Technology Industry Archive

A total of 53 banks across the country have been shut down this year by regulators, but the customer accounts have of course survived. So accounts belonging to the Bank of Wyoming of Thermopolis, Wyo., closed by Wyoming banking regulators last Friday, are now the happy depositors of the Central Bank & Trust of Lander, Wyo. The new depositors are something of a windfall for Central Bank...

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My colleague Michael Hickins and I have been going back and forth on this blog about Chrome OS. His last post about that followed the Google line about just whom Google had lined up, including HP, Lenovo, Asustek and others. But as Dan Nystedt at Computerworld noted today, if you talk to the PC vendors, many sound far less committed than the impression Google’s blog entry gives. In short,...

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Back in June, my colleague Michael Hickins called augmented reality the “killer app” of the cell phone and mentioned two companies, Layar and Mobilizy. There’s just one problem. An Apple patent getting press this week could mean that such vendors might have to get permission to do what they do, because, if granted, it would seem to give Apple a lock on augmented reality on a...

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You can come down on one side or the other of how practically big the planned Chrome OS will be. My take is skeptical, and as often happens, my colleague Michael Hickins disagrees. But getting stuck on the yes/no question misses what I think is a more interesting possibility: a Firefox-based OS. Look at Google’s plans: place Chrome atop Linux and create a lightweight OS that heavily...

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits that he might have to recuse himself from Apple’s board, now that Google is introducing the Chrome operating system. Schmidt told reporters at Sun Valley, Idaho, where he’s attending a technology conference, that he intends to discuss his board position “with the Apple people. At the moment, there’s no change,” he added. The move may...

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Executives at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.-owned papers allowed reporters to hack into phone conversations of celebrities, including Gwenyth Paltrow, and then paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover it up, according to a report in The Guardian. One of those executives is now the chief communications officer for the U.K.’s Conservative Party. That’s the political news....

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Of late there’s been far more government scrutiny of Google than any corporate executive wants for his or her company. Part of that has been the FTC looking at the boards of Google and Apple and how they are unusually closely interlocked, sharing, as they do, two directors. The big concern is whether Google and Apple are competitors and if an overly cozy relationship could be harmful to...

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If there was any doubt, as my colleague Erik Sherman expressed yesterday, that Google actually has any hardware partners lined up to use Chrome, its shiny forthcoming operating system, Google has put those doubts to rest. Partners so far include some of the biggest names in portable computing: Hewlett-Packard, one of the granddaddies of personal computing, Lenovo, which has already introduced...

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The worldwide runaway success of Apple’s iPhone is explained quite simply by the apps available for users to download. Apple has an unmatched catalog of apps and enjoys the benefit (and unparalleled competitive advantage) of the iTunes payment system, which is as frictionless as mobile payment systems get. Apple has, however, exposed itself to a significant danger, which is to deprive the...

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The battle has been raging for over a month as EMC and NetApps contended for Data Domain — ironic, as the prize was a company whose products actually reduced the need for the hardware that the two competitors sell for a living. Now EMC has walked away with the prize, though it seems that the real payoff would have to be in the negative sense of denying a strategic asset to a competitor....

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