Chris Preimesberger

Flipboard, Palo Alto, Calif. Flipboard is a purpose-designed magazine interface for social networks on iPads. It takes entries from networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter—basically any site the user wants—and mashes them up into a fun-to-use, digital-page-turning app for iPads. Versions for other tablets are said to be on the way. Foursquare, New York […]

Every so often, the IT world gets news of a “breakthrough” in new storage media research, and this week it was IBM’s turn to announce one in relation to a possible long-term replacement for NAND flash solid-state disks.Big Blue on June 30 revealed that its Zurich-based PCM (phase-change memory) research unit has produced 90-nanometer-size chips […]

Oracle just made about the easiest purchase of another company in its 30-plus years in business, since it is buying a company its CEO and co-founder already owns. The Redwood City, Calif.-based database and IT infrastructure maker revealed June 29 that it will acquire 10-year-old storage area network provider Pillar Data Systems, in which Oracle […]

A brand-new software company that deals strictly with the optimization of NAND flash in enterprise servers made its debut June 28. Mountain View, Calif.-based FlashSoft, positioning itself as “The Flash Virtualization Company,” launched both itself and its first product with the announcement of its Series A funding of $3 million from Thomvest Ventures. FlashSoft’s software, […]

Platform-as-a-service startup DotCloud has graduated from private beta to general availability status and is now offering its services to developers and IT departments for deploying their applications worldwide. DotCloud is a second-generation PAAS provider whose secret sauce makes it simpler for developers to deploy and scale their applications while delivering the flexibility and robustness required […]

Preconfiguration, prepackaging and automation of many IT functions are key attributes of the new unified computing systems, and this is a trend that is gaining serious traction on a global scale. Spending hours configuring a server or storage array for a virtualized system is fast becoming drudgery of the past. Oracle made a major contribution […]

The IT term “big data” is currently getting close to the same hot-button treatment that cloud computing did five years ago, and for good reason. The continued increasing amount of business data-created both by humans and by machines-is having major effects on IT systems, which are struggling to store, tier and make easily accessible all […]

ANAHEIM, Calif.-As anybody who’s experienced a U2 concert knows, these are events that overflow a sports stadium with light and sound and are unforgettable-whether you’re a U2 fan or not. eWEEK recently had the opportunity to check out the IT and performance of a U2 show firsthand at a concert here in Angel Stadium, and […]

Dell Nerve Center In an obscure tent, way at the back of the stadium, U2’s video and sound directors manage all the lights and video from 15 cameras to go with prerecorded video and graphics for the two-hour-plus stadium “U2 360” concert. It’s all controlled using off-the-shelf Dell workstations and monitors. Cool, but It Can […]

When all the numbers were tallied, Oracle turned in a record-breaking fourth quarter and fiscal year financial report June 23.However, a second consecutive quarter of weak data center hardware sales caused its stock to slip more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.Two hours after the markets closed, Oracle was selling at about $31 per share, […]

VMware is finding new ways to keep its desktop virtualization business moving. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization provider on June 22 announced the expansion of its VMware Ready program for partners providing desktop VDI based on the company’s View platform. The program provides users with validated desktop virtualization architectures that meet VMware’s functional and scalability […]

Hewlett-Packard, which has been in the data analytics business literally for generations, is reinventing itself in this fast-developing enterprise IT segment.Vertica, which HP acquired in February 2011 to compete with IBM, Oracle’s Exadata and EMC Greenplum, on June 20 launched Vertica Analytics Platform 5.0, a major release that enables an IT system to analyze more […]