Business

It’s not quite Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it’s pretty close. Software developers and corporations are working on ways to give your smartphone split personalities: one dedicated to work and the other to play. The BYOD, or “bring your own device,” movement—along with the “open” nature of Android—is helping make dual-purpose smartphones a growing trend.

One of the benefits of BYOD is reduced overhead for companies because they can minimize or eliminate hardware and wireless plan costs. Encouraging employees to use their own smartphones can also reduce calls to the IT department, as employees generally have a better understanding of their personal devices than corporate-issued ones.

But with those benefits come significant risks. Read the rest of this entry »

In response to a New York Times report about poor worker safety, last week Apple CEO Tim Cook sent his employees an internal memo stating that the company is a safety leader and would never, “stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain.” However, a representative with the Hong Kong-based Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), one of the organizations quoted extensively in the Times’ piece, said that Apple inspectors visited plants with serious safety problems, and they were not corrected until disaster struck.

According to SACOM Project Officer Debby Chan, Apple has a history of failing to address or being slow to disclose safety violations at its suppliers’ factories.  ”Apple staff know very well what’s going on at their suppliers. Yet, it is not the agenda of Apple to fix the problems,” she said.

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The last two years have seen a slow but steady decline in the price for PC notebooks, with the average cost dropping from $530  in January 2010 to $456 in December 2011, according to U.S. sales numbers compiled by Market Research Firm NPD. Although a sharp drop to just $407 in November is undoubtedly due to steep Black Friday sales, the overall decline points to a glut of cheap laptops combined with user demand for the lowest priced systems.

The average U.S. notebook price overall, which includes Macs, has risen and fallen over the past 24 months but now sits at a much-higher $631, about the same average as in January 2010 ($635). Clearly, Macs have been able to hold their prices even as PCs have gotten cheaper and cheaper. The least expensive Mac notebook is still $999, while Best Buy alone sells two dozen PC notebooks for less than $400 on its website.

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For years, the business world has belonged to Windows. As recently as 2008, technology research firm Forrester Research was telling companies that Windows PCs were the only machines they needed to worry about. Macs were a non-issue—but not anymore.

Today, organizations are openly accepting and deploying Macs on their networks. What’s more, Forrester Research has reversed course on its previous claim that the enterprise was no place for Macs, and is advising businesses to prepare for the coming Mac invasion, as more employees call on their employers to let them use Macs on the job.

According to the firm’s senior analyst David Johnson, 22 percent of companies surveyed have seen an increase in the use of employee-owned Macs. Yet, 41 percent of those firms don’t allow employees to access either their corporate network or email from Macs.

So how did Apple make so much progress in such a seemingly short amount of time? And how can IT mangers better manage Macs in a Windows environment?

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Looks like Research in Motion will have to keep on moving. Samsung said it isn’t looking to buy out part or all of RIM, refuting a report yesterday that reinvigorated investor interest and heightened speculation over the future of the struggling BlackBerry-maker.

“We haven’t considered acquiring the firm and are not interested in (buying RIM),” said Samsung spokesman James Chung in an article today by Reuters. The story also says that Samsung has not been approached by the Canadian firm for a takeover and is not interested in licensing RIM’s mobile platform, contrary to the original speculation on the web yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

Research in Motion may be looking to Samsung for an SOS to help save its flailing company. The maker of BlackBerry devices and the electronics giant are reportedly in talks to sell divisions of RIM — or alternately, the entire company, according to unnamed sources in an article at BGR.

A successful deal could help stall the decline of RIM, which has recently struggled to stay relevant in the wake of flawed business choices, a service blackout and weak product pipelines. Samsung, whose array of smartphones run on Google’s Android operating system, could benefit from the acquisition with strengthened market share and better email and messaging technology.

The potential deal is stagnating due to co-CEOs at RIM that are requesting too high of prices, according to the report. Despite a net worth of around $8.5 billion at RIM’s current share price, executives are looking for between $12 to $15 billion, BGR said. It’s an ambitious demand, given the fact that some consider the company to be overvalued as it is. Read the rest of this entry »

LAS VEGAS — Working from the road can be tough, as we’re finding during CES 2012. You’re in a strange hotel room, away from your family, and worst of all, you don’t have access to all of your office equipment. Luckily, Xerox is trying to making life a little easier. The company’s new battery-powered Xerox Mobile Scanner, announced at CES 2012, lets users scan color images and documents and wirelessly send then as JPG images and multipage PDF files to computers, mobile phones, tablets or cloud services. Read the rest of this entry »

Lenovo has just added a few more stallions to its stable of first-class business notebooks, including nine new versions of its ThinkPad Edge series and three editions of its B series laptops. One of these notebooks, the S430 is the first ThinkPad to offer an optional Thunderbolt port.

The 14-inch ThinkPad Edge E430 and ThinkPad Edge E435 come equipped with up to a Core i series processors or AMD Vision Accelerated series processor and as much as 8GB of RAM.Hard drive options range from a 320GB, 5,400 rpm drive to a 500GB, 7,200 rpm drive. Weighing in at 4.7 pounds and measuring  13.3 x 9.2 x 1.1 inches, the Edge E430 and Edge E435 get their graphics power from either an optional discrete Nvidia or AMD GPU with up to 1GB of VRAM. Both notebooks are swaddled in a soft-touch coating and available in a variety of colors including Midnight black, Heatwave red, Cobalt blue, or a simple brushed metal.

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RIM co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, might need to order some new business cards soon. According to Canada’s Financial Post, a group of shareholders is getting set to announce a new corporate structure for the BlackBerry maker, one that would see Lazaridis and Balsillie step down from their positions as co-chairmen of RIM’s board of directors.

If the men are asked to step aside, the position would be consolidated and taken over by board member Barbara Stymiest. An independent director, Stymiest was assigned to the board to evaluate it’s overall structure, including whether the company should have an independent chair rather than a leader director, and if it was necessary for Lazaridis and Balisillie to hold any significant board title, the Financial Post reports. Read the rest of this entry »

Research in Motion’s expedient descent into obsolescence may be taking place in a hastier manner than some expected. The maker of BlackBerry phones lost more subscribers in the month of November, pushing its market share in U.S. smartphones down to 16.6 percent of phones from 19.7 percent in the previous three-month period.

But as any pie-graph specialist will know, those 3.1 percentage points didn’t disappear – in fact, they cruised right over to Google, the developer of all things Android, according to the report, published December 29 by comScore. The search engine’s mobile platform remained the most used by U.S. cell patrons in November, with nearly 47 percent of the country’s subscribers owning Android-based smart phones. Read the rest of this entry »