Motorola Solutions has launched its Innovation Centre in Melbourne, a hub to demonstrate its current and future technologies in Australia, to help the adoption of innovative mobile technology across different industries.

The centre was officially inaugurated by Victorian Minister for Technology Gordon Rich-Phillips.

The centre is aimed at Motorola Solutions’ partners, software developers and customers to get hands-on demonstration and access to a range of Motorola’s current and future technologies.

The current demonstrations include a RFID-enabled wireless technology that would help supermarket or retailer shoppers self check-out items as they go, cutting waiting times at cash registers. For retailers, a wireless device could help automate inventory monitoring and ordering, helping shopping and retail operations become more efficient.

Motorola hopes to promote collaboration and innovation around how these technologies can benefit businesses in several services industries. The centre would enable Motorola’s partners and customers to take advantage of its investment in research and development of $US1bn.

The centre is located close to Motorola Solutions’ Network Operations Control Centre, which supports emergency services communications for police, fire and ambulance, and other and data networks such as mine sites in New Zealand and New Caledonia.

Outlining Motorla’s 2012 Retail Vision, Motorola Solutions Australia and New Zealand managing director, Gary Starr, highlighted the challenges faced by Australia’s bricks-and-mortar retailers with the advent of online shopping.

The company’s “Retail Vision” offers retailers mobile-enabled ideas on how they can differentiate themselves by enhancing customer experience amid a tough retail environment.

He noted an online shopping report on trends in Australia and New Zealand by PwC and Frost & Sullivan that stated that online sales are forecast to make up 6.3 per cent of the $253.8 billion spent on retail sales in Australia this year, up from 5.5 per cent in 2011 and 4.9 per cent in 2010.

“Retailers today recognise they must modify the way they sell to their customers and are working harder to meet shoppers’ heightened expectations,” Starr said.

“The retail environment of the future will take the complexity out of converged technology, allowing multiple systems to talk to one another and exchange only the important information needed to make intelligent, real-time decisions.”

Credit: Arnnet

Sprint today announced it will sell the Motorola Photon Q smartphone for $199.99 and a two-year service plan starting on Sunday.

The Photon Q has a 4.3-in. touchscreen display with a slide-out five-row Qwerty keyboard. It runs on a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and Android 4.0.4. Sprint made it available for pre-order today online.

The Photon Q is the largest smartphone screen available on a 4G LTE network, which Sprint launched in 15 cities on July 15. The smartphone’s other features include an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and an HD front-facing camera. Because it runs Ice Cream Sandwich, it comes with Android Beam and uses Near Field Communication for sharing data.

The display offers ColorBoost technology for more vivid images. It is also scratch resistant and features a splash guard coating to protect it against spills.

Sprint continues to offer its smartphones with unlimited data plans, starting at $80 a month. Both of its larger competitors, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, charge for data in set allotments, which can now be shared across 10 wireless devices.

The carrier said it recognizes there is a large group of its customers who want a physical Qwerty keyboard. It has paired the device with international roaming capabilities for use abroad.

Motorola, owned by Google since May, has plans to reduce the number of low-priced phones it offers. As part of that effort, Google announced layoffs of 4,000 workers, or 20% of its work force. The Photon Q was in development well before Google purchased Motorola for $12.5 billion.

See more by Matt Hamblen on Computerworld.com.

IANS

San Francisco, Aug 14: Google has confirmed that Motorola Mobility, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the internet search giant, will cut about 4,000 jobs or 20 percent of its workforce.

Two-thirds of the reduction is set to occur outside of the US, Google said Monday in a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to the filing, Motorola Mobility also plans to close or consolidate about one-third of its 90 facilities worldwide, and will simplify its mobile products offering by shifting the emphasis from low-end phones to more innovative and profitable devices, reported Xinhua.

The layoff is expected to cost Google nearly $275 million as the process incurs severance-related and other charges, which the company said will be largely recognized in the third quarter of this year.

Google closed the acquisition of Motorola Mobility in May 2012 with a hefty price tag of $12.5 billion, in a bold move to beef up its strength in mobile computing.

Since the completion of the purchase, Google has taken a series of measures to turn around the money-losing cellphone maker.

