Month: April 2016

Amazon Cloud Sales Soaring

Amazon Reported Higher Than Expected Revenues

Sales rose in North America, its biggest market, demonstrating the success of the fast delivery service Amazon Prime as the company spends big on film and TV content.

Sales for Amazon increased 28pc to $29.1bn (£20bn) in the three months to March 31, the company said. Operating income was $1.1bn in the first quarter, up from $255m at the same stage last year.

Amazon’s shares jumped 11pc higher in extended trading on Thursday night.

Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, saw revenues increase by 64pc to $2.57bn, and operating income soared by 161pc to $716m in the first quarter. Amazon Web Services now contributes about 40pc of group total operating income.

“Amazon devices are the top selling products on Amazon, and customers purchased more than twice as many Fire tablets than first quarter last year,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.

Amazon has made a big push into producing film and TV content, splashing out $160m to secure the services of the ex-Top Gear team Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammon and James May

Amazon said it expected net sales to grow between 21pc and 32pc in the current quarter to between $28bn and $30.5bn.

Amazon’s shares were trading at $677 in extended trading.

 

Credit: telegraph.co.uk

Windows 10 Is Getting Even Better

Here’s How Windows 10 Is Being Improved

A seemingly legit screenshot of a Windows 10 developer build shared on Reddit shows that the platform might soon bring the ability for users to switch between desktops and mobile devices, and pick up their work right where they left off.

windows_10_handoff_feature_screenshot_reddit_akazaitt

Sounds familiar? That’s because OS X has had similar functionality for the past two years, in the form of Handoff which works with iOS devices.

The screenshot details an option to ‘Let apps on your other devices launch apps and continue experiences,’ on your desktop via Bluetooth.

The screenshot is believed to be from a build with a Redstone update that Microsoft announced last month. The Handoff-like feature might be part of the company’s Project Rome, which was introduced at its Build Conference in March and aims to connect devices for an uninterrupted experience.

However, InfoWorld reported that Project Rome might be more ambitious than merely copying Handoff. For one thing, it will be able to work with devices not only over Bluetooth but also over Wi-Fi and via the Web, meaning your devices don’t need to be in the same room.

So, in addition to carrying over your progress in the same app, like reading an ebook, you might also be able to do things like pull files from your desktop to your mobile device remotely, or play a trivia game on your phone while watching a related movie on your PC.

Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again

Turn It Off And Back On Again

That phrase is somewhat a cliché’ amongst the IT professionals these days isn’t it? Often people don’t like this advice due to it not being a true “fix”. There is, however, some logic behind this underwhelming piece of advice.

If you are one of those people (like me) who all too often doesn’t shut your computer down fully i.e. sleep mode, hibernate mode or standby mode, you could be causing a slew of issues with your PC. The reason for this is that over time the applications and processes running on your computer will begin to accumulate some leftover digital crud – temporary files, disk caches, page files, open file descriptors, zombie processes and more that hang around long after you’ve closed the associated applications.

Memory leaks are another common problem, which occurs when you thought you’d closed an application long ago, yet the background process is still hogging space in your system, which in turn causes all sorts of performance and reliability issues.

These issues aren’t exclusive to computers that have been running for prolonged periods, it can happen at any point, but it is more common for computers that haven’t been rebooted in a while.

So there you have it, next time you have an issue, and someone says “have you tried turning it off and on again”, you know how and why it works (sometimes).