Tim Conneally

Leading Semiconductor company Intel lowered its fourth quarter earnings outlook on Monday, blaming global supply chain disruptions that have risen from catastrophic floods that have plagued Thailand since last July.

Even though Intel expects the sale of personal computers to be up sequentially this quarter, the severe flooding in Thailand has caused a hard disk supply shortage, which has in turn slowed the demand for processors.

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Hewlett-Packard announced on Friday that it is turning webOS software over to the open source community while still remaining a participant and investor in the project.

The future of WebOS has been uncertain since HP announced it was considering spinning off its consumer PC division to concentrate more on comprehensive cloud offerings for enterprise. Now that the company has decided to keep its PC systems division, WebOS looks like it will be going the way of the Android, except that it will be purely open source.

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Google on Thursday officially launched Google Currents, a news reading application for Android and iOS-based smartphones and tablets, and publishing backend for content producers.

Similar in concept to Flipboard, Zite or any of the dozens of "iPad magazines," Google Currents lets readers subscribe to different news sites and view their Google Reader RSS feeds paginated like a magazine, instead of infinitely vertical like a website. A user's Gmail account is tied with their Currents reading list, so sharing on Google+ has been built into the service.

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At the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar this week, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang put on his largest "explosion event" of the last three years, utilizing microchip-controlled explosives to form incredible designs and patterns. The video we've embedded of the event is an impressive testament to how a volatile black powder explosion can be controlled and shaped by computer.

Each set of explosions was calculated to paint a different picture. One series of explosions created black smoke clouds that looked like "drops of ink splattered across the sky."

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Acer Inc, the world's fourth-largest personal computer maker, is shifting gears slightly after nearly a full year of unprofitability.

In an interview with Dow Jones yesterday, Acer CEO J.T. Wang said the company is moving away from the low-cost strategy to one more focused on profit margins.

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Microsoft has rolled out the latest build of the Windows Defender Offline beta, a version of Windows' anti-spyware feature that is meant to be executed from a DVD or USB flash drive before Windows even starts up.

Windows Defender is included with Windows and has agents that can be run periodically, or at all times on a running system. Because it runs inside Windows, though, it is limited in what it can do.

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In the last couple of years, "vintage camera" apps have become a genre of their own, led by the likes of Instagram and Hipstamatic, and followed by Retro Camera, ShakeIt, CameraBag, and many many others.

The popularity of that type of application has remained mostly a mobile phenomenon. Nevercenter, the software house that created CameraBag, however, has turned the popular mobile app into a desktop photo editing application. The company this week has released the beta of CameraBag for Windows and Mac OS.

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The world of smartphones and mobile media tablets may be dominated by processors based on the ARM architecture, but other instruction sets are getting their due with Android.

There is development on Android on x86, spearheaded by processor makers AMD and Intel; and this week, MIPS Technologies announced the availability of the first mobile tablet running Android 4.0 on the MIPS architecture.

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Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless on Tuesday introduced two new Android-powered tablets sporting the Droid brand name and 4G LTE connectivity and the promise of an Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) upgrade: The Droid Xyboard 10.1 and 8.2. The devices are the successors to the popular Motorola Xoom tablet which first debuted in early 2011.

As the names suggest, one model of the Droid Xyboard has a 10.1" touchscreen and the other has an 8.2" touchscreen. Both models have dual-core 1.2 GHz processors, 1GB of RAM, LTE radios with 8-device hotspot functionality, 5 megapixel flash cameras and 1.3 megapixel chat cameras.

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Location-based social network Gowalla announced on Monday that its service is shutting down at the end of January as its team "goes to California" to join the Facebook team.

Gowalla became known as something of an also-ran against location-based social networking leader Foursquare. For a brief period of time in 2010, the two services were in close rivalry and so-called "geosocial networks" were hot topics in the startup scene.

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Security research company and prominent antivirus software vendor Kaspersky Lab has announced its intent to withdraw from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) because of the Alliance's support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, also known as H.R. 3261).

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) are the software industry's two biggest trade groups. Since both groups have strong anti-piracy stances, neither directly opposed the Stop Online Piracy Act. Both expressed interest in working with Congress to design the law.

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IT solutions leader Hewlett-Packard has been very deliberate about its belief in Hybrid cloud solutions; that is, solutions that integrate public and private cloud solutions into a single, more controlled package. It was one of the top three company priorities erstwhile CEO Leo Apotheker outlined earlier this year, for which the company has set aside $2 billion in financing.

This week at HP Discover 2011 in Vienna, Austria, HP announced a series of additions to its cloud solutions portfolio many of which utilize this hybrid architecture and integrate solutions from HP's partners, as well as logistical solutions such as consultation, education, management, testing, and training.

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Research in Motion sold 500,000 PlayBook tablets in its first quarter on the market, and 200,000 the next quarter. Because of these low sales figures, the company readily admitted there was a big surplus of PlayBooks, and based on some early promotions from the company, we assumed there were probably a lot of them laying around.

Today, the Canadian smartphone company confirmed this surplus and gave us a good idea about just how big it is. In the third quarter, only 150,000 PlayBooks sold through to customers, so the company is taking a $485 million markdown on its third quarter earnings because of the unsold PlayBooks in the channel.

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Taiwanese PC maker Asus has announced its quad-core Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android tablet will be available for order December 12th online and December 19th in physical retail stores.

The tablet is the first device to be built on Nvidia's new Tegra 3 system on a chip, and will carry a pricetag of $499 for the version with 32GB of storage, and $599 for the 64GB version. The Eee Station keyboard dock adds $149 to the total, but comes with the benefit of an additional battery that expands the life of the Transformer Prime by approximately six hours, bringing it to a total of 18 hours of battery life.

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Reports from Chinese media this week have been talking up the impending launch of Windows Phone in China. Microsoft's mobile operating system is expected to land in China some time in the first half of 2012, and Lenovo may be the first "unofficially announced" OEM partner.

Lenovo doesn't steal headlines with unconventional and groundbreaking designs or new sexy hardware. Instead, the company makes simple, functional devices that encompass a massive part of the workforce. In short, Lenovo makes kick ass black boxes.

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