IBM researchers have published results for a new nine-nanometer nanotube transistor that could redefine processors in the future. The carbon-based element is the first below 10 nanometers and is much more efficient than the best current silicon-based transistors. Because of the size and material, it can use considerably less power and takes on more of a current to improve the reliability.
HTC and IBM together said in an interview Friday that they were working together to get Android into the workplace. IBM's business apps were running on HTC's phones and tablets, HTC's Global Enterprise and Services director David Jaeger told eWeek. On its side, HTC was making sure both that the devices took full advantage of the IBM apps and that they "focused extensively" on security.
Google has quietly escalated its attempts to mount a defense for Android by getting more IBM patents. An acquisition recorded December 30 gave Google 217 more active and pending patents primarily focused on cellphones, mobile web browsers, and voice search. Among the examples are a patent for a "computer phone," another for a method of resizing websites for mobile, and a third for voice-based keyword searches.
As IBM head Samuel Palmisano prepares to step down from his position and hand the reins to Virginia Rometty, the chief executive has reflected on the company's recent strategy. In an interview with the New York Times, Palmisano suggests he faced strong disagreement within the company over the decision to sell of IBM's PC division, however he credits the decision with helping the company stay innovative and maintain profits.
IBM has revealed its sixth-annual Five in Five technology predictions for the future on Monday. The computer maker has outlined the five technologies that it believes will become commonplace within the next five years. The first of them involves recycling kinetic energy that would otherwise go to waste to help power homes, cities and workplaces. This could be done through dynamos on bicycles that could recharge portable devices, capturing heat from a computer, or walking and jogging.
IBM at the International Electronic Devices Meeting on Monday showed a working prototype of its racetrack memory made using conventional semiconductor tools. The 100 times more dense memory used to require a special research manufacturing machine but can now be made in a fully integrated way that should be much cheaper. IBM found it could put a nickel-iron layer on to a silicon wafer and etch out the 20-nanometer thick nanowires that define the memory.
Apple had made an olive branch license to Samsung for a patent that the Korean company turned down, a discovery within redacted court documents found on Saturday. Normally unavailable, the details given to The Verge showed that Apple in November 2010 offered the same license for its iOS scrolling feedback patent that it ultimately secured with IBM and Nokia. As a cornerstone of iOS' intuitiveness, it showed Apple willing to make a significant concession to Samsung first before it turned to the court.
IBM and Micron will collaborate on the production of the first memory chip to use CMOS manufacturing technology with through-silicon vias (TSVs). These are vertical conduits that electrically connect a stack of individual chips. This IBM process will let Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) run 15 times faster than current, conventional memory chips. The chip's parts will be made on 32-nanometer, high-K metal gate process technology that's as efficient as modern processors.
Apple's mobile devices were responsible for a tenth of all US online shopping on Black Friday this year, IBM said in a new study. The iPad and iPhone made up 4.8 and 5.6 percent each of all online shopping in the US, or 10.2 percent combined. Android, in spite of its larger collective market share, wasn't as trusted at just 4.1 percent.
China Labor Watch reported Thursday that 1,000 workers at a Jingyuan Computer Group plant in Shenzhen briefly went on strike over tough conditions. The staff at the southern China plant, who make keyboards, hard drives, displays, and wireless cameras for companies like Apple and IBM, have complained of working 100 to 120 hours of overtime each per month. They also cite being berated by supervisors, high injury rates, and frequent layoffs for older workers.
One of IBM's most influential CEOs, John Opel, died late Thursday at the age of 86, IBM confirmed on Friday. The former executive was CEO of the company from January 1981 to January 1985 and oversaw the launch of the original IBM PC, the 5150, in August 1981. He was credited with having the foresight to support home computers at a time when IBM was still known by most for its mainframes. Opel had IBM invest a minority stake in Intel in 1984 that helped establish its chips as the main choice for PC processors, even through today.
IBM has announced that it has elected Virginia Rometty to serve as the company's new CEO. The move marks the first time the company has placed a woman in the top spot. She is not a newcomer to the upper ranks, however, having served as senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy.
