SanDisk Announces World's Fastest Memory Cards

SanDisk, the famous company which specializes in making storage devices has announced the world’s fastest SDXC cards yet. The new Extreme Micro-SDXC lineup will have reading speeds of up to 80 MB/s and 50 MB/s writing speeds.

That’s almost double the speeds of its predecessor, the Ultra Micro-SDXC lineup which had speeds of 30 MB/s. According to SanDisk, this will prove to be a big step towards fast data transfers, video streaming and in photography, where the high bitrate in things like 1080p video and burst-shooting is a bit of a drag on current cards.

The cards will be available in 16 and 64 GB versions. They will be available for $59.99 and $199 respectively which is considerably more expensive than the previous cards.

Availability details are unknown as of now but it should be available later this year.

Apple Cuts Prices on Apps to Mark 5th Anniversary of App Store

Apple’s App Store has just turned 5 and to celebrate those five years of awesomeness Apple has decided to take off the price tag on certain apps and issue a price cut on several others.

The apps, as it turns out, are among the more popular ones in the App Store so it’s a great chance to get the best on your iOS device.

Here’s a list of the more popular ones among those apps:

• Traktor DJ
• Where’s My Water
• Infinity Blade II
• Barefoot World Atlas
• Tiny Wings
• Badland
• Superbrothers: Sword and Sorcery
• Over
• How to cook everything
• Day One

Here’s the entire list of those apps that are offered with discount. Traktor DJ in particular is a great value as it costs $20 normally. How to cook everything is priced at $10.

You better have to hurry as the app price cut might be over in sometime.

The five year period marks some great achievements. The store holds some 900,000 apps, which have been downloaded more than 50 billion times via 575 million accounts.

But perhaps the biggest achievement is the triggering of several other major app stores launches including Google Play and the exploding of the app development business, both of whom aren’t going to end anytime soon.

Samsung is Now the World's 14th Largest Company by Revenue

According to a new report by Forbes, Samsung is now the world’s 14th largest company in terms of revenue. It beats Apple by 5 spots, which is at 19th position with a revenue of $178.6 billion to Apple’s $156.5 billion.

Samsung climbed 6 ranks from 20 while Apple took a quantum leap to jump from 55th to 19th position. It also made double the profit than Samsung, 41.7 billion dollars to 20.6 billion profits made by Samsung.

The list also includes several other tech companies, headed by Toyota at 8th, Phillips at 16th, AT&T at 34th, HP at 43rd, Honda at 45th, IBM at 62nd, China Mobile Communications at 71st and Microsoft at 110th. Amazon is way down at 149th and Nokia, further still at 274th. Here’s the entire list.

Still, comparison between Samsung and Apple will be invalid as Samsung makes a variety of products including home appliances while Apple is almost exclusively a computer and software company.

The list is still topped by Shell, the Petroleum company at $481.7 billion and Wal-Mart at $469.2 billion.

Also one thing to note will be that the profits are only for these companies’ fiscal years which ended on 31st of March 2013 so anything which has happened sooner than that hasn’t made it’s way into that report.

Are the Good Days of the Smartphone Industry About to be Over?

The good, old days of the smartphone industry, where one saw long waiting lines before a new release or headlines telling “millions of units sold” might well have been numbered. As industry analysts have been observing lately, the smartphone sales haveslowed down, making many people of this industry wonder whether their fortunes are about to take a turn.

As of the second quarter of 2013, more than half of all phone shipments worldwide are smartphones as lower prices have made them more accessible. The arrival of new features (and gimmicks) overtime have perhaps equally lured people onboard the ship as well but obviously nothing timely is without its side-effects.

The myriad of features added in smartphones with the passage of time have killed the need to upgrade. Tech-enthusiasts, for sure, will upgrade as quickly as possible but the average person will find a smartphone of today to be more than enough for a lot more time than one might think.

And this, coupled with the disappointment brought by to the lack of new features and improvements in the bad ones is possibly the biggest cause why Apple and Samsung, among several others have missed sales targets.

Earlier this year, the prey of all this fiasco was Apple which missed analysts expectations and saw its shares slide from $700 to $417. This time they are Samsung and HTC, who are both facing similar problems, seeing their shares slide and sales miss targets simultaneously especially in the case of the latter.

Of course, it is still early to predict anything decisive but one thing is for sure: market is surely getting saturated with the laundry list of smartphones flooding the market with way more features than people need, thereby killing the necessity of upgrading.

7-Point Action Plan Proposed for Cyber Secure Pakistan

To address security issues related to the internet , Senate Committee on Defence and Defence Production organized a policy seminar on “Defending Pakistan Through Cyber Security Strategy” in coordination with Pakistan Information Security Association (PISA) yesterday at Pakistan Institute of Parliamentary Services (PIPS), Islamabad.

Senator Mushahid Hussain, Chairman of Senate Committee on Defence and Defence Production, in his welcoming address, said that the cyber security threat can affect Pakistan’s national defence, security, intelligence, diplomacy, nuclear and missile programme, economy, energy, education, civil aviation as well as industrial and manufacturing units both in the private and public sector. “Cyber security is an issue of paramount importance for Pakistan’s stability and progress.”

Ammar Jaffari, President of Pakistan Information Security Association (PISA) highlighted the importance of National Cyber Security Policy. “As a Global best practice to achieve desired results Pakistan need to have a road map which can only be achieved under a National Cyber Security Policy.” He said.

In the Q&A Session, Senator Farhatullah Babar suggested to form focal ministry or division exclusively to handle cyber security issues. He said laws for data protection should be introduced and in this regard, industry experts have to join hands with Parliamentarians. Senator Mushahid Hussain informed Senate Defence Committee has already taken initiative to form Joint Task Force for Cyber Security having technical support of PISA to present recommendations and situation analysis.

In his concluding speech, Senator Mushahid Hussain thanked the members of Senate Defence Committee and announced the Senate Defence Committee is proposing the following 7-point Action Plan for a Cyber Secure Pakistan:

1. Relevant legislation to preserve, protect and promote Pakistan cyber security, drafting for which has already begun. We will presents bills in Parliament for Cyber Security.
2. Cyber security threat should be accepted and recognized as new, emerging national security threat by the Government of Pakistan, similar to the threats like terrorism and military aggression.
3. Establishing a National Computer Emergency Response Team (PKCERT).
4. Establishing a Cyber-Security Task Force with affiliation with Ministry of Defence, Ministry of IT, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Information and our security organizations plus relevant and leading professionals from the private security so that Pakistan can take steps to combat this new emerging threat and formulate Cyber Security Strategy for Pakistan.
5. Under the office of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, an Inter-Services Cyber Command should be established to coordinate cyber security and cyber defence for the Pakistan Armed Forces.
6. Within the framework of SAARC, Pakistan should take the initiative to initiate talks among the 8-member states particularly India to establish acceptable norms of behavior in cyber security among the SAARC countries so that these countries are not engaged in cyber warfare against each other. If Pakistan and India can have an agreement not to attack nuclear installations, why not an agreement seeking the prevention of cyber warfare against each other?
7. Soon after Eid, the Senate Defence Committee, in cooperation with the Pakistan Information Security Association (PISA), will have a special media workshop to promote awareness among the public and educate opinion leaders on the issue of cyber security.

The seminar was attended by a number of representatives from civil society, government officials, ministries, academia and media as well.