Cisco to lay off at least 5,500 employees

Photo courtesy of Sky News

Networking equipment company Cisco is making the shift from hardware to software and with it they’ll be losing seven percent of their workforce or at least 5,500 employees. There will be 70,000 employees remaining after the job cuts happen during the first fiscal quarter of 2017. The company made the announcement during its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday afternoon. The layoffs could’ve been worse though as earlier claims said Cisco was supposedly going to let go as many as 14,000 employees.

Sales for the company grew two percent year-over-year (excluding a video unit) to US$12.6 billion during a quarter. Its stock was down 1.3 percent on Wednesday. It’s still going to be challenging for Cisco going forward as product or hardware make up almost half the company’s sales and three-fourths of its revenue in the last quarter. Meanwhile, its security business—which is its fastest growing segment—still represents four percent of its sales. It’s up 16 percent year-over-year or was worth $540 million during the quarter.

Source: Recode + Mashable

Nureva releases Span 1.2 software with enhanced collaborative features

Calgary-based Nureva Inc., an award-winning collaboration-solutions company, announced a new release of its software for the Nureva Span system.

Span 1.2 software, which customers receive automatically through the cloud, further enables collaborative activities in several key ways. The addition of familiar business-analysis templates makes it even easier for teams to leverage the Span system as part of their established processes. An upgrade to the software’s digital ink automatically smooths pen strokes to improve the appearance of annotations and sketches, while visual cues and new menu options make the use of groups and subgroups more intuitive.

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Apple could bring more apps and services to Google Android

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

We're at a completely different place in mobile ecosystems than we were years ago. The era of closed systems and software exclusive to specific hardware is  quickly comng to an end.

Google has always had its software and services available on iOS (not so much on Windows Phone or BlackBerry). Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has been relentless in making its services and apps available to Android and iOS and now it seems Apple is thinking of putting some of their apps and services on Android.

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Lollipop's memory leak problem confirmed, to be addressed in firmware update

Some Lollipop owners are experiencing some memory leak problems with their devices. Android OS 5.0.1 apparently shuts down apps and constant home screen refreshes. While the Android community has been waiting on Lollipop to come to their devices, it is apparent that there are still a number of bugs to be squashed and that's possibly why it is taking so long to roll out the update.

According to Phandroid, "The thread on Google’s Android Issue Tracker shows a range of Nexus devices afflicted, everything from Nexus 7 2013, to Nexus 4, and Nexus 5 showing Android system eating upwards of 1.2GB+ of RAM (normal usage is around 500MB)." The problem is noted and will likely get a fix soon.

Source: Phandroid