16 Juli, BlackBerry PlayBook Hadir di Pasaran

Produk tablet PC dengan berbagai platform sudah lebih dulu hadir di pasaran Indonesia.

Meski kalah gesit dengan produsen tablet komputer lainnya, namun Research In Motion, produsen smartphone BlackBerry tetap berkukuh untuk memasarkan tablet komputer besutannya ke pasaran Indonesia.

Sempat dikabarkan akan diberi nama BlackPad, tablet PC milik RIM kemudian dirilis menggunakan nama Playbook. Rencananya, di tanah air, produk itu akan beredar mulai 16 Juli mendatang lewat gerai resmi RIM atau lewat mitra operator.

Sebelum tanggal itu, pengguna sudah bisa melakukan pemesanan secara online di situs resminyahttp://id.blackberry.com/playbook/wheretobuy.

Menurut Hastings Singh, Director Distribution for Asia Pacific Research In Motion, ada 3 versi BlackBerry Playbook yang disiapkan yakni yang berkapasitas 16GB, 32GB, dan 64GB. Ketiga produk itu dipasarkan di harga 4,9 juta, 5,9 juta, dan 6,9 juta.

Meski hadir lebih lambat, namun Singh yakin bahwa produknya akan tetap mampu meraih perhatian pengguna di tanah air. “Pasar tablet di Indonesia berkembang pesat. Kami melihat bahwa masyarakat mencintai teknologi, dan mereka juga mencintai BlackBerry. Itu membuat saya cukup optimistis dengan peluang PlayBook," ucapnya.

Sebagai gambaran, di pasaran saat ini sudah lebih dulu hadir produk-produk tablet PC yang menggunakan berbagai platform. Seperti diketahui, tablet PC  iPad yang dibesut oleh Apple sudah hadir di Indonesia sejak November 2010.

Adapun tablet PC berbasis Android sudah hadir lebih awal, misalnya Samsung Galaxy Tab yang beredar sejak Oktober 2010 lalu, atau Dell Streak 7 dan Acer Iconia A500 yang meski juga cukup terlambat, namun sudah hadir per April dan Juni 2011.

• VIVAnews

Read More

Alasan Pemerintah Tak Akuisisi Bank Muamalat

Pemerintah menegaskan tidak akan ikut ambil bagian dalam proses akuisisi salah satu bank syariah Indonesia, PT Bank Muamalat Indonesia Tbk. Pasalnya, penawaran sahamnya dinilai terlalu tinggi.

Menurut Menteri Badan Usaha Milik Negara (BUMN) Mustafa Abubakar, pihaknya telah memanggil PT Bank Rakyat Indonesia Tbk (BRI) bersama para pemegang saham perorangan untuk membahas kemungkinan pengambilalihan Bank Muamalat.

"Bank Muamalat pernah kita wacanakan. Saya sudah memanggil BRI beserta pemegang saham perorangan yang lama. Kelihatannya ketika dipelajari pada tahap awal, dinilai terlalu mahal," ujarnya di sela acara Fun Bike IPB di Parkir Timur Senayan, Jakarta, Minggu 10 Juli 2011.

Saham yang ditawarkan Bank Muamalat, lanjutnya, berada di atas batas kenormalan penawaran harga saham. Bank Muamalat menawarkan sahamnya pada Price to Book Value (PBV) atau rasio harga saham terhadap nilai buku 3,2 kali.
"Kalau tidak salah, mereka minta PBV 3,2 kali, istilahnya. Normalnya itu berada di 2 sampai 2,2 kali. Itu bahasanya orang bank seperti itu. Bank BRI melihat itu tidak terjangkau," ungkapnya.
Sejauh ini, menurut Mustafa, belum juga ada bank-bank BUMN yang berniat mengakuisisi bank syariah pertama di Indonesia tersebut.
• VIVAnews

Read More

US Economic Woes Debated

A recent rise in the U.S. unemployment rate has rekindled debate on America's slow-growth economy and what can be done to spark expansion and create badly-needed jobs.

Historically, U.S. economic recoveries have gained momentum over time.  But a year and a half after emerging from the deepest recession of the post-World War II era, the U.S. economy is expanding, but only barely so. And even that anemic growth could be faltering. 

News that the nation’s unemployment rate shot up above nine percent last month intensified economists’ fears that tepid economic performance could persist for years to come.

According to Robert Reich, who served as Labor Secretary during the Clinton administration, America’s lackluster economy is easy to explain.

“The central problem is on the demand side. Seventy percent of the U.S. economy is consumers [consumer activity]. And consumers are hit with the equivalent of a truck," he said. "Housing prices are dropping like mad.  Wages adjusted for inflation are dropping.  Their jobs are disappearing. Under these circumstances, consumers are not spending.  And if they are not spending, then jobs are not going to be created.”