InterBrand's new rankings have seen Apple enter into the top 10 for the first time. The company leapt on the global ranks of its image's value from 17th to eighth, passing BMW, HP, Mercedes-Benz, and even its frequent ally Disney. Symbolically, it took over the former position from Nokia, whose rapid decline in sales and public perception dropped it to 14th.
The close of the stock market Thursday saw IBM overtake Microsoft to become the second most valuable technology company. IBM's climb to $214 billion in its stock market cap was just enough to counter a Microsoft decline to $213.2 billion, pushing Microsoft down to third. Apple was still the largest, even with recent sell-offs, and had a much larger $362.1 billion cap.
IBM and Intel have agreed to invest $4.4 billion to create an R&D hub for nanotechnology in Albany, New York. The two companies, along with Samsung, Global Foundries, and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufucturing Corporation), will make the investment over a five-year period. New York state will pour $400 million into its College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at Albany in support of the effort.
Apple has leaped ahead in rank to become the second most valuable brand in the world, an interim 2011 Brand Finance study claims. Although the worth of a brand is difficult to quantify, Brand Finance's latest metrics put Apple up 33 percent to $39.3 billion. Leading the list is Google, which rose 9 percent to just under $48.3 billion.
IBM and 3M are reportedly collaborating to develop new adhesives that will be designed for layered microprocessors. The stacked technology, which could be composed of up to 100 separate layers, is said to be geared for enterprise equipment, such as servers, or consumer electronics such as computers, smartphones, tablets or gaming devices.
IBM is building a hard drive of sorts that's 10 times bigger than any other built before it. It has a capacity of 120 petabytes, or 120 million gigabytes, and is made up of 200,000 hard drives hooked up together. IBM's data storge group is working on the project at the hardware giant's Almaden, CA research lab.
IBM on Thursday announced said it's working on two experimental chips that are structured like the human brain. It further believes these are key to developing what it calls cognitive computing. The effort will result in a machine that is close to processing information the way a human brain does, allowing it to learn and take action while being more space- and energy-efficient than modern computers.
Google has at last taken steps to try and protect Android developers from the wide-ranging Lodsys lawsuit, the company's general counsel Kent Walker stated Saturday. The company has asked the USPTO to reexamine the validity of two patents for in-app purchases that "should never have been issued," according to Walker. The approach described to Wired would either narrow the scope of the complaints or invalidate the patents entirely, likely forcing Lodsys to either limit the reach of lawsuits or toss them out entirely.
Microsoft's Corporate Communications VP Frank Shaw in a commentary on the 30th anniversary of the original IBM PC dismissed the talk of a post-PC era. He preferred to characterize it as a "PC-plus era," since there would be an estimated 400 million PCs sold around the world in 2011. Microsoft's response would be to largely stay the course, though he hinted at tighter hardware and software integration going on.
Google showed its first signs of becoming serious about patent defense with a discovery that it had bought 1,030 patents from IBM. The company quietly took on the intellectual property on July 12 and 13. Many are focused on web search, but others are clearly phone related and include chip and memory design, routers, servers, and others.
IBM, which turned 100 recently, on Thursday said it has developed solid-state chips that have the same capacity as current NAND flash storage but 100 times more performance and much longer durability. The so-called phase-change memory (PCM) chips have the ability to store two bits of data per cell without corrupting it, which is not something that could have been said of early versions of the technology. The nonvolatile memory retains data after its power supply is shut down, just like NAND flash memory.
International Business Machines, better known by its IBM acronym, has turned 100 years old on Thursday. Back on June 16, 1911, the company was called Computing Tabulating Recording Co. and was a result of the merger of three companies that built scales, punch clocks for work and other machines. The original Endicott, New York-based plant made cheese slicers and machines that read data stored on punch cards. The current name came to be in 1924.
Sony's CFO Masaru Kato gave out clues in a Memorial Day interview that the NGP would be considerably less expensive to make than earlier PlayStations. He described the handheld system as less "investment heavy" than before. Among the options mentioned to the Wall Street Journal were farming out chip manufacturing to other companies or using off-the-shelf parts.
