David Needle

SAN FRANCISO — ”We won’t all be using smartphones in 10 years.” That may have been the most sobering comment at the one-day Smartphone Summit conference here Monday. The gathering of communications and mobile device executives and developers featured positive comments and analysis of the current and future state of so-called smartphones. Ironically, though, there […]

Google scored a majority victory in its nasty battle with Microsoft over the hiring of a former Microsoft executive. A Washington State judge ruled today the hiring can proceed. The only stipulation was that the employee, Kai-Fu Lee, who is slated to head up Google’s research office in China, cannot recruit from Microsoft. ”This ruling […]

Vendors readily talk the talk in promoting the ”value proposition” of server blades: Just add a blade to the chassis and scale to as much processing as you need. But do blades walk the walk in delivering the goods? ”Many users are clearly disappointed in blades’ failure to deliver the benefits promised,” said Bob Gill, […]

Tech employees sending out trade secrets to competitors. Government workers e-mailing hate mail and pornography. Private financial and health information routinely sent out over the Web unencrypted and unprotected. These are but a few of the startling assertions in the new book, The Insider: A True Story Reveals the Threat to Intellectual Property From High-Tech […]

Summer slowdown? Don’t tell the folks at Intel. The chip giant has several announcements planned over the next 10 days, internetnews.com has learned. Details are sketchy, but expect to hear news in the coming weeks related to Intel’s up-and-coming dual core processors, and how fast Intel is ramping up to meet demand. Expect an update […]

You have to hand it to Andy Grove. Lost in the buzz over Apple’s mega-deal to switch to Intel chips is the clever groundwork laid by Intel’s recently retired chairman and CEO. Andy Grove stunned more than a few observers by praising the Macintosh in a 1998 interview with Time magazine when he said the […]

Blount International, Inc. had a problem. Blount’s Sporting Equipment Group (part of the company’s three manufacturing divisions) had a lot of great customer information in two disparate databases and no simple, secure way to consolidate without a lot of IT people being involved and access to its team sales team limited. Sales people typically had […]

CIO Robert Eads is a satisfied customer — and he almost can’t believe it. “In this era where most of the technology is hyped and doesn’t work as promised, it was a breath of fresh air to see something that does.” Eads, CIO of Atlanta-based E-Gatematrix, is talking about an Internet caching solution from startup […]

Any company with 300 facilities across North America represents a lot of purchasing power — and a challenge to coordinate it all. Smurfit-Stone Container Corp., the world’s largest integrated producer of paperboard and paper-based packaging products, faced just such a challenge following the 1998 merger of Jefferson Smurfit and Stone Container which (along with last […]

While it pales in comparison to the terrible human toll that cost thousands of lives, businesses in the surrounding area of the September 11 terrorist attacks area suffered immense damage. In addition to the tremendous loss of expertise and skills of workers killed in the disaster, businesses lost physical assets, data and the information technology […]