LinkedIn scoops up browser plugin Rapportive: ‘We fell in love’
LinkedIn has bought browser plugin outfit Rapportive for an undisclosed sum.
The two-year-old start-up told its users that its handling of their data was now covered by LinkedIn's privacy policy and terms of service.
"During our partnership with LinkedIn, we got to know them very well. We found a great overlap between our visions. We found a high-calibre and extremely driven team. We found, crucially, a 'members-first' company: everything that LinkedIn does is about making its members more successful," the company's CEO Rahul Vohra gushed. Read more...
Will Windows 8 sticker shock leave Microsoft unstuck?
"Sticker shock" is a US phrase that denotes a shopper’s surprised and generally disgusted reaction upon discovering the true price of an item they’re buying.
Microsoft experienced a different kind of sticker shock a few years back with Windows Vista: such a memory and CPU hog was Windows Vista that most PCs of that time struggled to run Redmond's latest client operating system.
A lot of software and many peripherals also didn’t work with it. Read more...
Whitman gives HP harsh report card, outlines recovery plan
Hewlett-Packard has underinvested in its business and become "too complex and too slow," President and CEO Meg Whitman said Wednesday, offering a three-part turnaround plan to get the ailing company back on track.
Speaking to analysts and investors after HP released its financial results, Whitman offered a frank assessment of HP's challenges at the end of her first full quarter on the job.
It was a tough three months for HP, which saw its profit dive 44 percent and revenue decline by 7 percent. Its giant Personal Systems Group, where revenue skidded 15 percent, needs to build more innovative PCs, Whitman said.
"The fact is that, for all that's right with PSG, we underinvested in innovation in the last several years and we've been late to market too often," Whitman said. Read more...
Feds request DNS Changer extension to keep 400K users online
Officials with the U.S. government have asked a New York judge to extend an impending deadline that could sever ties to the Internet for hundreds of thousands of users infected with the "DNS Changer" malware.
DNS Changer, which at its peak was installed on more than four million Windows PCs and Macs worldwide -- a quarter of them in the U.S. alone -- was the target of a major takedown last November organized by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The malware hijacked users' clicks by modifying their computers' domain name system (DNS) settings to send URL requests to the criminals' own servers, a tactic that shunted victims to hacker-created sites that resembled the real domains. Read more...
Toshiba and SanDisk shrink 128Gbit memory chips
Toshiba said Thursday it has shrunk the size of its 128Gbit NAND flash memory chips, in the race to bring more and tinier storage to products like USB storage and memory cards.
Together with partner SanDisk, the company said it is shipping the world's smallest 128Gbit memory chip, with an area of 170 square millimeters. The chip uses a 19-nanometer technology process, one step smaller than a 20-nanometer chip announced by Intel and Micron in December.
NAND flash memory, which holds data even when not powered, is used for storage in smartphones, music players, and increasingly in super-thin laptops such as Apple's MacBook Air and Intel-powered ultrabooks. Smaller chip sizes allow for smaller devices, but also drive down overall prices by allowing them to be more efficiently produced and forcing less advanced manufacturers to cut prices. Read more...
Adobe to Linux users: Get Chrome or forget Flash
Adobe today said that it would stop offering direct downloads of Flash Player for Linux, telling users to move to Google's Chrome browser, which bundles Flash with its updates.
Today's demotion of Flash Player on Linux to Chrome-only was the second time in the last three months that Adobe has withdrawn some or all support from a version of the popular media software: In November, Adobe announced it was abandoning development of Flash for mobile browsers, including the new Chrome for Android .
In a roadmap for Flash Player (download PDF), Adobe unveiled its plans through 2012 and into 2013.
The last version of a separate Flash Player for Linux, 11.2, will be released this quarter, Adobe announced in the roadmap document. After that, Linux users who require browser-based Flash must switch to Chrome, Google's three-year-old browser. Read more...
White House pushes for new privacy codes of conduct
The U.S. White House will push for online businesses to adopt new privacy codes of conduct, including consumer rights to control what information websites collect about them and a right to see what data is being collected, officials there said.
Members of President Barack Obama's administration will officially announce details about its so-called privacy bill of rights on Thursday, with the effort focused on government working with private businesses, privacy groups and other experts to develop voluntary privacy codes of conduct.
While the Obama administration will propose privacy legislation to the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of Commerce will move ahead with voluntary codes of conduct that could be implemented without congressional action, administration officials said in a press briefing late Wednesday. Legislation would put consumer privacy rights into law. Read more...
CIOs: Your next hire might not be an IT pro
In 2012 a preferred IT candidate might be someone whose background is in business rather than technology and who has sought supplementary tech certifications. How can this be? As Forrester analyst Stephanie Moore recently stated: "To build technology solutions that drive the business, as opposed to just enable the business, technologists need to have more contextual understanding -- so they understand, intuitively in some cases, what the business wants without the business having to specify it." It's tough to tailor a solution to your sales department's needs, for example, if you don't understand pipeline management. Read more...
Facebook profiles predict job success
If yo
u think just keeping your Facebook page free of drunken photos will help you land a job, think again.
Facebook facts that make you look worldly and popular may say more about you to a hiring manager than anything else. Photos of your trip to Bali; status updates on how much you enjoyed reading “War and Peace”; and thousands of Facebook friends apparently translate into a job candidate who will do better on the job.
At least those are the findings of a new study by a trio of universities that looked at how Facebook profiles predict job success. Read more...
Will future tablets and e-readers become more book-like?
All tablets today generally follow the lead of the iPad. You can expect a large slab with a multitouch display, a bezel, and either an aluminum or plastic back. It’s a simple form factor that lends itself to versatility. It gets out of the way to let your content take center stage.
But what if you took the general tablet concept, and bred it with a physical book? Then you might have something like the device that we see in this concept video. It’s a book-like tablet (or e-reader?) that features two or three panels — all of which have multitouch displays on both front and back. Read more...