Nicholas Kolakowski

Rising Wages According to Dice, the average salary for a tech professional increased from $79,384 in 2010 to $81,327 in 2011. Bonus Round About 32 percent of tech professionals in 2011 received some sort of bonus, up from 29 percent in 2010 and 24 percent in 2009. Jackpot Industries The industry verticals most likely to […]

Microsoft’s week centered on its decision to end its MIX conference, as well as some new sales data on Windows Phone. “We have decided to merge MIX, our spring web conference for developers and designers, into our next major developer conference, which we will host sometime in the coming year,” Tim O’Brien, Microsoft’s general manager […]

Apple retook the No. 1 spot in global smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new report from research firm IHS. In doing so, Apple managed to knock Samsung out of the top-ranked position it held in the third quarter. From store shelves to courtrooms, the two companies are locked in […]

Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has left Hewlett-Packard. His departure is the final nail in the coffin of HP’s current round of mobile-device efforts. Once an Apple executive who helped shepherd the iMac and iPod to production, Rubinstein later became CEO of Palm and launched the Pre, a smartphone running the webOS mobile operating system. […]

Newly minted RIM CEO Thorsten Heins gave an interview with the Crackberry blog Jan. 26, in which he attempted to refine earlier comments about the company’s overall direction. Specifically, he sought to put additional spin on quotes from this week that RIM was on the “right path” with its current strategy, which centers on the […]

Hewlett-Packard plans on making the webOS source code available under an open-source license by September, according to the company. As part of that ramp-up, HP is releasing version 2.0 of Enyo, the webOS developer tool. Developers using the tool will have the ability to write webOS applications supported across a broad range of mobile devise […]

Nokia sold more than 1 million Windows Phone units in the fourth quarter of 2011, surpassing some analyst expectations. That being said, the company’s quarterly results suggest it has a lot of ground to recover if it ultimately wants to challenge Google Android and Apple. Nokia’s net sales declined 21 percent from the year-ago quarter. […]

How much was Microsoft willing to pay Nokia to launch the latter’s Windows Phone line? The answer, according to Nokia’s most recent earnings report, was $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2011-and that’s only the beginning. “Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments [which […]

Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 will appear on both traditional PCs and tablets. However, as the company gears up to release the operating system’s beta in February, followed by the final version sometime in the second half of 2012, it’s increasingly clear that tablet functionality is a prime concern-a sea change from Windows 7, an OS […]

Apple apparently welcomes the iPad cannibalizing the market for both Windows PCs and Macs, according to comments made during the company’s Jan. 24 earnings call. “There is cannibalization clearly of the Mac by the iPad, but we continue to believe there is much more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad,” Apple CEO Tim Cook […]

Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5 will feature a bigger screen and a different casing from the iPhone 4, suggests a new posting on the Apple-centric blog 9to5Mac. According to the Jan. 25 report’s “reliable source at Foxconn in China,” the various prototypes circulating around that production facility share some common features, including a 4-plus-inch display and […]

SAP enjoyed significant increases in software revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, suggesting that the market’s appetite for enterprise IT products remains strong despite some turbulence in the overall economy. Total revenue for the quarter topped $5.8 billion, a year-over-year rise of 11 percent. Software and support revenue rose 16 percent and 13 percent […]