Technology Industry Archive

It’s clear that the future of Palm rests on the Pre, as my colleague Michael Hickins noted. Much of the potential success of the Pre — or any handset, as has been clear from Apple’s wild success — rides on the developers and companies that decide to create applications for the platform. And they are weighing a lot of factors to figure out where to focus their technical...

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A killer application has finally emerged that should allow smartphones to overtake conventional PCs and laptops as the computing device of choice: it’s called augmented reality, and as absurd as that sounds, that’s exactly what it is. Mobile applications consultant Tomi Ahonen wrote on his mobile developer forum that, “this is one of those game-changer types of...

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Dennis Howlett's analysis My recent post accusing Oracle of lying about its chief rival was close enough to the mark to get under Oracle’s skin. Still, it had some holes I couldn’t fill, not least of which because of different reporting periods for the two companies. But if I had half the accounting skills of my colleague at ZDNet, Dennis Howlett, I could have done a better job...

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Palm CEO Jonathan Rubinstein doesn’t think he has to beat the brains out of former employer Apple, or any other smartphone vendor, in order for Palm to succeed. It’s a remarkably calm assessment from the leader of a company whose future depends largely on the success of a single product launch, and even more so in the context of the testosterone-driven culture we inhabit, where from...

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In the book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that consumers buy goods because of subconscious, deeply-seated motivation to find mates and procreate. And a prime example of a company that has ridden Darwin all the way to the bank is Apple. “There’s a lot more human behavior that is unconsciously motivated to do this trait...

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Sirius XM has been notifying subscribers of a price hike that the company ascribes to increased music royalties that the service is incurring. But while the company is getting charged more, the subscription increases far outstrip the higher royalties, seeming to put the company in conflict with a promise it made the FCC at the time of the merger between former competitors Sirius and XM. In a...

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Microsoft has seen the fury of the masses and like Atlas, shrugged. A Twitter campaign astroturfed by email marketing campaign vendor Freshview is asking (or is it begging?) Microsoft to reverse course on a key technology decision made for Office 2007 in its next release of Outlook, slated for next year. As if. The die is cast. Even if it wanted, Microsoft probably couldn’t, given its...

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By allowing the Web to become a universal operating system, and making mobile devices more powerful than low-end laptops, HTML 5 is transforming IT more profoundly than any development since the advent of the Internet. As HTML 5 becomes the widely-adopted standard for authoring on the Web, it will radically transform three critical markets in the IT landscape: device makers, application...

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Being underwater — or, at least, standing in line — seems to be a fact of life for the US Patent and Trademark Office, and things have only been getting worse. With current applications down, so are fees and, therefore, USPTO revenues. The agency has frozen hiring and just cut examiner overtime, meaning that patent applications will only pile up even more. Will a Senate attempt to...

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When you hear corporations beating their chests over their competitive position, there’s always a good bet they are trying to make things look sunnier. My colleague Michael Hickins caught Oracle in posturing. But he mentioned SAP claiming that, where it competes with Oracle, it was “doing very well, thank you.” So I dug up SAP’s last financial statement, and if...

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