Google and NASA are forming a joint research lab to look at quantum computing for things like facial recognition and understanding of disease. Their computer is from D-Wave Systems, which appears to be producing quantum computing results years earlier than many expected.
Two cloud-based software companies, GoodData, which does business analytics, and Box, which stores data, have announced a joint product. The real big deal is what products like this say about the change in thinking about information, from a static fact to a potential source of insight.
The timeline isn’t clear, but the German software giant SAP thinks it’s time to get out of selling on-premise software. SAP is offering its advanced in-memory computing product, HANA, as a cloud service, and says everything else will go there.
Intel named Brian M. Krzanich to succeed Paul S. Otellini as chief executive, and appointed Renee J. James as its president.
Amazon Web Services is in the middle of a worldwide tour, selling itself to customers and partners and gearing up for competition from a variety of new competitors.
The medical profession is joining the move into the cloud, raising complex questions about business opportunities, Big Data and privacy.
Hewlett-Packard has unveiled its long-awaited low-power server for big data centers. The shocker is the way H.P. plans to come out with new models, using chips from many suppliers, every three to six months.
Lockheed Martin is on track to use quantum computing to solve some science and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.
Employees who put company information online with their smartphones create a tricky problem for I.T. departments: how to protect corporate data without hindering employees’ work.
Jeff Hawkins got rich and famous as the brains behind Palm, an early power in mobile data. He has also developed a new model of how we think, which will now be used, he says, to revolutionize the data analysis industry.
The growth of online staffing companies, which connect freelancers with remote clients for software and accounting jobs, could change qualifications for hiring.
IT’S not as easy being Meg Whitman as Meg Whitman might have expected. At 56, Ms. Whitman, the eBay billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of Hewlett-Packard for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.
The centuries-old scientific and engineering idea of progress through observing, modeling, testing and modifying is under attack. Now it is better to collect and examine lots of data, looking for patterns, and follow up on the most promising. The latest example: Autodesk says designers should generate a thousand product versions.
Sensors of your heart, blood, and brain are coming to market. These may a boon to science and personal health. For the companies involved, they may be goldmines of intimate real-time data on millions of subjects. How this information will be used will vary over all kinds of products and places.
Nest Labs makes a smart thermostat that promotes energy saving by studying its owner’s habits and predicting things about when people are home and what they are likely to do with their home heating and cooling.
Already, places without clean water, decent sanitation or steady electricity are using supercomputers through cheap mobile phones.
There is something strangely familiar about what is going on in tech. We’re having something like an early-1980s operating system struggle, with corporate survival as the prize. June’s three big announcements by Apple, Microsoft and Google made plain that we have a new mainstream model for using computers. As one of the participants noted, it is marked by the interaction of “the hardware, and the software and the cloud.” The three big companies all seem to have a big cloud computing capability, a decent-looking mobile device, and relationships with software developers. Those may be the minimum elements for competition in the new world. The two great challenges are mastering the cloud technology and convincing outside developers to join your team, making things to go inside one or another system.
The cutting edge of the Web just bled a little. On Friday night, lightning in Virginia took out part of Amazon’s cloud computing service, called Amazon Web Services, which hundreds of companies use for data storage and computation. Well-known sites like Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram were not accessible for hours. There was little information for customers about what had happened, or even whether user data was safe.
Meg Whitman has a clear vision of Hewlett-Packard making radically new consumer products. She sees it selling cloud computing technologies that she hopes will attract fast-growing start-ups to the venerable brand. She wants to transform its printing and services businesses. Much of the promise is on show at a big show for corporate clients in Las Vegas this week.
The only thing standing in her way is the present state of H.P.
“Back down to reality, we’ve got a $125 billion business with work to do,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview during the show. “We have to get the existing parts back on track.”
Privacy is always a moving target. In a networked world, it moves in lots of directions. A well-known Internet researcher warns, “Regulation is coming.”
Some years ago an engineer at Google told me why Google wasn’t collecting information linked to people’s names. “We don’t want the name. The name is noise.” There was enough information in Google’s large database of search queries, location, and online behavior, he said, that you could tell a lot about somebody through indirect means.
The point was that actually finding out people’s names isn’t necessary for sending them targeted ads. It can probably lead to trouble, as Google’s ownadventures in Wi-Fi snooping show. Even without knowing your name, increasingly, everything about you is out there. Whether and how you guard your privacy in an online world we are building up every day has become increasingly urgent.
“Everything I do in my personal life, in my professional life, it’s completely there,” said Mr. Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, in his first major interview. “A lot of what I do, what everyone does, is influenced by it.”
Alone among Facebook’s 900 million users, Mr. Saverin is special: a billionaire with only the vaguest of causes.
He co-founded Facebook at age 21, then left two years later with a legal settlement that cut him off from Facebook but left him phenomenally wealthy. His stake will most likely be worth more than $3 billion when Facebook goes public Friday.
Reports last week that Mr. Saverin, 30 and born in Brazil, had renounced the American citizenship he gained as a teenager led to considerable criticism that he was skipping out to avoid taxes. He has become a permanent resident of Singapore, which levies no capital gains taxes. Mr. Saverin said ...
