HP second to iPad?

So says the research firm NPD Group. Sales for the failed HP Touchpad were second only to the all mighty iPAD for 2011. In the firm’s estimation, HP held 17 percent share of U.S. tablet brands, followed by Samsung at 16 percent, Asus at 10 percent, and Motorola and Acer at 9 percent. Overall, consumers in the United States snatched up some 1.2 million non-iPad tablets from January through October, according to The NPD Group’s data. Collectively, those tablets generated an estimated $415 million at retail, with accessories bringing that total to around $700 million. To put the numbers of all the other non Apple tablets in perspective Apple sold some 11.12 million iPads in its fiscal 2011 fourth quarter, a 166 percent unit increase over the same quarter in 2010.

FCC says no to AT&T T-Mobile deal

The FCC has made a decision and it seems that they have agreed with the US Department of Justice and will say no to the agreed merger between the company's. The FCC said that the deal would lead to an unprecedented concentration of the mobile market in one company. In the report the FCC also doubted AT&T's claim that with the proposed merger it would make the roll-out of 4G faster. The FCC also did not agree with AT&T's claim that the merger would result in more jobs. The FCC made a statement that the opposite would happen. With this latest blow to the proposed deal AT&T has one last chance to change the outcome. The FCC is now required to send the merger request to a hearing before an administrative law judge, where AT&T and T-Mobile USA will have the opportunity to argue against the FCC and see if it can complete the deal.

AT&T Hacked???

AT&T recently announced that a shadow organization had attempted to obtain some customer information. The AT&T spokesman said that the organization tried to use some kind of custom autoscript that tried to determine if customer's telephone numbers were linked to online AT&T accounts. AT&T said that no accounts were breached and it only affected less than 1 percent, or 1 million customers, of the wireless accounts. AT&T said they were going to do further investigation to figure out what they were trying to do and how. It seems that the goal of the organization was a form of phishing that they were going to send messages to customers pretending to be from AT&T and steal credit card and other personal information.

When will Apple release the next batch of products???

According to sources not that long. The website iLounge has some interesting new rumors from a reported reliable source. That source says that we should expect the iPad 3 to launch in March and that it will be approximately 0.7 mm thicker than the iPad 2 due to the need to incorporate a dual light bar system for the higher -resolution display. The next iPhone should have a summer launch and carry a 4-inch display. The new iPhone will be 8 mm longer than the current form factor and not the teardrop shape design that earlier rumors has reported. The source also said that a new MacBook form factor thinner in design than the current one will be released sometime in 2012. All in all it seems like Apple is looking to get the next batch of products out to consumers to keep its lead in the market.

Triumph of the Nerds Part 3 Summary

In 1971 Xerox started a think tank in Palo Alto, Ca. called PARC. The goal of PARC was to think of the future of computing and how to dominate the market. For years they developed and built a computer they called "Alto." It cost them $10,000 to build and was never sold to the public. The Alto computer was unique because it had a graphical user interface or GUI. Unlike the current leader IBM that ran on the disk operating system or DOS Alto had a nice GUI that let the user move around a mouse on a screen and click it to select documents or other items. They could then do whatever they wanted to it like copy it to a floppy disk by dragging the file over to the destination and dropping it in the folder. This went way beyond what anyone at the time was using with the keyboard based typing input of DOS. The Alto computer was also able to connect to other computers via an Ethernet that was also ahead of its time. The Alto had a printer connected to it that was able to print out what the user viewed on screen. This went beyond the normal dot matrix printers of the time.

One of the co-founders of Apple computers Steve Jobs eventually took a tour of PARC and saw the Alto computer. It was after this viewing that he decided that a GUI on a computer was the way to go and the future of the personal computer. He made it his goal to make a computer that used a GUI interface and not the text based interface of DOS. IBM was taking a big chunk of sales away from the Apple II so Apple needed a better competitor. Steve Jobs called the next computer Lisa and wanted it to have a GUI like what he saw on the Xerox ALTO computer. The Lisa eventually came out in the year 1983 and cost a staggering $9,995 dollars. It was not a commercial success because of the high price compared to the IBM computers even with the fancy GUI interface. Jeff Raskin then came up with a lower priced computer for Apple that he called the Macintosh. Raskin's idea was to sell the Macintosh for around $600 dollars closing the gap on the IBM machines. Steve Jobs took over the project and using the ideas from Lisa came up with the machine.

