Samsung eyes record profit on strong smartphone sales

The logo of Samsung Electronics is seen at the company's headquarters in Seoul July 6, 2012. REUTERS photo

Samsung Electronics said Friday it expected a record operating profit of 6.7 trillion won ($5.9 billion) in the second quarter, boosted by strong sales of its flagship Galaxy smartphones.

The Korean firm, which is battling with Apple's iPhone and iPad for supremacy in the lucrative smartphone and tablet market, has seen heavy demand for its new Galaxy S III phone, which was introduced in Europe in May.

Samsung, the world's largest electronics company, was giving earnings guidance before official results later this month.

The predicted operating profit for April-June would represent a 79 percent rise from a year earlier. The previous highest operating profit was 5.85 trillion won in the first quarter.

The company estimated a 19 percent rise in sales to 47 trillion won in the second quarter. It did not give a net profit figure or explain its forecasts.

Analysts said the strong result was largely thanks to robust smartphone sales. These account for more than half the operating profit despite the Korean firm's continuing legal tussles with US rival Apple.

They said a strong turnaround at the flat panel operation compared with a year earlier also helped the estimated bottom line.

Gains were likely to continue into the third quarter due to strong demand both for the Galaxy S III and for mobile devices developed by its rivals.

These would boost sales of Samsung's chips and display components that are used in competitors' products.

Samsung introduced its Galaxy S III on May 29 in Europe to try to boost demand before the release of Apple's iPhone 5.

"For the third quarter, we forecast revenue and operating profit will stand at a record high of 54 trillion won and 8.5 trillion, respectively, thanks to the effect of Galaxy S III on the handset and component divisions," said Nomura analyst C.W. Chung.

Choi Do-Yeon, an analyst at LIG Investment & Securities, said the company could easily reach the seven trillion won operating profit level.

"Mobile phones, rather than chips, are now Samsung's main growth engine," Choi told Yonhap news agency.

Samsung and Apple have launched dozens of legal actions alleging patent infringements against each other in 10 countries worldwide.

In the latest setback for Samsung, a US judge last week granted Apple's request for an injunction blocking US sales of Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphones.

These are made in collaboration with Google to challenge the iPhone.

Despite the courtroom tussles, analysts remained bullish about the next quarter's results.

"Concerns about the patent lawsuits and the iPhone release have already been factored in. A seven trillion won level operating profit is viable," Lim Do-Ri of Shinyoung Securities told Yonhap.
(SEOUL - Agence France-Presse)

Google blocks access to videos insulting Atatürk: report

Political commentary remains a prime target as governments increase the number of requests for Google to remove material from the reach of Internet users.

The Internet giant yesterday released its fifth semi-annual Transparency Report providing insights into requests by countries around the world to "take down" content from search results or Google venues such as YouTube.

"Just like every other time before, we've been asked to take down political speech," Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou said.

"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship."

Requests from Turkish information technologies officials centered on videos of the founder of modern-day Turkey, and Google responded by making the targeted clips unavailable in that country.

The number of requests from the United States doubled in the second half of last year. Ukraine, Jordan and Bolivia showed up for the first time on the list of countries out to have online material removed, according to Google.

Google reported that it went along with slightly more than half of the approximately 1,000 requests it received to remove material or links.

The transparency report doesn't provide insights regarding countries such as China where tight Internet controls allow for blocking of content, eliminating the need to ask Google to take down content.

From the start of July through December of last year, Google complied with approximately 65 percent of the more that 467 court orders to remove material and with 47 percent of the more than 561 request without judicial backing.

"We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services," Chou said.

Google said the number of requests has grown steadily during the past two years.

Spanish regulators asked Google to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing private individuals or public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors.

In Poland, a public institution asked Google to remove links to a website criticizing it. Chou said that Google did not comply with those requests in either country.

An electoral court order from Brazil resulted in Google removing four profiles from its Orkut social network for political content.

Broad defamation laws in Brazil allow for obtaining court orders to remove even truthful information from the Internet, according to Google. The law there also reportedly bans showing parodies of candidates during elections, leading to requests for removal of material such as bits by celebrity comedians.

Among the requests turned down by Google was one from Canadian officials for the removal of a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen peeing on his passport and flushing it down a toilet.

The number of content removal requests received by Google in India was 49 percent higher in the second half of last year than in the first six months.

Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology asked Google to remove six YouTube videos that satirized the country's military and senior politicians. Google did not comply with that request. G

oogle said it did terminate five YouTube accounts at the behest of the United Kingdom Association of Police Officers, which contended they promoted terrorism.

The Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology in Thailand asked Google to remove 149 YouTube videos for allegedly insulting the monarchy there. Google restricted 70 percent of the videos from view online in Thailand.

"We realize that the numbers we share can only provide a small window into what's happening on the Web at large," Chou said. "But we do hope that by being transparent about these government requests, we can continue to contribute to the public debate about how government behaviors are shaping our Web." (SAN FRANCISCO - Agence France-Presse)

French rights groups want Google to stop suggesting 'Jew'

REUTERS photo

A French judge asked today a mediator to resolve a dispute pitting Internet giant Google against anti-racism groups who object to the search engine suggesting users add "Jew" to name searches.

