Tablet-PCs wie das iPad von Apple werden einer Studie zufolge Laptop-Computer bei den Verkaufszahlen ab 2016 überholen. Die jetzt veröffentlichte Untersuchung der Marktforschungsfirma NPD kommt zu dem Schluss, dass Tablets in den kommenden Jahren zur treibenden Wachstumskraft auf dem Markt für tragbare Computer würden.

Der Software-Konzern SAP muss sich bei der geplanten Übernahme des US-Online-Marktplatzes Ariba länger als erwartet in Geduld üben. Die Übernahme könne voraussichtlich erst im vierten Quartal dieses Jahres abgeschlossen werden, teilte SAP mit.

Die Neuvergabe aller Mobilfunkfrequenzen an Sunrise, Orange und die Swisscom in der Auktion vom letzten Februar hat Folgen für Funkmikrofone und -kameras. Geräte, die auf gewissen Frequenzen senden, dürfen künftig nicht mehr verwendet werden.

Die Fusion der in Bern angesiedelten Bedag Informatik und der Wettinger AC Service (Schweiz) ist abgeschlossen. Die Verwaltungsräte beider Unternehmen stimmten der Fusion zu, wie via Medienmitteilung verlautet wird. Die Eintragung ins Handelsregister sei bereits erfolgt.

Eine Umfrage des Telekom-Riesen O2 kommt zum Ergebnis, dass Smartphones immer seltener zum Telefonieren verwendet werden. Das Gespräch ist mit durchschnittlich 12,12 Minuten pro Tag nur der fünfthäufigste Verwendungszeck für Smartphones. Internetsurfen, soziale Netzwerke, Spiele und Musik erhalten alle mehr Aufmerksamkeit von den Nutzern als Telefonate.

Micron schnappt sich für rund zwei Milliarden Euro den insolventen japanischen Rivalen Elpida. Etwa ein Drittel der Summe wird als Kaufpreis abgegolten, der Rest in Raten dient der Tilgung der Schulden von Elpida und soll bis zum Jahr 2019 in Raten abgestottert werden, heisst es.

Der deutsche IT-Vermieter Grenkeleasing mit Hauptsitz im Baden-Württembergischen Baden-Baden konnte sein Neugeschäft im ersten Halbjahr 2012 deutlich steigern. Das Volumen der neuen Leasing- und Factoringverträge stieg im ersten Quartal um fast ein Fünftel auf 490 Mio. Euro, wie das Unternehmen mitteilte.

Die Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (ZHAW), eine der grössten Schweizer Mehrsparten-Fachhochschulen, will künftig für die Modellierung, Publikation und Dokumentation ihrer Geschäftsprozesse auf die BPM-Lösung Xpert.ivy des Schwerzenbacher Software-Hauses Soreco setzen.

Die Deutsche Telekom könnte sich für ihre Pläne zum Bezahlen mit dem Smartphone einem Medienbericht zufolge eine Partnerschaft mit Google vorstellen. "Wir sind in Gesprächen mit anderen Anbietern in diesem Markt, und selbst eine Kooperation mit Google ist theoretisch möglich", sagte Telekom-Manager Thomas Kiessling der Finanznachrichtenagentur Bloomberg.

Der südkoreanische Elektronikkonzern Samsung hat im erbitterten Patentstreit mit Apple eine weitere Niederlage erlitten. Ein US-Gericht wies am Montag einen Antrag der Koreaner zurück, ein Verkaufsverbot für den Tablet-Computer Galaxy Tab 10.1 in den USA aufzuheben.

redletterdave writes "Research In Motion is in trouble. The BlackBerry maker has been suffering from an identity crisis for the last six months, which has resulted in mass layoffs, lots of job shuffling, dramatic drop-offs in market share and a quickly decaying portfolio for investors. But not according to Thorsten Heins! The newly-appointed CEO published an op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail on Tuesday, and also appeared on a radio program the same morning, to deliver one message: 'There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now.'"

An anonymous reader writes "If you thought that Facebook's recent unannounced change of its users' email address tied with their account to Facebook ones was bad, you'll be livid if you check your mobile phone contacts and discover that the change has deleted the email addresses of many of your friends. According to Facebook, the glitch was due to a bug in its application-programming interface, and causes the last added email address to be pulled and added to the user's phone Contacts. The company says they are working hard at fixing the problem, but in the meantime, a lot of users have effectively lost some of the information stored on their devices."

riverat1 writes "Sea level rise won't stop for several hundred years even if we reverse global warming, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. As warmer water is mixed down into the oceans, it causes thermal expansion of the water. Under the best emissions scenario, the expected rise is 14.2 cm by 2100; under the worst, 32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone. Any water pumped from aquifers or glacial/ice sheet melt is added to that."

Nerval's Lobster writes "Tech writer David Strom starts a discussion about how you should go about securing virtual machines for your organization. 'The need to protect physical infrastructure is well known at this point: most enterprises would balk at a network without any firewalls, intrusion prevention devices or anti-virus scanners. Yet these devices aren’t as well deployed in the virtual context. ... Take firewalls, for example. The traditional firewalls from Checkpoint or Juniper aren’t designed to inspect and filter the vast amount of traffic originating from a hypervisor running, say, ten virtualized servers. Because VMs can start, stop, and move from hypervisor to hypervisor at the click of a button, protective features have to be able to handle these movements and activities with ease and not set off all sorts of alarms within an IT department.' He goes through the main functional areas that need protection, and points out that many vendors make it difficult to price out a given security plan."

