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IBM's cognitive computer recognizing numbers.

After a century of making tabulation machines IBM has come up with a new chip that marries our brain’s architecture with silicon guts. The goal is to create a new style of computing aimed at making sense of big data without consuming a lot of power. Read More »

Liquid Computing & the Curse of a Computer Hardware Startup

Liquid Computing, a startup building a unified computing box to help manage the virtualization of the data center, has lost its CEO and investors are winding down the company, showing how hard it is for a systems maker to stay alive and funded in today’s environment. Read More »

 
 

Obama Budget Spells Benefits for the Cloud

In President Obama’s budget announced yesterday, the feds may have opened a window of opportunity for cloud computing companies large and small hoping for some government largess. The federal budget hopes to increase spending on IT in 2011 by 1.2 percent to $79.4 billion. Read More »

MIT's Thin LCD Lets Your Fingers Do the Talking

MIT’s Media Lab today showed off a thin LCD screen that can respond to both touch and gestures. They call it a bidirectional screen, or BiDiScreen for short. The tech on display uses LCDs with built-in optics and new algorithms to allow for gesture control. Read More »

How AT&T May Limit Your Mobile Data

Mobile operators are overwhelmed by data usage on their networks, but rightly fear that implementing restrictions could lead to widespread public dissent. Instead of beating bandwidth hogs with a stick, perhaps they can offer a carrot to get them to take it easy on the network. Read More »

Telcos Eye the Cloud

The TM Forum, a standards organization that’s active in the service provider community, is developing standards for cloud best practices and interoperability — a move that could move cloud providers out of the realm of offering cheap infrastructure for startups and into providing enterprise-class services. Read More »

Green Computing Needs a Data Center Whisperer

As compute demand increases, demand for power in data centers is soaring. To help IT professionals halt the spread of watt-consuming servers, the industry needs to develop software that can communicate the ways in which the various layers of the data center perform and interact. … Read More »

First Cisco Systems decided to buy Norwegian video conferencing equipment maker Tandberg for about $3 billion. This week, Logitech, a Swiss computer peripherals maker, acquired LifeSize, an Austin, Texas-based private company, for about $405 million in cash. The two deals have brought the fast-growing … Read More »

HP Buys 3Com to Play Cisco's Server Game

Updated: HP said today that it plans to buy router and switching gear maker 3Com for $2.7 billion — a deal that seeks to put HP on better competitive footing against Cisco and its server efforts. HP and the rest of the computing … Read More »

Dell Plays the Networking Field With Juniper Deal

Dell today said it’s agreed to resell gear from Juniper Networks as the Round Rock, Texas, computer maker attempts to fill the networking hole in its product line. It signed a similar agreement with Brocade in August in the face of an onslaught … Read More »

Will Xerox's $6.4 Billion Bet on the Cloud Pay off?

Xerox, the document management company, said today it will buy Affiliated Computing Systems in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $6.4 billion. The combination of the two companies highlights the convergence of corporate documents and the cloud as with the ACS buy, Xerox will now … Read More »

IBM Fires Juniper-Loaded Salvo at Cisco

IBM said today it will resell switches and routers made by Juniper under the IBM brand to compliment Big Blue’s server products aimed at data centers. The move is a direct response to Cisco’s creation of its own brand of servers it calls … Read More »

More Must Reads

HP  said today that it has agreed to buy IBRIX, a Billerica, Mass.-based maker of software that allows customers to build out scalable storage clouds. Terms of the deal, which will augment HP’s sales to businesses requiring high-performance computing, were not disclosed. Like Read More »

Unisys, the IT services company, today became the latest with a set of products aimed at helping customers create their own internal clouds. And in a month it will offer a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that will deliver computing and storage on demand and on a … Read More »

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is rethinking his earlier disdain for software as a service and all things cloud, according to a report today in The Wall Street Journal. Maybe a dismal economy and a drop in Oracle sales are forcing him to change his … Read More »

Hewlett Packard  today announced a new line of servers, a data center mapping program and some consulting and financing services aimed at companies that build out mega data centers. Potential purchasers of the new HP machines include those building cloud computing offerings and enterprise customers … Read More »

Computer Sciences Corp., the IT service organization, today laid out its strategy for the cloud. Unsurprisingly, CSC’s cloud products will focus on being reliable and secure enough for enterprises and the federal government. CSC will continue providing its managed hosting business, but later this year will … Read More »

The transition to delivering software, services and compute infrastructure via the web will change the dynamics of the IT industry, shifting power away from the services players such as IBM and HP and toward companies running monolithic data center operations such as Salesforce.com, Amazon or … Read More »

There’s a lot of marketing been done to promote the cloud, but few of the big computing companies have come out with clear strategies related to providing computing or other technology as a service that’s paid for on a per-instance basis. Sun Microsystems plans to … Read More »

A month after Cisco unveiled its Unified Computing System, it has finally released pricing, processing power and memory details. The bottom line is this: the performance of the servers and overall system seem to be in line with competing products from HP and IBM built … Read More »

Updated: Fusion-io said today it has raised $47.5 million in second-round funding led by Lightspeed Venture, and formally announced David Bradford as CEO. The enterprise Flash drive startup also saw Series A investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Dell Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures, return for this … Read More »

