Departing IBM head honcho Samuel J. Palmisano has been known to say some outlandish things, but there’s nothing comical about the information divulged in a new piece surrounding his legacy in The New York Times. Outside of looking into the details of how IBM become one of the world’s most boring, highly profitable outfits, there’s plenty of fascinating nuggets to be had. For one, he focused intently on getting out of “low-margin businesses that were fading,” and not surprisingly, the outfit’s personal computer business was first on the chopping block.

Reportedly, he saw a lack of opportunity for innovation (at least “in the corporate market”), and felt that the “hub of innovation would shift to services and software.” As if a prophet, just about everything he expected has come to pass. The article explains that the jarring sale of its PC business was no easy thing to decide upon, and he even affirms that he “deflected overtures from Dell and private equity firms, preferring the sale to a company in China for strategic reasons.” As the story goes, China wants its corporations to have global reach, and by helping with that, IBM “enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business.” Trust us — there’s far more where this came from in the source link below.

[Thanks, Theo]

IBM’s Samuel J. Palmisano: we sold PC business due to lack of innovative opportunities originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Someone reportedly tampers with a demo iPhone 4S so that when a 12-year-old boy picks it up and asks Siri a question, she is not amused or amusing. She tells him to “Shut the f*** up.”

Originally posted at Technically Incorrect

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Both Net Applications and StatCounter have released their figures for browser market share for 2011 and it makes for largely unsurprising reading. Internet Explorer’s full share has dropped but it still maintains the top spot — a 52 percent share according to Net Applications and 39 percent according to StatCounter. Meanwhile, second place remains tantalizingly within reach for Chrome, which has made headway catching up with Firefox, whose growth had apparently stalled during 2011. According to Net Applications, Firefox held a 21.8 percent share of browser users this month, while Chrome reached 19.1 percent, up just under 8 percent and capping off a second year of impressive growth. Meanwhile, StatCounter pegs Google’s browser at second place for the end of the year, claiming 27.3 percent versus the 25.3 percent share grabbed by its vulpine rival. Unsurprisingly, the Windows Team Blog takes a different slant on recent browsing trends, trumpeting that its latest version, Internet Explorer 9, continues to grow on Windows 7. This is, however, balanced out by a corresponding drop in the users of its predecessor, IE 8. Better luck next year, eh, Microsoft?

Internet Explorer holds onto top browser crown while Chrome and Firefox tussle over second place originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Next year, Apple will unveil its iPad 3. History tells us we can expect iPad 3 sometime in the first quarter — but exactly when? And will it include a retina display? And will there be two different models? Let the rumor round-up begin!

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Today’s LogicBUY Deal is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for the Verizon system for $199.99.  This is the first phone running the new Android OS 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.  Features:  4.65″ 720×1280 HD Super AMOLED display, a dual-core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4460 processor, 1GB RAM, 32GB built-in storage, 5MP rear camera (1080p video capable), 1.3MP front [...]

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FBI Director Robert Mueller says bureau doesn’t knowingly use data collected by Carrier IQ.

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I woke up this morning to tweets from Uber customers nationwide who felt taken for a ride, literally and figuratively, after requesting an Uber on one of the busiest nights of the year. Despite the fact the company said as such on their blog and communication channels, riders were apparently not expecting the surcharges to be so exponentially high. In exchange for providing cars on demand, Uber used their system to find equilibrium within a market where demand outstripped supply, especially a few hours before and midnight. (I?m not a frequent Uber customer, but I used them three times over my recent holiday trip, and each time was flawless; I?ll continue to use the service when I need to.) Uber?s hangover this morning is more of a harbinger for consumers in general, especially when it comes to goods and services delivered online. Uber?s ?surcharges? last night were a classic example of dynamic pricing, or adjusting the price of something relative to the demand and supply, down to the minute or second. The more data a provider has on these inputs, the more likely they are to leverage that data to extract more value from providing equilibrium between supply and demand. Most every consumer is aware of this through searching for and buying airline tickets online, where fares seem to change magically, even mid-search.

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Armandina Skerl – About the Author:

If you have questions, please visit us at www.Tennessee.ChurchillMortgage.com for complete details and answers.

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Moshi Monsters are currently trying to take over the world, it seems. The site, aimed at kids around seven and upwards, now boasts over 50 million members, many of them paying a subscription fee to keep their own Moshi Monster happy and entertained. If you don’t pony up the fee, you’re only allowed to have [...]

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff used a high-profile company event in New York City to engage in one of his favorite activities: swiping at competitors such as Microsoft.

“I think they’ve lost their relevancy,” was how he described Microsoft during a Nov. 30 question-and-answer session, following his company’s unveiling of its Social Marketing Cloud. “I just don’t think they matter anymore.” He was dismissive of the upcoming Windows 8, suggesting that that the “Windows Everywhere” paradigm was terminally outdated.

Microsoft and Salesforce have made a sport of lunging at each other’s throats. On the product side, Salesforce.com’s browser-based CRM competes with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. On the lawsuit side, the two companies have engaged in tit-for-tat patent battles, the latest of which ended in August 2010 with Salesforce agreeing to pay Microsoft an unspecified amount.

