At the beginning of the year, Forrester Research asked consumers what their favorite operating system for a tablet would be. Forty-six percent chose Windows. Forrester asked the question again in September, and that number had dropped to 25 percent. READ MORE
Imagine you’re a top-notch HP employee. What’s your next career move? Maybe it should be selling hot dogs on the beach. That may be the only way to avoid the company’s practice of leveling non-compete lawsuits at employees who move on to other companies. After all, since HP is in just about every corner of the tech industry: servers, personal computers, networking, software, even mobile–just about any technology company could be viewed as a competitor. Enough! says Cisco in a blog entry. READ MORE
When Steve Jobs died, Apple fans were so distraught that they began treating Apple Stores like shrines, leaving flowers and notes on their doorsteps. Do you think your own store could ever inspire that degree of customer loyalty? Perhaps it can–if you follow in the footsteps of Ron Johnson, who headed up retail at Apple and is now leaving to become CEO of J.C. Penney. READ MORE
It’s a good time to be a spy. Even better, a maker of spy technology. According to documents The Wall Street Journal obtained from a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., the market for “off-the-shelf” spying products is booming, up from near zero before the September 11, 2001 attacks to $5 billion a year today. READ MORE
Start-ups are exciting but usually not rolling in money, so they tend to offer equity compensation in the form of stock options, or “pre-IPO” shares. Before you sign on to one of these deals, wouldn’t it be nice to know what it’s actually worth? And if you’re hiring for your own start-up, it’s even more important to know what you’re giving away. READ MORE
Popular online services Tumblr, Reddit and Mozilla (creator of the Firefox browser) have come out in black against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act now making its way through Congress. It’s part of a no-holds-barred campaign to stop the law, which would make service providers much more liable than in the past for copyright violations. Under SOPA not only would a user posting copyright protected video in YouTube be subject to legal action, so would YouTube (which is owned by Google). Tumblr in particular has gone all out, blacking out all user-generated content on its home page and inviting users to let the service connect them by phone to their congressional representative. They also get a recording of Tumblr CEO David Karp suggesting some talking points and thanking the caller for “doing your part to protect the Internet.” Read more at Mashable.
Anyone who’s been following the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction goings-on in the European tablet market knows that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has been banned in Germany for the offense of looking too much like an iPad. Since all tablets bear a striking resemblance to each other (except for a few with outlandish cases) that seems weird to begin with. Now, in an even odder twist, Samsung is seeking to bypass the injunction by shipping GalTabs to Germany with a slightly different design. Namely, with a metal band around the edges of the device. Will Apple seek yet another injunction to bar this new version? Our guess is yes. What will the German courts say? Stay tuned. Read more at CNET.
Earlier this month, Google launched its Gmail app for iOS devices. It wasn’t exactly met with a round of applause. There were few of the powerful features users get with regular Gmail, notifications weren’t working correctly, and the app crashed so often that Google finally pulled it from the Apple Store. READ MORE
E-mail is often called the “killer app” and many of us (especially me) seem to spend our entire waking lives reading, sorting, and sending e-mail messages. But, precisely because it is so ubiquitous and our use of it so second-nature, it can become the career-killer app as well. READ MORE
How would you like to tell prospective employers that you studied at the school of Steve Jobs? Apparently it sounds like a good idea to students at a technology school in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city. READ MORE