The Macintosh was finally released to much fan fair on January 24 in 1984. It was accompanied with a 15 million dollar advertising campaign that had a Super bowl ad. It was sold at the price of $1,995 half of which was pure profit for Apple. The Macintosh became the first affordable PC with a GUI interface. After an initial surge by last 1984 sales of the Machintosh were slow. It did not have a killer ap for the system and Apple needed to find a way to bring back up sales. They decided to work with Microsoft to come up with a software package to be sold for the Mac. Later they decided to talk with John Warnock who had founded a company called Adobe. Adobe was working on a program that would enable you to print out exactly what you saw on your screen. At the time because of the limits of the software and dot matrix printers this was not possible. Warnock, who was at one time a member of PARC, came up with what he called laser printing. With this new technology it lead to a new business called desktop publishing and led to a big boon for Apple. It was not cheap to buy the laser printers so it never grew into a larger market for Apple. Apple was floundering as a company and needed to turn things around. John Sculley, who was originally hired by Steve Jobs from PepsiCo, came up with new ideas to turn around Apple. Unfortunately for Steve Jobs those ideas did not include him being with the company. The Apple board decided to use Sculley's ideas and Jobs was forced out of the company he had founded.

Another development also doomed Apple. With there partnership with Microsoft Bill Gates saw another opportunity for his company to expand. Gates saw the future of a GUI interface and began work on one. At first they used a GUI on top of there DOS OS that they called Windows. It was very rough and at first did not work very well. Apple saw Windows and tried to sue Microsoft for using an interface that looked like Mac. Eventually Apple lost the suit and Microsoft was able to continue to work on Windows. Six years later in 1990 they released a version of Windows they called Windows 3. This was the first Windows OS that was exactly like Mac. It was an instant hit selling 3 million copies in the first year. Windows 3 led to Microsoft being the computer OS standard. Because of the nice GUI interface and wealth of programs Windows outraced all the competitors. Microsoft became the software company in the world while Apple was left struggling along and trying to find a new vision without Jobs at the helm.

Google launches Online music store

Google has finally released their answer to iTunes and iCloud. The Google music service lets users upload about 20,000 songs into cloud storage and play them on any computer, even in iOS, or on an Android smartphone running version 2.2 or better. What's more unlike Apple Google will not charge you for the service. You will still have to deal with your phone contractor for your data usage but Google will not tak on anything else for using the service. Like Apple Google will also have a online music store that you can purchase songs to store in the cloud. A total of eight million songs are available for purchase from Universal, EMI and Sony. Google has also integrated the Google + service with the music store and you can share your purchased music one time with your friends. Google will also have a free song of the day that you can add to your collection.

Microsoft to change Windows Update for New Windows 8

Say goodbye to the pop-up dialog box asking you to restart your computer after updating Windows. In a recent blog post on its site Microsoft has given some details on the new updating procedure for Windows 8. You now will get a restart notification on your login screen. Windows 8 will consolidate all updates for a month period in one restart. When needed you will get the notification on your login screen. If you do not do so after a 3 day period Windows 8 will do it for you. The big plus is that it will not do it if you are running critical applications. If you are Windows 8 will the restart the next time you login (to prevent data loss). You will than be given 15 minutes to save your data, and then the restart will take place. This seems like a positive change to not have any annoying pop-ups during presentations or while playing games on your windows machine. Once a month seems reasonable and if you are smart the changes wont matter to you because you will not be using the automatic install of windows update anyway.

