HP, Dell: Biggest PC makers in desperate need of a reboot

Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology. These days, HP is looking behind the times. 

Coming off a five-year stretch of miscalculations, HP is in such desperate need of a reboot that many investors have written off its chances of a comeback.Consider this: Since Apple Inc. shifted the direction of computing with the release of the iPhone in June 2007, HP's market value has plunged by 60 percent to $35 billion. During that time, HP has spent more than $40 billion on dozens of acquisitions that have largely turned out to be duds so far.

"Just think of all the value that they have destroyed," ISI Group analyst Brian Marshall said. "It has been a case of just horrible management."Marshall traces the bungling to the reign of Carly Fiorina, who pushed through an acquisition of Compaq Computer a decade ago despite staunch resistance from many shareholders, including the heirs of HP's co-founders.

 After HP ousted Fiorina in 2005, other questionable deals and investments were made by two subsequent CEOS, Mark Hurd and Leo Apotheker.HP hired Meg Whitman 11 months ago in the latest effort to salvage what remains of one of the most hallowed names in Silicon Valley 73 years after its start in a Palo Alto, Calif., garage.

The latest reminder of HP's ineptitude came last week when the company reported an $8.9 billion quarterly loss, the largest in the company's history. Most of the loss stemmed from an accounting charge taken to acknowledge that HP paid far too much when it bought technology consultant Electronic Data Systems for $13 billion in 2008. 

HP might have been unchallenged for the ignominious title as technology's most troubled company if not for one its biggest rivals, Dell Inc.
Like HP, Dell missed the trends that have turned selling PCs into one of technology's least profitable and slowest growing niches. As a result, Dell's market value has also plummeted by 60 percent, to about $20 billion, since the iPhone's release.
That means the combined market value of HP and Dell—the two largest PC makers in the U.S.—is less than the $63 billion in revenue Apple got from iPhones and various accessories during just the past nine months.
The hand-held, touch-based computing revolution unleashed by the iPhone and Apple's 2010 introduction of the iPad isn't the only challenge facing HP and Dell.
They are also scrambling to catch up in two other rapidly growing fields—"cloud computing" and "Big Data."
Cloud computing refers to the practice of distributing software applications over high-speed Internet connections from remote data centers so that customers can used them on any device with online access. Big Data is a broad term for hardware storage and other services that help navigate the sea of information flowing in from the increasing amount of work, play, shopping and social interaction happening online.
Both HP and Dell want a piece of the action because cloud computing and Big Data boast higher margins and growth opportunities than the PC business.

It's not an impossible transition, as demonstrated by the once-slumping but now-thriving IBM Corp., a technology icon even older than HP. But IBM began its makeover during the 1990s under Louis Gerstner and went through its share of turmoil before selling its PC business to Lenovo Group in 2005. HP and Dell are now trying to emulate IBM, but they may be making their moves too late as they try to compete with IBM and Oracle Corp., as well as a crop of younger companies that focus exclusively on cloud computing or Big Data.

A revival at HP will take time, something that HP CEO Meg Whitman has repeatedly stressed during her first 11 months on the job."Make no mistake about it: We are still in the early stages of a turnaround," Whitman told analysts during a conference call last week.

The problems Whitman is trying to fix were inherited from Apotheker and Hurd.
HP hired Apotheker after he was dumped by his previous employer. He lasted less than a year as HP's CEO—just long enough to engineer an $11 billion acquisition of business software maker Autonomy, another poorly performing deal that is threatening to lump HP with another huge charge.

Before Apotheker, Hurd won praise for cutting costs during his five-year reign at HP, but Marshall believes HP was too slow to respond to the mobile computing, cloud computing and Big Data craze that began to unfold under Hurd's watch. HP also started its costly shopping spree while Hurd was CEO.How much further will HP and Dell fall before they hit bottom?

HP's revenue has declined in each of the past four quarters, compared with the same period a year earlier, and analysts expect the trend to extend into next year. The most pessimistic scenarios envision HP's annual revenue falling from about $120 billion this year to $90 billion toward the end of this decade.