The conflict stems from Google's autocomplete feature that suggests what search people might want based on algorithms of previous searches.

Because users of Google.fr frequently ask whether politicians, actors or other celebrities are Jewish or not, the word "Jew" in French is frequently suggested as what those using the search engine might in fact be asking about.

SOS Racisme, the Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples (MRAP) and the International League Against Racism and anti-Semitism (LICRA) argue that Google is unintentionally breaking the law.

Google users "are confronted daily by the unsolicited and almost systematic association of the word 'Jew' with the names of the best-known people in the world of politics, the media or business," the groups say.

Under French law, it is illegal to record someone's ethnicity in a database.

Judge Martine Provost-Lopin accepted a request from all parties to appoint a mediator to find a solution, with a next hearing set for June 27, said SOS Racisme's lawyer Patrick Klugman.

"We will discuss more philosophy than law, more technical solutions than who is right or wrong," Klugman said, adding that the mediator was former business court judge Jean-Pierre Mattei.

A Google France spokesman told AFP on Tuesday that autocomplete results were "generated completely automatically, based purely on algorithmic criteria that correspond notably with the popularity of web users' inputs."

"Google does not decide on these requests in a manual way - all requests shown by autocomplete have previously been searched for by users on Google," the spokesman said, asking not to be named. (PARIS - Agence France-Presse)

Google Drive to offer free storage in the cloud

Google has launched a new consumer service offering up to 1TB (terabyte) of storage for photos and other online content.

Dubbed Google Drive, the service goes head to head with rival cloud services such as Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.

It offers 5GB (gigabyte) of storage for free. People pay on a rising scale for more space.

Experts say that Google is "late" to the market.

Cloud living
"Today, we're introducing Google Drive - a central place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all of your stuff," said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome and Apps in a blog post.

"Whether you're working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive."

The service will allow users to upload and access videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and other documents.

"Drive will help you live, work and play in the cloud," added Mr Pichai.

It can be installed to a Mac or PC or as an app to an Android phone or tablet. Google said that it was working on an app for Apple's mobile operating system, which should be available in the coming weeks.

For blind users, Drive can be accessed with a screen reader.

Grand canyon
Google will draw on its search expertise to help differentiate the service.

Users will be able search by keyword and filter by file type, owner or activity. Drive will also recognise text in scanned documents using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

This would allow someone, for example, to upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping and search for a word from the text of the news article.

Google Drive will also use image recognition.

"If you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip to Drive, the next time you search for Grand Canyon, photos of it will pop up," said Mr Pichai.

The first 5GB of storage comes free.

After that users can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 (£1.50) a month, 100GB for $4.99 a month or if they need 1TB, they can get it for $49.99 a month.

When users upgrade to a paid account, their Gmail account storage will automatically expand to 25GB.

By contrast, Microsoft offers yearly contracts. It charges $50 for maximum storage of 100GB.

Dropbox offers individual users up to 100GB at a rate of $19.99 per month or $199 per year. It also sells larger amounts to groups with the cost determined by how many people share the space.

Facebook?
Cloud services have become hugely popular as people seek to access content from a variety of places and devices.

Richard Edwards, principal analyst at research firm Ovum, said that Google was "very late" to the market but that its move could spur others.

"Facebook doesn't have a cloud service but this may prompt it into an acquisition," he said.

"If Facebook was to buy Dropbox that would be a game-changer."

In anticipation of Google's announcement, rivals updated their own services.

Dropbox now allows users to give non-members access to files via emailed links. Until now it had required both parties to sign up to its service and have shared folders.

Microsoft has also improved its SkyDrive service.

Among other features, it has integrated the drive into Windows Explorer and Apple's Finder so that it works as an extension of the desktop.

It also added capability to access files stored on the drive from an iPad as well as the iPhone and Windows Phone-based handsets. (Source: bbc.co.uk)

Google launches Street View in Israel

Google on Sunday launched Street View in Israel, the US Internet giant said, putting on show streets and sites of interest from the Holy Land's three major cities with its 360-degree street-level images.

The imagery of "Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa includes sites of interest such as the Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian quarters of Jerusalem's Old City, the Via Dolorosa, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Western Wall, Mount of Olives, old port of Jaffa, the Baha'i Gardens," a Google statement said.

Street View, which was launched in 2006, lets computer users view panoramic street scenes on Google Maps and take a virtual "walk" through cities such as New York, Paris or Hong Kong.

Panoramic images are taken by cars equipped with special cameras which photograph an area while driving through the streets; the images are then processed in the US, where details such as faces and registration plates are automatically blurred before being published on Google Maps.

In August, Israel's justice ministry gave Google the green light to start photographing the streets, but asked that Street View provide the public with a reliable way to request that further details be blurred after the images are published online.

Google said on Sunday that users would be able to ask for "additional blurring of themselves, their home or their car." To the images available now at www.google.co.il/streetview Google will later add pictures of other cities and sites, including the Dead Sea, Nazareth, Tiberias, Acre and Eilat. (Agence France-Presse-hurriyetdailynews)