Computers

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on East-West Digital News, a leading English-language resource on Russian digital industries and related venture activity. Luxoft, a major offshore software developer headquartered in Moscow, announced yesterday that it has filed a registration statement for a proposed initial public offering of its Class A ordinary shares. The book-running managers in the operation will be UBS Limited, Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, VTB Capital, and Cowen and Company. According to the filing, Luxoft is expecting to raise $80 million during the IPO – although this number may change closer to the offering date. In the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2013, the company posted $314.6 million in revenue, showing 16 percent year-to-year growth. Founded in 2000, Luxoft is part of the IBS Group, where it accounts for 87 percent of the group’s valuation – some $519 million, according to an analysis conducted last year by Uralsib Capital. The company currently employs more than 5,900 people in development offices in Russia, Ukraine, the UK, Vietnam, Romania, Germany and Poland, as well as in marketing offices in the US and on Cyprus. Luxoft recently expanded its US presence by acquiring the open-source solutions of Freedom OSS for an undisclosed sum. Beyond software outsourcing, Luxoft’s strong points include human-machine interfaces (HMI) for next-gen automotive solutions. In its December 2012 review of the auto sector’s most far-reaching trends, Gartner named Luxoft among the world’s four key providers of connected vehicle technology and services, including such important functional areas as telematics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs), infotainment, and mobility services. “One of the strengths of this company lies in its human resource assets: they have attracted the cream of the crop of Russian IT specialists,” said industry veteran Nikolai Puntikov in an exchange with East West Digital News. “However, Luxoft still faces the challenge of translating this into more tangible and protectable IP assets.” “This IPO will be good news for Russia’s IT industry,” Puntikov added. “It will reinforce the international image of Russian programmers and companies, and it’s this kind of success story that may stimulate the interest of entrepreneurs and financiers in this sector.” Russian tech companies go West Over the last few years several Russian tech companies have sought introduction on Western stock exchanges, where the volume of available funding is far more significant than on the still little developed local capital markets. In October 2010 Mail.Ru Group, one of the leading players on the Russian Internet scene, was introduced on the London Stock Exchange. In May 2011 the search giant Yandex raised $1.3 billion during its NASDAQ IPO. At the beginning of 2012 EPAM Systems, a CEE-oriented offshore software developer and one of Luxoft’s rivals, also launched a NASDAQ IPO. The results, however, were lower than the company had expected: instead of the forecast valuation of $650 to $730 million, EPAM Systems was valued at about $490 million. The trend of going public on Western stock exchanges was also supported by Russian mobile operator Megafon, which raised $1.7 billion in November 2012 by trading approximately 15 percent of its shares on the London and Moscow stock exchanges simultaneously. A more recent example is the $212 million NASDAQ IPO by the payment operator Qiwi earlier this month. There are also players on the Russian market who have already announced IPO plans but have not yet filed official statements. Among these are online fashion shopping club KupiVip.ru, which has one more year to live up to its IPO promise, and airline ticket booking site OneTwoTrip, with a Western IPO planned for 2014. Some Russian companies have not succumbed to the tempting prospects of public offering, however. Kaspersky Lab’s CEO Eugene Kaspersky announced in February that in order to remain as flexible as possi

British national daily newspaper The Guardian has unveiled plans to create a new global online identity, one that will serve as a home for its various digital properties around the world. The Guardian’s publisher, Guardian News & Media, announced it is to introduce a single portal on TheGuardian.com, which will host Guardian.co.uk, GuardianNews.com – which launched for the US market back in 2011 – and its upcoming Australian edition, which is scheduled to go live later this year. The Guardian was founded in 1821, but it was known as ‘The Manchester Guardian’ until 1959. Although it was slightly behind other publications in terms of launching an online presence, Guardian.co.uk finally landed in January 1999. This online portal hosted the whole Guardian Unlimited network of sites, which included News Unlimited, Football Unlimited, Cricket Unlimited and Jobs Unlimited. Later additions to the network include Film Unlimited, Education, Books, Shopping and Money. Then, in 2008, the Guardian Unlimited brand was replaced simply by Guardian.co.uk, which also served as the domain for its Sunday title The Observer. Tanya Cordrey, Chief Digital Officer at Guardian News & Media, made the announcement off the back of another record month for Guardian.co.uk, with ABC figures showing it secured 81 million uniquer browsers in April. This was the third straight record-traffic month for the publication. It seems the Guardian is looking to adapt its online model to mirror something like UK tabloid The Daily Mail, which operates MailOnline – a single-identity .co.uk website that lays claim to being the world’s highest-trafficed newspaper website. That’s not to say it will be looking to replicate the Daily Mail’s content, however, but it will be interesting to see how a new global identity will reflect the kinds of stories it publishes. Going global Though the Guardian is primarily a UK newspaper, only a third of its online visitors are now based in the UK which is why it’s looking to capitalize on its international presence. Indeed, it’s an easy-win for a publication looking to increase click-through-rates (CTRs) – there’s an online population of billions, but only 60 million in the UK. “This may be a small URL change but it marks a big step for the Guardian and reflects our evolution from a much-respected national print newspaper based only in the UK – reaching hundreds of thousands of people once a day – to a leading global news and media brand, with offices around the world, and an ever-growing worldwide audience accessing Guardian journalism every minute of every day,” said Cordrey. “Our move to theguardian.com will only strengthen our global presence and is a loud signal of our status as a leading digital news provider and of the breadth and depth of our content,” she added. From the Guardian’s perspective, centralizing everything makes a lot of sense in terms of creating a single, simplified brand against which it can attract more advertisers and other commercial opportunities from more countries. That’s the main appeal of a .com domain, but its content will also have to reflect this. No precise timeframe has been giving for porting all the content over to the new site, but it should all come together by the end of this year. “Over the coming months ahead of the move, our in-house digital team, working closely with the team at Yoast.com, will be working on this ambitious and challenging project,” continues Cordrey. “The Guardian websites involve millions of URLs and around 15 years’ worth of content, so it will take some time.”

