Boost Software™ INC Winner in 2013 WebAwards

September 23rd, 2013 at 8:06 am by Erin Walsh

In addition to such recent awards as the Best in Biz award (a distinction shared by Epson and Dell) and its status as a Microsoft Gold Partner, Boost Software™ recently won a WebAward from the Web Marketing Association for its PC HealthBoost™ software.

Boston, MA (PRWEB) September 16, 2013

Boost Software™ INC recently won the Computer: Software Standard of Excellence award from the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward. The young software corporation won the award in relation to the company’s PC HealthBoost™ registry cleaner & PC Optimization software.

“We’re always proud to win a worthy award,” said Erin Walsh, Boost Software’s Director of Public relations. “We have quite a bit to be proud of lately.”

What makes PC Health Boost™ winning software? The program is built to stricter standards than most registry cleaning software on the market. Many registry cleaners are repackaged or rebranded versions of the same whitelabel software.

PC HealthBoost™, however, was built from the ground up. Owners Peter Dunbar and Amit Mehta spent 12 months and over $300,000 in development costs from the software. They also integrated 24/7 customer support for the software, available from first-world call centers.

Aside from being a consumer favorite for the last 3 years, the program also earned Boost Software aMicrosoft Gold: Application Development partnership.

Mehta and Dunbar decided to create PC HealthBoost™ after selling similar products for other merchants online. They soon discovered a dearth of products they felt comfortable selling, and became frustrated at the lack of quality registry cleaners on the market. They discovered that the few that had quality programming typically did not have quality service to match.

So they spent a year and over a quarter of a million dollars developing a quality PC optimization tool. Unlike other registry cleaners—many of which are re-branded versions of the same whitelabel generic software—PC HealthBoost™ was put together from the ground up.

Another distinction the program’s owners wanted to make was that of customer support. Even the few registry cleaners they felt were worth buying lacked adequate support. The two vowed to change this with PC HealthBoost™, which offers 24/7 phone and email support based out of the United States, Australia and the UK.

Among other awards, PC HealthBoost™ has received the distinction of being a Brothersoft Editor’s Pick. According to the Brothersoft site, “PC HealthBoost™ is unique in that it uses a unique Algorithm (called ScanSafe) to clean the PC registry that’s safer and more stable than you’re Garden-variety registry cleaner.”

PC HealthBoost™ has received numerous other accolades, such as Tucows 5-Cow Rating. “With its cutting-edge PC optimization and registry cleaning technology, PC HealthBoost™ is head and shoulders above its competition in delivering speed, performance, and stability to your PC,” said the Tucows editorial review.

Boost Software™ was formed in 2009 by Amit Mehta and Peter Dunbar. Both owners sold software and other products prior to developing PC HealthBoost™. Mehta studied physics at MIT, while Dunbar is an experienced programmer, and was “hands-on involved” in the software’s development. More information about the company can be found at http://www.boostsoftware.com.

As posted on Sept 16, 2013 on PRWeb: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/9/prweb11125399.htm

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BOOST SOFTWARE, CLICK HERE

Tencent’s worth

A Chinese internet firm finds a better way to make money

IS TENCENT one of the world’s greatest internet firms? There are grounds for scepticism. The Chinese gaming and social-media firm started in the same way many local internet firms have: by copying Western success. QQ, its instant-messaging service, was a clone of ICQ, an Israeli invention acquired by AOL of America. And unlike global internet giants such as Google and Twitter, Tencent still makes its money in its protected home market.

Yet the Chinese firm’s stockmarket valuation briefly crossed the $100 billion mark this week for the first time. Given that the valuation of Facebook, the world’s leading social-media firm, itself crossed that threshold only a few weeks ago, it is reasonable to wonder whether Tencent is worth so much. However, Tencent now has bigger revenues and profits than Facebook. In the first half of this year Tencent enjoyed revenues of $4.5 billion and gross profits of $2.5 billion, whereas Facebook saw revenues of $3.3 billion and gross profits of $935m.

The Chinese firm’s market value reflects the phenomenal rise in its share price. A study out this week from the Boston Consulting Group found that Tencent had the highest shareholder total return (share-price appreciation plus dividends) of any large firm globally from 2008 to 2012—topping Amazon and even Apple.

Tencent has created a better business model than its Western peers. Many internet firms build a customer base by giving things away, be they search results or social-networking tools. They then seek to monetise their users, usually turning to online advertising. Google is a glorious example. Other firms try to make e-commerce work. But as the case of revenue-rich but profit-poor Amazon suggests, this can also be a hard slog.

Tencent does give its services away: QQ is used by 800m people, and its WeChat social-networking app (which initially resembled America’s WhatsApp) has several hundred million users. What makes it different from Western rivals is the way it uses these to peddle online games and other revenue-raising offerings.

Once users are hooked on a popular game, Tencent then persuades them to pay for “value-added services” such as fancy weapons, snazzy costumes for their avatars and online VIP rooms. Whereas its peers are still making most of their money from advertising, Fathom China, a research firm, reckons Tencent gets 80% of its revenues from such kit (see chart).

