The Deal reports that Apple Inc. confirmed an agreement to buy PA Semi, a boutique microprocessor manufacturer of sophisticated, low-priced chips. Apple has yet to officially announce the deal, but if they follow through with brining chips in house, key products like the iPhone and the iPod may go in a new direction; one that may inhibit competitors from copying the designs.
Every week, some enterprising vendor decides it can make a gadget to replace a laptop and look what was delivered: PDAs that can surf the Internet, poorly, and phones that play videos, poorly. What wouldn't lawyers give to be able to sail through airport security without the weight, bulk and inconvenience of lugging a Targus notebook bag. Author Alan Cohen looks at some "hyped" laptop alternatives that, under certain circumstances, might succeed where so many others have failed: giving lawyers the ability to leave their laptops -- but not their productivity -- behind.
What do mobile lawyers, insurance investigators, gadget geeks, teenagers and grandmothers have in common? They might all benefit from owning the Flip Video Ultra camcorder. Consultant Donna Payne gives you the lowdown on why it's the perfect time to take a Flip.
PinStack.com, the Web's largest BlackBerry community with more than 300,000 members, announced that it has chosen LinkedIn for Groups to facilitate professional networking for its members. To join the PinStack group on LinkedIn for free and learn more about its members and business opportunities, go to linkedin.pinstack.com.
... can be a hazardous lot, but they can also save you from an accident. It used to be that storage was always a backseat driver of content-centric law firm IT projects -- something tacked on to the back end of content-driven processes to store data. But EMC is changing that with its recent purchase of Infra Corp. Infra develops infraEnterprise, a Web-based solution for automating IT Service Management processes throughout an enterprise.
The infraEnterprise solution includes incident, problem, change, configuration and availability management processes, all certified under ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library).
With Infra technology and an already-tight grip on content with their storage and virtualization products, EMC aims to control IT processes and reduce service interruptions and downtime -- they look well-equipped to take the wheel.
does the fruit fly come to mind? Researchers at Stanford University are developing a patent to extend battery life tenfold. Now, if you are not a firm believer in battery technology, researchers are also working on wearable technology that will generate your personal computing needs.
Of course, we have them now. Voice, e-mail, and application platforms at the palm of our hand. What next? Motorola is starting to plan for it. Its venture-capital arm made an investment in contactless and mobile-phone payment technology company ViVOtech, Inc. ViVOtech's tech lets users pay for goods and serivces using RF-enabled credit and debit cards. Just when you think you got the hang of your phone, it turns into your pocket book.
I was on the hunt today for a 68-pin SCSI-3 to SCSI VHDCI (Very High Density Cable Interconnect) cable. I came up empty-handed, but it was the journey that mattered.
I walked up and down Market Street and visited three electronics stores, asking them if they had any SCSI cables or converters. I received questions for answers. "What's that?" "What do you use that for?" And even, "why would you want to do that?" That last question really got me thinking about life, the universe, green tea and Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker series, but I had to stay focused.
I was relieved to walk into CompUSA. Once in the door, I thought "OK, I'm in the land where someone should know something about computers." A quick perusal of the floor for cable interconnects only landed some internal IDE cables, USB cables and some external floppy cables. The external floppy cables should have tipped me off.
I went up to the counter and asked a clerk if they had any SCSI cables. A quick search on the computer yielded no results. I asked "what kind of a super store is this -- how are you spelling SCSI?"
The clerk responded "how are you spelling it?"
"S-C-S-I," I said.
"Oh. Let me check that."
I didn't even want to know how he spelled it, because I just realized I was a computer guy in consumer electronics land.
I walked back to the office waving my white towel overhead. In downtown San Francisco on Saturday, I blended right in ...
Hewlett-Packard's scanning technology helps solo practitioners and small law offices keep pace with the resources of a large firm. To support that statement, I took a look at HP's Scanet 7650N and found it to be an easy-to-install scanning device that puts paper documents, photographs and slides into a digital format and and onto network shares at the press of a button. HP recently released a their Scanjet N7710 for the small- to medium-sized law offices that needs a dedicated document scanner wed to a document management workflow.
When Interwoven teamed up with Riverbed Steelheads, you can bet that its customers in 66 of the Am Law 100 law firms looked to cast their lines in the same direction. Steelheads are appliances set up in central and remote law offices that speed the performance of applications and file transfers between sites. With Interwoven, Steelheads can bring together geographically dispersed WorkSite libraries and improve access to critical documents served from aging file servers and over slow WAN links. Although this means another set of appliances on the network, Riverbed provides easy configuration tools and management software that make Steelheads a low maintenance investment.
Sun Microsystems introduced a new version of its Niagra processor. The new UltraSPARC T2 chip will be twice as fast as its predecessor. Most lawyers are not familiar with Niagra, because it is not found in PCs or laptops. Niagra technology and the UltraSPARC T2 is primarily used in computer servers that make up the bulk of Sun's revenue (47 percent). But this news was dwarfed by Sun's announcement to reduce its work force as part of a new restructuring plan, according to a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission -- nothing like well-timed announcements to promote good technology.