Alpenföhn has introduced a new CPU cooler for ultra-compact systems.

Google will reportedly use Samsung’s organic light-emitting diode technology (OLED) in Google Glass – a wearable computer that should be available for consumers by the end of this year. A Korea Times report cited sources as saying that the company’s top management recently approved a proposal by Samsung Display, which would enable the South Korean company’s OLED displays to be used on Google Glass. “Samsung will supply its high-end OLED screens for Google Glass. This is a really big thing because its means that Google shares confidential data with Samsung on its futuristic projects,” an executive at one of Samsung Display’s local parts suppliers said in the report. Google CEO Larry Page is said to have recently inspected Samsung Display’s OLED production lines in Tangjeong and received a brief about details of the business. In a key note speech on Thursday at the Society for Information Display forum in Canada, Samsung Display CEO Kim Ki-nam also hinted that OLED on silicon could be used for glasses-type, augmented-reality devices much like Google Glass, according to the report. There have been reports that Google is concerned over Samsung’s dominance, but that was dismissed by Sundar Pichai, the new head of Android. Samsung’s Galaxy S4 recently passed 10 million channel sales within one month of its launch, becoming the company’s fastest-selling phone ever. Earlier this month, a report by Strategy Analytics said Samsung was the “undisputed king of the global Android smartphone industry” for now, and that it believed Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google. In a sign of closer cooperation, Google recently took the step of announcing a new version of S4 running stock Android (version 4.2.2), which will be available on Google Play starting June 26. Google’s Nexus 10 tablet is also manufactured by Samsung. Image Credit: Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

For its part, Apple has filed its own Notice of New Authority and New Facts Relevant to the Issues on Review with the ITC in Inv. No. 337-TA-794, where the Commission's Final Determination is due by May 31. Apple argues that the situation between it and Samsung is "strikingly similar" to the facts that gave rise to the Realtek-LSI injunction. Apple argues that prior to filing its ITC complaint, Samsung never made a license offer that was limited to its FRAND-encumbered SEPs - and Apple also argues (as it has in the past) that Samsung's use of the end product price as a royalty base and its efforts to seek injunction relief are further evidence of its FRAND violations. Finally, Apple accuses Samsung of making contradictory arguments in defending itself from SEP infringement allegations in its district court case against Ericsson. Apple argues that this shows that it would not be in the public interest to issue an exclusion order in the -794 case. - The Essential Patent Blog

On Monday, I profiled asylumbooter.com, one of several increasingly public DDoS-for-hire services posing as Web site "stress testing" services. Today, we'll look at ragebooter.net, yet another attack service except for one secret feature which sets it apart from the competition: According the site's proprietor, ragebooter.net includes a hidden backdoor that lets the FBI monitor customer activity. - Brian Krebs, Krebs on Security

The new two-factor authentication mechanism is a step in the right direction, but it remains questionable whether the measure will actually solve the problem for the targets of the latest hacks. News organisations tend to have multiple people, often on different continents, that need to access the organisation's Twitter account. In these cases, having one mobile phone in the organisation registered to the account presents a problem and will probably prevent the use of the login verification feature. - The H

Yahoo has acquired PlayerScale, a startup developer of infrastructure software for cross-platform gaming, adding to its string of recent acquisitions.The Internet giant said in a Twitter message Thursday that it would continue to support the gaming development platform, which PlayerScale claims powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and is adding over 400,000 new users every day.The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed."We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming -- whether it's casual, social or mobile," PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen said in a post on his company's website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the Debian "wheezy" release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release. The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd. - Bits From Debian

The law should not allow trolls to prey on end users. Period. We hear some policy makers are considering proposals that would immunize these users. This is precisely the kind of reform the system needs. Take for instance Innovatio, the troll who targets those who provide access to Wi-Fi networks in public spaces, like coffee shops and hotels. There's Lodsys, who targets app developers for using technologies to perform in-app upgrades-a feature that companies like Apple and Google provide to those developers. Or the infamous scanner troll, MPHJ Technology, who claims to own the technology covering scan-to-email and demands that companies pay up nearly $1,000 per employee for using it. And we can't forget Personal Audio, the troll who demands licenses from podcasters for, well, podcasting, despite the fact that most of those podcasters use off-the-shelf technology to distribute their podcasts. There is a trend here. These trolls are targeting consumers who use widely available products to conduct their businesses efficiently and effectively. Most, if not all, did not develop, manufacture, or sell the allegedly infringing technology. Most, if not all, had no idea that any patent existed that might prohibit how they use those products. - Julie Samuels, EFF