The latest projections for PC sales also paint a grim picture. The research firm IDC now predicts PC shipments this year will increase by less than 1 percent, down from its earlier forecast of 5 percent.

Whitman is determined to offset the crumbling revenue by trimming expenses. She already is trying to lower annual costs by $3.5 billion during the next two years, mostly by eliminating 27,000 jobs, or 8 percent of HP's workforce.Marshall expects Whitman's austerity campaign to enable HP to maintain its annual earnings at about $4 per share, excluding accounting charges, for the foreseeable future.

If HP can do that, Marshall believes the stock will turn out to be a bargain investment, even though he isn't expecting the business to grow during the next few years. The shares dropped 37 cents Monday to finish at $17.21, HP's lowest closing price in eight years.

One of the main reasons that Marshall still likes HP's stock at this price is because of the company's quarterly dividend of 13.2 cents per share. That translates into a dividend yield of about 3 percent, an attractive return during these times of puny interest rates.

Dell's stock looks less attractive, partly because its earnings appear to still be dropping. The company, which is based in Round Rock, Texas, signaled its weakness last week, when it lowered its earnings projection for the current fiscal year by 20 percent.

Dell executives also indicated that the company is unlikely to get a sales lift from the Oct. 26 release of Microsoft Corp.'s much-anticipated makeover of its Windows operating system. That's because Dell focuses on selling PCs to companies, which typically take a long time before they decide to switch from one version of Windows to the next generation.

Dell shares slipped to a new three-year low of $11.10 in Monday trading before closing at $11.12, down 14 cents.As PC sales languish, both HP and Dell are likely to spend more on cloud computing, data storage and technology consulting.

Although those look like prudent bets now, HP and Dell probably should be spending more money trying to develop products and services that turn into "the next new thing" in three or four years, said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan law and business professor who has been tracking the troubles of both companies.

"It's like they are both standing on the dock watching boats that have already sailed," Gordon said. "They are going to have to swim very fast just to have chance to climb back on one of the boats."

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Science Proves Sleep Learning Possible; “Learn French While You Sleep”

 Good news for the productivity-minded individual — the eight hours a day you spend dead to the world in the comforting embrace of sleep is time you could be getting work done. Hooray? Well, maybe. 

While reading or learning another language while you catch some shut-eye is still the stuff of fantasy, new research from the Weizmann Institute suggests that learning in one’s sleep may be a possibility, and that previous attempts just haven’t used the right combination of senses to make our subconscious minds start paying attention.

 Researchers have now used sounds and smell to get sleeping brains to expect a combination of the two sensations without any input from the conscious mind, according to a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

It’s long been understood that sleep is connected to learning. Studies have shown that sleep is important in making lasting connections about newly acquired information, and that retaining new data is difficult without getting proper rest. The goal of harnessing the subconscious to take in information while we catch our 40 winks has remained elusive, though. With this new research, we may be a step closer to making sleep lessons a reality.

Weizmann Institute researchers played a tone for sleeping patients, which was accompanied by a scent. That combination of smell and hearing seemed to create new connections in the brain, to the point that when one stimulus was taken away, subjects would still seek it out while remaining asleep. For example, subjects who had connected a sound with a scent while asleep would still sniff the air when the sound was played, even when no scent was associated with it.

Of course, this is all a little bit Pavlovian, which gets kind of creepy when you apply it to humans. It also begs the question of how much information one can really learn from a tone and a smell, but still — progress!

Even that, though, really skirts around the main issue — even if we are capable of learning things in our sleep, do we really want to set that precedent? Plenty of us are taking notes and fielding emails for our jobs or hobbies the other 16 hours of the day as it is. With that in mind, it seems like there’s something to be said for declaring one’s dreams well and thoroughly off-limits to anything that evens sniffs of work. After all, that’s how Donald Duck got to Mathmagic Land, and it looked like he had a really disturbing time there.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Get Out of My Head:Technology Capable of Plucking Secrets From Your Brain

 Ready for your life to be more like a dystopian sci-fi novel in all the worst ways? Well, science doesn’t care if you’re ready. Brainwave scanning consumer electronics designed for gaming can be hacked to read other brainwaves, potentially revealing your secrets by pulling them directly from your brain. 

