Articles by

Google's battle with Apple continues, and this week the website iFixit conducted a teardown of the new Nexus 7 tablet and found it to be more repairable than Apple's iPad The site, which regularly takes apart high-tech and potentially expensive gizmos and gadgets, noted that the Nexus shell came apart quite easily, allowing it to be opened and serv...

Based on the underperformance of its online services division, Microsoft announced Monday that it would be taking a write-down of US$6.2 billion.The non-cash, non-tax-deductible income statement charge for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2012 is for the "impairment of goodwill" related primarily to its 2007 $6.3 billion acquisition of aQuantive, Microsoft said.

An upgrade to the Pro edition of Microsoft's next operating system, Windows 8, will sell for US$40, a significantly lower price than what the company has charged for upgrade packages in the past The offer applies to purchases made through Windows.com for PCs running Windows XP or a later version. The price is a reduced promotional rate that will ru...

Google has sent a letter to European antitrust regulators proposing to address the Commission's concerns about competition. The widespread assumption is that Google is seeking to head off formal proceedings that may be pending to avoid a long, drawn-out investigation and hefty fine Google's overture was preceded by EU antitrust commissioner Joaqui...

The U.S. government's push to utilize cloud-based technology will eventually lead to some blockbuster contracts -- many well over US$10 million and others for even more than $100 million. Consider that just one contract in the current batch -- a cloud deal for email services at the U.S. Interior Department -- carries a price tag of $35-million Howe...

This week Esteban Kolsky and I launched a research initiative aimed at better understanding how businesses across the world are adopting social media for their business processes. ...

Pinta, a raster image editor, is the app equivalent of a diamond in the rough. Years of testing and reviewing open source and commercial software taught me never to assume that a relatively new application is not worthy of attention....

Facebook's email drama continues to unfold a week after it was revealed that the social network unilaterally switched its users' publicly posted email listings to their "@facebook.com" addresses More recently, users have begun complaining that Facebook's mobile app seems to be swapping out information contained in their smartphones' address books.

Facebook is rumored to be testing a Want button that would be similar in look and function to its now ubiquitous Like button. The feature was spotted by developer Tom Waddington, who ...

Apple has won a preliminary injunction against Samsung that bans U.S. sales of the latter's Galaxy Nexus smartphone The ruling came just days after the same court handed down a similar decision that banned U.S. sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1....

Google announced Friday a new set of reports in beta, Mobile App Analytics. Their purpose is to help marketers and developers measure the performance of mobile apps by providing reports on all the key points in a mobile customer's journey Google has broken out those key points into three sets of app metrics. One set deals with the initial app user...

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have demonstrated that a civilian drone can be hijacked by spoofing its GPS signals The news comes as the United States Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) prepares to integrate drones into the country's national airspace system. This task is mandated by the FAA Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2012, s...

Claims by a team of international cyrptographic researchers that they've "cracked" the RSA encryption used on a number of smartcards and secure tokens has set off a tempest in security circles The scientists from France, Italy, Norway and the United States have found a method for compromising the code in as little as 13 minutes. They plan to divulg...

Putting points on the board, "scoring" sales and posting results to beat the competition -- sales teams are the key offensive players at every organization. And not unlike star forwards on the basketball court, they require sufficient tools and training to be successful in this role. Unfortunately, sales teams are expected to put up big numbers without access to the tools that they need. After 20 years, the top sales performance management tool used by organizations is still Excel.

The iPad is an interesting product. It is basically a light Mac netbook lacking a keyboard but with touch. Had any other company brought this to market, it probably wouldn't have sold. The most successful product in its class that isn't an iPad is the Samsung Galaxy tablet, and it so close to an iPad that a judge just concluded it's an illegal...

What is the real value of intellectual property in the United States? Let's estimate this using the most inclusive definition of intellectual property: patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, customer lists, business know-how, and other secret sauce. ...

It used to be that technology companies would head to one or more of the plethora of industry trade shows to introduce new products and showcase their latest offerings. But in recent years many large companies have forgone the shows and instead have offered company-specific conferences and events This week Google might have raised the bar for what...

Google announced this week the launch of the Google Compute Engine, an Infrastructure as a Service product that lets users run Linux Virtual Machines (VMs) on Google's servers It promises to provide resources to businesses and other organizations that need intensive, short-term computing power to solve high-level problems, including those working ...

Research In Motion reported quarterly results that fell below investors' already meager expectations Thursday, adding that it plans thousands of further layoffs as well as another delay to the release of its BlackBerry 10 (BB10) platform RIM announced a US$518 million net loss on the quarter, or about 99 cents per share. Its revenue on the quarter ...

Microsoft's rollout of Windows 8 represents a new era for operating systems and for Microsoft in general. It also represents the probable end of the Windows desktop OS that most consumers now know, according to a report from Gartner, although the firm expects its demise to be long-unfolding. "The reality is, the PC market is a mature one, and ther...