Intel today unveiled its latest and greatest Nehalem chip for servers (now known as the Xeon 5500 series), setting off a round of announcements and articles comparing technical specifications across server vendors. And at 2.93 GHz (with certain tweaks it can get up to 3.33 … Read More »

Dell today launched several enterprise products aimed at cutting back on one of the more stubborn costs in an IT department — the IT professionals. Its new lines of servers include features such as ImageDirect, which eliminates the IT professional’s role in installing an image … Read More »

It’s been about three years since Amazon made its risky bet on delivering computing and storage via the cloud. It started by offering commitment-free, pay-as-you-go storage, enabling startups to start scaling their businesses without significant investment in capital equipment. It later added compute cycles to its … Read More »

Rackable announced today an update to its CloudRack servers. The CloudRack C2 servers can run at 104 degrees inside the data center, and they offload power supply to the rack to reduce energy wasted in converting AC electricity from the wall to DC electricity used … Read More »

Microsoft today is expected to announce a research and development program called Cloud Computing Futures that aims to look at how the data centers underlying cloud computing can operate as efficiently as possible. The idea behind this year-old effort that will emerge from stealth mode at … Read More »

HP seems to believe that firms delivering software and possibly platforms as a service will do better than those delivering infrastructure as a service (much like Amazon’s EC2). In its final discussion with customers about cloud computing this week, HP executives talked about research goals and … Read More »

Behind popular web services such as Facebook, Google and Amazon’s AWS are racks and racks of computers serving up millions of pages or providing raw computing power. The use of thousands of servers to deliver one application or act as a pool of computing resources has … Read More »

This week I’m listening in as HP talks to some of its customers about cloud computing. Today’s webinar was a pretty good overview of how enterprises should think about using the cloud to deliver IT services — and underneath that, why the cloud really isn’t … Read More »

Eventually the idea of cloud computing will become an accepted part of the information technology ecosystem — but it will be just one of many tools in the IT arsenal, according to HP. To stake its claim on the idea of pooled commodity computing resources, HP … Read More »

Symbian said today that 14 new companies, including Hewlett-Packard, MySpace, Qualcomm and SanDisk, have joined its foundation. This brings the number of companies that have signed up to use the mobile operating system’s platform to 78, putting it ahead of the 47 members of … Read More »

The impact of declining desktop and laptop demand on the PC industry became that much clearer this morning, as Microsoft reported lower-than-expected second-quarter earnings driven, in part, by a deterioration of its client PC business (sever software sales are flat) and said it would cut … Read More »

Microsoft continues to push touch as a user interface, this time as a participant in the $24 million funding round for Israeli startup N-Trig, whose technology enables multitouch, or the use of more than one finger for input. Multitouch hit it big on the iPhone, … Read More »

If cloud computing is ever going to reach its full potential, it needs to be more than a utility service that IT managers use to offload excess computing demands. That will require a shift in the way programmers build applications, says Russ Daniels, CTO and V-P … Read More »

Updated: The technology sector, already rocked by the credit crunch and slowing global economies, is facing a bleak 2009, the impact of which is going to be felt across the entire ecosystem. From PC makers to chipmakers to chip equipment makers, almost everyone is bracing for … Read More »

Other than the availability of bigger boxes it’s hard to point to big changes in the way we store our stuff. But much like the physical storage industry, which has seen slight innovations in recent years, business-class data storage is quietly making its own incremental improvements … Read More »

Computing giant Hewlett-Packard said today it would spend $360 million in cash to buy LeftHand Networks, a storage company that straddles two hot trends right now — allocating storage for virtualized servers and the using Ethernet for storage networks. LeftHand’s software essentially allows a … Read More »

Last Friday I was given a tour of HP’s factory floors in Houston, where it makes high-value custom servers for clients. The pictures I took document all the steps involved, from gathering the boards and chips to the shipping of individual servers, with a quick shot … Read More »

Just a day after Dell launched it’s own line of mini Inspirons, and after CEO Michael Dell said carriers would likely subsidize such netbooks, creating smaller price tags, the Wall Street Journal speculates that Dell will sell its manufacturing plants, shrinking its operations. … Read More »

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that within 18 months HP plans to have multiple touchscreen products, including a laptop, “that use the same type of finger-tapping interface popularized by Apple Inc.’s iPhone.” If HP does use the same type of touch screen as … Read More »

Updated at the bottom: At long last, Hewlett-Packard is stepping up with an answer to cloud computing by inking a partnership with two other big technology vendors and three universities to create a cloud computing testbed. Through its R&D unit, HP Labs, the computing giant had … Read More »

Cloud computers: Some call them ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs), some have dubbed them Netbooks, while others refer to them simply as handhelds. Regardless, there are certain features that any device in this new category must have. Continue Reading Read More »

Years from now, will we look back at the iPhone and touch-enabled Windows 7 and blame them for the thin film of muck covering our screens and the thick layer of skin on our fingertips? Yesterday it was the latest iPhone, and today Hewlett-Packard … Read More »

While it hasn’t yet decided to offer a cloud computing service, Hewlett-Packard today said it will combine its high-performance computing unit with it’s Web 2.0 and cloud computing infrastructure businesses to create the Scalability Computing Initiative, a name that will refer both to a … Read More »

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