Branchenexperten prognostizieren für die zweite Hälfte des laufenden Geschäftsjahres, dass die Lieferzahlen von PC-Komponenten um mindestens 20 Prozent steigen werden.

Wegen Verstössen gegen den Datenschutz haben sechs europäische Länder Strafmassnahmen gegen den US-Internetriesen Google angekündigt. Das Unternehmen habe nach der Kritik der EU-Datenschutzbehörden nicht reagiert, teilte die französische Datenschutzbehörde Cnil am Dienstag in Paris mit, die in der EU bei dem Thema die Federführung hat. Google beharrt bisher darauf, dass seine Nutzungsbestimmungen mit dem EU-Recht in Einklang stehen.

Von Orange zu Sunrise: Sebastian Prange übernimmt bei Sunrise als neues Mitglied der Geschäftsleitung die neu geschaffene Funktion des Chief Sales Officers. Der 39-jährige Vertriebs-Experte ist in dieser Funktion verantwortlich für die gesamte Vertriebsorganisation des Privatkundengeschäfts von Sunrise, teilt das Unternehmen via Communiqué mit.

Mit Andreas Schrag hat Scout 24 Schweiz einen neuen Director Marketing unter Vertrag genommen. Der 39jährige Berner ersetzt beim Netzwerk von Online-Marktplätze Frank Gerber, der nach zwölf Jahren als Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) den Schritt in die Selbständigkeit tut.

Der US-amerikanische Online-Handelsriese Amazon wendet sich mit seinem Datenspeicherdienst im Netz nun verstärkt an Endnutzer. Amazon veröffentlichte ein Programm für Windows und Mac OS, mit dem die Anwender ihre Daten bei dem unternehmenseigenen Speicherdienst Cloud Drive besser verwalten können als bisher.

Der skandinavische Telekommunikationskonzern TeliaSonera legt den geplanten Verkauf seiner spanischen Tochter Yoigo auf Eis. Es habe sich kein Bieter gefunden, der bereit gewesen sei, für die 76,6 Prozent an Yoigo einen angemessenen Preis zu zahlen, teilte das Unternehmen am Dienstag mit.

Der Elektrohändler Niedermeyer GmbH ist pleite. Das Wiener Traditionsunternehmen hat beim Handelsgericht Wien ein Sanierungsverfahren ohne Eigenverwaltung beantragt, wie der Kreditschutzverband von 1870 (KSV) heute (Dienstag) mitteilte.

Einer der größten Apple-Investoren wendet sich immer stärker von dem iPhone-Produzenten ab. Der Fidelity Contrafund unter der Leitung des angesehenen Geldmanagers Will Danoff verringerte seinen Apple-Anteil in den ersten zwei Monaten des Jahres um zehn Prozent, wie aus dem am Montag veröffentlichten Monatsbericht des Fonds hervorgeht.

Studierende und Forschende des Research Instituts for Security in the Information Society (Risis) der Berner Fachhochschule haben ein Angriffsszenario via Smartphone auf eine E-Banking Applikation erarbeitet und dabei aufgezeigt, wie einfach diese manipuliert werden kann.

Das forschungsbasierte Management-Magazin Harvard Business Review (HBR) hat zum zweiten Mal nach 2010 eine Rangliste mit den wweltweit besten 100 CEOs (Chief Executive Officer) erstellt. Die Überraschung: Der bereits im Oktober 2011 verstorbene langjährige Apple-Chef Steve Jobs wurde heuer an die erste Stelle gehievt.