Researchers have already modified the brain-computer interface (BCI) devices — like the EPOC, pictured above — to poke around in brainwaves that signify recognition, letting them know when you recognize a face, number, or address, even if you’re telling them you don’t.

BCI interfaces have been trickling onto the consumer market for the last couple of years. The devices are basically miniaturized EEG machines that can read a users brainwaves and translate those waves into instructions to devices like electronic wheelchairs or hands-free gaming systems. Researchers have shown how easily this technology could be hijacked in the future, though, with results ranging from the merely creepy to the mind-numbingly awful.

The team, composed of researchers from the University of Oxford, University of Geneva, and University of California Berkeley tweaked the system, then set about showing their subjects pictures of numbers, landmarks, and faces. They then looked for spikes in brainwave activity that could indicate familiarity with a person, place, or thing — even if the subject is claiming to be unfamiliar with it.

 While the success rate for indicating complex things like PIN numbers was below 40%, that’s actually scarily high for a first attempt, proof-of-principle experiment like this. More worryingly, that number is only going to go up as marketing researchers, professional interrogators, and mad scientists continue to refine the technique.

Though home iterations of EEG technology are still in their early stages, BCI devices can be ordered online right now by anyone with a couple of hundred dollars to spare. To turn one into a mind-reading truthoscope, though, you’ll need more than a little neuroscience know-how. If you happen to have one of these and be a savvy neuroscientist, though, please — don’t hurt us. We’ll tell you whatever you want to know.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Thomas Edison’s Dry Cleaning Bill to Run $20,000

 No doubt we can all appreciate a good historical artifact, but one of the problems with artifacts is that at some point, sentimentality and historical respect aside, they are just old things that sit around getting older. 

That’s the trouble The Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange,  New Jersey has run into recently, as some of the linens from their collection of Edison memorabilia are starting to show their age. 

 Namely, an American flag, one of Edison’s original movie projection screens, and one of his last lab coats have all seen better days, and are in need of a little restoration. So while the Internet has to wrangle a posse of nerds to pass the hat just to protect the land for a Tesla museum, taxpayers will be footing the $20,000 bill for Thomas Edison’s maid service, eight decades after his death.

No one is saying Edison is not a noteworthy figure who is deserving of a monument to the part he played in turning America into a scientific super power. He was a solid inventor and a great innovator, who had a sense for what the future would look like and the will — and wile — to make that future largely a reality.

Love the guy or hate him, it’s impossible to picture the state of American science today without Edison looming large over it. We get it. But man, $20,000 seems like a lot of money to lay out for a dry cleaning bill. I’m down to, like, six bucks a week for laundry, and the little old lady at the laundromat matches my socks together and everything.

That said, there’s a certain poetry to the matter. After all, from aircraft engines to nuclear power, General Electric wouldn’t be the corporate powerhouse it is today without nice fat government contracts. In a way, it’s a totally fitting way to celebrate Edison’s legacy. So if you or someone you know would like to very carefully clean Thomas Alva Edison’s artifacts, you can visit the Federal Business Opportunities website here to learn more.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Monday, August 27, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Two Nigerian Varsities Shine at Google's Online Marketing Competition

 Google has announced Thursday that 2 Nigerian universities; University of Lagos and University of Ibadan have emerged finalists in the 2012 edition of its annual Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC).

According to Obum Ekeke, Google's Regional Program Manager for University Programs & Outreach in SSA, the 2 universities were part of the 11,000 students from 86 countries/territories such as the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, South Africa. "The competition this year was very stiff, and being one of the teams to make it to the semifinals and finals is no little feat". The students and their lecturers put in their best and have been rewarded by this announcement".

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a global competition that was established to help prepare students studying courses such as advertising, e-commerce, integrated marketing communication, management information systems, marketing or new media technologies in the area of online marketing. It gives the students an opportunity to compete on an international stage.

