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The antiX distro is both something old and something new. It is a handy and innovative approach to keeping aging computers fast and active. It is also an energy infuser for new computers I started playing around with antiX when looking for something different to keep some older computers out of the trash heap. antiX is a fast, lightweight distro th...

Veeva Systems last week introduced several new CRM products for the pharmaceutical industry at its 2015 Customer Summit in Philadelphia Veeva CRM Suggestions offers recommendations on the best action and right channel for the next customer interaction. It's designed to accelerate the transition to a new multichannel model. All Veeva CRM customers w...

Gearbox Software on Friday demoed Battleborn at a pre-E3 event, stirring interest in the title, along with many comparisons to its Borderlands predecessor and other games ...

The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, officially kicks off in Los Angeles on Tuesday, but the festivities already have begun with a number of press events leading up to the opening. The trade show for the video game industry regularly draws in game developers, retailers and journalists from around the world, and it provides gamers with a preview of upcoming titles.

Much to Apple's dismay, I cover Apple events. One of the questions that frequently came up during its recent developer conference centered on Tim Cook. Was he becoming Steve Ballmer? The implication was that Steve was a failure at Microsoft, so the comparison didn't reflect well on Cook. I think this idea is wrongheaded. Yes, Tim Cook's situation...

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that plays until it finds the Royal Flush of new gadget announcements and discards the 9-highs of terrible ones. ...

Technology is giving companies an unprecedented view of their customers: demographic data; buying preferences; behaviors that signal the intent to buy; and analyses that enable them to develop expectations about how customers are likely to act during the buyer-seller relationship. Those abilities are new and, in many cases, hold a lot of promise Ho...

Twitter is changing CEOs for the fourth time in four years Incumbent Dick Costolo is stepping down July 1 and company cofounder Jack Dorsey will take over as interim CEO while the board searches, both internally and externally, for a suitable candidate to hold the post....

Touchpad pioneer Synaptics has touched up an unlikely area on a keyboard: the spacebar The company last week announced the availability of its SmartBar technology, which adds gesture features to the bar. For example, text can be selected by swiping it. A double-thumb gesture can be used to zoom in and out on a document or image. What's more, the ba...

The 18th annual PwC CEO survey of 1,322 corporate leaders in 77 countries, conducted between September and December 2014, found an overwhelming proportion are embarking on digital transformation initiatives to respond to escalating customer demands and intensifying competitive pressures However, many are taking different paths to achieve their cor...

Russia's advanced military combat robot -- which has drawn alarmed comparisons to Hollywood's Terminator -- will be able to run and clear an obstacle course by late this year, according to reports that surfaced this week. That's just the latest news fueling the already-fiery debate over what to do about killer robots....

Nutanix on Wednesday announced its Xtreme Computing Platform, challenging VMware's virtual machine software dominance Nutanix's XCP comes about one year after VMware introduced its own hyperconverged storage software, which offered customers an alternative to Nutanix's offering at the time....

Microsoft will phase out Patch Tuesday -- its monthly potpourri of software product fixes -- when it rolls out Windows 10, which could be a mixed bag for the operating system's security Patches will be applied automatically as they're ready. That means users no longer will have to wait until the second Tuesday in the month to secure their systems f...

Spotify has raised US$526 million in its latest round of funding, according to reports that surfaced Wednesday. That's more than half the $1 billion Spotify raised in funding over the past nine years, said Susan Schreiner, analyst at C4 Trends....

There seem to be two distinct sectors forming in the wireless industry. One side is wireless as part of a bundle of services. The other is wireless as a standalone product. This is not a case of one side being a winner and the other a loser -- they're just different. That means how we measure and track companies on both sides may have to change. G...

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled the Surface Hub, a large-screen device meant to dramatically improve business collaboration The 55-inch and 84-inch interactive displays marry white boards with presentations, voice with video, speakers with addressees, Android with iOS, and Windows 10 with conference rooms. The Surface Hubs will go on sale July 1, a...

Other countries' concerns over U.S. government surveillance programs likely will cost American businesses more than US$35 billion, according to a report released Tuesday by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation Originally it was thought that the fallout from Edward Snowden's revelations of U.S. mass surveillance programs would be limit...

U.S. federal CIO Tony Scott on Monday sent a memo to the heads of executive departments and agencies requiring that all publicly accessible federal websites and Web services use HTTPS -- "the strongest privacy and integrity protection currently available for public Web connections." Some federal websites currently use HTTPS, but there has not been...

Every innovation spawns its own set of issues. What happens when you have a lot of a good thing, like cloud computing? You might get a "Franken-cloud," as some vendors are calling it. Basically, a Franken-cloud is what happens when you have multiple cloud-based systems that need to share data and run processes in your business. As recently as a fe...

Apple this week announced Swift 2 and said it would open-source it later this year.Swift 2 is a programming language for iOS, OS X and watchOS. It has a new error handling model that works with Apple SDKs and NSError. Two new features in Objective-C -- nullability annotations and generics -- make Swift 2 work better with Apple SDKs.