Cynthia Harvey

Everyone expected Apple to unveil the iPad Mini at its Tuesday press event, but the company gave attendees a bit of a surprise with a host of other new or updated products as well. The company rolled out a new version of iBooks, two new iMacs, the Fusion drive, an updated MacBook, a new Mac […]

On Tuesday, Facebook reported its first good financial news in a long time. The company’s third quarter revenue grew 32 percent to hit $1.26 billion, beating analyst expectations of 29 percent revenue growth. The Wall Street Journal’s Matt Jarzemsky reported, “Facebook Inc.’s shares surged on Wednesday toward their biggest daily gain since the company’s initial […]

Multiple vendors, including Microsoft, IBM and Cloudera, have made major Hadoop-related announcements this week. And VMware’s Serengeti Project is bringing new virtualization capabilities to the open source big data platform. IBM made its Hadoop announcement at its Information On Demand and Business Analytics Forum. Joab Jackson from IDG News Service noted, “the company announced a […]

Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet will hit store shelves Friday, but several reviewers have already had a chance to try out the device. Their verdicts are mixed, with most finding things to praise and things to pan in Microsoft’s foray into the hardware market. Reuters reported, “Tech bloggers and other reviewers praised Microsoft Corp’s new Surface […]

On Monday, Amazon Web Services’ North Virginia data center experienced yet another outage, knocking many popular websites offline. By Tuesday morning, most of the company’s cloud computing services had been restored. “Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on Monday that resulted in downtime for many popular web destinations and services. Issues began at a Northern […]

On Monday, Yahoo turned in a solid financial report for the third quarter. In her first quarterly conference call, new CEO Marissa Mayer laid out her plan to focus the company’s efforts on mobile. Wall Street responded positively, sending Yahoo’s stock up. In The New York Times, Nicole Perlroth observed, “Largely because of a long-awaited […]

At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, senior VP Peter Sondergaard predicted that tech spending will continue to rise in the coming years. He also noted that most tech spending now occurs outside of the IT department and “Every budget is becoming an IT budget.” InformationWeek’s Eric Lundquist reported, “For those interested in trying to track IT spending, […]

Open source cloud computing vendor Rackspace has announced the availability of a new cloud storage offering. Called “Cloud Block Storage,” the service will use a combination of traditional hard drives and solid state drives (SSDs) to meet the needs of customers with I/O-intensive applications. According to ComputerWeekly’s Archana Venkatraman, “Open cloud provider Rackspace has launched […]

Later this week, Microsoft will officially debut its Windows 8 operating system, and the success or failure of the new OS could have huge implications for the tech industry. However, many people are criticizing the Windows 8 interface, particularly its lack of the familiar “start” button. The New York Times’ Nick Wingfield reported, “Jakob Nielsen, […]

HP has launched a new product aimed at moving the enterprise help desk into the cloud. Called HP Service Anywhere, the new software as a service (SaaS) offering adds features not available in HP’s traditional IT service management (ITMS) software. According to Craig Galbraith with Channel Partners, “HP says Service Anywhere provides comprehensive service desk […]