Nicholas Kolakowski

A Dusseldorf court declined to overturn a ruling that bars Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet from sale in Germany. Apple and Samsung have been locked in a particularly vicious legal battle in that country, with both sides suing each other over supposed patent violations. Late in 2011, Apple’s legal counsel scored a temporary injunction from […]

Salesforce.com has launched Desk.com, a customer help-desk dashboard that integrates Facebook and Twitter feeds alongside more traditional corporate channels such as email. As with all Salesforce services, this newest one is cloud-based; subscriptions start at $49 per seat per month. The target audience is small to midsized businesses (SMBs) who heavily rely on Twitter and […]

Microsoft’s next version of Office has reached its technical preview stage. Codenamed Office 15, the platform is being distributed to a select group of testers; a public beta will reportedly arrive this summer. Office 15 is apparently an ambitious project. “For the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile […]

Research In Motion decided to split the roles of chair and CEO after an independent committee found that doing so would constitute an “appropriate solution for RIM shareholders.” The committee’s report, which RIM posted on its Website, suggested that the company follow the policy of other Canadian companies, which generally split the roles of independent […]

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 […]