Darryl K. Taft

LAS VEGAS-IBM is taking buildings to school to make them smarter. Well, IBM is not exactly taking the buildings themselves to school, but the company is adding smarts to buildings to help managers manage them better. Indeed, the “smarts” help make it so that the buildings can manage themselves. The company talked up Smarter Buildings […]

It appears that Google is close to driving home the final nail into the Google Gears coffin. Google Gears is the search giant’s innovative technology for enabling offline applications. However, toward the end of 2009, Google announced that it was lessening its focus on Gears in lieu of support for HTML5, which provides Gears’ offline […]

Adobe Systems’ Photoshop graphics editing software has hit the 20-year mark. Adobe Photoshop turned 20 on Feb. 19 and is still going strong. In a news release the previous day, the company said: “The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) will be hosting a special Photoshop 20th Anniversary celebration for over a thousand attendees in […]

IBM announced Feb. 18 that the U.S. General Services Administration has awarded the company a $74.4 million contract to modernize the federal government’s acquisition and procurement system. The contract, which will run over an eight-year period, calls for IBM to “modernize the system that federal agencies and their suppliers use to source equipment, supplies, information […]

If you are wondering what will happen to the Yahoo Search developer tools now that the Microsoft and Yahoo search agreement has been approved, Yahoo has a message for you: Stay tuned. As it did when the Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance was initially announced last July, Yahoo’s Search team is saying the future of Yahoo Search […]

Taking aim at Microsoft SharePoint and IBM’s Lotus technology, Salesforce.com has launched a private beta of its Salesforce Chatter enterprise real-time enterprise collaboration application and platform. Salesforce.com introduced its Salesforce Chatter solution at the company’s annual Dreamforce ’09 developer conference in November 2009. Since then the company’s customer base has requested access to the enterprise […]

AdMarvel, a subsidiary of Opera Software as well as a provider of mobile advertising services, announced the availability of its Android Advertising Toolkit version 1.5 on Feb. 17. The AdMarvel Android Advertising Toolkit enables Android application developers to easily integrate rich media advertising, including advertising from various global ad networks, into their applications. AdMarvel announced […]

Microsoft plans to make a substantial showing at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference, in a continuation of the software giant’s campaign to make nice with open source and support open-source projects on Windows. In a blog post, Peter Galli, open-source community manager at Microsoft, laid out some of what the company will do at […]

The Linux Box has announced a partnership with Canonical whereby it will market the Ubuntu Linux operating system in the United States. As a Canonical Silver Solution Provider Partner, The Linux Box will sell, install and support customized Ubuntu-based solutions to organizations running Linux systems. It will also provide businesses with large-scale migration deployment support […]

IBM has announced its acquisition of Intelliden, a maker of “network automation software that enables organizations such as telecommunications companies to configure, manage and scale their networks,” IBM said Feb. 16. The acquisition, which comes just a week before IBM’s Pulse service management conference, held Feb. 21 to 24, is “expected to further strengthen the […]

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the Symbian Foundation announced the release of the Symbian 3 platform, the first fully open-source release of the Symbian OS. The Symbian Foundation made its announcement at MWC on Feb. 15, a little more than a week after the platform’s transition to an open-source license on Feb. […]

YouTube has launched a new feature to enable users to measure the speed of their video streaming, the YouTube Video Speed Dashboard. Chris Dale, a spokesperson for YouTube, announced the launch of the dashboard in a Feb. 11 blog post, saying video speed “can mean the difference between a fast and fun video viewing experience […]