, Cubiez is an online marketplace for apps through which you install and then run a variety of apps. Cubiez is fairly new in its field, and therefore doesn't offer many apps yet. While its biggest rival Pokki includes hundreds of different apps, Cubiez has only a few dozen at the moment. There's no way to view Cubiez apps online, but you can check them all out by installing Cubiez and clicking on its taskbar icon. You can look at all available apps, only new apps, or apps you have installed. There is no way to view apps by category, but since not many apps are available, this doesn't make much of a difference. Cubiez sits on the leftmost side of your taskbar—right next to the Start button (if you still have one)—and each app you install adds an icon on the taskbar as well. This is nice at first, but when you've installed seven apps, it starts to get crowded, and there's no way to put Cubiez to sleep or collapse all the icons into one. Installing apps is a breeze: After choosing an app from the marketplace and clicking the install button, you can't even count to five before the app is installed and available for use. Cubiez and its apps are all highly responsive, and there were no unexplained lags, sluggishness or unresponsiveness in any that I've tried. Of all the apps Cubiez offers, about half are games. Among these, you'll find some big names such as Kingdom Rush, Little Alchemy, and Plants vs. Zombies, some classics such as Pacman, and some super-addictive ones such as Unicorn Robot Attack. Aside from games, you'll find useful apps such as Calculator, Facebook, Google Maps, Google Search, NewsHub (an RSS reader), and Weather. If you're looking for a specific app, you can use the search box to find it quickly, but note that search strings are case sensitive, so searching for "facebook" will yield no results. The apps all run in a small window that can be moved around the screen, but cannot be resized.

The Outlook.com calendar gets a fresh Metro face starting Tuesday, as Microsoft rolls out a major new upgrade to this fundamental component of its online service. According to a Microsoft , the new calendar will be available “around the world this week,” though, of course, your Outlook.com account will have to be upgraded first. A Metro-fied calendar was from the original Outlook.com rollout last year. Instead users were stuck with a pastel, old-school calendar view evocative of the 1990s. But the calendar view shown today sports the jewel-toned, crisp-cornered Metro look, matching up with SkyDrive and other Metro-fied components of Outlook.com. Underneath it all, says Microsoft, is a raft of improvements that should look familiar to anyone who’s using Google Calendar. According to Microsoft, creating events in the calendar will now take fewer clicks, and it’ll be easier to jump to specific days and events. Microsoft also emphasizes the connectivity of the new calendar. Obviously, it can sync calendars across Windows devices, and it also can connect to social networking services like LinkedIn and Facebook, and add the birthdays of people you know to your calendar. You can share your calendar with specific people via e-mail addresses, or create a link to your calendar for wider sharing, with adjustable editing and privacy settings. And, of course, you can import calendars from other services—Microsoft helpfully provides a link to show you how to export a Google Calendar to Outlook.com.

A company called Nuance Mobile is adding a whole new dimension to the mobile advertising market.  Its new “” service allows users to converse with the advertisements on their mobile devices.  Michael Thompson, EVP and GM of Nuance, hopes that engaging with consumers on this level will help the advertiser to interact with them in a more meaningful way. A Nuance voice-enabled ad prompts the reader to ask a question and responds accordingly.  It capitalizes on the advanced state of mobile technology to integrate natural language processing (NLP) into the ad experience.  NLP is used in a variety of applications, including Apple’s Siri app.  The idea behind using it in ads is that it will act like a friend or personal assistant, giving the reader input on queried topics. “Voice has already changed the mobile interface, making it faster and easier for consumers to discover and access information, and find people and content,” Thompson said. He continues, “Mobile advertising shouldn’t be any different, and should be designed specifically around the unique capabilities of the mobile device.”

keeps files in sync across different devices and platforms, and pits Amazon Cloud Drive head-to-head against rivals such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. However, businesses should steer clear of Amazon Cloud Drive. The Amazon Cloud Drive Sync app is available for Windows or Mac OS X. Similar to other cloud file syncing tools, the app places a folder on your PC. Any files saved to the designated folder are automatically synced to Amazon Cloud Drive, and instantly available from any device that can access Amazon Cloud. By default, the local Amazon Cloud Drive folder created on a Windows or Mac OS X PC includes sub-folders for Documents, Pictures, and Videos. Amazon doesn’t offer a very consistent experience across platforms, though. The Kindle Fire stores and accesses the data through separate tabs of the mobile OS: Docs, Photos, Videos, and Music. It can get a little confusing because a JPG file stored in the Documents sub-folder on a Windows or Mac OS X PC ends up in Photos on the Kindle Fire, while a video clip stored under Documents will be found in Videos. It makes sense, logically, but may throw people off because the files are not located in the same place from device to device.

