Fahmida Y. Rashid

The smart-grid market in the United States will grow 70 percent to $9.6 billion by 2015, according to a Sept. 24 forecast from GTM Research analyst David Leeds. The market research company currently pegs the market at $5.6 billion. The term smart grid refers to a next-generation electricity delivery network designed to monitor household and […]

Panasonic is targeting mobile workers with the Toughbook U1 Ultra, its latest feature-packed ultramobile PC designed for rough handling on the road and in the field. Weighing a mere 2.3 pounds, the Toughbook U1 Ultra comes with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor, a roomy 64GB solid-state hard drive and 2GB of memory, and runs […]

Schools and libraries will soon be able to use E-Rate funds to purchase “dark fiber” lines, or unused fiber-optic connections, the Federal Communication Commission said on Sept. 22. As part of the FCC’s national broadband strategy, the funding will help these institutions move from basic Internet access to broadband. E-Rate, also known as the Schools […]

Thanks to a decade of shrinking IT budgets, the global IT debt will total approximately $500 billion in 2010, said a Gartner analyst on Sept. 23. The gap can potentially widen to $1 trillion by 2015, according to the market research firm. “This problem, hidden from sight, is getting bigger every year and more difficult […]

IBM opened three new analytics centers in Europe on Sept. 23, strengthening its offerings in the growing business analytics market. The announcement follows just days after IBM’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Marlborough, Mass.-based Netezza, a data warehousing and analytics appliance vendor. Last week, IBM also acquired OpenPages, another Massachusetts company with an analytics package designed […]

One day after the Great Twitter Meltdown, details of how pranksters gleefully redirected users and spewed out retweets full of gibberish continue to emerge. What’s surprising is that instead of criminals and attackers intent on taking over computers or stealing information, most of the perpetrators were just curious users trying to see what they could […]

IBM is rolling out a new line of entry-level servers based on Power7 processors that are designed for small enterprises and businesses with IT budget constraints. IBM announced the Power7 710, 720, 730 and 740 Express servers on Sept. 22. These four new IBM servers are based on the Power7 chip architecture that the company […]

As a JavaScript exploit wreaked havoc on Twitter.com on the morning of Sept. 21, a survey of small business IT managers revealed spam as the primary security threat to business networks. Despite the increasing number of malware attacks originating from social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, the managers called those threats “marginal” to […]

Hewlett-Packard has unveiled a cloud-based mobile device management system for IT managers struggling to keep track of the growing number of smartphones, notebooks and other wireless devices in the workplace. HP is also looking to partner with telecommunications companies to provide this management tool as a managed service. The rather awkwardly named HP Cloud Services […]