"We are very delighted that Nigerian Universities are rated amongst some of the best in this competition and congratulate the schools, the lecturers and the students. We will continue to support Nigerian universities as they prepare the students to take on the future" said Juliet Ehimuan Google Nigeria Country Manager.

The students and lecturers whose teams made it to the Finalist and Semi-Finalist categories are: Finalists teams from Africa: University of Ibadan, Nigeria Team: Akomolafe Oladeji (Lecturer), Oladipo Oluwaseyi, Olukayode Didunoluwa Olamide, Oyeside Olalekan, Alagbe Olarenwaju, and Aiyelari Temilolorun

University of Lagos, Nigeria Team: Adeyanju Olusiji Ayoade (Lecturer), Longe Olubusayo Anuoluwapo,Obanor Chukwuwezam, Babalola Hisa, Abdussalam Mariam Oluwakemi, and Fadeyi Ayoola Idris.

Sunday, August 19, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Android races past Apple in smartphone market share

The mobile space has quickly become a two-horse race between Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Apple -- and one of those giants significantly widened its lead last quarter.

 Google's Android surged to a whopping 68% share of the global smartphone market last quarter.

 That's four times the 17% market share held by Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), according to a Wednesday report from research firm IDC. IDC, which tracks smartphone market share by operating system, said that nearly 105 million Android phones were shipped in the second quarter -- more than double the number shipped at the same time last year.

 Apple also showed strong growth, with an almost 28% gain over the previous year to 26 million phones shipped.

 "Android continues to fire on all cylinders," IDC senior research analyst Ramon Llamas said in the report, citing good prices and new phone models from Android's hardware partners as growth catalysts.

 More specifically, IDC pegged Android's gain "directly" to Samsung, which represented 44% of all Android phones shipped during the quarter.

 That's more than the next seven Android vendors combined, IDC said. Samsung's Galaxy S III debuted late in the quarter to favorable reviews.

 Apple and Samsung are currently locked in a heated court battle over Apple's allegations that Samsung illegally copied its iPhone design.

 Apple's iOS momentum was slowed this quarter by rumors that the iPhone 5 will be released in September.

 The iPhone 4S has been on the market since last October, so IDC said sales have "cooled."

 Meanwhile, Android and iOS's combined 85% market share didn't leave much room for competitors. Shipments of BlackBerry phones from Research in Motion (RIMM) fell a staggering 41% over the year to 7.4 million.

 That represented less than 5% of the market -- the lowest level since 2009, IDC said. It will be tough for RIM to improve its position this year, as the company said in June that its BlackBerry 10 operating system is delayed again until 2013.

 The once-popular Symbian operating system from Nokia (NOK) "sunk to a new nadir last quarter," IDC said, with shipments falling more than 60% over the year. Symbian now represents only 4.4% of the global market. Microsoft's Windows and the open-source Linux rounded out the last 6% of the market.

Saturday, August 18, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Google announces new search tools

Google is making some changes to its most well-known product: search. The tweaks, updates and beta projects are all part of Google's attempt to make searches faster and more relevant.

 For starters, Google is bringing its Siri-esque voice search feature to the iPad and iPhone.

 The company expects to roll out an update to its free Google Search app later this week with the new feature, which uses speech-recognition technology to understand spoken, natural language search requests.

 Though it has not yet been approved, Google said it is working with Apple to get the app out.

 Depending on how you phrase your question or request, the app will bring up text answers and images or play YouTube videos.

 The app also can give answers specific to your location, such as movie times or weather. For example, "Play the sleepy kitten video" should automatically bring up and start playing a video of said exhausted feline, and "What's the weather here next week?" will show a weather report for that exact period.

 The version of this search-by-voice feature was already available for Android 4.1 users, and Google says it will be available for older versions of Android at some point in the future. There also are some subtle changes coming to English versions of the search engine around the world, starting Thursday.

 Auto-predict, the sometimes amusing feature that shows popular search terms that start with the words you are typing, will be joined by smarter, more relevant suggestions.

 The feature works by tapping the company's knowledge graph, which is a database of more than 500 million "objects." An object can be anything in the real world, such as a location, public figure, movie, sports team or company.

