2.3 million consumer financial records stolen
Fidelity National Information Services, a financial processing company, said Tuesday a worker at one of its subsidiaries stole 2.3 million consumer records containing credit card, bank account and other personal information. The employee sold the information to an unidentified data broker who sold it to several direct marketing companies, but the data were not used in identity theft or other fraudulent financial activity, Fidelity said in a statement. About 2.2 million records stolen from Certegy Check Services contained bank account information and 99,000 contained credit card information, Fidelity said. Fidelity said Certegy had asked a court in St. Petersburg to retrieve all the information from the employee and the marketing companies and to stop its use. It also said Certegy has contacted law enforcement officials. Certegy will notify all affected consumers of the theft and has contacted major credit agencies, Fidelity said. The employee, whose name was not released, was fired.

Google Grabs GrandCentral
Google said it has agreed to acquire web-based voice startup GrandCentral Communications. GrandCentral, which has raised roughly $4 million from Minor Ventures, allows people to have one unified telephone number. The company’s technology can make calls to one phone number ring multiple places—work, home, mobile, and VoIP. The service is also customizable so that only certain phones ring from certain callers. The unified number allows people to get free from telephone providers in a similar way that web-based email accounts liberated people from relying on Internet service providers. GrandCentral’s voice mail messages and phone calls can be recorded and saved for access via phone, email, or web browser. The service also features click-to-dial from a web address book and the ability to weed out telemarketer calls. GrandCentral’s idea of uniting all phones in one number square with Google’s stated goal of uniting all of a person’s personal and professional online tools. Google has been rumored to be developing its own mobile phone, and GrandCentral’s technology could theoretically be incorporated into such a device. GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet previously led VoIP company Dialpad Communications and sold it to Yahoo in 2005.

The Real Cost for the iPhone
The 8GB Iphone total bill of materials (BOM) and manufacturing cost is $265.83, delivering a margin of 55%. The thing sells at $1 less than $600 but Apple's BOM doesn't include royalties and logistics. The parts include Infineon's digital baseband, RF transceiver, and power management components. Nat Semi doesn't get a big share of the real estate, with one serial display interface costing $1.50. But German firm Balda in conjunction with Chinese firm TPK Holding supplied the display module at a cost of $27. The touch screen uses components from Epson, Sharp, and Toshiba Matsushita Display, amounting to $24.50. Samsung gets the lion share of component manufacturers by supplying an ARM RISC core, NAND flash and DRAM, amounting to a whopping cost of $76.25, or 30.5% of the BOM. Other beneficiaries from Apple marketing include Wolfson for the audio codec, CSR for the Bluetooth chip, and Marvell for the wi-fi baseband chip. 4.5 million of Jobs' dream machines will ship this year.

Wii outselling PS3 'six to one'
Nintendo's Wii console outsold Sony's PlayStation 3 in Japan last month by six to one. Nintendo sold 270,974 Wii consoles last month while Sony sold 41,628 PS3s, according to Enterbrain, a Japanese publisher that tracks console sales. Nintendo has sold about 2.76m Wii consoles in Japan since the launch last December, while Sony has sold 970,270 PS3s since it debuted last November. About 17,616 Xbox 360 consoles were sold in June. Globally, Sony has struggled so far to replicate the success it had with the first two PlayStation consoles. The machine has also suffered from a lack of "killer" exclusive titles which showcase the power of the machine. PlayStation fans are still awaiting some of the biggest franchises on the machine to emerge, such as Metal Gear Solid, Killzone 2 and Gran Turismo.

AT&T Offers DSL Customers Free Access to Wi-Fi Hotspots
AT&T Inc. announced that subscribers to its higher-speed broadband services will have free access to its Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country. Subscribers who get the company's Pro, Elite and FastAccess can use any of the company's 10,000 hotspots located in airports, coffee shops, McDonald's restaurants and Barnes & Noble bookstores for free. Those with lower tier services can add unlimited Wi-Fi access for $1.99 per month. Connections at AT&T Wi-Fi hot spots for nonsubscribers run $7.99 per day. Nationwide, 12.9 million customers subscribe to AT&T broadband services, though spokesman Fletcher Cook said the company does not break out how many are paying for the costlier, faster services.

Kremlin shuts AllOfMp3
The Kremlin has shut down a popular online music store under pressure from the US government and the World Trade Organisation. Russia wants to enter the WTO but is finding that its membership is being blocked by the US whose political masters are sustained by campaign donations from the music and movie business. AllOfMP3 had six million users who were able to download songs and albums for $0.20 per song, or less. The outfit claimed it was legal and obeyed Russian copyright law. Since that copyright law was being administered by an outfit that was a rival to the RIAA, there was a certain amount of demarcation argie-bargie involved. Most users will probably move to MP3sparks, a similar service with a similar setup, launched by the same company using a different licensing model.

Europe Steps Up Probe of New DVD Formats
The Watchdogs in Bruxelles, Europa, think that there's something fishy going on in the high end DVD market. The European Commission is particularly interested in the Sony sponsored Blu-ray (sic) group because it appears to have won the format wars in Hollywood, California. Jonathan Todd, chief spinner for the EC, has penned a note to major Hollywood studios in the middle of last month asking whether they had imposed "restrictive agreements" in choosing between Blu-ray and Toshiba-sponsored HD-DVD. A week or two back, a company with shops all over the place called Blockbuster said it will only stock films using Blu-ray. Many people are breeding moths in their wallets as they wait to find out how these latest format wars pan out.

China to overtake India in offshoring by 2011
Affordable rent, low-cost labor and population literacy are the main reasons why companies still prefer to set up their delivery centres in Indian cities uch as Mumbai and Bangalore. But this offshoring trend is likely to change in the near future. Chinese cities will soon overtake their Indian counterparts as top destinations for offshore global delivery by 2011, based on the results acquired from its Global Delivery Index (GDI). The GDI compares 35 cities in the Asia-Pacific region as potential offshore delivery centres based on a set of criteria such as labour and rental costs, language skills and turnover rate. Cities covered by the index include Adelaide, Bangalore, Dalian, Hanoi, and Kuala Lumpur. What differentiates the leading cities from the rest is "the focus on deal-clinching factors, including agent skills and political risk. There are different risk factors to consider when evaluating outsourcing, offshoring, onshoring, and nearshoring,. Some factors are obviously more critical than others. While Indian cities scored high on the criteria set by the GDI, the picture could well be different four years from now. Although the top-ranked Chinese cities — Beijing, Shanghai and Dalian — trail their Indian counterparts in the GDI this year, they are expected to overtake the competition by 2011.

Some in Silicon Valley Begin to Sour on India
The wages of techies in high tech cities such as Bangalore mean that US firms are beginning to hire at home rather than abroad. In 2005, wages for software developers were a quarter that of folk in places like Silicon Valley. But that's changed now and Bangalore engineers, it reckons are now earning 75% of the going rate in the USA. Not that it's all good news for the USA, because, some outsourcing firms are hiring staff from eastern European countries where labor is still cheap, or in Asian countries like Vietnam. And it only seems to be the top engineers that are affected by this shift because many big IT firms are still building up staff in India. Intel's CEO Paul Otellini as saying that wage inflation in India is four times that of inflation in the USA.

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