Cisco’s Net Income Falls but Outlook Improves

Stability has been an elusive concept for Cisco Systems over the last year. Sales have been on a jagged downward slope as the technology industry dealt with its worst downturn since the dot-com bust.But now Cisco, the world’s largest maker of network technology, says business appears to have reached a “tipping point.”

In the last three months, orders have started to arrive at a more consistent pace when measured against historical trends, said John T. Chambers, the chief executive, in an interview on Wednesday after the company released its fiscal fourth-quarter results.The orders were very good, Mr. Chambers said. It was the first normal order rate we have seen sequentially in a year.Such optimism seemed to run counter to Cisco’s fourth-quarter results, which showed just how much business spending on networking equipment has slowed. For the period ended July 25, Cisco reported a 46 percent plunge in net income to $1.1 billion, or 19 cents a share, from net income of $2 billion, or 33 cents a share, in the same period last year. Excluding charges for stock-option compensation, acquisitions and one-time items, Cisco earned 31 cents a share, beating the forecast of 29 cents a share by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Revenue fell 18 percent year-over-year to $8.5 billion, meeting analysts’ expectations. Sales of Cisco’s flagship routing and switching products fell 27 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Setting those bleak sales figures aside, Mr. Chambers focused on recent sales trends to support his hopes for better results ahead. The $8.5 billion in revenue, for example, was Cisco’s first quarter-to-quarter sales increase in a year. In addition, the increase in orders from the third quarter to the fourth quarter matched past trends, leading Mr. Chambers to characterize the business as more stable. Looking ahead, Cisco expects its first-quarter revenue to come in 15 to 17 percent below the $10.3 billion it reported last year. But even with such declines, Cisco would report quarter-to-quarter growth once again.On a global basis, we are starting to see potential positive trends in Asia-Pacific, the U.S., emerging markets and Japan, Mr. Chambers said. He added that selling equipment in Europe remained difficult.Despite those positive signals, Mr. Chambers, known for his upbeat demeanor, cautioned that a recovery was not guaranteed. “No one knows for sure when the recovery will occur, he said. “You would like to see a couple more quarters of the trends we saw before talking about that.Cisco has cut more than 2,000 jobs over the last year, but on Wednesday, the company declared an end to layoffs. Analysts saw this as a crucial indicator that Mr. Chambers thought Cisco had reached bottom.Effectively we have a new plateau, and moving forward, things appear to be behaving roughly the way they should, said Sam Wilson, a communications analyst for JMP Securities.In the midst of the economic downturn, Cisco has charged into several new markets, including computer servers for businesses and video recorders for consumers. The company is attacking 30 new businesses and could increase that, Mr. Chambers said. For the year, revenue fell 9 percent, to $36.1 billion, and profit dropped 24 percent, to $6.1 billion. Cisco finished with $35 billion in cash — one of the largest hoards in the technology industry.
By ASHLEE VANCE

