Two industry sources recently revealed that Nokia has cut the prices of its smartphones in Europe for slowing down the decline in its share of the higher end of the market.

The steepest cuts of around 15 percent were made on prices for the company’s flagship model, the N8, the multimedia phone C7, as well as the business user-targeted E6.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

Other price cuts were smaller, both sources said. “There are no very big cuts per model, but the scale — across the portfolio — is unseen for a very, very long time,” said one of the sources, who works at a European telecoms operator.

Shares in Nokia dropped sharply on the news and were 2 percent lower at 4.35 euros by 1256 GMT.

A Nokia spokesman declined to comment on specific prices and said changes were part of its normal business.

“It’s business as usual,” he said.

Analyst Carolina Milanesi from Gartner said the price cuts were not too surprising as Nokia has indicated that it would be more aggressive on pricing to keep users from defecting.

Nokia is expected to report losses for the second and third quarters this year as its ageing smartphone range is rapidly losing market share to phones running on the Android operating platform of Google.

Tags: Google, multimedia phone, Nokia, smartphones

Microsoft Corp. made its biggest move into the mobile and Internet-accessible world of “cloud” computing on June 28, 2011.

The world’s largest software company took the wraps off a revamped online version of its hugely profitable Office software suite.

From in.finance.yahoo.com:

The world’s largest software company is heaving its two-decade old set of applications — including Outlook email, Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint collaboration tools — into an online format so that customers can use them on a variety of devices from wherever they can get an Internet connection.

It wants to push back against Google Inc, which has stolen a small but worrying percentage of corporate customers with cheaper, web-only alternatives, which remove the need for companies to spend time on installing software or managing servers.

“It puts Microsoft in a better position than they were — they now have a broad product that they can more easily sell,” said Michael Silver, an analyst at tech research firm Gartner.

Microsoft shares rose 0.8 percent on Tuesday, following a 3.7 percent jump the day before, partly buoyed by hopes that the company can ultimately boost profits by extending its software dominance to the growing cloud sector.

One test customer “expects to cut travel costs and reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent after they retire the 60 servers they think they will save,” said Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.

Tags: collaboration tools, Excel spreadsheets, Google, Microsoft, Outlook email, software company, Steve Ballmer

An intensifying rivalry between Google Inc and Facebook has started after Google decided to block Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information.

Google will not allow other services to automatically import email contact data of its users for their own purposes unless the information flows both ways.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

Facebook, with more than 500 million users, relies on email services such as Google’s Gmail to help new users find friends already on the network. When a person joins, they are asked to import their Gmail contact list into the social network service. Facebook then tells the user which email contacts are also on the social network.

In a statement, Google said websites such as Facebook “leave users in a data dead end.” Facebook did not immediately provide a comment on Friday.

While Google framed the move as an attempt to protect its users’ ability to retain control of their personal data on the Internet, analysts said the move underscored the battle between Google, the world’s largest search engine, and Facebook, the dominant Internet social network.

“The fundamental power dynamic on the Web today is this emerging conflict between Facebook and Google,” said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. “Google needs to evolve to become a big player in the social Web and it hasn’t been able to do that.”

“If people do search within Facebook, if they do email within Facebook, if they do instant messaging within Facebook, all of these will chip away at Google’s properties.”

Google recently accused Facebook of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import & export of Facebook users’ information.

Tags: email contact data, email services, facebook, Gmail, Google, Google contact data, Internet social network, social network, social network service, social Web

With varied languages worldwide, it is sometimes difficult to have conversation and maintaining a social network. Google has revealed the software which can simplify the conversation between two people by translating into their respective languages. The technology has now taken great leaps to decode spoken languages as well.

From hindustantimes.com:

The new software, which can be installed on an internet-connected Android mobile phone, enables two people to utter simple statements into the same phone and hear a translation after a delay, but cannot be used for live telephone conversations between two places.

The software fetches the translations from a powerful language server run by Google. An assistant to Schmidt demonstrated it, translating a simple dialogue between.

This new software can be used with the help of an internet connected device. Also it works on the android which translates the live conversations but takes a few seconds to decode to the other language.

Tags: Google, internet, social network, technology

If you have been trying hard to find easy clues to understand search engine algorithms, you may be left disappointed to learn that search engines may be speedy but they lack preciseness.