 For example, a search for "Luxor" will suggest the Las Vegas casino, the city and the original Egyptian temple in search field.

 Another new feature is the knowledge carousel -- a collection of frequently mentioned results for certain search terms that will appear as a row of thumbnail images at the top of the screen.

 A search for famous astronauts will bring up images of relevant people, along with dates of birth and death.

 Clicking on one of these links updates the page's search results to show links about that person. It also works for other things such as locations, museums, animals or albums. The final feature announced Wednesday is a beta project that loops your Gmail account into the search results.

 When the feature is on, Google will search the Web as well as all the e-mails in your account and include a list of relevant e-mails or contacts on the side of your screen. For some common queries, Google will parse the e-mails to isolate key bits of information, much like travel app TripIt.

 A search for "my flights" will pull flight information for upcoming trips you may have booked, and present it along with data from the Web, like an updated flight status.

 The feature has been tested by several thousand Google employees, and now the company is opening up the trial to a test group of a million.

 Anyone can sign up to try the feature at g.co/searchtrial, although it will only work on the main Google.com site in English.

 These tweaks are the survivors of a huge number of experiments Google has done for search.

 In 2011, the search team conducted 58,000 experiments on search and made 530 tweaks to how search works. Google says it has found more than 30 trillion unique URLs on the Web, crawls 20 billion sites a day and processes 100 billion searches every month.

 Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of engineering, said the changes bring Google one step closer to his dream of being like Capt.

 Kirk on "Star Trek" and using the starship computer to find out anything he needed to know.

 "The destiny of search is to become that 'Star Trek' computer," he said.

Thursday, August 09, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Using WiFi to see through walls

British engineers from University College London have developed a passive radar system that can see through walls using the WiFi signals generated by wireless routers and access points.

The system, devised by Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty, requires two antennae and a signal processing unit (i.e. computer), and is no larger than a suitcase. Unlike normal radar, which emits radio waves and then measures any reflected signals, this new system operates in complete stealth.

 

The passive radar process is actually quite simple. In any space that has WiFi, you are constantly being bombarded by 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio waves. When these waves hit a moving object, their frequency is altered (the Doppler effect).

 By carefully “sniffing” the WiFi signals, Woodbridge and Chetty are able to reconstruct an image any objects or humans that are moving on the other side of the wall. 

Fundamentally, this is a radar system — you’re just using radio waves that have been emitted by an external WiFi router, rather than creating your own. Compare this with MIT’s through-the-wall (TTW) radar, which is 8 feet (2.4m) across and requires a large power source to generate lots and lots of microwaves.

In testing, this passive radar system is able to detect a person’s location, speed, and direction, through a foot-thick brick wall. One problem with Doppler-based systems is that they only work with moving objects — a would-be burglar or combatant can thwart these systems by standing still.

 With further work, though, the UCL engineers think they can increase the sensitivity of the system so that it can detect the movement of your ribcage as you breathe in and out.


The use cases, as you can imagine, are mainly militaristic. The UK Ministry of Defence is already looking into whether this passive radar could be used in urban warfare. PopSci speculates that passive radar could be useful for tracking the movements of children (or the elderly) throughout the house.

 Presumably, with sensitive equipment (and a lot of WiFi routers?) you might even get close to X-ray vision.
Woodbridge and Chetty seem to be passive radar specialists: They were apparently the first researchers to build a radar system using software-defined radio gear, and they’ve also done the same passive WiFi radar trick with WiMAX — which presumably allows for much longer range detection.

Wednesday, August 08, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

The app that finds a parking space

 Sensors alerting motorists to empty parking spaces are being installed in British streets for the first time.The small sensors, embedded in the asphalt of each parking bay, can tell whether a car is present, absent or has over-stayed its allotted time. 

The data will be collected centrally and sent via smartphone or tablet apps to drivers, who will be able to pay for the space via their mobile.There are also plans for the alerts to be sent to parking wardens. 

The system is in use in San Francisco but the British trial is believed to be the first in Europe. It is being piloted in central London by Westminster Council on 135 bays over four streets.