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls all the computer and math stuff that was part of the job.
People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. And I’m not kidding.The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured, said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments. Even the recently ended Netflix contest, which offered $1 million to anyone who could significantly improve the company’s movie recommendation system, was a battle waged with the weapons of modern statistics. Though at the fore, statisticians are only a small part of an army of experts using modern statistical techniques for data analysis. Computing and numerical skills, experts say, matter far more than degrees. So the new data sleuths come from backgrounds like economics, computer science and mathematics. They are certainly welcomed in the White House these days. Robust, unbiased data are the first step toward addressing our long-term economic needs and key policy priorities,Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared in a speech in May. Later that day, Mr. Orszag confessed in a blog entry that his talk on the importance of statistics was a subject “near to my (admittedly wonkish) heart.I.B.M., seeing an opportunity in data-hunting services, created a Business Analytics and Optimization Services group in April. The unit will tap the expertise of the more than 200 mathematicians, statisticians and other data analysts in its research labs — but that number is not enough. I.B.M. plans to retrain or hire 4,000 more analysts across the company. In another sign of the growing interest in the field, an estimated 6,400 people are attending the statistics profession’s annual conference in Washington this week, up from around 5,400 in recent years, according to the American Statistical Association. The attendees, men and women, young and graying, looked much like any other crowd of tourists in the nation’s capital. But their rapt exchanges were filled with talk of randomization, parameters, regressions and data clusters. The data surge is elevating a profession that traditionally tackled less visible and less lucrative work, like figuring out life expectancy rates for insurance companies.Ms. Grimes, 32, got her doctorate in statistics from Stanford in 2003 and joined Google later that year. She is now one of many statisticians in a group of 250 data analysts. She uses statistical modeling to help improve the company’s search technology. For example, Ms. Grimes worked on an algorithm to fine-tune Google’s crawler software, which roams the Web to constantly update its search index. The model increased the chances that the crawler would scan frequently updated Web pages and make fewer trips to more static ones.The goal, Ms. Grimes explained, is to make tiny gains in the efficiency of computer and network use. Even an improvement of a percent or two can be huge, when you do things over the millions and billions of times we do things at Google,” she said.It is the size of the data sets on the Web that opens new worlds of discovery. Traditionally, social sciences tracked people’s behavior by interviewing or surveying them. But the Web provides this amazing resource for observing how millions of people interact, said Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist and social networking researcher at Cornell.For example, in research just published, Mr. Kleinberg and two colleagues followed the flow of ideas across cyberspace. They tracked 1.6 million news sites and blogs during the 2008 presidential campaign, using algorithms that scanned for phrases associated with news topics like “lipstick on a pig.The Cornell researchers found that, generally, the traditional media leads and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours. But a handful of blogs were quickest to quotes that later gained wide attention.The rich lode of Web data, experts warn, has its perils. Its sheer volume can easily overwhelm statistical models. Statisticians also caution that strong correlations of data do not necessarily prove a cause-and-effect link. For example, in the late 1940s, before there was a polio vaccine, public health experts in America noted that polio cases increased in step with the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks, according to David Alan Grier, a historian and statistician at George Washington University. Eliminating such treats was even recommended as part of an anti-polio diet. It turned out that polio outbreaks were most common in the hot months of summer, when people naturally ate more ice cream, showing only an association, Mr. Grier said.If the data explosion magnifies longstanding issues in statistics, it also opens up new frontiers. The key is to let computers do what they are good at, which is trawling these massive data sets for something that is mathematically odd, said Daniel Gruhl, an I.B.M. researcher whose recent work includes mining medical data to improve treatment. And that makes it easier for humans to do what they are good at — explain those anomalies.Andrea Fuller contributed reporting.
STEVE LOHR

Google Adds Searching by Voice to iPhone Software

SAN FRANCISCO — Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Google’s voice search software works only with iPhones, but the company plans to make it available to other phones.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Vic Gundotra, right, and Gummi Hafsteinsson, of Google, with an iPhone running the voice search.
Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.
The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.
The ability to recognize just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering. The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.
The service can be used to get restaurant recommendations and driving directions, look up contacts in the iPhone’s address book or just settle arguments in bars. The query “What is the best pizza restaurant in Noe Valley?” returns a list of three restaurants in that San Francisco neighborhood, each with starred reviews from Google users and links to click for phone numbers and directions.
Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon Universitywho has done pioneering work in voice recognition, said Google’s advantage in this field was the ability to store and analyze vast amounts of data. “Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months,” he said.
“It’s important to understand that machine recognition will never be perfect,” Mr. Reddy added. “The question is, How close can they come to human performance?” For Google the technology is critical to its next assault on the world of advertising. Google executives said location-based queries would make it possible to charge higher rates for advertisements from nearby businesses, for example, although it is not selling such ads now. As with other Google products the service is freely available to consumers, and the company plans to eventually make it available for phones other than the iPhone.
“We are dramatically increasing value to the advertiser through location and voice,” said Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.
Google is by no means the only company working toward more advanced speech recognition capabilities. So-called voice response technology is now routinely used in telephone answering systems and in other consumer services and products. These systems, however, often have trouble with the complexities of free-form language and usually offer only a limited range of responses to queries.
Several weeks ago Adobe added voice recognition technology developed by Autonomy, a British firm, to its Creative Suite software, allowing it to generate transcripts of video and audio recordings with a high degree of accuracy.
Mr. Gundotra said Google had been tackling the twin problems of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.
“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” he said.
The new iPhone search capability is not the first speech offering from Google. In March, it announced that GOOG-411, an experimental directory information service, had turned into a real product. The service allows users to ask for business phone and address information. The company said it had built on its experience and the data it collected through GOOG-411 in developing the iPhone service.
The new service is an example of the way Google tries to blend basic computer science research with product engineering. The company has hired many of the best speech recognition researchers in the world and now has teams working on different aspects of the problem in New York, London and its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
An intriguing part of the overall design of the service was contributed by a Google researcher in London, who found a way to use the iPhone accelerometer — the device that senses how the phone is held — to set the software to “listen” mode when the phone is raised to the user’s ear.
Google researchers said that another of its advantages over competitors was the billions of queries its users have made over the years.
“One thing that has changed is the amount of computation and the amount of data that is available,” said Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google.
Past queries can be used to build a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, Mr. Cohen said. This is just one of the components of the speech recognition system, which also includes a sound analysis model and a mechanism for linking the basic components of language to actual words.
Google recently published a technical paper on building large models for machine translation of language. The researchers wrote that they had trained the system on two trillion “tokens,” or words.
By JOHN MARKOFF