The new changes including the layoff are designed to return Motorola Mobility’s mobile devices unit to profitability, after it lost money in 14 of the last 16 quarters, Google noted in its filing.

Credit: ianslive

Months after being acquired by Google Inc., Motorola Mobility is undergoing a drastic restructuring and cutting more than 20 percent of its Chicago-area workforce in a bid to restore profits and better compete in a cutthroat field of smartphone-makers.

Google said Monday that Motorola Mobility, which it purchased for $12.4 billion in May, is laying off 20 percent of its 20,000-strong global workforce, affecting 4,000 employees worldwide. Locally, the company is cutting 700 of its 3,000 employees in Libertyville and Chicago, bringing the head count to about 2,300, said spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson. That represents a nearly 23 percent reduction and accounts for more than half the layoffs Motorola Mobility is making in the U.S.

The deep cuts come less than one month after Motorola Mobility and Mayor Rahm Emanuel made a high-profile announcement that the company would move its headquarters and 3,000 workers from Libertyville to the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago next year. The layoffs will suspend a state incentives program that gives Motorola Mobility tax breaks for retaining at least 2,500 local employees.

“When Google bought Motorola Mobility (in May), we knew things would not go along as they had in the past, that Google would bring new focus and restructuring to the business,” Emanuel said in a Monday phone interview.

Google’s new vision for Motorola Mobility involves shuttering about one-third of its 90 facilities worldwide and focusing on “more innovative and profitable devices” instead of lower-end phones that lack the processing power and computerlike features of smartphones, Google said Monday. That means Motorola Mobility will be making a big bet on pricier, cutting-edge devices — a strategy that carries risks in a highly competitive gadgets market.

The restructuring efforts are aimed at improving finances at Motorola Mobility, which has lost money in 14 of the past 16 quarters. In the most recent quarter, the company posted an operating loss of $233 million, with the bulk of that coming from the mobile devices segment. Motorola Mobility’s other division makes cable TV set-top boxes.

Layoffs are common byproducts of large corporate deals, and in the case of Google and Motorola Mobility, analysts said the two companies overlapped in areas ranging from sales and marketing to software engineering.

“It’s unfortunate, but it was foreseeable,” said Chris Silva, a mobile industry analyst at Altimeter Group. “It probably wouldn’t be surprising to see more (cuts) happen. These are two very large companies that are just starting to consummate their relationship, figure out redundancies and squeeze out inefficiencies.”

While Motorola Mobility declined to provide details on the types of jobs affected by the layoffs, analysts noted that a significant portion of the company’s employees were working on lower-end phones, which is no longer an area of interest for Google. Instead, Motorola Mobility will be poised to deliver high-end mobile devices that showcase the latest capabilities of Google’s Android operating system. Motorola’s portfolio of 24,500 granted and pending patents, many of them related to Android, were hugely attractive to Mountain View, Calif.-based Google.

Former Motorola Mobility Chief Executive Sanjay Jha, who was replaced by Google executive Dennis Woodside when the deal closed, had devoted major resources to developing Android-based smartphones during his tenure, forging a close relationship with Google and scrapping other operating systems. His turnaround efforts at the long-suffering mobile devices division involved layoffs and other cost-cutting measures. Google is taking that strategy further.

“It’s almost like Google is finishing the work Sanjay wanted to do,” said Chris Hazelton, research director for mobile and wireless at 451 Research. “Sanjay probably couldn’t make cuts this deep and make investors happy. Motorola’s (now) a piece of a much larger company. While this is a very deep cut to Motorola, it’s something that’s seen as being needed, and the company that can do it is Google.”

Competing in low-end phones requires selling large numbers of devices in emerging markets, a challenge that has tripped up several of Motorola Mobility’s competitors. But focusing on a handful of “hero” devices at the premium end of the market has its pitfalls: The strategy requires making costly bets on a small number of products that must go up against crowd favorites such as Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S.

Before smartphones emerged, Motorola had dominated the mobile phone market with the Razr, only to tumble into near-obsolescence after failing to produce a worthy successor. Jha had expressed his distaste for a strategy that relied too much on a single product.