Carbonite to add more Features in new plans

The new version 5 of Carbonite will give home users some additional features. Carbonite will still offer the basic Home storage plan but it now costs $59 dollars per year instead of $55. For that price you get unlimited storage but no local backup--and by default, it will not automatically select video files and some other files nested within a folder. New in this version is the $99 dollar HomePlus and the $149 dollar HomePremium. In Home Plus you get the ability to backup external hard drives attached to your PC, as well as create an image of your system to a local hard drive. HomePremium gives you that plus what Carbonite calls there Courier service. With this additional feature Carbonite will overnight a physical copy of your data to you for quick restore. This way if you can not get onto the internet you can still get your computer back up and running.

Carbonite really seems set on giving home users no excuse to not back up files. For $59 dollars to you get a nice service that with a little work by the users keep your files safe. If you want to pay a little more a year you get some new cool features that really make it easy for you to back up and restore you home computer.

Triumph of the Nerds part 2...

IBM was started by Tom Watson and Tom Watson Jr. They were the big player in the server market and they wanted to get into the growing PC market. An typical IBM employee worked Monday to Friday starting at 8 O'Clock and ending the day at 5 O'Clock. They have to wear white shirts with starched collars with garters on the legs to keep the socks high. They had a way of working you had to follow and they even had a song book full of songs called, "Songs of IBM." They had a corporate culture unique to them. For a big company like them to notice Apple and the growing success of the PC you know it had to be going well.
In August of 1979 IBM enlisted Bill Lowe to head the team that would make the first IBM PC. Bill and his team in Florida had to come up with a way to make an IBM fast to not loose too much of the market to competitors. His idea was to go against common IBM thinking and make it open architecture and use off the shelf components to make the PC. They still had one problem. They needed both a computer language and an Operating System for the computer to work. They had to find somebody to license it to them. They looked at Gary Kildall and Bill Gates to come up with this software. Kildall had CPM which at the time was the first and largest OS. Bill Gates had the biggest computer language in Basic. They needed both but they first talked to Bill Gates.
Bill Gates had a meeting with IBM and told them he did not have a OS. He told IBM to talk to Kildall because he already had one in CPM. When IBM went to Kildall's house they were told to wait around for Kildall and had to talk to his wife. When she would not sign the non disclosure agreement, or NDA, IBM walked away and talked to Gates again. Gates being the great business man he was leaped at the second chance. Paul Allen who worked for Gates at the time knew of another OS made by a man named Tim Patterson. His program was called QDOS or quick and dirty dos. It was almost identical to CPM because Patterson had reversed engineered his OS from it. He could not license the OS to Microsoft because he worked for a company called Seattle Computer Products or SCP. Bill Gates and Microsoft paid SCP $50,000 for the unlimited use of Qdos. It turned out to be a great deal for Microsoft because they in turn sold the licenses to each computer for $50 dollars.
So now that Microsoft had both parts needed for IBM they started to make the IBM PC. They called it "The Floridian Project" and the anticipation for it was big in the PC world. The IBM would release the computer on August 12, 1981 and eventually sold 2 Million PC's. The killer app was a spreadsheet program called Lotus 1-2-3 and IBM quickly gained 50% of the PC market. IBM was king but they did make some crucial mistakes along the way.
IBM did not buy the OS from Gates and did not prevent him from licensing it to other companies. They only paid Gates a fee to use it on the computers and he could do that with anyone else he so wanted. Intel made the CPU for the IBM computer and like Microsoft they too could sell the CPU to anyone that wanted one. With those two key components open to competitors it was only a matter of time before somebody came along and take on IBM.
That company was Rod Canion and Compaq. Compaq could get all the parts it needed for a PC off the shelf and could get the software from Microsoft. What they could not get was the ROM-BIOS that was proprietary to IBM. Compaq had to use a technique called "clean room reverse engineering" to copy the IBM ROM-BIOS legally. Eventually they succeeded and the first IBM "Clone" computer was made. Since Compaq did not have the high costs of IBM they could sell the computer a lot less to consumers. It became a huge success and eventually other computer makers also started to sell IBM clone computers. IBM was seeing its market share sink. They had to come up with a way to gain back what they had lost.
IBM came with with the next IBM called computer called the OS2. Unlike the previous IBM PC the OS2 was more closed ended and did not use off the shelf computer parts. They wanted a proprietary OS for it and went to Microsoft to get it. Microsoft and IBM started to work on the new OS together. At the same time Microsoft was working on a new OS that they were calling Windows. Microsoft claims to have told IBM to use Windows and not OS2 for there next computer. IBM did not like that idea and the relationship started to crumble. The closed down buttoned culture of IBM did not mesh well with the young upstart free wheeling Microsoft. Eventually Bill Gates decided to stick with his OS called Windows and dump IBM. IBM was not happy with this decision and did not make an IBM that had Microsoft software on it.
The Relationship between IBM and Microsoft was an interesting one. It lasted 10 years and made both companies a lot of money. IBM became the biggest PC manufacturer because of it but because of some mistakes also cost them a lot of money in the long run. Because IGM did not buy the OS from Microsoft or make sure Microsoft could not license it to anybody else IBM's time in the sun was short lived. Eventually it because the OS and not the Hardware that drove the personal computer business and let Microsoft become one of the leaders of a one hundred billion dollar industry and IBM left in the dust.