Corel Video Studio Pro X2

Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 is a video editing and disk authoring software for creating high-def slideshows, movies, etc. You can burn such slideshows and videos to DVD and HD-DVD. The software is very easy to use.

When you open the program. it allows you to choose the way you want to create the slides how or video by selecting the VideoStudio Editor. Movie Wizard or DV to DVD Wizard. VideoStudio Editor is the full fledged editing tool that enables you to capture video. edit and give special effect to it. You can instantly know the stages of' your project through the new workflow tool bar and can have complete control over your clip duration, audio levels, motion, reverse playback and multi-trim video capabilities.

The Movie Wizard makes the entire post production process quick and easy. You can give zoom effects to important clips using Pan and Zoom and can incorporate still photos inside the video. You can use the drag and drop technique to load HD video cont'ent. DV to DVD Wizard allows you to get the video from the camcorder and copy it onto a DVD. After selecting the clips, the Wizard captures them and puts them into a movie template. One advantage of the DV to DVD Wizard is that you can burn video directly from the camcorder to disc
VideoStudio Pro X2 includes a Voice Track, Music Track and music, and sound effects audio clips. You can import WAC, MP3 or any other sound files from CD or from Web. For faster video uploading, MPEG4 H.264 encoding method is incorporated for creating small files. Users can personalize their video by painting, drawing and writing with 'Painting Creator' effects. You can upload your video to 'YouTube' directly and encode the movies in FLV. Share the videos projects with the help of mobile devices like Apple iPhone and iPod. Import videos from AVCHD. camcorders and edit quickly with the enhanced Smart Proxy editing option, The program supports Intel's quad core technology, for both dual core and quad core CPUs. the encoding time is reduced.

The software DVD contains VideoStudio Editor, Movie Wizard, DV to DVD Wizard, Corel WinDVD, template libraries. title animations and overly clips and Bonus NewBlue film effects filters.

Minimum system requirements comprise of Intel Pentium 4, AMD Athlon XP or higher, Windows XP or Vista. 512 MB RAM and 1 GB free Hard Disk space.

ConvertX to DVD 3

Want to watch your downloaded collection of movies on the home theatre system? To do this you will need to convert the videos into the VOB format of DVD video. This can be done using tools like Nero or Roxio, but ConvertX to DVD does the job really well. With it you can also design the menus for your home DVD movie. Of course, you can just buy yourself a DVD player that plays DivX.

There's support for a wide range of formats that include avi, divx, xvid, mov, mkv, flv , mpegl, mpeg2, mpeg-, nsv, dvr-ms, tivo, ts, ifo, vob, wmv, realmedia, existing files from digital camcorders, TV/Sat, capture cards and so on.
We liked the exhaustive set of options for defining various aspects of DVD creation such as encoding quality, DVD target size, video and audio processing parameters, chapter intervals, DVD resolution and so on.

You can either define these parameters from a dialog box or through the Tree View. If you opt for the latter, where options are neatly categorized, simply click on the default text and replace it with you text-as in the case of 'Title text for Title Menu'.

As we went about converting a video and making a DVD, we noticed that previews were always shown at each step. This feedback helped us make refinements before burning the DVD using the built-in CD burning engine.