Laut einem Bericht der Nachrichtenagentur Bloomberg befindet sich der US-PC-Hersteller Dell in Gesprächen mit zwei privaten Investmentgesellschaften über eine eigene Übernahme. Die Aktie legte daraufhin deutlich zu und wurde sogar kurzfristig vom Handel ausgesetzt. Dem Bericht zufolge seien die Gespräche jedoch noch in einem Vorstadium.

Nachdem der mobile Browser des chinesischen Suchmaschinendienstes Baidu bisher nur in Asien genutzt wurde, geht er nun auf Expansionskurs: Mit Hilfe des französischen Service-Betreibers France Telecom soll er nun Afrika erobern.

Die grenzübergreifende Konsolidierung zwischen den Telekomkonzernen soll nach Plänen der EU-Kommissarin Neelie Kroes attraktiver gestaltet werden. Über diese Partnerschaften soll das notwendige Kapital für neue Technologien zusammengetragen werden. Einen EU-weiten Regulator werde es dennoch nicht geben.

Der Firmenmitbegründer und langjährige Kopf des ERP-Riesen SAP, Hasso Plattner, sieht den Walldorfer Konzern auch künftig als eigenständiges Unternehmen. Man sei klar heraus aus der Spekulationszone, wird der SAP-Mitbegründer heute vom deutschen Handelsblatt zitiert.

Medienmilliardär Rupert Murdoch kauft sich fünf Jahre nach seinem Einstieg bei Sky Deutschland nun auch die Mehrheit des Bezahlsenders. Der 81 Jahre alte Unternehmer übernimmt über eine Tochter seines Medienimperiums News Corp. für knapp 400 Mio. Euro weitere Anteile des nach wie vor in den roten Zahlen steckenden Konzerns. Er sichert dem ehemaligen Pay-TV-Sender Premiere zudem einen Bankkredit ab und verlängert ein Gesellschafterdarlehen, wie Sky am Montag mitteilte.

Die Begeisterung der Verbraucher für Tablets wird so schnell nicht vergehen, sind sich Marktforscher überzeugt. Die PC-Branche muss sich auf eine neue Realität einstellen. Allein im Weihnachtsquartal fielen die Umsätze mit PCs und Laptops um mehr als fünf Prozent.

Per 1. Januar sind in der Schweiz die neuen Gewährleistungsbestimmungen beim Kaufvertrag in Kraft getreten. Über die erwarteten Auswirkungen dieser neuen Bestimmungen für die KonsumentInnen ist zwar ausführlich berichtet worden, aber nach Meinung des Branchenverbandes Swico werden in der Öffentlichkeit jedoch immer wieder Rechtsbegriffe falsch verwendet oder gar verwechselt, so dass eine grosse Unsicherheit entstanden sei.

Mögliche Altlasten aus seiner Zeit als Marketingchef der Telekom Austria haben für Google Germany-Chef Stefan Tweraser nun erste Konsequenzen. "Google hat sich mit Stefan Tweraser darauf verständigt, dass er seine Aufgaben für Google Deutschland zunächst ruhen lässt", zitiert Spiegel Online einen Firmensprecher. Sales Director Alastair Bruce wird seine Agenden vorerst übernehmen.

Samsung hat neue Zahlen zur Performance seiner "Galaxy S"-Reihe an Android-Smartphones bekanntgegeben. Die Flagship-Reihe hat demnach die 100-Millionen-Marke durchbrochen.

Die US-amerikanische iPhone- und iPad-Erfinderin Apple hat die Bestellmengen von Komponenten für das iPhone 5 zurückgefahren. Grund sei die schwächer als erwartet ausgefallene Nachfrage nach dem Gerät, wie Insider betonen.

I’ve been a fan of the ell, make that one thing now, thanks to vipSync. First, a little background on : It's a relationship manager more than a contacts app. It allows you to maintain your contacts, classifying them into one or more “orbits”, and to track connections among your contacts. Just as I learned when using the Sage ACT database (which was co-developed by Mike Muhney, founder of VIPOrbit), VIPOrbit is only valuable if you actually use it. If you dabble in it here and there, it probably seems underwhelming. However, if you make it your primary contact, calendar, and communications hub, its ability to keep your life and calendar in order is impressive. What are the two major issues with VIPOrbit? First, there’s no way to make it the default app for contacts, calendar, placing calls, or any of its other functions on your iPhone. Unfortunately, that's a limitation of iOS itself and unless Apple changes the way apps can interact with its OS, there’s no fix. In the meantime, making proper use of VIPOrbit requires more conscious effort because calls, texts, calendar events, and other relevant actions will use the built-in iOS apps by default.

for anyone who routinely travels with a tablet. , yet fits in your wallet. . On the CES show floor, near-final production samples were on display, and I was lucky enough to get a sample for review. The ChargeCard is no larger than a credit card, and barely any thicker. I put mine in my wallet and promptly forgot it was there (until I needed it—see below).

PCs were upstaged by tablets, smartphones and TVs at this year’s International CES show, with some companies maintaining a smaller presence or holding back product announcements for a later date. There were fewer product announcements from PC makers compared to previous years, with in Barcelona Feb. 25-28. “I think the timing of CES was bad this year for the PC cycle, and several did mention MWC as a venue for their next announcements,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, who attended the show.