Microsoft to start selling new Windows Phones

At a press event in New York City Microsoft announced new "Mango" phones for AT&T and T-Mobile. For T-Mobile they announced the $100 HTC Radar 4G that comes with a front facing camera with a silver metal body. For AT&T they announced the $50 dollar Samsung Focus Flash that has a smaller size and screen. For $200 dollars you can get your hands on the Samsung Focus S that comes with a slimmer design and a nicer screen. They had no word on when Verizon will start getting the new phones. AT&T on there own has announced the release of the much anticipated HTC Titan Windows phone. The massive 4.7 inch touch screen phone will be available on Nov. 20 for $200 dollars. It also comes with 512 MB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage, a 1.5 GHz single core processor, an eight megapixel camera.

It seems like Microsoft is getting ready for its big push to gain a foothold in the mobile phone market. The big question is with so many good options already who going to make a move to Windows when everybody already knows about Apple and Android?

HP decides webOS fate on Nov. 8th???

It seems like the world will finally know what HP is going to do with its webOS platform. HP is hosting a Nov. 8th meeting where a variety of things are going to be discussed. Sources have said that at this meeting HP is going to finally decide what it is going to do with the platform it acquired from Palm. The HP tablet was killed off in one of that last moves the ex CEO Leo Apotheker did before leaving. New CEO Meg Whitman has taken over and has said that HP is going to stay in the tablet business with an agreement with Microsoft and the new Windows 8 platform. HP could announce it will sell of the webOS (which has some rumored bidders as Oracle, Amazon, Research In Motion, IBM, and Intel),license the software to other companies for their own devices, or shut down the unit entirely and keep the patents they acquired. Whatever the decision it seems we might all finally learn the fate of webOS on November 8th. Stay tuned.

HP now considering sale of webOS?

It looks like HP just can not let the failure of its Palm acquisition go. Word is that HP is seeking advise from Bank of America Merrill Lynch whether or not to sell the webOS unit. HP paid 1.2 Billion dollars in 2010 for the OS from Palm. They had used the OS in the failed Touchpad product. Some analysts say that HP could get anywhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. A far cry from what they paid for the OS but at this point HP should try to get all they can back on there failed experiment.

Triumph of the Nerds Part 1 summary

In the early 80's nobody really knew what a computer was. Many people probably never saw a computer in person. The only real computers were called mainframe computers and they took up whole rooms in size. They were used by large companies to do basic things like billing. They used a special code called binary that only worked with 1's and 0's. All of the data had to be input into them by long stretches of tape or by flipping switches on the front. It took people to come up with a computer language for the computer to take off. The first language was called Cobal and it was followed by Fortran and Basic.