I have no icons on my desktop. I have two wide-screen monitors totaling almost 4,000 horizontal pixels, and not a single icon— because one icon often begets many, ending up with a messy, disorganized desktop and crowding my beautiful wallpapers. But $10 utility Fences 2 has me rethinking my anti-icon stance.

have had their wishes granted courtesy of Mailbird, a new email client for the Windows desktop. Mailbird is a speedy, no-nonsense client that offers basic email functionality without all the clutter that power-user programs such as Outlook or Thunderbird can offer. In fact, Mailbird's so no-nonsense that the version available now only supports a single user account at a time, and that account has to be a Gmail or Google apps account. Support for additional services and multiple accounts are planned for further down the road, however. . It’s not clear how long Mailbird will be available as a beta product, but the company behind the app—also called Mailbird—is already offering preorders for Pro version subscriptions. Right now, you can purchase a year of Mailbird Pro for $9, with the regular price set to jump to $12 after the beta phase. Mailbird will also be available as a free, ad-supported version following the beta period. A Mailbird representative was unavailable for comment at this writing, so it’s not clear whether there will be any functional difference between the paid and free versions, other than the removal of ads. Free (and beta) users will also have a “sent from Mailbird” signature automatically attached to all their messages that cannot be removed.

A federal court's ruling against MP3 resale service ReDigi could be bad news for Apple and Amazon, who've both considered setting up their own stores for second-hand digital content. , U.S. District Court judge Richard Sullivan ruled that users aren't allowed to resell their old MP3 files under existing copyright law. The court granted a request by Capitol Records for summary judgment against RiDigi, which means there will be no trial. ReDigi itself is liable for secondary copyright infringement, and Capitol will likely seek payment for damages. ReDigi lets music owners sell their MP3 files, and lets buyers purchase those files for as low as $0.49 per track. RiDigi also offers a syndication service for artists that lets them collect 20 percent of all pre-owned music sales revenue. ReDigi argued that it doesn't technically copy music files, but instead transfers them to its own servers. To make sure the original owner doesn't hang onto a copy, RiDigi monitors the seller's computer for unauthorized tracks. Judge Sullivan didn't buy that argument, ruling that RiDigi was “distributing reproductions of the copyrighted code embedded in new material objects, namely, the ReDigi server in Arizona and its users’ hard drives.”

It’s official, and it’s been official for a while—Android is far and away the most popular smartphone OS in America. Ever since January 2011, when the platform surpassed RIM to take the top spot for the first time in comScore’s monthly market share rankings, Google’s operating system has continued to grow its user base, which accounts for 52 percent of the market as of this January. This growth has been created on the back of substantial software upgrades, in the form of Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean (Android 4.0 and 4.1, respectively), as well as increasingly impressive hardware from OEMs like Samsung, HTC, Sony, Motorola and LG. Last year’s Samsung Galaxy S III was the in total quarterly sales in years, according to research from Strategy Analytics, though the subsequent release of the iPhone 5 saw Apple retake the top spot quickly thereafter. It’s easy to find a host of reasons for Android’s ascendance among consumers—a wide variety of devices offers more choice to prospective buyers, stronger hardware and bigger screens appeal to fans of the latest and greatest, and as of Android 4.0 and 4.1, the interface is arguably more impressive than the latest version of Apple iOS.

A trademark infringement lawsuit against Facebook over its use of 'timeline' will go to trial before a jury, after a judge ruled that the company had failed to show that the trademark was generic or descriptive, or Facebook's use of it amounted to fair use. Timelines, a website to collaboratively record and share history, filed a complaint against Facebook in September, 2011, and sought a restraining order to bar Facebook from offering its Timeline service, but this was denied, according to records of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. The company was set up in January, 2007 and launched its Timelines.com website in 2009. It owns U.S. federal trademark registration numbers for "Timelines," "Timelines.com" and for its "Timelines" design mark, according to court papers. It also operates a website called LifeSnapz.com and other services. Facebook filed for a summary judgment on each of the claims of the plaintiff and on its own counterclaims, including cancellation of Timelines' registered marks, which was refused by the judge on Monday. The case is now set to proceed to trial before a jury on April 22.