Dissent around Microsoft's leadership became more public Wednesday with a speech from Greenlight Capital manager David Einhorn. The hedge fund operator told those at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had to "give someone else a chance" at the top spot. He considered the early Microsoft executive the "biggest overhang" on Microsoft's stock because he was mired in traditional behavior.
IBM has just beat out Microsoft to grab the number two spot behind Apple on the stock market cap results. The difference is very slight, however, with IBM valued at $208.07 billion while Microsoft is at $207.95 billion. Apple remains on top since passing Microsoft at about the same time last year, with a $311.62 billion market cap as of earlier on Friday.
Apple achieved a symbolic win over Google late Sunday by passing its rival for the top spot in Millward Brown's 2011 BrandZ study. The swap represented the end to a four-year reign by Google, which slipped to second place. Apple won a brand value of $153 billion by managing to up the price of its mobile devices with the iPad but stoking demand the way a luxury brand might.
A unique breakdown of the OS market by revenue share published by Gartner on Wednesday has revealed moves up in revenue market share by Apple, Microsoft, and some Linux developers last year. Windows as expected stayed on top and gained share by its cash intake, up almost nine points to 78.6 percent and $23.85 billion dollars' worth of sales. Apple only moved up a tenth of a point to 1.7 percent total share, but the growth had it moving twice as quickly and jumping 15.8 percent to $520 million.
UnXis on Monday afternoon said it had finished buying out all of the SCO Group's staff and patents following its failed return to relevance. The buyout gives it control over SCO Unix as well as the roughly 32,000 contracts SCO still held. Plans weren't exact but would include a "new generation of hardware, software and cloud computing."
Forrester Research CEO George Colony has placed a prediction that Apple's growth will continue to outpace that of rivals IBM and HP. The latter companies are expected to fall behind, in terms of yearly revenue, as early as 2013. Colony anticipates Apple's revenues to exceed $200 billion during the same period of time.
For a fourth year in a row, Fortune has once again identified Apple as its Most Admired company in the world. Apple has an overall score of 8.16. "The company's blistering pace of new product releases has continued to set the bar high for tech companies across the board," Fortune writes.
IBM and Samsung have announced a new partnership that aims to expand research into new semiconductor materials, manufacturing processes and other technologies. The collaborative efforts are said to be focused on semiconductors for a wide range of potential applications such as smartphones or communications infrastructure.
Apple successfully won 563 patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office during 2010, says IFI Claims Patent Services. The number is roughly double the 289 seized by Apple in 2009, and has allowed the company to crack the top 50 businesses with a rank of 46th. Most of the patents awarded were originally submitted by Apple in 2004 or 2005, meaning that the company's position could rise still further in coming years as patents are granted for an expanding range of technology.
IBM researchers on Thursday revealed new information about the technology behind its 3D memory, dubbed Racetrack. The new info reveals that the new type of storage can hold as much as 100 times more data while using less energy than current designs. The six-year old project involves moving data to where it can be used by sliding magnetic bits along nanowire 'racetracks.'
Incumbent carriers AT&T and Verizon spent the most money lobbying the US government in summer 2010 while Apple and some other technology firms spent relatively little, newly published disclosure reports have uncovered. The two both significantly increased their spending to $3.47 million and $3.83 million respectively, up from $3.18 million and $2.96 million a year ago. AT&T spent most of its time persuading the government on broadband expansion, calling cards and distracted driving rules, while Verizon's details were less focused and saw it spend on Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and the White House itself.
A newly-formed SSD Form Factor Working Group has been formed, with the aim of bringing out a PCI Express-based SSD standard. Made up of promoter members Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM and Intel, the group will focus on enterprise customers who need ever-higher performance storage that is cost effective and easy to use. While PCIe based SSDs are available now, they aren't simple and are usually reserved for servers, workstations and very high-end gamers.
Newsweek has released its own green rankings of companies for the second straight year, with little changes from year to year. Most significantly Dell has moved up from its number two spot, knocking HP out of the top spot, with a perfect score of 100. IBM, Johnson & Johnson and Intel rounded off the top five, with Apple unusually not listed [in one of the top spots in their category].