Cyber attacks of all kinds are on the rise. It is a trend you ignore at your own peril. National Security Agency and U.S. cyber-command chief Keith Alexander said in July that Internet attacks of all sorts surged 44 percent in 2011 and are responsible for what he terms the "." In a world where you can to start your attack, and in a world where a criminal enterprise industry has developed to support amplifying attacks in progress, it is important to understand that these types of attacks are simply not going away. Are you ready for them? Are you considering the right points? Here are four strategies to help your organization prepare for and defend against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) events in the future. Most of us develop systems on strict budgets. There is a general resistance among financial types as well as information executives to not pay for unused capacity. This makes good sense in and of itself—why waste your dollars on capacity, either bandwidth or compute, that you are not using? Many companies scale their systems to match a predictable but legitimate peak, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or another annual peak load. In a DDoS attack, however, your site or resource can experience loads many times greater than even your highest peak activity—on the order of 10 or 20 times, if not more. Mind you, I'm not suggesting you budget capacity to pay hackers to blast your network with packets. While you are specing bandwidth and compute resources, though, it makes sense to give yourself a healthy margin of error, even on top of your peak.

With the holiday shopping season behind us, it's clearer than ever tablets are cutting deeply into traditional PC sales, even after the launch of Windows 8. According to Gartner, PC sales fell by 4.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to the same quarter a year earlier. Lenovo and Asus actually managed to grow their PC shipments by 8.2 percent, and 6.4 percent, respectively, but they couldn't make up for sales declines for other PC makers, including a massive 20.9 percent dip in shipments for Dell. The problem, according to Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa, is that consumers have become less reliant on PCs for casual use. So while families may keep a shared PC at home for work and creative tasks, they're buying new tablets instead of replacing their aging laptops.

When , the service’s distinguishing factor was that it provided unlimited audiobook listening for a flat $25 monthly fee. On Monday, the company changed course and switched to a two-tier pricing model for a specific number of books. now charges $15 a month for one audiobook from its 25,000-plus book catalog, or $23 a month for two books. Those prices just happen to coincide exactly with what Audible.com charges, although the Amazon-owned Audible service offers nearly four times as many titles. (And like with Audible.com, you can purchase books a la carte, although the Audiobooks.com site doesn’t make it easy to find out much about how that works.) Alongside the change, the company said that its research indicated most people only listen to one or two books a month, so its new pricing model opens the door for more customers.

A county in Texas is planning to cut its library system's connection to the printed page by going totally digital in the coming months. to establish a bookless library system. The new system—called BiblioTech, a wordplay on the Spanish term for library: biblioteca—would be the first public library system in the nation to go bookless. "It's not a replacement for the [city] library system, it's an enhancement," Wolff added.

Fiddling with the Registry is old hat to anyone conversant with Windows, but Microsoft's Surface RT—well, that's a tablet with a specialized version of Windows. Surely it has no Registry to hack, right? Wrong—and stop calling me Shirley. (Dang, that joke just doesn't work in print.) It turns out that you can indeed access the Registry of a Surface RT tablet, and one of the first discovered tweaks can greatly reduce the lag time between touching the screen and getting a response. Let me just pause right here and note that if you've never noticed any lag on your Surface, or it doesn't bother you, it's probably not worth monkeying with the Registry. As always, any changes you make therein can have undesirable results, so I don't recommend this to anyone who's not an intermediate or advanced user.

Just when you thought name-brand Android tablets couldn't get any cheaper, Asus and a handful of other vendors have limboed below the $150 mark. Asus waited until just after CES to announce the Memo Pad ME172V, a 7-inch Android tablet scheduled for release in the U.S. in April priced at $149. Although the screen size is the same as Asus' Nexus 7, its specs are inferior. It has an 1024-by-600-pixel resolution display, a 1GHz Via WM8950 CPU, which is based on the single-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, and either 8 or 16 GB of storage. By comparison, Google's Nexus 7 has a 1280-by-800-pixel screen and 16GB of storage, and runs on a quad-core Tegra 3 chip. The Memo Pad is also a tiny bit thicker and heavier (at 0.82 pounds) than the Nexus 7. The good news is that the Memo Pad does include a microSD slot for 16GB of added storage and a 1-megapixel front-facing camera. For software, the tablet runs a gently-modified version of Android 4.1, with the same app dock offered in the Nexus 7. Asus is also offering 5GB of online storage along with the tablet. A keyboard dock accessory will not be available for the tablet, so users will have to use the on-screen keyboard to type, Asus said in a statement.

Samsung on Monday Android smartphone was released. The first Samsung Galaxy S topped 24 million shipments, with the first 10 million in seven months. In 2011, the Galaxy S II reached 40 million shipments, and the first 10 million in five months. Then in 2012, S III shipments topped 20 million in 100 days, and now stand at more than 40 million. The milestones refer to global channel sales, also known as shipments to network operators and resellers, and not to actual sales to customers. Samsung is the top smartphone manufacturer in the U.S., according to the latest Samsung as the top smartphone manufacturer too, with 29 percent of the market; those figures place Samsung above Nokia with 24 percent and Apple with 10 percent. It’s not just Samsung’s Galaxy S line that contributed to its success. As Farhad Manjoo , the company is flooding the market with various types of devices until it is able to identify what sticks with customers. This year, in the S line, Samsung also launched the Galaxy S III mini, and the Galaxy S II Plus, which sits between the S III mini and the S III in terms of specifications.