The council, which charges up to £4.40 (about R50) an hour for on-street parking, said: 

“It will reduce congestion and minimise the need for motorists to endlessly trawl the streets searching for somewhere to park.” - Daily Mail

Wednesday, August 08, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Apple, Google moving apart -YouTube not on new iPhone, iPad

 Apple Inc. said Google Inc.'s YouTube won't be included in the next version of the soft-ware used in the iPhone and iPad, the latest evidence of escalating competition between the two companies.

Apple has featured YouTube as a core application since the iPhone debuted in 2007. As Google has pushed into the smartphone market, the relationship between the companies has frayed.

Google's Android software is now the world's largest operating system for smart-phones, used by Apple's rivals, including Samsung Electronics Co."Their two ecosystems are pulling away from each other," said Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group. "At the end of the day, this is two companies agreeing they just don't want to work together anymore."

Apple also plans to replace Google's maps application with its own in the next iOS release.

Users will see the effects when the next version of Apple's mobile software, called iOS 6, is released later this year. A licence expired that al-lowed the company to include YouTube, said Trudy Muller, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple. As a result, the YouTube app won't come pre-installed on future iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch releases or if a user downloads iOS 6 to existing devices.

"Customers can use You-Tube in the Safari browser, and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the App Store," Muller said.

Chris Dale, a spokesman for Google, didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Wednesday, August 08, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Don't rely on Hollywood to stop 'doomsday asteroid'

It will take more than Bruce Willis to save the Earth from a giant doomsday asteroid, according to scientists.In the 1998 movie Armageddon, Willis plays an oil-drilling engineer who heads a mission to split an asteroid the size of Texas in half with a nuclear bomb.

The two halves of the space rock pass either side of the Earth, saving the human race from annihilation.But in reality, such a strategy would just not work, a study has shown.

Borrowing a famous phrase from another Hollywood film, Jaws, we would need a bigger bomb.

A team of physics students calculated it would have to be a billion times more powerful than the largest nuclear device ever detonated on Earth, the Soviet Union's 50-megaton hydrogen bomb "Big Ivan".

The asteroid would also have to be detected much earlier than the one in the film to stand any chance of splitting it in time.Ben Hall, 22, a member of the University of Leicester team, said: "One possible alternative method would be moving the asteroid via propulsion methods attached to it. What is certain is that most methods would require very early detection of such an asteroid and very careful planning in deriving a solution.

"I really enjoyed the film Armageddon and up until recently never really considered the plausibility in the science behind the movie. But after watching it again I found myself being more sceptical about the film in many areas.

"I think that directors attempt to make films scientifically accurate but find they run into a lot of trouble in what can and cannot be done, thus leading to falsification in the science to make movies more interesting or visually appealing to the audience."

The research is published in this year's University of Leicester Journal of Special Physics Topics.

The journal is published every year, and features original short papers written by students in the final year of their four-year Master of Physics degree.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Reports: iPhone 5 to be unveiled Sept. 12

Gadget fans waiting anxiously for the next iPhone to be released may be reaching the home stretch.

 Apple, which has made no official announcement, is planning a September 12 event at which the next generation of the iconic smartphone will presumably be announced, according to multiple reports.

 iMore, an Apple-oriented blog, was the first to report that "sources who have proven accurate in the past" said the phone will be introduced at an event that day and released nine days later.

 Observers are calling it the iPhone 5, although no name has been announced.

 Others, including The Wall Street Journal's All Things D blog, followed with similar reports. Quoting anonymous sources at Apple, All Things D said an event is planned for the week of September 9.

 The 12th would be a Wednesday, which follows with previous Apple events.

 2007: First iPhone announcement A September release would be slightly ahead of Apple's established one-iPhone-per-year pace. But the iPhone 4S took longer than usual, its October unveiling coming about 16 months after the iPhone 4.

 A fall iPhone release has been considered a foregone conclusion by most observers for months. Speculation has focused on a handful of expected new features, including a slightly larger screen, a smaller dock connector and NFC technology that would make it easier for shoppers to make payments through their phones.

 iMore also says that the mythical "iPad Mini" will be unveiled at the event. Speculation has increasingly ramped up that Apple, faced by competition from Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7 tablets, is making a smaller version of the iPad.

