Daily Tech Briefing: Oct. 6, 2014

Hewlett-Packard executives are considering splitting the tech giant in two, with one company focusing on the PC and printer businesses and the other on enterprise offerings including networking and services, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the plan.

HP CEO Meg Whitman would become chairman of the PC and printer business and CEO of the corporate-focused business, which would be called Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

Dion Weisler, executive vice president of HP's Printers and Personal Systems unit, would be CEO of that business while Director Patricia Russo would be chairman of the enterprise business.

Google introduced the Nexus 5 smartphone almost a year ago on Oct. 31, 2013, and the company has yet to release an updated model.

Now there is increasing speculation about what the Nexus 6 will be like. One recent report says that an upcoming Nexus 6 will be a phablet, following in the footsteps of other device makers who are building larger devices with bigger displays.

One rumor suggests that the Nexus 5 will have a 5.9-inch display, giving it a screen making it not much smaller than some of the 7-inch tablets on the market.

A year after bringing the in-memory database software DB2 with BLU Acceleration to market, IBM has enhanced the technology to make it simpler, more economical and faster to analyze massive amounts of data.

The company's new DB2 capabilities include enhancements to BLU Acceleration. Furthermore, IBM claims the new technology loads data 1,000 times faster than other leading databases.

In response to the growing number of connected smart devices, Google is kicking off a project designed to make it easier for people to connect to the Internet of Things.

The goal of Google's Physical Web project is to create an open Web specification that will enable people to simply interact with whatever smart device or system they want, according to the project's Web page.

The idea is to create a "discovery service" where each smart device is given a URL that is broadcast via Bluetooth Low Energy and which can be received by nearby devices.