The first official courses will be announced this summer and are set to begin in the fall.

EdX students won’t receive university credit for the classes, which will span a variety of disciplines. There’s no admissions process, but there are exams and other assessments, with certificates available “for a modest fee” to students who demonstrate mastery of the material.

The project builds on an online education program that MIT announced last year. A prototype course on circuits and electronics began in March and attracted more than 120,000 students, though only about 10,000 stayed with the course through the mid-term exam, an MIT spokeswoman said.

The Harvard-MIT project faces some competition in the push to make high-quality educational courses available online.

Last month, Princeton, Stanford, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania announced that they would offer free Web-based courses through a for-profit company called Coursera that was founded by two Stanford computer science professors. One of those professors, Andrew Ng, taught a free online course in machine learning this past fall with an enrollment of more than 100,000 students.

There’s also Udacity, co-founded by a former Stanford professor, and Khan Academy, which boasts 3,100 free educational videos across a variety of subjects.

MIT and Harvard said that they hope to eventually partner with other universities to expand the offerings on the edX platform.

“Harvard and MIT will use these new technologies and the research they will make possible to lead the direction of online learning in a way that benefits our students, our peers, and people across the nation and the globe,” Harvard president Drew Faust said.

Source: CNNMoney

On Thursday, the site unveiled Facebook App Center, a clearinghouse for social apps that sounds a lot like Apple’s online store. And while most will likely remain free (with some making money through in-game purchases), Facebook will also now allow paid apps on the site.

“For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga,” Facebook’s Aaron Brady wrote on the site’s page for developers.

The center will be available on the Web and on both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. It will roll out to users over the next few weeks, according to Brady’s post.

Facebook will use “a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement” to determine which apps are added to the App Center and which get most prominently displayed.

“Well-designed apps that people enjoy will be prominently displayed,” Brady wrote. “Apps that receive poor user ratings or don’t meet the quality guidelines won’t be listed.”

Developers are being asked to create an app detail page, that will give potential users details about the app and be accessible to Web searches.

Those pages are due by May 18, signaling that a full rollout might not happen until after then.

And in a move that mirrors Apple and Android app stores, developers will now be given the option of charging a one-time fee for their apps.

“Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps,” Brady wrote.

Facebook currently makes about 15% of its money through payments in games and other apps. Zynga, owners of FarmVille, Draw Something and other successful games, are responsible for the majority of those payments. Facebook takes a 30% cut of the payments.

The center rolls out at an opportune time for Facebook, as it prepares for an initial public stock offering. Facebook has not yet found a way to make money on the increasing number of users who access the site through mobile devices. Becoming more visible to iPhone and Android users may be a move in that direction, easing investor concerns in the process.

Most initial tech-world reactions Thursday were positive.

“So far, I see nothing not to thumbs-up here,” wrote Matt Peckham for Time. “A user-related ranking and inclusion system? A chance to investigate an app before installing it? A way for developers to compete on more level terms with Apple and Google with regard to app pricing? Everything in one central location? App agnosticism when it comes to platform and installation?

“Sure, it means a little extra work for developers and new challenge metrics for getting an app included as well as made visible, but the end benefits for users, at least on e-paper, seem broadly win-win at this point.”

Source: CNN

“Despite PC vendors and phone manufacturers wanting a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market, so far, we have seen very limited success outside of Apple with its iPad,” Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said in a statement.

Gartner said it saw Microsoft winning 4 percent of the market in 2012, with its upcoming Windows 8 platform, while market leader Apple would control 61 percent of the market and Google’s Android platform 32 percent.

The research firm said it expected Microsoft’s market share to rise gradually, helped by enterprise purchases, but to reach just 11.8 percent in 2016 as it lacks consumer appeal.

“Many vendors will wait for Windows 8 to be ready and will try to enter the market with a dual-platform approach, hoping that the Microsoft brand could help them in both the business and consumer markets,” Milanesi said.

In addition to traditional PC makers, Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker by volume, is set to unveil its first tablet using Windows 8 software later this year.

Gartner said it expected the market to roughly double this year, with all vendors in total selling 119 million tablets.

Source: Yahoo News

The plant, which will mark Samsung’s biggest-ever overseas investment in chip production, is reportedly going to be built in the central-China city of Xian. Before Monday’s announcement, analysts had anticipated the plant would cost about half of the $7 billion price tag.

Bloomberg quoted Korean investment analyst Seo Won Seok saying,
“A single factory of this size could be the largest in the industry. For NAND flash, China will be a key production site, along with Korea.”
Fellow chip manufacturer Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) opened its first plan in China, located in the
northeastern city of Dalian, in 2010.

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Samsung-to-Build-7B-Plant-in-China-74761.html

Management shuffle

The departure of RIM’s co-chief executives was long overdue. Not even troubled computer giant Hewlett-Packard – which lost two CEOs in less than a year – was as bad a technology car crash as Research In Motion.
Here was a company that defined what smartphones were all about; that had cornered the oh-so-important corporate market; that had made serious inroads into the youth market with cheap entry-level smartphones. And then threw it all away in an orgy of poor executive decisions, lacklustre innovation, unkept promises in delivering new product and – the greatest sin of all – a total lack of understanding that its part of the tech industry was undergoing a fundamental shift.

