up quite a bit of speculation over the event, with one of the more prominent themes being that Oracle and Microsoft will announce additional support for running Java applications on Windows Azure, said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research.

Another scenario being floated would see Microsoft and Oracle team up on an OpenStack-like hybrid cloud project, Wang said.