Technology Industry Archive

IBM is still trying to take advantage of Microsoft’s stumbles with Vista in the hopes that customer confusion results in defection to IBM platforms and applications. The most recent evidence of this is a posting by IBM blogger extraordinaire Ed Brill (a sometimes commenter on this blog) in which he takes Microsoft to task for encouraging customers to start testing Windows 7 rather than...

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Mellmo CEO Santiago Becerra has had to swallow a bitter pill. When Becerra briefed me on a new iPhone application for business users last week in New York, he told me that an enterprise license for the software, which makes it easier to read reports from business information crunching applications on relatively tiny iPhone screens, would be $100,000 per server, plus a twenty percent annual...

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The iPhone has been called the third evolution in computing platforms (mainframes and PCs were the first two), and where Apple’s fortunes are concerned, there had better be a lot of truth — and growth — in that. Indeed, there isn’t a lot of good news for Apple in its core businesses as its heads into its annual developer conference in a little less than two weeks. Mac...

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After weathering a Twitter uproar over some “adult-oriented” books not showing up in searches, Amazon is facing yet another squall, as its search results go haywire in the opposite direction, adding seemingly irrelevant products to customer searches. And Twitter users have resurrected the #amazonfail hash tag to alert people to the problem. [Check the update at the end, as there's a...

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Qualcomm’s new Plaza Retail, a supermarket for mobile applications, gets the handset technology vendor into the mobile application space, and is potentially a boon for consumers and the application developers themselves. Currently, mobile applications have to be tailored for each individual app store, which means an app that works for the iPhone doesn’t work on phones made by Nokia,...

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Skype, the Internet-based telephony company which eBay plans to spin off in 2010, claims it’s gaining a new audience — business users. Chaim Haas, a spokesman for the company, told me that the proportion of business users as a percent of the total customer base grew from 30 percent to 35 percent from 2007 to 2008. And in case you’re wondering, that’s not because its user...

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A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world: courts, regulation, and lawsuits. Small security company gets big patent infringement judgment against Microsoft – Security company Uniloc won a patent infringement suit against Microsoft after six years for a judgment of $388 million. Microsoft will appeal. [Source: Computerworld] Laptop vendors suing Nvidia —...

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The $1.45 billion fine levied against Intel last week by the European Commission, will doubtless be seen in hindsight as a watershed event heralding a new era of government clampdowns on certain types of business activities. The only question in the balance is whether this new era of regulation will lead to increased competition and innovation, or a stifling of business creativity. Financial...

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There’s nothing that can make you sit back, scratch your head, and wonder at the correlation between innovation and patents granted than looking at the top 300 list published by the Intellectual Property Owners Association, or IPO. This summary of how many utility patents companies received in the US last year was fascinating, both for those who racked them up and the corporations that...

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Hide the women and children, and any stock you hold dear in your Internet start-up. The Venture Summit East is starting up on Tuesday, which will be graced by such luminaries of the Sand Hill Road Gang as Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Alan Patricof of Greycroft Partners, Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners, Sunil Dhaliwal of Battery Ventures and Ham Lord of Launchpad Venture...

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