Once upon a time, I set out to buy an HP Spectre x360 laptop. It didn’t go well, and the issues I encountered offer a lesson in what to look for when making purchases online. The first red flag went up when the computer was added to the shopping cart …
The eighth person hired at Google, and its first vice president of engineering, talked today about how the world’s largest Internet company nearly failed. Urs Holzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure and a Google Fellow, spoke today at the Collision conference in Las Vegas about avoiding failure, not being …
Nvidia’s 3G and LTE modem business is up for sale as the company moves away from mobile devices. The company on Tuesday said it plans to wind down its Icera modem operations by the second quarter of fiscal 2016 and sell its assets. Nvidia will start licensing modems from third-party …
Hardware makers are providing the building blocks for databases, ERP and analytics applications to run faster in data centers with new systems based on Intel’s latest Xeon E7 v3 chips. Seventeen hardware makers have announced 45 systems running on Intel’s new chips, which have up to 18 CPU cores. Servers …
BOSTON – The view from Harvard’s Michael Porter, an economist noted for his work on competition, is that the last 10 or 15 years have been “pretty dismal” for the economy. The IT- and Internet- driven innovations over the past four decades or so have played themselves out. The rate …
Mobile phone users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” for their location tracking data, and should expect police agencies investigating crimes to obtain that information without court-approved warrants, a U.S. appeals court has ruled. Historical cell tower location data is not private information owned by customers but by the mobile …
It’s simple for consumers to get apps whenever the mood strikes them, but in enterprises it’s typically a different story. Borrowing a page from successful consumer app stores, SAP has launched SAP Store, hoping to make software purchases just as easy on the business side. Unveiled Tuesday at Sapphire Now …
Microsoft this week launched a tool that initially is best for managing its public and private clouds but that the company says will soon enable enterprises to control hybrid clouds based on Amazon Web Services and VMware clouds, too. “[The Operations Management Suite] helps simplify management of your datacenter assets …
Google has a new plan to help developers cash in with the Play Store. According to The Information, Google will announce at its I/O conference later this month that developers will be able to test their apps with by rolling out different features or pricing to different users. It’s called …
For the first time, Android phone and tablet advertising revenues edged out iOS mobile ads in the first quarter of 2015, according to measurements by a mobile ad service. Opera Mediaworks said Android garnered 45.8% of total revenues generated on Opera’s ad platform, compared to 45.4% for iOS during the …
No longer will SQL Server administrators have to worry about filling up their database servers. SQL Server’s next edition will provide a way to extend databases into the cloud, allowing customers to retain information they otherwise might need to erase due to a lack of local storage space. SQL Server …
Less than a week after rumors surfaced that Salesforce.com is fielding buyout offers, Microsoft is reportedly considering throwing its hat in the ring. Although Microsoft isn’t in talks with Salesforce and a deal isn’t imminent, Microsoft is evaluating making a bid for the cloud CRM provider after it was approached …
Google’s Chrome browser broke the 25% user share mark last month, putting it in the position that Firefox briefly attained but quickly lost. In April, Chrome accounted for 25.7% of the total browser user share according to Web analytics vendor Net Applications. User share is a rough estimate of the …
Less than a week after rumors surfaced that Salesforce.com is fielding buyout offers, Microsoft is reportedly considering throwing its hat in the ring. Although Microsoft isn’t in talks with Salesforce and a deal isn’t imminent, Microsoft is evaluating making a bid for the cloud CRM provider after it was approached …
If the waiter was rude, your hotel room dirty or the plumber sloppy, you should be able to say so online without fear of getting slapped with a lawsuit. So said a group of lawmakers who want to make it illegal for U.S. businesses to use contracts to preemptively muzzle …
Little did we know that our interview with John Chambers at Cisco’s “Texas Data Center Day” in April might be our last with him as the company’s CEO. As we learned this week, he’ll hand the reins to Chuck Robbins in July, though will remain the company’s chairman and become …
Cisco next month will unveil an Ethernet switch designed for campus aggregation but in a space saving form factor that’s smaller than previous models. The Catalyst 6840-X is a 2RU device featuring up to 40 10G Ethernet ports and two 40G uplinks. It will include all of the software feature …
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced it has opened registration for outreach programs to help firms comply with an SEC rule that aims to protect investors by strengthening the technology underpinning U.S. securities markets. The Commission adopted Regulation Systems Compliance and Integrity, or Regulation SCI, in November 2014 and …
SAP is deepening its partnership with Google and will collaborate with the search giant on new projects focused on business analytics and enterprise applications. The new collaboration will result, for example, in tighter integration between Google Apps and SAP’s Lumira analytics platform, according to SAP CEO Bill McDermott. Users can …
EMC will release its ViPR Controller storage automation and control software as an open-source project, letting third parties develop their own services and applications on top of it and possibly make ViPR work with more parts of enterprise storage environments. The open-source release, called Project CoprHD, is set to go …
The Ubuntu phone/desktop PC combo device Ubuntu has confirmed that it’s working on a combination phone and desktop PC. This new device would let you use it as a phone, and then plug it into a monitor to use as a desktop computer. Is this something that you would buy? …
NASA is making progress on its journey to send humans to Mars, but it will take tenacity, flexibility and the cooperation of scientists and engineers from around the world. “We’re on pace… to send American astronauts to Mars in the 2030s,” said NASA administrator Charles Bolden, speaking at the Humans …
Dell is offering to helping cut business’ reliance on Windows PC hardware with a new management appliance, which could serve up virtual Windows desktops to Chromebooks. Dell’s Appliance for Wyse – vWorkspace product uses desktop virtualization technology to deliver Windows desktop software to Chromebooks and other endpoints. Though brokered from …
Smaller servers are taking over data centers, but Intel believes the future is also bright for powerful big-iron servers, thanks to companies’ embrace of machine learning, which requires a lot of horsepower to process complex algorithms and large data sets. With its new top-line Xeon E7 v3 server chips based …
EMC’s VCE division wants to take the engineered systems approach it’s honed with its Vblocks into next-generation mobile and cloud applications. On Monday, it introduced the VCE VxRack System, a hyperconverged platform designed to scale out to thousands of racks of computing and storage capacity. Where Vblocks are designed to …