Lenovo marked two milestones today, starting with a unique upgrade to the ThinkPad T series. The T410, T410s and T510 are the first known business notebooks to use NVIDIA's Optimus graphics switching and can switch to or from their dedicated NVS 3100M video and Intel's integrated chipset. The option of switching to Intel's slower but more miserly video when on battery gives them as much as a third more battery life, or about an hour of extra time.
Several technology companies are near the end of talks with the Department of Justice to settle and avoid an investigation into claims of anti-competitive hiring deals, insiders said tonight [sub. required]. Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar are all hoping to avoid an antitrust case and will potentially halt any pacts they have to avoid poaching each other's employees. The WSJ noted that some of the firms are more willing to settle than others, but didn't say which.
At the Hot Chips 2010 conference on Tuesday, IBM talked about its z196 CPU for Z-series mainframe computers. Claimed as the fastest processor in the world, has a clock speed of 5.2GHz and will ship in September, though its price is expected to be anywhere in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars to over a million. The chip is one of the only CISC chips left in the category, supporting large programs that need more memory than RISC chips such as PowerPC and ARM embedded processors.
Microsoft reached a milestone today as Windows 95 reached the 15th anniversary of its launch on August 24, 1995. The OS was the highest-profile debut ever for Microsoft and saw rare lines for a software launch; media reports from the period had some lining up without knowing what Windows 95 did. Its launch campaign included an ad blitz with the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" and ultimately saw Microsoft spend $300 million on marketing, a feat it wouldn't repeat until years later.
Senior VP Mark Papermaster's abrupt departure from Apple may have stemmed from personal disagreement with CEO Steve Jobs, contacts claimed Sunday night [sub. required]. The executive reportedly lost Jobs' confidence "months ago" and hadn't been influential for awhile. He allegedly neither had the creativity nor the sheer attention to detail expected to survive in the culture of Apple's higher-ups.
(Updated with added insights) In a surprise move, Apple today confirmed that Senior VP of Device Hardware Engineering Mark Papermaster was leaving the company after less than two years. Neither the company nor Papermaster has said whether the executive is leaving voluntarily or was forced out of the position, but it has already removed his biography. Mac hardware engineering Senior VP Bob Mansfield will take over his responsibilities in the short term.
SCO was dealt a late and possibly final blow on Thursday as Judge Ted Stewart has handed Novell a declaratory judgment against SCO in court. The decision supports Novell's view that it owns key Unix copyrights and that SCO didn't need or own the copyrights for its controversial SCOsource program, which would have forced some of those using Linux to pay royalties. It further lets Novell dismiss SCO's related lawsuits against IBM and Sequent.
IBM has announced that its Lotus messaging and collaboration utility will be available on the iPad. Lotus Notes Traveler will allow users to connect with enterprise e-mail, calendar and contact information from Lotus Domino servers and other mobile devices.
Apple has fallen to the third position in Rescuecom's latest computer reliability report, after maintaining the highest overall score in 2009. Each of the top five companies showed improvements in scores, with IBM and Lenovo representing the strongest growth as both companies share the top spot for the first quarter in 2010.
Key electronics producers today formed a new coalition to boost the creation of Linux-based devices. Linaro's partners ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments are all providing software and tools to help bring out open-source tablets, and other devices, easier and sooner. The help won't be limited to pure Linux and will include Android, MeeGo, webOS and other variants that are mostly open.
Apple has again ranked first in a BusinessWeek list of the world's 50 most innovative corporations. The results are based on a poll of 1,590 executives from different countries, using a deliberately ambiguous definition of the term "innovation," though generally referring to bringing something new and profitable to the market, whether a product, service or strategy. Counterbalancing opinion is a 10 percent weight on stock returns, along with 5 percent values assigned to three-year revenue and margin growth.
Apple has lept ahead significantly in this year's Fortune 500 list, rising from 71st place to 56th. The chart ranks American companies in terms of size, and as of March 26th the company was estimated to have a market value of close to $209.4 billion. Its assets are said to be valued at over $53.8 billion, and revenues have climbed 12.5 percent since last year to sit at more than $36.5 billion. Profits are disproportionately higher, up 18 percent to about $5.7 billion.
