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After seeing the new Microsoft offerings, Steve Wozniak recently lamented that Microsoft is nowout innovating Apple. Wozniak is the surviving founder of Apple, and his perspective clearly isimportant, but he was the guy who got the product to work. It was the other Steve who was largely responsible for creating the entity that was Apple, and it was the other Steve that made it a huge success.

I have been taking a closer look at two of the brand-new technologies that are really shaking up the computer world. One is Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system with all those funky tiles. The other is the Lenovo Yoga 13 laptop. The changes are many. Some will think all this change is good, others will not. Let's look at the good, the bad and the ugly...

It's hard to think of an IT vendor with a stronger leadership position than Intel, but the company is having trouble shaking off the perception that it is on the ropes or headed for disaster in some of its core markets On one hand, Intel's mission-critical Itanium platform suffered when Oracle and HP publicly butted heads in an altercation that end...

This story was originally published on March 2, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series The Internet has become the world's largest shopping mall, and the market is continuing to grow. Q4 2011 U.S. retail ecommerce sales were up 14 percent compared with 2010, reaching nearly US$50 billion for the quarter, ComScore r...

This story was originally published on Aug. 21, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast.

This story was originally published on Sept. 11, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. The fires raging across western U.S. states this summer, at times plowing through residences and other structures, might have gotten you thinking: "What if?"...

This story was originally published on March 10, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series OK, it's time to officially close the book on the 2011 holiday retail season and to shift our attention forward to 2012. For me personally, what makes it difficult to stop looking back are the new trends that emerged that will f...

This story was originally published on Aug. 22, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Just after 11 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1977, while pointing toward the constellation Sagittarius, Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope picked up a mysterious transmission that would very soon make history....

Stick a fork in the sacrosanctity of Thanksgiving -- it is done. A number of retailers, most famously Walmart, will be opening their doors on Thanksgiving Day, on the premise that they will be scooping up sales from consumers too eager to wait for Black Friday. Whether that is true or whether so-called Gray Thursday will cannibalize sales meant for Black Friday and Cyber Monday is yet to be determined...

Mozilla has made its Web browser more social -- and more secure -- with the release of Firefox 17 The latest version of the foundation's popular browser includes a plug-in that displays notifications and instant messages from Facebook in a sidebar....

"GUYS, teenagers have messy bedrooms, and The Times is ON IT." "GUYS, women enjoy wearing pantyhose again, and The Times is ON IT."

The committee reviewing applications for dozens of new top-level domains has publicized more than 250 objections to dozens of them, along with the reasons for objecting The Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers' Government Advisory Committee, which represents about 50 governments worldwide, has listed the objections on its website....

Adoption of cloud technology at the federal level is still far from routine -- but cloud transactions continue to emerge on a regular basis. The deals range in value, demonstrating that cloud migration can be applied for relatively small deployments or for huge networks In the latest major deal, HP Enterprise Services will provide a cloud-based em...

Incorporating analytics in a vendor's solution set was once enough to qualify the vendor as very forward looking and a leader in the market. I think that's true in CRM for sure, and this metric could be spreading. Ever since Salesforce introduced its Marketing Cloud at Cloudforce New York, however, that hasn't been enough Salesforce effectively rai...

KMyMoney is a comprehensive finance-tracking application that does not require an accounting degree to use effectively Linux provides several hearty checkbook and banking programs. Among the more well-known are GNUCash, Grisbi, Skrooge and MoneyDance. Each of these contenders for your attention have their own unique look and feel....

Take a laptop or smartphone in addition to blankets and chairs if you're looking for aspot in the tent cities springing up outside your local big box store this week. Smartphone-driven on-the-fly research is proving to make it easier this year to find Black Friday deals on TVs, tabletsand other merchandise Whipping out one of our 110 million smartp...

HP released its fourth quarter earnings report, bearing out CEO Meg Whitman's warning last month. It is not pretty For the full year fiscal 2012, net revenue was US$120.4 billion, down 5 percent from the prior-year period. For the fourth quarter, HP posted net revenue of $30 billion, down 7 percent year over year....

Intel CEO Paul Otellini will retire in May, stepping down at the end of an eight-year reign at the head of the chipmaking giant as the computing industry undergoes a major market transformation Intel did not announce his successor, but said Otellini will oversee the upcoming six-month leadership transition.

The Wii U's launch has not been without its bumps in the road, to put it kindly. There were reports of users waiting hours to download and install a very large -- said to be 5 GB -- mandatory firmware update. For some, the wait seemed endless, and they powered off the system before the download was complete. When they powered on again, some found their consoles bricked.

Legendary Australian rock band AC/DC, which had long been queasy about digital formats, has released its music on Apple's iTunes store According to the BBC, AC/DC previously asserted that it wouldn't make individual songs available digitally because each song was part of an album. And the band didn't want to break its art into pieces -- or someth...