Intel has been making efforts to expand its mobile computing capabilities and gain further inroads into the important Chinese market. The company’s latest move was to announce plans to invest another $1.6 billion over the next 15 years to upgrade its chip fabrication site in Chengdu, China, a 10-year-old facility in which Intel had previously invested $600 million.
Intel is trying to win market share in highly competitive mobile market, which is dominated by ARM and its manufacturing partners, including Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments.
Cisco Systems and IBM recently introduced VersaStack, an integrated system that combines Cisco’s Unified Computing System integrated offering with IBM’s Storwize V7000 storage system. The move comes as the demand for integrated data center systems—which bundle compute, storage, networking, management software and virtualization into a single package—grows among enterprises.
IBM has announced that Watson Analytics, the company’s natural language-based cognitive service, is available in public beta. IBM Watson Analytics automates tasks such as data preparation, predictive analysis and visual storytelling for business professionals.
The solution is offered as a cloud-based “freemium” service, all business users can now access Watson Analytics from any desktop or mobile device.
Google is hoping to address long-standing issues with the CAPTCHA user validation test with its new “NoCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA,” widget. Instead of having Internet users confirm that they are human rather than a computer each time by filling out complicated CAPTCHA text strings, Google’s new widget will just ask them straight up if they are robots, programs or not.
Google Product Manager Vinay Shet explained that, by simply clicking on the box, a majority of users will be able to confirm they are not robots, thanks to a sophisticated Google risk analysis engine running in the background.