The computer's next big problem was the size of the computer. Nobody would want anything that took up the size of a large room. It took a company called Intel to develop a microprocessor. Intel was founded by Gordon Moore and they shrunk down the size of the processor by placing millions of transistors on a single chip. Now computers instead of taking up an entire room could fit on a large desk. After this discovery people started to work on how to make a computer that normal people could buy. Ed Roberts was that man. He had a small computer calculator company called MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He came up with the first P.C. and called it the Altair. It was designed as a kit that the buyer had to put together. If you did not do it correctly it did not work. It was a large box that had a front panel on it that had a number of switches on it to input the data. It had no external display and had no other inputs or outputs for anything. If you flipped the right switches in the correct order a light would blink on the display telling you did the process correctly. It needed a basic interpreter to do anything useful on it not requiring the switches.

Enter Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They worked on an interpreter for the Altair. After a successful demonstration to Ed Roberts Gates left Harvard and started a company with Allen called Microsoft. After the basic interpreter was introduced by them people were able to attach terminals to the Altair and start programing programs for it. Many of the programs were simple games or other non-useful things. Nobody really had anything useful for the computer to do other than look nice. It took another man to make that happen.

After the mild success of the Altair other people wanted to make computers as well. Two such men were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They started a computer company out of a garage called Apple and set about to make a better computer. The first one was called the Apple 1 and had no case or terminal. Jobs wanted the computer to be easier for people to buy and use so Wozniak started to work on making it smaller and cheaper. The Apple 2 was introduced two years later at the West Coast Computer Faire run by Jim Warren. They were able to get money from a venture capitalist and made 1,000 Apple 2's. They became a hit and soon became the bells of the ball. They soon had all the money they could every want and had everyone touting there work.

After the release of the Apple 2 many more people started to use a P.C. The main problem with it was it still had no real purpose or application to make you buy one. It took Dan Brinklin a professor at Harvard to come up with it. He and a programmer named Bob Franston came up with a spreadsheet program called Visicalc. It took the work one person could work a whole day on into something so simple a computer could do it in seconds. It changed how businesses ran companies and helped fuel the economic boom of the 80's. The Apple 2 became so popular in allowed Apple to go public in 1980 and made Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak instant millionaires. The P.C. market became a billion dollar industry that Apple had 50 percent of the market.

How HP doomed the TouchPad to failure...

By now everyone knows that HP's introduction and now end to the TouchPad. How could a company such as HP get it all so wrong you ask? Well lets see if we can find out. Do not hold a gigantic press event touting your product six months before it rolls out to the stores. Do not price it a lot higher than your competitor and market leader. Do not leave it up to retailers to market your product when it comes to market instead of yourself. Do not after only a few months out into the market drop the price closer to what you should have initially and then tell everybody that you are going to stop making the product.

All in all maybe it was easy to see why the HP TouchPad failed but the big mystery is still if everyone else could see it why did nobody at HP see the same thing?

Carbonite to launch "Personal Cloud" for Consumers

The Boston based cloud back-up company Carbonite is going to introduce a cloud based service for consumers and home based business. Carbonite's new HomePlus and HomePremier services provide such features as file mirroring, folder restoring, and full-system snapshots -- much like modern enterprise storage networks. Carbonite's MirrorImage now enables "bare-metal"-type snapshots of a computer's entire system to be taken every 24 hours and copied to a second hard drive or to one in the cloud; this includes all the data files. It only takes 3 to 4 clicks to get the PC back up and running. Annual pricing runs $59 (for Carbonite Home, the basic storage service), $99 for Home Plus and $149 for Home Premier.

Wow. This sounds like a great solution for the average home user who does not think about backing up there files. This seems like a great investment for any small home business to not have to worry about losing valuable data and not have to spend that much money to do so.

Could NeXT have been THE big thing???

Way back in 1988 Compaq, Dell, and IBM approached Steve Jobs and asked him if they could license his object oriented NeXTSTEP operating system. NeXT was a company that Steve Jobs personally started. They did not see a future in DOS and did not like the Microsoft operating system. Gates reached an agreement with IBM and did get some money to work on and sell the OS. Bill Gates personally got irate at this news and told everyone he could at IBM and other places that the NeXT OS was bad and was not compatible with anything. After IBM hired a new chief of strategy the relationship with Jobs cooled down. IBM eventually turned to the development of OS2 with Microsoft and Steve Jobs folded neXT into Apple after it failed. What long ago stared out as NeXTSTEP has since transformed into Mac OS X.