 The move would fly in the face of statements made by the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who favored full-size tablets.

 But Apple faces unprecedented competition in the space and may argue that screen technology that would have made a smaller iPad impractical before is now available.

 On the smartphone front, Apple also faces a landscape that's arguably more challenging than it's seen in a while.

 The iPhone is still the most popular handset in the field, but the total number of phones running Google's Android operating system has been greater for some time.

 And while competitors in the past have arguably spent the time between iPhone releases trying to catch up, many reviewers feel that several models among the current crop of Android phones have surpassed the 4S in terms of features and performance.

 Notably, the Samsung Galaxy S III has topped 10 million in sales in two months -- a number it took the Galaxy S II five months to hit.

 Reviewers have praised its bigger screen, sleek design and a set of new features. The iPhone 4S was, in some senses, a glorified update of the iPhone 4, with its advances coming in new software features and improved camera and display.

 It outsold its predecessor, although with anticipation high for the looming iPhone 5, sales have begun to flag. According to its recent earnings report, Apple shipped 26 million iPhones from April to June, which was less than the 28 million to 29 million that Wall Street analysts had predicted.

 It was a steep drop from the 35.1 million that the company sold in the previous quarter.

Friday, August 03, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Microsoft's Outlook hits a million users, including fake Ballmer

Microsoft's rebranding of the widely used but culturally fading Hotmail service is off to a big start.

 More than 1 million people signed up for e-mail accounts with Outlook, the new service to which all Hotmail users will eventually be transferred, in its first few hours of existence Tuesday.

 But one important person apparently didn't, at least not using his full name in his address: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Staffers at the PC Pro website were able to register steveballmer@outlook.com.

 They weren't the only ones to notice the apparent quirk. One Twitter user also claims to have secured donotreply@outlook.com. "[C]an't wait to see all the spam I get," he wrote.

 But it was the Ballmer grab that turned heads. It quickly led to the parody Tumblr account, Ballmer on Ballmer, on which spoof e-mails from the CEO are posted. In one, the phony Ballmer sends a photo to an account made to look like it belongs to the former Microsoft CEO, philanthropist Bill Gates. The fake Gates' response? "Would you please not bother me with this s---? I am trying to cure Malaria."

 The jokes do highlight at least one positive for Microsoft, though: People in the tech world are talking about Hotmail (or at least its replacement). The e-mail service has long remained the world's most popular, largely due to it being bundled with the near-ubiquitious Windows operating system.

 But it had long since lost its cachet with younger or tech-industry users, and by some accounts has been surpassed by Google's Gmail. But some early reviews of the new Outlook e-mail service have been glowing.

 "After a decade as a punchline, Hotmail just pulled off the biggest victory in the inbox game since Gmail. And it might just get you to switch," wrote Sam Biddle on Gizmodo.

 Shortly after 3 p.m. ET Tuesday, the Outlook Twitter account posted a chart showing the million sign-ups.

 Right now, switching to Outlook is voluntary for Hotmail users. They'll eventually have no choice, although Microsoft has not disclosed a timetable for that move.

Friday, August 03, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Incredible : The Cost of Being Iron Man and Batman

We've all wanted to be Batman at one time or another, but how much would it cost to actually become Batman? Of all the superheroes, Batman's wealth is significantly larger than most - with the possible exception of Tony Stark aka Iron Man.

 Wayne Manor costs $600,000,000 alone with an annual running cost of $37,000.

 Top that off with $80 million worth of vehicles and a stockpile of weapons totalling more than $10,000 and you will have to save pretty hard to afford to become Batman

  Of course Batman hasn't saved or taken out a loan to build up his wealth.

 He was born in to the Wayne family fortune and now owns Wayne Enterprises, a multinational organisation with divisions in technology, shipping, defence, chemicals and many more.

 Wayne Enterprises (not included in the infographic) is worth a total of $7 billion. Take a look at our 'Cost of Being Batman' infographic and ask yourself if you could afford to become Batman!

Friday, August 03, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More