Zothecula writes "In the quest to develop implantable electronics to monitor the human body from within, flexibility and stretchability have been major hurdles. We've seen numerous developments including stretchable LED arrays, an implantable device for measuring the heart's electrical output, and an electrode array that melts onto the surface of the brain. Now researchers have developed technology that combines a porous polymer and liquid metal that allows electronics to bend and stretch to more than 200 percent their original size (abstract)."

MrSeb writes "The VideoLAN Project has pushed a beta version of VLC for Android to the Google Play Store. The beta brings most of the functionality of VLC for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X to Android in a native UI in the Android 4.0 Holo style. However, there are a few hitches. The beta release published to the Google Play Store today is only compatible with ARM systems that use the ARMv7 architecture set and support the NEON instruction set. That means that there are several devices — mostly those released before the Samsung Galaxy S in late 2010, and anything powered by Tegra 2 — that cannot run the current beta. Also, apparently due to a lack of North America-specific Android test devices, VLC for Android is currently not available from the US or Canadian Play Store. Both problems should be rectified soon, though." VLC is one of those impressive programs that just works with nearly any input thrown at it, and one of the first things I put on any computer. I hope the Android version retains pitch-controlled variable-speed playback, perhaps my favorite VLC feature, and something I miss on my tablet.

coondoggie writes "Want to run a successful high-tech company? Don't drop out of college. The myth of the brilliant Ivy League student who starts a business in his dorm room, drops out of school, and goes on to run a successful high-tech start-up for many decades to come is essentially just that: a myth. Despite a few high-profile exceptions — such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — the vast majority of CEOs running successful U.S. high-tech firms have college degrees, and more than half have at least one graduate degree."

An anonymous reader writes "There is a lot of controversy and a big hullabaloo about Southern California Edison and various other utilities around the country installing smart meters at residential homes. Various action groups claim that these smart meters transmit an unsafe amount of RF and that they are an invasion of privacy. The information out there seems rather spotty and inconsistent — what do you engineers out there think? Are these things potentially harmful? Are they an invasion of privacy?"

walterbyrd writes with a story at The Inquirer outlining the latest volley in the patent wars surrounding mobile hardware, this time aimed at the new Aus-built Nexus 7 tablet from Google by Nokia, in which the company's spokesman says, "Nokia has more than 40 licensees, mainly for its standards essential patent portfolio, including most of the mobile device manufacturers. Neither Google nor Asus is licensed under our patent portfolio. 'Companies who are not yet licensed under our standard essential patents should simply approach us and sign up for a license.'"

Hugh Pickens points out a report from Jamie Smith Hopkins that "The unusual nature of the 'derecho' is complicating efforts to get everyone's much-needed air conditioning up and running again as more than 1.4 million people from Illinois to Virginia still remain without power and power companies warn some customers could be without power for the rest of the week in the worst hit areas. Utilities don't have enough staff to handle severe-storm outages – the expense would send rates soaring – so they rely on out-of-state utilities to send help, says Stephen Woerner, Baltimore Gas and Electric's (BGE) chief operating officer. Hurricane forecasts offer enough advanced warning for utilities to 'pre-mobilize' and get the out-of-state assistance in place but the forecast for Friday's walloping wind was merely scattered thunderstorms. 'No utility was prepared for what we saw in terms of having staff available that first day,' says Woerner. But is it a given that a strong storm would cause this magnitude of damage to the electricity grid? 'Even without pursuing the extremely expensive option of burying all of the region's electrical lines, the utilities can and do take steps between bouts of severe weather to prevent outages,' writes the Baltimore Sun, adding that consumer advocates are concerned that utilities invest sufficiently in preventive maintenance. 'Tree trimming and replacement of old infrastructure — particularly in areas that have been shown to be vulnerable to previous storms — helps prevent outages.'"

sciencehabit writes "An investigating committee in Japan has concluded that a Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a whopping 172 papers over the past 19 years. Among other problems, the panel, set up by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, could find no records of patients and no evidence medication was ever administered. 'It is as if someone sat at a desk and wrote a novel about a research idea,' the committee wrote in a 29 June summary report."

wiredmikey writes "The popular Blackhole exploit kit, assumed to be created and maintained by an individual going by the online moniker of 'Paunch,' who continuously updates the browser exploit software, looks like it has just received another upgrade. The exploit works by infecting a user when they visit a Blackhole-infected site, and their browser runs the JavaScript code, usually via a hidden iframe. If the location or URL for the malicious iframe changes or is taken down, all of the compromised sites will have to be updated to point to this new location, making it hard for the attackers. To deal with this, the Blackhole JavaScript code on compromised sites now dynamically generates pseudo-random domains, based on the date and other information, and then creates an iframe pointing to the generated domain. Moreover, the kit's recent upgrade also added a new attack. According to Sophos, sometime in early June Blackhole was updated to include an attack that targets a flaw in Microsoft's XML Core Services, which remains unpatched. Unfortunately, the changes prove once again that the criminal economy online is alive and well."