It is very interesting how if one man really bought into NeXT and not OS2 we could have a completely different computer landscape. Just think of a world where Mac OS is on almost everyone's personal computer and Windows is just a small speck on the windshield. Imagine the world for the computer technician. That might have been a spooky place for him indeed.

Living in a digital age...

The program Frontline did a piece on what is happening to people around the world living in this new digital age. The program explored both pluses and minuses of the use of technology in today's society. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The students are constantly multitasking while they are at school. They are talking to one person while texting another person and sending an e-mail to someone else. The professors said that the students are becoming too distracted in class doing other things than listening to the lectures.

At Stanford University in California they conducted a study on the students. They found that while multitasking the students actually worked slower than when they only did on task at a time. They became so distracted by doing many things at once it look them longer to do any one task by itself. Researchers say it is hard to conduct studies on the impact of technology on people because it changes so rapidly that you can not monitor the effects on people. The government of South Korea is so concerned about the growing crisis that they have called gaming an addiction and a mental health crisis. They have sent up rehabilitation centers around the country to try to deal with the effects of long term gaming use by youth in the country.

A Junior High School in the Bronx is has used computer laptops given to students to raise the grades of the students and lower the violence at the school. People play the MMO game World of Warcraft and meet people from all over the world and some even have real world relationships with people they meet in the game. Some companies like IBM have used virtual worlds like Second Life to hold meetings and cut down travel costs. They think that meeting in the virtual world actually leads to closer interaction and relations than meeting other ways. The U.S. Military uses remote unmanned airplanes to conduct air strikes in foreign countries. The pilots are able to drop bombs on terror suspects and than drive home from work for dinner.

The program was very interesting. It showed both the good and the bad side of technology. Many advances have been made using new technology but other things have also been lost. When people changed from the spoken word to writing words we lost some of our memory capability. Since we have moved from a written word to using e-mail and texting some feel we have lost our ability to write. I think that with technology like anything else in life moderation is key and you should not be afraid of new things but do not toss the old things away too quickly.

Facebook to build massive server farm on edge of Artic circle

Facebook is going to build three giant server halls that covers an area the size of 11 football fields. They are going to build it in the town of Lulea that is on the Northern tip of Sweden that is just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle. The site will need to generate 120 MW of power to operate and cost Facebook around 62 million Euro's a year to run. They are going to use the naturally cool temperatures of the area, around 2C or 35.6F average, to keep the servers cool enough to run and not need any other sources to cool the halls.

This seems like a very interesting way to go. Using the naturally cool climate to cool the servers and keep them at optimal temperature seems like a win-win idea. They get to spend less money to keep them running and they do not have to use any other means that might pollute the environment.

Lee Medical uses iPad's to reduce catheter infections

Lee Medical, a local medical company in Tennessee that services 60 hospitals and other health care facilities in the area, is using custom software for FileMaker on the iPAD to keep track of the location & usage history of Catheters. By using the iPAD's they are able to use a central server that keeps track of the use history and the location of all the catheters in the area. They are also able to schedule procedures and know what places to visit. The great thing about using the iPAD's is the data is all on a protected server and no data is stored on the iPAD's so it can not be stolen. They have been able to reduce infection rates from 2 to 18 per 1,000 catheter days to 0.5 per 1,000 catheter days. I think it is really neat they companies are coming up with new and productive ways to use iPAD's and the software programs that are available to it. This is also a safe way to use it because all of the data is stored on a server and not the individual iPAD's.

HDD shortage expected to impact market

The flooding in Thailand could impact the HDD market. The big hard drive suppliers Western Digital & Seagate are either stopping production of HD's or using short supplies left to build the drives. Apple, Dell, & Intel are not worried about the shortage yet but are closely monitoring the situation and will react as the situation changes.