This year China has overtaken America to become the world’s biggest e-commerce market, in terms of sales. It is also now the biggest market for smartphones. This means it may soon have the world’s dominant market in “m-commerce”, purchases on mobile devices.

Tencent’s main rivals in Chinese m-commerce are Baidu, which dominates search on desktop computers (helped by the government’s suppression of Google) and Alibaba, an e-commerce giant now preparing for a huge share offering. All three have gone on acquisition sprees, in an attempt to lead the market. The big worry for investors is the cost of this arms race.

Alibaba recently invested $300m in AutoNavi, an online-mapping firm, and nearly $600m in Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. Baidu has been even more ambitious, spending $1.85 billion to buy 91 Wireless, the country’s biggest third-party store for smartphone apps, and $370m for PPS, an online-video firm.

Tencent may have an edge over its two rivals in m-commerce because of the wild popularity of WeChat, which is used on mobile phones. But to ensure it stays in the race, it is also spending heavily. On September 16th it said it will spend $448m to acquire a big stake in Sogou, an online-search firm; it plans to merge its own flagging search engine (aptly named Soso) into the venture. It had previously invested in Didi Dache, China’s largest taxi-hailing app, and is rumoured to be interested in online travel and dating firms too.

The three Goliaths are buying up innovative firms because they are too big and bureaucratic to create things themselves, mutter some entrepreneurs (presumably not those being bought out handsomely). A more pressing worry for Tencent’s shareholders is that its lavish spending, on top of heavy investment in improving its unimpressive e-commerce offerings, will eat into profits. Worse, the m-commerce arms race risks distracting it from gaming and value-added services, the cash cows that are paying for everything else. A $100 billion valuation might then seem too rich.

Read more at: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21586557-chinese-internet-firm-finds-better-way-make-money-tencents-worth

Intel’s Laser Chips Could Make Data Centers Run Better

Silicon chips with optical technology allow a new form of superfast data connection.



Intel hopes to make computing far more efficient by introducing a technology that replaces conventional copper data cables with faster optical data links. The breakthrough required Intel to fit lasers and other optical components onto silicon chips, which usually deal only with electronic signals.

The initial version of what Intel calls its silicon photonics technology can transmit data at speeds of 100 gigabits per second along a cable approximately five millimeters in diameter. Intel will offer it for use connecting servers inside data centers, where it can take the place of PCI-E data cables that carry data at up to eight gigabits per second and networking cables that reach 40 gigabits per second at best. The latest version of the USB standard common in consumer gadgets can move data at only five gigabits per second.

“We’re launching this in mass production, and Intel has decided to make a significant investment,” says Mario Paniccia, who has led Intel’s silicon photonics research for years and now heads the group commercializing it. “We have lots of customers.” Future versions of the technology are intended to appear outside data centers, perhaps in consumer applications.

Intel’s technology can significantly reduce the costs of running a data center—the large computing clusters that crunch data, run apps, and host websites. That’s because one of Intel’s new optical cables can replace 10 or more of the relatively bulky PCI-E copper cables that connect servers stacked on the same rack. Those cables impede the flow of air used to cool servers. Data centers vary in their efficiency, but it is typical for cooling to account for roughly half the cost of running a data center.

Intel’s silicon photonics technology can also be used to replace conventional Ethernet networking cables. It could allow companies to rethink established ways of organizing computers inside data centers.

Intel has developed a small circuit board that can be added to a server to upgrade it to the optical technology. The most important part of it is a compact module containing one or more silicon chips (Intel won’t say how many) that can convert back and forth between a computer’s electronic signals and optical ones able to travel down a fiber. Among the optical components inside the chips are four silicon lasers that can each stream data at a rate of 25 gigabits per second. A card can have more than one of those optical chips on it, depending on how much bandwidth is needed. Intel worked with Corning, best known for inventing the Gorilla Glass used in many mobile devices, to develop new connectors and cables to link up the new optical boards.

The current form of the technology was shaped by feedback from companies including Facebook, Microsoft, and cloud hosting company Rackspace, some of which have committed to using the technology, says Paniccia. Pricing and availability of the technology has not been announced, but it could create a significant new income stream for Intel. In 2012, a total of 8.1 million servers were shipped worldwide, according to IDC, and many companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are investing heavily in data centers (see “Inside Facebook’s Not-So-Secret New Data Center”).

Intel is also working with operators of extremely powerful computer clusters and super computers, including unspecified U.S. government agencies. Intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency and CIA are known to use high-powered computers to process and analyze data collected through surveillance.

Today servers are self-contained computers with processors, memory, and storage that inhabit a single layer of a server rack. The bandwidth boost from silicon photonics makes it possible to instead fill a whole layer of a rack with processors, another with memory, and a third with storage. That can make upgrades faster and help make better use of cooling by directing it onto the components that need it most, says Pannicia.

Some of Intel’s partners are considering a more extreme version of that approach. It would see memory, processors, and data storage being kept in entirely separate cabinets, all linked with optical connections. That could allow further improvements to maintenance and cooling. It could also permit memory to be “virtualized” so that it is dynamically allocated to software and servers as needed, a more efficient approach than having it bound to specific servers.

Read more at: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518941/intels-laser-chips-could-make-data-centers-run-better/