In the wake of that lawsuit, the companies’ respective spokespeople took a somewhat conciliatory tone, with Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft (not to mention the bête noire of Google Android), describing the endpoint agreement as “an example of how companies can compete vigorously in the marketplace while respecting each other’s intellectual property rights.”

But that doesn’t stop Benioff from doing his best to rip into Microsoft seemingly at every opportunity. There’s a method to his madness: Salesforce products like the new Social Marketing Cloud (a suite of cloud-based analytics and engagement tools built atop Radian6 software) fully embrace the idea of browser-based software as an increasingly important business platform, one whose flexibility and scalability eclipses traditional on-premises software (and associated hardware). Meanwhile, Microsoft is powering toward the cloud as fast as it can, with products like Office 365, but its revenues are still largely tethered to traditional software such as Office and Windows, which it continues to heavily promote. Benioff needs to cast his company as the way of the future, and Microsoft as struggling to catch up.

The flip side is that Microsoft has billions of dollars and thousands of very smart people at its disposal. That means the company can do things like burn through hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter on developing online services. It can also afford to play a much longer game, strategy-wise, than many of its competitors. In other words, it’s a dangerous opponent.

So Benioff slams them as outdated, and Microsoft’s people fire back, and the game continues.

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In Time is the latest from Sci-Fi director Andrew Niccol. Justin Timberlake stars as the boy from the hood, Amanda Seyfried plays the rich girl from the other side of the tracks who he kidnaps to save himself.

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This Sunday will be a major television-viewing day for millions of Americans. Most of them will pay to have Fox’s broadcast of the Super Bowl beamed into their homes. But I won’t.

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At Eco-Products 2011 show in Tokyo, Sony shows off a prototype battery that gets its power from shredded paper.

Originally posted at Crave

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Every now and then, Amazon claims to have the best season ever. Oh, it’s the holidays! Just like clockwork, Amazon is celebrating a post-Christmas success, with 2011 being the ‘best holiday ever for Kindle.’ The company oday announced that 2011 was the best holiday ever for the Kindle family as customers purchased millions of Kindle Fires…

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Earlier this week, you may have noticed that your Verizon Wireless LTE smartphone couldn’t do inconsequential things like update your inbox, or pull up a webpage. This happened once. Then twice. And finally a third time this month. And what’s the root cause? “Growing pains,” according to the carrier’s latest statement. And since growing pains are a natural consequence of adolescence, there’s no reason for Verizon to issue any kind of apology to its paying customers, who naturally expect such inconsistencies from “the most advanced 4GLTE wireless network in the world.” Now, some of you also reported issues connecting to the 3G network, which Verizon reps claim didn’t experience any downtime. Instead, your hiccups were a result of being “unable to connect to the 3G Network as quickly as [Verizon] would have liked.” Have any questions? Of course you don’t. Such can be expected from any carrier, just like the requirement to fork over two bucks for the convenience of paying your monthly bill.

Continue reading Verizon offers vague statement, no apology for LTE downtime

Verizon offers vague statement, no apology for LTE downtime originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Your momma always said your handsome mug would take you places. Now it might allow you to access your iPad. An Apple patent application released today describes a facial recognition system that requires minimal computing power, and works whether you’re indoors or out — we don’t use our tablets and phones in a photo booth, after all. The technology works by comparing a current image of your mug to a reference model user profile made using “high information” portions of the human face, like eyes and mouths. Translation: it’ll take a picture, compare it against the pictures associated with various user accounts on the device and decide if the two images are similar enough to grant you access. Because this is just an application, it’s safe to say we won’t be seeing this kind of facial recognition in iOS anytime soon, but let’s hope it works better than the ICS version if it does.

Update: An important thing to note is that Apple applied for this patent long before Android’s Face Unlock debuted a few months back. The paperwork was first submitted on June 29th, 2010 — it’s just now being disclosed to the public.

Apple applies for facial recognition patent, wants to let iDevices get to know you better originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We dug into ESPN’s use of the Xbox 360 and EA Sports games to power its Virtual Playbook segments last year, but in preparation for this round of BCS bowl games it’s upgraded the system with a bit of augmented reality. The new GameView system uses a tabletop 70-inch touchscreen LCD, a copy of NCAA Football ’12 and four dedicated workstations to blend everything together and create a simulation for viewers to see the analysts move virtual players around the field. It should at least be more interesting than CNN’s previous election coverage implementation, although we’re mostly wondering when a combo of Kinect, Surface and old school electronic football will bring the experience directly to our living rooms to play around with. Check out the gallery for a few more screens and expect to see this implemented more during the upcoming big time bowl games — no, there’s no secret code Desmond Howard can input to get a national championship game between two college football teams that haven’t already played each other, we asked.

Continue reading ESPN’s bowl coverage swaps out the telestrator for augmented reality GameView

ESPN’s bowl coverage swaps out the telestrator for augmented reality GameView originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From cockroach swatter slippers to bad breath detectors, these gift suggestions will give the naughty on your list something to crab about.

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Amazon on Wednesday issued a software update for its Kindle Fire tablet that it said addresses some of the most vocal complaints about the device, including sluggish response to touch and a lack of parental controls.

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