Technewscape

Stephen Baker, analyst with the NPD Group notes: "As Apple increases iPad distribution and consumer interest peaks, the profile of an iPad owner is much more likely to mirror the overall tech population. When that does happen, other tech products with similar usage profiles as the iPad, such as notebooks, netbooks, and e-readers, will come under increased pressure from the iPad."

Best-selling authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear are looking back to the future. This month, they launched a story —The Mongoliad— using a 175-year-old publishing model. Their novel-as-app (or app-as-novel) is coming out in weekly, serial segments, complete with cliffhanger endings and a cheap subscription rate. Readers will pay $5.99 at mongoliad.com for a six-month app that gets them a chapter a week zapped to their smart phone, iPad or computer. The creators hope to have the book available at the iTunes store in the near future.

In the last 12 months the number of European consumers watching video on their mobile phone has increased by 66 percent. In the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy (the EU5), there are now over 12.1 million consumers using their mobile phone to watch on-demand programs and streaming videos each month, says market researcher ComScore.

Brian Tobey, corporate vice-president of manufacturing, supply chain, information and services at Microsoft, told Gartner's Supply Chain Executive Conference in London that the company was moving its IT structure into the cloud to eliminate the traditional approach of dealing with partners in a supply chain via "one-to-one telephone connections". Microsoft uses Microsoft's Windows Azure platform, the public cloud, for its partner-facing applications in the digital supply chain. Meanwhile, for back office applications and sensitive data, the company uses the private cloud, Windows Hyper-V.

More and more devices I look at are coming installed with applications I don't want, often popping up messages to try and upsell me on services I have no interest in...Google must take a stand for the end user and insist that parts of Android must be included on every device in order to bear the Google name -- and that all carrier installed apps and services are easily and freely removed by users at their discretion.

The worldwide mobile operating system (OS) market will be dominated by Symbian and Android, as the two OSs will account for 59.8 percent of mobile OS sales by 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. Symbian will remain at the top of Gartner's worldwide OS ranking due to Nokia's volume and the push into more mass market price points. However, by the end of the forecast period, the No. 1 spot will be contested with Android, which will be at a very similar share level.

According to Niall Harbison, the seven major trends that will shape Social Media over the next few months would be: Group Buying, Question and Answer sites, Mobile applications, Facebook Credits, Branded Content, Twitter Monetizing and Google To Keep On Failing.

The chipmakers behind the touchpads that are killing off the laptop mouse and the keys on a mobile phone are battling for supremacy in the latest blockbuster gadget -- the tablet PC. Boosted by Apple's iPad, sales of tablet, or slate, touchscreen units will jump to more than 136 million in 2014 from just 15.4 million this year, says market research firm iSuppli.

Hyperdigitisation, Globalisation, Consumerisation and the Cloud are some of the major forces that are actively reshaping the future of IT services and the outsourcing market, according to Gartner. “Buyers, providers and investors in the IT services market confront the same confluence of market and technological forces, even though their approaches and core concerns may differ,” said Benjamin Pring, research vice president at Gartner. “These forces are radically reshaping the fundamentals of how providers deliver and sell IT services and how buyers consume them.”

It's been a tense period for the technology sector, what with the bruising bidding war over 3Par Inc. and the mounting tensions between Hewlett-Packard Co. and Oracle Corp. But behind the drama, analysts and executives point to what they say is the crux of the matter: A fast consolidating industry, highlighted by the battle for piece of the changing data center market. The push toward cloud computing, in which businesses access computing power through a network instead of in-house data centers, is one the key trends driving the changes in the corporate tech arena.