David Needle

Online auction giant eBay reached out to brick and mortar retail behemoth Wal-Mart Stores to hire away its senior vice-president and chief technology officer, Matt Carey. He joins the company officially on Feb. 1, 2006 with the position of chief technology officer and senior vice president for eBay Marketplaces. During his over twenty year tenure […]

Sprint Nextel says it will buy its largest affiliate, Nextel Partners Inc., for $6.5 billion or $28.50 a share price. The price had been the subject of extended negotiations with each company hiring advisers to calculate the value of the deal, which was announced Tuesday. The total value of the acquisition (Sprint Nextel, which had […]

Big storage vendors had some big gains in revenue for the third quarter of this year, according to a report released today by Gartner. The report tracked worldwide revenue among providers of external controller-based (ECB ) disk storage which totaled $3.42 for the quarter, a 6.8 percent increase over the same period last year. Industry […]

How do you make a commodity product standout? In marketing they call it “adding value,” but does adding free software to one of those keychain-ready Flash drives fit the bill? Lexar Media thinks so, and from a convenience factor it may have a point. The Fremont, Calif.-based digital-media company announced that starting next Month, consumers […]

The outlook for PC sales continues to be in the solid double-digit range despite many factors that could have stunted growth back into single numbers. A report released by IDC today forecasts PC growth of close to 15 percent for the fourth quarter of this year and annual growth to 15.8, a half point ahead […]

Robert Colwell, a former chief microprocessor architect at Intel, says much-hyped dual- and multi-core chips aren’t the final or even best solution to improved system performance. “If there is a crying need in the general population for greater performance, and you become aware of that and you fill that need, you should reap the rewards […]

MENLO PARK, CALIF. — It’s not surprising to hear a company like Sun Microsystems tout technology, but at a briefing here today, the server giant was particularly bullish about one segment traditionally thought of as people-intensive. “Ultimately, [support] will be provided by technology, not people,” said Don Grantham, executive vice president of Sun Services. “This […]

The Research in Motion (RIM) roller coaster continued its wild ride Friday with the news of a much-needed victory in its patent fight with NTP. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued what it called a non-final rejection of a third patent owned by NTP, according to a report by “Bloomberg News.” RIM is involved […]

Talton Technologies doesn’t quite have content on its Web site ready, nor are its patent applications turned in. But the tiny startup claims to have a solution to a major cause of PC failure. Company founder and president Russ Russell told internetnews.com his discovery came after he and another engineering partner had their PCs quit […]

iPods in the workplace? Short of those who work in the entertainment industry, it’s hard to imagine Apple’s music and video player being on any IT manager’s purchasing list, or an approved expense by a department manager. But the hot-selling consumer device might start making business inroads if today’s announcement by Trinity Workplace Learning is […]

It looks like business users aren’t taking advantage of the power of PDAs in a connected or online mode because they are too hard to use. At least that’s one of the conclusions of a new report released today by Strategy Analytics, which surveyed business users of PDAs and cell phones. “What we found is […]

SAN FRANCISCO – On-demand or software-as-a-service (SaaS) will continue to disrupt traditional software models, industry watchers said. Still, most enterprises will pick and choose where they want to implement it, rather than make wholesale changes. That was the feeling of several software executives and investors speaking at a conference here Wednesday sponsored by “Red Herring” […]