Reich spoke on ABC’s This Week program. He advocated additional federal stimulus to spur economic activity.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama sharply disagreed.

“Stimulus basically does not work. We have tried that," said Shelby. "I think what we have got to do is create the conditions [for economic growth]: tax reform, incentives for manufacturing. The market grows the economy. We have grown the government, but we have not grown the economy.”

But former Labor Secretary Reich insisted that, when the private sector is lagging, the government should intervene.

“When consumers and private investors are pulling in [withholding spending], then government has got to fill the gap," said Reich. " We have done this for the last 75 years.”

Under President Barack Obama, an $800-billion federal stimulus package has been approved, income tax cuts have been extended, and the amount of money taken from workers’ paychecks to fund Social Security for retirees has been temporarily reduced. In addition, the U.S. central bank has kept interest rates at historically-low levels and sought ways to pump money into the ailing economy.

Senator Shelby says there is only so much a heavily-indebted federal government can or should do, and that a new stimulus package, if proposed, would not pass Congress.

“What we need to do is create some certainty, some conditions for people to invest, to grow [the economy], to have some confidence," he said. "There is not a lot of confidence in the economy right now.”

President Obama has urged patience, arguing that the economy needs time to heal from a deep recession and the 2008 financial crisis. Republican presidential hopefuls vying to challenge Obama in next year’s election have been quick to proclaim that what is truly needed is new economic leadership.

Read More

How Apple Feeds Its Army of App Makers

Let them make money, ensure the coding tools are easy to use, and keep out the riffraff

As he has for each of the past 14 years, Andrew Stone woke at 3:45 on the morning of Apple's (AAPL) annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6 in San Francisco, grabbed his yoga mat, and joined the queue of techies waiting to be let in for Steve Jobs's 10 a.m. presentation. The gangly Stone, a former architect who has written software for Jobs's machines since the 1980s, revels in talking tech with fellow Apple geeks, particularly the Europeans and Asians who often save a night's hotel fare by spending the night in line.

This year, more than ever, the good mood was powered by something other than camaraderie: Developers are making money, getting lots of contract work. "You have no idea how many people around here are overjoyed," says Stone, 55, who flew up from his home in Albuquerque the day before. He recalls far leaner years, when many struggled to come up with the $3,000 or so for the conference fee and travel. "Now, good developers can make almost as much money as they want."

The scene outside the conference hall is a snapshot of the war Apple is waging for the hearts and minds of developers. The scale and diversity of Apple's app universe—425,000, roughly twice as many as Android's—is a big reason consumers have purchased more than 200 million iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. In his WWDC talk, Jobs laid out a post-PC vision of online services that will open up vast opportunities for programmers to come up with new kinds of software. "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just another device," Jobs told the crowd. "We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." He announced a new service, iCloud, that will ensure any photo, music, or other file that is downloaded or changed on your iPhone is automatically, wirelessly synched to any of your other Apple devices and vice versa. A new iMessage will make it simpler to communicate via text, voice, and video. The basic iOS operating system has been improved, which will make it easier to snap pictures, share files, or find an article. To the extent that Jobs can persuade consumers not to bother with non-Apple products, his pull with developers may increase as well.

Freelance developers such as Stone tend to be an idealistic, egalitarian bunch, suspicious of big companies intent on telling them, or consumers, what to do. And yet Apple has expertly played on their pragmatism—programming tools are slick and simple to use, for example. The main reason there are so many more apps available for Apple products is that there are more ways for developers to make money on them. Consumers have paid more than $4.3 billion for apps sold on Apple's App Store. That includes the original purchase, plus upgrades and ads that appear within the apps. Eddie Marks and his college roommate haven't even bothered to count up the winnings from the ads that appear on their free app, which lets iPhone users simulate the sound of cocking and firing a shotgun. "We've made more than $1 million," says Marks, whose initial goal was simply to raise rent and beer money until he could find a job after graduation in 2008. "It could be $2 million, but I doubt it."

Apple hasn't monopolized developers' attention. According to a survey by market research firm Evans Data, the percentage of developers writing apps for Android (43.5 percent) just passed the share working in iOS (39.7 percent). While Apple dominates a certain high-end niche, Android has been adopted by almost every other phone maker and wireless carrier. Throw in the hundreds of millions of devices running BlackBerry, Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Phone, or Nokia's (NOK) Symbian, and "there's very little exclusivity in the mobile development space," says Evans Data Chief Executive Officer Janel Garvin.

Read More