With all the tablets and smart phones that fight for our attention, more traditional tech companies have been pushed to the background. Yet IBM and HP each managed to grab the attention of the tech world this week when IBM appointed Ginni Rometty as chief executive and HP announced it would keep its PC division.
Tech news from around the web:
France Telecom and Publicis are to set up a joint venture-capital fund focused on European technology start-ups, according to Bloomberg. The size of the fund may be greater than €100m ($139m), people close to the plan told Bloomberg.
Apple has had its patent for the “slide to unlock” control used on its devices confirmed, ZDNet reports. This puts every Android phone and tablet that uses the same process to unlock their screens in the line of fire from Apple’s patent lawyers, ZDNet warns.
Over the past decade, technological advancements have made televisions thinner and thinner, with giant cathode ray tube sets replaced by flatscreen TVs whose thickness are now measured in millimeters.
Starting next year, however, ‘fatter’ flatscreen TVs may be making a comeback in emerging markets, according to one screen maker.
Tech news from around the web:
Research In Motion has run into a problem over its BBX operating system – the blending of its QNX and existing BlackBerry software, PaidContent reports. Basis International, which makes software-development tools, has sent a cease and desist letter and a threat of further legal action to RIM on the basis that the new operating system’s name is too similar to Basis’s flagship product, BBx.
Index and Charles Dunstone buy into iZettle, the European Square
Carphone Warehouse co-founder Charles Dunstone and Index Ventures have invested €8.2m ($11.2m) in iZettle, Europe’s answer to mobile-payment firm Square.
Sweden’s iZettle operates a payment system for small or nomadic merchants – be they market traders, window cleaners or conference-goers – through a card reader that attaches to the bottom of an iPhone.
Supercomputing’s exascale arms race
A supercomputing race is taking place among leading nations to reap the economic benefits of reaching exaflop speeds, according to Steve Scott, formerly of Cray Inc and now Nvidia’s new chief technology officer.
“It’s really critical for industrial competitiveness, military superiority is not the most important thing anymore,” he told us, in the week Nvidia announced it would supply 18,000 of its Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to upgrade a supercomputer at the US’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Intel dissolves Digital Home
Intel has quietly ditched its Digital Home Group, which had championed the Smart TV category of internet-connected televisions – a target market for its Atom microprocessors.
The company made the high-profile appointment of Erik Huggers from the BBC in January to head what was described at the time as a “key strategic business for Intel”. An Intel spokeswoman said on Wednesday that Mr Huggers was remaining at Intel but Digital Home was not now considered a core business.
Tech news from around the web:
Research by Barclays has found that the Amazon’s Kindle E-readers will outsell the full-colour Kindle Fire in 2012, PaidContent reports. Barclays estimates that Amazon will sell 15.3m Kindle Fire tablets and 23.5m Kindle e-readers next year.
The death of Steve Jobs produced a wave of public grief. From accounts of his historical significance to highly personal reminiscences, it was a moment to commemorate a man who did more than anyone to shape the history of personal technology.
The death of Steve Jobs, announced tonight by Apple, was expected but still comes as a shock. There are very few business people who are truly irreplaceable but Mr Jobs was undoubtedly so.
Like many other people, I heard the news via his products – in my case through Twitter on an iPod Touch — and am writing this on a MacBook Air. Mr Jobs’ original vision of a world of personal computers came truer than even he imagined.
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