First Apple, then Google managed to eat the Blackberry pie, and RIM did nothing to stop them. The company’s new boss will have to work very hard to keep RIM in the smartphone game. Mr Lazaridis, speaking after the announcement, said he recognized things needed to change at the company. “There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership,” he said at a press conference at RIM’s headquarters in Waterloo, Canada. “Jim and I went to the board and told them that we thought that time was now.”

Mr Heins started at RIM in 2007, having previously worked at Siemens Communications. He became the chief operating officer in August 2011, according to the company. Mr Heins said: “As with any company that has grown as fast as we have, there have been inevitable growing pains”. “We have learned from those challenges and, I believe, we have and will become a stronger company as a result.” Barbara Stymiest, who has been on the board of RIM since 2007, has been made the new chairman, a post that Mr Balsillie and Mr Lazaridis also shared.

Sharp decline
Blackberry, which was once extremely popular with users has suffered major setbacks in recent months. It had its worst service outage in 2011 and has been losing market share to its competitors in the smartphone markets. Billions of dollars have been wiped from its market value as shares have tumbled 75% and sales have dropped.

One of its latest offering the PlayBook tablet, a reply to Apple’s iPad, has not proven as popular as the company had hoped. Larry Magid, a technology analyst with CNET, told the BBC World Service that Mr Lazaridis and Mr Balsillie had to go. “Research In Motion, which once dominated the smartphone market, has been steadily losing market share both to the iPhone and iPad and the tablet area and the various android devices,” Mr Magid said. “I think it was a matter of time before these two made the wise choice to step aside and see if anybody else can do better with the company.”

The project will be jointly financed by China and Tanzania, while the Minister for Communication Science and Technology Professor Makame Mbarawa confirmed that China will invest $170 million, while the host country will pay $18 million.

Mbarawa added that the project aims to connect all the regions of the country, and should be completed by the end of 2012. “Over 10,000km will be connected by March this year and the government plans to expand to all regions in the country,” he said.

“ICT development and advancement have a positive correlation.

Where there is ICT infrastructure, established structures and unconditional and reliable accessibility then automatically there is social, cultural and economic development.

ICT can therefore be a tool for achieving sustainable development, which comprises economic development, social development and environmental protection,” the East African wrote.

Mobile “apps” are functional programmes installed on phones and tablet devices, and range from games such as the famous Angry Birds to messaging services such as WhatsApp messenger, travel guides and online newspapers. Usually they’re downloaded onto your mobile phone through the internet, but in India millions can’t access the web through their phones, which is where this shop, Mobiworld, spotted a gap in the market.

“People want to access more applications on their mobile phones, but GPRS connections can be slow or non existent in India, so it’s just not possible,” says Partha Chaudhari from Onward Mobility, the company behind Mobiworld. At Mobiworld, customers owning smartphones can get mobile applications downloaded onto their phone via Bluetooth and a secure SMS code.

A member of staff is on hand to help you through the process. Mr Chaudhari says this method appeals to a large number of Indian consumers who like personal service and like to “touch and feel” a product before they buy it. He admits the range of apps his store offers, nine currently, is minute when compared with the thousands of applications which can be purchased over the internet through the iTunes, Android or Nokia stores, for example, but says they plan to expand their range in the coming months.

‘Ready to invest’

Getting a foothold into the Indian apps business is seen as a lucrative move by many in India. The cover of a recent issue of the Indian magazine Businessworld asked whether the Indian app business would be the next big model for entrepreneurs to make money. In a cramped office in the Ville Parle area of Mumbai are the offices of Spiel Studios. About a dozen young men stare intently at their computer screens as they perform a range of tasks. Some are designing cartoon characters to star in their latest game, others are working on complex software codes.

The company creates apps for clients in India and around the world, specialising in games. It was started in 2007 by Mohit Sureka, who was 22 years old at the time. “When we started, this industry didn’t exist, mobile apps development wasn’t taken seriously as a career and as a business proposition, but now there are investors who are ready to invest in a company just because you’re into mobile app development,” says Mr Sureka.

Made in India?

This change in the industry’s fortunes, which has been propelled by the growth in the ownership of smartphones worldwide, is one reason Sureka has been able to expand his team by opening offices in the US and the UK. With lower set-up costs and a huge pool of IT talent, many more Western companies are eyeing up India for app production, effectively outsourcing this process.

But the domestic app market is also booming. The value of the Indian value added services industry, which includes mobile apps, was estimated at $3.4bn (£2.2bn) in 2011, according to Deloitte. The mobile application industry in India alone is predicted to top $4bn by the year 2015, according to figures from Asia Pacific Research Group (APRG). Figures from the Indian research company IMRB suggest that one in three of the country’s urban internet users have accessed a mobile phone application. Globally the mobile app industry is expected to be valued at $17bn by the end of this year.

Domestic boost