OLA AHLVARSSON PRESENTS SIME AND RESULT

RESULT BRAZIL

By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer Wed Sep 3

Paf, a Nordic gaming operator, has signed a unique sponsorship agreement with the Spanish top football club Atletico de Madrid and becomes the clubs Official Gaming Sponsor.

Paf is the new shorts-sponsor for the club where Paf’s brand will appear on the shorts, training clothes, training field etc.

The sponsorship is for the season 2008-2011, where Paf will use Atletico de Madrid’s image as an international communication platform to further strengthen awareness for Paf’s brand and services.

The sponsorship also contains another unique dimension.

Paf will also during the first quarter 2009 launch a tailored made online gaming site for Atletico de Madrid’s fans around the world. On this gaming site, fans will be able to find for example the best odds on Atletico de Madrid’s matches, win tickets and VIP packages, get exclusive information from players and managers and much more entertaining and fun content.

“This is a historic cooperation for us, being able to team-up with one of the best football clubs in Europe, sharing the same values as we, is a true honor for Paf. We have found a very like-minded club, with a very good reputation, which is a cornerstone in this sponsorship agreement. Paf is dedicated to create a win-win situation, not only for the Club, but also for Atletico de Madrid fans” says Anders Wiklund, Head of Business to Business at Paf”.

Paf was established 1966 as a charitable organization, which still today is the foundation in Paf’s business. Last year Paf donated 20 million euro to different charity organizations, which will also be a driving force in the cooperation with Atletico de Madrid. Revenue from players’ spending on the gaming site will also be donated to local charity in Madrid chosen by Atletico de Madrid them selves.

“We are very proud to have found a new sponsor sharing the same vision as us. Paf’s mindset of creating value for the club and for our fans, and having a charitable profile, is in line with our current strategy and business development. Not only have we secured the needed founds for the club, but also being able to create added value for our fans when the online gaming site is launched later by Paf. It’s also the first time a sponsor insists on distributing money to local charity, which truly makes this cooperation unique and a win-win situation for the Club, for the Fans and for Charity” says Juan Carlos Moya, Commercial Director of Atletico de Madrid.

Juan Carlos Moya, Commercial Director of Atletico de Madrid and Anders Wiklund, Head of Business to Business at Paf

Information about Paf:

The Paf Group is a charitable gaming operator with its head office on Åland, an autonomous province of Finland. It has 40 years operating experience in land-based and shipboard, and has been an Internet gaming operator since 1999. The Paf Group employs over 400 people and has offices in Mariehamn, Stockholm, Helsinki and Tallinn. In 2007 the group’s turnover amounted to approximately 100 million euro. Paf operates under a license from the Åland government within an EU jurisdiction. The distributable profit is in its entirety donated to good causes within e.g. the public, culture and sport sector where as the distribution 2007 amounted to 20 million euro.

Spring Wireless, mobile business solution supplier in Latin America, has just received a financial supply of US$ 56 million, from Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Ideasnet. The resources will be used for the extension of the company international operations.

The first step will be a new office in Seattle. The focus will be the service sectors, financial, goods and pharmaceuticals. Until the end of the year, the expectations are three new clients and 20 clients in 2009.

The aim is to consolidate the company as a world leader in mobile business solutions. They are three times bigger than the main competitor in USA and their technology is ahead from the developed by them.

The international operations already represent 25% of company total income. The idea is that in 2009 this represents 45% of the results. Nowadays, the company has 600 employees, 40% abroad, and 230 clients, around 70 abroad.

F/Nazca, in its 3rd research on internet access in Brazil, shows that Brazilian people has been using the internet in lan houses (29%), at home (21%), at friends’ and relatives’ (21%), at school and university (10%) and in public centres of access.

This means that there is been, probably, a democratization of the internet access. Of course the majority of users are in classes A and B, but C and D also use it, regardless the age or region. The investment in free access places and in universities and schools is the major factor for this continuum growth of internet access.

Last year (2007), for the first time in the country, it was sold more computers – 10.7 million – than TV sets – 10.5 million. When you install ten computers at a school in the Northeast, allowing them to be used by the whole community, you are making a revolution, says Ari Meneghini, executive director of Interactive Advertising Bureau Brazil (IAB). It is still hard to analyze all that, but changes are happening. Who is economically excluded is not necessarily excluded from the internet.

In 2007, Datafolha had an estimation of 41.6 million internauts in Brazil. But according to this new study, from F/Nazca, there are 59 million internet users in the country. The researches were done based in different methodologies, but the lesson learnt is that the internet is reaching Brazilian people.