Search engines such as Wolfram Alpha have employed the model of delivering answers and not pointing to the direction unlike Google and others that start providing hints as soon as a word is typed in the search box.

From Timesofindia.indiatimes.com:

There are no easy answers. Search engines like Google are based on an algorithm mechanism. This is a complex mathematical formula that crawls through billions of sites on the net and ranks its pages, thereby creating a vast index that is tapped to deliver search results. “Considering that the internet is growing at a frantic pace, and new pages are continuously being added, it’s a challenge to constantly index fresh pages and produce results that are new and pertinent,” admits Dod.

Often, experimentation is the key. Google has experimented with what it terms the Universal search. This blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines to deliver comprehensive results. Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India, says that Universal search is an important first step in exploring the full range of what can be achieved. “Users today are looking at compact and personalized results. Search engines have to understand this and be more intuitive. The future will see radical advances in modes of search. Our goal is to take advantage of these and keep evolving the interface design and user experience.”

Bing, Microsoft’s search portal, launched last year as the “decision engine” has similar aspirations of developing as a search engine that can offer solutions, not just plain vanilla search results. Eventually, say Microsoft sources, the idea is to pull out specific bits of information from different web pages and serve them up as one result. This will be quite different from the way it works now, where an engine lists a choice of many pages, each of which contains the keywords searched for.

Kapil Gupta of Synapse India, a software firm that specializes in SEO, said search engine algorithms have become smarter with integrated artificial intelligence and search domain has surely got more user-oriented than ever and will continue to do so.

Tags: artificial intelligence, Google, images, keywords, news, search engine algorithms, SEO, video, Wolfram Alpha

Many business entrepreneurs still are of the view that the benefits of Internet will slowly erode with time. They probably don’t know that a reluctance to change and accept the Internet as an amicable marketing option can deeply hamper their business prospects. With the Internet a buzzword as well as a necessity for everyone, people who still use traditional mails for communicating urgent mails and neglect emails, by saying that emails will soon not be justifying their presence, is probably living in a self-created world.

In the online world of today, trendsetters such as eBay, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN have ensured that a whole new generation awake daily after a tight sleep with web activities on their minds. The success and popularity of Internet and Online Shopping have clearly suggested that it does make sense to stay online and advertise products and services online for a business rather than struggling with obsolete marketing techniques. With more and more customers as well as providers going online, it is almost unthinkable for a business or an individual with a futuristic approach to neglect usefulness of the Internet. This is because the web allows a business to have a comprehensive brochure in the form of web pages and remain accessible even outside its working hours. Since a website is visible to the worldwide audience at large, there is no limitation of any kind for a business to limit its potential to its local area.

In a nutshell, tunes of the World Wide Web are now reaching all with the world getting awakened to web. Is your business hearing the tunes or still struggling?

Tags: AOL, benefits of Internet, eBay, Google, marketing, marketing option, marketing techniques, MSN, Online Shopping, Yahoo!

Can you imagine a Warrior fighting a battle without enough or with broken, rusted arrows in his quiver? If he still shows the inclination of fighting a valiant battle, the consequences are obviously known and simply not worth mentioning. The same goes for your business if it lacks an effective online presence.

Each and every business in today’s competitive world must identify and understand the fact that an effective web presence can help it to reach its predefined objectives. Ever since the introduction of the Web and “intelligent” search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and MSN amongst many, there have been an expression of interest by many small as well as big businesses to join the online league via a website.

Since more and more customers are online these days, it is almost imperative for each and every business to create as well as maintain a viable online presence. However, just having online presence will not work as there may be many competitors who may also be online. To do complete justice to your small business’s web presence, it is also necessary to ensure that the business website is able to serve the purpose for which it is created and not otherwise.

In order to ensure that the web-based services are in the right place, a small business can avail the specialized services of an Internet Marketing Agency. Such an agency can help a business to retain existing and attract new customers besides ensuring that there are no deviations in terms of predefined objectives and actual solutions. The services offered by such an agency could help a business to move swiftly and steadily towards accomplishment of its objectives.

Tags: effective online presence, effective web presence, Google, Internet Marketing Agency, MSN, online presence, web presence, Yahoo!