Research firm Gartner has released its third quarter 2008 results for the personal computer market, showing that in the US, Apple shipments exceeded Acer, the company with the biggest growth in worldwide market share.
Globally, the Acer brand, which now includes Gateway, Packard Bell, and eMachines,shipped 47.3% more hardware than last year's third quarter, growing its market share by nearly 3%, the largest improvement of the top-selling brands. Gartner research shows that Asus and Acer were the two vendors who have expanded their market share the most through the popularity of netbooks. Overall, PC shipments increased by 15%.
Leaving beta for general availability this week, Bento 2 combines new spreadsheet functionality with iPhone data sync, iTunes-like search, and Leopard effects-based themes.
Less than a year after the beta of its first personal database for Mac, Apple's FileMaker has released Bento 2, an edition that adds features in two main areas: more integration with outside applications, and the addition of sophisticated spreadsheet-like functionality.
The company made money during the third quarter, but eBay officials warned during its quarterly earnings call on Wednesday that the outlook for the holiday season is fairly grim.
The company's making money, though, particularly in the PayPal unit, which reported 27 percent growth and $597 million in revenue. During the quarter, according to CEO John Donahoe, Paypal's volume exceeded eBay's volume. That's the first time that's happened; PayPal is now doing more non-eBay transactions than eBay transactions.
The OpenID digital identity management standard's long and winding road to general usage hit a pothole in recent tests by Yahoo, one of the program's most prominent identity service providers.
Started in 2005, the service has reported several gains in adoption over the past few months. Most notably, MySpace announced in July that it would be providing OpenID services -- a tremendous increase in potential users of the single-sign-in system.
Nearly one year ago, a Sunnyvale company called Quantenna announced that it had secured approximately $25 million to begin its development of various "next-gen" wireless technologies. Today, the company is ready to break a big barrier.
Quantenna's QHS 802.11n chipsets have a 4x4 MIMO antenna system with Transmit Beamforming, with the stated goal of being used in the streaming of high-definition multimedia content or in HD IPTV setups.
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for Windows from FileForum now.
Web users who are expecting a major shift in philosophy in the first round of Firefox betas, may want to wait for the developers to have their say. For now, there are a few helpful features, but one really useful one remains on the way.
Legislation now proposed in the US Congress would effectively postpone the February 17, 2009 date for the switchover to all-digital TV. Today, the NAB came out in support of that measure, with Nielsen data to back it up.
More than 21.5 million US households -- or one in five -- are still either completely or partially unprepared for the upcoming transition to all-digital TV on February 17 of next year, the Nielsen Company said on Wednesday. That same day, the National Association of Broadcasters endorsed proposed legislation in the US Congress that would enable an extension of the quickly encroaching deadline, now only four months away.
Nvidia's GeForce 9400M, the integrated GPU featured in every new Apple notebook unveiled yesterday, has today been officially announced on its own.
The integrated 9400M supports Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, and offers 16 CUDA parallel cores with 54 gigaflops of processing power. Nvidia claims its performance is five times better than Intel's GM45 Chipset in 3DMark Vantage bench tests.
On Monday, Microsoft confirmed that its nomenclature for Windows marketing will revert to an earlier time, when numbers were enough to convey meaning. Now, already, the company is having to explain its own logic and its numerology.
It could, for all intents and purposes, just be a number. But previous editions of Windows, including the one we're on now, have been given so-called "aspirational names" whose significance and symbology were the subject of some sustained gushing from Microsoft's marketing department in the past.
With unique visitors and page views on the rise for September, AOL is giving much of the credit to last month's e-mail aggregation move. Now, another sort of aggregation appears to be in the works.
It's too early to tell whether the demise of AOL Journals and Hometown will make much of a dent. However, AOL.com's unique visitors rose by 12%, total visits by 15%, and page views by 34% for the month of September, according to comScore's Media Matrix report.
Download Intel Flash 10 Player for Windows from FileForum now.
Today, Adobe has launched Flash Player 10 after nearly six months in public beta, the day after Microsoft released Silverlight 2, Flash's most high-profile competitor.
Of the American corporations that will be impacted -- some severely -- by the global economic downturn, Intel will be best positioned to withstand the storm due to its very low debt position, its senior executives told investors Tuesday.
So the only uncertainty facing Intel in the coming quarter and thereafter is not how much liability it will suddenly face, but how much demand for CPUs and technology products will drop. This from both CEO Paul Otellini and new CFO Stacy J. Smith, during the company's quarterly third quarter conference call.
Personal finance tracker mint.com, which picked up a "Best of Show" Tuesday at Finovate, has released its collection of investment tracking tools from closed beta.
The free personal-budgeting site, which also reports signing up its 500,000th user sometime in the past few days, thus adds a fancier set of financial-planning tools to its previous abilities to parse data from checking, savings and credit-card accounts. Mint CEO and founder Aaron Patzer describes the additions as making the site "more mainstream" -- and increasing its appeal to users over 35.
Lower-cost virtualization -- priced at just $70 per seat -- wins out over laptops in a bid to deliver computer education to 1.8 million schoolchildren in an Indian province.
Undercut on pricing by virtualization vendor NComputing, former partners turned rivals Intel and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) each got edged out this week on a deal to bring computing to 1.8 million schoolchildren in India.
What's bigger than Google? The vision of librarians, according to the academic institutions banding together to create HathiTrust -- a "universal library" built in part on Google's scanning efforts.
HathiTrust (pronounced haw-TEE -- it's the Hindi word for elephant, that animal that famously lives long and never forgets) launched Tuesday. It's a project of the member universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the University of California system. The CIC has been working with Google since last year to digitize books held in libraries at member schools; the UC system signed on with Google in 2006, and the University of Michigan's MBooks (now folded into HathiTrust) has underway since the school announced affiliation with the Google Books Library Project during its launch in 2004.