Elections

Because of the elections this year in Brazil, there were some restrictions for the candidates. It is not allowed to have blogs or communities during the campaign. This is something that the majority does not agree with. As the content of the internet is made by the public, and if they want to see or to read about someone’s ideas on any subject they will go after it – which is different on TV, where you watch everyday at a certain time the candidates’ speech -, it should not be prohibited to use the technology to reach people. Like Barack Obama had done, using Twitter, Orkut, Facebook, blogs, etc, the candidates would have had here the same opportunity, as people have nowadays great access to the web. More than it was ever imagined.

(based on Ultimo Segundo article from August 5th)

By Caroline McCarthy, CNET Tue Jul 29, 11:34 AM ET – Yahoo News

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they’ve teamed up to create a “test bed” project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally. With the rather dry name of The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open-source project will consist of data centers around the globe “to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.” They’ve partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as the National Science Foundation.

Using largely HP hardware and Intel processors, six initial data centers will be built at those locations, each with 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores (that’s probably about 125 to 500 servers). Though research has already begun “in bits and pieces,” all the centers are expected to become fully functional later this year. Researchers from all three companies as well as the host institutions will have access to the project.

The three companies declined to state how much each had contributed financially, but did say that each was responsible for committing hardware and people to do the research. When HP Labs underwent a major reorganization in March, it named large-scale cloud services as a key focus. Labs Director and company Senior Vice President Prith Banerjee said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters that the project is important to HP because “we believe we are entering a new era called ‘Everything as a Service,’” where devices and services will “interact seamlessly through the cloud. To realize the full potential, the tech industry must think of the cloud as a platform.” Yahoo’s commitment to cloud computing stems from its involvement in the Apache Hadoop project, an open-source project for large-scale data processing, similar to Google’s proprietary MapReduce software. Yahoo formed a cloud computing group as part of a major reorganization in June, and earlier this year partnered with a research facility in India to make one of the world’s fastest supercomputers available for cloud computing research.

The three founding companies said they were “open” to adding additional partners in the future and stressed the open-source element of the project, saying that HP, Yahoo, and Intel were each committed to using information gleaned from the test beds and contributing it to open-source projects both commercially and for further research.

CNET News’ Erica Ogg and Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

Ericsson stated today that number of broadband subscribers may jump from the actual 250 million to 2.2 billion in five years, stimulated by the exponential growth of the emerging markets.

The senior VP of sales and marketing Torbjorn Possne Said on an press conference in Singapore that the growth will be guided by the Asian and Latin American markets. Possne says there are currently 350 million users of fixed broadband worldwide, a number that should double by 2013.

Ulf Ewaldsson, head of the radio division, says that India is na example of fast growth for the company. “In India we are building a station every 11 minutes”, he says.

With 8 million broadband subscribers, Jan Signell, president of Ericsson Southeast Asia, hopes to reach the 40 million subscriptions mark within a few years, with the radio playing an important role in the growth.
Singapore Telecommunications recently chose Ericsson to expand its wireless broadband network and MoblieOne chose the company for the microwave and optical solutions divisions, says.
Signel added that Ericsson is looking for business in ultra-fast broadband network of Singapore, despite of not having any partnerships yet.

A Petrobras ultrapassou a Microsoft, tornando-se a terceira maior empresa do continente americano em valor de mercado (soma do valor de suas ações), segundo a consultoria Economática divulgou nesta segunda-feira (19/05).

O levantamento tomou como base o preço das ações das companhias na última sexta-feira (16/05), data em que a Petrobras tinha um valor de mercado de aproximadamente US$ 287,2 bilhões, contra US$ 279,3 bilhões da maior empresa de software do mundo.
Nesse dia, as ações preferenciais da Petrobras encerraram cotadas a R$ 48,15, enquanto as ordinárias valiam R$ 57,90. Já os papéis da Microsoft encerraram valendo US$ 29,99 cada.

Em um ano, as ações da empresa brasileira subiram mais de 110%, enquanto os papéis da Microsoft sofreram desvalorização de 3,5% em relação ao fechamento em 16 de maio de 2007.

No ranking das maiores empresas da América em valor de mercado, além da Petrobras, figuram outras brasileiras como a Vale, em nono lugar com US$ 196,5 bilhões, e o Bradesco, com US$ 67,2 bilhões, na quadragésima terceira posição.
A única empresa mexicana a aparecer no ranking é a operadora de telefonia América Móvil, com US$ 99 bilhões, com a vigésima nona posição. Em primeiro lugar na lista ficou a maior empresa petrolífera do mundo, a Exxon Mobil, com valor estimado em US$ 489,6 bilhões.

Fonte Globo.com